358 files changed, 34732 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/26659-8.txt b/26659-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0965184
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10602 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Will to Believe, by William James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Will to Believe
+       and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
+
+Author: William James
+
+Release Date: May 8, 2009 [EBook #26659]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILL TO BELIEVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines. (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE
+
+
+AND OTHER ESSAYS IN
+
+POPULAR PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+
+BY WILLIAM JAMES
+
+
+
+
+NEW IMPRESSION
+
+
+
+LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
+
+FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
+
+LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+_Copyright, 1896_
+
+BY WILLIAM JAMES
+
+
+  First Edition. February, 1897,
+
+  Reprinted, May, 1897, September, 1897,
+  March, 1898, August, 1899, June, 1902,
+  January, 1903, May, 1904, June, 1905,
+  March, 1907, April, 1908,
+  September, 1909, December, 1910,
+  November, 1911, November, 1912
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+My Old Friend,
+
+CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE,
+
+  To whose philosophic comradeship in old times
+  and to whose writings in more recent years
+  I owe more incitement and help than
+  I can express or repay.
+
+
+
+
+{vii}
+
+PREFACE.
+
+At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the students
+devoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have the
+laudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholar
+to address them, the occasion often being made a public one.  I have
+from time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had my
+discourse printed in one or other of the Reviews.  It has seemed to me
+that these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, as
+they shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together express
+a tolerably definite philosophic attitude in a very untechnical way.
+
+Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I
+should call it that of _radical empiricism_, in spite of the fact that
+such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy.  I
+say 'empiricism,' because it is contented to regard its most assured
+conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to
+modification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical,'
+because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and,
+{viii} unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under
+the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does
+not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience
+has got to square.  The difference between monism and pluralism is
+perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy.  _Primâ
+facie_ the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be
+that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an
+effort to redeem it from that first crude form.  Postulating more unity
+than the first experiences yield, we also discover more.  But absolute
+unity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains
+undiscovered, still remains a _Grenzbegriff_.  "Ever not quite" must be
+the rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it.  After
+all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity
+of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities
+mutually unmediated and unexplained.  To the very last, there are the
+various 'points of view' which the philosopher must distinguish in
+discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains
+a bare externality and datum to the other.  The negative, the alogical,
+is never wholly banished.  Something--"call it fate, chance, freedom,
+spontaneity, the devil, what you will"--is still wrong and other and
+outside and unincluded, from _your_ point of view, even though you be
+the greatest of philosophers.  Something is always mere fact and
+_givenness_; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of
+view extant from which this would not be found to be the case.
+"Reason," as a gifted writer says, "is {ix} but one item in the
+mystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned,
+reason and wonder blushed face to face.  The inevitable stales, while
+doubt and hope are sisters.  Not unfortunately the universe is
+wild,--game-flavored as a hawk's wing.  Nature is miracle all; the same
+returns not save to bring the different.  The slow round of the
+engraver's lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is
+distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true,--ever not
+quite."[1]
+
+This is pluralism, somewhat rhapsodically expressed.  He who takes for
+his hypothesis the notion that it is the permanent form of the world is
+what I call a radical empiricist.  For him the crudity of experience
+remains an eternal element thereof.  There is no possible point of view
+from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact.  Real
+possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real
+evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real
+moral life, just as common-sense conceives these things, may remain in
+empiricism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt
+either to 'overcome' or to reinterpret in monistic form.
+
+Many of my professionally trained _confrères_ will smile at the
+irrationalism of this view, and at the artlessness of my essays in
+point of technical form.  But they should be taken as illustrations of
+the radically empiricist attitude rather than as argumentations for its
+validity.  That admits meanwhile of {x} being argued in as technical a
+shape as any one can desire, and possibly I may be spared to do later a
+share of that work.  Meanwhile these essays seem to light up with a
+certain dramatic reality the attitude itself, and make it visible
+alongside of the higher and lower dogmatisms between which in the pages
+of philosophic history it has generally remained eclipsed from sight.
+
+The first four essays are largely concerned with defending the
+legitimacy of religious faith.  To some rationalizing readers such
+advocacy will seem a sad misuse of one's professional position.
+Mankind, they will say, is only too prone to follow faith
+unreasoningly, and needs no preaching nor encouragement in that
+direction.  I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks is
+criticism and caution, not faith.  Its cardinal weakness is to let
+belief follow recklessly upon lively conception, especially when the
+conception has instinctive liking at its back.  I admit, then, that
+were I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowd
+it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing
+as I have in these pages preached it.  What such audiences most need is
+that their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that the
+northwest wind of science should get into them and blow their
+sickliness and barbarism away.  But academic audiences, fed already on
+science, have a very different need.  Paralysis of their native
+capacity for faith and timorous _abulia_ in the religious field are
+their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion,
+carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence
+by {xi} waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in
+regard to truth.  But there is really no scientific or other method by
+which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing
+too little or of believing too much.  To face such dangers is
+apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the
+measure of our wisdom as men.  It does not follow, because recklessness
+may be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached to
+them.  What _should_ be preached is courage weighted with
+responsibility,--such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons never
+failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might
+tell against their success, and made every provision to minimize
+disaster in case they met defeat.  I do not think that any one can
+accuse me of preaching reckless faith.  I have preached the right of
+the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk.  I
+have discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of us
+escape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to face
+them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there.
+
+After all, though, you will say, Why such an ado about a matter
+concerning which, however we may theoretically differ, we all
+practically agree?  In this age of toleration, no scientist will ever
+try actively to interfere with our religious faith, provided we enjoy
+it quietly with our friends and do not make a public nuisance of it in
+the market-place.  But it is just on this matter of the market-place
+that I think the utility of such essays as mine may turn.  If {xii}
+religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the
+active faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in
+life, are the experimental tests by which they are verified, and the
+only means by which their truth or falsehood can be wrought out.  The
+truest scientific hypothesis is that which, as we say, 'works' best;
+and it can be no otherwise with religious hypotheses.  Religious
+history proves that one hypothesis after another has worked ill, has
+crumbled at contact with a widening knowledge of the world, and has
+lapsed from the minds of men.  Some articles of faith, however, have
+maintained themselves through every vicissitude, and possess even more
+vitality to-day than ever before: it is for the 'science of religions'
+to tell us just which hypotheses these are.  Meanwhile the freest
+competition of the various faiths with one another, and their openest
+application to life by their several champions, are the most favorable
+conditions under which the survival of the fittest can proceed.  They
+ought therefore not to lie hid each under its bushel, indulged-in
+quietly with friends.  They ought to live in publicity, vying with each
+other; and it seems to me that (the régime of tolerance once granted,
+and a fair field shown) the scientist has nothing to fear for his own
+interests from the liveliest possible state of fermentation in the
+religious world of his time.  Those faiths will best stand the test
+which adopt also his hypotheses, and make them integral elements of
+their own.  He should welcome therefore every species of religious
+agitation and discussion, so long as he is willing to allow that some
+religious hypothesis _may_ be {xiii} true.  Of course there are plenty
+of scientists who would deny that dogmatically, maintaining that
+science has already ruled all possible religious hypotheses out of
+court.  Such scientists ought, I agree, to aim at imposing privacy on
+religious faiths, the public manifestation of which could only be a
+nuisance in their eyes.  With all such scientists, as well as with
+their allies outside of science, my quarrel openly lies; and I hope
+that my book may do something to persuade the reader of their crudity,
+and range him on my side.  Religious fermentation is always a symptom
+of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget
+that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative
+pretensions, that our faiths do harm.  The most interesting and
+valuable things about a man are his ideals and over-beliefs.  The same
+is true of nations and historic epochs; and the excesses of which the
+particular individuals and epochs are guilty are compensated in the
+total, and become profitable to mankind in the long run.
+
+The essay 'On some Hegelisms' doubtless needs an apology for the
+superficiality with which it treats a serious subject.  It was written
+as a squib, to be read in a college-seminary in Hegel's logic, several
+of whose members, mature men, were devout champions of the dialectical
+method.  My blows therefore were aimed almost entirely at that.  I
+reprint the paper here (albeit with some misgivings), partly because I
+believe the dialectical method to be wholly abominable when worked by
+concepts alone, and partly because the essay casts some positive light
+on the pluralist-empiricist point of view.
+
+{xiv}
+
+The paper on Psychical Research is added to the volume for convenience
+and utility.  Attracted to this study some years ago by my love of
+sportsmanlike fair play in science, I have seen enough to convince me
+of its great importance, and I wish to gain for it what interest I can.
+The American Branch of the Society is in need of more support, and if
+my article draws some new associates thereto, it will have served its
+turn.
+
+Apology is also needed for the repetition of the same passage in two
+essays (pp. 59-61 and 96-7, 100-1).  My excuse is that one cannot
+always express the same thought in two ways that seem equally forcible,
+so one has to copy one's former words.
+
+The Crillon-quotation on page 62 is due to Mr. W. M. Salter (who
+employed it in a similar manner in the 'Index' for August 24, 1882),
+and the dream-metaphor on p. 174 is a reminiscence from some novel of
+George Sand's--I forget which--read by me thirty years ago.
+
+Finally, the revision of the essays has consisted almost entirely in
+excisions.  Probably less than a page and a half in all of new matter
+has been added.
+
+
+HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
+  CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,
+    December, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+[1] B. P. Blood: The Flaw in Supremacy: Published by the Author,
+Amsterdam, N. Y., 1893.
+
+
+
+
+{x}
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                                                 PAGE
+
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1
+
+  Hypotheses and options, 1.  Pascal's wager, 5.  Clifford's
+  veto, 8.  Psychological causes of belief, 9.  Thesis of the
+  Essay, 11.  Empiricism and absolutism, 12.  Objective certitude
+  and its unattainability, 13. Two different sorts of risks in
+  believing, 17.  Some risk unavoidable, 19.  Faith may bring
+  forth its own verification, 22.  Logical conditions of religious
+  belief, 25.
+
+
+IS LIFE WORTH LIVING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   32
+
+  Temperamental Optimism and Pessimism, 33.  How reconcile
+  with life one bent on suicide? 38.  Religious melancholy and its
+  cure, 39.  Decay of Natural Theology, 43.  Instinctive antidotes
+  to pessimism, 46.  Religion involves belief in an unseen
+  extension of the world, 51.  Scientific positivism, 52.  Doubt
+  actuates conduct as much as belief does, 54.  To deny certain
+  faiths is logically absurd, for they make their objects true, 56.
+  Conclusion, 6l.
+
+
+THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   63
+
+  Rationality means fluent thinking, 63.  Simplification, 65.
+  Clearness, 66.  Their antagonism, 66.  Inadequacy of the
+  abstract, 68.  The thought of nonentity, 71.  Mysticism, 74.  Pure
+  theory cannot banish wonder, 75.  The passage to practice may
+  restore the feeling of rationality, 75.  Familiarity and
+  expectancy, 76.  'Substance,' 80.  A rational world must appear
+
+{xvi}
+
+  congruous with our powers, 82.  But these differ from man to
+  man, 88.  Faith is one of them, 90.  Inseparable from doubt, 95.
+  May verify itself, 96.  Its rôle in ethics, 98.  Optimism and
+  pessimism, 101.  Is this a moral universe?--what does the problem
+  mean? 103.  Anaesthesia _versus_ energy, 107.  Active assumption
+  necessary, 107.  Conclusion, 110.
+
+
+REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  111
+
+  Prestige of Physiology, 112.  Plan of neural action, 113.  God
+  the mind's adequate object, 116.  Contrast between world as
+  perceived and as conceived, 118.  God, 120.  The mind's three
+  departments, 123.  Science due to a subjective demand, 129.
+  Theism a mean between two extremes, 134.  Gnosticism, 137.
+  No intellection except for practical ends, 140.  Conclusion, 142.
+
+
+
+THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  145
+
+  Philosophies seek a rational world, 146.  Determinism and
+  Indeterminism defined, 149.  Both are postulates of rationality,
+  152.  Objections to chance considered, 153.  Determinism
+  involves pessimism, 159.  Escape _via_ Subjectivism, 164.
+  Subjectivism leads to corruption, 170.  A world with chance in
+  it is morally the less irrational alternative, 176.  Chance not
+  incompatible with an ultimate Providence, 180.
+
+
+THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . .  184
+
+  The moral philosopher postulates a unified system, 185.
+  Origin of moral judgments, 185.  Goods and ills are created by
+  judgment?, 189.  Obligations are created by demands, 192.  The
+  conflict of ideals, 198.  Its solution, 205.  Impossibility of an
+  abstract system of Ethics, 208.  The easy-going and the
+  strenuous mood, 211.  Connection between Ethics and Religion, 212.
+
+
+GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  216
+
+  Solidarity of causes in the world, 216.  The human mind abstracts
+  in order to explain, 219.  Different cycles of operation in
+  Nature, 220.  Darwin's distinction between causes that produce
+  and causes that preserve a variation, 221.  Physiological causes
+  produce, the environment only adopts or preserves, great men,
+  225.  When adopted they become social ferments, 226.  Messrs.
+
+{xvii}
+
+  Spencer and Allen criticised, 232.  Messrs. Wallace and
+  Gryzanowski quoted, 239.  The laws of history, 244.  Mental
+  evolution, 245.  Analogy between original ideas and Darwin's
+  accidental variations, 247.  Criticism of Spencer's views, 251.
+
+
+THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  255
+
+  Small differences may be important, 256.  Individual
+  differences are important because they are the causes of social
+  change, 259.  Hero-worship justified, 261.
+
+
+ON SOME HEGELISMS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  263
+
+  The world appears as a pluralism, 264.  Elements of unity in
+  the pluralism, 268.  Hegel's excessive claims, 273.  He makes of
+  negation a bond of union, 273.  The principle of totality, 277.
+  Monism and pluralism, 279.  The fallacy of accident in Hegel,
+  280.  The good and the bad infinite, 284.  Negation, 286.
+  Conclusion, 292.--Note on the Anaesthetic revelation, 294.
+
+
+WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED . . . . . . . . . . . .  299
+
+  The unclassified residuum, 299.  The Society for Psychical
+  Research and its history, 303.  Thought-transference, 308.
+  Gurney's work, 309.  The census of hallucinations, 312.
+  Mediumship, 313.  The 'subliminal self,' 315.  'Science' and her
+  counter-presumptions, 317.  The scientific character of
+  Mr. Myers's work, 320.  The mechanical-impersonal view of life
+  versus the personal-romantic view, 324.
+
+
+INDEX  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  329
+
+
+
+
+{1}
+
+ESSAYS
+
+IN
+
+POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.
+
+
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE.[1]
+
+In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of his brother,
+Fitz-James, there is an account of a school to which the latter went
+when he was a boy.  The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse
+with his pupils in this wise: "Gurney, what is the difference between
+justification and sanctification?--Stephen, prove the omnipotence of
+God!" etc.  In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifference
+we are prone to imagine that here at your good old orthodox College
+conversation continues to be somewhat upon this order; and to show you
+that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects,
+I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon on
+justification by faith to read to you,--I mean an essay in
+justification _of_ faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing
+attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely
+logical {2} intellect may not have been coerced.  'The Will to
+Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper.
+
+I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily
+adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the
+logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to
+be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were
+personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves.
+I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own
+position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a good
+occasion to make my statements more clear.  Perhaps your minds will be
+more open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal.  I will be
+as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up some
+technical distinctions that will help us in the end.
+
+
+I.
+
+Let us give the name of _hypothesis_ to anything that may be proposed
+to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead
+wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either _live_ or _dead_.  A
+live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to
+whom it is proposed.  If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion
+makes no electric connection with your nature,--it refuses to
+scintillate with any credibility at all.  As an hypothesis it is
+completely dead.  To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the
+Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities:
+it is alive.  This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis
+are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the {3} individual
+thinker.  They are measured by his willingness to act.  The maximum of
+liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably.
+Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency
+wherever there is willingness to act at all.
+
+Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an _option_.
+Options may be of several kinds.  They may be--1, _living_ or _dead_;
+2, _forced_ or _avoidable_; 3, _momentous_ or _trivial_; and for our
+purposes we may call an option a _genuine_ option when it is of the
+forced, living, and momentous kind.
+
+1.  A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones.  If
+I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a
+dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive.
+But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise:
+trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small,
+to your belief.
+
+2.  Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella
+or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not
+forced.  You can easily avoid it by not going out at all.  Similarly,
+if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or
+call it false," your option is avoidable.  You may remain indifferent
+to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any
+judgment as to my theory.  But if I say, "Either accept this truth or
+go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing
+place outside of the alternative.  Every dilemma based on a complete
+logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option
+of this forced kind.
+
+{4}
+
+3.  Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North
+Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would
+probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would
+either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether
+or put at least the chance of it into your hands.  He who refuses to
+embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried
+and failed.  _Per contra_, the option is trivial when the opportunity
+is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is
+reversible if it later prove unwise.  Such trivial options abound in
+the scientific life.  A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to
+spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent.
+But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for
+his loss of time, no vital harm being done.
+
+It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions
+well in mind.
+
+
+II.
+
+The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion.
+When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and
+volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions.  When we look
+at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had
+once said its say.  Let us take the latter facts up first.
+
+Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our
+opinions being modifiable at will?  Can our will either help or hinder
+our intellect in its perceptions of truth?  Can we, by just willing it,
+believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, {5} and that the
+portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else?  Can
+we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were
+true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with
+rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar
+bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars?  We can say any of these
+things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just
+such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in
+made up,--matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and
+relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if
+we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any
+action of our own.
+
+In Pascal's Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known in literature
+as Pascal's wager.  In it he tries to force us into Christianity by
+reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with the
+stakes in a game of chance.  Translated freely his words are these: You
+must either believe or not believe that God is--which will you do?
+Your human reason cannot say.  A game is going on between you and the
+nature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out either
+heads or tails.  Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if you
+should stake all you have on heads, or God's existence: if you win in
+such case, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at
+all.  If there were an infinity of chances, and only one for God in
+this wager, still you ought to stake your all on God; for though you
+surely risk a finite loss by this procedure, any finite loss is
+reasonable, even a certain one is reasonable, if there is but the
+possibility of {6} infinite gain.  Go, then, and take holy water, and
+have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples,--_Cela
+vous fera croire et vous abêtira_.  Why should you not?  At bottom,
+what have you to lose?
+
+You probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in
+the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps.  Surely
+Pascal's own personal belief in masses and holy water had far other
+springs; and this celebrated page of his is but an argument for others,
+a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the
+unbelieving heart.  We feel that a faith in masses and holy water
+adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the
+inner soul of faith's reality; and if we were ourselves in the place of
+the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off
+believers of this pattern from their infinite reward.  It is evident
+that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses
+and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a
+living option.  Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water on
+its account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seem
+such foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for them
+specifically, leaves us unmoved.  As well might the Mahdi write to us,
+saying, "I am the Expected One whom God has created in his effulgence.
+You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me; otherwise you shall be
+cut off from the light of the sun.  Weigh, then, your infinite gain if
+I am genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not!"  His logic
+would be that of Pascal; but he would vainly use it on us, for the
+hypothesis he offers us is dead.  No tendency to act on it exists in us
+to any degree.
+
+{7}
+
+The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of
+view, simply silly.  From another point of view it is worse than silly,
+it is vile.  When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical
+sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested
+moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience
+and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to
+the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar;
+how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,--then how
+besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes
+blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things
+from out of his private dream!  Can we wonder if those bred in the
+rugged and manly school of science should feel like spewing such
+subjectivism out of their mouths?  The whole system of loyalties which
+grow up in the schools of science go dead against its toleration; so
+that it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fever
+should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if the
+incorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness
+and unacceptableness to the heart in its cup.
+
+  It fortifies my soul to know
+  That, though I perish, Truth is so--
+
+sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: "My only consolation lies in the
+reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they
+hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no
+reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend
+[the word 'pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have
+reached the {8} lowest depth of immorality."  And that delicious
+_enfant terrible_ Clifford writes; "Belief is desecrated when given to
+unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private
+pleasure of the believer,...  Whoso would deserve well of his fellows
+in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very
+fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an
+unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away....
+If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though
+the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the pleasure
+is a stolen one....  It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of
+our duty to mankind.  That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs
+as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then
+spread to the rest of the town....  It is wrong always, everywhere, and
+for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
+
+
+III.
+
+All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by Clifford,
+with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the voice.  Free-will
+and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only
+fifth wheels to the coach.  Yet if any one should thereupon assume that
+intellectual insight is what remains after wish and will and
+sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what
+then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth
+of the facts.
+
+It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature is
+unable to bring to life again  But what has made them dead for us is
+for the most part {9} a previous action of our willing nature of an
+antagonistic kind.  When I say 'willing nature,' I do not mean only
+such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we
+cannot now escape from,--I mean all such factors of belief as fear and
+hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the
+circumpressure of our caste and set.  As a matter of fact we find
+ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why.  Mr. Balfour gives the
+name of 'authority' to all those influences, born of the intellectual
+climate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or
+dead.  Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the
+conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in
+Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of
+the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name.  We see
+into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much
+less, than any disbeliever in them might possess.  His
+unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its
+conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the _prestige_ of the
+opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our
+sleeping magazines of faith.  Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine
+hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can
+find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is
+criticised by some one else.  Our faith is faith in some one else's
+faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.  Our belief
+in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our
+minds and it are made for each other,--what is it but a passionate
+affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?  We want
+to have a truth; we want to believe that our {10} experiments and
+studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better
+position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our
+thinking lives.  But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us _how we know_
+all this, can our logic find a reply?  No! certainly it cannot.  It is
+just one volition against another,--we willing to go in for life upon a
+trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.[2]
+
+As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no
+use.  Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings.
+Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism
+in his scheme of life.  Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism,
+and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because a
+priestly system is for him an organic need and delight.  Why do so few
+'scientists' even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called?
+Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me,
+that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together
+to keep it suppressed and concealed.  It would undo the uniformity of
+Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot
+carry on their pursuits.  But if this very man had been shown something
+which as a scientist he might _do_ with telepathy, he might not only
+have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough.  This
+very law which the logicians would impose upon us--if I may give the
+name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature
+here--is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all
+elements for {11} which they, in their professional quality of
+logicians, can find no use.
+
+Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our
+convictions.  There are passional tendencies and volitions which run
+before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter
+that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the
+previous passional work has been already in their own direction.
+Pascal's argument, instead of being powerless, then seems a regular
+clincher, and is the last stroke needed to make our faith in masses and
+holy water complete.  The state of things is evidently far from simple;
+and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the
+only things that really do produce our creeds.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to
+ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, on
+the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our
+minds.  The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this:  _Our passional
+nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between
+propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature
+be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such
+circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself
+a passional decision,--just like deciding yes or no,--and is attended
+with the same risk of losing the truth_.  The thesis thus abstractly
+expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear.  But I must first
+indulge in a bit more of preliminary work.
+
+
+{12}
+
+V.
+
+It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion we are on
+'dogmatic' ground,--ground, I mean, which leaves systematic
+philosophical scepticism altogether out of account.  The postulate that
+there is truth, and that it is the destiny of our minds to attain it,
+we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make
+it.  We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point.
+But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be
+held in two ways.  We may talk of the _empiricist_ way and of the
+_absolutist_ way of believing in truth.  The absolutists in this matter
+say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can _know
+when_ we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that
+although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when.  To _know_
+is one thing, and to know for certain _that_ we know is another.  One
+may hold to the first being possible without the second; hence the
+empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic
+in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees
+of dogmatism in their lives.
+
+If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist
+tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the
+absolutist tendency has had everything its own way.  The characteristic
+sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainly
+consisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or system
+that by it bottom-certitude had been attained.  "Other philosophies are
+collections of opinions, mostly false; _my_ philosophy {13} gives
+standing-ground forever,"--who does not recognize in this the key-note
+of every system worthy of the name?  A system, to be a system at all,
+must come as a _closed_ system, reversible in this or that detail,
+perchance, but in its essential features never!
+
+Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go when one wishes to
+find perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elaborated this
+absolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that of 'objective
+evidence.'  If, for example, I am unable to doubt that I now exist
+before you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortal
+then I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my intellect
+irresistibly.  The final ground of this objective evidence possessed by
+certain propositions is the _adaequatio intellectûs nostri cum rê_.
+The certitude it brings involves an _aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum
+assensum_ on the part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the
+subject a _quietem in cognitione_, when once the object is mentally
+received, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and in the whole
+transaction nothing operates but the _entitas ipsa_ of the object and
+the _entitas ipsa_ of the mind.  We slouchy modern thinkers dislike to
+talk in Latin,--indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at
+bottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever we
+uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, and
+I do.  Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know
+that we do know.  There is something that gives a click inside of us, a
+bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept
+the dial and meet over the meridian hour.  The greatest empiricists
+among us are only empiricists on reflection: when {14} left to their
+instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.  When the Cliffords
+tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficient
+evidence,' insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind.
+For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other
+way.  They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the
+universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead
+hypothesis from the start.
+
+
+VI.
+
+But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in our
+quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact?  Shall
+we espouse and indorse it?  Or shall we treat it as a weakness of our
+nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can?
+
+I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can
+follow as reflective men.  Objective evidence and certitude are
+doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and
+dream-visited planet are they found?  I am, therefore, myself a
+complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes.  I
+live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on
+experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our
+opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them--I absolutely do
+not care which--as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible,
+I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the
+whole history of philosophy will bear me out.  There is but one
+indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic
+scepticism itself leaves {15} standing,--the truth that the present
+phenomenon of consciousness exists.  That, however, is the bare
+starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be
+philosophized about.  The various philosophies are but so many attempts
+at expressing what this stuff really is.  And if we repair to our
+libraries what disagreement do we discover!  Where is a certainly true
+answer found?  Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as
+two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing
+by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever
+regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been
+called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by
+some one else.  The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play
+but in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as Zöllner and
+Charles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logic
+by the Hegelians, are striking instances in point.
+
+No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.
+Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting
+it either in revelation, the _consensus gentium_, the instincts of the
+heart, or the systematized experience of the race.  Others make the
+perceptive moment its own test,--Descartes, for instance, with his
+clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid with
+his 'common-sense;' and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment _a
+priori_.  The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to be
+verified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity or
+self-relation, realized when a thing is its own other,--are standards
+which, in turn, have been used.  The much {16} lauded objective
+evidence is never triumphantly there, it is a mere aspiration or
+_Grenzbegriff_, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking
+life.  To claim that certain truths now possess it, is simply to say
+that when you think them true and they _are_ true, then their evidence
+is objective, otherwise it is not.  But practically one's conviction
+that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only
+one more subjective opinion added to the lot.  For what a contradictory
+array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been
+claimed!  The world is rational through and through,--its existence is
+an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God,--a personal God is
+inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately
+known,--the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative
+exists,--obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent
+spiritual principle is in every one,--there are only shifting states of
+mind; there is an endless chain of causes,--there is an absolute first
+cause; an eternal necessity,--a freedom; a purpose,--no purpose; a
+primal One,--a primal Many; a universal continuity,--an essential
+discontinuity in things; an infinity,--no infinity.  There is
+this,--there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not
+thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false;
+and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the
+trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even
+with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for
+knowing whether it be truth or no.  When, indeed, one remembers that
+the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of
+objective certitude has been {17} the conscientious labors of the Holy
+Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the
+doctrine a respectful ear.
+
+But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the
+doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or
+hope of truth itself.  We still pin our faith on its existence, and
+still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by
+systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think.  Our great
+difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face.  The strength
+of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the _terminus a quo_
+of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the
+_terminus ad quem_.  Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to
+decide.  It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an
+hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by
+foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the
+total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means
+by its being true.
+
+
+VII.
+
+One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done.
+There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of
+opinion,--ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference
+the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little
+concern.  _We must know the truth_; and _we must avoid error_,--these
+are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are
+not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two
+separable laws.  Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the
+truth _A_, we escape {18} as an incidental consequence from believing
+the falsehood _B_, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving
+_B_ we necessarily believe _A_.  We may in escaping _B_ fall into
+believing other falsehoods, _C_ or _D_, just as bad as _B_; or we may
+escape _B_ by not believing anything at all, not even _A_.
+
+Believe truth!  Shun error!--these, we see, are two materially
+different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring
+differently our whole intellectual life.  We may regard the chase for
+truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may,
+on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and
+let truth take its chance.  Clifford, in the instructive passage which
+I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course.  Believe nothing, he
+tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it
+on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.  You,
+on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very
+small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be
+ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone
+indefinitely the chance of guessing true.  I myself find it impossible
+to go with Clifford.  We must remember that these feelings of our duty
+about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our
+passional life.  Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to
+grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, "Better go without
+belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant
+private horror of becoming a dupe.  He may be critical of many of his
+desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys.  He cannot imagine
+any one questioning its binding force.  For my own part, I {19} have
+also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than
+being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's
+exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound.  It is like a
+general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle
+forever than to risk a single wound.  Not so are victories either over
+enemies or over nature gained.  Our errors are surely not such awfully
+solemn things.  In a world where we are so certain to incur them in
+spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier
+than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.  At any rate, it seems
+the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight at our
+question.  I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a matter of
+fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions,
+but that there are some options between opinions in which this
+influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful
+determinant of our choice.
+
+I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, and
+lend an inhospitable ear.  Two first steps of passion you have indeed
+had to admit as necessary,--we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we
+must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal
+consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take
+no further passional step.
+
+Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow.  Wherever the
+option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can
+throw the {20} chance of _gaining truth_ away, and at any rate save
+ourselves from any chance of _believing falsehood_, by not making up
+our minds at all till objective evidence has come.  In scientific
+questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in
+general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to
+act on is better than no belief at all.  Law courts, indeed, have to
+decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a
+judge's duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a
+learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time
+over: the great thing is to have them decided on _any_ acceptable
+principle, and got out of the way.  But in our dealings with objective
+nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and
+decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the
+next business would be wholly out of place.  Throughout the breadth of
+physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and
+seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped
+by believing a premature theory need be faced.  The questions here are
+always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate
+not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or
+falsehood is seldom forced.  The attitude of sceptical balance is
+therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes.  What
+difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or have
+not a theory of the Röntgen rays, whether we believe or not in
+mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious
+states?  It makes no difference.  Such options are not forced on us.
+On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing
+reasons _pro et contra_ with an indifferent hand.
+
+{21}
+
+I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind.  For purposes of
+discovery such 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.  See for example the sagacity which Spencer and
+Weismann now display.  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.  The most useful investigator, because the most
+sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of
+the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become
+deceived.[3]  Science has organized this nervousness into a regular
+_technique_, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen
+so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased
+to care for truth by itself at all.  It is only truth as technically
+verified that interests her.  The truth of truths might come in merely
+affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it.  Such truth as
+that, she might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of
+her duty to mankind.  Human passions, however, are stronger than
+technical rules.  "Le coeur a ses raisons," as Pascal says, "que la
+raison ne connaît pas;" and however indifferent to all but the bare
+rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the
+concrete players who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually,
+each one of them, in love with some pet 'live hypothesis' of his own.
+Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the
+{22} dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving
+us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.
+
+The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in our
+speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at
+least as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery)
+always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have
+arrived?  It seems _a priori_ improbable that the truth should be so
+nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that.  In the great
+boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom
+come out so even and leave the plates so clean.  Indeed, we should view
+them with scientific suspicion if they did.
+
+
+IX.
+
+_Moral questions_ immediately present themselves as questions whose
+solution cannot wait for sensible proof.  A moral question is a
+question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be
+good if it did exist.  Science can tell us what exists; but to compare
+the _worths_, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must
+consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.  Science herself
+consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite
+ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme
+goods for man.  Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it
+oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and
+correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn
+declares.  The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having
+them is decided by {23} our will.  Are our moral preferences true or
+false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or
+bad for _us_, but in themselves indifferent?  How can your pure
+intellect decide?  If your heart does not _want_ a world of moral
+reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.
+Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head's
+play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can.  Some men
+(even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the
+moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their
+supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill
+at ease.  The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naïveté
+and gullibility on his.  Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he
+clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which
+(as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no
+better than the cunning of a fox.  Moral scepticism can no more be
+refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can.  When we
+stick to it that there _is_ truth (be it of either kind), we do so with
+our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results.  The
+sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which
+of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.
+
+Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain 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 {24} 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
+absolutists 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.
+
+A social organism 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 any one else backs him
+up.  If we believed that the whole car-full would rise {25} at once
+with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never
+even be attempted.  There are, then, cases 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 should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the
+'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking being can fall.  Yet
+such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to
+regulate our lives!
+
+
+X.
+
+In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire
+is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.
+
+But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have
+nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question of
+religious faith.  Let us then pass on to that.  Religions differ so
+much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we
+must make it very generic and broad.  What then do we now mean by the
+religious hypothesis?  Science says things are; morality says some
+things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two
+things.
+
+First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the
+overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last
+stone, so to speak, and say the final word.  "Perfection is
+eternal,"--this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting
+this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously
+cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.
+
+{26}
+
+The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now
+if we believe her first affirmation to be true.
+
+Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are
+_in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true_.
+(Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset.  If we are to
+discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option.  If for
+any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living
+possibility be true, then you need go no farther.  I speak to the
+'saving remnant' alone.)  So proceeding, we see, first, that religion
+offers itself as a _momentous_ option.  We are supposed to gain, even
+now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital
+good.  Secondly, religion is a _forced_ option, so far as that good
+goes.  We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting
+for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way _if
+religion be untrue_, we lose the good, _if it be true_, just as
+certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.  It is as if a man
+should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him
+because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after
+he brought her home.  Would he not cut himself off from that particular
+angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one
+else?  Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a
+certain particular kind of risk.  _Better risk loss of truth than
+chance of error_,--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position.  He is
+actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing
+the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is
+backing the religious hypothesis against the field.  To preach
+scepticism to us as a duty until {27} 'sufficient evidence' for
+religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in
+presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its
+being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may
+be true.  It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only
+intellect with one passion laying down its law.  And by what, forsooth,
+is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted?  Dupery for dupery,
+what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than
+dupery through fear?  I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse
+obedience to the scientist's command to imitate his kind of option, in
+a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to
+choose my own form of risk.  If religion be true and the evidence for
+it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher
+upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business
+in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the
+winning side,--that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to
+run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world
+religiously might be prophetic and right.
+
+All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and
+right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is
+a live hypothesis which may be true.  Now, to most of us religion comes
+in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more
+illogical.  The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is
+represented in our religions as having 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
+{28} 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 centres 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 from us 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,
+forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that
+there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our
+logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we
+can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis.  If
+the hypothesis _were_ true in all its parts, including this one, then
+pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances,
+would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature
+would be logically required.  I, therefore, for one cannot see my way
+to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to
+keep my willing nature out of the game.  I cannot do so for this plain
+reason, that _a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from
+acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were
+really there, would be an irrational rule_.  That for me {29} is the
+long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the
+kinds of truth might materially be.
+
+
+I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped.  But sad
+experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from
+radically saying with me, _in abstracto_, that we have the right to
+believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our
+will.  I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is because you have
+got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are
+thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious
+hypothesis which for you is dead.  The freedom to 'believe what we
+will' you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith
+you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, "Faith
+is when you believe something that you know ain't true."  I can only
+repeat that this is misapprehension.  _In concreto_, the freedom to
+believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the
+individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem
+absurdities to him who has them to consider.  When I look at the
+religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I
+think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically
+it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our
+heart, instincts, and courage, and wait--acting of course meanwhile
+more or less as if religion were _not_ true[4]--till {30} doomsday, or
+till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have
+raked in evidence enough,--this command, I say, seems to me the
+queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave.  Were we
+scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse.  If we had an
+infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel
+ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting
+to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word.  But if we
+are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know
+for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle
+fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell.
+Indeed we _may_ wait if we will,--I hope you do not think that I am
+denying that,--but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we
+believed.  In either case we _act_, taking our life in our hands.  No
+one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words
+of abuse.  We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to
+respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about
+the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner
+tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which
+is empiricism's glory; then only shall we live and let live, in
+speculative as well as in practical things.
+
+I began by a reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation
+from him.  "What do you think {31} of yourself?  What do you think of
+the world?...  These are questions with which all must deal as it seems
+good to them.  They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other
+we must deal with them....  In all important transactions of life we
+have to take a leap in the dark....  If we decide to leave the riddles
+unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is
+a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril.  If a
+man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one
+can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is
+mistaken.  If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not
+see that any one can prove that _he_ is mistaken.  Each must act as he
+thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him.  We stand
+on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist,
+through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be
+deceptive.  If we stand still we shall be frozen to death.  If we take
+the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces.  We do not certainly know
+whether there is any right one.  What must we do?  'Be strong and of a
+good courage.'  Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what
+comes....  If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."[5]
+
+
+[1] An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown
+Universities.  Published in the New World, June, 1896.
+
+[2] Compare the admirable page 310 in S. H. Hodgson's "Time and Space,"
+London, 1865.
+
+[3] Compare Wilfrid Ward's Essay, "The Wish to Believe," in his
+_Witnesses to the Unseen_, Macmillan & Co., 1893.
+
+[4] Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe
+religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if
+we did believe it to be true.  The whole defence of religious faith
+hinges upon action.  If the action required or inspired by the
+religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the
+naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity,
+better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of
+idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds.  I myself believe, of course,
+that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which
+specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part
+unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief.
+
+[5] Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 353, 2d edition.  London, 1874.
+
+
+
+
+{32}
+
+IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?[1]
+
+When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some fifteen years
+ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the _liver_" had great
+currency in the newspapers.  The answer which I propose to give
+to-night cannot be jocose.  In the words of one of Shakespeare's
+prologues,--
+
+  "I come no more to make you laugh; things now,
+  That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
+  Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"--
+
+must be my theme.  In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner
+in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not
+what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those
+whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the
+surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you
+heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests
+and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness.
+Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in
+turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder
+bass-note of life.  Let us search the lonely depths for an hour
+together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things
+our question may find.
+
+{33}
+
+I.
+
+With many men the question of life's worth is answered by a
+temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that
+anything seriously evil can exist.  Our dear old Walt Whitman's works
+are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism.  The mere joy of
+living is so immense in Walt Whitman's veins that it abolishes the
+possibility of any other kind of feeling:--
+
+  "To breathe the air, how delicious!
+  To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand!...
+  To be this incredible God I am!...
+  O amazement of things, even the least particle!
+  O spirituality of things!
+  I too carol the Sun, usher'd or at noon, or as now, setting;
+  I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the
+    growths of the earth....
+
+  I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old,
+  I sing the endless finales of things,
+  I say Nature continues--glory continues.
+  I praise with electric voice,
+  For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
+  And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last."
+
+So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing
+but his happiness to tell:--
+
+
+"How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted
+only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of
+felicity itself!  I rose with the sun, and I was happy; I went to walk,
+and I was happy; I saw 'Maman,' and I was happy; I left her, and I was
+happy.  I rambled through the woods and over the vine-slopes, I
+wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I {34} worked in the
+garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and
+happiness followed me everywhere.  It was in no one assignable thing;
+it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant."
+
+
+If moods like this could be made permanent, and constitutions like
+these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses
+as the present one.  No philosopher would seek to prove articulately
+that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would
+vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the
+question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply.  But we
+are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and
+alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning
+life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them
+a standing refutation.  In what is called 'circular insanity,' phases
+of melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that we
+can discover; and often enough to one and the same well person life
+will present incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness
+to-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical
+books used to call "the concoction of the humors."  In the words of the
+newspaper joke, "it depends on the liver."  Rousseau's ill-balanced
+constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days
+a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear.  Some
+men seem launched upon the world even from their birth with souls as
+incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman's was of gloom, and they have
+left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his,--the
+exquisite Leopardi, for example; or our own contemporary, {35} James
+Thomson, in that pathetic book, The City of Dreadful Night, which I
+think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty,
+simply because men are afraid to quote its words,--they are so gloomy,
+and at the same time so sincere.  In one place the poet describes a
+congregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unillumined
+cathedral at night.  The sermon is too long to quote, but it ends
+thus:--
+
+  "'O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief;
+  A few short years must bring us all relief:
+   Can we not bear these years of laboring breath.
+  But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
+  Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
+   Without the fear of waking after death.'--
+
+  "The organ-like vibrations of his voice
+   Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;
+  The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice
+   Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:
+  Our shadowy congregation rested still,
+  As brooding on that 'End it when you will.'
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+  "Our shadowy congregation rested still,
+   As musing on that message we had heard,
+  And brooding on that 'End it when you will,'
+   Perchance awaiting yet some other word;
+  When keen as lightning through a muffled sky
+  Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry;--
+
+  "'The man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth:
+   We have no personal life beyond the grave;
+  There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:
+   Can I find here the comfort which I crave?
+
+  "'In all eternity I had one chance,
+   One few years' term of gracious human life,--
+  The splendors of the intellect's advance,
+   The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;
+
+{36}
+
+  "'The social pleasures with their genial wit;
+   The fascination of the worlds of art;
+  The glories of the worlds of Nature lit
+   By large imagination's glowing heart;
+
+  "'The rapture of mere being, full of health;
+   The careless childhood and the ardent youth;
+  The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,
+   The reverend age serene with life's long truth;
+
+  "'All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
+   The storied memories of the times of old,
+  The patient tracking of the world's great plan
+   Through sequences and changes myriadfold.
+
+  "'This chance was never offered me before;
+   For me the infinite past is blank and dumb;
+  This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
+   Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.
+
+  "'And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
+   A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
+  Of noble human life upon this earth
+   So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.
+
+  "'My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,
+   My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
+  I worse than lose the years which are my all:
+   What can console me for the loss supreme?
+
+  "'Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
+   Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair!
+  Our life 's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
+   Hush, and be mute, envisaging despair.'
+
+  "This vehement voice came from the northern aisle,
+   Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;
+  And none gave answer for a certain while,
+   For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;
+  At last the pulpit speaker simply said,
+  With humid eyes and thoughtful, drooping head,--
+
+{37}
+
+  "'My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus:
+  This life holds nothing good for us,
+   But it ends soon and nevermore can be;
+  And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
+  And shall know nothing when consigned to earth;
+   I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.'"
+
+
+"It ends soon, and never more can be," "Lo, you are free to end it when
+you will,"--these verses flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson's
+pen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the
+world is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain
+of delight.  That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides
+declare,--an army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the
+British army, follows the sun round the world and never terminates.
+We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must 'ponder these things'
+also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life
+is the life we share.  The plainest intellectual integrity,--nay, more,
+the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case.
+
+
+"If suddenly," says Mr. Ruskin, "in the midst of the enjoyments of the
+palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of
+the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings
+who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the
+company feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible in
+destitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon the
+soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest,--would only the
+crumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, a
+passing thought, be vouchsafed to them?  Yet the actual facts, the real
+relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the {38}
+intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-bed,--by
+the few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate
+the merriment from the misery."
+
+
+II.
+
+To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is
+to imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such
+terms with life that the only comfort left him is to brood on the
+assurance, "You may end it when you will."  What reasons can we plead
+that may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up the
+burden again?  Ordinary Christians, reasoning with would-be suicides,
+have little to offer them beyond the usual negative, "Thou shalt not."
+God alone is master of life and death, they say, and it is a
+blasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand.  But can _we_ find
+nothing richer or more positive than this, no reflections to urge
+whereby the suicide may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel,
+that in spite of adverse appearances even for him life is still worth
+living?  There are suicides and suicides (in the United States about
+three thousand of them every year), and I must frankly confess that
+with perhaps the majority of these my suggestions are impotent to deal.
+Where suicide is the result of insanity or sudden frenzied impulse,
+reflection is impotent to arrest its headway; and cases like these
+belong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can only
+offer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end of
+this hour.  My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my
+words are to deal only with that metaphysical _tedium vitae_ which is
+peculiar to {39} reflecting men.  Most of you are devoted, for good or
+ill, to the reflective life.  Many of you are students of philosophy,
+and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality
+that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed.
+This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career.
+Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost
+as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the
+bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of
+life.  But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further
+reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholy
+and _Weltschmerz_ bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak.
+
+Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing more
+recondite than religious faith.  So far as my argument is to be
+destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of
+certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith
+compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist in
+holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let
+loose these springs in a normal, natural way.  Pessimism is essentially
+a religious disease.  In the form of it to which you are most liable,
+it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no
+normal religious reply.
+
+Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different
+levels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight
+view of things, and I must treat of them in turn.  The second stage is
+the more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exercise
+of religious {40} trust and fancy.  There are, as is well known,
+persons who are naturally very free in this regard, others who are not
+at all so.  There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to
+their heart's content in prospects of immortality; and there are others
+who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem
+real to themselves at all.  These latter persons are tied to their
+senses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them,
+moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call 'hard
+facts,' which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into the
+unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment.  Minds of
+either class may, however, be intensely religious.  They may equally
+desire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and
+communion with the total soul of things.  But the craving, when the
+mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now reveals
+them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when
+it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another and
+a better world.
+
+That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease.  The
+nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources; but its great
+reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the
+phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind
+nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is.  What philosophers
+call 'natural theology' has been one way of appeasing this craving;
+that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has
+been another way.  Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two
+classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its
+{41} facts 'hard;' suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving
+for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to
+construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or
+poetically,--and what result can there be but inner discord and
+contradiction?  Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be
+relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts
+religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or,
+supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit the
+religious reading to go on.  These two ways of relief are the two
+stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I
+made allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, make
+more clear.
+
+
+III.
+
+Starting then with nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religious
+craving, to say with Marcus Aurelius, "O Universe! what thou wishest I
+wish."  Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made
+heaven and earth, and, looking on them, saw that they were good.  Yet,
+on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth
+refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all.  Every
+phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some
+contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the
+mind.  Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep
+house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals
+over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of
+an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things {42}
+together meaninglessly to a common doom.  This is an uncanny, a
+sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar _unheimlichkeit_,
+or poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together
+which cannot possibly agree,--in our clinging, on the one hand, to the
+demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on the
+other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spirit's
+adequate manifestation and expression.  It is in the contradiction
+between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us,
+and with which we ought to have some communion, and the character of
+such a spirit as revealed by the visible world's course, that this
+particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle
+reside, Carlyle expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal
+'Sartor Resartus' entitled 'The Everlasting No.'  "I lived," writes
+poor Teufelsdröckh, "in a continual, indefinite, pining fear;
+tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as
+if all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me;
+as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring
+monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured."
+
+This is the first stage of speculative melancholy.  No brute can have
+this sort of melancholy; no man who is irreligious can become its prey.
+It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the
+mere necessary outcome of animal experience.  Teufelsdröckh himself
+could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this
+world's experiences very well, were he not the victim of an originally
+unlimited trust and affection towards them.  If he might meet them
+piecemeal, with no suspicion {43} of any whole expressing itself in
+them, shunning the bitter parts and husbanding the sweet ones, as the
+occasion served, and as the day was foul or fair, he could have
+zigzagged toward an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air
+vocal with his lamentations.  The mood of levity, of 'I don't care,' is
+for this world's ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic.  But, no!
+something deep down in Teufelsdröckh and in the rest of us tells us
+that there _is_ a Spirit in things to which we owe allegiance, and for
+whose sake we must keep up the serious mood.  And so the inner fever
+and discord also are kept up; for nature taken on her visible surface
+reveals no such Spirit, and beyond the facts of nature we are at the
+present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look.
+
+Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that
+this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the
+inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naïvely and simply taken.
+There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous
+wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an
+established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round
+ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a "Moral and Intelligent
+Contriver of the World."  But those times are past; and we of the
+nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical
+philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to
+worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate
+expression.  Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature;
+but none the less so all we know of evil.  Visible nature is all
+plasticity and indifference,--a moral multiverse, as one might call it,
+and not a moral {44} universe.  To such a harlot we owe no allegiance;
+with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are
+free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to
+follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such other
+particular features as will help us to our private ends.  If there be a
+divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot
+possibly be its _ultimate word_ to man.  Either there is no Spirit
+revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as
+all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or
+_this_ world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning
+resides in a supplementary unseen or _other_ world.
+
+I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain (though it
+may seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that the
+naturalistic superstition, the worship of the God of nature, simply
+taken as such, should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educated
+mind.  In fact, if I am to express my personal opinion unreservedly, I
+should say (in spite of its sounding blasphemous at first to certain
+ears) that the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate
+relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the idea
+that such a God exists.  Such rebellion essentially is that which in
+the chapter I have quoted from Carlyle goes on to describe:--
+
+
+"'Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go
+cowering and trembling?  Despicable biped!...  Hast thou not a heart;
+canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom,
+though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes
+thee?  Let it come, then, I will meet it and defy it!'  And as I so
+thought, there rushed like a stream of fire {45} over my whole soul;
+and I shook base Fear away from me forever....
+
+"Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the
+recesses of my being, of my Me, and then was it that my whole Me stood
+up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest.  Such a
+Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same
+Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly
+called.  The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless,
+outcast, and the Universe is mine;' to which my whole Me now made
+answer: 'I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!'  From that
+hour," Teufelsdröckh-Carlyle adds, "I began to be a man."
+
+
+And our poor friend, James Thomson, similarly writes:--
+
+  "Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
+    I think myself, yet I would rather be
+    My miserable self than He, than He
+  Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.
+
+  The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
+    From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
+    Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred,
+  Malignant and implacable!  I vow
+
+  That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
+    For all the temples to Thy glory built,
+    Would I assume the ignominious guilt
+  Of having made such men in such a world."
+
+
+We are familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons
+exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their
+ancestral Calvinism,--him who made the garden and the serpent, and
+pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell.  Some of them have found
+humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology;
+but, both alike, they {46} assure us that to have got rid of the
+sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward
+that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls.  Now,
+to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to
+sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be
+scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from
+which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and
+with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness may
+remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering
+mood.  With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for
+their relations with it then are only practical.  It looms up no longer
+so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance,
+as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to
+worry about their derivation from the 'one and only Power.'
+
+Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic
+superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers
+to his question about the worth of life.  There are in most men
+instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily when the burden
+of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off.  The certainty
+that you now _may_ step out of life whenever you please, and that to do
+so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief.  The
+thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession.
+
+  "This little life is all we must endure;
+  The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,"--
+
+says Thomson; adding, "I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me."
+Meanwhile we can always {47} stand it for twenty-four hours longer, if
+only to see what to-morrow's newspaper will contain, or what the next
+postman will bring.
+
+But far deeper forces than this mere vital curiosity are arousable,
+even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and
+admiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will still
+respond to fit appeals.  This evil which we feel so deeply is something
+that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no
+'Substance' or 'Spirit' is behind them, are finite, and we can deal
+with each of them in turn.  It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that
+sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life;
+they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest.  The
+sovereign source of melancholy is repletion.  Need and struggle are
+what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the
+void.  Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of
+Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our
+Bible come.  Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of
+Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and
+idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French
+'milliards' were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the
+country in the shape in which we see it there to-day.  The history of
+our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with
+fighting ills.  Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been
+reading, as examples of what strong men will endure.  In 1483 a papal
+bull of Innocent VIII. enjoined their extermination.  It absolved those
+who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical
+pains and penalties, released them from {48} any oath, legitimized
+their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired,
+and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics.
+
+
+"There is no town in Piedmont," says a Vaudois writer, "where some of
+our brethren have not been put to death.  Jordan Terbano was burnt
+alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin, Michael Goneto, an
+octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Meano;
+Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his living
+body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his
+entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place
+to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia;
+Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna
+Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and
+hunger on the snow at Sarcena; Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres,
+had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony at
+Penile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for having
+praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matches
+which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the
+fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and then
+lighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder, which,
+being lighted, blew his head to pieces;...  Sara Rostignol was slit
+open from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road
+between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried
+thus on a pike from San Giovanni to La Torre."[2]
+
+
+_Und dergleicken mehr_!  In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of the
+Vaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors.  The
+places of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and {49} the
+whole Vaudois people learned French in order to follow their services.
+More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from the
+normal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand.  In
+1686 the Duke of Savoy ordered the three thousand that remained to give
+up their faith or leave the country.  Refusing, they fought the French
+and Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remained
+alive or uncaptured, when they gave up, and were sent in a body to
+Switzerland.  But in 1689, encouraged by William of Orange and led by
+one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred of
+them returned to conquer their old homes again.  They fought their way
+to Bobi, reduced to four hundred men in the first half year, and met
+every force sent against them, until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving
+up his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV.,
+restored them to comparative freedom,--since which time they have
+increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day.
+
+What are our woes and sufferance compared with these?  Does not the
+recital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us
+with resolution against our petty powers of darkness,--machine
+politicians, spoilsmen, and the rest?  Life is worth living, no matter
+what it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successful
+terminations and one's heel set on the tyrant's throat.  To the
+suicide, then, in his supposed world of multifarious and immoral
+nature, you can appeal--and appeal in the name of the very evils that
+make his heart sick there--to wait and see his part of the battle out.
+And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these {50}
+circumstances, is not the sophistical 'resignation' which devotees of
+cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of
+licking a despotic Deity's hand.  It is, on the contrary, a resignation
+based on manliness and pride.  So long as your would-be suicide leaves
+an evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly no concern with
+evil in the abstract and at large.  The submission which you demand of
+yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent
+acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at
+large is _none of your business_ until your business with your private
+particular evils is liquidated and settled up.  A challenge of this
+sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made
+to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your
+reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with
+a certain interest again.  The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating
+thing.  When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts
+have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their
+lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together
+here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our
+relation to the universe in a more solemn light.  "Does not," as a
+young Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, "the
+acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?"
+Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some
+self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon
+which ours are built?  To hear this question is to answer it in but one
+possible way, if one have a normally constituted heart.
+
+{51}
+
+Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and
+honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living
+from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to
+get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to
+religion and its more positive gifts.  A poor half-way stage, some of
+you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an
+honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instincts
+which are our nature's best equipment, and to which religion herself
+must in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals.
+
+
+IV.
+
+And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the question, I
+come to what is the soul of my discourse.  Religion has meant many
+things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean
+to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called
+order of nature, which constitutes this world's experience, is only one
+portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this
+visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive,
+but in its relation to which the true significance of our present
+mundane life consists.  A man's religious faith (whatever more special
+items of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith in
+the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of
+the natural order may be found explained.  In the more developed
+religions the natural world has always been regarded as the mere
+scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal world, and affirmed
+to be a sphere of {52} education, trial, or redemption.  In these
+religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one
+can enter into life eternal.  The notion that this physical world of
+wind and water, where the sun rises and the moon sets, is absolutely
+and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one
+which we find only in very early religions, such as that of the most
+primitive Jews.  It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite
+of the fact that poets and men of science whose good-will exceeds their
+perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our
+contemporary ears) that, as I said a while ago, has suffered definitive
+bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must
+count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day.  For such
+persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science knows it,
+cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent.  It is
+mere _weather_, as Chauncey Wright called it, doing and undoing without
+end.
+
+Now, I wish to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of this
+hour, that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a
+partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen
+spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem
+to us better worth living again.  But as such a trust will seem to some
+of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a
+word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that science
+opposes to our act.
+
+There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and
+materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually
+tangible.  Of this sort of mind the entity called 'science' is the
+idol.  {53} Fondness for the word 'scientist' is one of the notes by
+which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any
+opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it 'unscientific.'  It must
+be granted that there is no slight excuse for this.  Science has made
+such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our
+knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men of
+science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable
+virtues,--that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their
+head.  In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one
+teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already
+been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the
+picture to fill in.  But the slightest reflection on the real
+conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are.  They
+show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how
+one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so
+crude.  Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have
+arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been
+formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon
+the brevity of science's career.  It began with Galileo, not three
+hundred years ago.  Four thinkers since Galileo, each informing his
+successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might
+have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this
+room.  Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than
+the present one, an audience of some five or six score people, if each
+person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to
+the black unknown of the human species, {54} to days without a document
+or monument to tell their tale.  Is it credible that such a mushroom
+knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, _can_ represent more than
+the minutest glimpse of what the universe will really prove to be when
+adequately understood?  No! our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.
+Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain,--that the world of
+our present natural knowledge _is_ enveloped in a larger world of
+_some_ sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no
+positive idea.
+
+Agnostic positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically in
+the most cordial terms, but insists that we must not turn it to any
+practical use.  We have no right, this doctrine tells us, to dream
+dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe,
+merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our
+highest interests.  We must always wait for sensible evidence for our
+beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no
+hypotheses whatever.  Of course this is a safe enough position _in
+abstracto_.  If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs,
+to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a
+philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the
+other would be his wisest cue.  But, unfortunately, neutrality is not
+only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our
+relations to an alternative are practical and vital.  This is because,
+as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes,
+and involve conduct on our part.  Our only way, for example, of
+doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing _is_, is
+continuing to act as if it were _not_.  If, for instance, {55} I refuse
+to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and
+light no fire just as if it still were warm.  If I doubt that you are
+worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just
+as if you were _un_worthy of the same.  If I doubt the need of insuring
+my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no
+need.  And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can
+only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if
+it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as
+if it were _not_ so, or in an irreligious way.  There are, you see,
+inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and
+must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically
+against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an
+unattainable thing.
+
+And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner
+interests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands?
+Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have
+no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain?
+In other cases divinations based on inner interests have proved
+prophetic enough.  Take science itself!  Without an imperious inner
+demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we
+should never have attained to proving that such harmonies be hidden
+between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world.
+Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact
+ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and
+blood, to gratify an inner need.  Whence such needs come from we do not
+know; we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes
+them with Darwin's 'accidental variations.' {56} But the inner need of
+believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more
+spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative
+in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation
+ever can be in a professionally scientific head.  The toil of many
+generations has proved the latter need prophetic.  Why _may_ not the
+former one be prophetic, too?  And if needs of ours outrun the visible
+universe, why _may_ not that be a sign that an invisible universe is
+there?  What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our
+religious demands?  Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she
+can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic "thou shalt not
+believe without coercive sensible evidence" is simply an expression
+(free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of
+a certain peculiar kind.
+
+Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I
+mean by 'trusting'?  Is the word to carry with it license to define in
+detail an invisible world, and to anathematize and excommunicate those
+whose trust is different?  Certainly not!  Our faculties of belief were
+not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they
+were given us to live by.  And to trust our religious demands means
+first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the
+invisible world which they suggest were real.  It is a fact of human
+nature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that
+goes without a single dogma or definition.  The bare assurance that
+this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the
+external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces
+have the last word and are eternal,--this bare {57} assurance is to
+such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every
+contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural
+plane.  Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all
+the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons
+at a stroke.  Often enough the wild-eyed look at life--the suicidal
+mood--will then set in.
+
+And now the application comes directly home to you and me.  Probably to
+almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth
+living, if we only could be _certain_ that our bravery and patience
+with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in
+an unseen spiritual world.  But granting we are not certain, does it
+then follow that a bare trust in such a world is a fool's paradise and
+lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free
+to indulge?  Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that
+is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf.
+That the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging
+multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove;
+and that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual
+atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for
+apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of
+our domestic animals.  Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but
+not of it.  They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner
+meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their
+intelligence,--events in which they themselves often play the cardinal
+part.  My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father
+demands damages.  The dog {58} may be present at every step of the
+negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all
+means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with _him_; and
+he never _can_ know in his natural dog's life.  Or take another case
+which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days.  Consider
+a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory.  He lies strapped
+on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark
+consciousness is literally in a sort of hell.  He cannot see a single
+redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these
+diabolical-seeming events are often controlled by human intentions with
+which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse
+of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce.
+Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and man, are to be
+bought by them.  It may be genuinely a process of redemption.  Lying on
+his back on the board there he may be performing a function
+incalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; and
+yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that
+must remain absolutely beyond his ken.
+
+Now turn from this to the life of man.  In the dog's life we see the
+world invisible to him because we live in both worlds.  In human life,
+although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing
+both these worlds a still wider world may be there, as unseen by us as
+our world is by him; and to believe in that world _may_ be the most
+essential function that our lives in this world have to perform.  But
+"_may_ be! _may_ be!" one now hears the positivist contemptuously
+exclaim; "what use can a scientific life have for maybes?"  Well, I
+reply, the {59} 'scientific' life itself has much to do with maybes,
+and human life at large has everything to do with them.  So far as man
+stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his
+entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes.  Not a
+victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done,
+except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a
+scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a
+mistake.  It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another
+that we live at all.  And often enough our faith beforehand in an
+uncertified result _is the only thing that makes the result come true_.
+Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have
+worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a
+terrible leap.  Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your
+feet are nerved to its accomplishment.  But mistrust yourself, and
+think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of
+maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and
+trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in
+the abyss.  In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the
+part of wisdom as well as of courage is to _believe what is in the line
+of your needs_, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled.  Refuse
+to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably
+perish.  But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save
+yourself.  You make one or the other of two possible universes true by
+your trust or mistrust,--both universes having been only _maybes_, in
+this particular, before you contributed your act.
+
+Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is
+subject to conditions logically {60} much like these.  It does, indeed,
+depend on you _the liver_.  If you surrender to the nightmare view and
+crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a
+picture totally black.  Pessimism, completed by your act, is true
+beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes.  Your mistrust of life has
+removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to
+it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that
+existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power.
+But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the
+nightmare view you cling to it that this world is not the _ultimatum_.
+Suppose you find yourself a very well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of--
+
+  "Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith
+  As soldiers live by courage; as, by strength
+  Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas."
+
+Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable
+subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more
+wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in
+the larger whole.  Have you not now made life worth living on these
+terms?  What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities
+ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave
+these higher faculties of yours no scope?  Please remember that
+optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own
+reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts
+of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition.
+They may even be the decisive elements in determining the definition.
+A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the
+addition {61} of a feather's weight; a long phrase may have its sense
+reversed by the addition of the three letters _n-o-t_.  This life is
+worth living, we can say, _since it is what we make it, from the moral
+point of view_; and we are determined to make it from that point of
+view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success.
+
+Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have
+assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those
+efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral
+men.  Our faith in the seen world's goodness (goodness now meaning
+fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by
+leaning on our faith in the unseen world.  But will our faith in the
+unseen world similarly verify itself?  Who knows?
+
+Once more it is a case of _maybe_; and once more maybes are the essence
+of the situation.  I confess that I do not see why the very existence
+of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response
+which any one of us may make to the religious appeal.  God himself, in
+short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our
+fidelity.  For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and
+tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this.  If
+this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained
+for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private
+theatricals from which one may withdraw at will.  But it _feels_ like a
+real fight,--as if there were something really wild in the universe
+which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to
+redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and
+fears.  For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is
+adapted.  The deepest thing in our {62} nature is this _Binnenleben_
+(as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the
+heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and
+unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears.  As through the cracks and
+crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which
+then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths
+of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take
+their rise.  Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature
+of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all
+abstract statements and scientific arguments--the veto, for example,
+which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith--sound to us like
+mere chatterings of the teeth.  For here possibilities, not finished
+facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to
+quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society,
+"as the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so
+the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists."
+
+
+These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life.  Believe
+that life _is_ worth living, and your belief will help 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."
+
+
+
+[1] An Address to the Harvard Young Men's Christian Association.
+Published in the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and
+as a pocket volume by S. B. Weston, Philadelphia, 1896.
+
+[2] Quoted by George E. Waring in his book on Tyrol.  Compare A.
+Bérard: Les Vaudois, Lyon, Storck, 1892.
+
+
+
+
+{63}
+
+THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY.[1]
+
+I.
+
+What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; and why
+do they philosophize at all?  Almost every one will immediately reply:
+They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall
+on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which
+every one by nature carries about with him under his hat.  But suppose
+this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize
+it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance?  The only
+answer can be that he will recognize its rationality as he recognizes
+everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him.
+When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality.
+
+What, then, are the marks?  A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is
+one of them.  The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to
+rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.
+
+But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positive
+character.  Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is
+constituted merely by the absence {64} of any feeling of irrationality?
+I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view.  All
+feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological
+speculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple
+discharge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest,
+impediment, or resistance.  Just as we feel no particular pleasure when
+we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the
+respiratory motions are prevented,--so any unobstructed tendency to
+action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative
+accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but
+little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought
+meets with difficulties, we experience distress.  It is only when the
+distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or to
+aspire.  When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or
+of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say
+with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such
+times, "I am sufficient as I am."  This feeling of the sufficiency of
+the present moment, of its absoluteness,--this absence of all need to
+explain it, account for it, or justify it,--is what I call the
+Sentiment of Rationality.  As soon, in short, as we are enabled from
+any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of
+seems to us _pro tanto_ rational.
+
+Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency,
+produce the sentiment of rationality.  Conceived in such modes, being
+vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation.  But
+this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up
+the theoretic way.
+
+{65}
+
+The facts of the world in their sensible diversity are always before
+us, but our theoretic need is that they should be conceived in a way
+that reduces their manifoldness to simplicity.  Our pleasure at finding
+that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is
+like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound
+into melodic or harmonic order.  The simplified result is handled with
+far less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophic
+conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-saving
+contrivance.  The passion for parsimony, for economy of means in
+thought, is the philosophic passion _par excellence_; and any character
+or aspect of the world's phenomena which gathers up their diversity
+into monotony will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher's mind
+stand for that essence of things compared with which all their other
+determinations may by him be overlooked.
+
+More universality or extensiveness is, then, one mark which the
+philosopher's conceptions must possess.  Unless they apply to an
+enormous number of cases they will not bring him relief.  The knowledge
+of things by their causes, which is often given as a definition of
+rational knowledge, is useless to him unless the causes converge to a
+minimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects.
+The more multiple then are the instances, the more flowingly does his
+mind rove from fact to fact.  The phenomenal transitions are no real
+transitions; each item is the same old friend with a slightly altered
+dress.
+
+Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon and the apple
+are, as far as their relation to the {66} earth goes, identical; of
+knowing respiration and combustion to be one; of understanding that the
+balloon rises by the same law whereby the stone sinks; of feeling that
+the warmth in one's palm when one rubs one's sleeve is identical with
+the motion which the friction checks; of recognizing the difference
+between beast and fish to be only a higher degree of that between human
+father and son; of believing our strength when we climb the mountain or
+fell the tree to be no other than the strength of the sun's rays which
+made the corn grow out of which we got our morning meal?
+
+
+But alongside of this passion for simplification there exists a sister
+passion, which in some minds--though they perhaps form the minority--is
+its rival.  This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the impulse
+to be _acquainted_ with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole.
+Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred
+outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics.  It loves
+to recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more of
+these it can carry the happier it is.  It prefers any amount of
+incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literal
+details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of
+conceiving things that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the
+same time their concrete fulness.  Clearness and simplicity thus set up
+rival claims, and make a real dilemma for the thinker.
+
+A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of
+these two cravings.  No system of philosophy can hope to be universally
+accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or {67} entirely
+subordinates the one to the other.  The fate of Spinosa, with his
+barren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that of
+Hume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness' of
+everything, on the other,--neither philosopher owning any strict and
+systematic disciples to-day, each being to posterity a warning as well
+as a stimulus,--show us that the only possible philosophy must be a
+compromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity.
+But the only way to mediate between diversity and unity is to class the
+diverse items as cases of a common essence which you discover in them.
+Classification of things into extensive 'kinds' is thus the first step;
+and classification of their relations and conduct into extensive 'laws'
+is the last step, in their philosophic unification.  A completed
+theoretic philosophy can thus never be anything more than a completed
+classification of the world's ingredients; and its results must always
+be abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstract
+essence embedded in the living fact,--the rest of the living fact being
+for the time ignored by the classifier.  This means that none of our
+explanations are complete.  They subsume things under heads wider or
+more familiar; but the last heads, whether of things or of their
+connections, are mere abstract genera, data which we just find in
+things and write down.
+
+When, for example, we think that we have rationally explained the
+connection of the facts _A_ and _B_ by classing both under their common
+attribute _x_, it is obvious that we have really explained only so much
+of these items as _is x_.  To explain the connection of choke-damp and
+suffocation by the lack of oxygen is {68} to leave untouched all the
+other peculiarities both of choke-damp and of suffocation,--such as
+convulsions and agony on the one hand, density and explosibility on the
+other.  In a word, so far as _A_ and _B_ contain _l_, _m_, _n_, and
+_o_, _p_, _q,_ respectively, in addition to _x_, they are not explained
+by _x_.  Each additional particularity makes its distinct appeal.  A
+single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of
+view.  The entire fact is not accounted for until each and all of its
+characters have been classed with their likes elsewhere.  To apply this
+now to the case of the universe, we see that the explanation of the
+world by molecular movements explains it only so far as it actually
+_is_ such movements.  To invoke the 'Unknowable' explains only so much
+as is unknowable, 'Thought' only so much as is thought, 'God' only so
+much as is God.  _Which_ thought?  _Which_ God?--are questions that
+have to be answered by bringing in again the residual data from which
+the general term was abstracted.  All those data that cannot be
+analytically identified with the attribute invoked as universal
+principle, remain as independent kinds or natures, associated
+empirically with the said attribute but devoid of rational kinship with
+it.
+
+Hence the unsatisfactoriness of all our speculations.  On the one hand,
+so far as they retain any multiplicity in their terms, they fail to get
+us out of the empirical sand-heap world; on the other, so far as they
+eliminate multiplicity the practical man despises their empty
+barrenness.  The most they can say is that the elements of the world
+are such and such, and that each is identical with itself wherever
+found; but the question Where is it found? the practical man is left to
+answer by his own wit.  Which, of all the {69} essences, shall here and
+now be held the essence of this concrete thing, the fundamental
+philosophy never attempts to decide.  We are thus led to the conclusion
+that the simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the best
+possible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable
+and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the truth.  It is a
+monstrous abridgment of life, which, like all abridgments is got by the
+absolute loss and casting out of real matter.  This is why so few human
+beings truly care for philosophy.  The particular determinations which
+she ignores are the real matter exciting needs, quite as potent and
+authoritative as hers.  What does the moral enthusiast care for
+philosophical ethics?  Why does the _AEsthetik_ of every German
+philosopher appear to the artist an abomination of desolation?
+
+  Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie
+  Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
+
+The entire man, who feels all needs by turns, will take nothing as an
+equivalent for life but the fulness of living itself.  Since the
+essences of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through the
+whole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness and
+alternation that he will enjoy them.  When weary of the concrete clash
+and dust and pettiness, he will refresh himself by a bath in the
+eternal springs, or fortify himself by a look at the immutable natures.
+But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; he will
+never carry the philosophic yoke upon his shoulders, and when tired of
+the gray monotony of her problems and insipid spaciousness of her
+results, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic
+richness of the concrete world.
+
+{70}
+
+So our study turns back here to its beginning.  Every way of
+classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular
+purpose.  Conceptions, 'kinds,' are teleological instruments.  No
+abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality
+except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver.  The
+interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but
+one of a thousand human purposes.  When others rear their heads, it
+must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs.  The
+exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their
+solutions is thus greatly reduced.  The only virtue their theoretic
+conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an
+equivalent for the world only so far as the world is simple,--the world
+meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily
+complex affair.  Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency
+in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the
+most invincible of human impulses.  The quest of the fewest elements of
+things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are men to
+think at all.
+
+
+But suppose the goal attained.  Suppose that at last we have a system
+unified in the sense that has been explained.  Our world can now be
+conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief.  Our universal
+concept has made the concrete chaos rational.  But now I ask, Can that
+which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly
+called rational?  It would seem at first sight that it might.  One is
+tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is
+appeased by the identification of one {71} thing with another, a datum
+which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving
+definitively, or be rational _in se_.  No otherness being left to annoy
+us, we should sit down at peace.  In other words, as the theoretic
+tranquillity of the boor results from his spinning no further
+considerations about his chaotic universe, so any datum whatever
+(provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle
+from the universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as
+there would then be for him absolutely no further considerations to
+spin.
+
+This in fact is what some persons think.  Professor Bain says,--
+
+
+"A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown to
+resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known.
+Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be apparent contradiction:
+the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity,
+fraternity.  When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation
+can go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; there
+is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire....  The
+path of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward generality, wider
+and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every
+department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends,
+perfect vision is gained."
+
+
+But, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold.  Our mind is so
+wedded to the process of seeing an _other_ beside every item of its
+experience, that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented to
+it, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at the
+void beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation.  In
+short, it spins for itself the further positive consideration of a
+nonentity {72} enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leads
+nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again.  But there is
+no natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and the
+thought stands oscillating to and fro, wondering "Why was there
+anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?"
+and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost.  Indeed, Bain's words are so
+untrue that in reflecting men it is just when the attempt to fuse the
+manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the
+conception of the universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection,
+that the craving for further explanation, the ontological
+wonder-sickness, arises in its extremest form.  As Schopenhauer says,
+"The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in
+motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is
+just as possible as its existence."
+
+The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent of the
+philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense.  Absolute
+existence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothing
+remain unmediated to our understanding.  One philosopher only has
+pretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm.  Hegel, by trying
+to show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by a
+series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivable
+into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotary
+circulation of the mind within its bounds.  Since such unchecked
+movement gives the feeling of rationality, he must be held, if he has
+succeeded, to have eternally and absolutely quenched all rational
+demands.
+
+But for those who deem Hegel's heroic effort to {73} have failed,
+nought remains but to confess that when all things have been unified to
+the supreme degree, the notion of a possible other than the actual may
+still haunt our imagination and prey upon our system.  The bottom of
+being is left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come
+upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and
+wonder as little as possible.  The philosopher's logical tranquillity
+is thus in essence no other than the boor's.  They differ only as to
+the point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset the
+absoluteness of the data he assumes.  The boor does so immediately, and
+is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt.  The
+philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is
+warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only
+practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the
+ultimate Why?  If he cannot exorcise this question, he must ignore or
+blink it, and, assuming the data of his system as something given, and
+the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or of
+action based on it.  There is no doubt that this acting on an opaque
+necessity is accompanied by a certain pleasure.  See the reverence of
+Carlyle for brute fact: "There is an infinite significance in fact."
+"Necessity," says Dühring, and he means not rational but given
+necessity, "is the last and highest point that we can reach....  It is
+not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but also
+that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal equilibrium in
+an uttermost datum which can simply not be other than it is."
+
+Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism, God's fiat being
+in physics and morals such an {74} uttermost datum.  Such also is the
+attitude of all hard-minded analysts and _Verstandesmenschen_.  Lotze,
+Renouvier, and Hodgson promptly say that of experience as a whole no
+account can be given, but neither seek to soften the abruptness of the
+confession nor to reconcile us with our impotence.
+
+
+But mediating attempts may be made by more mystical minds.  The peace
+of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails.  To
+religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the
+world, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by
+the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish;
+nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep,--as Wordsworth says,
+"thought is not; in enjoyment it expires."  Ontological emotion so
+fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap it
+and put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence.  Even the
+least religious of men must have felt with Walt Whitman, when loafing
+on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that "swiftly arose
+and spread round him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument
+of the earth."  At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there
+were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic
+grubbing and brooding.  In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is
+at best a learned fool.
+
+Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which the
+head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematized
+method would be a philosophic achievement of first-rate importance.
+But as used by mystics hitherto it has lacked universality, being
+available for few persons and at few times, and {75} even in these
+being apt to be followed by fits of reaction and dryness; and if men
+should agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge without logical
+pertinency, a plaster but no cure, and that the idea of non-entity can
+never be exorcised, empiricism will be the ultimate philosophy.
+Existence then will be a brute fact to which as a whole the emotion of
+ontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain eternally
+unsatisfied.  Then wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential
+attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizing
+of it will continue to be an ingredient in the philosophic industry of
+the race.  Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its
+Faust, or its Sartor Resartus.
+
+
+With this we seem to have considered the possibilities of purely
+theoretic rationality.  But we saw at the outset that rationality meant
+only unimpeded mental function.  Impediments that arise in the
+theoretic sphere might perhaps be avoided if the stream of mental
+action should leave that sphere betimes and pass into the practical.
+Let us therefore inquire what constitutes the feeling of rationality in
+its _practical_ aspect.  If thought is not to stand forever pointing at
+the universe in wonder, if its movement is to be diverted from the
+issueless channel of purely theoretic contemplation, let us ask what
+conception of the universe will awaken active impulses capable of
+effecting this diversion.  A definition of the world which will give
+back to the mind the free motion which has been blocked in the purely
+contemplative path may so far make the world seem rational again.
+
+Well, of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand,
+that one which awakens the active {76} impulses, or satisfies other
+aesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more
+rational conception, and will deservedly prevail.
+
+There is nothing improbable in the supposition that an analysis of the
+world may yield a number of formulae, all consistent with the facts.
+In physical science different formulae may explain the phenomena
+equally well,--the one-fluid and the two-fluid theories of electricity,
+for example.  Why may it not be so with the world?  Why may there not
+be different points of view for surveying it, within each of which all
+data harmonize, and which the observer may therefore either choose
+between, or simply cumulate one upon another?  A Beethoven
+string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses'
+tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms;
+but the application of this description in no way precludes the
+simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.  Just
+so a thorough-going interpretation of the world in terms of mechanical
+sequence is compatible with its being interpreted teleologically, for
+the mechanism itself may be designed.
+
+If, then, there were several systems excogitated, equally satisfying to
+our purely logical needs, they would still have to be passed in review,
+and approved or rejected by our aesthetic and practical nature.  Can we
+define the tests of rationality which these parts of our nature would
+use?
+
+
+Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere
+familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of their
+rationality.  The empiricist school has been so much struck by this
+circumstance {77} as to have laid it down that the feeling of
+rationality and the feeling of familiarity are one and the same thing,
+and that no other kind of rationality than this exists.  The daily
+contemplation of phenomena juxtaposed in a certain order begets an
+acceptance of their connection, as absolute as the repose engendered by
+theoretic insight into their coherence.  To explain a thing is to pass
+easily back to its antecedents; to know it is easily to foresee its
+consequents.  Custom, which lets us do both, is thus the source of
+whatever rationality the thing may gain in our thought.
+
+In the broad sense in which rationality was defined at the outset of
+this essay, it is perfectly apparent that custom must be one of its
+factors.  We said that any perfectly fluent and easy thought was devoid
+of the sentiment of irrationality.  Inasmuch then as custom acquaints
+us with all the relations of a thing, it teaches us to pass fluently
+from that thing to others, and _pro tanto_ tinges it with the rational
+character.
+
+Now, there is one particular relation of greater practical importance
+than all the rest,--I mean the relation of a thing to its future
+consequences.  So long as an object is unusual, our expectations are
+baffled; they are fully determined as soon as it becomes familiar.  I
+therefore propose this as the first practical requisite which a
+philosophic conception must satisfy: _It must, in a general way at
+least, banish uncertainty from the future_.  The permanent presence of
+the sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely ignored by most
+writers, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment is
+never free from the ingredient of expectancy.  Every one knows how when
+a painful thing has to be undergone in the {78} near future, the vague
+feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness
+and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our
+attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given
+present.  The same is true when a great happiness awaits us.  But when
+the future is neutral and perfectly certain, 'we do not mind it,' as we
+say, but give an undisturbed attention to the actual.  Let now this
+haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without
+an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind.
+But in every novel or unclassified experience this is just what occurs;
+we do not know what will come next; and novelty _per se_ becomes a
+mental irritant, while custom _per se_ is a mental sedative, merely
+because the one baffles while the other settles our expectations.
+
+Every reader must feel the truth of this.  What is meant by coming 'to
+feel at home' in a new place, or with new people?  It is simply that,
+at first, when we take up our quarters in a new room, we do not know
+what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what
+forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and
+corners.  When after a few days we have learned the range of all these
+possibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears.  And so it does
+with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any
+essentially new manifestations from their character.
+
+The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectly
+obvious; 'natural selection,' in fact, was bound to bring it about
+sooner or later.  It is of the utmost practical importance to an animal
+that he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects {79} that
+surround him, and especially that he should not come to rest in
+presence of circumstances that might be fraught either with peril or
+advantage,--go to sleep, for example, on the brink of precipices, in
+the dens of enemies, or view with indifference some new-appearing
+object that might, if chased, prove an important addition to the
+larder.  Novelty _ought_ to irritate him.  All curiosity has thus a
+practical genesis.  We need only look at the physiognomy of a dog or a
+horse when a new object comes into his view, his mingled fascination
+and fear, to see that the element of conscious insecurity or perplexed
+expectation lies at the root of his emotion.  A dog's curiosity about
+the movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far as
+the point of deciding what is going to happen next.  That settled,
+curiosity is quenched.  The dog quoted by Darwin, whose behavior in
+presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to a sense
+'of the supernatural,' was merely exhibiting the irritation of an
+uncertain future.  A newspaper which could move spontaneously was in
+itself so unexpected that the poor brute could not tell what new
+wonders the next moment might bring forth.
+
+To turn back now to philosophy.  An ultimate datum, even though it be
+logically unrationalized, will, if its quality is such as to define
+expectancy, be peacefully accepted by the mind; while if it leave the
+least opportunity for ambiguity in the future, it will to that extent
+cause mental uneasiness if not distress.  Now, in the ultimate
+explanations of the universe which the craving for rationality has
+elicited from the human mind, the demands of expectancy to be satisfied
+have always played a fundamental part.  {80} The term set up by
+philosophers as primordial has been one which banishes the
+incalculable.  'Substance,' for example, means, as Kant says, _das
+Beharrliche_, which will be as it has been, because its being is
+essential and eternal.  And although we may not be able to prophesy in
+detail the future phenomena to which the substance shall give rise, we
+may set our minds at rest in a general way, when we have called the
+substance God, Perfection, Love, or Reason, by the reflection that
+whatever is in store for us can never at bottom be inconsistent with
+the character of this term; so that our attitude even toward the
+unexpected is in a general sense defined.  Take again the notion of
+immortality, which for common people seems to be the touchstone of
+every philosophic or religious creed: what is this but a way of saying
+that the determination of expectancy is the essential factor of
+rationality?  The wrath of science against miracles, of certain
+philosophers against the doctrine of free-will, has precisely the same
+root,--dislike to admit any ultimate factor in things which may rout
+our prevision or upset the stability of our outlook.
+
+Anti-substantialist writers strangely overlook this function in the
+doctrine of substance; "If there be such a _substratum_," says Mill,
+"suppose it at this instant miraculously annihilated, and let the
+sensations continue to occur in the same order, and how would the
+_substratum_ be missed?  By what signs should we be able to discover
+that its existence had terminated?  Should we not have as much reason
+to believe that it still existed as we now have?  And if we should not
+then be warranted in believing it, how can we be so now?"  Truly
+enough, if we have {81} already securely bagged our facts in a certain
+order, we can dispense with any further warrant for that order.  But
+with regard to the facts yet to come the case is far different.  It
+does not follow that if substance may be dropped from our conception of
+the irrecoverably past, it need be an equally empty complication to our
+notions of the future.  Even if it were true that, for aught we know to
+the contrary, the substance might develop at any moment a wholly new
+set of attributes, the mere logical form of referring things to a
+substance would still (whether rightly or wrongly) remain accompanied
+by a feeling of rest and future confidence.  In spite of the acutest
+nihilistic criticism, men will therefore always have a liking for any
+philosophy which explains things _per substantiam_.
+
+A very natural reaction against the theosophizing conceit and
+hide-bound confidence in the upshot of things, which vulgarly
+optimistic minds display, has formed one factor of the scepticism of
+empiricists, who never cease to remind us of the reservoir of
+possibilities alien to our habitual experience which the cosmos may
+contain, and which, for any warrant we have to the contrary, may turn
+it inside out to-morrow.  Agnostic substantialism like that of Mr.
+Spencer, whose Unknowable is not merely the unfathomable but the
+absolute-irrational, on which, if consistently represented in thought,
+it is of course impossible to count, performs the same function of
+rebuking a certain stagnancy and smugness in the manner in which the
+ordinary philistine feels his security.  But considered as anything
+else than as reactions against an opposite excess, these philosophies
+of uncertainty cannot be acceptable; the general mind will fail to {82}
+come to rest in their presence, and will seek for solutions of a more
+reassuring kind.
+
+We may then, I think, with perfect confidence lay down as a first point
+gained in our inquiry, that a prime factor in the philosophic craving
+is the desire to have expectancy defined; and that no philosophy will
+definitively triumph which in an emphatic manner denies the possibility
+of gratifying this need.
+
+
+We pass with this to the next great division of our topic.  It is not
+sufficient for our satisfaction merely to know the future as
+determined, for it may be determined in either of many ways, agreeable
+or disagreeable.  For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it
+must define the future _congruously with our spontaneous powers_.  A
+philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either of two
+defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance.  First, its ultimate
+principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our
+dearest desires and most cherished powers.  A pessimistic principle
+like Schopenhauer's incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann's
+wicked jack-of-all-trades the Unconscious, will perpetually call forth
+essays at other philosophies.  Incompatibility of the future with their
+desires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of more
+fixed disquietude than uncertainty itself.  Witness the attempts to
+overcome the 'problem of evil,' the 'mystery of pain.'  There is no
+'problem of good.'
+
+But a second and worse defect in a philosophy than that of
+contradicting our active propensities is to give them no object
+whatever to press against.  A philosophy whose principle is so
+incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all {83}
+relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at one
+blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism.  Better face the
+enemy than the eternal Void!  This is why materialism will always fail
+of universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into an
+atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity.
+For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the
+impulses which we most cherish.  The real _meaning_ of the impulses, it
+says, is something which has no emotional interest for us whatever.
+Now, what is called 'extradition' is quite as characteristic of our
+emotions as of our senses: both point to an object as the cause of the
+present feeling.  What an intensely objective reference lies in fear!
+In like manner an enraptured man and a dreary-feeling man are not
+simply aware of their subjective states; if they were, the force of
+their feelings would all evaporate.  Both believe there is outward
+cause why they should feel as they do: either, "It is a glad world! how
+good life is!" or, "What a loathsome tedium is existence!"  Any
+philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by
+explaining away its objects or translating them into terms of no
+emotional pertinency, leaves the mind with little to care or act for.
+This is the opposite condition from that of nightmare, but when acutely
+brought home to consciousness it produces a kindred horror.  In
+nightmare we have motives to act, but no power; here we have powers,
+but no motives.  A nameless _unheimlichkeit_ comes over us at the
+thought of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the
+objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies.
+The monstrously lopsided equation of the universe and its {84} knower,
+which we postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled
+by the no less lopsided equation of the universe and the _doer_.  We
+demand in it a character for which our emotions and active propensities
+shall be a match.  Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the
+cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that his
+reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast
+whole,--that he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do
+what it expects of him.  But as his abilities to do lie wholly in the
+line of his natural propensities; as he enjoys reacting with such
+emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the
+like; and as he very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or
+doubt,--a philosophy which should only legitimate emotions of the
+latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and
+craving.
+
+It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up
+of practical interests.  The theory of evolution is beginning to do
+very good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of
+reflex action.  Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, a
+cross-section at a certain point, of what in its totality is a motor
+phenomenon.  In the lower forms of life no one will pretend that
+cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action.  The
+germinal question concerning things brought for the first time before
+consciousness is not the theoretic 'What is that?' but the practical
+'Who goes there?' or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, 'What is
+to be done?'--'Was fang' ich an?'  In all our discussions about the
+intelligence of lower animals, the only test we use is that of their
+_acting_ as if for a purpose.  {85} Cognition, in short, is incomplete
+until discharged in act; and although it is true that the later mental
+development, which attains its maximum through the hypertrophied
+cerebrum of man, gives birth to a vast amount of theoretic activity
+over and above that which is immediately ministerial to practice, yet
+the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the active nature
+asserts its rights to the end.
+
+When the cosmos in its totality is the object offered to consciousness,
+the relation is in no whit altered.  React on it we must in some
+congenial way.  It was a deep instinct in Schopenhauer which led him to
+reinforce his pessimistic argumentation by a running volley of
+invective against the practical man and his requirements.  No hope for
+pessimism unless he is slain!
+
+Helmholtz's immortal works on the eye and ear are to a great extent
+little more than a commentary on the law that practical utility wholly
+determines which parts of our sensations we shall be aware of, and
+which parts we shall ignore.  We notice or discriminate an ingredient
+of sense only so far as we depend upon it to modify our actions.  We
+_comprehend_ a thing when we synthetize it by identity with another
+thing.  But the other great department of our understanding,
+_acquaintance_ (the two departments being recognized in all languages
+by the antithesis of such words as _wissen_ and _kennen_; _scire_ and
+_noscere_, etc.), what is that also but a synthesis,--a synthesis of a
+passive perception with a certain tendency to reaction?  We are
+acquainted with a thing as soon as we have learned how to behave
+towards it, or how to meet the behavior which we expect from it.  Up to
+that point it is still 'strange' to us.
+
+{86}
+
+If there be anything at all in this view, it follows that however
+vaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate universal datum, he
+cannot be said to leave it unknown to us so long as he in the slightest
+degree pretends that our emotional or active attitude toward it should
+be of one sort rather than another.  He who says "life is real, life is
+earnest," however much he may speak of the fundamental mysteriousness
+of things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness by
+ascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood called
+seriousness,--which means the willingness to live with energy, though
+energy bring pain.  The same is true of him who says that all is
+vanity.  For indefinable as the predicate 'vanity' may be _in se_, it
+is clearly something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape from
+suffering, to be our rule of life.  There can be no greater incongruity
+than for a disciple of Spencer to proclaim with one breath that the
+substance of things is unknowable, and with the next that the thought
+of it should inspire us with awe, reverence, and a willingness to add
+our co-operative push in the direction toward which its manifestations
+seem to be drifting.  The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it make
+such distinct demands upon our activity we surely are not ignorant of
+its essential quality.
+
+If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great
+periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common,
+we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have
+said to the human being, "The inmost nature of the reality is congenial
+to _powers_ which you possess."  In what did the emancipating message
+of primitive Christianity consist but in the announcement that {87} God
+recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely
+overlooked?  Take repentance: the man who can do nothing rightly can at
+least repent of his failures.  But for paganism this faculty of
+repentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair.
+Christianity took it, and made it the one power within us which
+appealed straight to the heart of God.  And after the night of the
+middle ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses
+of the flesh, and defined the reality to be such that only slavish
+natures could commune with it, in what did the _sursum corda_ of the
+platonizing renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype
+of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole
+aesthetic being?  What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals
+to powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them,--faith
+and self-despair,--but which were personal, requiring no priestly
+intermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God?
+What caused the wildfire influence of Rousseau but the assurance he
+gave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, if
+only the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between?
+How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time with
+cheer, except by saying, "Use all your powers; that is the only
+obedience the universe exacts"?  And Carlyle with his gospel of work,
+of fact, of veracity, how does he move us except by saying that the
+universe imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can
+perform?  Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be is
+here in the enveloping now; that man has but to obey himself,--"He who
+will rest in what he _is_, {88} is a part of destiny,"--is in like
+manner nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency
+of one's natural faculties.
+
+In a word, "Son of Man, _stand upon thy feet_ and I will speak unto
+thee!" is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs have
+helped the disciple.  But that has been enough to satisfy the greater
+part of his rational need.  _In se_ and _per se_ the universal essence
+has hardly been more defined by any of these formulas than by the
+agnostic _x_; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are,
+are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent; that it speaks to them and
+will in some way recognize their reply; that I can be a match for it if
+I will, and not a footless waif,--suffices to make it rational to my
+feeling in the sense given above.  Nothing could be more absurd than to
+hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse
+to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more
+powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies.  Fatalism, whose
+solving word in all crises of behavior is "all striving is vain," will
+never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is
+indestructible in the race.  Moral creeds which speak to that impulse
+will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and
+shadowy determination of expectancy.  Man needs a rule for his will,
+and will invent one if one be not given him.
+
+
+But now observe a most important consequence.  Men's active impulses
+are so differently mixed that a philosophy fit in this respect for
+Bismarck will almost certainly be unfit for a valetudinarian poet.  In
+other words, although one can lay down in advance the {89} rule that a
+philosophy which utterly denies all fundamental ground for seriousness,
+for effort, for hope, which says the nature of things is radically
+alien to human nature, can never succeed,--one cannot in advance say
+what particular dose of hope, or of gnosticism of the nature of things,
+the definitely successful philosophy shall contain.  In short, it is
+almost certain that personal temperament will here make itself felt,
+and that although all men will insist on being spoken to by the
+universe in some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just the
+same way.  We have here, in short, the sphere of what Matthew Arnold
+likes to call _Aberglaube_, legitimate, inexpugnable, yet doomed to
+eternal variations and disputes.
+
+Take idealism and materialism as examples of what I mean, and suppose
+for a moment that both give a conception of equal theoretic clearness
+and consistency, and that both determine our expectations equally well.
+Idealism will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution,
+materialism by another.  At this very day all sentimental natures, fond
+of conciliation and intimacy, tend to an idealistic faith.  Why?
+Because idealism gives to the nature of things such kinship with our
+personal selves.  Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with,
+what we are least afraid of.  To say then that the universe essentially
+is thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all.
+There is no radically alien corner, but an all-pervading _intimacy_.
+Now, in certain sensitively egotistic minds this conception of reality
+is sure to put on a narrow, close, sick-room air.  Everything
+sentimental and priggish will be consecrated by it.  That element in
+reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there
+because it calls forth {90} powers that he owns--the rough, harsh,
+sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the
+democratizer--is banished because it jars too much on the desire for
+communion.  Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws
+many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic
+reaction against the contrary extreme.  They sicken at a life wholly
+constituted of intimacy.  There is an overpowering desire at moments to
+escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no
+respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over
+us.  The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think,
+always be seen in philosophy.  Some men will keep insisting on the
+reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that we
+can act _with_; others, on the opacity of brute fact that we must react
+_against_.
+
+
+Now, there is one element of our active nature which the Christian
+religion has emphatically recognized, but which philosophers as a rule
+have with great insincerity tried to huddle out of sight in their
+pretension to found systems of absolute certainty.  I mean the element
+of faith.  Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is
+still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness
+to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the
+prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.  It is in
+fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs;
+and there will be a very widespread tendency in men of vigorous nature
+to enjoy a certain amount of uncertainty in their philosophic creed,
+just as risk lends a zest to worldly activity.  Absolutely certified
+philosophies {91} seeking the _inconcussum_ are fruits of mental
+natures in which the passion for identity (which we saw to be but one
+factor of the rational appetite) plays an abnormally exclusive part.
+In the average man, on the contrary, the power to trust, to risk a
+little beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function.  Any mode
+of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous
+power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to
+create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is
+willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers.
+
+The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is
+strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day;
+but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only
+legitimate when used in the interests of one particular
+proposition,--the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is
+uniform.  That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she
+follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can _know_; but
+in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or
+assume it.  As Helmholtz says: "Hier gilt nur der eine Rath: vertraue
+und handle!"  And Professor Bain urges: "Our only error is in proposing
+to give any reason or justification of the postulate, or to treat it as
+otherwise than begged at the very outset."
+
+With regard to all other possible truths, however, a number of our most
+influential contemporaries think that an attitude of faith is not only
+illogical but shameful.  Faith in a religious dogma for which there is
+no outward proof, but which we are tempted to postulate for our
+emotional interests, just as we {92} postulate the uniformity of nature
+for our intellectual interests, is branded by Professor Huxley as "the
+lowest depth of immorality."  Citations of this kind from leaders of
+the modern _Aufklärung_ might be multiplied almost indefinitely.  Take
+Professor Clifford's article on the 'Ethics of Belief.'  He calls it
+'guilt' and 'sin' to believe even the truth without 'scientific
+evidence.'  But what is the use of being a genius, unless _with the
+same scientific evidence_ as other men, one can reach more truth than
+they?  Why does Clifford fearlessly proclaim his belief in the
+conscious-automaton theory, although the 'proofs' before him are the
+same which make Mr. Lewes reject it?  Why does he believe in primordial
+units of 'mind-stuff' on evidence which would seem quite worthless to
+Professor Bain?  Simply because, like every human being of the
+slightest mental originality, he is peculiarly sensitive to evidence
+that bears in some one direction.  It is utterly hopeless to try to
+exorcise such sensitiveness by calling it the disturbing subjective
+factor, and branding it as the root of all evil.  'Subjective' be it
+called! and 'disturbing' to those whom it foils!  But if it helps those
+who, as Cicero says, "vim naturae magis sentiunt," it is good and not
+evil.  Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we
+form our philosophical opinions.  Intellect, will, taste, and passion
+co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the
+passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over
+the philosopher across the way.  The absurd abstraction of an intellect
+verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the
+probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose
+denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ideally as inept
+as it is actually impossible.  It is almost incredible that men who are
+themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can
+be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal
+preference, belief, or divination.  How have they succeeded in so
+stultifying their sense for the living facts of human nature as not to
+perceive that every philosopher, or man of science either, whose
+initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought, has taken
+his stand on a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in one
+direction rather than another, and a sort of preliminary assurance that
+his notion can be made to work; and has borne his best fruit in trying
+to make it work?  These mental instincts in different men are the
+spontaneous variations upon which the intellectual struggle for
+existence is based.  The fittest conceptions survive, and with them the
+names of their champions shining to all futurity.
+
+The coil is about us, struggle as we may.  The only escape from faith
+is mental nullity.  What we enjoy most in a Huxley or a Clifford is not
+the professor with his learning, but the human personality ready to go
+in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances.  The
+concrete man has but one interest,--to be right.  That for him is the
+art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.  Naked he
+is flung into the world, and between him and nature there are no rules
+of civilized warfare.  The rules of the scientific game, burdens of
+proof, presumptions, _experimenta crucis_, complete inductions, and the
+like, are only binding on those who enter that game.  As a matter of
+fact we all more or less do enter it, because it helps us to our end.
+But if the means presume to frustrate the end and call us cheats for
+being right in {94} advance of their slow aid, by guesswork or by hook
+or crook, what shall we say of them?  Were all of Clifford's works,
+except the Ethics of Belief, forgotten, he might well figure in future
+treatises on psychology in place of the somewhat threadbare instance of
+the miser who has been led by the association of ideas to prefer his
+gold to all the goods he might buy therewith.
+
+In short, if I am born with such a superior general reaction to
+evidence that I can guess right and act accordingly, and gain all that
+comes of right action, while my less gifted neighbor (paralyzed by his
+scruples and waiting for more evidence which he dares not anticipate,
+much as he longs to) still stands shivering on the brink, by what law
+shall I be forbidden to reap the advantages of my superior native
+sensitiveness?  Of course I yield to my belief in such a case as this
+or distrust it, alike at my peril, just as I do in any of the great
+practical decisions of life.  If my inborn faculties are good, I am a
+prophet; if poor, I am a failure: nature spews me out of her mouth, and
+there is an end of me.  In the total game of life we stake our persons
+all the while; and if in its theoretic part our persons will help us to
+a conclusion, surely we should also stake them there, however
+inarticulate they may be.[2]
+
+{95}
+
+But in being myself so very articulate in proving what to all readers
+with a sense for reality will seem a platitude, am I not wasting words?
+We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith.  Faith is
+synonymous with working hypothesis.  The only difference is that while
+some hypotheses can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy ages.
+A chemist who conjectures that a certain wall-paper contains arsenic,
+and has faith enough to lead him to take the trouble to put some of it
+into a hydrogen bottle, finds out by the results of his action whether
+he was right or wrong.  But theories like that of Darwin, or that of
+the kinetic constitution of matter, may exhaust the labors of
+generations in their corroboration, each tester of their truth
+proceeding in this simple way,--that he acts as if it were true, and
+expects the result to disappoint him if his assumption is false.  The
+longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows his faith in his
+theory.
+
+Now, in such questions as God, immortality, absolute morality, and
+free-will, no non-papal believer at the present day pretends his faith
+to be of an essentially different complexion; he can always doubt his
+creed.  But his intimate persuasion is that the odds in its favor are
+strong enough to warrant him in acting all along on the assumption of
+its truth.  His corroboration or repudiation by the nature of things
+may be deferred until the day of judgment.  The {96} uttermost he now
+means is something like this: "I _expect_ then to triumph with tenfold
+glory; but if it should turn out, as indeed it may, that I have spent
+my days in a fool's paradise, why, better have been the dupe of _such_
+a dreamland than the cunning reader of a world like that which then
+beyond all doubt unmasks itself to view."  In short, we _go in_ against
+materialism very much as we should _go in_, had we a chance, against
+the second French empire or the Church of Rome, or any other system of
+things toward which our repugnance is vast enough to determine
+energetic action, but too vague to issue in distinct argumentation.
+Our reasons are ludicrously incommensurate with the volume of our
+feeling, yet on the latter we unhesitatingly act.
+
+
+Now, I wish to show what to my knowledge has never been clearly pointed
+out, that belief (as measured by action) not only does and must
+continually outstrip scientific evidence, but that there is a certain
+class of truths of whose reality belief is a factor as well as a
+confessor; and that as regards this class of truths faith is not only
+licit and pertinent, but essential and indispensable.  The truths
+cannot become true till our faith has made them so.
+
+Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps, and have had the
+ill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is
+by a terrible leap.  Being without similar experience, I have no
+evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and
+confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my
+feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps
+have been impossible.  But suppose that, on the contrary, {97} the
+emotions of fear and mistrust preponderate; or suppose that, having
+just read the Ethics of Belief, I feel it would be sinful to act upon
+an assumption unverified by previous experience,--why, then I shall
+hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launching
+myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the
+abyss.  In this case (and it is one of an immense class) the part of
+wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of
+the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its
+object.  _There are then cases where faith creates its own
+verification_.  Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save
+yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish.
+The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage.
+
+The future movements of the stars or the facts of past history are
+determined now once for all, whether I like them or not.  They are
+given irrespective of my wishes, and in all that concerns truths like
+these subjective preference should have no part; it can only obscure
+the judgment.  But in every fact into which there enters an element of
+personal contribution on my part, as soon as this personal contribution
+demands a certain degree of subjective energy which, in its turn, calls
+for a certain amount of faith in the result,--so that, after all, the
+future fact is conditioned by my present faith in it,--how trebly
+asinine would it be for me to deny myself the use of the subjective
+method, the method of belief based on desire!
+
+In every proposition whose bearing is universal (and such are all the
+propositions of philosophy), the acts of the subject and their
+consequences throughout eternity should be included in the formula.  If
+_M_ {98} represent the entire world _minus_ the reaction of the thinker
+upon it, and if _M_ + _x_ represent the absolutely total matter of
+philosophic propositions (_x_ standing for the thinker's reaction and
+its results),--what would be a universal truth if the term x were of
+one complexion, might become egregious error if _x_ altered its
+character.  Let it not be said that _x_ is too infinitesimal a
+component to change the character of the immense whole in which it lies
+imbedded.  Everything depends on the point of view of the philosophic
+proposition in question.  If we have to define the universe from the
+point of view of sensibility, the critical material for our judgment
+lies in the animal kingdom, insignificant as that is, quantitatively
+considered.  The moral definition of the world may depend on phenomena
+more restricted still in range.  In short, many a long phrase may have
+its sense reversed by the addition of three letters, _n-o-t_; many a
+monstrous mass have its unstable equilibrium discharged one way or the
+other by a feather weight that falls.
+
+Let us make this clear by a few examples.  The philosophy of evolution
+offers us to-day a new criterion to serve as an ethical test between
+right and wrong.  Previous criteria, it says, being subjective, have
+left us still floundering in variations of opinion and the _status
+belli_.  Here is a criterion which is objective and fixed: _That is to
+be called good which is destined to prevail or survive_.  But we
+immediately see that this standard can only remain objective by leaving
+myself and my conduct out.  If what prevails and survives does so by my
+help, and cannot do so without that help; if something else will
+prevail in case I alter my conduct,--how can I possibly now, conscious
+of alternative courses of action open before me, either of which {99} I
+may suppose capable of altering the path of events, decide which course
+to take by asking what path events will follow?  If they follow my
+direction, evidently my direction cannot wait on them.  The only
+possible manner in which an evolutionist can use his standard is the
+obsequious method of forecasting the course society would take _but for
+him_, and then putting an extinguisher on all personal idiosyncrasies
+of desire and interest, and with bated breath and tiptoe tread
+following as straight as may be at the tail, and bringing up the rear
+of everything.  Some pious creatures may find a pleasure in this; but
+not only does it violate our general wish to lead and not to follow (a
+wish which is surely not immoral if we but lead aright), but if it be
+treated as every ethical principle must be treated,--namely, as a rule
+good for all men alike,--its general observance would lead to its
+practical refutation by bringing about a general deadlock.  Each good
+man hanging back and waiting for orders from the rest, absolute
+stagnation would ensue.  Happy, then, if a few unrighteous ones
+contribute an initiative which sets things moving again!
+
+All this is no caricature.  That the course of destiny may be altered
+by individuals no wise evolutionist ought to doubt.  Everything for him
+has small beginnings, has a bud which may be 'nipped,' and nipped by a
+feeble force.  Human races and tendencies follow the law, and have also
+small beginnings.  The best, according to evolution, is that which has
+the biggest endings.  Now, if a present race of men, enlightened in the
+evolutionary philosophy, and able to forecast the future, were able to
+discern in a tribe arising near them the potentiality of future
+supremacy; were able to see that their own {100} race would eventually
+be wiped out of existence by the new-comers if the expansion of these
+were left unmolested,--these present sages would have two courses open
+to them, either perfectly in harmony with the evolutionary test:
+Strangle the new race now, and ours survives; help the new race, and it
+survives.  In both cases the action is right as measured by the
+evolutionary standard,--it is action for the winning side.
+
+Thus the evolutionist foundation of ethics is purely objective only to
+the herd of nullities whose votes count for zero in the march of
+events.  But for others, leaders of opinion or potentates, and in
+general those to whose actions position or genius gives a far-reaching
+import, and to the rest of us, each in his measure,--whenever we
+espouse a cause we contribute to the determination of the evolutionary
+standard of right.  The truly wise disciple of this school will then
+admit faith as an ultimate ethical factor.  Any philosophy which makes
+such questions as, What is the ideal type of humanity?  What shall be
+reckoned virtues?  What conduct is good? depend on the question, What
+is going to succeed?--must needs fall back on personal belief as one of
+the ultimate conditions of the truth.  For again and again success
+depends on energy of act; energy again depends on faith that we shall
+not fail; and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right,--which
+faith thus verifies itself.
+
+Take as an example the question of optimism or pessimism, which makes
+so much noise just now in Germany.  Every human being must sometime
+decide for himself whether life is worth living.  Suppose that in
+looking at the world and seeing how full it is of misery, of old age,
+of wickedness and {101} pain, and how unsafe is his own future, he
+yields to the pessimistic conclusion, cultivates disgust and dread,
+ceases striving, and finally commits suicide.  He thus adds to the mass
+_M_ of mundane phenomena, independent of his subjectivity, the
+subjective complement _x_, which makes of the whole an utterly black
+picture illumined by no gleam of good.  Pessimism completed, verified
+by his moral reaction and the deed in which this ends, is true beyond a
+doubt.  _M_ + _x_ expresses a state of things totally bad.  The man's
+belief supplied all that was lacking to make it so, and now that it is
+made so the belief was right.
+
+But now suppose that with the same evil facts _M_, the man's reaction
+_x_ is exactly reversed; suppose that instead of giving way to the evil
+he braves it, and finds a sterner, more wonderful joy than any passive
+pleasure can yield in triumphing over pain and defying fear; suppose he
+does this successfully, and however thickly evils crowd upon him proves
+his dauntless subjectivity to be more than their match,--will not every
+one confess that the bad character of the _M_ is here the _conditio
+sine qua non_ of the good character of the _x_?  Will not every one
+instantly declare a world fitted only for fair-weather human beings
+susceptible of every passive enjoyment, but without independence,
+courage, or fortitude, to be from a moral point of view incommensurably
+inferior to a world framed to elicit from the man every form of
+triumphant endurance and conquering moral energy?  As James Hinton
+says,--
+
+
+"Little inconveniences, exertions, pains.--these are the only things in
+which we rightly feel our life at all.  If these be not there,
+existence becomes worthless, or worse; {102} success in putting them
+all away is fatal.  So it is men engage in athletic sports, spend their
+holidays in climbing up mountains, find nothing so enjoyable as that
+which taxes their endurance and their energy.  This is the way we are
+made, I say.  It may or may not be a mystery or a paradox; it is a
+fact.  Now, this enjoyment in endurance is just according to the
+intensity of life: the more physical vigor and balance, the more
+endurance can be made an element of satisfaction.  A sick man cannot
+stand it.  The line of enjoyable suffering is not a fixed one; it
+fluctuates with the perfectness of the life.  That our pains are, as
+they are, unendurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne
+save in misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion alone makes
+patient,--that our pains are thus unendurable, means not that they are
+too great, but that _we are sick_.  We have not got our proper life.
+So you perceive pain is no more necessarily an evil, but an essential
+element of the highest good."[3]
+
+
+But the highest good can be achieved only by our getting our proper
+life; and that can come about only by help of a moral energy born of
+the faith that in some way or other we shall succeed in getting it if
+we try pertinaciously enough.  This world _is_ good, we must say, since
+it is what we make it,--and we shall make it good.  How can we exclude
+from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation
+of the truth?  _M_ has its character indeterminate, susceptible of
+forming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of a
+meliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on the
+other.  All depends on the character of the {103} personal contribution
+_x_.  Wherever the facts to be formulated contain such a contribution,
+we may logically, legitimately, and inexpugnably believe what we
+desire.  The belief creates its verification.  The thought becomes
+literally father to the fact, as the wish was father to the thought.[4]
+
+
+Let us now turn to the radical question of life,--the question whether
+this be at bottom a moral or an unmoral universe,--and see whether the
+method of faith may legitimately have a place there.  It is really the
+question of materialism.  Is the world a simple brute actuality, an
+existence _de facto_ about which the deepest thing that can be said is
+that it happens so to be; or is the judgment of _better_ or worse, of
+_ought_, as intimately pertinent to phenomena as the simple judgment
+_is_ or _is not_?  The materialistic theorists say that judgments of
+worth are themselves mere matters of fact; that the words 'good' and
+'bad' have no sense apart from subjective passions and interests which
+we may, if we please, play fast and loose with at will, so far as any
+duty of ours to the non-human universe is concerned.  Thus, when a
+materialist says it is better for him to suffer great inconvenience
+than to break a promise, he only means that his social interests have
+become so knit up with {104} keeping faith that, those interests once
+being granted, it is better for him to keep the promise in spite of
+everything.  But the interests themselves are neither right nor wrong,
+except possibly with reference to some ulterior order of interests
+which themselves again are mere subjective data without character,
+either good or bad.
+
+For the absolute moralists, on the contrary, the interests are not
+there merely to be felt,--they are to be believed in and obeyed.  Not
+only is it best for my social interests to keep my promise, but best
+for me to have those interests, and best for the cosmos to have this
+me.  Like the old woman in the story who described the world as resting
+on a rock, and then explained that rock to be supported by another
+rock, and finally when pushed with questions said it was rocks all the
+way down,--he who believes this to be a radically moral universe must
+hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate
+_should_, or on a series of _shoulds_ all the way down.[5]
+
+The practical difference between this objective sort of moralist and
+the other one is enormous.  The subjectivist in morals, when his moral
+feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek
+harmony by toning down the sensitiveness of the feelings.  Being mere
+data, neither good nor evil in themselves, he may pervert them or lull
+them to sleep by any means at his command.  Truckling, compromise,
+time-serving, capitulations of conscience, are conventionally
+opprobrious names for what, if successfully carried out, {105} would be
+on his principles by far the easiest and most praiseworthy mode of
+bringing about that harmony between inner and outer relations which is
+all that he means by good.  The absolute moralist, on the other hand,
+when his interests clash with the world, is not free to gain harmony by
+sacrificing the ideal interests.  According to him, these latter should
+be as they are and not otherwise.  Resistance then, poverty, martyrdom
+if need be, tragedy in a word,--such are the solemn feasts of his
+inward faith.  Not that the contradiction between the two men occurs
+every day; in commonplace matters all moral schools agree.  It is only
+in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then
+routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.  It cannot then be
+said that the question, Is this a moral world? is a meaningless and
+unverifiable question because it deals with something non-phenomenal.
+Any question is full of meaning to which, as here, contrary answers
+lead to contrary behavior.  And it seems as if in answering such a
+question as this we might proceed exactly as does the physical
+philosopher in testing an hypothesis.  He deduces from the hypothesis
+an experimental action, _x_; this he adds to the facts _M_ already
+existing.  It fits them if the hypothesis be true; if not, there is
+discord.  The results of the action corroborate or refute the idea from
+which it flowed.  So here: the verification of the theory which you may
+hold as to the objectively moral character of the world can consist
+only in this,--that if you proceed to act upon your theory it will be
+reversed by nothing that later turns up as your action's fruit; it will
+harmonize so well with the entire drift of experience that the latter
+will, as it were, adopt it, or at most give it an ampler {106}
+interpretation, without obliging you in any way to change the essence
+of its formulation.  If this be an objectively moral universe, all acts
+that I make on that assumption, all expectations that I ground on it,
+will tend more and more completely to interdigitate with the phenomena
+already existing.  _M_ + _x_ will be in accord; and the more I live,
+and the more the fruits of my activity come to light, the more
+satisfactory the consensus will grow.  While if it be not such a moral
+universe, and I mistakenly assume that it is, the course of experience
+will throw ever new impediments in the way of my belief, and become
+more and more difficult to express in its language.  Epicycle upon
+epicycle of subsidiary hypothesis will have to be invoked to give to
+the discrepant terms a temporary appearance of squaring with each
+other; but at last even this resource will fail.
+
+If, on the other hand, I rightly assume the universe to be not moral,
+in what does my verification consist?  It is that by letting moral
+interests sit lightly, by disbelieving that there is any duty about
+_them_ (since duty obtains only as _between_ them and other phenomena),
+and so throwing them over if I find it hard to get them satisfied,--it
+is that by refusing to take up a tragic attitude, I deal in the
+long-run most satisfactorily with the facts of life.  "All is vanity"
+is here the last word of wisdom.  Even though in certain limited series
+there may be a great appearance of seriousness, he who in the main
+treats things with a degree of good-natured scepticism and radical
+levity will find that the practical fruits of his epicurean hypothesis
+verify it more and more, and not only save him from pain but do honor
+to his sagacity.  While, on the other hand, he who contrary {107} to
+reality stiffens himself in the notion that certain things absolutely
+should be, and rejects the truth that at bottom it makes no difference
+what is, will find himself evermore thwarted and perplexed and
+bemuddled by the facts of the world, and his tragic disappointment
+will, as experience accumulates, seem to drift farther and farther away
+from that final atonement or reconciliation which certain partial
+tragedies often get.
+
+_Anaesthesia_ is the watchword of the moral sceptic brought to bay and
+put to his trumps.  _Energy_ is that of the moralist.  Act on my creed,
+cries the latter, and the results of your action will prove the creed
+true, and that the nature of things is earnest infinitely.  Act on
+mine, says the epicurean, and the results will prove that seriousness
+is but a superficial glaze upon a world of fundamentally trivial
+import.  You and your acts and the nature of things will be alike
+enveloped in a single formula, a universal _vanitas vanitatum_.
+
+
+For the sake of simplicity I have written as if the verification might
+occur in the life of a single philosopher,--which is manifestly untrue,
+since the theories still face each other, and the facts of the world
+give countenance to both.  Rather should we expect, that, in a question
+of this scope, the experience of the entire human race must make the
+verification, and that all the evidence will not be 'in' till the final
+integration of things, when the last man has had his say and
+contributed his share to the still unfinished _x_.  Then the proof will
+be complete; then it will appear without doubt whether the moralistic x
+has filled up the gap which alone kept the _M_ of the world from
+forming an even and harmonious unity, or whether the {108}
+non-moralistic _x_ has given the finishing touches which were alone
+needed to make the _M_ appear outwardly as vain as it inwardly was.
+
+But if this be so, is it not clear that the facts _M_, taken _per se_,
+are inadequate to justify a conclusion either way in advance of my
+action?  My action is the complement which, by proving congruous or
+not, reveals the latent nature of the mass to which it is applied.  The
+world may in fact be likened unto a lock, whose inward nature, moral or
+unmoral, will never reveal itself to our simply expectant gaze.  The
+positivists, forbidding us to make any assumptions regarding it,
+condemn us to eternal ignorance, for the 'evidence' which they wait for
+can never come so long as we are passive.  But nature has put into our
+hands two keys, by which we may test the lock.  If we try the moral key
+_and it fits_, it is a moral lock.  If we try the unmoral key and _it_
+fits, it is an unmoral lock.  I cannot possibly conceive of any other
+sort of 'evidence' or 'proof' than this.  It is quite true that the
+co-operation of generations is needed to educe it.  But in these
+matters the solidarity (so called) of the human race is a patent fact.
+The essential thing to notice is that our active preference is a
+legitimate part of the game,--that it is our plain business as men to
+try one of the keys, and the one in which we most confide.  If then the
+proof exist not till I have acted, and I must needs in acting run the
+risk of being wrong, how can the popular science professors be right in
+objurgating in me as infamous a 'credulity' which the strict logic of
+the situation requires?  If this really be a moral universe; if by my
+acts I be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may doubt be
+itself a moral act {109} analogous to voting for a side not yet sure to
+win,--by what right shall they close in upon me and steadily negate the
+deepest conceivable function of my being by their preposterous command
+that I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in
+eternal and insoluble doubt?  Why, doubt itself is a decision of the
+widest practical reach, if only because we may miss by doubting what
+goods we might be gaining by espousing the winning side.  But more than
+that! it is often practically impossible to distinguish doubt from
+dogmatic negation.  If I refuse to stop a murder because I am in doubt
+whether it be not justifiable homicide, I am virtually abetting the
+crime.  If I refuse to bale out a boat because I am in doubt whether my
+efforts will keep her afloat, I am really helping to sink her.  If in
+the mountain precipice I doubt my right to risk a leap, I actively
+connive at my destruction.  He who commands himself not to be credulous
+of God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may again and again be
+indistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them.  Scepticism in
+moral matters is an active ally of immorality.  Who is not for is
+against.  The universe will have no neutrals in these questions.  In
+theory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wise
+scepticism, we are really doing volunteer military service for one side
+or the other.
+
+Yet obvious as this necessity practically is, thousands of innocent
+magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow
+negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls.
+All they need to be free and hearty again in the exercise of their
+birthright is that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away.  All
+that the human {110} heart wants is its chance.  It will willingly
+forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel
+that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no
+one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs.  And if
+I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few
+of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down its
+lion-strength, I shall be more than rewarded for my pains.
+
+
+To sum up: No philosophy will permanently be deemed rational by all men
+which (in addition to meeting logical demands) does not to some degree
+pretend to determine expectancy, and in a still greater degree make a
+direct appeal to all those powers of our nature which we hold in
+highest esteem.  Faith, being one of these powers, will always remain a
+factor not to be banished from philosophic constructions, the more so
+since in many ways it brings forth its own verification.  In these
+points, then, it is hopeless to look for literal agreement among
+mankind.
+
+The ultimate philosophy, we may therefore conclude, must not be too
+strait-laced in form, must not in all its parts divide heresy from
+orthodoxy by too sharp a line.  There must be left over and above the
+propositions to be subscribed, _ubique, semper, et ab omnibus_, another
+realm into which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples and
+indulge its own faith at its own risks; and all that can here be done
+will be to mark out distinctly the questions which fall within faith's
+sphere.
+
+
+
+[1] This essay as far as page 75 consists of extracts from an article
+printed in Mind for July, 1879.  Thereafter it is a reprint of an
+address to the Harvard Philosophical Club, delivered in 1880, and
+published in the Princeton Review, July, 1882.
+
+[2] At most, the command laid upon us by science to believe nothing not
+yet verified by the senses is a prudential rule intended to maximize
+our right thinking and minimize our errors _in the long run_.  In the
+particular instance we must frequently lose truth by obeying it; but on
+the whole we are safer if we follow it consistently, for we are sure to
+cover our losses with our gains.  It is like those gambling and
+insurance rules based on probability, in which we secure ourselves
+against losses in detail by hedging on the total run.  But this hedging
+philosophy requires that long run should be there; and this makes it
+inapplicable to the question of religious faith as the latter comes
+home to the individual man.  He plays the game of life not to escape
+losses, for he brings nothing with him to lose; he plays it for gains;
+and it is now or never with him, for the long run which exists indeed
+for humanity, is not there for him.  Let him doubt, believe, or deny,
+he runs his risk, and has the natural right to choose which one it
+shall be.
+
+[3] Life of James Hinton, pp. 172, 173.  See also the excellent chapter
+on Faith and Sight in the Mystery of Matter, by J. Allanson Picton.
+Hinton's Mystery of Pain will undoubtedly always remain the classical
+utterance on this subject.
+
+[4] Observe that in all this not a word has been said of free-will.  It
+all applies as well to a predetermined as to an indeterminate universe.
+If _M_ + _x_ is fixed in advance, the belief which leads to _x_ and the
+desire which prompts the belief are also fixed.  But fixed or not,
+these subjective states form a phenomenal condition necessarily
+preceding the facts; necessarily constitutive, therefore, of the truth
+_M_ + _x_ which we seek.  If, however, free acts be possible, a faith
+in their possibility, by augmenting the moral energy which gives them
+birth, will increase their frequency in a given individual.
+
+[5] In either case, as a later essay explains (see p. 193), the
+_should_ which the moralist regards as binding upon him must be rooted
+in the feeling of some other thinker, or collection of thinkers, to
+whose demands he individually bows.
+
+
+
+
+{111}
+
+REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM.[1]
+
+MEMBERS OF THE MINISTERS' INSTITUTE:
+
+Let me confess to the diffidence with which I find myself standing here
+to-day.  When the invitation of your committee reached me last fall,
+the simple truth is that I accepted it as most men accept a
+challenge,--not because they wish to fight, but because they are
+ashamed to say no.  Pretending in my small sphere to be a teacher, I
+felt it would be cowardly to shrink from the keenest ordeal to which a
+teacher can be exposed,--the ordeal of teaching other teachers.
+Fortunately, the trial will last but one short hour; and I have the
+consolation of remembering Goethe's verses,--
+
+  "Vor den Wissenden sich stellen,
+  Sicher ist 's in allen Fällen,"--
+
+for if experts are the hardest people to satisfy, they have at any rate
+the liveliest sense of the difficulties of one's task, and they know
+quickest when one hits the mark.
+
+Since it was as a teacher of physiology that I was most unworthily
+officiating when your committee's {112} invitation reached me, I must
+suppose it to be for the sake of bringing a puff of the latest winds of
+doctrine which blow over that somewhat restless sea that my presence is
+desired.  Among all the healthy symptoms that characterize this age, I
+know no sounder one than the eagerness which theologians show to
+assimilate results of science, and to hearken to the conclusions of men
+of science about universal matters.  One runs a better chance of being
+listened to to-day if one can quote Darwin and Helmholtz than if one
+can only quote Schleiermacher or Coleridge.  I almost feel myself this
+moment that were I to produce a frog and put him through his
+physiological performances in a masterly manner before your eyes, I
+should gain more reverential ears for what I have to say during the
+remainder of the hour.  I will not ask whether there be not something
+of mere fashion in this prestige which the words of the physiologists
+enjoy just now.  If it be a fashion, it is certainly a beneficial one
+upon the whole; and to challenge it would come with a poor grace from
+one who at the moment he speaks is so conspicuously profiting by its
+favors.
+
+I will therefore only say this: that the latest breeze from the
+physiological horizon need not necessarily be the most important one.
+Of the immense amount of work which the laboratories of Europe and
+America, and one may add of Asia and Australia, are producing every
+year, much is destined to speedy refutation; and of more it may be said
+that its interest is purely technical, and not in any degree
+philosophical or universal.
+
+This being the case, I know you will justify me if I fall back on a
+doctrine which is fundamental and well established rather than novel,
+and ask you whether {113} by taking counsel together we may not trace
+some new consequences from it which shall interest us all alike as men.
+I refer to the doctrine of reflex action, especially as extended to the
+brain.  This is, of course, so familiar to you that I hardly need
+define it.  In a general way, all educated people know what reflex
+action means.
+
+It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outward
+discharges from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges
+are themselves the result of impressions from the external world,
+carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves.  Applied at
+first to only a portion of our acts, this conception has ended by being
+generalized more and more, so that now most physiologists tell us that
+every action whatever, even the most deliberately weighed and
+calculated, does, so far as its organic conditions go, follow the
+reflex type.  There is not one which cannot be remotely, if not
+immediately, traced to an origin in some incoming impression of sense.
+There is no impression of sense which, unless inhibited by some other
+stronger one, does not immediately or remotely express itself in action
+of some kind.  There is no one of those complicated performances in the
+convolutions of the brain to which our trains of thought correspond,
+which is not a mere middle term interposed between an incoming
+sensation that arouses it and an outgoing discharge of some sort,
+inhibitory if not exciting, to which itself gives rise.  The structural
+unit of the nervous system is in fact a triad, neither of whose
+elements has any independent existence.  The sensory impression exists
+only for the sake of awaking the central process of reflection, and the
+central process of reflection exists {114} only for the sake of calling
+forth the final act.  All action is thus _re_-action upon the outer
+world; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation or
+thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose
+ends have their point of application in the outer world.  If it should
+ever have no roots in the outer world, if it should ever happen that it
+led to no active measures, it would fail of its essential function, and
+would have to be considered either pathological or abortive.  The
+current of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant to run out
+at our hands, feet, or lips.  The only use of the thoughts it occasions
+while inside is to determine its direction to whichever of these organs
+shall, on the whole, under the circumstances actually present, act in
+the way most propitious to our welfare.
+
+The willing department of our nature, in short, dominates both the
+conceiving department and the feeling department; or, in plainer
+English, perception and thinking are only there for behavior's sake.
+
+I am sure I am not wrong in stating this result as one of the
+fundamental conclusions to which the entire drift of modern
+physiological investigation sweeps us.  If asked what great
+contribution physiology has made to psychology of late years, I am sure
+every competent authority will reply that her influence has in no way
+been so weighty as in the copious illustration, verification, and
+consolidation of this broad, general point of view.
+
+I invite you, then, to consider what may be the possible speculative
+consequences involved in this great achievement of our generation.
+Already, it dominates all the new work done in psychology; but {115}
+what I wish to ask is whether its influence may not extend far beyond
+the limits of psychology, even into those of theology herself.  The
+relations of the doctrine of reflex action with no less a matter than
+the doctrine of theism is, in fact, the topic to which I now invite
+your attention.
+
+
+We are not the first in the field.  There have not been wanting writers
+enough to say that reflex action and all that follows from it give the
+_coup de grâce_ to the superstition of a God.
+
+If you open, for instance, such a book on comparative psychology, as
+der Thierische Wille of G. H. Schneider, you will find, sandwiched in
+among the admirable dealings of the author with his proper subject, and
+popping out upon us in unexpected places, the most delightfully _naïf_
+German onslaughts on the degradation of theologians, and the utter
+incompatibility of so many reflex adaptations to the environment with
+the existence of a creative intelligence.  There was a time, remembered
+by many of us here, when the existence of reflex action and all the
+other harmonies between the organism and the world were held to prove a
+God.  Now, they are held to disprove him.  The next turn of the
+whirligig may bring back proof of him again.
+
+Into this debate about his existence, I will not pretend to enter.  I
+must take up humbler ground, and limit my ambition to showing that a
+God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which,
+if he did exist, would form _the most adequate possible object_ for
+minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the
+universe.  My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward
+reality of {116} a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is
+the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible
+for the human mind's contemplation.  _Anything short of God is not
+rational, anything more than God is not possible_, if the human mind be
+in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reaction
+which we at the outset allowed.
+
+Theism, whatever its objective warrant, would thus be seen to have a
+subjective anchorage in its congruity with our nature as thinkers; and,
+however it may fare with its truth, to derive from this subjective
+adequacy the strongest possible guaranty of its permanence.  It is and
+will be the classic mean of rational opinion, the centre of gravity of
+all attempts to solve the riddle of life,--some falling below it by
+defect, some flying above it by excess, itself alone satisfying every
+mental need in strictly normal measure.  Our gain will thus in the
+first instance be psychological.  We shall merely have investigated a
+chapter in the natural history of the mind, and found that, as a matter
+of such natural history, God may be called the normal object of the
+mind's belief.  Whether over and above this he be really the living
+truth is another question.  If he is, it will show the structure of our
+mind to be in accordance with the nature of reality.  Whether it be or
+not in such accordance is, it seems to me, one of those questions that
+belong to the province of personal faith to decide.  I will not touch
+upon the question here, for I prefer to keep to the strictly
+natural-history point of view.  I will only remind you that each one of
+us is entitled either to doubt or to believe in the harmony between his
+faculties and the truth; and that, whether he doubt or {117} believe,
+he does it alike on his personal responsibility and risk.
+
+  "Du musst glauben, du musst wagen,
+    Denn die Götter leihn kein Pfand,
+  Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen
+    In das schöne Wunderland."
+
+
+I will presently define exactly what I mean by God and by Theism, and
+explain what theories I referred to when I spoke just now of attempts
+to fly beyond the one and to outbid the other.
+
+
+But, first of all, let me ask you to linger a moment longer over what I
+have called the reflex theory of mind, so as to be sure that we
+understand it absolutely before going on to consider those of its
+consequences of which I am more particularly to speak.  I am not quite
+sure that its full scope is grasped even by those who have most
+zealously promulgated it.  I am not sure, for example, that all
+physiologists see that it commits them to regarding the mind as an
+essentially teleological mechanism.  I mean by this that the conceiving
+or theorizing faculty--the mind's middle department--functions
+_exclusively for the sake of ends_ that do not exist at all in the
+world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by
+our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether.[2]  It is a
+transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different
+world,--the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected
+in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose
+whatsoever.  Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective
+purposes, preferences, {118} fondnesses for certain effects, forms,
+orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order
+of our experience to be remodelled at all.  But, as we have the
+elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be
+effected; there is no escape.  The world's contents are _given_ to each
+of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can
+hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is
+like.  We have to break that order altogether,--and by picking out from
+it the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far
+away, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definite
+threads of sequence and tendency; to foresee particular liabilities and
+get ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place of
+what was chaos.  Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this
+moment and impartially added together an utter chaos?  The strains of
+my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of
+the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you
+may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all?  Is
+it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them
+that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few
+others--the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke from
+places in your memory that have nothing to do with this scene
+associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train
+of thought,--rational, because it leads to a conclusion which we have
+some organ to appreciate?  We have no organ or faculty to appreciate
+the simply given order.  The real world as it is given objectively at
+this moment is the sum total of all its beings and {119} events now.
+But can we think of such a sum?  Can we realize for an instant what a
+cross-section of all existence at a definite point of time would be?
+While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea-gull catches a fish at the mouth
+of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes
+in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.
+What does that mean?  Does the contemporaneity of these events with one
+another and with a million others as disjointed, form a rational bond
+between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world?
+Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the
+real order of the world.  It is an order with which we have nothing to
+do but to get away from it as fast as possible.  As I said, we break
+it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break
+it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home.  We make ten
+thousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we react
+as though the others did not exist.  We discover among its various
+parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical
+relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and
+out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and
+lawgiving, and ignore the rest.  Essential these relations are, but
+only _for our purpose_, the other relations being just as real and
+present as they; and our purpose is to _conceive simply_ and to
+_foresee_.  Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends
+pure and simple?  They are the ends of what we call science; and the
+miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any
+philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling.
+It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to {120} many of our
+aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends.
+
+When the man of affairs, the artist, or the man of science fails, he is
+not rebutted.  He tries again.  He says the impressions of sense _must_
+give way, _must_ be reduced to the desiderated form.[3]  They all
+postulate in the interests of their volitional nature a harmony between
+the latter and the nature of things.  The theologian does no more.  And
+the reflex doctrine of the mind's structure, though all theology should
+as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor
+itself at least obeyed in form the mind's most necessary law.[4]
+
+
+Now for the question I asked above: What kind of a being would God be
+if he did exist?  The word 'God' has come to mean many things in the
+history {121} of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the 'Idee'
+which figures in the pages of Hegel.  Even the laws of physical nature
+have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and
+presented as the only fitting object of our reverence.[5]  Of course,
+if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more
+definite than this.  We must not call any object of our loyalty a 'God'
+without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be
+one of God's functions.  He must have some intrinsic characteristics of
+his own besides; and theism must mean the faith of that man who
+believes that the object of _his_ loyalty has those other attributes,
+negative or positive, as the case may be.
+
+Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of God, and their
+amounts and mutual relations, the world has been delivered over to
+disputes.  All such may for our present purpose be considered as quite
+inessential.  Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself,
+the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection
+with our free-will, the proportion of his mercy to his justice, and the
+amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical
+relation to the phenomenal world, whether causal, substantial, ideal,
+or what not,--are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not
+concern us at all.  Whoso debates them presupposes the essential
+features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these
+essential features, the bare poles of the subject, that our business
+exclusively lies.
+
+{122}
+
+Now, what are these essential features?  First, it is essential that
+God be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he
+must be conceived under the form of a mental personality.  The
+personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is
+involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition
+of our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves being
+all good and righteous things.  But, extrinsically considered, so to
+speak, God's personality is to be regarded, like any other personality,
+as something lying outside of my own and other than me, and whose
+existence I simply come upon and find.  A power not ourselves, then,
+which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which
+recognizes us,--such is the definition which I think nobody will be
+inclined to dispute.  Various are the attempts to shadow forth the
+other lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination;
+various the ways of conceiving in what mode the recognition, the
+hearkening to our cry, can come.  Some are gross and idolatrous; some
+are the most sustained efforts man's intellect has ever made to keep
+still living on that subtile edge of things where speech and thought
+expire.  But, with all these differences, the essence remains
+unchanged.  In whatever other respects the divine personality may
+differ from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous at
+least in this,--that both have purposes for which they care, and each
+can hear the other's call.
+
+
+Meanwhile, we can already see one consequence and one point of
+connection with the reflex-action theory of mind.  Any mind,
+constructed on the {123} triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its
+impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that
+object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and
+finally react.  The stage of reaction depends on the stage of
+definition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressing
+object.  When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, our
+reactions are firm and certain enough,--often instinctive.  I see the
+desk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk.
+But the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fuse
+themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a
+whole,--the universe.  And then the object that confronts us, that
+knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided
+upon and actively met, is just this whole universe itself and its
+essence.
+
+What are _they_, and how shall I meet _them_?
+
+The whole flood of faiths and systems here rush in.  Philosophies and
+denials of philosophy, religions and atheisms, scepticisms and
+mysticisms, confirmed emotional moods and habitual practical biases,
+jostle one another; for all are alike trials, hasty, prolix, or of
+seemly length, to answer this momentous question.  And the function of
+them all, long or short, that which the moods and the systems alike
+subserve and pass into, is the third stage,--the stage of action.  For
+no one of them itself is final.  They form but the middle segment of
+the mental curve, and not its termination.  As the last theoretic pulse
+dies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but the
+forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of
+mentality finds its rhythmic pause.
+
+{124}
+
+We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage.  Sometimes we think
+it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in
+the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that
+it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have
+pointed out,--the function of defining the direction which our
+activity, immediate or remote, shall take.
+
+If I simply say, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas!" I am defining the
+total nature of things in a way that carries practical consequences
+with it as decidedly as if I write a treatise De Natura Rerum in twenty
+volumes.  The treatise may trace its consequences more minutely than
+the saying; but the only worth of either treatise or saying is that the
+consequences are there.  The long definition can do no more than draw
+them; the short definition does no less.  Indeed, it may be said that
+if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should
+have identical consequences, those two definitions would really be
+identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by
+the different verbiage in which they are expressed.[6]
+
+
+My time is unfortunately too short to stay and give to this truth the
+development it deserves; but I will assume that you grant it without
+further parley, and pass to the next step in my argument.  And here,
+too, I shall have to bespeak your close attention for a moment, while I
+pass over the subject far more {125} rapidly than it deserves.  Whether
+true or false, any view of the universe which shall completely satisfy
+the mind must obey conditions of the mind's own imposing, must at least
+let the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called a
+rational universe or not.  Not any nature of things which may seem to
+be will also seem to be _ipso facto_ rational; and if it do not seem
+rational, it will afflict the mind with a ceaseless uneasiness, till it
+be formulated or interpreted in some other and more congenial way.  The
+study of what the mind's criteria of rationality are, the definition of
+its exactions in this respect, form an intensely interesting subject
+into which I cannot enter now with any detail.[7]  But so much I think
+you will grant me without argument,--that all three departments of the
+mind alike have a vote in the matter, and that no conception will pass
+muster which violates any of their essential modes of activity, or
+which leaves them without a chance to work.  By what title is it that
+every would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy which
+rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one half
+of mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creed
+of some partial sect?  Either it has dropped out of its net some of our
+impressions of sense,--what we call the facts of nature,--or it has
+left the theoretic and defining department with a lot of
+inconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands; or else,
+finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active and
+emotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-on or to
+live for.  Any one of these defects is fatal to its complete success.
+Some one {126} will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system,
+and to seek another in its stead.
+
+I need not go far to collect examples to illustrate to an audience of
+theologians what I mean.  Nor will you in particular, as champions of
+the Unitarianism of New England, be slow to furnish, from the motives
+which led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism,
+instances enough under the third or practical head.  A God who gives so
+little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all
+its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they
+say to our most cherished powers, There is no object for you.
+
+Well, just as within the limits of theism some kinds are surviving
+others by reason of their greater practical rationality, so theism
+itself, by reason of its practical rationality, is certain to survive
+all lower creeds.  Materialism and agnosticism, even were they true,
+could never gain universal and popular acceptance; for they both,
+alike, give a solution of things which is irrational to the practical
+third of our nature, and in which we can never volitionally feel at
+home.  Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental
+functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its
+formula of formulas prepared.  The whole array of active forces of our
+nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how
+to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life.  "Well!"
+cry they, "what shall we do?"  "Ignoramus, ignorabimus!" says
+agnosticism.  "React upon atoms and their concussions!" says
+materialism.  What a collapse!  The mental train misses fire, the
+middle fails to ignite the end, the cycle breaks down half-way to its
+conclusion; and the active {127} powers left alone, with no proper
+object on which to vent their energy, must either atrophy, sicken, and
+die, or else by their pent-up convulsions and excitement keep the whole
+machinery in a fever until some less incommensurable solution, some
+more practically rational formula, shall provide a normal issue for the
+currents of the soul.
+
+Now, theism always stands ready with the most practically rational
+solution it is possible to conceive.  Not an energy of our active
+nature to which it does not authoritatively appeal, not an emotion of
+which it does not normally and naturally release the springs.  At a
+single stroke, it changes the dead blank _it_ of the world into a
+living _thou_, with whom the whole man may have dealings.  To you, at
+any rate, I need waste no words in trying to prove its supreme
+commensurateness with all the demands that department Number Three of
+the mind has the power to impose on department Number Two.
+
+Our volitional nature must then, until the end of time, exert a
+constant pressure upon the other departments of the mind to induce them
+to function to theistic conclusions.  No contrary formulas can be more
+than provisionally held.  Infra-theistic theories must be always in
+unstable equilibrium; for department Number Three ever lurks in ambush,
+ready to assert its rights, and on the slightest show of justification
+it makes its fatal spring, and converts them into the other form in
+which alone mental peace and order can permanently reign.
+
+The question is, then, _Can_ departments One and Two, _can_ the facts
+of nature and the theoretic elaboration of them, always lead to
+theistic conclusions?
+
+The future history of philosophy is the only {128} authority capable of
+answering that question.  I, at all events, must not enter into it
+to-day, as that would be to abandon the purely natural-history point of
+view I mean to keep.
+
+This only is certain, that the theoretic faculty lives between two
+fires which never give her rest, and make her incessantly revise her
+formulations.  If she sink into a premature, short-sighted, and
+idolatrous theism, in comes department Number One with its battery of
+facts of sense, and dislodges her from her dogmatic repose.  If she
+lazily subside into equilibrium with the same facts of sense viewed in
+their simple mechanical outwardness, up starts the practical reason
+with its demands, and makes _that_ couch a bed of thorns.  From
+generation to generation thus it goes,--now a movement of reception
+from without, now one of expansion from within; department Number Two
+always worked to death, yet never excused from taking the most
+responsible part in the arrangements.  To-day, a crop of new facts;
+to-morrow, a flowering of new motives,--the theoretic faculty always
+having to effect the transition, and life growing withal so complex and
+subtle and immense that her powers of conceiving are almost ruptured
+with the strain.  See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic
+and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution,
+and how the young thinkers are at work!  See, in Great Britain, how the
+dryness of the strict associationist school, which under the
+ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday,
+gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional
+needs and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectual
+harmonies!  These are but tackings to the common {129} port, to that
+ultimate _Weltanschauung_ of maximum subjective as well as objective
+richness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any rate
+wear the theistic form.
+
+
+Here let me say one word about a remark we often hear coming from the
+anti-theistic wing: It is base, it is vile, it is the lowest depth of
+immorality, to allow department Number Three to interpose its demands,
+and have any vote in the question of what is true and what is false;
+the mind must be a passive, reactionless sheet of white paper, on which
+reality will simply come and register its own philosophic definition,
+as the pen registers the curve on the sheet of a chronograph.  "Of all
+the cants that are canted in this canting age" this has always seemed
+to me the most wretched, especially when it comes from professed
+psychologists.  As if the mind could, consistently with its definition,
+be a reactionless sheet at all!  As if conception could possibly occur
+except for a teleological purpose, except to show us the way from a
+state of things our senses cognize to another state of things our will
+desires!  As if 'science' itself were anything else than such an end of
+desire, and a most peculiar one at that!  And as if the 'truths' of
+bare physics in particular, which these sticklers for intellectual
+purity contend to be the only uncontaminated form, were not as great an
+alteration and falsification of the simply 'given' order of the world,
+into an order conceived solely for the mind's convenience and delight,
+as any theistic doctrine possibly can be!
+
+Physics is but one chapter in the great jugglery which our conceiving
+faculty is forever playing with {130} the order of being as it presents
+itself to our reception.  It transforms the unutterable dead level and
+continuum of the 'given' world into an utterly unlike world of sharp
+differences and hierarchic subordinations for no other reason than to
+satisfy certain subjective passions we possess.[8]
+
+And, so far as we can see, the given world is there only for the sake
+of the operation.  At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance
+of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the
+unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate.  To bid the man's
+subjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out the
+environment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statue
+express itself from out the stone.  Operate we must! and the only
+choice left us is that between operating to poor or to rich results.
+The only possible duty there can be in the matter is the duty of
+getting the richest results that the material given will allow.  The
+richness lies, of course, in the energy of all three departments of the
+mental cycle.  Not a sensible 'fact' of department One must be left in
+the cold, not a faculty of department Three be paralyzed; and
+department Two must form an indestructible bridge.  It is natural that
+the habitual neglect of department One by theologians should arouse
+indignation; but it is most _un_natural that the indignation should
+take the form of a wholesale denunciation of department Three.  It is
+the story of Kant's dove over again, denouncing the {131} pressure of
+the air.  Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us, that, amid the
+wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands
+upright,--that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but one
+commandment, but that one supreme, saying, _Thou shalt not be a
+theist_, for that would be to satisfy thy subjective propensities, and
+the satisfaction of those is intellectual damnation.  These most
+conscientious gentlemen think they have jumped off their own
+feet,--emancipated their mental operations from the control of their
+subjective propensities at large and _in toto_.  But they are deluded.
+They have simply chosen from among the entire set of propensities at
+their command those that were certain to construct, out of the
+materials given, the leanest, lowest, aridest result,--namely, the bare
+molecular world,--and they have sacrificed all the rest.[9]
+
+Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of
+his subjective propensities,--his pre-eminence over them simply and
+solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of
+his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual.  Had his whole
+life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have
+established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
+And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his
+wants are to be trusted; that even {132} when their gratification seems
+farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of
+his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present
+powers of reckoning.  Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you
+undo him.  The appetite for immediate consistency at any cost, or what
+the logicians call the 'law of parsimony,'--which is nothing but the
+passion for conceiving the universe in the most labor-saving
+way,--will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, end by blighting the
+development of the intellect itself quite as much as that of the
+feelings or the will.  The scientific conception of the world as an
+army of molecules gratifies this appetite after its fashion most
+exquisitely.  But if the religion of exclusive scientificism should
+ever succeed in suffocating all other appetites out of a nation's mind,
+and imbuing a whole race with the persuasion that simplicity and
+consistency demand a _tabula rasa_ to be made of every notion that does
+not form part of the _soi-disant_ scientific synthesis, that nation,
+that race, will just as surely go to ruin, and fall a prey to their
+more richly constituted neighbors, as the beasts of the field, as a
+whole, have fallen a prey to man.
+
+I have myself little fear for our Anglo-Saxon race.  Its moral,
+aesthetic, and practical wants form too dense a stubble to be mown by
+any scientific Occam's razor that has yet been forged.  The knights of
+the razor will never form among us more than a sect; but when I see
+their fraternity increasing in numbers, and, what is worse, when I see
+their negations acquiring almost as much prestige and authority as
+their affirmations legitimately claim over the minds of the docile
+public, I feel as if the influences working in the direction of our
+mental barbarization were {133} beginning to be rather strong, and
+needed some positive counteraction.  And when I ask myself from what
+quarter the invasion may best be checked, I can find no answer as good
+as the one suggested by casting my eyes around this room.  For this
+needful task, no fitter body of men than the Unitarian clergy exists.
+Who can uphold the rights of department Three of the mind with better
+grace than those who long since showed how they could fight and suffer
+for department One?  As, then, you burst the bonds of a narrow
+ecclesiastical tradition, by insisting that no fact of sense or result
+of science must be left out of account in the religious synthesis, so
+may you still be the champions of mental completeness and
+all-sidedness.  May you, with equal success, avert the formation of a
+narrow scientific tradition, and burst the bonds of any synthesis which
+would pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, those
+relations of reality, to which at present our active and emotional
+tendencies are our only avenues of approach.  I hear it said that
+Unitarianism is not growing in these days.  I know nothing of the truth
+of the statement; but if it be true, it is surely because the great
+ship of Orthodoxy is nearing the port and the pilot is being taken on
+board.  If you will only lead in a theistic science, as successfully as
+you have led in a scientific theology, your separate name as Unitarians
+may perish from the mouths of men; for your task will have been done,
+and your function at an end.  Until that distant day, you have work
+enough in both directions awaiting you.
+
+
+Meanwhile, let me pass to the next division of our subject.  I said
+that we are forced to regard God as {134} the normal object of the
+mind's belief, inasmuch as any conception that falls short of God is
+irrational, if the word 'rational' be taken in its fullest sense; while
+any conception that goes beyond God is impossible, if the human mind be
+constructed after the triadic-reflex pattern we have discussed at such
+length.  The first half of the thesis has been disposed of.
+Infra-theistic conceptions, materialisms and agnosticisms, are
+irrational because they are inadequate stimuli to man's practical
+nature.  I have now to justify the latter half of the thesis.
+
+I dare say it may for an instant have perplexed some of you that I
+should speak of conceptions that aimed at going beyond God, and of
+attempts to fly above him or outbid him; so I will now explain exactly
+what I mean.  In defining the essential attributes of God, I said he
+was a personality lying outside our own and other than us,--a power not
+ourselves.  Now, the attempts to fly beyond theism, of which I speak,
+are attempts to get over this ultimate duality of God and his believer,
+and to transform it into some sort or other of identity.  If
+infratheistic ways of looking on the world leave it in the third
+person, a mere _it_; and if theism turns the _it_ into a _thou_,--so we
+may say that these other theories try to cover it with the mantle of
+the first person, and to make it a part of _me_.
+
+I am well aware that I begin here to tread on ground in which trenchant
+distinctions may easily seem to mutilate the facts.
+
+That sense of emotional reconciliation with God which characterizes the
+highest moments of the theistic consciousness may be described as
+'oneness' with him, and so from the very bosom of theism a {135}
+monistic doctrine seem to arise.  But this consciousness of
+self-surrender, of absolute practical union between one's self and the
+divine object of one's contemplation, is a totally different thing from
+any sort of substantial identity.  Still the object God and the subject
+I are two.  Still I simply come upon him, and find his existence given
+to me; and the climax of my practical union with what is given, forms
+at the same time the climax of my perception that as a numerical fact
+of existence I am something radically other than the Divinity with
+whose effulgence I am filled.
+
+Now, it seems to me that the only sort of union of creature with
+creator with which theism, properly so called, comports, is of this
+emotional and practical kind; and it is based unchangeably on the
+empirical fact that the thinking subject and the object thought are
+numerically two.  How my mind and will, which are not God, can yet
+cognize and leap to meet him, how I ever came to be so separate from
+him, and how God himself came to be at all, are problems that for the
+theist can remain unsolved and insoluble forever.  It is sufficient for
+him to know that he himself simply is, and needs God; and that behind
+this universe God simply is and will be forever, and will in some way
+hear his call.  In the practical assurance of these empirical facts,
+without 'Erkentnisstheorie' or philosophical ontology, without
+metaphysics of emanation or creation to justify or make them more
+intelligible, in the blessedness of their mere acknowledgment as given,
+lie all the peace and power he craves.  The floodgates of the religious
+life are opened, and the full currents can pour through.
+
+It is this empirical and practical side of the theistic position, its
+theoretic chastity and modesty, which I {136} wish to accentuate here.
+The highest flights of theistic mysticism, far from pretending to
+penetrate the secrets of the _me_ and the _thou_ in worship, and to
+transcend the dualism by an act of intelligence, simply turn their
+backs on such attempts.  The problem for them has simply
+vanished,--vanished from the sight of an attitude which refuses to
+notice such futile theoretic difficulties.  Get but that "peace of God
+which passeth understanding," and the questions of the understanding
+will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest.  In other
+words, theistic mysticism, that form of theism which at first sight
+seems most to have transcended the fundamental otherness of God from
+man, has done it least of all in the theoretic way.  The pattern of its
+procedure is precisely that of the simplest man dealing with the
+simplest fact of his environment.  Both he and the theist tarry in
+department Two of their minds only so long as is necessary to define
+what is the presence that confronts them.  The theist decides that its
+character is such as to be fitly responded to on his part by a
+religious reaction; and into that reaction he forthwith pours his soul.
+His insight into the _what_ of life leads to results so immediately and
+intimately rational that the _why_, the _how_, and the _whence_ of it
+are questions that lose all urgency.  'Gefühl ist Alles,' Faust says.
+The channels of department Three have drained those of department Two
+of their contents; and happiness over the fact that being has made
+itself what it is, evacuates all speculation as to how it could make
+itself at all.
+
+But now, although to most human minds such a position as this will be
+the position of rational equilibrium, it is not difficult to bring
+forward certain {137} considerations, in the light of which so simple
+and practical a mental movement begins to seem rather short-winded and
+second-rate and devoid of intellectual style.  This easy acceptance of
+an opaque limit to our speculative insight; this satisfaction with a
+Being whose character we simply apprehend without comprehending
+anything more about him, and with whom after a certain point our
+dealings can be only of a volitional and emotional sort; above all,
+this sitting down contented with a blank unmediated dualism,--are they
+not the very picture of unfaithfulness to the rights and duties of our
+theoretic reason?
+
+Surely, if the universe is reasonable (and we must believe that it is
+so), it must be susceptible, potentially at least, of being reasoned
+_out_ to the last drop without residuum.  Is it not rather an insult to
+the very word 'rational' to say that the rational character of the
+universe and its creator means no more than that we practically feel at
+home in their presence, and that our powers are a match for their
+demands?  Do they not in fact demand to be _understood_ by us still
+more than to be reacted on?  Is not the unparalleled development of
+department Two of the mind in man his crowning glory and his very
+essence; and may not the _knowing of the truth_ be his absolute
+vocation?  And if it is, ought he flatly to acquiesce in a spiritual
+life of 'reflex type,' whose form is no higher than that of the life
+that animates his spinal cord,--nay, indeed, that animates the writhing
+segments of any mutilated worm?
+
+It is easy to see how such arguments and queries may result in the
+erection of an ideal of our mental destiny, far different from the
+simple and practical religious one we have described.  We may well
+begin {138} to ask whether such things as practical reactions can be
+the final upshot and purpose of all our cognitive energy.  Mere outward
+acts, changes in the position of parts of matter (for they are nothing
+else), can they possibly be the culmination and consummation of our
+relations with the nature of things?  Can they possibly form a result
+to which our godlike powers of insight shall be judged merely
+subservient?  Such an idea, if we scan it closely, soon begins to seem
+rather absurd.  Whence this piece of matter comes and whither that one
+goes, what difference ought that to make to the nature of things,
+except so far as with the comings and the goings our wonderful inward
+conscious harvest may be reaped?
+
+And so, very naturally and gradually, one may be led from the theistic
+and practical point of view to what I shall call the _gnostical_ one.
+We may think that department Three of the mind, with its doings of
+right and its doings of wrong, must be there only to serve department
+Two; and we may suspect that the sphere of our activity exists for no
+other purpose than to illumine our cognitive consciousness by the
+experience of its results.  Are not all sense and all emotion at bottom
+but turbid and perplexed modes of what in its clarified shape is
+intelligent cognition?  Is not all experience just the eating of the
+fruit of the tree of _knowledge_ of good and evil, and nothing more?
+
+These questions fan the fire of an unassuageable gnostic thirst, which
+is as far removed from theism in one direction as agnosticism was
+removed from it in the other; and which aspires to nothing less than an
+absolute unity of knowledge with its object, and refuses to be
+satisfied short of a fusion and solution and saturation of both
+impression and action with reason, and {139} an absorption of all three
+departments of the mind into one.  Time would fail us to-day (even had
+I the learning, which I have not) to speak of gnostic systems in
+detail.  The aim of all of them is to shadow forth a sort of process by
+which spirit, emerging from its beginnings and exhausting the whole
+circle of finite experience in its sweep, shall at last return and
+possess itself as its own object at the climax of its career.  This
+climax is the religious consciousness.  At the giddy height of this
+conception, whose latest and best known form is the Hegelian
+philosophy, definite words fail to serve their purpose; and the
+ultimate goal,--where object and subject, worshipped and worshipper,
+facts and the knowledge of them, fall into one, and where no other is
+left outstanding beyond this one that alone is, and that we may call
+indifferently act or fact, reality or idea, God or creation,--this
+goal, I say, has to be adumbrated to our halting and gasping
+intelligence by coarse physical metaphors, 'positings' and
+'self-returnings' and 'removals' and 'settings free,' which hardly help
+to make the matter clear.
+
+But from the midst of the curdling and the circling of it all we seem
+dimly to catch a glimpse of a state in which the reality to be known
+and the power of knowing shall have become so mutually adequate that
+each exhaustively is absorbed by the other and the twain become one
+flesh, and in which the light shall somehow have soaked up all the
+outer darkness into its own ubiquitous beams.  Like all headlong
+ideals, this apotheosis of the bare conceiving faculty has its depth
+and wildness, its pang and its charm.  To many it sings a truly siren
+strain; and so long as it is held only as a postulate, as a mere
+vanishing {140} point to give perspective to our intellectual aim, it
+is hard to see any empirical title by which we may deny the legitimacy
+of gnosticism's claims.  That we are not as yet near the goal it
+prefigures can never be a reason why we might not continue indefinitely
+to approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason's
+actual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith in
+the infinite character of its potential destiny.
+
+Now, here it is that the physiologist's generalization, as it seems to
+me, may fairly come in, and by ruling any such extravagant faith out of
+court help to legitimate our personal mistrust of its pretensions.  I
+confess that I myself have always had a great mistrust of the
+pretensions of the gnostic faith.  Not only do I utterly fail to
+understand what a cognitive faculty erected into the absolute of being,
+with itself as its object, can mean; but even if we grant it a being
+other than itself for object, I cannot reason myself out of the belief
+that however familiar and at home we might become with the character of
+that being, the bare being of it, the fact that it is there at all,
+must always be something blankly given and presupposed in order that
+conception may begin its work; must in short lie beyond speculation,
+and not be enveloped in its sphere.
+
+Accordingly, it is with no small pleasure that as a student of
+physiology and psychology I find the only lesson I can learn from these
+sciences to be one that corroborates these convictions.  From its first
+dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find that the cognitive
+faculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one element
+in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mental
+powers,--the powers {141} of will.  Such a thing as its emancipation
+and absolution from these organic relations receives no faintest color
+of plausibility from any fact we can discern.  Arising as a part, in a
+mental and objective world which are both larger than itself, it must,
+whatever its powers of growth may be (and I am far from wishing to
+disparage them), remain a part to the end.  This is the character of
+the cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have no
+reason to suppose that that character will ever change.  On the
+contrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power of
+moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the
+deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess.  In
+every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred
+from, the grasp of every other.  God's being is sacred from ours.  To
+co-operate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems
+all he wants of us.  In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any
+chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking
+of him up, must lie the real meaning of our destiny.
+
+This is nothing new.  All men know it at those rare moments when the
+soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and
+insisting about this formula or that.  In the silence of our theories
+we then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Being
+beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the
+character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe,
+is more than all theories about it put together.  The most any theory
+about it can do is to bring us to that.  Certain it is that the acutest
+theories, the greatest intellectual power, the most elaborate
+education, are a {142} sheer mockery when, as too often happens, they
+feed mean motives and a nerveless will.  And it is equally certain that
+a resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped with
+learning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should never
+pay were we not satisfied that the essential root of human personality
+lay there.
+
+
+I have sketched my subject in the briefest outlines; but still I hope
+you will agree that I have established my point, and that the
+physiological view of mentality, so far from invalidating, can but give
+aid and comfort to the theistic attitude of mind.  Between agnosticism
+and gnosticism, theism stands midway, and holds to what is true in
+each.  With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannot
+know how Being made itself or us.  With gnosticism, it goes so far as
+to insist that we can know Being's character when made, and how it asks
+us to behave.
+
+If any one fear that in insisting so strongly that behavior is the aim
+and end of every sound philosophy I have curtailed the dignity and
+scope of the speculative function in us, I can only reply that in this
+ascertainment of the _character_ of Being lies an almost infinite
+speculative task.  Let the voluminous considerations by which all
+modern thought converges toward idealistic or pan-psychic conclusions
+speak for me.  Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of a Renouvier,
+reply whether within the limits drawn by purely empirical theism the
+speculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do.
+But do it little or much, its _place_ in a philosophy is always the
+same, and is set by the structural form of the mind.  Philosophies,
+whether expressed in sonnets or {143} systems, all must wear this form.
+The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and
+asks its meaning.  He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and
+makes a voyage long or short.  He ascends into the empyrean, and
+communes with the eternal essences.  But whatever his achievements and
+discoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some
+new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with
+which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the _terra
+firma_ of concrete life again.
+
+Whatever thought takes this voyage is a philosophy.  We have seen how
+theism takes it.  And in the philosophy of a thinker who, though long
+neglected, is doing much to renovate the spiritual life of his native
+France to-day (I mean Charles Renouvier, whose writings ought to be
+better known among us than they are), we have an instructive example of
+the way in which this very empirical element in theism, its confession
+of an ultimate opacity in things, of a dimension of being which escapes
+our theoretic control, may suggest a most definite practical
+conclusion,--this one, namely, that 'our wills are free.'  I will say
+nothing of Renouvier's line of reasoning; it is contained in many
+volumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention.[10]  But to
+enforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes the
+philosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem of
+Tennyson, published last year, in which the speculative voyage is made,
+and the same conclusion reached in a few lines:--
+
+{144}
+
+  "Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
+  From that great deep before our world begins,
+  Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will,--
+  Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
+  From that true world within the world we see,
+  Whereof our world is but the bounding shore,--
+  Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,
+  With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun
+  Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.
+  For in the world which is not ours, they said,
+  'Let us make man,' and that which should be man,
+  From that one light no man can look upon,
+  Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons
+  And all the shadows.  O dear Spirit, half-lost
+  In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign
+  That thou art thou,--who wailest being born
+  And banish'd into mystery,...
+            ...our mortal veil
+  And shattered phantom of that Infinite One,
+  Who made thee unconceivably thyself
+  Out of his whole world-self and all in all,--
+  Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape
+  And ivyberry, choose; and still depart
+  From death to death through life and life, and find
+  Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought
+  Not matter, nor the finite-infinite,
+  _But this main miracle, that thou art thou,
+  With power on thine own act and on the world_."
+
+
+
+[1] Address delivered to the Unitarian Ministers' Institute at
+Princeton, Mass., 1881, and printed in the Unitarian Review for October
+of that year.
+
+[2] See some Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind, in the Journal of
+Speculative Philosophy for January, 1878.
+
+[3] "No amount of failure in the attempt to subject the world of
+sensible experience to a thorough-going system of conceptions, and to
+bring all happenings back to cases of immutably valid law, is able to
+shake our faith in the rightness of our principles.  We hold fast to
+our demand that even the greatest apparent confusion must sooner or
+later solve itself in transparent formulas.  We begin the work ever
+afresh; and, refusing to believe that nature will permanently withhold
+the reward of our exertions, think rather that we have hitherto only
+failed to push them in the right direction.  And all this pertinacity
+flows from a conviction that we have no right to renounce the
+fulfilment of our task.  What, in short sustains the courage of
+investigators is the force of obligation of an ethical idea."
+(Sigwart: Logik, bd. ii., p. 23.)
+
+This is a true account of the spirit of science.  Does it essentially
+differ from the spirit of religion?  And is any one entitled to say in
+advance, that, while the one form of faith shall be crowned with
+success, the other is certainly doomed to fail?
+
+[4] Concerning the transformation of the given order into the order of
+conception, see S. H. Hodgson, The Philosophy of Reflection, chap. v.;
+H. Lotze, Logik, sects. 342-351; C. Sigwart, Logik, sects. 60-63, 105.
+
+[5] Haeckel has recently (Der Monismus, 1893, p. 37) proposed the
+Cosmic Ether as a divinity fitted to reconcile science with theistic
+faith.
+
+[6] See the admirably original "Illustrations of the Logic of Science,"
+by C. S. Peirce, especially the second paper, "How to make our Thoughts
+clear," in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878.
+
+[7] On this subject, see the preceding Essay.
+
+[8] "As soon as it is recognized that our thought, as logic deals with
+it, reposes on our _will to think_, the primacy of the will, even in
+the theoretical sphere, must be conceded; and the last of
+presuppositions is not merely [Kant's] that 'I think' must accompany
+all my representations, but also that 'I will' must dominate all my
+thinking."  (Sigwart; Logik, ll. 25.)
+
+[9] As our ancestors said, _Fiat justitia, pereat mundus_, so we, who
+do not believe in justice or any absolute good, must, according to
+these prophets, be willing to see the world perish, in order that
+_scientia fiat_.  Was there ever a more exquisite idol of the den, or
+rather of the _shop_?  In the clean sweep to be made of superstitions,
+let the idol of stern obligation to be scientific go with the rest, and
+people will have a fair chance to understand one another.  But this
+blowing of hot and of cold makes nothing but confusion.
+
+[10] Especially the Essais de Critique Générale, 2me Edition, 6 vols.,
+12mo, Paris, 1875; and the Esquisse d'une Classification Systématique
+des Doctrines Philosophiques, 2 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1885.
+
+
+
+
+{145}
+
+THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM.[1]
+
+A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out
+of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than
+warm up stale arguments which every one has heard.  This is a radical
+mistake.  I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive
+genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground,--not, perhaps,
+of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our
+sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the
+ideas of fate and of free-will imply.  At our very side almost, in the
+past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press
+works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights.  Not to
+speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not
+to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here,--we see in the
+writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delboeuf[2] how completely changed
+and refreshed is the form of all the old disputes.  I cannot pretend to
+vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my
+ambition limits itself to just one little point.  If I can make two of
+the necessarily implied corollaries {146} of determinism clearer to you
+than they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for you
+to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of
+what you are about.  And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to
+remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of
+your hesitation is.  I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all
+pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true.  The
+most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in
+assuming it true, and acting as if it were true.  If it be true, it
+seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case.  Its
+truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats.
+It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their
+backs upon it.  In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are
+free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free.
+This should exclude, it seems to me, from the free-will side of the
+question all hope of a coercive demonstration,--a demonstration which
+I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.
+
+
+With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance.  But not
+without one more point understood as well.  The arguments I am about to
+urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories
+about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to
+attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective
+satisfaction; and, second, if there be two conceptions, and the one
+seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we are
+entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two.
+I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me;
+{147} for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not,
+they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say.  I
+cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the
+magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science--our
+doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest--proceed
+from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational
+shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the
+crude order of our experience.  The world has shown itself, to a great
+extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality.  How much
+farther it will show itself plastic no one can say.  Our only means of
+finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions
+of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality.  If a certain
+formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral
+demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to
+doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence,
+for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as
+subjective and emotional as the other is.  The principle of causality,
+for example,--what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply
+a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper
+kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary
+juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears?  It is as much an altar
+to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens.  All our
+scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
+Uniformity is as much so as is free-will.  If this be admitted, we can
+debate on even terms.  But if any one pretends that while freedom and
+variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and
+uniformity are something {148} altogether different, I do not see how
+we can debate at all.[3]
+
+To begin, then, I must suppose you acquainted with all the usual
+arguments on the subject.  I cannot stop to take up the old proofs from
+causation, from statistics, from the certainty with which we can
+foretell one another's conduct, from the fixity of character, and all
+the rest.  But there are two words which usually encumber these
+classical arguments, {149} and which we must immediately dispose of if
+we are to make any progress.  One is the eulogistic word _freedom_, and
+the other is the opprobrious word _chance_.  The word 'chance' I wish
+to keep, but I wish to get rid of the word 'freedom.'  Its eulogistic
+associations have so far overshadowed all the rest of its meaning that
+both parties claim the sole right to use it, and determinists to-day
+insist that they alone are freedom's champions.  Old-fashioned
+determinism was what we may call _hard_ determinism.  It did not shrink
+from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and
+the like.  Nowadays, we have a _soft_ determinism which abhors harsh
+words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination,
+says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity
+understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
+Even a writer as little used to making capital out of soft words as Mr.
+Hodgson hesitates not to call himself a 'free-will determinist.'
+
+Now, all this is a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of
+fact has been entirely smothered.  Freedom in all these senses presents
+simply no problem at all.  No matter what the soft determinist mean by
+it,--whether he mean the acting without external constraint; whether he
+mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law
+of the whole,--who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and
+sometimes we are not?  But there _is_ a problem, an issue of fact and
+not of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is often
+decided without discussion in one sentence,--nay, in one clause of a
+sentence,--by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their
+efforts to show {150} what 'true' freedom is; and that is the question
+of determinism, about which we are to talk to-night.
+
+Fortunately, no ambiguities hang about this word or about its opposite,
+indeterminism.  Both designate an outward way in which things may
+happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental
+associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance.  Now,
+evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism and
+indeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible to
+find.  Let us look at the difference between them and see for
+ourselves.  What does determinism profess?
+
+It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down
+absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be.  The
+future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we
+call the present is compatible with only one totality.  Any other
+future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible.  The
+whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an
+absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or
+shadow of turning.
+
+  "With earth's first clay they did the last man knead,
+  And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.
+  And the first morning of creation wrote
+  What the last dawn of reckoning shall read."
+
+
+Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain
+amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of
+them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be.  It
+admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that
+things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be
+ambiguous.  Of two {151} alternative futures which we conceive, both
+may now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at the
+very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself.
+Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact.
+It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it
+corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things.  To that
+view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from
+out of which they are chosen; and, _somewhere_, indeterminism says,
+such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.
+
+Determinism, on the contrary, says they exist _nowhere_, and that
+necessity on the one hand and impossibility on the other are the sole
+categories of the real.  Possibilities that fail to get realized are,
+for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all.
+There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all
+that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity
+virtually there.  The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass
+of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which
+'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.
+
+The issue, it will be seen, is a perfectly sharp one, which no
+eulogistic terminology can smear over or wipe out.  The truth _must_
+lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side makes the
+other false.
+
+The question relates solely to the existence of possibilities, in the
+strict sense of the term, as things that may, but need not, be.  Both
+sides admit that a volition, for instance, has occurred.  The
+indeterminists say another volition might have occurred in its place;
+the determinists swear that nothing could possibly {152} have occurred
+in its place.  Now, can science be called in to tell us which of these
+two point-blank contradicters of each other is right?  Science
+professes to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters of
+fact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount of
+assurance that something actually happened give us the least grain of
+information as to whether another thing might or might not have
+happened in its place?  Only facts can be proved by other facts.  With
+things that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern.  If
+we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the
+possibility-question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up.
+
+And the truth is that facts practically have hardly anything to do with
+making us either determinists or indeterminists.  Sure enough, we make
+a flourish of quoting facts this way or that; and if we are
+determinists, we talk about the infallibility with which we can predict
+one another's conduct; while if we are indeterminists, we lay great
+stress on the fact that it is just because we cannot foretell one
+another's conduct, either in war or statecraft or in any of the great
+and small intrigues and businesses of men, that life is so intensely
+anxious and hazardous a game.  But who does not see the wretched
+insufficiency of this so-called objective testimony on both sides?
+What fills up the gaps in our minds is something not objective, not
+external.  What divides us into possibility men and anti-possibility
+men is different faiths or postulates,--postulates of rationality.  To
+this man the world seems more rational with possibilities in it,--to
+that man more rational with possibilities excluded; and talk as we will
+about having to yield to {153} evidence, what makes us monists or
+pluralists, determinists or indeterminists, is at bottom always some
+sentiment like this.
+
+The stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to the
+idea of chance.  As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our
+friends, we find a number of them shaking their heads.  This notion of
+alternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one of
+several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name
+for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind
+can for an instant tolerate in the world.  What is it, they ask, but
+barefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law?  And
+if the slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the
+whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos
+from recommencing her topsy-turvy reign?
+
+Remarks of this sort about chance will put an end to discussion as
+quickly as anything one can find.  I have already told you that
+'chance' was a word I wished to keep and use.  Let us then examine
+exactly what it means, and see whether it ought to be such a terrible
+bugbear to us.  I fancy that squeezing the thistle boldly will rob it
+of its sting.
+
+The sting of the word 'chance' seems to lie in the assumption that it
+means something positive, and that if anything happens by chance, it
+must needs be something of an intrinsically irrational and preposterous
+sort.  Now, chance means nothing of the kind.  It is a purely negative
+and relative term,[4] giving us {154} no information about that of
+which it is predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with
+something else,--not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other
+things in advance of its own actual presence.  As this point is the
+most subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the point
+on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to
+it.  What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be
+in itself to call it 'chance.'  It may be a bad thing, it may be a good
+thing.  It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching
+the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an
+unimaginably perfect way.  All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that
+this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise.  For the
+system of other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing.  Its
+origin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands
+off! coming, when it comes, as a free gift, or not at all.
+
+This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when
+thus considered _ab. extra_, or from the point of view of previous
+things or distant things, do not preclude its having any amount of
+positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and
+moment.  All that its chance-character asserts about it is that there
+is something in it really of its own, something that is not the
+unconditional property of the whole.  If the whole wants this property,
+the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance.
+That the universe may actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this
+sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited
+powers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion.
+
+Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest {155} dose of
+disconnectedness of one part with another, the smallest modicum of
+independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, for
+example, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into a
+sort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all.  Since
+future human volitions are as a matter of fact the only ambiguous
+things we are tempted to believe in, let us stop for a moment to make
+ourselves sure whether their independent and accidental character need
+be fraught with such direful consequences to the universe as these.
+
+What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after
+the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance as far as the present
+moment is concerned?  It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford
+Street are called; but that only one, and that one _either_ one, shall
+be chosen.  Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of
+my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the
+choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street.
+In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and
+then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate ten
+minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door
+of this hall just as I was before the choice was made.  Imagine then
+that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and
+traverse Oxford Street.  You, as passive spectators, look on and see
+the two alternative universes,--one of them with me walking through
+Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking through
+Oxford Street.  Now, if you are determinists you believe one of these
+universes to have been from eternity impossible: you believe it to have
+{156} been impossible because of the intrinsic irrationality or
+accidentality somewhere involved in it.  But looking outwardly at these
+universes, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one, and
+which the rational and necessary one?  I doubt if the most iron-clad
+determinist among you could have the slightest glimmer of light on this
+point.  In other words, either universe _after the fact_ and once there
+would, to our means of observation and understanding, appear just as
+rational as the other.  There would be absolutely no criterion by which
+we might judge one necessary and the other matter of chance.  Suppose
+now we relieve the gods of their hypothetical task and assume my
+choice, once made, to be made forever.  I go through Divinity Avenue
+for good and all.  If, as good determinists, you now begin to affirm,
+what all good determinists punctually do affirm, that in the nature of
+things I _couldn't_ have gone through Oxford Street,--had I done so it
+would have been chance, irrationality, insanity, a horrid gap in
+nature,--I simply call your attention to this, that your affirmation is
+what the Germans call a _Machtspruch_, a mere conception fulminated as
+a dogma and based on no insight into details.  Before my choice, either
+street seemed as natural to you as to me.  Had I happened to take
+Oxford Street, Divinity Avenue would have figured in your philosophy as
+the gap in nature; and you would have so proclaimed it with the best
+deterministic conscience in the world.
+
+But what a hollow outcry, then, is this against a chance which, if it
+were present to us, we could by no character whatever distinguish from
+a rational necessity!  I have taken the most trivial of examples, but
+no possible example could lead to any different {157} result.  For what
+are the alternatives which, in point of fact, offer themselves to human
+volition?  What are those futures that now seem matters of chance?  Are
+they not one and all like the Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street of our
+example?  Are they not all of them _kinds_ of things already here and
+based in the existing frame of nature?  Is any one ever tempted to
+produce an _absolute_ accident, something utterly irrelevant to the
+rest of the world?  Do not all the motives that assail us, all the
+futures that offer themselves to our choice, spring equally from the
+soil of the past; and would not either one of them, whether realized
+through chance or through necessity, the moment it was realized, seem
+to us to fit that past, and in the completest and most continuous
+manner to interdigitate with the phenomena already there?[5]
+
+The more one thinks of the matter, the more one wonders that so empty
+and gratuitous a hubbub as this outcry against chance should have found
+so great an echo in the hearts of men.  It is a word which tells us
+absolutely nothing about what chances, or about the _modus operandi_ of
+the chancing; and the use of it as a war-cry shows only a temper of
+{158} intellectual absolutism, a demand that the world shall be a solid
+block, subject to one control,--which temper, which demand, the world
+may not be bound to gratify at all.  In every outwardly verifiable and
+practical respect, a world in which the alternatives that now actually
+distract _your_ choice were decided by pure chance would be by _me_
+absolutely undistinguished from the world in which I now live.  I am,
+therefore, entirely willing to call it, so far as your choices go, a
+world of chance for me.  To _yourselves_, it is true, those very acts
+of choice, which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are the
+opposites of this, for you are within them and effect them.  To you
+they appear as decisions; and decisions, for him who makes them, are
+altogether peculiar psychic facts.  Self-luminous and self-justifying
+at the living moment at which they occur, they appeal to no outside
+moment to put its stamp upon them or make them continuous with the rest
+of nature.  Themselves it is rather who seem to make nature continuous;
+and in their strange and intense function of granting consent to one
+possibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocal
+and double future into an inalterable and simple past.
+
+But with the psychology of the matter we have no concern this evening.
+The quarrel which determinism has with chance fortunately has nothing
+to do with this or that psychological detail.  It is a quarrel
+altogether metaphysical.  Determinism denies the ambiguity of future
+volitions, because it affirms that nothing future can be ambiguous.
+But we have said enough to meet the issue.  Indeterminate future
+volitions do mean chance.  Let us not fear to shout it from the
+house-tops if need be; for we now know that {159} the idea of chance
+is, at bottom, exactly the same thing as the idea of gift,--the one
+simply being a disparaging, and the other a eulogistic, name for
+anything on which we have no effective _claim_.  And whether the world
+be the better or the worse for having either chances or gifts in it
+will depend altogether on _what_ these uncertain and unclaimable things
+turn out to be.
+
+
+And this at last brings us within sight of our subject.  We have seen
+what determinism means: we have seen that indeterminism is rightly
+described as meaning chance; and we have seen that chance, the very
+name of which we are urged to shrink from as from a metaphysical
+pestilence, means only the negative fact that no part of the world,
+however big, can claim to control absolutely the destinies of the
+whole.  But although, in discussing the word 'chance,' I may at moments
+have seemed to be arguing for its real existence, I have not meant to
+do so yet.  We have not yet ascertained whether this be a world of
+chance or no; at most, we have agreed that it seems so.  And I now
+repeat what I said at the outset, that, from any strict theoretical
+point of view, the question is insoluble.  To deepen our theoretic
+sense of the _difference_ between a world with chances in it and a
+deterministic world is the most I can hope to do; and this I may now at
+last begin upon, after all our tedious clearing of the way.
+
+I wish first of all to show you just what the notion that this is a
+deterministic world implies.  The implications I call your attention to
+are all bound up with the fact that it is a world in which we
+constantly have to make what I shall, with your permission, call
+judgments of regret.  Hardly an hour passes in {160} which we do not
+wish that something might be otherwise; and happy indeed are those of
+us whose hearts have never echoed the wish of Omar Khayam--
+
+  "That we might clasp, ere closed, the book of fate,
+    And make the writer on a fairer leaf
+  Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate.
+
+  "Ah!  Love, could you and I with fate conspire
+  To mend this sorry scheme of things entire,
+    Would we not shatter it to bits, and then
+  Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"
+
+
+Now, it is undeniable that most of these regrets are foolish, and quite
+on a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on the
+universe of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable The
+Atheist and the Acorn,--
+
+  "Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore,
+  Thy whimsies would have worked no more," etc.
+
+Even from the point of view of our own ends, we should probably make a
+botch of remodelling the universe.  How much more then from the point
+of view of ends we cannot see!  Wise men therefore regret as little as
+they can.  But still some regrets are pretty obstinate and hard to
+stifle,--regrets for acts of wanton cruelty or treachery, for example,
+whether performed by others or by ourselves.  Hardly any one can remain
+_entirely_ optimistic after reading the confession of the murderer at
+Brockton the other day: how, to get rid of the wife whose continued
+existence bored him, he inveigled her into a desert spot, shot her four
+times, and then, as she lay on the ground and said to him, "You didn't
+do it on purpose, did you, dear?" replied, "No, I {161} didn't do it on
+purpose," as he raised a rock and smashed her skull.  Such an
+occurrence, with the mild sentence and self-satisfaction of the
+prisoner, is a field for a crop of regrets, which one need not take up
+in detail.  We feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the rest
+of the universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else would
+really have been better in its place.
+
+But for the deterministic philosophy the murder, the sentence, and the
+prisoner's optimism were all necessary from eternity; and nothing else
+for a moment had a ghost of a chance of being put into their place.  To
+admit such a chance, the determinists tell us, would be to make a
+suicide of reason; so we must steel our hearts against the thought.
+And here our plot thickens, for we see the first of those difficult
+implications of determinism and monism which it is my purpose to make
+you feel.  If this Brockton murder was called for by the rest of the
+universe, if it had to come at its preappointed hour, and if nothing
+else would have been consistent with the sense of the whole, what are
+we to think of the universe?  Are we stubbornly to stick to our
+judgment of regret, and say, though it _couldn't_ be, yet it _would_
+have been a better universe with something different from this Brockton
+murder in it?  That, of course, seems the natural and spontaneous thing
+for us to do; and yet it is nothing short of deliberately espousing a
+kind of pessimism.  The judgment of regret calls the murder bad.
+Calling a thing bad means, if it mean anything at all, that the thing
+ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its stead.
+Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead,
+virtually defines the universe {162} as a place in which what ought to
+be is impossible,--in other words, as an organism whose constitution is
+afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw.  The pessimism
+of a Schopenhauer says no more than this,--that the murder is a
+symptom; and that it is a vicious symptom because it belongs to a
+vicious whole, which can express its nature no otherwise than by
+bringing forth just such a symptom as that at this particular spot.
+Regret for the murder must transform itself, if we are determinists and
+wise, into a larger regret.  It is absurd to regret the murder alone.
+Other things being what they are, _it_ could not be different.  What we
+should regret is that whole frame of things of which the murder is one
+member.  I see no escape whatever from this pessimistic conclusion, if,
+being determinists, our judgment of regret is to be allowed to stand at
+all.
+
+The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to abandon
+the judgment of regret.  That this can be done, history shows to be not
+impossible.  The devil, _quoad existentiam_, may be good.  That is,
+although he be a _principle_ of evil, yet the universe, with such a
+principle in it, may practically be a better universe than it could
+have been without.  On every hand, in a small way, we find that a
+certain amount of evil is a condition by which a higher form of good is
+bought.  There is nothing to prevent anybody from generalizing this
+view, and trusting that if we could but see things in the largest of
+all ways, even such matters as this Brockton murder would appear to be
+paid for by the uses that follow in their train.  An optimism _quand
+même_, a systematic and infatuated optimism like that ridiculed by
+Voltaire in his Candide, is one of the possible {163} ideal ways in
+which a man may train himself to look on life.  Bereft of dogmatic
+hardness and lit up with the expression of a tender and pathetic hope,
+such an optimism has been the grace of some of the most religious
+characters that ever lived.
+
+  "Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
+  And all is clear from east to west."
+
+
+Even cruelty and treachery may be among the absolutely blessed fruits
+of time, and to quarrel with any of their details may be blasphemy.
+The only real blasphemy, in short, may be that pessimistic temper of
+the soul which lets it give way to such things as regrets, remorse, and
+grief.
+
+Thus, our deterministic pessimism may become a deterministic optimism
+at the price of extinguishing our judgments of regret.
+
+But does not this immediately bring us into a curious logical
+predicament?  Our determinism leads us to call our judgments of regret
+wrong, because they are pessimistic in implying that what is impossible
+yet ought to be.  But how then about the judgments of regret
+themselves?  If they are wrong, other judgments, judgments of approval
+presumably, ought to be in their place.  But as they are necessitated,
+nothing else _can_ be in their place; and the universe is just what it
+was before,--namely, a place in which what ought to be appears
+impossible.  We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog, but the
+other one sinks all the deeper.  We have rescued our actions from the
+bonds of evil, but our judgments are now held fast.  When murders and
+treacheries cease to be sins, regrets are theoretic absurdities and
+errors.  The theoretic and the active life thus play a kind of {164}
+see-saw with each other on the ground of evil.  The rise of either
+sends the other down.  Murder and treachery cannot be good without
+regret being bad: regret cannot be good without treachery and murder
+being bad.  Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; so
+something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world.
+It must be a place of which either sin or error forms a necessary part.
+From this dilemma there seems at first sight no escape.  Are we then so
+soon to fall back into the pessimism from which we thought we had
+emerged?  And is there no possible way by which we may, with good
+intellectual consciences, call the cruelties and the treacheries, the
+reluctances and the regrets, _all_ good together?
+
+Certainly there is such a way, and you are probably most of you ready
+to formulate it yourselves.  But, before doing so, remark how
+inevitably the question of determinism and indeterminism slides us into
+the question of optimism and pessimism, or, as our fathers called it,
+'the question of evil.'  The theological form of all these disputes is
+the simplest and the deepest, the form from which there is the least
+escape,--not because, as some have sarcastically said, remorse and
+regret are clung to with a morbid fondness by the theologians as
+spiritual luxuries, but because they are existing facts of the world,
+and as such must be taken into account in the deterministic
+interpretation of all that is fated to be.  If they are fated to be
+error, does not the bat's wing of irrationality still cast its shadow
+over the world?
+
+
+The refuge from the quandary lies, as I said, not far off.  The
+necessary acts we erroneously regret {165} may be good, and yet our
+error in so regretting them may be also good, on one simple condition;
+and that condition is this: The world must not be regarded as a machine
+whose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but rather
+as a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of what
+goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are.  Not the doing either
+of good or of evil is what nature cares for, but the knowing of them.
+Life is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of _knowledge_.  I am
+in the habit, in thinking to myself, of calling this point of view the
+_gnostical_ point of view.  According to it, the world is neither an
+optimism nor a pessimism, but a _gnosticism_.  But as this term may
+perhaps lead to some misunderstandings, I will use it as little as
+possible here, and speak rather of _subjectivism_, and the
+_subjectivistic_ point of view.
+
+Subjectivism has three great branches,--we may call them scientificism,
+sentimentalism, and sensualism, respectively.  They all agree
+essentially about the universe, in deeming that what happens there is
+subsidiary to what we think or feel about it.  Crime justifies its
+criminality by awakening our intelligence of that criminality, and
+eventually our remorses and regrets; and the error included in remorses
+and regrets, the error of supposing that the past could have been
+different, justifies itself by its use.  Its use is to quicken our
+sense of _what_ the irretrievably lost is.  When we think of it as that
+which might have been ('the saddest words of tongue or pen'), the
+quality of its worth speaks to us with a wilder sweetness; and,
+conversely, the dissatisfaction wherewith we think of what seems to
+have driven it from its natural place gives us the severer pang.
+Admirable artifice of {166} nature! we might be tempted to
+exclaim,--deceiving us in order the better to enlighten us, and leaving
+nothing undone to accentuate to our consciousness the yawning distance
+of those opposite poles of good and evil between which creation swings.
+
+We have thus clearly revealed to our view what may be called the
+dilemma of determinism, so far as determinism pretends to think things
+out at all.  A merely mechanical determinism, it is true, rather
+rejoices in not thinking them out.  It is very sure that the universe
+must satisfy its postulate of a physical continuity and coherence, but
+it smiles at any one who comes forward with a postulate of moral
+coherence as well.  I may suppose, however, that the number of purely
+mechanical or hard determinists among you this evening is small.  The
+determinism to whose seductions you are most exposed is what I have
+called soft determinism,--the determinism which allows considerations
+of good and bad to mingle with those of cause and effect in deciding
+what sort of a universe this may rationally be held to be.  The dilemma
+of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right
+horn is subjectivism.  In other words, if determinism is to escape
+pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a
+simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in
+themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and
+ethical, in us.
+
+To escape pessimism is, as we all know, no easy task.  Your own studies
+have sufficiently shown you the almost desperate difficulty of making
+the notion that there is a single principle of things, and that
+principle absolute perfection, rhyme together with {167} our daily
+vision of the facts of life.  If perfection be the principle, how comes
+there any imperfection here?  If God be good, how came he to
+create--or, if he did not create, how comes he to permit--the devil?
+The evil facts must be explained as seeming: the devil must be
+whitewashed, the universe must be disinfected, if neither God's
+goodness nor his unity and power are to remain impugned.  And of all
+the various ways of operating the disinfection, and making bad seem
+less bad, the way of subjectivism appears by far the best.[6]
+
+For, after all, is there not something rather absurd in our ordinary
+notion of external things being good or bad in themselves?  Can murders
+and treacheries, considered as mere outward happenings, or motions of
+matter, be bad without any one to feel their badness?  And could
+paradise properly be good in the absence of a sentient principle by
+which the goodness was perceived?  Outward goods and evils seem
+practically indistinguishable except in so far as they result in
+getting moral judgments made about them.  But then the moral judgments
+seem the main thing, and the outward facts mere perishing instruments
+for their production.  This is subjectivism.  Every one must at some
+time have wondered at that strange paradox of our moral nature, that,
+though the {168} pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils,
+the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation and
+death.  Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or
+on earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape?  The white-robed
+harp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table
+elysium represented in Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, as the final
+consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this
+respect,--lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all.[7]  We look upon
+them from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivings
+and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations, which forms
+our present state, and _tedium vitae_ is the only sentiment they awaken
+in our breasts.  To our crepuscular natures, born for the conflict, the
+Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro, the shifting struggle of the sunbeam
+in the gloom, such pictures of light upon light are vacuous and
+expressionless, and neither to be enjoyed nor understood.  If _this_ be
+the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations of mankind
+suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets confessed and martyrs
+sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end
+than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should
+succeed, and protract _in saecula saeculorum_ their contented and
+inoffensive lives,--why, at such a rate, better lose than win the
+battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last
+act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be
+saved from so singularly flat a winding-up.
+
+{169}
+
+All this is what I should instantly say, were I called on to plead for
+gnosticism; and its real friends, of whom you will presently perceive I
+am not one, would say without difficulty a great deal more.  Regarded
+as a stable finality, every outward good becomes a mere weariness to
+the flesh.  It must be menaced, be occasionally lost, for its goodness
+to be fully felt as such.  Nay, more than occasionally lost.  No one
+knows the worth of innocence till he knows it is gone forever, and that
+money cannot buy it back.  Not the saint, but the sinner that
+repenteth, is he to whom the full length and breadth, and height and
+depth, of life's meaning is revealed.  Not the absence of vice, but
+vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human
+state.  And there seems no reason to suppose it not a permanent human
+state.  There is a deep truth in what the school of Schopenhauer
+insists on,--the illusoriness of the notion of moral progress.  The
+more brutal forms of evil that go are replaced by others more subtle
+and more poisonous.  Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, and
+never do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves and
+the azure meet.  The final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly
+to be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness,
+through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of
+characters.  This of course obliges some of us to be vessels of wrath,
+while it calls others to be vessels of honor.  But the subjectivist
+point of view reduces all these outward distinctions to a common
+denominator.  The wretch languishing in the felon's cell may be
+drinking draughts of the wine of truth that will never pass the lips of
+the so-called favorite of fortune.  And the peculiar consciousness of
+{170} each of them is an indispensable note in the great ethical
+concert which the centuries as they roll are grinding out of the living
+heart of man.
+
+So much for subjectivism!  If the dilemma of determinism be to choose
+between it and pessimism, I see little room for hesitation from the
+strictly theoretical point of view.  Subjectivism seems the more
+rational scheme.  And the world may, possibly, for aught I know, be
+nothing else.  When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its
+forms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutal
+and the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is an
+integral part of the total richness,--why, then it seems a grudging and
+sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink from any of its
+facts and wish them not to be.  Rather take the strictly dramatic point
+of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which
+the spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, is
+eternally thinking out and representing to itself.[8]
+
+
+No one, I hope, will accuse me, after I have said all this, of
+underrating the reasons in favor of subjectivism.  And now that I
+proceed to say why those reasons, strong as they are, fail to convince
+my own mind, I trust the presumption may be that my objections are
+stronger still.
+
+I frankly confess that they are of a practical order.  If we
+practically take up subjectivism in a sincere and radical manner and
+follow its consequences, we meet with some that make us pause.  Let a
+subjectivism {171} begin in never so severe and intellectual a way, it
+is forced by the law of its nature to develop another side of itself
+and end with the corruptest curiosity.  Once dismiss the notion that
+certain duties are good in themselves, and that we are here to do them,
+no matter how we feel about them; once consecrate the opposite notion
+that our performances and our violations of duty are for a common
+purpose, the attainment of subjective knowledge and feeling, and that
+the deepening of these is the chief end of our lives,--and at what
+point on the downward slope are we to stop?  In theology, subjectivism
+develops as its 'left wing' antinomianism.  In literature, its left
+wing is romanticism.  And in practical life it is either a nerveless
+sentimentality or a sensualism without bounds.
+
+Everywhere it fosters the fatalistic mood of mind.  It makes those who
+are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless
+those whose energy is already in excess.  All through history we find
+how subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts itself in
+every sort of spiritual, moral, and practical license.  Its optimism
+turns to an ethical indifference, which infallibly brings dissolution
+in its train.  It is perfectly safe to say now that if the Hegelian
+gnosticism, which has begun to show itself here and in Great Britain,
+were to become a popular philosophy, as it once was in Germany, it
+would certainly develop its left wing here as there, and produce a
+reaction of disgust.  Already I have heard a graduate of this very
+school express in the pulpit his willingness to sin like David, if only
+he might repent like David.  You may tell me he was only sowing his
+wild, or rather his tame, oats; and perhaps he was.  But the point is
+{172} that in the subjectivistic or gnostical philosophy oat-sowing,
+wild or tame, becomes a systematic necessity and the chief function of
+life.  After the pure and classic truths, the exciting and rancid ones
+must be experienced; and if the stupid virtues of the philistine herd
+do not then come in and save society from the influence of the children
+of light, a sort of inward putrefaction becomes its inevitable doom.
+
+Look at the last runnings of the romantic school, as we see them in
+that strange contemporary Parisian literature, with which we of the
+less clever countries are so often driven to rinse out our minds after
+they have become clogged with the dulness and heaviness of our native
+pursuits.  The romantic school began with the worship of subjective
+sensibility and the revolt against legality of which Rousseau was the
+first great prophet: and through various fluxes and refluxes, right
+wings and left wings, it stands to-day with two men of genius, M. Renan
+and M. Zola, as its principal exponents,--one speaking with its
+masculine, and the other with what might be called its feminine, voice.
+I prefer not to think now of less noble members of the school, and the
+Renan I have in mind is of course the Renan of latest dates.  As I have
+used the term gnostic, both he and Zola are gnostics of the most
+pronounced sort.  Both are athirst for the facts of life, and both
+think the facts of human sensibility to be of all facts the most worthy
+of attention.  Both agree, moreover, that sensibility seems to be there
+for no higher purpose,--certainly not, as the Philistines say, for the
+sake of bringing mere outward rights to pass and frustrating outward
+wrongs.  One dwells on the sensibilities for their energy, the other
+for their sweetness; one speaks with a voice of {173} bronze, the other
+with that of an Æolian harp; one ruggedly ignores the distinction of
+good and evil, the other plays the coquette between the craven
+unmanliness of his Philosophic Dialogues and the butterfly optimism of
+his Souvenirs de Jeunesse.  But under the pages of both there sounds
+incessantly the hoarse bass of _vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas_,
+which the reader may hear, whenever he will, between the lines.  No
+writer of this French romantic school has a word of rescue from the
+hour of satiety with the things of life,--the hour in which we say, "I
+take no pleasure in them,"--or from the hour of terror at the world's
+vast meaningless grinding, if perchance such hours should come.  For
+terror and satiety are facts of sensibility like any others; and at
+their own hour they reign in their own right.  The heart of the
+romantic utterances, whether poetical, critical, or historical, is this
+inward remedilessness, what Carlyle calls this far-off whimpering of
+wail and woe.  And from this romantic state of mind there is absolutely
+no possible _theoretic_ escape.  Whether, like Renan, we look upon life
+in a more refined way, as a romance of the spirit; or whether, like the
+friends of M. Zola, we pique ourselves on our 'scientific' and
+'analytic' character, and prefer to be cynical, and call the world a
+'roman experimental' on an infinite scale,--in either case the world
+appears to us potentially as what the same Carlyle once called it, a
+vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death.
+
+The only escape is by the practical way.  And since I have mentioned
+the nowadays much-reviled name of Carlyle, let me mention it once more,
+and say it is the way of his teaching.  No matter for Carlyle's life,
+no matter for a great deal of his {174} writing.  What was the most
+important thing he said to us?  He said: "Hang your sensibilities!
+Stop your snivelling complaints, and your equally snivelling raptures!
+Leave off your general emotional tomfoolery, and get to WORK like men!"
+But this means a complete rupture with the subjectivist philosophy of
+things.  It says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact for
+our recognition.  With the vision of certain works to be done, of
+certain outward changes to be wrought or resisted, it says our
+intellectual horizon terminates.  No matter how we succeed in doing
+these outward duties, whether gladly and spontaneously, or heavily and
+unwillingly, do them we somehow must; for the leaving of them undone is
+perdition.  No matter how we feel; if we are only faithful in the
+outward act and refuse to do wrong, the world will in so far be safe,
+and we quit of our debt toward it.  Take, then, the yoke upon our
+shoulders; bend our neck beneath the heavy legality of its weight;
+regard something else than our feeling as our limit, our master, and
+our law; be willing to live and die in its service,--and, at a stroke,
+we have passed from the subjective into the objective philosophy of
+things, much as one awakens from some feverish dream, full of bad
+lights and noises, to find one's self bathed in the sacred coolness and
+quiet of the air of the night.
+
+But what is the essence of this philosophy of objective conduct, so
+old-fashioned and finite, but so chaste and sane and strong, when
+compared with its romantic rival?  It is the recognition of limits,
+foreign and opaque to our understanding.  It is the willingness, after
+bringing about some external good, to feel at peace; for our
+responsibility ends with the {175} performance of that duty, and the
+burden of the rest we may lay on higher powers.[9]
+
+  "Look to thyself, O Universe,
+  Thou art better and not worse,"
+
+we may say in that philosophy, the moment we have done our stroke of
+conduct, however small.  For in the view of that philosophy the
+universe belongs to a plurality of semi-independent forces, each one of
+which may help or hinder, and be helped or hindered by, the operations
+of the rest.
+
+
+But this brings us right back, after such a long detour, to the
+question of indeterminism and to the conclusion of all I came here to
+say to-night.  For the only consistent way of representing a pluralism
+and a world whose parts may affect one another through their conduct
+being either good or bad is the indeterministic way.  What interest,
+zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we
+are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural
+way,--nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way?  And what sense can
+there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we
+need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us
+as well?  I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we
+feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.  I cannot
+understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its
+happening.  I cannot understand regret without the admission of real,
+genuine possibilities in the world.  Only _then_ is it {176} other than
+a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an
+irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it
+must forever after mourn.
+
+
+If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the
+eye of science and reason impossibility, and that if I act badly 'tis
+that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right
+back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism,
+from out of whose toils we have just wound our way.
+
+Now, we are of course free to fall back, if we please.  For my own
+part, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of
+objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply,
+determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains
+difficulties that are greater still.  But you will remember that I
+expressly repudiated awhile ago the pretension to offer any arguments
+which could be coercive in a so-called scientific fashion in this
+matter.  And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk,
+obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way.  This
+personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the
+problem; and the most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he
+can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to
+work on others as it may.
+
+Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this.  The world is
+enigmatical enough in all conscience, whatever theory we may take up
+toward it.  The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular
+sense based on the judgment of regret, represents {177} that world as
+vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they
+act wrong.  And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of
+possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly
+warded off.  In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency
+or of stability.  It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in
+which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to
+a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt,
+remain forever inacceptable.  A friend with such a mind once told me
+that the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the
+horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.
+
+But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are
+repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every
+alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way.  The indeterminism
+with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the
+native absolutism of my intellect,--an absolutism which, after all,
+perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check.  But the determinism
+with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with
+no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral
+reality through and through.  When, for example, I imagine such carrion
+as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the
+universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature
+without shrinking from complicity with such a whole.  And I
+deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by
+saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of
+the whole, is not carrion.  There are some instinctive reactions which
+{178} I, for one, will not tamper with.  The only remaining
+alternative, the attitude of gnostical romanticism, wrenches my
+personal instincts in quite as violent a way.  It falsifies the simple
+objectivity of their deliverance.  It makes the goose-flesh the murder
+excites in me a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime.
+It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic
+exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one's diseased curiosity
+pleases to carry it out.  And with its consecration of the 'roman
+naturaliste' state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of
+Parisian _littérateurs_ among the eternally indispensable organs by
+which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective
+illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of
+a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the
+objective carrion I called it in to take away.
+
+No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our
+moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward;
+but better far than that the world of chance.  Make as great an uproar
+about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and
+nothing more.  If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the
+philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits
+me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of
+affection and an unsophisticated moral sense.  And if I still wish to
+think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a
+chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to
+pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all.  That 'chance'
+whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish {179} from my
+view of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that
+'chance' is--what?  Just this,--the chance that in moral respects the
+future may be other and better than the past has been.  This is the
+only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist.  Shame, rather,
+on its repudiation and its denial!  For its presence is the vital air
+which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.
+
+
+And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see
+admitted by others to-night.  But I know that if I do stop here,
+misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you, and keep all
+I have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a few
+more words.
+
+In the first place, in spite of all my explanations, the word 'chance'
+will still be giving trouble.  Though you may yourselves be adverse to
+the deterministic doctrine, you wish a pleasanter word than 'chance' to
+name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider my
+preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part.
+It certainly _is_ a bad word to make converts with; and you wish I had
+not thrust it so butt-foremost at you,--you wish to use a milder term.
+
+Well, I admit there may be just a dash of perversity in its choice.
+The spectacle of the mere word-grabbing game played by the soft
+determinists has perhaps driven me too violently the other way; and,
+rather than be found wrangling with them for the good words, I am
+willing to take the first bad one which comes along, provided it be
+unequivocal.  The question is of things, not of eulogistic names for
+them; and the best word is the one that enables men to {180} know the
+quickest whether they disagree or not about the things.  But the word
+'chance,' with its singular negativity, is just the word for this
+purpose.  Whoever uses it instead of 'freedom,' squarely and resolutely
+gives up all pretence to control the things he says are free.  For
+_him_, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be.
+It is a word of _impotence_, and is therefore the only sincere word we
+can use, if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant it
+honestly, and really risk the game.  "Who chooses me must give and
+forfeit all he hath."  Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets
+us, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretence of
+restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other
+we anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does not get
+beyond our sight.
+
+
+But now you will bring up your final doubt.  Does not the admission of
+such an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a
+Providence governing the world?  Does it not leave the fate of the
+universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure?
+Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate
+peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?
+
+To this my answer must be very brief.  The belief in free-will is not
+in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you
+do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but _fatal_
+decrees.  If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as
+actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those
+two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled
+even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; {181}
+and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be
+from all eternity.
+
+An analogy will make the meaning of this clear.  Suppose two men before
+a chessboard,--the one a novice, the other an expert player of the
+game.  The expert intends to beat.  But he cannot foresee exactly what
+any one actual move of his adversary may be.  He knows, however, all
+the _possible_ moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet
+each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of
+victory.  And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how
+devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the
+novice's king.
+
+Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for
+the infinite mind in which the universe lies.  Suppose the latter to be
+thinking out his universe before he actually creates it.  Suppose him
+to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not _now_[10]
+decide on all the steps thereto.  At various points, ambiguous
+possibilities shall be left {182} open, _either_ of which, at a given
+instant, may become actual.  But whichever branch of these bifurcations
+become real, I know what I shall do at the _next_ bifurcation to keep
+things from drifting away from the final result I intend.[11]
+
+The creator's plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to many
+of its actual details, but all possibilities would be marked down.  The
+realization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; that
+is, would only be determined when the moment of realization came.
+Other possibilities would be _contingently_ determined; that is, their
+decision would have to wait till it was seen how the matters of
+absolute chance fell out.  But the rest of the plan, including its
+final upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all.  So the
+creator himself would not need to know _all_ the details of actuality
+until they came; and at any time his own view of the world would be a
+view partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours is
+now.  Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that his
+world was safe, and that no matter how much it might zig-zag he could
+surely bring it home at last.
+
+{183}
+
+Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creator
+leave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by himself, each
+when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he
+alienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out to
+finite creatures such as we men are.  The great point is that the
+possibilities are really _here_.  Whether it be we who solve them, or
+he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate's scales
+seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks
+nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that
+the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now.  _That_ is what
+gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as
+Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement.  This
+reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft
+alike, suppress by their denial that _anything_ is decided here and
+now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long
+ago.  If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the error
+of continuing to believe in liberty.[12]  It is fortunate for the
+winding up of controversy that in every discussion with determinism
+this _argumentum ad hominem_ can be its adversary's last word.
+
+
+
+[1] An Address to the Harvard Divinity Students, published in the
+Unitarian Review for September, 1884.
+
+[2] And I may now say Charles S. Peirce,--see the Monist, for 1892-93.
+
+[3] "The whole history of popular beliefs about Nature refutes the
+notion that the thought of a universal physical order can possibly have
+arisen from the purely passive reception and association of particular
+perceptions.  Indubitable as it is that men infer from known cases to
+unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to
+the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would
+never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the
+belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation.
+From the point of view of strict experience, nothing exists but the sum
+of particular perceptions, with their coincidences on the one hand,
+their contradictions on the other.
+
+"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is
+not discovered; _till the order is looked for_.  The first impulse to
+look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained,
+or produce a result.  But the practical need is only the first occasion
+for our reflection on the conditions of true knowledge; and even were
+there no such need, motives would still be present for carrying us
+beyond the stage of mere association.  For not with an equal interest,
+or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those
+natural processes in which a thing is linked with its former mate, and
+those in which it is linked to something else.  _The former processes
+harmonize with the conditions of his own thinking_: the latter do not.
+In the former, his _concepts_, _general judgments_, and _inferences_
+apply to reality: in the latter, they have no such application.  And
+thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without
+reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized
+throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities,
+uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and
+guiding principle of his own thought."  (Sigwart, Logik, bd. 3, s. 382.)
+
+[4] Speaking technically, it is a word with a positive denotation, but
+a connotation that is negative.  Other things must be silent about
+_what_ it is: it alone can decide that point at the moment in which it
+reveals itself.
+
+[5] A favorite argument against free-will is that if it be true, a
+man's murderer may as probably be his best friend as his worst enemy, a
+mother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first-born, and all of
+us be as ready to jump from fourth-story windows as to go out of front
+doors, etc.  Users of this argument should properly be excluded from
+debate till they learn what the real question is.  'Free-will' does not
+say that everything that is physically conceivable is also morally
+possible.  It merely says that of alternatives that really _tempt_ our
+will more than one is really possible.  Of course, the alternatives
+that do thus tempt our will are vastly fewer than the physical
+possibilities we can coldly fancy.  Persons really tempted often do
+murder their best friends, mothers do strangle their first-born, people
+do jump out of fourth-story windows, etc.
+
+[6] To a reader who says he is satisfied with a pessimism, and has no
+objection to thinking the whole bad, I have no more to say: he makes
+fewer demands on the world than I, who, making them, wish to look a
+little further before I give up all hope of having them satisfied.  If,
+however, all he means is that the badness of some parts does not
+prevent his acceptance of a universe whose _other_ parts give him
+satisfaction, I welcome him as an ally.  He has abandoned the notion of
+the _Whole_, which is the essence of deterministic monism, and views
+things as a pluralism, just as I do in this paper.
+
+[7] Compare Sir James Stephen's Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862,
+pp. 138, 318.
+
+[8] Cet univers est un spectacle que Dieu se donne à lui-même.  Servons
+les intentions du grand chorège en contribuant à rendre le spectacle
+aussi brillant, aussi varié que possible.--RENAN.
+
+[9] The burden, for example, of seeing to it that the _end_ of all our
+righteousness be some positive universal gain.
+
+[10] This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of
+time.  And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I
+have no reply to make.  A mind to whom all time is simultaneously
+present must see all things under the form of actuality, or under some
+form to us unknown.  If he thinks certain moments as ambiguous in their
+content while future, he must simultaneously know how the ambiguity
+will have been decided when they are past.  So that none of his mental
+judgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his world is one
+from which chance is excluded.  Is not, however, the timeless mind
+rather a gratuitous fiction?  And is not the notion of eternity being
+given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon
+us the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?--just
+the point to be proved.  To say that time is an illusory appearance is
+only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that
+the frame of things is an absolute unit.  Admit plurality, and time may
+be its form.
+
+[11] And this of course means 'miraculous' interposition, but not
+necessarily of the gross sort our fathers took such delight in
+representing, and which has so lost its magic for us.  Emerson quotes
+some Eastern sage as saying that if evil were really done under the
+sun, the sky would incontinently shrivel to a snakeskin and cast it out
+in spasms.  But, says Emerson, the spasms of Nature are years and
+centuries; and it will tax man's patience to wait so long.  We may
+think of the reserved possibilities God keeps in his own hand, under as
+invisible and molecular and slowly self-summating a form as we please.
+We may think of them as counteracting human agencies which he inspires
+_ad hoc_.  In short, signs and wonders and convulsions of the earth and
+sky are not the only neutralizers of obstruction to a god's plans of
+which it is possible to think.
+
+[12] As long as languages contain a future perfect tense, determinists,
+following the bent of laziness or passion, the lines of least
+resistance, can reply in that tense, saying, "It will have been fated,"
+to the still small voice which urges an opposite course; and thus
+excuse themselves from effort in a quite unanswerable way.
+
+
+
+
+{184}
+
+THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE.[1]
+
+The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing
+possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance.  We
+all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we
+contribute to the race's moral life.  In other words, there can be no
+final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has
+had his experience and said his say.  In the one case as in the other,
+however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts
+to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which
+determine what that 'say' shall be.
+
+
+First of all, what is the position of him who seeks an ethical
+philosophy?  To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who
+are satisfied to be ethical sceptics.  He _will_ not be a sceptic;
+therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of
+ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual
+alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every
+would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and
+renounce his original aim.  That aim is to find an account of the moral
+relations that obtain among things, which {185} will weave them into
+the unity of a stable system, and make of the world what one may call a
+genuine universe from the ethical point of view.  So far as the world
+resists reduction to the form of unity, so far as ethical propositions
+seem unstable, so far does the philosopher fail of his ideal.  The
+subject-matter of his study is the ideals he finds existing in the
+world; the purpose which guides him is this ideal of his own, of
+getting them into a certain form.  This ideal is thus a factor in
+ethical philosophy whose legitimate presence must never be overlooked;
+it is a positive contribution which the philosopher himself necessarily
+makes to the problem.  But it is his only positive contribution.  At
+the outset of his inquiry he ought to have no other ideals.  Were he
+interested peculiarly in the triumph of any one kind of good, he would
+_pro tanto_ cease to be a judicial investigator, and become an advocate
+for some limited element of the case.
+
+
+There are three questions in ethics which must be kept apart.  Let them
+be called respectively the _psychological_ question, the _metaphysical_
+question, and the _casuistic_ question.  The psychological question
+asks after the historical _origin_ of our moral ideas and judgments;
+the metaphysical question asks what the very _meaning_ of the words
+'good,' 'ill,' and 'obligation' are; the casuistic question asks what
+is the _measure_ of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so
+that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.
+
+
+I.
+
+The psychological question is for most disputants the only question.
+When your ordinary doctor of {186} divinity has proved to his own
+satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called 'conscience' must
+be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your
+popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that 'apriorism' is an
+exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually
+resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons
+thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said.  The
+familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used
+now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really
+refer to the psychological question alone.  The discussion of this
+question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible
+to enter upon it at all within the limits of this paper.  I will
+therefore only express dogmatically my own belief, which is this,--that
+the Benthams, the Mills, and the Barns have done a lasting service in
+taking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must have
+arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and
+reliefs from pain.  Association with many remote pleasures will
+unquestionably make a thing significant of goodness in our minds; and
+the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will
+its source appear to be.  But it is surely impossible to explain all
+our sentiments and preferences in this simple way.  The more minutely
+psychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces
+of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment
+with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from
+those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are
+practically all that pure empiricism can admit.  Take the love of
+drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror {187} of high places, the
+tendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, the
+susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the
+passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics,--no one of
+these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility.
+They _go with_ other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and
+some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing
+in us for which some use may not be found.  But their origin is in
+incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose
+original features arose with no reference to the perception of such
+discords and harmonies as these.
+
+Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this
+secondary and brain-born kind.  They deal with directly felt fitnesses
+between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of
+habit and presumptions of utility.  The moment you get beyond the
+coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor
+Richard's Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the
+eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained.  The sense for
+abstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation,
+from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or
+for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of
+others.  The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual
+attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the
+essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic
+fussiness, etc.,--are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference
+of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake.  The nobler thing
+_tastes_ better, and that is all that we can say.  {188} 'Experience'
+of consequences may truly teach us what things are _wicked_, but what
+have consequences to do with what is _mean_ and _vulgar_?  If a man has
+shot his wife's paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in
+things is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and
+the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again?
+Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs.
+Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and
+millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a
+certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
+lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of
+emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an
+impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how
+hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as
+the fruit of such a bargain?  To what, once more, but subtile
+brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests
+against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice?--I refer to
+Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his
+substitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr.
+Heidenhain's Process), to M. Guyau with his radical condemnation of the
+punitive ideal.  All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as
+much beyond what can be ciphered out from the 'laws of association' as
+the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go
+beyond such precepts of the 'etiquette to be observed during
+engagement' as are printed in manuals of social form.
+
+No!  Purely inward forces are certainly at work here.  All the higher,
+more penetrating ideals are {189} revolutionary.  They present
+themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in
+that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the
+environment and the lessons it has so far taught as must learn to bend.
+
+This is all I can say of the psychological question now.  In the last
+chapter of a recent work[2] I have sought to prove in a general way the
+existence, in our thought, of relations which do not merely repeat the
+couplings of experience.  Our ideals have certainly many sources.  They
+are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained,
+and pains to be escaped.  And for having so constantly perceived this
+psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school.  Whether
+or not such applause must be extended to that school's other
+characteristics will appear as we take up the following questions.
+
+The next one in order is the metaphysical question, of what we mean by
+the words 'obligation,' 'good,' and 'ill.'
+
+
+II.
+
+First of all, it appears that such words can have no application or
+relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists.  Imagine an
+absolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts,
+and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested
+spectator: would there be any sense in saying of that world that one of
+its states is better than another?  Or if there were two such worlds
+possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and
+the other bad,--good or {190} bad positively, I mean, and apart from
+the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the
+philosopher's private interests?  But we must leave these private
+interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and
+we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical
+facts _per se_.  Surely there is no _status_ for good and evil to exist
+in, in a purely insentient world.  How can one physical fact,
+considered simply as a physical fact, be 'better' than another?
+Betterness is not a physical relation.  In its mere material capacity,
+a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant or painful.
+Good for what?  Good for the production of another physical fact, do
+you say?  But what in a purely physical universe demands the production
+of that other fact?  Physical facts simply _are_ or are _not_; and
+neither when present or absent, can they be supposed to make demands.
+If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have
+ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious
+sensibility.  Goodness, badness, and obligation must be _realised_
+somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical
+philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic 'nature of things' can
+realize them.  Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing _in
+vacuo_.  Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no
+world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to
+which ethical propositions apply.
+
+The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the universe,
+there is a chance for goods and evils really to exist.  Moral relations
+now have their _status_, in that being's consciousness.  So far as he
+feels anything to be good, he _makes_ it good.  It {191} _is_ good, for
+him; and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the sole
+creator of values in that universe, and outside of his opinion things
+have no moral character at all.
+
+In such a universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the
+question of whether the solitary thinker's judgments of good and ill
+are true or not.  Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to
+which he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity,
+subject to no higher judge.  Let us call the supposed universe which he
+inhabits a _moral solitude_.  In such a moral solitude it is clear that
+there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the
+god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his
+own several ideals with one another.  Some of these will no doubt be
+more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a
+profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him with
+more obstinate regrets if violated.  So the thinker will have to order
+his life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly
+discordant and unhappy.  Into whatever equilibrium he may settle,
+though, and however he may straighten out his system, it will be a
+right system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there is
+nothing moral in the world.
+
+If now we introduce a second thinker with his likes and dislikes into
+the universe, the ethical situation becomes much more complex, and
+several possibilities are immediately seen to obtain.
+
+One of these is that the thinkers may ignore each other's attitude
+about good and evil altogether, and each continue to indulge his own
+preferences, indifferent to what the other may feel or do.  In such a
+{192} case we have a world with twice as much of the ethical quality in
+it as our moral solitude, only it is without ethical unity.  The same
+object is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view
+which this one or that one of the thinkers takes.  Nor can you find any
+possible ground in such a world for saying that one thinker's opinion
+is more correct than the other's, or that either has the truer moral
+sense.  Such a world, in short, is not a moral universe but a moral
+dualism.  Not only is there no single point of view within it from
+which the values of things can be unequivocally judged, but there is
+not even a demand for such a point of view, since the two thinkers are
+supposed to be indifferent to each other's thoughts and acts.  Multiply
+the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us in the
+ethical sphere something like that world which the antique sceptics
+conceived of,--in which individual minds are the measures of all
+things, and in which no one 'objective' truth, but only a multitude of
+'subjective' opinions, can be found.
+
+But this is the kind of world with which the philosopher, so long as he
+holds to the hope of a philosophy, will not put up.  Among the various
+ideals represented, there must be, he thinks, some which have the more
+truth or authority; and to these the others _ought_ to yield, so that
+system and subordination may reign.  Here in the word 'ought' the
+notion of _obligation_ comes emphatically into view, and the next thing
+in order must be to make its meaning clear.
+
+
+Since the outcome of the discussion so far has been to show us that
+nothing can be good or right except {193} so far as some consciousness
+feels it to be good or thinks it to be right, we perceive on the very
+threshold that the real superiority and authority which are postulated
+by the philosopher to reside in some of the opinions, and the really
+inferior character which he supposes must belong to others, cannot be
+explained by any abstract moral 'nature of things' existing
+antecedently to the concrete thinkers themselves with their ideals.
+Like the positive attributes good and bad, the comparative ones better
+and worse must be _realised_ in order to be real.  If one ideal
+judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be
+made flesh by being lodged concretely in some one's actual perception.
+It cannot float in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of
+meteorological phenomenon, like the aurora borealis or the zodiacal
+light.  Its _esse_ is _percipi_, like the _esse_ of the ideals
+themselves between which it obtains.  The philosopher, therefore, who
+seeks to know which ideal ought to have supreme weight and which one
+ought to be subordinated, must trace the _ought_ itself to the _de
+facto_ constitution of some existing consciousness, behind which, as
+one of the data of the universe, he as a purely ethical philosopher is
+unable to go.  This consciousness must make the one ideal right by
+feeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong.  But
+now what particular consciousness in the universe _can_ enjoy this
+prerogative of obliging others to conform to a rule which it lays down?
+
+If one of the thinkers were obviously divine, while all the rest were
+human, there would probably be no practical dispute about the matter.
+The divine thought would be the model, to which the others should
+conform.  But still the theoretic question {194} would remain, What is
+the ground of the obligation, even here?
+
+In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitable
+tendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when they
+are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad.  They
+imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides;
+and each tries to prove that this pre-existing order is more accurately
+reflected in his own ideas than in those of his adversary.  It is
+because one disputant is backed by this overarching abstract order that
+we think the other should submit.  Even so, when it is a question no
+longer of two finite thinkers, but of God and ourselves,--we follow our
+usual habit, and imagine a sort of _de jure_ relation, which antedates
+and overarches the mere facts, and would make it right that we should
+conform our thoughts to God's thoughts, even though he made no claim to
+that effect, and though we preferred _de facto_ to go on thinking for
+ourselves.
+
+But the moment we take a steady look at the question, _we see not only
+that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be
+no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a
+claim_.  Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they
+cover each other exactly.  Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves
+as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true 'in
+themselves,' is therefore either an out-and-out superstition, or else
+it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real
+Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our
+obligation must be ultimately based.  In a theistic-ethical philosophy
+that thinker in question is, of {195} course, the Deity to whom the
+existence of the universe is due.
+
+I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I have
+called the superstitious view, to realize that every _de facto_ claim
+creates in so far forth an obligation.  We inveterately think that
+something which we call the 'validity' of the claim is what gives to it
+its obligatory character, and that this validity is something outside
+of the claim's mere existence as a matter of fact.  It rains down upon
+the claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the
+moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the
+influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens.  But
+again, how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness,
+additional to the imperativeness which is in the concrete claim itself,
+_exist_?  Take any demand, however slight, which any creature, however
+weak, may make.  Ought it not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied?
+If not, prove why not.  The only possible kind of proof you could
+adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a
+demand that ran the other way.  The only possible reason there can be
+why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is
+desired.  Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it
+_makes_ itself valid by the fact that it exists at all.  Some desires,
+truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant
+persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they
+bring.  But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small
+obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal
+demands.
+
+If we must talk impersonally, to be sure we can say {196} that 'the
+universe' requires, exacts, or makes obligatory such or such an action,
+whenever it expresses itself through the desires of such or such a
+creature.  But it is better not to talk about the universe in this
+personified way, unless we believe in a universal or divine
+consciousness which actually exists.  If there be such a consciousness,
+then its demands carry the most of obligation simply because they are
+the greatest in amount.  But it is even then not _abstractly right_
+that we should respect them.  It is only concretely right,--or right
+after the fact, and by virtue of the fact, that they are actually made.
+Suppose we do not respect them, as seems largely to be the case in this
+queer world.  That ought not to be, we say; that is wrong.  But in what
+way is this fact of wrongness made more acceptable or intelligible when
+we imagine it to consist rather in the laceration of an _à priori_
+ideal order than in the disappointment of a living personal God?  Do
+we, perhaps, think that we cover God and protect him and make his
+impotence over us less ultimate, when we back him up with this _à
+priori_ blanket from which he may draw some warmth of further appeal?
+But the only force of appeal to _us_, which either a living God or an
+abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the 'everlasting ruby
+vaults' of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and
+not irresponsive to the claim.  So far as they do feel it when made by
+a living consciousness, it is life answering to life.  A claim thus
+livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which
+no thought of an 'ideal' backing can render more complete; while if, on
+the other hand, the heart's response is withheld, the stubborn
+phenomenon is there of an impotence in the claims {197} which the
+universe embodies, which no talk about an eternal nature of things can
+gloze over or dispel.  An ineffective _à priori_ order is as impotent a
+thing as an ineffective God; and in the eye of philosophy, it is as
+hard a thing to explain.
+
+
+We may now consider that what we distinguished as the metaphysical
+question in ethical philosophy is sufficiently answered, and that we
+have learned what the words 'good,' 'bad,' and 'obligation' severally
+mean.  They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support.
+They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or
+anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds.
+
+Wherever such minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demands
+upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features.
+Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out
+from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving
+souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution
+as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could
+harbor.  It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock's
+inhabitants would die.  But while they lived, there would be real good
+things and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations,
+claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments;
+compunctions and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace
+of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral
+life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of
+interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.
+
+{198}
+
+We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just
+like the inhabitants of such a rock.  Whether a God exist, or whether
+no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an
+ethical republic here below.  And the first reflection which this leads
+to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe
+where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there
+is a God as well.  'The religion of humanity' affords a basis for
+ethics as well as theism does.  Whether the purely human system can
+gratify the philosopher's demand as well as the other is a different
+question, which we ourselves must answer ere we close.
+
+
+III.
+
+The last fundamental question in Ethics was, it will be remembered, the
+_casuistic_ question.  Here we are, in a world where the existence of a
+divine thinker has been and perhaps always will be doubted by some of
+the lookers-on, and where, in spite of the presence of a large number
+of ideals in which human beings agree, there are a mass of others about
+which no general consensus obtains.  It is hardly necessary to present
+a literary picture of this, for the facts are too well known.  The wars
+of the flesh and the spirit in each man, the concupiscences of
+different individuals pursuing the same unshareable material or social
+prizes, the ideals which contrast so according to races, circumstances,
+temperaments, philosophical beliefs, etc.,--all form a maze of
+apparently inextricable confusion with no obvious Ariadne's thread to
+lead one out.  Yet the philosopher, just because he is a philosopher,
+adds his own peculiar ideal to the confusion {199} (with which if he
+were willing to be a sceptic he would be passably content), and insists
+that over all these individual opinions there is a _system of truth_
+which he can discover if he only takes sufficient pains.
+
+We stand ourselves at present in the place of that philosopher, and
+must not fail to realize all the features that the situation comports.
+In the first place we will not be sceptics; we hold to it that there is
+a truth to be ascertained.  But in the second place we have just gained
+the insight that that truth cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws,
+or an abstract 'moral reason,' but can only exist in act, or in the
+shape of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found.  There is,
+however, no visible thinker invested with authority.  Shall we then
+simply proclaim our own ideals as the lawgiving ones?  No; for if we
+are true philosophers we must throw our own spontaneous ideals, even
+the dearest, impartially in with that total mass of ideals which are
+fairly to be judged.  But how then can we as philosophers ever find a
+test; how avoid complete moral scepticism on the one hand, and on the
+other escape bringing a wayward personal standard of our own along with
+us, on which we simply pin our faith?
+
+The dilemma is a hard one, nor does it grow a bit more easy as we
+revolve it in our minds.  The entire undertaking of the philosopher
+obliges him to seek an impartial test.  That test, however, must be
+incarnated in the demand of some actually existent person; and how can
+he pick out the person save by an act in which his own sympathies and
+prepossessions are implied?
+
+One method indeed presents itself, and has as a matter of history been
+taken by the more serious {200} ethical schools.  If the heap of things
+demanded proved on inspection less chaotic than at first they seemed,
+if they furnished their own relative test and measure, then the
+casuistic problem would be solved.  If it were found that all goods
+_quâ_ goods contained a common essence, then the amount of this essence
+involved in any one good would show its rank in the scale of goodness,
+and order could be quickly made; for this essence would be _the_ good
+upon which all thinkers were agreed, the relatively objective and
+universal good that the philosopher seeks.  Even his own private ideals
+would be measured by their share of it, and find their rightful place
+among the rest.
+
+Various essences of good have thus been found and proposed as bases of
+the ethical system.  Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to be
+recognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy for
+the moment; to make others as well as him happy in the long run; to add
+to his perfection or dignity; to harm no one; to follow from reason or
+flow from universal law; to be in accordance with the will of God; to
+promote the survival of the human species on this planet,--are so many
+tests, each of which has been maintained by somebody to constitute the
+essence of all good things or actions so far as they are good.
+
+No one of the measures that have been actually proposed has, however,
+given general satisfaction.  Some are obviously not universally present
+in all cases,--_e. g._, the character of harming no one, or that of
+following a universal law; for the best course is often cruel; and many
+acts are reckoned good on the sole condition that they be exceptions,
+and serve not as examples of a universal law.  Other {201} characters,
+such as following the will of God, are unascertainable and vague.
+Others again, like survival, are quite indeterminate in their
+consequences, and leave us in the lurch where we most need their help:
+a philosopher of the Sioux Nation, for example, will be certain to use
+the survival-criterion in a very different way from ourselves.  The
+best, on the whole, of these marks and measures of goodness seems to be
+the capacity to bring happiness.  But in order not to break down
+fatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and impulses
+that never _aim_ at happiness; so that, after all, in seeking for a
+universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most
+universal principle,--that _the essence of good is simply to satisfy
+demand_.  The demand may be for anything under the sun.  There is
+really no more ground for supposing that all our demands can be
+accounted for by one universal underlying kind of motive than there is
+ground for supposing that all physical phenomena are cases of a single
+law.  The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those
+of physics are.  The various ideals have no common character apart from
+the fact that they are ideals.  No single abstract principle can be so
+used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientifically
+accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale.
+
+
+A look at another peculiarity of the ethical universe, as we find it,
+will still further show us the philosopher's perplexities.  As a purely
+theoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly ever
+come up at all.  If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the
+best _imaginable_ system of goods he would indeed have an easy task;
+for all demands as {202} such are _primâ facie_ respectable, and the
+best simply imaginary world would be one in which _every_ demand was
+gratified as soon as made.  Such a world would, however, have to have a
+physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we
+inhabit.  It would need not only a space, but a time, 'of
+_n_-dimensions,' to include all the acts and experiences incompatible
+with one another here below, which would then go on in
+conjunction,--such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking our
+holiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yet
+doing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keeping
+our youthful freshness of heart; and the like.  There can be no
+question that such a system of things, however brought about, would be
+the absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could create
+universes _à priori_, and provide all the mechanical conditions, that
+is the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create.
+
+But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and
+the casuistic question here is most tragically practical.  The actually
+possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded;
+and there is always a _pinch_ between the ideal and the actual which
+can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind.  There is
+hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the
+possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined
+good.  Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of
+some other end of desire.  Shall a man drink and smoke, _or_ keep his
+nerves in condition?--he cannot do both.  Shall he follow his fancy for
+Amelia, _or_ for Henrietta?--both cannot be the choice of his heart.
+Shall he have the {203} dear old Republican party, _or_ a spirit of
+unsophistication in public affairs?--he cannot have both, etc.  So that
+the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination
+in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need.  Some part of
+the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part.  It is a
+tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has
+to deal.
+
+Now we are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopher's task by
+the fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largely
+ordered already.  If we follow the ideal which is conventionally
+highest, the others which we butcher either die and do not return to
+haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, every one
+applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear.  In other words, our
+environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.  The
+philosopher, however, cannot, so long as he clings to his own ideal of
+objectivity, rule out any ideal from being heard.  He is confident, and
+rightly confident, that the simple taking counsel of his own intuitive
+preferences would be certain to end in a mutilation of the fulness of
+the truth.  The poet Heine is said to have written 'Bunsen' in the
+place of 'Gott' in his copy of that author's work entitled "God in
+History," so as to make it read 'Bunsen in der Geschichte.'  Now, with
+no disrespect to the good and learned Baron, is it not safe to say that
+any single philosopher, however wide his sympathies, must be just such
+a Bunsen in der Geschichte of the moral world, so soon as he attempts
+to put his own ideas of order into that howling mob of desires, each
+struggling to get breathing-room for the ideal to which it clings?  The
+very best of men must not only be insensible, but {204} be ludicrously
+and peculiarly insensible, to many goods.  As a militant, fighting
+free-handed that the goods to which he is sensible may not be submerged
+and lost from out of life, the philosopher, like every other human
+being, is in a natural position.  But think of Zeno and of Epicurus,
+think of Calvin and of Paley, think of Kant and Schopenhauer, of
+Herbert Spencer and John Henry Newman, no longer as one-sided champions
+of special ideals, but as schoolmasters deciding what all must
+think,--and what more grotesque topic could a satirist wish for on
+which to exercise his pen?  The fabled attempt of Mrs. Partington to
+arrest the rising tide of the North Atlantic with her broom was a
+reasonable spectacle compared with their effort to substitute the
+content of their clean-shaven systems for that exuberant mass of goods
+with which all human nature is in travail, and groaning to bring to the
+light of day.  Think, furthermore, of such individual moralists, no
+longer as mere schoolmasters, but as pontiffs armed with the temporal
+power, and having authority in every concrete case of conflict to order
+which good shall be butchered and which shall be suffered to
+survive,--and the notion really turns one pale.  All one's slumbering
+revolutionary instincts waken at the thought of any single moralist
+wielding such powers of life and death.  Better chaos forever than an
+order based on any closet-philosopher's rule, even though he were the
+most enlightened possible member of his tribe.  No! if the philosopher
+is to keep his judicial position, he must never become one of the
+parties to the fray.
+
+
+What can he do, then, it will now be asked, except to fall back on
+scepticism and give up the notion of being a philosopher at all?
+
+{205}
+
+But do we not already see a perfectly definite path of escape which is
+open to him just because he is a philosopher, and not the champion of
+one particular ideal?  Since everything which is demanded is by that
+fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy
+(since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world)
+be simply to satisfy at all times _as many demands as we can_?  That
+act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole,
+in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions.  In the
+casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which
+_prevail at the least cost_, or by whose realization the least possible
+number of other ideals are destroyed.  Since victory and defeat there
+must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the
+more inclusive side,--of the side which even in the hour of triumph
+will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished
+party's interests lay.  The course of history is nothing but the story
+of men's struggles from generation to generation to find the more and
+more inclusive order.  _Invent some manner_ of realizing your own
+ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands,--that and that only
+is the path of peace!  Following this path, society has shaken itself
+into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of
+social discoveries quite analogous to those of science.  Polyandry and
+polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial
+torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually
+aroused complaints; and though some one's ideals are unquestionably the
+worse off for each improvement, yet a vastly greater total number of
+them find shelter in our civilized society than in the older {206}
+savage ways.  So far then, and up to date, the casuistic scale is made
+for the philosopher already far better than he can ever make it for
+himself.  An experiment of the most searching kind has proved that the
+laws and usages of the land are what yield the maximum of satisfaction
+to the thinkers taken all together.  The presumption in cases of
+conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good.
+The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of his
+casuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customs
+of the community on top.
+
+And yet if he be a true philosopher he must see that there is nothing
+final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, as
+our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones,
+so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order
+which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without
+producing others louder still.  "Rules are made for man, not man for
+rules,"--that one sentence is enough to immortalize Green's Prolegomena
+to Ethics.  And although a man always risks much when he breaks away
+from established rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole than
+they permit, yet the philosopher must allow that it is at all times
+open to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake
+his life and character upon the throw.  The pinch is always here.  Pent
+in under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom it
+weighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are always
+rumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue by
+which they may get free.  See the abuses which the {207} institution of
+private property covers, so that even to-day it is shamelessly asserted
+among us that one of the prime functions of the national government is
+to help the adroiter citizens to grow rich.  See the unnamed and
+unnamable sorrows which the tyranny, on the whole so beneficent, of the
+marriage-institution brings to so many, both of the married and the
+unwed.  See the wholesale loss of opportunity under our _régime_ of
+so-called equality and industrialism, with the drummer and the
+counter-jumper in the saddle, for so many faculties and graces which
+could flourish in the feudal world.  See our kindliness for the humble
+and the outcast, how it wars with that stern weeding-out which until
+now has been the condition of every perfection in the breed.  See
+everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem
+how to make them less.  The anarchists, nihilists, and free-lovers; the
+free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and
+civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists;
+the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the
+weak,--these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed
+against them, are simply deciding through actual experiment by what
+sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in
+this world.  These experiments are to be judged, not _à priori_, but by
+actually finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcry
+or how much appeasement comes about.  What closet-solutions can
+possibly anticipate the result of trials made on such a scale?  Or what
+can any superficial theorist's judgment be worth, in a world where
+every one of hundreds of ideals has its special champion already
+provided {208} in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it,
+and to fight to death in its behalf?  The pure philosopher can only
+follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least
+resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive
+arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the
+kingdom of heaven is incessantly made.
+
+
+IV.
+
+All this amounts to saying that, so far as the casuistic question goes,
+ethical science is just like physical science, and instead of being
+deducible all at once from abstract principles, must simply bide its
+time, and be ready to revise its conclusions from day to day.  The
+presumption of course, in both sciences, always is that the vulgarly
+accepted opinions are true, and the right casuistic order that which
+public opinion believes in; and surely it would be folly quite as
+great, in most of us, to strike out independently and to aim at
+originality in ethics as in physics.  Every now and then, however, some
+one is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary
+thought or action may bear prosperous fruit.  He may replace old 'laws
+of nature' by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in a
+certain place, bring in a total condition of things more ideal than
+would have followed had the rules been kept.
+
+On the whole, then, we must conclude that no philosophy of ethics is
+possible in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term.  Everywhere
+the ethical philosopher must wait on facts.  The thinkers who create
+the ideals come he knows not whence, their sensibilities are evolved he
+knows not how; and the {209} question as to which of two conflicting
+ideals will give the best universe then and there, can be answered by
+him only through the aid of the experience of other men.  I said some
+time ago, in treating of the 'first' question, that the intuitional
+moralists deserve credit for keeping most clearly to the psychological
+facts.  They do much to spoil this merit on the whole, however, by
+mixing with it that dogmatic temper which, by absolute distinctions and
+unconditional 'thou shalt nots,' changes a growing, elastic, and
+continuous life into a superstitious system of relics and dead bones.
+In point of fact, there are no absolute evils, and there are no
+non-moral goods; and the _highest_ ethical life--however few may be
+called to bear its burdens--consists at all times in the breaking of
+rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case.  There is but
+one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek
+incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring
+about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
+Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as
+our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for
+the moral life.  For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a
+unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and
+ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe
+without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists.
+The philosopher, then, _quâ_ philosopher, is no better able to
+determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than other men.
+He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most men, what the question
+always is,--not a question of this good or that good simply taken, but
+of the two total {210} universes with which these goods respectively
+belong.  He knows that he must vote always for the richer universe, for
+the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter into complex
+combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole.  But
+which particular universe this is he cannot know for certain in
+advance; he only knows that if he makes a bad mistake the cries of the
+wounded will soon inform him of the fact.  In all this the philosopher
+is just like the rest of us non-philosophers, so far as we are just and
+sympathetic instinctively, and so far as we are open to the voice of
+complaint.  His function is in fact indistinguishable from that of the
+best kind of statesman at the present day.  His books upon ethics,
+therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and
+more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative
+and suggestive rather than dogmatic,--I mean with novels and dramas of
+the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and
+philanthropy and social and economical reform.  Treated in this way
+ethical treatises may be voluminous and luminous as well; but they
+never can be _final_, except in their abstractest and vaguest features;
+and they must more and more abandon the old-fashioned, clear-cut, and
+would-be 'scientific' form.
+
+
+V.
+
+The chief of all the reasons why concrete ethics cannot be final is
+that they have to wait on metaphysical and theological beliefs.  I said
+some time back that real ethical relations existed in a purely human
+world.  They would exist even in what we called a moral solitude if the
+thinker had various {211} ideals which took hold of him in turn.  His
+self of one day would make demands on his self of another; and some of
+the demands might be urgent and tyrannical, while others were gentle
+and easily put aside.  We call the tyrannical demands _imperatives_.
+If we ignore these we do not hear the last of it.  The good which we
+have wounded returns to plague us with interminable crops of
+consequential damages, compunctions, and regrets.  Obligation can thus
+exist inside a single thinker's consciousness; and perfect peace can
+abide with him only so far as he lives according to some sort of a
+casuistic scale which keeps his more imperative goods on top.  It is
+the nature of these goods to be cruel to their rivals.  Nothing shall
+avail when weighed in the balance against them.  They call out all the
+mercilessness in our disposition, and do not easily forgive us if we
+are so soft-hearted as to shrink from sacrifice in their behalf.
+
+The deepest difference, practically, in the moral life of man is the
+difference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood.  When in the
+easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling
+consideration.  The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite
+indifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained.  The
+capacity for the strenuous mood probably lies slumbering in every man,
+but it has more difficulty in some than in others in waking up.  It
+needs the wilder passions to arouse it, the big fears, loves, and
+indignations; or else the deeply penetrating appeal of some one of the
+higher fidelities, like justice, truth, or freedom.  Strong relief is a
+necessity of its vision; and a world where all the mountains are
+brought down and all the valleys are {212} exalted is no congenial
+place for its habitation.  This is why in a solitary thinker this mood
+might slumber on forever without waking.  His various ideals, known to
+him to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the same
+denominational value: he can play fast or loose with them at will.
+This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to
+our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power.  Life,
+to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but
+it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the
+infinite scale of values fails to open up.  Many of us, indeed,--like
+Sir James Stephen in those eloquent 'Essays by a Barrister,'--would
+openly laugh at the very idea of the strenuous mood being awakened in
+us by those claims of remote posterity which constitute the last appeal
+of the religion of humanity.  We do not love these men of the future
+keenly enough; and we love them perhaps the less the more we hear of
+their evolutionized perfection, their high average longevity and
+education, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunity
+from pain and zymotic disease, and all their other negative
+superiorities.  This is all too finite, we say; we see too well the
+vacuum beyond.  It lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and may
+all be dealt with in the don't-care mood.  No need of agonizing
+ourselves or making others agonize for these good creatures just at
+present.
+
+When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of
+the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out.  The scale of the
+symphony is incalculably prolonged.  The more imperative ideals now
+begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and
+to utter the penetrating, shattering, {213} tragically challenging note
+of appeal.  They ring out like the call of Victor Hugo's alpine eagle,
+"qui parle au précipice et que le gouffre entend," and the strenuous
+mood awakens at the sound.  It saith among the trumpets, ha, ha! it
+smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the
+shouting.  Its blood is up; and cruelty to the lesser claims, so far
+from being a deterrent element, does but add to the stern joy with
+which it leaps to answer to the greater.  All through history, in the
+periodical conflicts of puritanism with the don't-care temper, we see
+the antagonism of the strenuous and genial moods, and the contrast
+between the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation from on high,
+and those of prudence and the satisfaction of merely finite need.
+
+The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural
+human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or
+traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one
+simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of
+existence its keenest possibilities of zest.  Our attitude towards
+concrete evils is entirely different in a world where we believe there
+are none but finite demanders, from what it is in one where we joyously
+face tragedy for an infinite demander's sake.  Every sort of energy and
+endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set
+free in those who have religious faith.  For this reason the strenuous
+type of character will on the battle-field of human history always
+outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the
+wall.
+
+
+It would seem, too,--and this is my final conclusion,--that the stable
+and systematic moral universe {214} for which the ethical philosopher
+asks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine thinker
+with all-enveloping demands.  If such a thinker existed, his way of
+subordinating the demands to one another would be the finally valid
+casuistic scale; his claims would be the most appealing; his ideal
+universe would be the most inclusive realizable whole.  If he now
+exist, then actualized in his thought already must be that ethical
+philosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermore
+approach.[3]  In the interests of our own ideal of systematically
+unified moral truth, therefore, we, as would-be philosophers, must
+postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religious
+cause.  Meanwhile, exactly what the thought of the infinite thinker may
+be is hidden from us even were we sure of his existence; so that our
+postulation of him after all serves only to let loose in us the
+strenuous mood.  But this is what it does in all men, even those who
+have no interest in philosophy.  The ethical philosopher, therefore,
+whenever he ventures to say which course of action is the best, is on
+no essentially different level from the common man.  "See, I have set
+before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; therefore,
+choose life that thou and thy seed may live,"--when this challenge
+comes to us, it is simply our total character and personal genius that
+are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and
+use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or
+incapacity for moral life.  From this unsparing practical ordeal no
+professor's lectures and no array of books {215} can save us.  The
+solving word, for the learned and the unlearned man alike, lies in the
+last resort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of their
+interior characters, and nowhere else.  It is not in heaven, neither is
+it beyond the sea; but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth
+and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.
+
+
+
+[1] An Address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the
+International Journal of Ethics, April, 1891.
+
+[2] The Principles of Psychology, New York, H. Holt & Co, 1890.
+
+[3] All this is set forth with great freshness and force in the work of
+my colleague, Professor Josiah Royce: "The Religious Aspect of
+Philosophy."  Boston, 1885.
+
+
+
+
+{216}
+
+GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT.[1]
+
+A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains
+between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of
+zoölogical evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
+
+It will be best to prepare the ground for my thesis by a few very
+general remarks on the method of getting at scientific truth.  It is a
+common platitude that a complete acquaintance with any one thing,
+however small, would require a knowledge of the entire universe.  Not a
+sparrow falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of his
+fall are to be found in the milky way, in our federal constitution, or
+in the early history of Europe.  That is to say, alter the milky way,
+alter the federal constitution, alter the facts of our barbarian
+ancestry, and the universe would so far be a different universe from
+what it now is.  One fact involved in the difference might be that the
+particular little street-boy who threw the stone which brought down the
+sparrow might not find himself opposite the sparrow at that particular
+moment; or, finding himself there, he might not be in that particular
+serene and disengaged mood of mind which expressed itself in throwing
+the stone.  But, true as all this is, it would be very foolish for any
+one who {217} was inquiring the cause of the sparrow's fall to overlook
+the boy as too personal, proximate, and so to speak anthropomorphic an
+agent, and to say that the true cause is the federal constitution, the
+westward migration of the Celtic race, or the structure of the milky
+way.  If we proceeded on that method, we might say with perfect
+legitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon his
+door-step and cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteen
+at the table, died because of that ominous feast.  I know, in fact, one
+such instance; and I might, if I chose, contend with perfect logical
+propriety that the slip on the ice was no real accident.  "There are no
+accidents," I might say, "for science.  The whole history of the world
+converged to produce that slip.  If anything had been left out, the
+slip would not have occurred just there and then.  To say it would is
+to deny the relations of cause and effect throughout the universe.  The
+real cause of the death was not the slip, _but the conditions which
+engendered the slip_,--and among them his having sat at a table, six
+months previous, one among thirteen.  _That_ is truly the reason why he
+died within the year."
+
+It will soon be seen whose arguments I am, in form, reproducing here.
+I would fain lay down the truth without polemics or recrimination.  But
+unfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statement
+until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement
+would be.  The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark
+background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.  And
+the error which I am going to use as a foil to set off what seems to me
+the truth of my own statements is contained in the philosophy of Mr.
+Herbert Spencer and {218} his disciples.  Our problem is, What are the
+causes that make communities change from generation to
+generation,--that make the England of Queen Anne so different from the
+England of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so different from
+that of thirty years ago?
+
+I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the accumulated
+influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and
+their decisions.  The Spencerian school replies, The changes are
+irrespective of persons, and independent of individual control.  They
+are due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physical
+geography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer
+relations; to everything, in fact, except the Grants and the Bismarcks,
+the Joneses and the Smiths.
+
+
+Now, I say that these theorizers are guilty of precisely the same
+fallacy as he who should ascribe the death of his friend to the dinner
+with thirteen, or the fall of the sparrow to the milky way.  Like the
+dog in the fable, who drops his real bone to snatch at its image, they
+drop the real causes to snatch at others, which from no possible human
+point of view are available or attainable.  Their fallacy is a
+practical one.  Let us see where it lies.  Although I believe in
+free-will myself, I will waive that belief in this discussion, and
+assume with the Spencerians the predestination of all human actions.
+On that assumption I gladly allow that were the intelligence
+investigating the man's or the sparrow's death omniscient and
+omnipresent, able to take in the whole of time and space at a single
+glance, there would not be the slightest objection to the milky way or
+the fatal feast being {219} invoked among the sought-for causes.  Such
+a divine intelligence would see instantaneously all the infinite lines
+of convergence towards a given result, and it would, moreover, see
+impartially: it would see the fatal feast to be as much a condition of
+the sparrow's death as of the man's; it would see the boy with the
+stone to be as much a condition of the man's fall as of the sparrow's.
+
+The human mind, however, is constituted on an entirely different plan.
+It has no such power of universal intuition.  Its finiteness obliges it
+to see but two or three things at a time.  If it wishes to take wider
+sweeps it has to use 'general ideas,' as they are called, and in so
+doing to drop all concrete truths.  Thus, in the present case, if we as
+men wish to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy and
+the dinner and the sparrow and the man's death, we can do so only by
+falling back on the enormous emptiness of what is called an abstract
+proposition.  We must say, All things in the world are fatally
+predetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a system
+of natural law.  But in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have
+lost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters the
+concrete links are the only things of importance.  The human mind is
+essentially partial.  It can be efficient at all only by _picking out_
+what to attend to, and ignoring everything else,--by narrowing its
+point of view.  Otherwise, what little strength it has is dispersed,
+and it loses its way altogether.  Man always wants his curiosity
+gratified for a particular purpose.  If, in the case of the sparrow,
+the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from the
+cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, to
+{220} survey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhile
+escape.  And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves
+in contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice
+the ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor fellow,
+who never dined out in his life, may slip on it in coming to the door,
+and fall and break his head too.
+
+It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our
+view.  In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring and
+neglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adopted
+in the differential calculus.  The calculator throws out all the
+'infinitesimals' of the quantities he is considering.  He treats them
+(under certain rules) as if they did not exist.  In themselves they
+exist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist
+for the purposes of his calculation.  Just so an astronomer, in dealing
+with the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no account of the waves
+made by the wind, or by the pressure of all the steamers which day and
+night are moving their thousands of tons upon its surface.  Just so the
+marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, but
+not for the equally real motion of the earth and solar system.  Just so
+a business man's punctuality may overlook an error of five minutes,
+while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must count each
+thousandth of a second.
+
+There are, in short, _different cycles of operation_ in nature;
+different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one
+another, so that what goes on at any moment in one may be compatible
+with almost any condition of things at the same time in the next.  The
+mould on the biscuit in the store-room of a {221} man-of-war vegetates
+in absolute indifference to the nationality of the flag, the direction
+of the voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on on
+board; and a mycologist may study it in complete abstraction from all
+these larger details.  Only by so studying it, in fact, is there any
+chance of the mental concentration by which alone he may hope to learn
+something of its nature.  On the other hand, the captain who in
+manoeuvring the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary
+to bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likely
+lose the battle by reason of the excessive 'thoroughness' of his mind.
+
+The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected
+with one another only _if we take the whole universe into account_.
+For all lesser points of view it is lawful--nay, more, it is for human
+wisdom necessary--to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one
+another.
+
+
+And this brings us nearer to our special topic.  If we look at an
+animal or a human being, distinguished from the rest of his kind by the
+possession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall be
+able to discriminate between the causes which originally _produced_ the
+peculiarity in him and the causes that _maintain_ it after it is
+produced; and we shall see, if the peculiarity be one that he was born
+with, that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevant
+cycles.  It was the triumphant originality of Darwin to see this, and
+to act accordingly.  Separating the causes of production under the
+title of 'tendencies to spontaneous variation,' and relegating them to
+a physiological cycle which he forthwith {222} agreed to ignore
+altogether,[2] he confined his attention to the causes of preservation,
+and under the names of natural selection and sexual selection studied
+them exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment.
+
+Pre-Darwinian philosophers had also tried to establish the doctrine of
+descent with modification; but they all committed the blunder of
+clumping the two cycles of causation into one.  What preserves an
+animal with his peculiarity, if it be a useful one, they saw to be the
+nature of the environment to which the peculiarity was adjusted.  The
+giraffe with his peculiar neck is preserved by the fact that there are
+in his environment tall trees whose leaves he can digest.  But these
+philosophers went further, and said that the presence of the trees not
+only maintained an animal with a long neck to browse upon their
+branches, but also produced him.  They _made_ his neck long by the
+constant striving they aroused in him to reach up to them.  The
+environment, in short, was supposed by these writers to mould the
+animal by a kind of direct pressure, very much as a seal presses the
+wax into harmony with itself.  Numerous instances were given of the way
+in which this goes on under our eyes.  The exercise of the forge makes
+the right arm strong, the palm grows callous to the oar, the mountain
+air distends the chest, the chased fox grows cunning and the chased
+bird shy, the arctic cold stimulates the animal combustion, and so
+forth.  Now these changes, of which many more examples might be
+adduced, are {223} at present distinguished by the special name of
+_adaptive_ changes.  Their peculiarity is that that very feature in the
+environment to which the animal's nature grows adjusted, itself
+produces the adjustment.  The 'inner relation,' to use Mr. Spencer's
+phrase, 'corresponds' with its own efficient cause.
+
+Darwin's first achievement was to show the utter insignificance in
+amount of these changes produced by direct adaptation, the immensely
+greater mass of changes being produced by internal molecular accidents,
+of which we know nothing.  His next achievement was to define the true
+problem with which we have to deal when we study the effects of the
+visible environment on the animal.  That problem is simply this; Is the
+environment more likely to _preserve or to destroy him_, on account of
+this or that peculiarity with which he may be born?  In giving the name
+of 'accidental variations' to those peculiarities with which an animal
+is born, Darwin does not for a moment mean to suggest that they are not
+the fixed outcome of natural law.  If the total system of the universe
+be taken into account, the causes of these variations and the visible
+environment which preserves or destroys them, undoubtedly do, in some
+remote and roundabout way, hang together.  What Darwin means is, that,
+since that environment is a perfectly known thing, and its relations to
+the organism in the way of destruction or preservation are tangible and
+distinct, it would utterly confuse our finite understandings and
+frustrate our hopes of science to mix in with it facts from such a
+disparate and incommensurable cycle as that in which the variations are
+produced.  This last cycle is that of occurrences before the animal is
+born.  It is the cycle of influences upon ova and embryos; {224} in
+which lie the causes that tip them and tilt them towards masculinity or
+femininity, towards strength or weakness, towards health or disease,
+and towards divergence from the parent type.  What are the causes there?
+
+In the first place, they are molecular and invisible,--inaccessible,
+therefore, to direct observation of any kind.  Secondly, their
+operations are compatible with any social, political, and physical
+conditions of environment.  The same parents, living in the same
+environing conditions, may at one birth produce a genius, at the next
+an idiot or a monster.  The visible external conditions are therefore
+not direct determinants of this cycle; and the more we consider the
+matter, the more we are forced to believe that two children of the same
+parents are made to differ from each other by causes as
+disproportionate to their ultimate effects as is the famous pebble on
+the Rocky Mountain crest, which separates two rain-drops, to the Gulf
+of St. Lawrence and the Pacific Ocean toward which it makes them
+severally flow.
+
+
+The great mechanical distinction between transitive forces and
+discharging forces is nowhere illustrated on such a scale as in
+physiology.  Almost all causes there are forces of _detent_, which
+operate by simply unlocking energy already stored up.  They are
+upsetters of unstable equilibria, and the resultant effect depends
+infinitely more on the nature of the materials upset than on that of
+the particular stimulus which joggles them down.  Galvanic work, equal
+to unity, done on a frog's nerve will discharge from the muscle to
+which the nerve belongs mechanical work equal to seventy thousand; and
+exactly the same muscular {225} effect will emerge if other irritants
+than galvanism are employed.  The irritant has merely started or
+provoked something which then went on of itself,--as a match may start
+a fire which consumes a whole town.  And qualitatively as well as
+quantitatively the effect may be absolutely incommensurable with the
+cause.  We find this condition of things in ail organic matter.
+Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which the instability of
+albuminoid compounds opposes to their study.  Two specimens, treated in
+what outwardly seem scrupulously identical conditions, behave in quite
+different ways.  You know about the invisible factors of fermentation,
+and how the fate of a jar of milk--whether it turn into a sour clot or
+a mass of koumiss--depends on whether the lactic acid ferment or the
+alcoholic is introduced first, and gets ahead of the other in starting
+the process.  Now, when the result is the tendency of an ovum, itself
+invisible to the naked eye, to tip towards this direction or that in
+its further evolution,--to bring forth a genius or a dunce, even as the
+rain-drop passes east or west of the pebble,--is it not obvious that
+the deflecting cause must lie in a region so recondite and minute, must
+be such a ferment of a ferment, an infinitesimal of so high an order,
+that surmise itself may never succeed even in attempting to frame an
+image of it?
+
+Such being the case, was not Darwin right to turn his back upon that
+region altogether, and to keep his own problem carefully free from all
+entanglement with matters such as these?  The success of his work is a
+sufficiently affirmative reply.
+
+
+And this brings us at last to the heart of our subject.  The causes of
+production of great men lie in a {226} sphere wholly inaccessible to
+the social philosopher.  He must simply accept geniuses as data, just
+as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations.  For him, as for Darwin,
+the only problem is, these data being given, How does the environment
+affect them, and how do they affect the environment?  Now, I affirm
+that the relation of the visible environment to the great man is in the
+main exactly what it is to the 'variation' in the Darwinian philosophy.
+It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short _selects_
+him.[3]  And whenever it adopts and preserves the great man, it becomes
+modified by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way.  He
+acts as a ferment, and changes its constitution, just as the advent of
+a new zoölogical species changes the faunal and floral equilibrium of
+the region in which it appears.  We all recollect Mr. Darwin's famous
+statement of the influence of cats on the growth of clover in their
+neighborhood.  We all have read of the effects of the European rabbit
+in New Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in the controversy
+about the English sparrow here,--whether he kills most canker-worms, or
+drives away most native birds.  Just so the great man, whether he be an
+importation from without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, or
+whether he spring from the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about
+a rearrangement, on a large or a small scale, of the pre-existing
+social relations.
+
+{227}
+
+The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are in
+the main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the example of
+individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the
+moment, or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that
+they became ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent or
+fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose
+gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another
+direction.
+
+We see this power of individual initiative exemplified on a small scale
+all about us, and on a large scale in the case of the leaders of
+history.  It is only following the common-sense method of a Lyell, a
+Darwin, and a Whitney to interpret the unknown by the known, and reckon
+up cumulatively the only causes of social change we can directly
+observe.  Societies of men are just like individuals, in that both at
+any given moment offer ambiguous potentialities of development.
+Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on a
+decision which has to be made before a certain day.  He takes the place
+offered in the counting-house, and is _committed_.  Little by little,
+the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so
+near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities.  At first, he
+may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hour
+might not have been the better of the two; but with the years such
+questions themselves expire, and the old alternative _ego_, once so
+vivid, fades into something less substantial than a dream.  It is no
+otherwise with nations.  They may be committed by kings and ministers
+to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this
+{228} religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science,
+or industry.  A war is a true point of bifurcation of future
+possibilities.  Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be the
+starting-point of new policies.  Just so does a revolution, or any
+great civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose operations
+widen with the course of time.  Communities obey their ideals; and an
+accidental success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.
+
+Would England have to-day the 'imperial' ideal which she now has, if a
+certain boy named Bob Clive had shot himself, as he tried to do, at
+Madras?  Would she be the drifting raft she is now in European
+affairs[4] if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead of
+a Victoria, and if Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had all
+been born in Prussia?  England has, no doubt, to-day precisely the same
+intrinsic value relatively to the other nations that she ever had.
+There is no such fine accumulation of human material upon the globe.
+But in England the material has lost effective form, while in Germany
+it has found it.  Leaders give the form.  Would England be crying
+forward and backward at once, as she does now, 'letting I will not wait
+upon I would,' wishing to conquer but not to fight, if her ideal had in
+all these years been fixed by a succession of statesmen of supremely
+commanding personality, working in one direction?  Certainly not.  She
+would have espoused, for better or worse, either one course or another.
+Had Bismarck died in his cradle, the Germans would still be satisfied
+with appearing to themselves as a race of spectacled _Gelehrten_ and
+political herbivora, and to the French as _ces bons_, or _ces naifs_,
+{229} _Allemands_.  Bismarck's will showed them, to their own great
+astonishment, that they could play a far livelier game.  The lesson
+will not be forgotten.  Germany may have many vicissitudes, but they--
+
+        "will never do away, I ween,
+  The marks of that which once hath been"--
+
+of Bismarck's initiative, namely, from 1860 to 1873.
+
+The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as, at any
+rate, one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution.  The
+community _may_ evolve in many ways.  The accidental presence of this
+or that ferment decides in which way it _shall_ evolve.  Why, the very
+birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human
+speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to
+teach them.  So with us individuals.  Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy
+the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical
+effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to
+our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us.  But it is like
+Columbus's egg.  "All can raise the flowers now, for all have got the
+seed."  But if this be true of the individuals in the community, how
+can it be false of the community as a whole?  If shown a certain way, a
+community may take it; if not, it will never find it.  And the ways are
+to a large extent indeterminate in advance.  A nation may obey either
+of many alternative impulses given by different men of genius, and
+still live and be prosperous, just as a man may enter either of many
+businesses.  Only, the prosperities may differ in their type.
+
+But the indeterminism is not absolute.  Not every {230} 'man' fits
+every 'hour.'  Some incompatibilities there are.  A given genius may
+come either too early or too late.  Peter the Hermit would now be sent
+to a lunatic asylum.  John Mill in the tenth century would have lived
+and died unknown.  Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant
+his civil war.  An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted
+rifles; and, to express differently an instance which Spencer uses,
+what could a Watt have effected in a tribe which no precursive genius
+had taught to smelt iron or to turn a lathe?
+
+Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes a certain genius
+now incompatible with his surroundings is usually the fact that some
+previous genius of a different strain has warped the community away
+from the sphere of his possible effectiveness.  After Voltaire, no
+Peter the Hermit; after Charles IX. and Louis XIV., no general
+protestantization of France; after a Manchester school, a
+Beaconsfield's success is transient; after a Philip II., a Castelar
+makes little headway; and so on.  Each bifurcation cuts off certain
+sides of the field altogether, and limits the future possible angles of
+deflection.  A community is a living thing, and in words which I can do
+no better than quote from Professor Clifford,[5] "it is the peculiarity
+of living things not merely that they change under the influence of
+surrounding circumstances, but that any change which takes place in
+them is not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organism
+to serve as the foundation for future actions.  If you cause any
+distortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever you
+may do afterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your {231}
+distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part of
+the tree's nature....  Suppose, however, that you take a lump of gold,
+melt it, and let it cool....  No one can tell by examining a piece of
+gold how often it has been melted and cooled in geologic ages, or even
+in the last year by the hand of man.  Any one who cuts down an oak can
+tell by the rings in its trunk how many times winter has frozen it into
+widowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it into life.  A living
+being must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its
+own existence, but of all its ancestors."
+
+Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects his picture in a
+certain sense.  Whatever lines follow must be built on those first laid
+down.  Every author who starts to rewrite a piece of work knows how
+impossible it becomes to use any of the first-written pages again.  The
+new beginning has already excluded the possibility of those earlier
+phrases and transitions, while it has at the same time created the
+possibility of an indefinite set of new ones, no one of which, however,
+is completely determined in advance.  Just so the social surroundings
+of the past and present hour exclude the possibility of accepting
+certain contributions from individuals; but they do not positively
+define what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they are
+powerless to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shall
+be.[6]
+
+{232}
+
+Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly
+distinct factors,--the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the
+play of physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the
+power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the
+social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him
+and his gifts.  Both factors are essential to change.  The community
+stagnates without the impulse of the individual.  The impulse dies away
+without the sympathy of the community.
+
+All this seems nothing more than common-sense.  All who wish to see it
+developed by a man of genius should read that golden little work,
+Bagehot's Physics and Politics, in which (it seems to me) the complete
+sense of the way in which concrete things grow and change is as
+livingly present as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy of
+evolution is livingly absent.  But there are never wanting minds to
+whom such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to an
+anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of knowledge.  "The
+individual withers, and the world is more and more," to these writers;
+and in a Buckle, a Draper, and a Taine we all know how much the 'world'
+has come to be almost synonymous with the _climate_.  We all know, too,
+how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a
+'science of history' and those who deny the existence of anything like
+necessary 'laws' where human societies are concerned.  Mr. Spencer, at
+the opening of his Study of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the
+'great-man theory' of history, from which a few passages may be
+quoted:--
+
+"The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably
+believed so long as, resting in general {233} notions, you do not ask
+for particulars.  But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand
+that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we
+discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent.  If, not stopping at
+the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back
+a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory
+breaks down completely.  The question has two conceivable answers: his
+origin is supernatural, or it is natural.  Is his origin supernatural?
+Then he is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed,--or,
+rather, not removed at all....  Is this an unacceptable solution?  Then
+the origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is
+recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society
+that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents.  Along with the
+whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its
+institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts
+and appliances, he is a _resultant_....  You must admit that the
+genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex
+influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the
+social state into which that race has slowly grown....  Before he can
+remake his society, his society must make him.  All those changes of
+which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the
+generations he descended from.  If there is to be anything like a real
+explanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of
+conditions out of which both he and they have arisen."[7]
+
+
+Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost call
+impudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the first sentence
+of this extract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those who
+believe in the power of initiative of the great man.
+
+{234}
+
+Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes
+social, political, and religious discussion in England, and contrasts
+so strongly with the bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, is
+largely due to J. S. Mill's example.  I may possibly be wrong about the
+facts; but I am, at any rate, 'asking for particulars,' and not
+'resting in general notions.'  And if Mr. Spencer should tell me it
+started from no personal influence whatever, but from the 'aggregate of
+conditions,' the 'generations,' Mill and all his contemporaries
+'descended from,' the whole past order of nature in short, surely he,
+not I, would be the person 'satisfied with vagueness.'
+
+The fact is that Mr. Spencer's sociological method is identical with
+that of one who would invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the
+sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death.
+It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of
+replying to whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, "God
+is great."  _Not_ to fall back on the gods, where a proximate principle
+may be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of an
+efficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect.
+
+To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its
+antecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal
+and consummation, of science.  If she is simply to lead us out of the
+labyrinth by the same hole we went in by three or four thousand years
+ago, it seems hardly worth while to have followed her through the
+darkness at all.  If anything is humanly certain it is that the great
+man's society, properly so called, does not make him before he can
+remake it.  Physiological forces, with which {235} the social,
+political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological
+conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition
+of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by
+which I write, are what make him.  Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the
+convergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged on
+Stratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W.
+Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born
+there,--as the pressure of water outside a certain boat will cause a
+stream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak?  And does he
+mean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera
+infantum, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon would needs have
+engendered a duplicate copy of him, to restore the sociologic
+equilibrium,--just as the same stream of water will reappear, no matter
+how often you pass a sponge over the leak, so long as the outside level
+remains unchanged?  Or might the substitute arise at
+'Stratford-atte-Bowe'?  Here, as elsewhere, it is very hard, in the
+midst of Mr. Spencer's vagueness, to tell what he does mean at all.
+
+We have, however, in his disciple, Mr. Grant Allen, one who leaves us
+in no doubt whatever of his precise meaning.  This widely informed,
+suggestive, and brilliant writer published last year a couple of
+articles in the Gentleman's Magazine, in which he maintained that
+individuals have no initiative in determining social change.
+
+"The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect,
+commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend, not
+upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other
+unknown and unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the
+{236} physical circumstances to which they are exposed.  If it be a
+fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizably
+from the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably from
+the people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspicuous differences
+between them are wholly due to the geographical position of the various
+races.  If the people who went to Hamburg had gone to Timbuctoo, they
+would now be indistinguishable from the semi-barbarian negroes who
+inhabit that central African metropolis;[8] and if the people who went
+to Timbuctoo had gone to Hamburg, they would now have been
+white-skinned merchants driving a roaring trade in imitation sherry and
+indigestible port....  The differentiating agency must be sought in the
+great permanent geographical features of land and sea; ... these have
+necessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories of
+every nation upon the earth....  We cannot regard any nation as an
+active agent in differentiating itself.  Only the surrounding
+circumstances can have any effect in such a direction.  [These two
+sentences dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively independent
+physiological cycle of causation.]  To suppose otherwise is to suppose
+that the mind of man is exempt from the universal law of causation.
+There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors.  Even
+tastes and inclinations _must_ themselves be the result of surrounding
+causes."[9]
+
+{237}
+
+Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says:--
+
+
+"It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical
+Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan
+brain,...  To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing
+whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the
+physical conditions in which they are set,--including, of course, under
+the term _physical conditions_ the relations of place and time in which
+they stand with regard to other bodies of men.  To suppose otherwise is
+to deny the primordial law of causation.  To imagine that the mind can
+differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated
+without a cause."[10]
+
+
+This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the
+moment we refuse to invest in the kind of causation which is peddled
+round by a particular school, makes one impatient.  These writers have
+no imagination of alternatives.  With them there is no _tertium quid_
+between outward environment and miracle.  _Aut Caesar, aut nullus_!
+_Aut_ Spencerism, _aut_ catechism!
+
+If by 'physical conditions' Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the
+outward cycle of visible nature and man, his assertion is simply
+physiologically false.  For a national mind differentiates 'itself'
+whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the
+invisible and molecular cycle.  But if Mr. Allen means by 'physical
+conditions' the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but
+the vague Asiatic {238} profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate,
+which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or
+scientific character.
+
+
+And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have distinguished
+in these matters between _necessary_ conditions and _sufficient_
+conditions of a given result?  The French say that to have an omelet we
+must break our eggs; that is, the breaking of eggs is a necessary
+condition of the omelet.  But is it a sufficient condition?  Does an
+omelet appear whenever three eggs are broken?  So of the Greek mind.
+To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such commercial
+dealings with the world as the geographical Hellas afforded are a
+necessary condition.  But if they are a sufficient condition, why did
+not the Phoenicians outstrip the Greeks in intelligence?  No
+geographical environment can produce a given type of mind.  It can only
+foster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and
+frustrate others.  Once again, its function is simply selective, and
+determines what shall actually be only by destroying what is positively
+incompatible.  An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvident
+habits in its denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a region
+shall unite with their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or the
+pugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, an
+accident.  Evolutionists should not forget that we all have five
+fingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merely
+because the first vertebrate above the fishes _happened_ to have that
+number.  He owed his prodigious success in founding a line of descent
+to some entirely other quality,--we know {239} not which,--but the
+inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the present
+day.  So of most social peculiarities.  Which of them shall be taken in
+tow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is a
+matter of what physiological accidents shall happen among individuals.
+Mr. Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples of
+China, India, England, Rome, etc.  I have not the smallest hesitation
+in predicting that he will do no more with these examples than he has
+done with Hellas.  He will appear upon the scene after the fact, and
+show that the quality developed by each race was, naturally enough, not
+incompatible with its habitat.  But he will utterly fail to show that
+the particular form of compatibility fallen into in each case was the
+one necessary and only possible form.
+
+Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a
+fauna and its environment are.  An animal may better his chances of
+existence in either of many ways,--growing aquatic, arboreal, or
+subterranean; small and swift, or massive and bulky; spiny, horny,
+slimy, or venomous; more timid or more pugnacious; more cunning or more
+fertile of offspring; more gregarious or more solitary; or in other
+ways besides,--and any one of these ways may suit him to many widely
+different environments.
+
+Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the striking
+illustrations of this in his Malay Archipelago:--
+
+"Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its vast size and its
+freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geological structure, its
+uniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forest vegetation
+that clothes its surface; the Moluccas are the counterpart of the
+Philippines {240} in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility,
+their luxuriant forests, and their frequent earthquakes; and Bali, with
+the east end of Java, has a climate almost as dry and a soil almost as
+arid as that of Timor.  Yet between these corresponding groups of
+islands, constructed, as it were, after the same pattern, subjected to
+the same climate, and bathed by the same oceans, there exists the
+greatest possible contrast when we compare their animal productions.
+Nowhere does the ancient doctrine that differences or similarities in
+the various forms of life that inhabit different countries are due to
+corresponding physical differences or similarities in the countries
+themselves, meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction.  Borneo
+and New Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be,
+are zoölogically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its
+dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its temperate
+climate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related to
+those inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhere
+clothe the plains and mountains of New Guinea."
+
+
+Here we have similar physical-geography environments harmonizing with
+widely differing animal lives, and similar animal lives harmonizing
+with widely differing geographical environments.  A singularly
+accomplished writer, E. Gryzanowski, in the North American Review,[11]
+uses the instances of Sardinia and Corsica in support of this thesis
+with great effect He says:--
+
+
+"These sister islands, lying in the very centre of the Mediterranean,
+at almost equal distances from the centres of Latin and Neo-Latin
+civilization, within easy reach of the Phoenician, the Greek, and the
+Saracen, with a {241} coast-line of more than a thousand miles, endowed
+with obvious and tempting advantages, and hiding untold sources of
+agricultural and mineral wealth, have nevertheless remained unknown,
+unheeded, and certainly uncared for during the thirty centuries of
+European history....  These islands have dialects, but no language;
+records of battles, but no history.  They have customs, but no laws;
+the _vendetta_, but no justice.  They have wants and wealth, but no
+commerce, timber and ports, but no shipping.  They have legends, but no
+poetry, beauty, but no art; and twenty years ago it could still be said
+that they had universities, but no students....  That Sardinia, with
+all her emotional and picturesque barbarism, has never produced a
+single artist is almost as strange as her barbarism itself....  Near
+the focus of European civilization, in the very spot which an _à
+priori_ geographer would point out as the most favorable place for
+material and intellectual, commercial, and political development, these
+strange sister islands have slept their secular sleep, like _nodes_ on
+the sounding-board of history."
+
+
+This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with some
+detail.  All the material advantages are in favor of Sardinia, "and the
+Sardinian population, being of an ancestry more mixed than that of the
+English race, would justify far higher expectations than that of
+Sicily."  Yet Sicily's past history has been brilliant in the extreme,
+and her commerce to-day is great.  Dr. Gryzanowski has his own theory
+of the historic torpor of these favored isles.  He thinks they
+stagnated because they never gained political autonomy, being always
+owned by some Continental power.  I will not dispute the theory; but I
+will ask, Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately: Simply
+because no individuals were {242} born there with patriotism and
+ability enough to inflame their countrymen with national pride,
+ambition, and thirst for independent life.  Corsicans and Sardinians
+are probably as good stuff as any of their neighbors.  But the best
+wood-pile will not blaze till a torch is applied, and the appropriate
+torches seem to have been wanting.[12]
+
+Sporadic great men come everywhere.  But for a community to get
+vibrating through and through {243} with intensely active life, many
+geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required.  This is
+why great epochs are so rare,--why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an
+early Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery.  Blow must follow blow so
+fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals.  Then the mass of the
+nation grows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertia
+long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away.
+We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human
+affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but
+that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant.  This
+mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why
+great rivers flow by great towns.  It is true that great public
+fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses, who in more torpid times
+would have had no chance to work.  But over and above this there must
+be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the
+fermentation begin at all.  The unlikeliness of the concourse is far
+greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the
+rarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they always
+wear.
+
+{244}
+
+It is folly, then, to speak of the 'laws of history' as of something
+inevitable, which science has only to discover, and whose consequences
+any one can then foretell but do nothing to alter or avert.  Why, the
+very laws of physics are conditional, and deal with _ifs_.  The
+physicist does not say, "The water will boil anyhow;" he only says it
+will boil if a fire be kindled beneath it.  And so the utmost the
+student of sociology can ever predict is that _if_ a genius of a
+certain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow.  It might
+long ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy and
+Germany would reach a stable unity if some one could but succeed in
+starting the process.  It could not have been predicted, however, that
+the _modus operandi_ in each case would be subordination to a paramount
+state rather than federation, because no historian could have
+calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same
+moment such positions of authority to three such peculiar individuals
+as Napoleon III., Bismarck, and Cavour.  So of our own politics.  It is
+certain now that the movement of the independents, reformers, or
+whatever one please to call them, will triumph.  But whether it do so
+by converting the Republican party to its ends, or by rearing a new
+party on the ruins of both our present factions, the historian cannot
+say.  There can be no doubt that the reform movement would make more
+progress in one year with an adequate personal leader than as now in
+ten without one.  Were there a great citizen, splendid with every civic
+gift, to be its candidate, who can doubt that he would lead us to
+victory?  But, at present, we, his environment, who sigh for him and
+would so gladly preserve and adopt him if he came, can neither {245}
+move without him, nor yet do anything to bring him forth.[13]
+
+To conclude: The evolutionary view of history, when it denies the vital
+importance of individual initiative, is, then, an utterly vague and
+unscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinism
+into the most ancient oriental fatalism.  The lesson of the analysis
+that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with
+which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the
+energy of the individual.  Even the dogged resistance of the
+reactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely to
+defeat is justified and shown to be effective.  He retards the
+movement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives it
+a resultant momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries'
+speed; and keeps up, in short, a constant lateral pressure, which, to
+be sure, never heads it round about, but brings it up at last at a goal
+far to the right or left of that to which it would have drifted had he
+allowed it to drift alone.
+
+
+I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function of the
+environment in _mental_ evolution.  After what I have already said, I
+may be quite concise.  Here, if anywhere, it would seem at first sight
+as if that school must be right which makes the mind passively plastic,
+and the environment actively productive of the form and order of its
+conceptions; which, in a word, thinks that all mental progress must
+result from {246} a series of adaptive changes, in the sense already
+defined of that word.  We know what a vast part of our mental furniture
+consists of purely remembered, not reasoned, experience.  The entire
+field of our habits and associations by contiguity belongs here.  The
+entire field of those abstract conceptions which were taught us with
+the language into which we were born belongs here also.  And, more than
+this, there is reason to think that the order of 'outer relations'
+experienced by the individual may itself determine the order in which
+the general characters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extracted
+by his mind.[14]  The pleasures and benefits, moreover, which certain
+parts of the environment yield, and the pains and hurts which other
+parts inflict, determine the direction of our interest and our
+attention, and so decide at which points the accumulation of mental
+experiences shall begin.  It might, accordingly, seem as if there were
+no room for any other agency than this; as if the distinction we have
+found so useful between 'spontaneous variation,' as the producer of
+changed forms, and the environment, as their preserver and destroyer,
+did not hold in the case of mental progress; as if, in a word, the
+parallel with darwinism might no longer obtain, and Spencer might be
+quite right with his fundamental law of intelligence, which says, "The
+cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency
+with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has
+been repeated in experience."[15]
+
+{247}
+
+But, in spite of all these facts, I have no hesitation whatever in
+holding firm to the darwinian distinction even here.  I maintain that
+the facts in question are all drawn from the lower strata of the mind,
+so to speak,--from the sphere of its least evolved functions, from the
+region of intelligence which man possesses in common with the brutes.
+And I can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those mental
+departments which are highest, which are most characteristically human,
+Spencer's law is violated at every step; and that as a matter of fact
+the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are
+originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental
+out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the
+excessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simply
+confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or
+destroys,--selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and
+social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort.
+
+It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of a
+simple order are very literal.  They are slaves of habit, doing what
+they have been taught without variation; dry, prosaic, and
+matter-of-fact in their remarks; devoid of humor, except of the coarse
+physical kind which rejoices in a practical joke; taking the world for
+granted; and possessing in their faithfulness and honesty the single
+gift by which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration.  But
+{248} even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic ring,
+and to remind us more of the immutable properties of a piece of
+inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable of
+alternative choice.  When we descend to the brutes, all these
+peculiarities are intensified.  No reader of Schopenhauer can forget
+his frequent allusions to the _trockener ernst_ of dogs and horses, nor
+to their _ehrlichkeit_.  And every noticer of their ways must receive a
+deep impression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple,
+and treadmill-like operations of their minds.
+
+But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change!  Instead of
+thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten
+track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and
+transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions
+and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the
+subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly
+introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is
+fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where
+partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine
+is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law.  According to the
+idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have one
+character or another.  They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will
+be flashes of poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions of
+dramatic fiction or of mechanical device, logical or philosophic
+abstractions, business projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trains
+of experimental consequences based thereon; they will be musical
+sounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or visions of
+moral harmony.  But, whatever their {249} differences may be, they will
+all agree in this,--that their genesis is sudden and, as it were,
+spontaneous.  That is to say, the same premises would not, in the mind
+of another individual, have engendered just that conclusion; although,
+when the conclusion is offered to the other individual, he may
+thoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of him to whom
+it first occurred.
+
+To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically
+pointed out[16] how the genius of discovery depends altogether on the
+number of these random notions and guesses which visit the
+investigator's mind.  To be fertile in hypotheses is the first
+requisite, and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience
+contradicts them is the next.  The Baconian method of collating tables
+of instances may be a useful aid at certain times.  But one might as
+well expect a chemist's note-book to write down the name of the body
+analyzed, or a weather table to sum itself up into a prediction of
+probabilities of its own accord, as to hope that the mere fact of
+mental confrontation with a certain series of facts will be sufficient
+to make _any_ brain conceive their law.  The conceiving of the law is a
+spontaneous variation in the strictest sense of the term.  It flashes
+out of one brain, and no other, because the instability of that brain
+is such as to tip and upset itself in just that particular direction.
+But the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad
+flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an
+exact equality in respect of their origin.  Aristotle's absurd Physics
+and his immortal Logic flow from one source: the forces that produce
+the one produce the other.  {250} When walking along the street,
+thinking of the blue sky or the fine spring weather, I may either smile
+at some grotesque whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an
+intuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which at that
+moment was far from my thoughts.  Both notions are shaken out of the
+same reservoir,--the reservoir of a brain in which the reproduction of
+images in the relations of their outward persistence or frequency has
+long ceased to be the dominant law.  But to the thought, when it is
+once engendered, the consecration of agreement with outward relations
+may come.  The conceit perishes in a moment, and is forgotten.  The
+scientific hypothesis arouses in me a fever of desire for verification.
+I read, write, experiment, consult experts.  Everything corroborates my
+notion, which being then published in a book spreads from review to
+review and from mouth to mouth, till at last there is no doubt I am
+enshrined in the Pantheon of the great diviners of nature's ways.  The
+environment _preserves_ the conception which it was unable to _produce_
+in any brain less idiosyncratic than my own.
+
+Now, the spontaneous upsettings of brains this way and that at
+particular moments into particular ideas and combinations are matched
+by their equally spontaneous permanent tiltings or saggings towards
+determinate directions.  The humorous bent is quite characteristic; the
+sentimental one equally so.  And the personal tone of each mind, which
+makes it more alive to certain classes of experience than others, more
+attentive to certain impressions, more open to certain reasons, is
+equally the result of that invisible and unimaginable play of the
+forces of growth within the nervous system which, irresponsibly to the
+{251} environment, makes the brain peculiarly apt to function in a
+certain way.  Here again the selection goes on.  The products of the
+mind with the determined aesthetic bent please or displease the
+community.  We adopt Wordsworth, and grow unsentimental and serene.  We
+are fascinated by Schopenhauer, and learn from him the true luxury of
+woe.  The adopted bent becomes a ferment in the community, and alters
+its tone.  The alteration may be a benefit or a misfortune, for it is
+(_pace_ Mr. Allen) a differentiation from within, which has to run the
+gauntlet of the larger environment's selective power.  Civilized
+Languedoc, taking the tone of its scholars, poets, princes, and
+theologians, fell a prey to its rude Catholic environment in the
+Albigensian crusade.  France in 1792, taking the tone of its St. Justs
+and Marats, plunged into its long career of unstable outward relations.
+Prussia in 1806, taking the tone of its Humboldts and its Steins,
+proved itself in the most signal way 'adjusted' to its environment in
+1872.
+
+Mr. Spencer, in one of the strangest chapters of his Psychology,[17]
+tries to show the necessary order in which the development of
+conceptions in the human race occurs.  No abstract conception can be
+developed, according to him, until the outward experiences have reached
+a certain degree of heterogeneity, definiteness, coherence, and so
+forth.
+
+
+"Thus the belief in an unchanging order, the belief in _law_, is a
+belief of which the primitive man is absolutely incapable....
+Experiences such as he receives furnish but few data for the conception
+of uniformity, whether as displayed in things or in relations....  The
+daily {252} impressions which the savage gets yield the notion very
+imperfectly, and in but few cases.  Of all the objects around,--trees,
+stones, hills, pieces of water, clouds, and so forth,--most differ
+widely, ... and few approach complete likeness so nearly as to make
+discrimination difficult.  Even between animals of the same species it
+rarely happens that, whether alive or dead, they are presented in just
+the same attitudes....  It is only along with a gradual development of
+the arts ... that there come frequent experiences of perfectly straight
+lines admitting of complete apposition, bringing the perceptions of
+equality and inequality.  Still more devoid is savage life of the
+experiences which generate the conception of the uniformity of
+succession.  The sequences observed from hour to hour and day to day
+seem anything but uniform, difference is a far more conspicuous trait
+among them....  So that if we contemplate primitive human life as a
+whole, we see that multiformity of sequence, rather than uniformity, is
+the notion which it tends to generate....  Only as fast as the practice
+of the arts develops the idea of measure can the consciousness of
+uniformity become clear....  Those conditions furnished by advancing
+civilization which make possible the notion of uniformity
+simultaneously make possible the notion of _exactness_....  Hence the
+primitive man has little experience which cultivates the consciousness
+of what we call _truth_.  How closely allied this is to the
+consciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is implied even
+in language.  We speak of a true surface as well as a true statement.
+Exactness describes perfection in a mechanical fit, as well as perfect
+agreement between the results of calculations."
+
+
+The whole burden of Mr. Spencer's book is to show the fatal way in
+which the mind, supposed passive, is moulded by its experiences of
+'outer {253} relations.'  In this chapter the yard-stick, the balance,
+the chronometer, and other machines and instruments come to figure
+among the 'relations' external to the mind.  Surely they are so, after
+they have been manufactured; but only because of the preservative power
+of the social environment.  Originally all these things and all other
+institutions were flashes of genius in an individual head, of which the
+outer environment showed no sign.  Adopted by the race and become its
+heritage, they then supply instigations to new geniuses whom they
+environ to make new inventions and discoveries; and so the ball of
+progress rolls.  But take out the geniuses, or alter their
+idiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformities will the environment
+show?  We defy Mr. Spencer or any one else to reply.
+
+The plain truth is that the 'philosophy' of evolution (as distinguished
+from our special information about particular cases of change) is a
+metaphysical creed, and nothing else.  It is a mood of contemplation,
+an emotional attitude, rather than a system of thought,--a mood which
+is old as the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation of
+it (such as the spencerian philosophy) will dispel; the mood of
+fatalistic pantheism, with its intuition of the One and All, which was,
+and is, and ever shall be, and from whose womb each single thing
+proceeds.  Far be it from us to speak slightingly here of so hoary and
+mighty a style of looking on the world as this.  What we at present
+call scientific discoveries had nothing to do with bringing it to
+birth, nor can one easily conceive that they should ever give it its
+_quietus_, no matter how logically incompatible with its spirit the
+ultimate phenomenal distinctions which {254} science accumulates should
+turn out to be.  It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions on which
+science is based, for it draws its vital breath from a region
+which--whether above or below--is at least altogether different from
+that in which science dwells.  A critic, however, who cannot disprove
+the truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in
+protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes.  I think
+that all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agree
+that the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and intellectual progress is
+an obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought,
+just as the spencerian philosophy of 'Force,' effacing all the previous
+distinctions between actual and potential energy, momentum, work,
+force, mass, etc., which physicists have with so much agony achieved,
+carries us back to a pre-galilean age.
+
+
+
+[1] A lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society; published in
+the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1880.
+
+[2] Darwin's theory of pangenesis is, it is true, an attempt to account
+(among other things) for variation.  But it occupies its own separate
+place, and its author no more invokes the environment when he talks of
+the adhesions of gemmules than he invokes these adhesions when he talks
+of the relations of the whole animal to the environment.  _Divide et
+impera!_
+
+[3] It is true that it remodels him, also, to some degree, by its
+educative influence, and that this constitutes a considerable
+difference between the social case and the zoölogical case, I neglect
+this aspect of the relation here, for the other is the more important.
+At the end of the article I will return to it incidentally.
+
+[4] The reader will remember when this was written.
+
+[5] Lectures and Essays, i. 82.
+
+[6] Mr. Grant Allen himself, in an article from which I shall presently
+quote, admits that a set of people who, if they had been exposed ages
+ago to the geographical agencies of Timbuctoo, would have developed
+into negroes might now, after a protracted exposure to the conditions
+of Hamburg, never become negroes if transplanted to Timbuctoo.
+
+[7] Study of Sociology, pages 33-35.
+
+[8] No! not even though they were bodily brothers!  The geographical
+factor utterly vanishes before the ancestral factor.  The difference
+between Hamburg and Timbuctoo as a cause of ultimate divergence of two
+races is as nothing to the difference of constitution of the ancestors
+of the two races, even though as in twin brothers, this difference
+might be invisible to the naked eye.  No two couples of the most
+homogeneous race could possibly be found so identical as, if set in
+identical environments, to give rise to two identical lineages.  The
+minute divergence at the start grows broader with each generation, and
+ends with entirely dissimilar breeds.
+
+[9] Article 'Nation Making,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878.  I quote
+from the reprint in the Popular Science Monthly Supplement December,
+1878, pages 121, 123, 126.
+
+[10] Article 'Hellas,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878.  Reprint in
+Popular Science Monthly Supplement, September, 1878.
+
+[11] Vol. cxiii. p. 318 (October, 1871).
+
+[12] I am well aware that in much that follows (though in nothing that
+precedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily shotted bows of Mr. Galton,
+for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of genius I have
+the greatest respect.  Mr. Galton inclines to think that genius of
+intellect and passion is bound to express itself, whatever the outward
+opportunity, and that within any given race an equal number of geniuses
+of each grade must needs be born in every equal period of time; a
+subordinate race cannot possibly engender a large number of high-class
+geniuses, etc.  He would, I suspect, infer the suppositions I go on to
+make--of great men fortuitously assembling around a given epoch and
+making it great, and of their being fortuitously absent from certain
+places and times (from Sardinia, from Boston now, etc.)--to be
+radically vicious.  I hardly think, however, that he does justice to
+the great complexity of the conditions of _effective_ greatness, and to
+the way in which the physiological averages of production may be masked
+entirely during long periods, either by the accidental mortality of
+geniuses in infancy, or by the fact that the particular geniuses born
+happened not to find tasks.  I doubt the truth of his assertion that
+_intellectual_ genius, like murder, 'will out.' It is true that certain
+types are irrepressible.  Voltaire, Shelley, Carlyle, can hardly be
+conceived leading a dumb and vegetative life in any epoch.  But take
+Mr. Galton himself, take his cousin Mr. Darwin, and take Mr. Spencer:
+nothing is to me more have died 'with all their music in them,' known
+only to their friends as persons of strong and original character and
+judgment.  What has started them on their career of effective greatness
+is simply the accident of each stumbling upon a task vast, brilliant,
+and congenial enough to call out the convergence of all his passions
+and powers.  I see no more reason why, in case they had not fallen in
+with their several hobbies at propitious periods in their life, they
+need necessarily have hit upon other hobbies, and made themselves
+equally great.  Their case seems similar to that of the Washingtons,
+Cromwells, and Grants, who simply rose to their occasions.  But apart
+from these causes of fallacy, I am strongly disposed to think that
+where transcendent geniuses are concerned the numbers anyhow are so
+small that their appearance will not fit into any scheme of averages.
+That is, two or three might appear together, just as the two or three
+balls nearest the target centre might be fired consecutively.  Take
+longer epochs and more firing, and the great geniuses and near balls
+would on the whole be more spread out.
+
+[13] Since this paper was written, President Cleveland has to a certain
+extent met the need.  But who can doubt that if he had certain other
+qualities which he has not yet shown, his influence would have been
+still more decisive?  (1896.)
+
+[14] That is, if a certain general character be rapidly repeated in our
+outer experience with a number of strongly contrasted concomitants, it
+will be sooner abstracted than if its associates are invariable or
+monotonous.
+
+[14] Principles of Psychology, i. 460.  See also pp. 463, 464, 500.  On
+page 408 the law is formulated thus: The _persistence_ of the
+connection in consciousness is proportionate to the _persistence_ of
+the outer connection.  Mr. Spencer works most with the law of
+frequency.  Either law, from my point of view, is false; but Mr.
+Spencer ought not to think them synonymous.
+
+[16] In his Principles of Science, chapters xi., xii., xxvi.
+
+[17] Part viii. chap. iii.
+
+
+
+
+{255}
+
+THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS.
+
+The previous Essay, on Great Men, etc., called forth two replies,--one
+by Mr. Grant Allen, entitled the 'Genesis of Genius,' in the Atlantic
+Monthly, vol. xlvii. p. 351; the other entitled 'Sociology and Hero
+Worship,' by Mr. John Fiske, _ibidem_, p. 75.  The article which
+follows is a rejoinder to Mr. Allen's article.  It was refused at the
+time by the Atlantic, but saw the day later in the Open Court for
+August, 1890.  It appears here as a natural supplement to the foregoing
+article, on which it casts some explanatory light.
+
+
+Mr. Allen's contempt for hero-worship is based on very simple
+considerations.  A nation's great men, he says, are but slight
+deviations from the general level.  The hero is merely a special
+complex of the ordinary qualities of his race.  The petty differences
+impressed upon ordinary Greek minds by Plato or Aristotle or Zeno, are
+nothing at all compared with the vast differences between every Greek
+mind and every Egyptian or Chinese mind.  We may neglect them in a
+philosophy of history, just as in calculating the impetus of a
+locomotive we neglect the extra impetus given by a single piece of
+better coal.  What each man adds is but an infinitesimal fraction
+compared with what he derives from his parents, or {256} indirectly
+from his earlier ancestry.  And if what the past gives to the hero is
+so much bulkier than what the future receives from him, it is what
+really calls for philosophical treatment.  The problem for the
+sociologist is as to what produces the average man; the extraordinary
+men and what they produce may by the philosophers be taken for granted,
+as too trivial variations to merit deep inquiry.
+
+Now, as I wish to vie with Mr. Allen's unrivalled polemic amiability
+and be as conciliatory as possible, I will not cavil at his facts or
+try to magnify the chasm between an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Napoleon
+and the average level of their respective tribes.  Let it be as small
+as Mr. Allen thinks.  All that I object to is that he should think the
+mere _size_ of a difference is capable of deciding whether that
+difference be or be not a fit subject for philosophic study.  Truly
+enough, the details vanish in the bird's-eye view; but so does the
+bird's-eye view vanish in the details.  Which is the right point of
+view for philosophic vision?  Nature gives no reply, for both points of
+view, being equally real, are equally natural; and no one natural
+reality _per se_ is any more emphatic than any other.  Accentuation,
+foreground, and background are created solely by the interested
+attention of the looker-on; and if the small difference between the
+genius and his tribe interests me most, while the large one between
+that tribe and another tribe interests Mr. Allen, our controversy
+cannot be ended until a complete philosophy, accounting for all
+differences impartially, shall justify us both.
+
+An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing:
+"There is very little difference between one man and another; but what
+little there {257} is, _is very important_."  This distinction seems to
+me to go to the root of the matter.  It is not only the size of the
+difference which concerns the philosopher, but also its place and its
+kind.  An inch is a small thing, but we know the proverb about an inch
+on a man's nose.  Messrs. Allen and Spencer, in inveighing against
+hero-worship, are thinking exclusively of the size of the inch; I, as a
+hero-worshipper, attend to its seat and function.
+
+Now, there is a striking law over which few people seem to have
+pondered.  It is this: That among all the differences which exist, the
+only ones that interest us strongly are those _we do not take for
+granted_.  We are not a bit elated that our friend should have two
+hands and the power of speech, and should practise the matter-of-course
+human virtues; and quite as little are we vexed that our dog goes on
+all fours and fails to understand our conversation.  Expecting no more
+from the latter companion, and no less from the former, we get what we
+expect and are satisfied.  We never think of communing with the dog by
+discourse of philosophy, or with the friend by head-scratching or the
+throwing of crusts to be snapped at.  But if either dog or friend fall
+above or below the expected standard, they arouse the most lively
+emotion.  On our brother's vices or genius we never weary of
+descanting; to his bipedism or his hairless skin we do not consecrate a
+thought.  _What_ he says may transport us; that he is able to speak at
+all leaves us stone cold.  The reason of all this is that his virtues
+and vices and utterances might, compatibly with the current range of
+variation in our tribe, be just the opposites of what they are, while
+his zoölogically human attributes cannot possibly go astray.  There
+{258} is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the
+dramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the
+stage.  This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the
+race's average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of
+the social community in which it occurs.  It is like the soft layer
+beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year's growth is going
+on.  Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which stands inert and
+belongs almost to the inorganic world.  Layer after layer of human
+perfection separates me from the central Africans who pursued Stanley
+with cries of "meat, meat!"  This vast difference ought, on Mr. Allen's
+principles, to rivet my attention far more than the petty one which
+obtains between two such birds of a feather as Mr. Allen and myself.
+Yet while I never feel proud that the sight of a passer-by awakens in
+me no cannibalistic waterings of the mouth, I am free to confess that I
+shall feel very proud if I do not publicly appear inferior to Mr. Allen
+in the conduct of this momentous debate.  To me as a teacher the
+intellectual gap between my ablest and my dullest student counts for
+infinitely more than that between the latter and the amphioxus: indeed,
+I never thought of the latter chasm till this moment.  Will Mr. Allen
+seriously say that this is all human folly, and tweedledum and
+tweedledee?
+
+To a Veddah's eyes the differences between two white literary men seem
+slight indeed,--same clothes, same spectacles, same harmless
+disposition, same habit of scribbling on paper and poring over books,
+etc.  "Just two white fellows," the Veddah will say, "with no
+perceptible difference."  But what a difference to the literary men
+themselves!  Think, Mr. Allen, of {259} confounding our philosophies
+together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are
+indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah!  Our flesh creeps at the
+thought.
+
+But in judging of history Mr. Allen deliberately prefers to place
+himself at the Veddah's point of view, and to see things _en gros_ and
+out of focus, rather than minutely.  It is quite true that there are
+things and differences enough to be seen either way.  But which are the
+humanly important ones, those most worthy to arouse our interest,--the
+large distinctions or the small?  In the answer to this question lies
+the whole divergence of the hero-worshippers from the sociologists.  As
+I said at the outset, it is merely a quarrel of emphasis; and the only
+thing I can do is to state my personal reasons for the emphasis I
+prefer.
+
+The zone of the individual differences, and of the social 'twists'
+which by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formative
+processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where
+past and future meet.  It is the theatre of all we do not take for
+granted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow its
+scope, it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions.
+The sphere of the race's average, on the contrary, no matter how large
+it may be, is a dead and stagnant thing, an achieved possession, from
+which all insecurity has vanished.  Like the trunk of a tree, it has
+been built up by successive concretions of successive active zones.
+The moving present in which we live with its problems and passions, its
+individual rivalries, victories, and defeats, will soon pass over to
+the majority and leave its small deposit on this static mass, to make
+room for fresh actors and a newer play.  {260} And though it may be
+true, as Mr. Spencer predicts, that each later zone shall fatally be
+narrower than its forerunners; and that when the ultimate lady-like
+tea-table elysium of the Data of Ethics shall prevail, such questions
+as the breaking of eggs at the large or the small end will span the
+whole scope of possible human warfare,--still even in this shrunken and
+enfeebled generation, _spatio aetatis defessa vetusto_, what eagerness
+there will be!  Battles and defeats will occur, the victors will be
+glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of
+yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in
+safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those
+evanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver in fate's scale.
+
+And is not its instinct right?  Do not we here grasp the
+race-differences _in the making_, and catch the only glimpse it is
+allotted to us to attain of the working units themselves, of whose
+differentiating action the race-gaps form but the stagnant sum?  What
+strange inversion of scientific procedure does Mr. Allen practise when
+he teaches us to neglect elements and attend only to aggregate
+resultants?  On the contrary, simply because the active ring, whatever
+its bulk, _is elementary_, I hold that the study of its conditions (be
+these never so 'proximate') is the highest of topics for the social
+philosopher.  If individual variations determine its ups and downs and
+hair-breadth escapes and twists and turns, as Mr. Allen and Mr. Fiske
+both admit, Heaven forbid us from tabooing the study of these in favor
+of the average!  On the contrary, let us emphasize these, and the
+importance of these; and in picking out from history our heroes, and
+communing with their {261} kindred spirits,--in imagining as strongly
+as possible what differences their individualities brought about in
+this world, while its surface was still plastic in their hands, and
+what whilom feasibilities they made impossible,--each one of us may
+best fortify and inspire what creative energy may lie in his own
+soul.[1]
+
+This is the lasting justification of hero-worship, and the pooh-poohing
+of it by 'sociologists' is the ever-lasting excuse for popular
+indifference to their general laws and averages.  The difference
+between an America rescued by a Washington or by a 'Jenkins' may, as
+Mr. Allen says, be 'little,' but it is, in the words of my carpenter
+friend, 'important.'  Some organizing genius must in the nature of
+things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will
+affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should
+have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte?  What animal,
+domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a word
+of sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings of
+Jesus of Nazareth?
+
+The preferences of sentient creatures are what _create_ the importance
+of topics.  They are the absolute and ultimate law-giver here.  And I
+for my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary
+sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined
+tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of
+individual {262} differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of
+fatalisms.  Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is
+it to be,--that of your preference, or mine?  There lies the question
+of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide.
+
+
+
+[1] M. G. Tarde's book (itself a work of genius), Les Lois de
+l'Imitation, Étude Sociologique (2me Édition, Paris, Alcan, 1895), is
+the best possible commentary on this text,--'invention' on the one
+hand, and 'imitation' on the other, being for this author the two sole
+factors of social change.
+
+
+
+
+{263}
+
+ON SOME HEGELISMS.[1]
+
+We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British and
+American philosophy.  Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that I
+believe but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be counted
+among the privat-docenten and younger professors of Germany, and whose
+older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so
+zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be
+reckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higher
+walks of thought.  And there is no doubt that, as a movement of
+reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian
+influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a
+certain kind.  Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly
+indulgent.  Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption
+with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become
+quasi-official, make ready to defend itself as well as to attack
+others.  It is with no hope of converting independent thinkers, but
+rather with the sole aspiration of showing some chance youthful
+disciple that there _is_ another point of view in philosophy that I
+fire this skirmisher's shot, which may, I hope, soon be followed by
+somebody else's heavier musketry.
+
+{264}
+
+The point of view I have in mind will become clearer if I begin with a
+few preparatory remarks on the motives and difficulties of
+philosophizing in general.
+
+
+To show that the real is identical with the ideal may roughly be set
+down as the mainspring of philosophic activity.  The atomic and
+mechanical conception of the world is as ideal from the point of view
+of some of our faculties as the teleological one is from the point of
+view of others.  In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere and
+roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member
+calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity.
+Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong together by inward
+kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers
+of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.
+
+Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law.
+The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us.
+Each asserts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest,
+which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without
+it.  Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous--are the adjectives by
+which we are tempted to describe it.  And yet from out the bosom of it
+a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration
+that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form.  Not only do
+the materials lend themselves under certain circumstances to aesthetic
+manipulation, but underlying their worst disjointedness are three great
+continua in which for each of us reason's ideal is actually reached.  I
+mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of
+space.  In {265} these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely
+at home.  The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself,
+and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is
+not lost.
+
+Consider, for example, space.  It is a unit.  No force can in any way
+break, wound, or tear it.  It has no joints between which you can pass
+your amputating knife, for it penetrates the knife and is not split,
+Try to make a hole in space by annihilating an inch of it.  To make a
+hole you must drive something else through.  But what can you drive
+through space except what is itself spatial?
+
+But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, space in its
+parts contains an infinite variety, and the unity and the variety do
+not contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects.  The
+one is the whole, the many are the parts.  Each part is one again, but
+only one fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, the
+very picture of peace and non-contradiction.  It is true that the space
+between two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of a
+dumb-bell both unites and divides the two balls.  But the union and the
+division are not _secundum idem_: it divides them by keeping them out
+of the space between, it unites them by keeping them out of the space
+beyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency.
+Self-contradiction in space could only ensue if one part tried to oust
+another from its position; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishes
+in the framing, and cannot stay to vex the mind.[2]  Beyond the parts
+we see or think at any {266} given time extend further parts; but the
+beyond is homogeneous with what is embraced, and follows the same law;
+so that no surprises, no foreignness, can ever emerge from space's womb.
+
+Thus with space our intelligence is absolutely intimate; it is
+rationality and transparency incarnate.  The same may be said of the
+ego and of time.  But if for simplicity's sake we ignore them, we may
+truly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world the
+standard set by our knowledge of space is what governs our desire.[3]
+Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the margin of foreignness, be exorcised
+from other things and leave them unitary like the space they fill?
+Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.
+
+But the moment we turn to the material qualities {267} of being, we
+find the continuity ruptured on every side.  A fearful jolting begins.
+Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its mechanical bare
+poles,--atoms and their motions,--the discontinuity is bad enough.  The
+laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion,
+all seem arbitrary collocations of data.  The atoms themselves are so
+many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise
+seems to involve the existence of the rest.  We have not banished
+discontinuity, we have only made it finer-grained.  And to get even
+that degree of rationality into the universe we have had to butcher a
+great part of its contents.  The secondary qualities we stripped off
+from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled 'subjective
+illusion,' still _as such_ are facts, and must themselves be
+rationalized in some way.
+
+But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are
+farther than ever from the goal.  We have not now the refuge of
+distinguishing between the 'reality' and its appearances.  Facts of
+thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only
+differences, and identities of thought the only identities there are.
+Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity.  We can
+no longer speak of heat and light being reconciled in any _tertium
+quid_ like wave-motion.  For motion is motion, and light is light, and
+heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their
+existence.  Together with the other attributes and things we conceive,
+they make up Plato's realm of immutable ideas.  Neither _per se_ calls
+for the other, hatches it out, is its 'truth,' creates it, or has any
+sort of inward community with it except that of being comparable {268}
+in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling,
+as the case may be.  The world of qualities is a world of things almost
+wholly discontinuous _inter se_.  Each only says, "I am that I am," and
+each says it on its own account and with absolute monotony.  The
+continuities of which they _partake_, in Plato's phrase, the ego,
+space, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they
+possess.
+
+It might seem as if in the mere 'partaking' there lay a contradiction
+of the discontinuity.  If the white must partake of space, the heat of
+time, and so forth,--do not whiteness and space, heat and time,
+mutually call for or help to create each other?
+
+Yes; a few such _à priori_ couplings must be admitted.  They are the
+axioms: no feeling except as occupying some space and time, or as a
+moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of
+an object; no time without a previous time,--and the like.  But they
+are limited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad
+genera of concepts, and leave quite undetermined what the
+specifications of those genera shall be.  What feeling shall fill
+_this_ time, what substance execute _this_ motion, what qualities
+combine in _this_ being, are as much unanswered questions as if the
+metaphysical axioms never existed at all.
+
+The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly
+mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pass over the facts of the
+world.  Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few
+vague enveloping laws, independent in all besides.--such seems the
+truth.
+
+In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far {269} apart that
+their conjunction seems quite hopeless.  To eat our cake and have it,
+to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of
+selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be
+the ideal.  But the real offers us these terms in the shape of mutually
+exclusive alternatives of which only one can be true at once; so that
+we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility.  The wrench is
+absolute: "Either--or!"  Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on an
+event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or
+poorer without any intermediate degrees passed over; just as my
+wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me
+from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are
+compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the
+conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and
+impossibility in all its fulness for the other,--so the bachelor joys
+are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must
+henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good
+enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible
+living in the sunshine, the 'unbuttoning after supper and sleeping upon
+benches in the afternoon,' are stars that have set upon the path of him
+who in good earnest makes himself a moralist.  The transitions are
+abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many
+possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all
+their sudden completeness.
+
+Must we then think that the world that fills space and time can yield
+us no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty space
+and time themselves?  Is what unity there is in the world {270} mainly
+derived from the fact that the world is _in_ space and time and
+'partakes' of them?  Can no vision of it forestall the facts of it, or
+know from some fractions the others before the others have arrived?
+Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid there
+being any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happening
+itself?  Can we gain no anticipatory assurance that what is to come
+will have no strangeness?  Is there no substitute, in short, for life
+but the living itself in all its long-drawn weary length and breadth
+and thickness?
+
+In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sense
+finds no difficulty in acquiescing.  To such a way of thinking the
+notion of 'partaking' has a deep and real significance.  Whoso partakes
+of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and
+its other partakers.  But he claims no more.  His share in no wise
+negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession
+of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and
+which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing.  Why may
+not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all
+the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet
+sit at the common table of space and time?
+
+To me this view seems deeply probable.  Things cohere, but the act of
+cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of
+their qualifications indeterminate.  As the first three notes of a tune
+comport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till a
+particular ending has actually come,--so the parts actually known of
+the universe may comport many ideally possible complements.  But as
+{271} the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one is
+not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary
+elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all.
+Why, if one act of knowledge could from one point take in the total
+perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever
+have been anything more than that act?  Why duplicate it by the tedious
+unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality?  No answer seems
+possible.  On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community
+of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part
+controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually
+given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at
+all.  This is the moral view, the view that gives to other powers the
+same freedom it would have itself,--not the ridiculous 'freedom to do
+right,' which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as _I_ think
+right, but the freedom to do as _they_ think right, or wrong either.
+After all, what accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe
+to me?  By what insatiate conceit and lust of intellectual despotism do
+I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic
+throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the
+Lord's anointed?  Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right?
+And shall it be given before they are given?  _Data! gifts!_ something
+to be thankful for!  It is a gift that we can approach things at all,
+and, by means of the time and space of which our minds and they
+partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.
+
+There are 'bounds of ord'nance' set for all things, where they must
+pause or rue it.  'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for
+it, not by it.
+
+{272}
+
+Now, to a mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply
+loathsome.  Bounds that we can't overpass!  Data! facts that say,
+"Hands off, till we are given"! possibilities we can't control! a
+banquet of which we merely share!  Heavens, this is intolerable; such a
+world is no world for a philosopher to have to do with.  He must have
+all or nothing.  If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the
+sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational
+at all.  It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose
+haphazard sway I will not truckle.  But, no! this is not the world.
+The world is philosophy's own,--a single block, of which, if she once
+get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey
+and feed her all-devouring theoretic maw.  Naught shall be but the
+necessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom
+to obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her
+champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.
+
+The insolence of sway, the _hubris_ on which gods take vengeance, is in
+temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice.  A
+Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters.  But when an
+_intellect_ is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence
+must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a
+monster, but a philosophic prophet.  May not this be all wrong?  Is
+there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of
+liability to excess?  And where everything else must be contented with
+its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod
+over the whole?
+
+I confess I can see no _à priori_ reason for the exception.  He who
+claims it must be judged by the {273} consequences of his acts, and by
+them alone.  Let Hegel then confront the universe with his claim, and
+see how he can make the two match.
+
+
+The universe absolutely refuses to let him travel without jolt.  Time,
+space, and his ego are continuous; so are degrees of heat, shades of
+light and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes call
+for salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows what
+salt and sugar are.  But on the whole there is nought to soften the
+shock of surprise to his intelligence, as it passes from one quality of
+being to another.  Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him who
+holds the one the other is not given till it give itself.  Real being
+comes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with no
+permission asked of the conceiver.  In despair must Hegel lift vain
+hands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, he
+must throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature of
+things an _absolute_ muddle and incoherence.
+
+But, hark!  What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear?
+Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require?
+Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency?  Is not
+jolt passage?  Is friction other than a kind of lubrication?  Is not a
+chasm a filling?--a queer kind of filling, but a filling still.  Why
+seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart
+is the only glue you need?  Let all that negation which seemed to
+disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the
+problem stands solved.  The paradoxical character of the notion could
+not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native {274} Germany,
+where mental excess is endemic.  Richard, for a moment brought to bay,
+is himself again.  He vaults into the saddle, and from that time his
+career is that of a philosophic desperado,--one series of outrages upon
+the chastity of thought.
+
+And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree?  The
+old receipts of squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns
+have many applications.  An evil frankly accepted loses half its sting
+and all its terror.  The Stoics had their cheap and easy way of dealing
+with evil.  _Call_ your woes goods, they said; refuse to _call_ your
+lost blessings by that name,--and you are happy.  So of the
+unintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and what
+further do you require?  There is even a more legitimate excuse than
+that.  In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas lies
+a standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to say
+anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling
+words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability.  Thus
+Baron Bunsen writes to his wife: "Nothing is near but the far; nothing
+true but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothing
+so real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing so
+visible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death."  Of
+these ecstatic moments the _credo quia impossibile_ is the classical
+expression.  Hegel's originality lies in his making their mood
+permanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others,--not
+as a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens of
+her intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is always
+ready), but as the very form of intellectual responsibility itself.
+
+{275}
+
+And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel's ways
+of applying his discovery.  His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which
+if you once pass the door you may be lost forever.  Safety lies in not
+entering.  Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance with
+various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so
+plausible as to slide us unresistingly and almost unwittingly through
+the fatal arch.  It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it
+is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that
+its premises are rotten.  I shall accordingly confine myself to a few
+of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they
+break down, so must the system which they prop.
+
+First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing and
+partaking business he so much loathes.  He will not call contradiction
+the glue in one place and identity in another; that is too
+half-hearted.  Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must derive
+its credit from being shown to be latently involved in cases that we
+hitherto supposed to embody pure continuity.  Thus, the relations of an
+ego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place with
+another place, of a cause with its effect, of a thing with its
+properties, and especially of parts with wholes, must be shown to
+involve contradiction.  Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heart
+of coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them,
+and must be taken as the universal solvent,--or, rather, there is no
+longer any need of a solvent.  To 'dissolve' things in identity was the
+dream of earlier cruder schools.  Hegel will show that their very
+difference is their identity, and that {276} in the act of detachment
+the detachment is undone, and they fall into each other's arms.
+
+Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher who
+pretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words that
+it can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (the
+identity of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, and
+obliges him in fact to use the word 'understanding,' whenever it occurs
+in his pages, as a term of contempt.  Take the case of space we used
+above.  The common man who looks at space believes there is nothing in
+it to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, no
+secrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make the
+static whole.  His intellect is satisfied with accepting space as an
+ultimate genus of the given.  But Hegel cries to him: "Dupe! dost thou
+not see it to be one nest of incompatibilities?  Do not the unity of
+its wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patent
+contradiction?  Does it not both unite and divide things; and but for
+this strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all?  The
+hidden dynamism of self-contradiction is what incessantly produces the
+static appearance by which your sense is fooled."
+
+But if the man ask how self-contradiction _can_ do all this, and how
+its dynamism may be seen to work, Hegel can only reply by showing him
+the space itself and saying: "Lo, _thus_."  In other words, instead of
+the principle of explanation being more intelligible than the thing to
+be explained, it is absolutely unintelligible if taken by itself, and
+must appeal to its pretended product to prove its existence.  Surely,
+such a system of explaining _notum per ignotum_, of {277} making the
+_explicans_ borrow credentials from the _explicand_, and of creating
+paradoxes and impossibilities where none were suspected, is a strange
+candidate for the honor of being a complete rationalizer of the world.
+
+The principle of the contradictoriness of identity and the identity of
+contradictories is the essence of the hegelian system.  But what
+probably washes this principle down most with beginners is the
+combination in which its author works it with another principle which
+is by no means characteristic of his system, and which, for want of a
+better name, might be called the 'principle of totality.'  This
+principle says that you cannot adequately know even a part until you
+know of what whole it forms a part.  As Aristotle writes and Hegel
+loves to quote, an amputated hand is not even a hand.  And as Tennyson
+says,--
+
+  "Little flower--but if I could understand
+  What you are, root and all, and all in all,
+  I should know what God and man is."
+
+Obviously, until we have taken in all the relations, immediate or
+remote, into which the thing actually enters or potentially may enter,
+we do not know all _about_ the thing.
+
+And obviously for such an exhaustive acquaintance with the thing, an
+acquaintance with every other thing, actual and potential, near and
+remote, is needed; so that it is quite fair to say that omniscience
+alone can completely know any one thing as it stands.  Standing in a
+world of relations, that world must be known before the thing is fully
+known.  This doctrine is of course an integral part of empiricism, an
+integral part of common-sense.  Since when could good men not apprehend
+the passing hour {278} in the light of life's larger sweep,--not grow
+dispassionate the more they stretched their view?  Did the 'law of
+sharing' so little legitimate their procedure that a law of identity of
+contradictories, forsooth, must be trumped up to give it scope?  Out
+upon the idea!
+
+Hume's account of causation is a good illustration of the way in which
+empiricism may use the principle of totality.  We call something a
+cause; but we at the same time deny its effect to be in any latent way
+contained in or substantially identical with it.  We thus cannot tell
+what its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened.
+The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thing
+to be so far as it is a cause.  Humism thus says that its causality is
+something adventitious and not necessarily given when its other
+attributes are there.  Generalizing this, empiricism contends that we
+must everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing and
+its relations, and, among these, between those that are essential to
+our knowing it at all and those that may be called adventitious.  The
+thing as actually present in a given world is there with _all_ its
+relations; for it to be known as it _there_ exists, they must be known
+too, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness large
+enough to embrace that world as a unity.  But what constitutes this
+singleness of fact, this unity?  Empiricism says, Nothing but the
+relation-yielding matrix in which the several items of the world find
+themselves embedded,--time, namely, and space, and the mind of the
+knower.  And it says that were some of the items quite different from
+what they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, an
+equally unitary world might be, provided each {279} item were an object
+for consciousness and occupied a determinate point in space and time.
+All the adventitious relations would in such a world be changed, along
+with the intrinsic natures and places of the beings between which they
+obtained; but the 'principle of totality' in knowledge would in no wise
+be affected.
+
+But Hegelism dogmatically denies all this to be possible.  In the first
+place it says there are no intrinsic natures that may change; in the
+second it says there are no adventitious relations.  When the relations
+of what we call a thing are told, no _caput mortuum_ of intrinsicality,
+no 'nature,' is left.  The relations soak up all there is of the thing;
+the 'items' of the world are but _foci_ of relation with other _foci_
+of relation; and all the relations are necessary.  The unity of the
+world has nothing to do with any 'matrix.'  The matrix and the items,
+each with all, make a unity, simply because each in truth is all the
+rest.  The proof lies in the _hegelian_ principle of totality, which
+demands that if any one part be posited alone all the others shall
+forthwith _emanate_ from it and infallibly reproduce the whole.  In the
+_modus operandi_ of the emanation comes in, as I said, that partnership
+of the principle of totality with that of the identity of
+contradictories which so recommends the latter to beginners in Hegel's
+philosophy.  To posit one item alone is to deny the rest; to deny them
+is to refer to them; to refer to them is to begin, at least, to bring
+them on the scene; and to begin is in the fulness of time to end.
+
+
+If we call this a monism, Hegel is quick to cry, Not so!  To say simply
+that the one item is the rest {280} of the universe is as false and
+one-sided as to say that it is simply itself.  It is both and neither;
+and the only condition on which we gain the right to affirm that it is,
+is that we fail not to keep affirming all the while that it is not, as
+well.  Thus the truth refuses to be expressed in any single act of
+judgment or sentence.  The world appears as a monism _and_ a pluralism,
+just as it appeared in our own introductory exposition.
+
+But the trouble that keeps us and Hegel from ever joining hands over
+this apparent formula of brotherhood is that we distinguish, or try to
+distinguish, the respects in which the world is one from those in which
+it is many, while all such stable distinctions are what he most
+abominates.  The reader may decide which procedure helps his reason
+most.  For my own part, the time-honored formula of empiricist
+pluralism, that the world cannot be set down in any single proposition,
+grows less instead of more intelligible when I add, "And yet the
+different propositions that express it are one!"  The unity of the
+propositions is that of the mind that harbors them.  Any one who
+insists that their diversity is in any way itself their unity, can only
+do so because he loves obscurity and mystification for their own pure
+sakes.
+
+
+Where you meet with a contradiction among realities, Herbart used to
+say, it shows you have failed to make a real distinction.  Hegel's
+sovereign method of going to work and saving all possible
+contradictions, lies in pertinaciously refusing to distinguish.  He
+takes what is true of a term _secundum quid_, treats it as true of the
+same term _simpliciter_, and then, of course, applies it to the term
+_secundum aliud_.  A {281} good example of this is found in the first
+triad.  This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due
+to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever _is_ by
+the same act _is not_, and gets undone and swept away; and that thus
+the irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has been
+written has its roots in an ineluctable necessity which lies revealed
+to our logical reason.  This notion of a being which forever stumbles
+over its own feet, and has to change in order to exist at all, is a
+very picturesque symbol of the reality, and is probably one of the
+points that make young readers feel as if a deep core of truth lay in
+the system.
+
+But how is the reasoning done?  Pure being is assumed, without
+determinations, being _secundum quid_.  In this respect it agrees with
+nothing.  Therefore _simpliciter_ it is nothing; wherever we find it,
+it is nothing; crowned with complete determinations then, or _secundum
+aliud_, it is nothing still, and _hebt sich auf_.
+
+It is as if we said, Man without his clothes may be named 'the naked.'
+Therefore man _simpliciter_ is the naked; and finally man with his hat,
+shoes, and overcoat on is the naked still.
+
+Of course we may in this instance or any other repeat that the
+conclusion is strictly true, however comical it seems.  Man within the
+clothes is naked, just as he is without them.  Man would never have
+invented the clothes had he not been naked.  The fact of his being clad
+at all does prove his essential nudity.  And so in general,--the form
+of any judgment, being the addition of a predicate to a subject, shows
+that the subject has been conceived without the predicate, and thus by
+a strained metaphor may {282} be called the predicate's negation.  Well
+and good! let the expression pass.  But we must notice this.  The
+judgment has now created a new subject, the naked-clad, and all
+propositions regarding this must be judged on their own merits; for
+those true of the old subject, 'the naked,' are no longer true of this
+one.  For instance, we cannot say because the naked pure and simple
+must not enter the drawing-room or is in danger of taking cold, that
+the naked with his clothes on will also take cold or must stay in his
+bedroom.  Hold to it eternally that the clad man _is_ still naked if it
+amuse you,--'tis designated in the bond; but the so-called
+contradiction is a sterile boon.  Like Shylock's pound of flesh, it
+leads to no consequences.  It does not entitle you to one drop of his
+Christian blood either in the way of catarrh, social exclusion, or what
+further results pure nakedness may involve.
+
+In a version of the first step given by our foremost American
+Hegelian,[4] we find this playing with the necessary form of judgment.
+Pure being, he says, has no determinations.  But the having none is
+itself a determination.  Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self,
+and so on.  Why not take heed to the _meaning_ of what is said?  When
+we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely
+the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make.
+The showman who advertised his elephant as 'larger than any elephant in
+the world except himself' must have been in an hegelian country where
+he was afraid that if he were less explicit the audience would
+dialectically proceed to say: {283} "This elephant, larger than any in
+the world, involves a contradiction; for he himself is in the world,
+and so stands endowed with the virtue of being both larger and smaller
+than himself,--a perfect hegelian elephant, whose immanent
+self-contradictoriness can only be removed in a higher synthesis.  Show
+us the higher synthesis!  We don't care to see such a mere abstract
+creature as your elephant."  It may be (and it was indeed suggested in
+antiquity) that all things are of their own size by being both larger
+and smaller than themselves.  But in the case of this elephant the
+scrupulous showman nipped such philosophizing and all its inconvenient
+consequences in the bud, by explicitly intimating that larger than any
+_other_ elephant was all he meant.
+
+
+Hegel's quibble with this word _other_ exemplifies the same fallacy.
+All 'others,' as such, are according to him identical.  That is,
+'otherness,' which can only be predicated of a given thing _A_,
+_secundum quid_ (as other than _B_, etc.), is predicated _simpliciter_,
+and made to identify the _A_ in question with _B_, which is other only
+_secundum aliud_,--namely other than _A_.
+
+Another maxim that Hegelism is never tired of repeating is that "to
+know a limit is already to be beyond it."  "Stone walls do not a prison
+make, nor iron bars a cage."  The inmate of the penitentiary shows by
+his grumbling that he is still in the stage of abstraction and of
+separative thought.  The more keenly he thinks of the fun he might be
+having outside, the more deeply he ought to feel that the walls
+identify him with it.  They set him beyond them _secundum quid_, in
+imagination, in longing, in despair; _argal_ they take him there
+_simpliciter_ and {284} in every way,--in flesh, in power, in deed.
+Foolish convict, to ignore his blessings!
+
+
+Another mode of stating his principle is this: "To know the finite as
+such, is also to know the infinite."  Expressed in this abstract shape,
+the formula is as insignificant as it is unobjectionable.  We can cap
+every word with a negative particle, and the word _finished_
+immediately suggests the word _unfinished_, and we know the two words
+together.
+
+But it is an entirely different thing to take the knowledge of a
+concrete case of ending, and to say that it virtually makes us
+acquainted with other concrete facts _in infinitum_.  For, in the first
+place, the end may be an absolute one.  The _matter_ of the universe,
+for instance, is according to all appearances in finite amount; and if
+we knew that we had counted the last bit of it, infinite knowledge in
+that respect, so far from being given, would be impossible.  With
+regard to _space_, it is true that in drawing a bound we are aware of
+more.  But to treat this little fringe as the equal of infinite space
+is ridiculous.  It resembles infinite space _secundum quid_, or in but
+one respect,--its spatial quality.  We believe it homogeneous with
+whatever spaces may remain; but it would be fatuous to say, because one
+dollar in my pocket is homogeneous with all the dollars in the country,
+that to have it is to have them.  The further points of space are as
+numerically distinct from the fringe as the dollars from the dollar,
+and not until we have actually intuited them can we be said to 'know'
+them _simpliciter_.  The hegelian reply is that the _quality_ of space
+constitutes its only _worth_; and that there is nothing true, good, or
+beautiful to be known {285} in the spaces beyond which is not already
+known in the fringe.  This introduction of a eulogistic term into a
+mathematical question is original.  The 'true' and the 'false' infinite
+are about as appropriate distinctions in a discussion of cognition as
+the good and the naughty rain would be in a treatise on meteorology.
+But when we grant that all the worth of the knowledge of distant spaces
+is due to the knowledge of what they may carry in them, it then appears
+more than ever absurd to say that the knowledge of the fringe is an
+equivalent for the infinitude of the distant knowledge.  The distant
+spaces even _simpliciter_ are not yet yielded to our thinking; and if
+they were yielded _simpliciter_, would not be yielded _secundum aliud_,
+or in respect to their material filling out.
+
+Shylock's bond was an omnipotent instrument compared with this
+knowledge of the finite, which remains the ignorance it always was,
+till the infinite by its own act has piece by piece placed itself in
+our hands.
+
+Here Hegelism cries out: "By the identity of the knowledges of infinite
+and finite I never meant that one could be a _substitute_ for the
+other; nor does true philosophy ever mean by identity capacity for
+substitution."  This sounds suspiciously like the good and the naughty
+infinite, or rather like the mysteries of the Trinity and the
+Eucharist.  To the unsentimental mind there are but two sorts of
+identity,--total identity and partial identity.  Where the identity is
+total, the things can be substituted wholly for one another.  Where
+substitution is impossible, it must be that the identity is incomplete.
+It is the duty of the student then to ascertain the exact _quid,
+secundum_ which it obtains, as we have tried to do above.  Even the
+Catholic will tell you that when he believes in the {286} identity of
+the wafer with Christ's body, he does not mean in all respects,--so
+that he might use it to exhibit muscular fibre, or a cook make it smell
+like baked meat in the oven.  He means that in the one sole respect of
+nourishing his being in a certain way, it is identical with and can be
+substituted for the very body of his Redeemer.
+
+
+'The knowledge of opposites is one,' is one of the hegelian first
+principles, of which the preceding are perhaps only derivatives.  Here
+again Hegelism takes 'knowledge' _simpliciter_, and substituting it for
+knowledge in a particular respect, avails itself of the confusion to
+cover other respects never originally implied.  When the knowledge of a
+thing is given us, we no doubt think that the thing may or must have an
+opposite.  This postulate of something opposite we may call a
+'knowledge of the opposite' if we like; but it is a knowledge of it in
+only that one single respect, that it is something opposite.  No number
+of opposites to a quality we have never directly experienced could ever
+lead us positively to infer what that quality is.  There is a jolt
+between the negation of them and the actual positing of it in its
+proper shape, that twenty logics of Hegel harnessed abreast cannot
+drive us smoothly over.
+
+The use of the maxim 'All determination is negation' is the fattest and
+most full-blown application of the method of refusing to distinguish.
+Taken in its vague confusion, it probably does more than anything else
+to produce the sort of flicker and dazzle which are the first mental
+conditions for the reception of Hegel's system.  The word 'negation'
+taken _simpliciter_ is treated as if it covered an indefinite number of
+{287} _secundums_, culminating in the very peculiar one of
+self-negation.  Whence finally the conclusion is drawn that assertions
+are universally self-contradictory.  As this is an important matter, it
+seems worth while to treat it a little minutely.
+
+When I measure out a pint, say of milk, and so determine it, what do I
+do?  I virtually make two assertions regarding it,--it is this pint; it
+is not those other gallons.  One of these is an affirmation, the other
+a negation.  Both have a common subject; but the predicates being
+mutually exclusive, the two assertions lie beside each other in endless
+peace.
+
+I may with propriety be said to make assertions more remote
+still,--assertions of which those other gallons are the subject.  As it
+is not they, so are they not the pint which it is.  The determination
+"this is the pint" carries with it the negation,--"those are not the
+pints."  Here we have the same predicate; but the subjects are
+exclusive of each other, so there is again endless peace.  In both
+couples of propositions negation and affirmation are _secundum aliud_:
+this is _a_; this is n't not-_a_.  This kind of negation involved in
+determination cannot possibly be what Hegel wants for his purposes.
+The table is not the chair, the fireplace is not the cupboard,--these
+are literal expressions of the law of identity and contradiction, those
+principles of the abstracting and separating understanding for which
+Hegel has so sovereign a contempt, and which his logic is meant to
+supersede.
+
+And accordingly Hegelians pursue the subject further, saying there is
+in every determination an element of real conflict.  Do you not in
+determining the milk to be this pint exclude it forever from the chance
+of being those gallons, frustrate it from {288} expansion?  And so do
+you not equally exclude them from the being which it now maintains as
+its own?
+
+Assuredly if you had been hearing of a land flowing with milk and
+honey, and had gone there with unlimited expectations of the rivers the
+milk would fill; and if you found there was but this single pint in the
+whole country,--the determination of the pint would exclude another
+determination which your mind had previously made of the milk.  There
+would be a real conflict resulting in the victory of one side.  The
+rivers would be negated by the single pint being affirmed; and as
+rivers and pint are affirmed of the same milk (first as supposed and
+then as found), the contradiction would be complete.
+
+But it is a contradiction that can never by any chance occur in real
+nature or being.  It can only occur between a false representation of a
+being and the true idea of the being when actually cognized.  The first
+got into a place where it had no rights and had to be ousted.  But in
+_rerum naturâ_ things do not get into one another's logical places.
+The gallons first spoken of never say, "We are the pint;" the pint
+never says, "I am the gallons."  It never tries to expand; and so there
+is no chance for anything to exclude or negate it.  It thus remains
+affirmed absolutely.
+
+Can it be believed in the teeth of these elementary truths that the
+principle _determinatio negatio_ is held throughout Hegel to imply an
+active contradiction, conflict, and exclusion?  Do the horse-cars
+jingling outside negate me writing in this room?  Do I, reader, negate
+you?  Of course, if I say, "Reader, we are two, and therefore I am
+two," I negate you, for I am actually thrusting a part into the seat of
+the whole.  {289} The orthodox logic expresses the fallacy by saying
+the we is taken by me distributively instead of collectively; but as
+long as I do not make this blunder, and am content with my part, we all
+are safe.  In _rerum naturâ_, parts remain parts.  Can you imagine one
+position in space trying to get into the place of another position and
+having to be 'contradicted' by that other?  Can you imagine your
+thought of an object trying to dispossess the real object from its
+being, and so being negated by it?  The great, the sacred law of
+partaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegel
+cannot possibly understand.  All or nothing is his one idea.  For him
+each point of space, of time, each feeling in the ego, each quality of
+being, is clamoring, "I am the all,--there is nought else but me."
+This clamor is its essence, which has to be negated in another act
+which gives it its true determination.  What there is of affirmative in
+this determination is thus the mere residuum left from the negation by
+others of the negation it originally applied to them.
+
+But why talk of residuum?  The Kilkenny cats of fable could leave a
+residuum in the shape of their undevoured tails.  But the Kilkenny cats
+of existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel are all-devouring, and
+leave no residuum.  Such is the unexampled fury of their onslaught that
+they get clean out of themselves and into each other, nay more, pass
+right through each other, and then "return into themselves" ready for
+another round, as insatiate, but as inconclusive, as the one that went
+before.
+
+If I characterized Hegel's own mood as _hubris_, the insolence of
+excess, what shall I say of the mood he ascribes to being?  Man makes
+the gods in his {290} image; and Hegel, in daring to insult the
+spotless _sôphrosune_ of space and time, the bound-respecters, in
+branding as strife that law of sharing under whose sacred keeping, like
+a strain of music, like an odor of incense (as Emerson says), the dance
+of the atoms goes forward still, seems to me but to manifest his own
+deformity.
+
+
+This leads me to animadvert on an erroneous inference which hegelian
+idealism makes from the form of the negative judgment.  Every negation,
+it says, must be an intellectual act.  Even the most _naïf_ realism
+will hardly pretend that the non-table as such exists _in se_ after the
+same fashion as the table does.  But table and non-table, since they
+are given to our thought together, must be consubstantial.  Try to make
+the position or affirmation of the table as simple as you can, it is
+also the negation of the non-table; and thus positive being itself
+seems after all but a function of intelligence, like negation.
+Idealism is proved, realism is unthinkable.  Now I have not myself the
+least objection to idealism,--an hypothesis which voluminous
+considerations make plausible, and whose difficulties may be cleared
+away any day by new discriminations or discoveries.  But I object to
+proving by these patent ready-made _à priori_ methods that which can
+only be the fruit of a wide and patient induction.  For the truth is
+that our affirmations and negations do not stand on the same footing at
+all, and are anything but consubstantial.  An affirmation says
+something about an objective existence.  A negation says something
+_about an affirmation_,--namely, that it is false.  There are no
+negative predicates or falsities in nature.  Being makes no false
+hypotheses that have {291} to be contradicted.  The only denials she
+can be in any way construed to perform are denials of our errors.  This
+shows plainly enough that denial must be of something mental, since the
+thing denied is always a fiction.  "The table is not the chair"
+supposes the speaker to have been playing with the false notion that it
+may have been the chair.  But affirmation may perfectly well be of
+something having no such necessary and constitutive relation to
+thought.  Whether it really is of such a thing is for harder
+considerations to decide.
+
+
+If idealism be true, the great question that presents itself is whether
+its truth involve the necessity of an infinite, unitary, and omniscient
+consciousness, or whether a republic of semi-detached consciousnesses
+will do,--consciousnesses united by a certain common fund of
+representations, but each possessing a private store which the others
+do not share.  Either hypothesis is to me conceivable.  But whether the
+egos be one or many, the _nextness_ of representations to one another
+within them is the principle of unification of the universe.  To be
+thus consciously next to some other representation is the condition to
+which each representation must submit, under penalty of being excluded
+from this universe, and like Lord Dundreary's bird 'flocking all
+alone,' and forming a separate universe by itself.  But this is only a
+condition of which the representations _partake_; it leaves all their
+other determinations undecided.  To say, because representation _b_
+cannot be in the same universe with _a_ without being _a's neighbor_;
+that therefore _a_ possesses, involves, or necessitates _b_, hide and
+hair, flesh and fell, all appurtenances and belongings,--is {292} only
+the silly hegelian all-or-nothing insatiateness once more.
+
+Hegel's own logic, with all the senseless hocus-pocus of its triads,
+utterly fails to prove his position.  The only evident compulsion which
+representations exert upon one another is compulsion to submit to the
+conditions of entrance into the same universe with them--the conditions
+of continuity, of selfhood, space, and time--under penalty of being
+excluded.  But what this universe shall be is a matter of fact which we
+cannot decide till we know what representations _have_ submitted to
+these its sole conditions.  The conditions themselves impose no further
+requirements.  In short, the notion that real contingency and ambiguity
+may be features of the real world is a perfectly unimpeachable
+hypothesis.  Only in such a world can moral judgments have a claim to
+be.  For the bad is that which takes the place of something else which
+possibly might have been where it now is, and the better is that which
+absolutely might be where it absolutely is not.  In the universe of
+Hegel--the absolute block whose parts have no loose play, the pure
+plethora of necessary being with the oxygen of possibility all
+suffocated out of its lungs--there can be neither good nor bad, but one
+dead level of mere fate.
+
+But I have tired the reader out.  The worst of criticising Hegel is
+that the very arguments we use against him give forth strange and
+hollow sounds that make them seem almost as fantastic as the errors to
+which they are addressed.  The sense of a universal mirage, of a
+ghostly unreality, steals over us, which is the very moonlit atmosphere
+of Hegelism itself.  What wonder then if, instead of {293} converting,
+our words do but rejoice and delight, those already baptized in the
+faith of confusion?  To their charmed senses we all seem children of
+Hegel together, only some of us have not the wit to know our own
+father.  Just as Romanists are sure to inform us that our reasons
+against Papal Christianity unconsciously breathe the purest spirit of
+Catholicism, so Hegelism benignantly smiles at our exertions, and
+murmurs, "If the red slayer think he slays;" "When me they fly, I am
+the wings," etc.
+
+To forefend this unwelcome adoption, let me recapitulate in a few
+propositions the reasons why I am not an hegelian.
+
+1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real
+contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the
+other false.  When this happens, one must go forever; nor is there any
+'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive.
+
+2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere
+negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought.
+
+3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges, because they
+are without chasm.
+
+4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only
+partially.
+
+5. This partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a
+common world.
+
+6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts.
+
+7. But the same quality appears in many times and spaces.  Generic
+sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by
+which the jolts are reduced.
+
+8. What between different qualities jolts remain.  {294} Each, as far
+as the other is concerned, is an absolutely separate and contingent
+being.
+
+9. The moral judgment may lead us to postulate as irreducible the
+contingencies of the world.
+
+10. Elements mutually contingent are not in conflict so long as they
+partake of the continua of time, space, etc.,--partaking being the
+exact opposite of strife.  They conflict only when, as mutually
+exclusive possibilities, they strive to possess themselves of the same
+parts of time, space, and ego.
+
+11. That there are such real conflicts, irreducible to any
+intelligence, and giving rise to an excess of possibility over
+actuality, is an hypothesis, but a credible one.  No philosophy should
+pretend to be anything more.
+
+
+NOTE.--Since the preceding article was written, some observations on
+the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted to
+make by reading the pamphlet called The Anaesthetic Revelation and the
+Gist of Philosophy, by Benjamin Paul Blood, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874,
+have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and
+the weakness of Hegel's philosophy.  I strongly urge others to repeat
+the experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough.  The
+effects will of course vary with the individual.  Just as they vary in
+the same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in the
+former case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain.  With
+me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the
+experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense
+metaphysical illumination.  Truth lies open to the view in depth
+beneath depth of almost blinding evidence.  The mind sees all the
+logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity
+to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety
+returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly
+at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a
+cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled,
+or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand.
+
+{295}
+
+The immense emotional sense of _reconciliation_ which characterizes the
+'maudlin' stage of alcoholic drunkenness,--a stage which seems silly to
+lookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes a
+chief part of the temptation to the vice,--is well known.  The centre
+and periphery of things seem to come together.  The ego and its
+objects, the _meum_ and the _tuum_, are one.  Now this, only a
+thousandfold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first
+result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the
+conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepest
+convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong.  Whatever idea or
+representation occurred to the mind was seized by the same logical
+forceps, and served to illustrate the same truth; and that truth was
+that every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a higher
+unity in which it is based; that all contradictions, so-called, are but
+differences; that all differences are of degree; that all degrees are
+of a common kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being;
+and that we are literally in the midst of _an infinite_, to perceive
+the existence of which is the utmost we can attain.  Without the _same_
+as a basis, how could strife occur?  Strife presupposes something to be
+striven about; and in this common topic, the same for both parties, the
+differences merge.  From the hardest contradiction to the tenderest
+diversity of verbiage differences evaporate; _yes_ and _no_ agree at
+least in being assertions; a denial of a statement is but another mode
+of stating the same, contradiction can only occur of the same
+thing,--all opinions are thus synonyms, are synonymous, are the same.
+But the same phrase by difference of emphasis is two; and here again
+difference and no-difference merge in one.
+
+It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the
+identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this
+experience.  I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written
+during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless
+drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire
+of infinite rationality.  God and devil, good and evil, life and death,
+I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity
+and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and
+swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and
+small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty
+other {296} contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way.
+The mind saw how each term _belonged_ to its contrast through a
+knife-edge moment of transition which _it_ effected, and which,
+perennial and eternal, was the _nunc stans_ of life.  The thought of
+mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgment of
+opposition, as 'nothing--but,' 'no more--than,' 'only--if,' etc.,
+produced a perfect delirium of theoretic rapture.  And at last, when
+definite ideas to work on came slowly, the mind went through the mere
+_form_ of recognizing sameness in identity by contrasting the same word
+with itself, differently emphasized, or shorn of its initial letter.
+Let me transcribe a few sentences:
+
+  What's mistake but a kind of take?
+  What's nausea but a kind of -ausea?
+  Sober, drunk, -_unk_, astonishment.
+  Everything can become the subject of criticism--how
+      criticise without something _to_ criticise?
+  Agreement--disagreement!!
+  Emotion--motion!!!
+  Die away from, _from_, die away (without the _from_).
+  Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!
+  Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!
+  It escapes, it escapes!
+  But----
+  What escapes, WHAT escapes?
+  Emphasis, EMphasis; there must be some emphasis in order
+      for there to be a phasis.
+  No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is _other_.
+  _In_coherent, coherent--same.
+  And it fades!  And it's infinite!  AND it's infinite!
+  If it was n't _going_, why should you hold on to it?
+  Don't you see the difference, don't you see the identity?
+  Constantly opposites united!
+  The same me telling you to write and not to write!
+  Extreme--extreme, extreme!  Within the _ex_tensity that
+      'extreme' contains is contained the '_extreme_' of intensity.
+  Something, and _other_ than that thing!
+  Intoxication, and _otherness_ than intoxication.
+  Every attempt at betterment,--every attempt at otherment,--is a----.
+  It fades forever and forever as we move.
+
+{297}
+
+  There _is_ a reconciliation!
+  Reconciliation--_e_conciliation!
+  By God, how that hurts!  By God, how it _does n't_ hurt!
+      Reconciliation of two extremes.
+  By George, nothing but _o_thing!
+  That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure _on_sense!
+  Thought deeper than speech----!
+  Medical school; divinity school, _school_!  SCHOOL!  Oh my
+      God, oh God, oh God!
+
+The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this:--
+
+There are no differences but differences of degree between different
+degrees of difference and no difference.
+
+This phrase has the true Hegelian ring, being in fact a regular _sich
+als sich auf sich selbst beziehende Negativität_.  And true Hegelians
+will _überhaupt_ be able to read between the lines and feel, at any
+rate, what _possible_ ecstasies of cognitive emotion might have bathed
+these tattered fragments of thought when they were alive.  But for the
+assurance of a certain amount of respect from them, I should hardly
+have ventured to print what must be such caviare to the general.
+
+
+But now comes the reverse of the medal.  What is the principle of unity
+in all this monotonous rain of instances?  Although I did not see it at
+first, I soon found that it was in each case nothing but the abstract
+_genus_ of which the conflicting terms were opposite species.  In other
+words, although the flood of ontologic _emotion_ was Hegelian through
+and through, the _ground_ for it was nothing but the world-old
+principle that things are the same only so far and no farther than they
+_are_ the same, or partake of a common nature,--the principle that
+Hegel most tramples under foot.  At the same time the rapture of
+beholding a process that was infinite, changed (as the nature of the
+infinitude was realized by the mind) into the sense of a dreadful and
+ineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort is
+incommensurable and in the light of which whatever happens is
+indifferent.  This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture to
+horror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced.  I
+got it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough to
+produce incipient nausea; and I cannot but regard it as the normal and
+inevitable outcome of the {298} intoxication, if sufficiently
+prolonged.  A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and
+indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis,
+but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one,--this is the
+upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright.
+
+Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader will
+have noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing the
+clue.  Something 'fades,' 'escapes;' and the feeling of insight is
+changed into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion,
+astonishment.  I know no more singular sensation than this intense
+bewilderment, with nothing particular left to be bewildered at save the
+bewilderment itself.  It seems, indeed, _a causa sui_, or 'spirit
+become its own object.'
+
+My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the
+law of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived,
+engender a very powerful emotion, that Hegel was so unusually
+susceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratification
+became his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to the
+means he employed; that _indifferentism_ is the true outcome of every
+view of the world which makes infinity and continuity to be its
+essence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the
+mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the
+identification of contradictories, so far from being the
+self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a
+self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and
+terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood
+of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.
+
+
+
+[1] Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882.
+
+[2] The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and the
+fact that it is all finished and given and there, can be got over in
+more than one way.  The simplest way is by idealism, which
+distinguishes between space as actual and space as potential.  For
+idealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but all
+actually represented spaces are finite; it is only possibly
+representable spaces that are infinite.
+
+[3] Not only for simplicity's sake do we select space as the paragon of
+a rationalizing continuum.  Space determines the relations of the items
+that enter it in a far more intricate way than does time; in a far more
+fixed way than does the ego.  By this last clause I mean that if things
+are in space at all, they must conform to geometry; while the being in
+an ego at all need not make them conform to logic or any other manner
+of rationality.  Under the sheltering wings of a self the matter of
+unreason can lodge itself as safely as any other kind of content.  One
+cannot but respect the devoutness of the ego-worship of some of our
+English-writing Hegelians.  But at the same time one cannot help
+fearing lest the monotonous contemplation of so barren a principle as
+that of the pure formal self (which, be it never so essential a
+condition of the existence of a world of organized experience at all,
+must notwithstanding take its own _character_ from, not give the
+character to, the separate empirical data over which its mantle is
+cast), one cannot but fear, I say, lest the religion of the
+transcendental ego should, like all religions of the 'one thing
+needful,' end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.
+
+[4] Journal of Speculative Philosophy, viii. 37.
+
+
+
+
+{299}
+
+WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED.[1]
+
+"The great field for new discoveries," said a scientific friend to me
+the other day, "is always the unclassified residuum."  Round about the
+accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort
+of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and
+irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to
+ignore than to attend to.  The ideal of every science is that of a
+closed and completed system of truth.  The charm of most sciences to
+their more passive disciples consists in their appearing, in fact, to
+wear just this ideal form.  Each one of our various _ologies_ seems to
+offer a definite head of classification for every possible phenomenon
+of the sort which it professes to cover; and so far from free is most
+men's fancy, that, when a consistent and organized scheme of this sort
+has once been comprehended and assimilated, a different scheme is
+unimaginable.  No alternative, whether to whole or parts, can any
+longer be conceived as possible.  Phenomena unclassifiable within the
+system are therefore paradoxical {300} absurdities, and must be held
+untrue.  When, moreover, as so often happens, the reports of them are
+vague and indirect; when they come as mere marvels and oddities rather
+than as things of serious moment,--one neglects or denies them with the
+best of scientific consciences.  Only the born geniuses let themselves
+be worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get no
+peace till they are brought within the fold.  Your Galileos, Galvanis,
+Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins are always getting confounded and
+troubled by insignificant things.  Any one will renovate his science
+who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena.  And when the
+science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of
+the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
+
+No part of the unclassified residuum has usually been treated with a
+more contemptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomena
+generally called _mystical_.  Physiology will have nothing to do with
+them.  Orthodox psychology turns its back upon them.  Medicine sweeps
+them out; or, at most, when in an anecdotal vein, records a few of them
+as 'effects of the imagination,'--a phrase of mere dismissal, whose
+meaning, in this connection, it is impossible to make precise.  All the
+while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the
+surface of history.  No matter where you open its pages, you find
+things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal
+possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and
+productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiar
+individuals over persons and things in their neighborhood.  We suppose
+that 'mediumship' {301} originated in Rochester, N. Y., and animal
+magnetism with Mesmer; but once look behind the pages of official
+history, in personal memoirs, legal documents, and popular narratives
+and books of anecdote, and you will find that there never was a time
+when these things were not reported just as abundantly as now.  We
+college-bred gentry, who follow the stream of cosmopolitan culture
+exclusively, not infrequently stumble upon some old-established
+journal, or some voluminous native author, whose names are never heard
+of in _our_ circle, but who number their readers by the
+quarter-million.  It always gives us a little shock to find this mass
+of human beings not only living and ignoring us and all our gods, but
+actually reading and writing and cogitating without ever a thought of
+our canons and authorities.  Well, a public no less large keeps and
+transmits from generation to generation the traditions and practices of
+the occult; but academic science cares as little for its beliefs and
+opinions as you, gentle reader, care for those of the readers of the
+Waverley and the Fireside Companion.  To no one type of mind is it
+given to discern the totality of truth.  Something escapes the best of
+us,--not accidentally, but systematically, and because we have a twist.
+The scientific-academic mind and the feminine-mystical mind shy from
+each other's facts, just as they fly from each other's temper and
+spirit.  Facts are there only for those who have a mental affinity with
+them.  When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the
+academic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to
+interpret and discuss them,--for surely to pass from mystical to
+scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity; but on
+the other hand if there is {302} anything which human history
+demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary
+academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present
+themselves as wild facts, with no stall or pigeon-hole, or as facts
+which threaten to break up the accepted system.  In psychology,
+physiology, and medicine, wherever a debate between the mystics and the
+scientifics has been once for all decided, it is the mystics who have
+usually proved to be right about the _facts_, while the scientifics had
+the better of it in respect to the theories.  The most recent and
+flagrant example of this is 'animal magnetism,' whose facts were
+stoutly dismissed as a pack of lies by academic medical science the
+world over, until the non-mystical theory of 'hypnotic suggestion' was
+found for them,--when they were admitted to be so excessively and
+dangerously common that special penal laws, forsooth, must be passed to
+keep all persons unequipped with medical diplomas from taking part in
+their production.  Just so stigmatizations, invulnerabilities,
+instantaneous cures, inspired discourses, and demoniacal possessions,
+the records of which were shelved in our libraries but yesterday in the
+alcove headed 'superstitions,' now, under the brand-new title of 'cases
+of hystero-epilepsy,' are republished, reobserved, and reported with an
+even too credulous avidity.
+
+Repugnant as the mystical style of philosophizing maybe (especially
+when self-complacent), there is no sort of doubt that it goes with a
+gift for meeting with certain kinds of phenomenal experience.  The
+writer of these pages has been forced in the past few years to this
+admission; and he now believes that he who will pay attention to facts
+of the sort dear to mystics, {303} while reflecting upon them in
+academic-scientific ways, will be in the best possible position to help
+philosophy.  It is a circumstance of good augury that certain
+scientifically trained minds in all countries seem drifting to the same
+conclusion.  The Society for Psychical Research has been one means of
+bringing science and the occult together in England and America; and
+believing that this Society fulfils a function which, though limited,
+is destined to be not unimportant in the organization of human
+knowledge, I am glad to give a brief account of it to the uninstructed
+reader.
+
+According to the newspaper and drawing-room myth, soft-headedness and
+idiotic credulity are the bond of sympathy in this Society, and general
+wonder-sickness its dynamic principle.  A glance at the membership
+fails, however, to corroborate this view.  The president is Prof. Henry
+Sidgwick,[2] known by his other deeds as the most incorrigibly and
+exasperatingly critical and sceptical mind in England.  The hard-headed
+Arthur Balfour is one vice-president, and the hard-headed Prof. J. P.
+Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is another.  Such
+men as Professor Lodge, the eminent English physicist, and Professor
+Richet, the eminent French physiologist, are among the most active
+contributors to the Society's Proceedings; and through the catalogue of
+membership are sprinkled names honored throughout the world for their
+scientific capacity.  In fact, were I asked to point to a scientific
+journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources
+of error might be seen in their full bloom, {304} I think I should have
+to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
+The common run of papers, say on physiological subjects, which one
+finds in other professional organs, are apt to show a far lower level
+of critical consciousness.  Indeed, the rigorous canons of evidence
+applied a few years ago to testimony in the case of certain 'mediums'
+led to the secession from the Society of a number of spiritualists.
+Messrs. Stainton Moses and A. R. Wallace, among others, thought that no
+experiences based on mere eyesight could ever have a chance to be
+admitted as true, if such an impossibly exacting standard of proof were
+insisted on in every case.
+
+The S. P. R., as I shall call it for convenience, was founded in 1882
+by a number of gentlemen, foremost among whom seem to have been
+Professors Sidgwick, W. F. Barrett, and Balfour Stewart, and Messrs. R.
+H. Hutton, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers.
+Their purpose was twofold,--first, to carry on systematic
+experimentation with hypnotic subjects, mediums, clairvoyants, and
+others; and, secondly, to collect evidence concerning apparitions,
+haunted houses, and similar phenomena which are incidentally reported,
+but which, from their fugitive character, admit of no deliberate
+control.  Professor Sidgwick, in his introductory address, insisted
+that the divided state of public opinion on all these matters was a
+scandal to science,--absolute disdain on _à priori_ grounds
+characterizing what may be called professional opinion, while
+indiscriminate credulity was too often found among those who pretended
+to have a first-hand acquaintance with the facts.
+
+As a sort of weather bureau for accumulating {305} reports of such
+meteoric phenomena as apparitions, the S. P. R. has done an immense
+amount of work.  As an experimenting body, it cannot be said to have
+completely fulfilled the hopes of its founders.  The reasons for this
+lie in two circumstances: first, the clairvoyant and other subjects who
+will allow themselves to be experimented upon are few and far between;
+and, secondly, work with them takes an immense amount of time, and has
+had to be carried on at odd intervals by members engaged in other
+pursuits.  The Society has not yet been rich enough to control the
+undivided services of skilled experimenters in this difficult field.
+The loss of the lamented Edmund Gurney, who more than any one else had
+leisure to devote, has been so far irreparable.  But were there no
+experimental work at all, and were the S. P. R. nothing but a
+weather-bureau for catching sporadic apparitions, etc., in their
+freshness, I am disposed to think its function indispensable in the
+scientific organism.  If any one of my readers, spurred by the thought
+that so much smoke must needs betoken fire, has ever looked into the
+existing literature of the supernatural for proof, he will know what I
+mean.  This literature is enormous, but it is practically worthless for
+evidential purposes.  Facts enough are cited, indeed; but the records
+of them are so fallible and imperfect that at most they lead to the
+opinion that it may be well to keep a window open upon that quarter in
+one's mind.
+
+In the S. P. R.'s Proceedings, on the contrary, a different law
+prevails.  Quality, and not mere quantity, is what has been mainly kept
+in mind.  The witnesses, where possible, have in every reported case
+been cross-examined personally, the collateral facts {306} have been
+looked up, and the story appears with its precise coefficient of
+evidential worth stamped on it, so that all may know just what its
+weight as proof may be.  Outside of these Proceedings, I know of no
+systematic attempt to _weigh_ the evidence for the supernatural.  This
+makes the value of the volumes already published unique; and I firmly
+believe that as the years go on and the ground covered grows still
+wider, the Proceedings will more and more tend to supersede all other
+sources of information concerning phenomena traditionally deemed
+occult.  Collections of this sort are usually best appreciated by the
+rising generation.  The young anthropologists and psychologists who
+will soon have full occupancy of the stage will feel how great a
+scientific scandal it has been to leave a great mass of human
+experience to take its chances between vague tradition and credulity on
+the one hand and dogmatic denial at long range on the other, with no
+body of persons extant who are willing and competent to study the
+matter with both patience and rigor.  If the Society lives long enough
+for the public to become familiar with its presence, so that any
+apparition, or house or person infested with unaccountable noises or
+disturbances of material objects, will as a matter of course be
+reported to its officers, we shall doubtless end by having a mass of
+facts concrete enough to theorize upon.  Its sustainers, therefore,
+should accustom themselves to the idea that its first duty is simply to
+exist from year to year and perform this recording function well,
+though no conclusive results of any sort emerge at first.  All our
+learned societies have begun in some such modest way.
+
+But one cannot by mere outward organization make much progress in
+matters scientific.  Societies can {307} back men of genius, but can
+never take their place.  The contrast between the parent Society and
+the American Branch illustrates this.  In England, a little group of
+men with enthusiasm and genius for the work supplied the nucleus; in
+this country, Mr. Hodgson had to be imported from Europe before any
+tangible progress was made.  What perhaps more than anything else has
+held the Society together in England is Professor Sidgwick's
+extraordinary gift of inspiring confidence in diverse sorts of people.
+Such tenacity of interest in the result and such absolute impartiality
+in discussing the evidence are not once in a century found in an
+individual.  His obstinate belief that there is something yet to be
+brought to light communicates patience to the discouraged; his
+constitutional inability to draw any precipitate conclusion reassures
+those who are afraid of being dupes.  Mrs. Sidgwick--a sister, by the
+way, of the great Arthur Balfour--is a worthy ally of her husband in
+this matter, showing a similarly rare power of holding her judgment in
+suspense, and a keenness of observation and capacity for experimenting
+with human subjects which are rare in either sex.
+
+The _worker_ of the Society, as originally constituted, was Edmund
+Gurney.  Gurney was a man of the rarest sympathies and gifts.
+Although, like Carlyle, he used to groan under the burden of his
+labors, he yet exhibited a colossal power of dispatching business and
+getting through drudgery of the most repulsive kind.  His two thick
+volumes on 'Phantasms of the Living,' collected and published in three
+years, are a proof of this.  Besides this, he had exquisite artistic
+instincts, and his massive volume on 'The Power of Sound' was, when it
+appeared, the most important {308} work on aesthetics in the English
+language.  He had also the tenderest heart and a mind of rare
+metaphysical power, as his volumes of essays, 'Tertium Quid,' will
+prove to any reader.  Mr. Frederic Myers, already well known as one of
+the most brilliant of English essayists, is the _ingenium praefervidum_
+of the S. P. R.  Of the value of Mr. Myers's theoretic writings I will
+say a word later.  Dr. Hodgson, the American secretary, is
+distinguished by a balance of mind almost as rare in its way as
+Sidgwick's.  He is persuaded of the reality of many of the phenomena
+called spiritualistic, but he also has uncommon keenness in detecting
+error; and it is impossible to say in advance whether it will give him
+more satisfaction to confirm or to smash a given case offered to his
+examination.
+
+
+It is now time to cast a brief look upon the actual contents of these
+Proceedings.  The first two years were largely taken up with
+experiments in thought-transference.  The earliest lot of these were
+made with the daughters of a clergyman named Creery, and convinced
+Messrs. Balfour Stewart, Barrett, Myers, and Gurney that the girls had
+an inexplicable power of guessing names and objects thought of by other
+persons.  Two years later, Mrs. Sidgwick and Mr. Gurney, recommencing
+experiments with the same girls, detected them signalling to each
+other.  It is true that for the most part the conditions of the earlier
+series had excluded signalling, and it is also possible that the
+cheating may have grafted itself on what was originally a genuine
+phenomenon.  Yet Gurney was wise in abandoning the entire series to the
+scepticism of the reader.  Many critics of the S. P. R. seem out of all
+{309} its labors to have heard only of this case.  But there are
+experiments recorded with upwards of thirty other subjects.  Three were
+experimented upon at great length during the first two years: one was
+Mr. G. A. Smith; the other two were young ladies in Liverpool in the
+employment of Mr. Malcolm Guthrie.
+
+It is the opinion of all who took part in these latter experiments that
+sources of conscious and unconscious deception were sufficiently
+excluded, and that the large percentage of correct reproductions by the
+subjects of words, diagrams, and sensations occupying other persons'
+consciousness were entirely inexplicable as results of chance.  The
+witnesses of these performances were in fact all so satisfied of the
+genuineness of the phenomena, that 'telepathy' has figured freely in
+the papers of the Proceedings and in Gurney's book on Phantasms as a
+_vera causa_ on which additional hypotheses might be built.  No mere
+reader can be blamed, however, if he demand, for so revolutionary a
+belief, a more overwhelming bulk of testimony than has yet been
+supplied.  Any day, of course, may bring in fresh experiments in
+successful picture-guessing.  But meanwhile, and lacking that, we can
+only point out that the present data are strengthened in the flank, so
+to speak, by all observations that tend to corroborate the possibility
+of other kindred phenomena, such as telepathic impression,
+clairvoyance, or what is called 'test-mediumship.'  The wider genus
+will naturally cover the narrower species with its credit.
+
+Gurney's papers on hypnotism must be mentioned next.  Some of them are
+less concerned with establishing new facts than with analyzing old
+ones.  But omitting these, we find that in the line of pure {310}
+observation Gurney claims to have ascertained in more than one subject
+the following phenomenon: The subject's hands are thrust through a
+blanket, which screens the operator from his eyes, and his mind is
+absorbed in conversation with a third person.  The operator meanwhile
+points with his finger to one of the fingers of the subject, which
+finger alone responds to this silent selection by becoming stiff or
+anaesthetic, as the case may be.  The interpretation is difficult, but
+the phenomenon, which I have myself witnessed, seems authentic.
+
+Another observation made by Gurney seems to prove the possibility of
+the subject's mind being directly influenced by the operator's.  The
+hypnotized subject responds, or fails to respond, to questions asked by
+a third party according to the operator's silent permission or refusal.
+Of course, in these experiments all obvious sources of deception were
+excluded.  But Gurney's most important contribution to our knowledge of
+hypnotism was his series of experiments on the automatic writing of
+subjects who had received post-hypnotic suggestions.  For example, a
+subject during trance is told that he will poke the fire in six minutes
+after waking.  On being waked he has no memory of the order, but while
+he is engaged in conversation his hand is placed on a _planchette_,
+which immediately writes the sentence, "P., you will poke the fire in
+six minutes."  Experiments like this, which were repeated in great
+variety, seem to prove that below the upper consciousness the hypnotic
+consciousness persists, engrossed with the suggestion and able to
+express itself through the involuntarily moving hand.
+
+Gurney shares, therefore, with Janet and Binet, the {311} credit of
+demonstrating the simultaneous existence of two different strata of
+consciousness, ignorant of each other, in the same person.  The
+'extra-consciousness,' as one may call it, can be kept on tap, as it
+were, by the method of automatic writing.  This discovery marks a new
+era in experimental psychology, and it is impossible to overrate its
+importance.  But Gurney's greatest piece of work is his laborious
+'Phantasms of the Living.'  As an example of the drudgery stowed away
+in the volumes, it may suffice to say that in looking up the proofs for
+the alleged physical phenomena of witchcraft, Gurney reports a careful
+search through two hundred and sixty books on the subject, with the
+result of finding no first-hand evidence recorded in the trials except
+the confessions of the victims themselves; and these, of course, are
+presumptively due to either torture or hallucination.  This statement,
+made in an unobtrusive note, is only one instance of the care displayed
+throughout the volumes.  In the course of these, Gurney discusses about
+seven hundred cases of apparitions which he collected.  A large number
+of these were 'veridical,' in the sense of coinciding with some
+calamity happening to the person who appeared.  Gurney's explanation is
+that the mind of the person undergoing the calamity was at that moment
+able to impress the mind of the percipient with an hallucination.
+
+Apparitions, on this 'telepathic' theory, may be called 'objective'
+facts, although they are not 'material' facts.  In order to test the
+likelihood of such veridical hallucinations being due to mere chance,
+Gurney instituted the 'census of hallucinations,' which has been
+continued with the result of obtaining answers from over twenty-five
+thousand persons, asked {312} at random in different countries whether,
+when in good health and awake, they had ever heard a voice, seen a
+form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for.
+The result seems to be, roughly speaking, that in England about one
+adult in ten has had such an experience at least once in his life, and
+that of the experiences themselves a large number coincide with some
+distant event.  The question is, Is the frequency of these latter cases
+too great to be deemed fortuitous, and must we suppose an occult
+connection between the two events?  Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick have worked
+out this problem on the basis of the English returns, seventeen
+thousand in number, with a care and thoroughness that leave nothing to
+be desired.  Their conclusion is that the cases where the apparition of
+a person is seen on the day of his death are four hundred and forty
+times too numerous to be ascribed to chance.  The reasoning employed to
+calculate this number is simple enough.  If there be only a fortuitous
+connection between the death of an individual and the occurrence of his
+apparition to some one at a distance, the death is no more likely to
+fall on the same day as the apparition than it is to occur on the same
+day with any other event in nature.  But the chance-probability that
+any individual's death will fall on any given day marked in advance by
+some other event is just equal to the chance-probability that the
+individual will die at all on any specified day; and the national
+death-rate gives that probability as one in nineteen thousand.  If,
+then, when the death of a person coincides with an apparition of the
+same person, the coincidence be merely fortuitous, it ought not to
+occur oftener than once in nineteen thousand cases.  As a matter of
+fact, {313} however, it does occur (according to the census) once in
+forty-three cases, a number (as aforesaid) four hundred and forty times
+too great.  The American census, of some seven thousand answers, gives
+a remarkably similar result.  Against this conclusion the only rational
+answer that I can see is that the data are still too few; that the net
+was not cast wide enough; and that we need, to get fair averages, far
+more than twenty-four thousand answers to the census question.  This
+may, of course, be true, though it seems exceedingly unlikely; and in
+our own twenty-four thousand answers veridical cases may possibly have
+heaped themselves unduly.
+
+The next topic worth mentioning in the Proceedings is the discussion of
+the physical phenomena of mediumship (slate-writing, furniture-moving,
+and so forth) by Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr. Hodgson, and 'Mr. Davey.'  This, so
+far as it goes, is destructive of the claims of all the mediums
+examined.  'Mr. Davey' himself produced fraudulent slate-writing of the
+highest order, while Mr. Hodgson, a 'sitter' in his confidence,
+reviewed the written reports of the series of his other sitters,--all
+of them intelligent persons,--and showed that in every case they failed
+to see the essential features of what was done before their eyes.  This
+Davey-Hodgson contribution is probably the most damaging document
+concerning eye-witnesses' evidence that has ever been produced.
+Another substantial bit of work based on personal observation is Mr.
+Hodgson's report on Madame Blavatsky's claims to physical mediumship.
+This is adverse to the lady's pretensions; and although some of Madame
+Blavatsky's friends make light of it, it is a stroke from which her
+reputation will not recover.
+
+{314}
+
+Physical mediumship in all its phases has fared hard in the
+Proceedings.  The latest case reported on is that of the famous Eusapia
+Paladino, who being detected in fraud at Cambridge, after a brilliant
+career of success on the continent, has, according to the draconian
+rules of method which govern the Society, been ruled out from a further
+hearing.  The case of Stainton Moses, on the other hand, concerning
+which Mr. Myers has brought out a mass of unpublished testimony, seems
+to escape from the universal condemnation, and appears to force upon us
+what Mr. Andrew Lang calls the choice between a moral and a physical
+miracle.
+
+In the case of Mrs. Piper, not a physical but a trance medium, we seem
+to have no choice offered at all.  Mr. Hodgson and others have made
+prolonged study of this lady's trances, and are all convinced that
+super-normal powers of cognition are displayed therein.  These are
+_primâ facie_ due to 'spirit-control.'  But the conditions are so
+complex that a dogmatic decision either for or against the
+spirit-hypothesis must as yet be postponed.
+
+One of the most important experimental contributions to the Proceedings
+is the article of Miss X. on 'Crystal Vision.'  Many persons who look
+fixedly into a crystal or other vaguely luminous surface fall into a
+kind of daze, and see visions.  Miss X. has this susceptibility in a
+remarkable degree, and is, moreover, an unusually intelligent critic.
+She reports many visions which can only be described as apparently
+clairvoyant, and others which beautifully fill a vacant niche incur
+knowledge of subconscious mental operations.  For example, looking into
+the crystal before breakfast one morning she reads in printed
+characters of the {315} death of a lady of her acquaintance, the date
+and other circumstances all duly appearing in type.  Startled by this,
+she looks at the 'Times' of the previous day for verification, and
+there among the deaths are the identical words which she has seen.  On
+the same page of the Times are other items which she remembers reading
+the day before; and the only explanation seems to be that her eyes then
+inattentively observed, so to speak, the death-item, which forthwith
+fell into a special corner of her memory, and came out as a visual
+hallucination when the peculiar modification of consciousness induced
+by the crystal-gazing set in.
+
+Passing from papers based on observation to papers based on narrative,
+we have a number of ghost stories, etc., sifted by Mrs. Sidgwick and
+discussed by Messrs. Myers and Podmore.  They form the best ghost
+literature I know of from the point of view of emotional interest.  As
+to the conclusions drawn, Mrs. Sidgwick is rigorously non-committal,
+while Mr. Myers and Mr. Podmore show themselves respectively hospitable
+and inhospitable to the notion that such stories have a basis of
+objectivity dependent on the continued existence of the dead.
+
+I must close my gossip about the Proceedings by naming what, after all,
+seems to me the most important part of its contents.  This is the long
+series of articles by Mr. Myers on what he now calls the 'subliminal
+self,' or what one might designate as ultra-marginal consciousness.
+The result of Myers's learned and ingenious studies in hypnotism,
+hallucinations, automatic writing, mediumship, and the whole series of
+allied phenomena is a conviction which he expresses in the following
+terms:--
+
+{316}
+
+"Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more
+extensive than he knows,--an individuality which can never express
+itself completely through any corporeal manifestation.  The self
+manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of
+the self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organic
+expression in abeyance or reserve."
+
+
+The ordinary consciousness Mr. Myers likens to the visible part of the
+solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged
+by the inclusion of the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays.  In the
+psychic spectrum the 'ultra' parts may embrace a far wider range, both
+of physiological and of psychical activity, than is open to our
+ordinary consciousness and memory.  At the lower end we have the
+_physiological_ extension, mind-cures, 'stigmatization' of ecstatics,
+etc.; in the upper, the hyper-normal cognitions of the medium-trance.
+Whatever the judgment of the future may be on Mr. Myers's speculations,
+the credit will always remain to them of being the first attempt in any
+language to consider the phenomena of hallucination, hypnotism,
+automatism, double personality, and mediumship as connected parts of
+one whole subject.  All constructions in this field must be
+provisional, and it is as something provisional that Mr. Myers offers
+us his formulations.  But, thanks to him, we begin to see for the first
+time what a vast interlocked and graded system these phenomena, from
+the rudest motor-automatisms to the most startling sensory-apparition,
+form.  Quite apart from Mr. Myers's conclusions, his methodical
+treatment of them by classes and series is the first great step toward
+overcoming the distaste of orthodox science to look at them at all.
+
+{317}
+
+One's reaction on hearsay testimony is always determined by one's own
+experience.  Most men who have once convinced themselves, by what seems
+to them a careful examination, that any one species of the supernatural
+exists, begin to relax their vigilance as to evidence, and throw the
+doors of their minds more or less wide open to the supernatural along
+its whole extent.  To a mind that has thus made its _salto mortale_,
+the minute work over insignificant cases and quiddling discussion of
+'evidential values,' of which the Society's reports are full, seems
+insufferably tedious.  And it is so; few species of literature are more
+truly dull than reports of phantasms.  Taken simply by themselves, as
+separate facts to stare at, they appear so devoid of meaning and sweep,
+that, even were they certainly true, one would be tempted to leave them
+out of one's universe for being so idiotic.  Every other sort of fact
+has some context and continuity with the rest of nature.  These alone
+are contextless and discontinuous.
+
+Hence I think that the sort of loathing--no milder word will do--which
+the very words 'psychical research' and 'psychical researcher' awaken
+in so many honest scientific breasts is not only natural, but in a
+sense praiseworthy.  A man who is unable himself to conceive of any
+_orbit_ for these mental meteors can only suppose that Messrs. Gurney,
+Myers, & Co.'s mood in dealing with them must be that of silly
+marvelling at so many detached prodigies.  And such prodigies!  So
+science simply falls back on her general _non-possumus_; and most of
+the would-be critics of the Proceedings have been contented to oppose
+to the phenomena recorded the simple presumption that in some way or
+other the reports _must_ be {318} fallacious,--for so far as the order
+of nature has been subjected to really scientific scrutiny, it always
+has been proved to run the other way.  But the oftener one is forced to
+reject an alleged sort of fact by the use of this mere presumption, the
+weaker does the presumption itself get to be; and one might in course
+of time use up one's presumptive privileges in this way, even though
+one started (as our anti-telepathists do) with as good a case as the
+great induction of psychology that all our knowledge comes by the use
+of our eyes and ears and other senses.  And we must remember also that
+this undermining of the strength of a presumption by reiterated report
+of facts to the contrary does not logically require that the facts in
+question should all be well proved.  A lot of rumors in the air against
+a business man's credit, though they might all be vague, and no one of
+them amount to proof that he is unsound, would certainly weaken the
+_presumption_ of his soundness.  And all the more would they have this
+effect if they formed what Gurney called a fagot and not a chain,--that
+is, if they were independent of one another, and came from different
+quarters.  Now, the evidence for telepathy, weak and strong, taken just
+as it comes, forms a fagot and not a chain.  No one item cites the
+content of another item as part of its own proof.  But taken together
+the items have a certain general consistency; there is a method in
+their madness, so to speak.  So each of them adds presumptive value to
+the lot; and cumulatively, as no candid mind can fail to see, they
+subtract presumptive force from the orthodox belief that there can be
+nothing in any one's intellect that has not come in through ordinary
+experiences of sense.
+
+But it is a miserable thing for a question of truth {319} to be
+confined to mere presumption and counter-presumption, with no decisive
+thunderbolt of fact to clear the baffling darkness.  And, sooth to say,
+in talking so much of the merely presumption-weakening value of our
+records, I have myself been wilfully taking the point of view of the
+so-called 'rigorously scientific' disbeliever, and making an _ad
+hominem_ plea.  My own point of view is different.  For me the
+thunderbolt _has_ fallen, and the orthodox belief has not merely had
+its presumption weakened, but the truth itself of the belief is
+decisively overthrown.  If I may employ the language of the
+professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by
+a particular instance.  If you wish to upset the law that all crows are
+black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you
+prove one single crow to be white.  My own white crow is Mrs. Piper.
+In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that
+knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use
+of her eyes and ears and wits.  What the source of this knowledge may
+be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to
+make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no
+escape.  So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I
+cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the 'rigorously
+scientific' mind, with its presumption as to what the true order of
+nature ought to be.  I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in
+spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight.  The
+rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark.
+Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method.  To
+suppose that it means a certain set of {320} results that one should
+pin one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius,
+and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.
+
+We all, scientists and non-scientists, live on some inclined plane of
+credulity.  The plane tips one way in one man, another way in another;
+and may he whose plane tips in no way be the first to cast a stone!  As
+a matter of fact, the trances I speak of have broken down for my own
+mind the limits of the admitted order of nature.  Science, so far as
+science denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dust
+for me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present
+is that science be built up again in a form in which such things may
+have a positive place.  Science, like life, feeds on its own decay.
+New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and
+new together into a reconciling law.
+
+And here is the real instructiveness of Messrs. Myers and Gurney's
+work.  They are trying with the utmost conscientiousness to find a
+reconciling conception which shall subject the old laws of nature to
+the smallest possible strain.  Mr. Myers uses that method of gradual
+approach which has performed such wonders in Darwin's hands.  When
+Darwin met a fact which seemed a poser to his theory, his regular
+custom, as I have heard an able colleague say, was to fill in all round
+it with smaller facts, as a wagoner might heap dirt round a big rock in
+the road, and thus get his team over without upsetting.  So Mr. Myers,
+starting from the most ordinary facts of inattentive consciousness,
+follows this clue through a long series which terminates in ghosts, and
+seeks to show that these are but extreme manifestations of a {321}
+common truth,--the truth that the invisible segments of our minds are
+susceptible, under rarely realized conditions, of acting and being
+acted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives.  This
+may not be ultimately true (for the theosophists, with their astral
+bodies and the like, may, for aught I now know, prove to be on the
+correcter trail), but no one can deny that it is in good scientific
+form,--for science always takes a known kind of phenomenon, and tries
+to extend its range.
+
+I have myself, as American agent for the census, collected hundreds of
+cases of hallucination in healthy persons.  The result is to make me
+feel that we all have potentially a 'subliminal' self, which may make
+at any time irruption into our ordinary lives.  At its lowest, it is
+only the depository of our forgotten memories; at its highest, we do
+not know what it is at all.  Take, for instance, a series of cases.
+During sleep, many persons have something in them which measures the
+flight of time better than the waking self does.  It wakes them at a
+preappointed hour; it acquaints them with the moment when they first
+awake.  It may produce an hallucination,--as in a lady who informs me
+that at the instant of waking she has a vision of her watch-face with
+the hands pointing (as she has often verified) to the exact time.  It
+may be the feeling that some physiological period has elapsed; but,
+whatever it is, it is subconscious.
+
+A subconscious something may also preserve experiences to which we do
+not openly attend.  A lady taking her lunch in town finds herself
+without her purse.  Instantly a sense comes over her of rising from the
+breakfast-table and hearing her purse drop upon the floor.  On reaching
+home she finds {322} nothing under the table, but summons the servant
+to say where she has put the purse.  The servant produces it, saying;
+"How did you know where it was?  You rose and left the room as if you
+did n't know you 'd dropped it."  The same subconscious something may
+recollect what we have forgotten.  A lady accustomed to taking
+salicylate of soda for muscular rheumatism wakes one early winter
+morning with an aching neck.  In the twilight she takes what she
+supposes to be her customary powder from a drawer, dissolves it in a
+glass of water, and is about to drink it down, when she feels a sharp
+slap on her shoulder and hears a voice in her ear saying, "Taste it!"
+On examination, she finds she has got a morphine powder by mistake.
+The natural interpretation is that a sleeping memory of the morphine
+powders awoke in this quasi-explosive way.  A like explanation offers
+itself as most plausible for the following case: A lady, with little
+time to catch the train, and the expressman about to call, is excitedly
+looking for the lost key of a packed trunk.  Hurrying upstairs with a
+bunch of keys, proved useless, in her hand, she hears an 'objective'
+voice distinctly say, "Try the key of the cake-box."  Being tried, it
+fits.  This also may well have been the effect of forgotten experience.
+
+Now, the effect is doubtless due to the same hallucinatory mechanism;
+but the source is less easily assigned as we ascend the scale of cases.
+A lady, for instance, goes after breakfast to see about one of her
+servants who has become ill over night.  She is startled at distinctly
+reading over the bedroom door in gilt letters the word 'small-pox.'
+The doctor is sent for, and ere long pronounces small-pox to be the
+disease, although the lady says, "The thought of {323} the girl's
+having small-pox never entered my mind till I saw the apparent
+inscription."  Then come other cases of warning; for example, that of a
+youth sitting in a wagon under a shed, who suddenly hears his dead
+mother's voice say, "Stephen, get away from here quick!" and jumps out
+just in time to see the shed-roof fall.
+
+After this come the experiences of persons appearing to distant friends
+at or near the hour of death.  Then, too, we have the trance-visions
+and utterances, which may appear astonishingly profuse and continuous,
+and maintain a fairly high intellectual level.  For all these higher
+phenomena, it seems to me that while the proximate mechanism is that of
+'hallucination,' it is straining an hypothesis unduly to name any
+ordinary subconscious mental operation--such as expectation,
+recollection, or inference from inattentive perception--as the ultimate
+cause that starts it up.  It is far better tactics, if you wish to get
+rid of mystery, to brand the narratives themselves as unworthy of
+trust.  The trustworthiness of most of them is to my own mind far from
+proved.  And yet in the light of the medium-trance, which is proved, it
+seems as if they might well all be members of a natural kind of fact of
+which we do not yet know the full extent.
+
+Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States to-day live
+as steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferent
+to modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the twelfth century.
+They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously
+indifferent to their experiences.  Although in its essence science only
+stands for a method and for no fixed belief, yet as habitually taken,
+both by its votaries and outsiders, it is {324} identified with a
+certain fixed belief,--the belief that the hidden order of nature is
+mechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories are
+irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such things as human
+life.  Now, this mechanical rationalism, as one may call it, makes, if
+it becomes one's only way of thinking, a violent breach with the ways
+of thinking that have played the greatest part in human history.
+Religious thinking, ethical thinking, poetical thinking, teleological,
+emotional, sentimental thinking, what one might call the personal view
+of life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and the
+romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view,
+have been, and even still are, outside of well-drilled scientific
+circles, the dominant forms of thought.  But for mechanical
+rationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion.  The chronic
+belief of mankind, that events may happen for the sake of their
+personal significance, is an abomination; and the notions of our
+grandfathers about oracles and omens, divinations and apparitions,
+miraculous changes of heart and wonders worked by inspired persons,
+answers to prayer and providential leadings, are a fabric absolutely
+baseless, a mass of sheer _un_truth.
+
+Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which the
+romantic and personal view of nature may lead, if wholly unchecked by
+impersonal rationalism, are direful.  Central African Mumbo-jumboism is
+one of unchecked romanticism's fruits.  One ought accordingly to
+sympathize with that abhorrence of romanticism as a sufficient
+world-theory; one ought to understand that lively intolerance of the
+least grain of romanticism in the views of life of other people, which
+are such characteristic marks of those who {325} follow the scientific
+professions to-day.  Our debt to science is literally boundless, and
+our gratitude for what is positive in her teachings must be
+correspondingly immense.  But the S. P. R.'s Proceedings have, it seems
+to me, conclusively proved one thing to the candid reader; and that is
+that the verdict of pure insanity, of gratuitous preference for error,
+of superstition without an excuse, which the scientists of our day are
+led by their intellectual training to pronounce upon the entire thought
+of the past, is a most shallow verdict.  The personal and romantic view
+of life has other roots besides wanton exuberance of imagination and
+perversity of heart.  It is perennially fed by _facts of experience_,
+whatever the ulterior interpretation of those facts may prove to be;
+and at no time in human history would it have been less easy than
+now--at most times it would have been much more easy--for advocates
+with a little industry to collect in its favor an array of contemporary
+documents as good as those which our publications present.  These
+documents all relate to real experiences of persons.  These experiences
+have three characters in common: They are capricious, discontinuous,
+and not easily controlled; they require peculiar persons for their
+production; their significance seems to be wholly for personal life.
+Those who preferentially attend to them, and still more those who are
+individually subject to them, not only easily may find, but are
+logically bound to find, in them valid arguments for their romantic and
+personal conception of the world's course.  Through my slight
+participation in the investigations of the S. P. R. I have become
+acquainted with numbers of persons of this sort, for whom the very word
+'science' has become a name of reproach, for reasons that I now both
+understand {326} and respect.  It is the intolerance of science for
+such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of
+their existence or of their significance (except as proofs of man's
+absolute innate folly), that has set science so apart from the common
+sympathies of the race.  I confess that it is on this, its humanizing
+mission, that the Society's best claim to the gratitude of our
+generation seems to me to depend.  It has restored continuity to
+history.  It has shown some reasonable basis for the most superstitious
+aberrations of the foretime.  It has bridged the chasm, healed the
+hideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot into
+the human world.
+
+I will even go one step farther.  When from our present advanced
+standpoint we look back upon the past stages of human thought, whether
+it be scientific thought or theological thought, we are amazed that a
+universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication
+should ever have seemed to any one so little and plain a thing.
+Whether it be Descartes's world or Newton's, whether it be that of the
+materialists of the last century or that of the Bridgewater treatises
+of our own, it always looks the same to us,--incredibly perspectiveless
+and short.  Even Lyell's, Faraday's, Mill's, and Darwin's consciousness
+of their respective subjects are already beginning to put on an
+infantile and innocent look.  Is it then likely that the science of our
+own day will escape the common doom; that the minds of its votaries
+will never look old-fashioned to the grandchildren of the latter?  It
+would be folly to suppose so.  Yet if we are to judge by the analogy of
+the past, when our science once becomes old-fashioned, it will be more
+for its omissions of fact, for its {327} ignorance of whole ranges and
+orders of complexity in the phenomena to be explained, than for any
+fatal lack in its spirit and principles.  The spirit and principles of
+science are mere affairs of method; there is nothing in them that need
+hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal
+forces are the starting-point of new effects.  The only form of thing
+that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely
+have, is our own personal life.  The only complete category of our
+thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category of
+personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements of
+that.  And this systematic denial on science's part of personality as a
+condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and
+innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may,
+conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very
+defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own
+boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make
+it look perspectiveless and short.
+
+
+
+[1] This Essay is formed of portions of an article in Scribner's
+Magazine for March, 1890, of an article in the Forum for July, 1892,
+and of the President's Address before the Society for Psychical
+Research, published in the Proceedings for June, 1896, and in Science.
+
+[2] Written in 1891.  Since then, Mr. Balfour, the present writer, and
+Professor William Crookes have held the presidential office.
+
+
+
+
+{329}
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+  ABSOLUTISM, 12, 30.
+  Abstract conceptions, 219.
+  Action, as a measure of belief, 3, 29-30.
+  Actual world narrower than ideal, 202.
+  Agnosticism, 54, 81, 126.
+  Allen, G., 231, 235, 256.
+  Alps, leap in the, 59, 96.
+  Alternatives, 156, 161, 202, 269.
+  Ambiguity of choice, 156; of being, 292.
+  Anaesthetic revelation, 294.
+  A priori truths, 268.
+  Apparitions, 311.
+  Aristotle, 249.
+  Associationism, in Ethics, 186.
+  Atheist and acorn, 160.
+  Authorities in Ethics, 204; _versus_ champions, 207.
+  Axioms, 268.
+
+  BAGEHOT, 232.
+  Bain, 71, 91.
+  Balfour, 9.
+  Being, its character, 142; in Hegel, 281.
+  Belief, 59.  See 'Faith.'
+  Bellamy, 188.
+  Bismarck, 228.
+  Block-universe, 292.
+  Blood, B. P., vi, 294.
+  Brockton murderer, 160, 177.
+  Bunsen, 203, 274.
+
+  CALVINISM, 45.
+  Carlyle, 42, 44, 45, 73, 87, 173.
+  'Casuistic question' in Ethics, 198.
+  Causality, 147.
+  Causation, Hume's doctrine of, 278.
+  Census of hallucinations, 312.
+  Certitude, 13, 30.
+  Chance, 149, 153-9, 178-180.
+  Choice, 156.
+  Christianity, 5, 14.
+  Cicero, 92.
+  City of dreadful night, 35.
+  Clark, X., 50.
+  Classifications, 67.
+  Clifford, 6, 7, 10, 14, 19, 21, 92, 230.
+  Clive, 228.
+  Clough, 6.
+  Common-sense, 270.
+  Conceptual order of world, 118.
+  Conscience, 186-8.
+  Contradiction, as used by Hegel, 275-277.
+  Contradictions of philosophers, 16.
+  Crillon, 62
+  Criterion of truth, 15, 16; in Ethics, 205.
+  Crude order of experience, 118.
+  Crystal vision, 314.
+  Cycles in Nature, 220, 223-4.
+
+  DARWIN, 221, 223, 226, 320.
+  Data, 271.
+  Davey, 313.
+  Demands, as creators of value, 201.
+  'Determination is negation,' 286-290.
+  Determinism, 150; the Dilemma of;
+    145-183; 163, 166; hard and soft, 149.
+  Dogs, 57.
+  Dogmatism, 12.
+  Doubt, 54, 109.
+  Dupery, 27.
+
+  EASY-GOING mood, 211, 213.
+  Elephant, 282.
+  Emerson, 23, 175.
+  Empiricism, i., 12, 14, 17, 278.
+  England, 228.
+  Environment, its relation to great men,
+    223, 226; to great thoughts, 250.
+  Error, 163; duty of avoiding, 18.
+  Essence of good and bad, 200-1.
+  Ethical ideals, 200.
+  Ethical philosophy, 208, 210, 216.
+  Ethical standards, 205; diversity of, 200.
+  Ethics, its three questions, 185.
+  Evidence, objective, 13, 15, 16.
+  Evil, 46, 49, 161, 190.
+  Evolution, social, 232, 237; mental, 245.
+  Evolutionism, its test of right, 98-100.
+  Expectancy, 77-80.
+  Experience, crude, _versus_ rationalized,
+    118; tests our faiths, 105.
+
+  FACTS, 271.
+  Faith, that truth exists, 9, 23; in our
+    fellows, 24-5; school boys' definition of, 29;
+    a remedy for pessimism, 60, 101; religious, 56;
+    defined, 90; defended against 'scientific'
+    objections, viii-xi, 91-4; may
+    create its own verification, 59, 96-103.
+  Familiarity confers rationality, 76.
+  Fatalism, 88.
+  Fiske, 255, 260.
+  Fitzgerald, 160.
+  Freedom, 103, 271.
+  Free-will, 103, 145, 157.
+
+  GALTON, 242.
+  Geniuses, 226, 229.
+  Ghosts, 315,
+  Gnosticism, 138-140, 165, 169.
+  God, 61, 68; of Nature, 43; the most
+    adequate object for our mind, 116,
+    122; our relations to him, 134-6;
+    his providence, 182; his demands
+    create obligation, 193; his function
+    in Ethics, 212-215.
+  Goethe, 111.
+  Good, 168, 200, 201.
+  Goodness, 190.
+  Great-man theory of history, 232.
+  Great men and their environment, 216-254.
+  Green, 206,
+  Gryzanowski, 240.
+  Gurney, 306, 307, 311.
+  Guthrie, 309.
+  Guyau, 188.
+
+  HALLUCINATIONS, Census of, 312.
+  Happiness, 33.
+  Harris, 282.
+  Hegel, 72, 263; his excessive claims,
+    272; his use of negation, 273, 290;
+    of contradiction, 274, 276; on being,
+    281; on otherness, 283; on infinity,
+    284; on identity, 285; on determination,
+    289; his ontological emotion, 297.
+  Hegelisms, on some, 263-298.
+  Heine, 203.
+  Helmholtz, 85, 91.
+  Henry IV., 62.
+  Herbart, 280.
+  Hero-worship, 261.
+  Hinton, C. H., 15.
+  Hinton, J., 101.
+  Hodgson, R., 308.
+  Hodgson, S, H., 10.
+  Honor, 50.
+  Hugo, 213.
+  Human mind, its habit of abstracting, 219.
+  Hume on causation, 278.
+  Huxley, 6, 10, 92.
+  Hypnotism, 302, 309.
+  Hypotheses, live or dead, 2; their
+    verification, 105; of genius, 249.
+
+  IDEALS, 200; their conflict, 202.
+  Idealism, 89, 291.
+  Identity, 285.
+  Imperatives, 211.
+  Importance of individuals, the, 255-262;
+    of things, its ground, 257.
+  Indeterminism, 150.
+  Individual differences, 259.
+  Individuals, the importance of, 255-262
+  Infinite, 284.
+  Intuitionism, in Ethics, 186, 189.
+
+  JEVONS, 249.
+  Judgments of regret, 159.
+
+  KNOWING, 12.
+  Knowledge, 85.
+
+  LEAP on precipice, 59, 96.
+  Leibnitz, 43.
+  Life, is it worth living, 32-62.
+
+  MAGGOTS, 176-7.
+  Mahdi, the, 2, 6.
+  Mallock, 32, 183.
+  Marcus Aurelius, 41.
+  Materialism, 126.
+  'Maybes,' 59.
+  Measure of good, 205.
+  Mediumship, physical, 313, 314.
+  Melancholy, 34, 39, 42.
+  Mental evolution, 246; structure, 114, 117.
+  Mill, 234.
+  Mind, its triadic structure, 114, 117;
+    its evolution, 246; its three departments,
+    114, 122, 127-8.
+  Monism, 279.
+  Moods, the strenuous and the easy, 211, 213
+  Moralists, objective and subjective, 103-108.
+  Moral judgments, their origin, 186-8;
+    obligation, 192-7; order, 193;
+    philosophy, 184-5.
+  Moral philosopher and the moral life, the, 184-215.
+  Murder, 178.
+  Murderer, 160, 177.
+  Myers, 308, 315, 320.
+  Mystical phenomena, 300.
+  Mysticism, 74.
+
+  NAKED, the, 281.
+  Natural theology, 40-4.
+  Nature, 20, 41-4, 56.
+  Negation, as used by Hegel, 273.
+  Newman, 10.
+  Nitrous oxide, 294.
+  Nonentity, 72.
+
+  OBJECTIVE evidence, 13, 15, 16.
+  Obligation, 192-7.
+  Occult phenomena, 300; examples of, 323.
+  Omar Khayam, 160.
+  Optimism, 60, 102, 163.
+  Options offered to belief, 3, 11, 27.
+  Origin of moral judgments, 186-8.
+  'Other,' in Hegel, 283.
+
+  PARSIMONY, law of, 132.
+  Partaking, 268, 270, 275, 291.
+  Pascal's wager, 5, 11.
+  Personality, 324, 327.
+  Pessimism, 39, 40, 47, 60, 100, 101, 161, 167.
+  Philosophy, 65; depends on personal
+    demands, 93; makes world unreal,
+    39; seeks unification, 67-70; the
+    ultimate, 110; its contradictions, 16.
+  Physiology, its _prestige_, 112.
+  Piper, Mrs., 314, 319.
+  Plato, 268
+  Pluralism, vi, 151, 178, 192, 264, 267.
+  Positivism, 54, 108
+  Possibilities, 151, 181-2, 292, 294.
+  Postulates, 91-2.
+  Powers, our powers as congruous with the world, 86.
+  Providence, 180.
+  Psychical research, what it has accomplished, 299-327;
+    Society for, 303, 305, 325.
+  Pugnacity, 49, 51.
+
+  QUESTIONS, three, in Ethics, 185.
+
+  RATIONALISM, 12, 30.
+  Rationality, the sentiment of, 63-110;
+    limits of theoretic, 65-74; mystical,
+    74; practical, 82-4; postulates of, 152.
+
+  Rational order of world, 118, 125, 147.
+  Reflex action and theism, 111-144.
+  Reflex action defined, 113; it refutes gnosticism, 140-1.
+  Regret, judgments of, 159.
+  Religion, natural, 52; of humanity, 198.
+  Religious hypothesis, 25, 28, 51.
+  Religious minds, 40.
+  Renan, 170, 172.
+  Renouvier, 143.
+  Risks of belief or disbelief, ix, 26; rules for minimizing, 94.
+  Romantic view of world, 324.
+  Romanticism, 172-3.
+  Rousseau, 4, 33, 87.
+  Ruskin, 37.
+
+  SALTER, 62.
+  Scepticism, 12, 23, 109.
+  Scholasticism, 13.
+  Schopenhauer, 72, 169.
+  Science, 10, 21; its recency, 52-4;
+    due to peculiar desire, 129-132, 147;
+    its disbelief of the occult, 317-320;
+    its negation of personality, 324-6;
+    cannot decide question of determinism, 152.
+  Science of Ethics, 208-210.
+  Selection of great men, 226.
+  Sentiment of rationality, 63.
+  Seriousness, 86.
+  Shakespeare, 32, 235.
+  Sidgwick, 303, 307.
+  Sigwart, 120, 148.
+  Society for psychical research, 303; its 'Proceedings,' 305, 325.
+  Sociology, 259.
+  Solitude, moral, 191.
+  Space, 265.
+  Spencer, 168, 218, 232-235, 246, 251, 260.
+  Stephen, L., 1.
+  Stephen, Sir J., 1, 30, 212.
+  Stoics, 274.
+  Strenuous mood, 211, 213.
+  Subjectivism, 165, 170.
+  'Subliminal self,' 315, 321.
+  Substance, 80.
+  Suicide, 38, 50, 60.
+  System in philosophy, 13, 185, 199.
+
+  TELEPATHY, 10, 309.
+  Theism, and reflex action, 111-144.
+  Theism, 127, 134-6; see 'God.'
+  Theology, natural, 41; Calvinistic, 45.
+  Theoretic faculty, 128.
+  Thought-transference, 309.
+  Thomson, 35-7, 45, 46.
+  Toleration, 30.
+  Tolstoi, 188.
+  'Totality,' the principle of, 277.
+  Triadic structure of mind, 123.
+  Truth, criteria of, 15; and error, 18; moral, 190-1.
+
+  UNITARIANS, 126, 133.
+  Unknowable, the, 68, 81.
+  Universe = M + x, 101; its rationality, 125, 137.
+  Unseen world, 51, 54, 56, 61.
+  Utopias, 168.
+
+  VALUE, judgments of, 103.
+  Variations, in heredity, etc., 225, 249.
+  Vaudois, 48.
+  Veddah, 258.
+  Verification of theories, 95, 105-8.
+  Vivisection, 58.
+
+  WALDENSES, 47-9.
+  Wallace, 239, 304,
+  Whitman, 33, 64, 74.
+  Wordsworth, 60.
+  World, its ambiguity, 76; the invisible,
+    51, 54, 56; two orders of, 118.
+  Worth, judgments of, 103.
+  Wright, 52.
+
+  X., Miss, 314.
+
+  ZOLA, 172.
+  Zöllner, 15.
+
+
+
+
+By the Same Author
+
+
+THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.
+  2 vols.  8vo.  New York: Henry Holt & Co.  London;
+  Macmillan & Co.  1890
+
+PSYCHOLOGY: BRIEFER COURSE (TEXT BOOK).
+  12mo.  New York: Henry Holt & Co.  London:
+  Macmillan & Co.  1892.
+
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS
+  IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.
+  12mo.  New York, London.  Bombay and Calcutta:
+  Longmans, Green & Co.  1897.
+
+HUMAN IMMORTALITY: TWO SUPPOSED
+  OBJECTIONS TO THE DOCTRINE.
+  16mo.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.  1898.
+
+TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND
+  TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS.
+  12mo.  New York: Henry Holt & Co.  London,
+  Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co.  1899.
+
+THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE:
+  A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE.
+  Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902.
+  8vo.  New York, London, Bombay and Calcutta:
+  Longmans, Green & Co.  1902.
+
+PRAGMATISM: A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD
+  WAYS OF THINKING: POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY.
+  New York, London, Bombay and Calcutta:
+  Longmans, Green & Co.  1907.
+
+A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE: HIBBERT
+  LECTURES AT MANCHESTER COLLEGE ON THE
+  PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY.
+  New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta:
+  Longmans, Green & Co.  1909.
+
+THE MEANING OF TRUTH; A SEQUEL TO "PRAGMATISM."
+  New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta;
+  Longmans, Green & Co.  1909.
+
+THE LITERARY REMAINS OF HENRY JAMES
+  Edited, with an Introduction, by WILLIAM JAMES.
+  With Portrait.  Crown 8vo.  Boston: Houghton
+  Mifflin Co.  1885.
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+Transcriber's notes:
+
+Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly
+braces, e.g. {99}.  They have been located where page breaks occurred
+in the original book, in accordance with Project Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99.
+For its Index, a page number has been placed only at the start of that
+section.  In the HTML version of this book, page numbers are placed in
+the left margin.
+
+Footnotes are indicated by numbers enclosed in square brackets, e.g.
+[2].  They have been renumbered sequentially and moved to the end of
+their respective chapters.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Will to Believe, by William James
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILL TO BELIEVE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 26659-8.txt or 26659-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/2/6/6/5/26659/
+
+Produced by Al Haines. (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/26659-8.zip b/26659-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6aacf94
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-8.zip
diff --git a/26659-h.zip b/26659-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9bf3bc1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-h.zip
diff --git a/26659-h/26659-h.htm b/26659-h/26659-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b838d3a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-h/26659-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,13512 @@
+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<HTML>
+<HEAD>
+
+<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+
+<TITLE>
+The Project Gutenberg E-text of The Will to Believe, by William James
+</TITLE>
+
+<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
+BODY { color: Black;
+       background: White;
+       margin-right: 10%;
+       margin-left: 10%;
+       font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;
+       text-align: justify }
+
+P {text-indent: 4% }
+
+P.noindent {text-indent: 0% }
+
+P.poem {text-indent: 0%;
+        margin-left: 10%;
+        font-size: small }
+
+P.letter {text-indent: 0%;
+          font-size: small ;
+          margin-left: 10% ;
+          margin-right: 10% }
+
+P.footnote {font-size: smaller ;
+            text-indent: 0% ;
+            margin-left: 10% ;
+            margin-right: 10% }
+
+P.index {font-size: small ;
+         text-indent: -5% ;
+         margin-left: 5% ;
+         margin-top: 0% ;
+         margin-bottom: 0% ;
+         margin-right: 0% }
+
+P.intro {font-size: small ;
+         text-indent: 5% ;
+         margin-left: 5% ;
+         margin-right: 0% }
+
+P.quote {font-size: small ;
+         text-indent: 4% ;
+         margin-left: 0% ;
+         margin-right: 0% }
+
+H3.title  {
+	float: left;
+	position: relative; /*needed by IE6*/
+	text-align: left;
+        }
+
+.pagenum  {
+	float: right;
+	position: relative; /* needed by IE6*/
+	text-align: right;
+        }
+
+.pagenum { position: absolute;
+           left: 1%;
+           font-size: 95%;
+           text-align: left;
+           text-indent: 0;
+           font-style: normal;
+           font-weight: normal;
+           font-variant: normal; }
+
+P.finis { font-size: larger ;
+          text-align: center ;
+          text-indent: 0% ;
+          margin-left: 0% ;
+          margin-right: 0% }
+
+
+</STYLE>
+
+</HEAD>
+
+<BODY>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Will to Believe, by William James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Will to Believe
+       and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
+
+Author: William James
+
+Release Date: May 8, 2009 [EBook #26659]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILL TO BELIEVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines. (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center" STYLE="color: red">
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE
+</H1>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+AND OTHER ESSAYS IN
+<BR>
+POPULAR PHILOSOPHY
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+BY WILLIAM JAMES
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+NEW IMPRESSION
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+FOURTH AVENUE &amp; 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
+<BR>
+LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
+<BR>
+1912
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+<I>Copyright, 1896</I>
+<BR>
+BY WILLIAM JAMES
+</H5>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H5 STYLE="margin-left: 15%">
+First Edition. February, 1897,<BR>
+<BR>
+Reprinted, May, 1897, September, 1897,<BR>
+March, 1898, August, 1899, June, 1902,<BR>
+January, 1903, May, 1904, June, 1905,<BR>
+March, 1907, April, 1908,<BR>
+September, 1909, December, 1910,<BR>
+November, 1911, November, 1912<BR>
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+To
+<BR>
+My Old Friend,
+<BR>
+CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE,
+<BR><BR>
+To whose philosophic comradeship in old times<BR>
+and to whose writings in more recent years<BR>
+I owe more incitement and help than<BR>
+I can express or repay.<BR>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="Pvii"></A>vii}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+PREFACE.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the students
+devoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have the
+laudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholar
+to address them, the occasion often being made a public one.  I have
+from time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had my
+discourse printed in one or other of the Reviews.  It has seemed to me
+that these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, as
+they shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together express
+a tolerably definite philosophic attitude in a very untechnical way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I
+should call it that of <I>radical empiricism</I>, in spite of the fact that
+such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy.  I
+say 'empiricism,' because it is contented to regard its most assured
+conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to
+modification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical,'
+because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="Pviii"></A>viii}</SPAN>
+unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under
+the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does
+not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience
+has got to square.  The difference between monism and pluralism is
+perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy.  <I>Primâ
+facie</I> the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be
+that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an
+effort to redeem it from that first crude form.  Postulating more unity
+than the first experiences yield, we also discover more.  But absolute
+unity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains
+undiscovered, still remains a <I>Grenzbegriff</I>.  "Ever not quite" must be
+the rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it.  After
+all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity
+of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities
+mutually unmediated and unexplained.  To the very last, there are the
+various 'points of view' which the philosopher must distinguish in
+discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains
+a bare externality and datum to the other.  The negative, the alogical,
+is never wholly banished.  Something&mdash;"call it fate, chance, freedom,
+spontaneity, the devil, what you will"&mdash;is still wrong and other and
+outside and unincluded, from <I>your</I> point of view, even though you be
+the greatest of philosophers.  Something is always mere fact and
+<I>givenness</I>; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of
+view extant from which this would not be found to be the case.
+"Reason," as a gifted writer says, "is
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="Pix"></A>ix}</SPAN>
+but one item in the
+mystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned,
+reason and wonder blushed face to face.  The inevitable stales, while
+doubt and hope are sisters.  Not unfortunately the universe is
+wild,&mdash;game-flavored as a hawk's wing.  Nature is miracle all; the same
+returns not save to bring the different.  The slow round of the
+engraver's lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is
+distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true,&mdash;ever not
+quite."[<A NAME="ch00fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch00fn1">1</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is pluralism, somewhat rhapsodically expressed.  He who takes for
+his hypothesis the notion that it is the permanent form of the world is
+what I call a radical empiricist.  For him the crudity of experience
+remains an eternal element thereof.  There is no possible point of view
+from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact.  Real
+possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real
+evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real
+moral life, just as common-sense conceives these things, may remain in
+empiricism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt
+either to 'overcome' or to reinterpret in monistic form.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many of my professionally trained <I>confrères</I> will smile at the
+irrationalism of this view, and at the artlessness of my essays in
+point of technical form.  But they should be taken as illustrations of
+the radically empiricist attitude rather than as argumentations for its
+validity.  That admits meanwhile of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{x}</SPAN>
+being argued in as technical a
+shape as any one can desire, and possibly I may be spared to do later a
+share of that work.  Meanwhile these essays seem to light up with a
+certain dramatic reality the attitude itself, and make it visible
+alongside of the higher and lower dogmatisms between which in the pages
+of philosophic history it has generally remained eclipsed from sight.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The first four essays are largely concerned with defending the
+legitimacy of religious faith.  To some rationalizing readers such
+advocacy will seem a sad misuse of one's professional position.
+Mankind, they will say, is only too prone to follow faith
+unreasoningly, and needs no preaching nor encouragement in that
+direction.  I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks is
+criticism and caution, not faith.  Its cardinal weakness is to let
+belief follow recklessly upon lively conception, especially when the
+conception has instinctive liking at its back.  I admit, then, that
+were I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowd
+it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing
+as I have in these pages preached it.  What such audiences most need is
+that their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that the
+northwest wind of science should get into them and blow their
+sickliness and barbarism away.  But academic audiences, fed already on
+science, have a very different need.  Paralysis of their native
+capacity for faith and timorous <I>abulia</I> in the religious field are
+their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion,
+carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence
+by
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{xi}</SPAN>
+waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in
+regard to truth.  But there is really no scientific or other method by
+which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing
+too little or of believing too much.  To face such dangers is
+apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the
+measure of our wisdom as men.  It does not follow, because recklessness
+may be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached to
+them.  What <I>should</I> be preached is courage weighted with
+responsibility,&mdash;such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons never
+failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might
+tell against their success, and made every provision to minimize
+disaster in case they met defeat.  I do not think that any one can
+accuse me of preaching reckless faith.  I have preached the right of
+the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk.  I
+have discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of us
+escape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to face
+them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After all, though, you will say, Why such an ado about a matter
+concerning which, however we may theoretically differ, we all
+practically agree?  In this age of toleration, no scientist will ever
+try actively to interfere with our religious faith, provided we enjoy
+it quietly with our friends and do not make a public nuisance of it in
+the market-place.  But it is just on this matter of the market-place
+that I think the utility of such essays as mine may turn.  If
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{xii}</SPAN>
+
+religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the
+active faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in
+life, are the experimental tests by which they are verified, and the
+only means by which their truth or falsehood can be wrought out.  The
+truest scientific hypothesis is that which, as we say, 'works' best;
+and it can be no otherwise with religious hypotheses.  Religious
+history proves that one hypothesis after another has worked ill, has
+crumbled at contact with a widening knowledge of the world, and has
+lapsed from the minds of men.  Some articles of faith, however, have
+maintained themselves through every vicissitude, and possess even more
+vitality to-day than ever before: it is for the 'science of religions'
+to tell us just which hypotheses these are.  Meanwhile the freest
+competition of the various faiths with one another, and their openest
+application to life by their several champions, are the most favorable
+conditions under which the survival of the fittest can proceed.  They
+ought therefore not to lie hid each under its bushel, indulged-in
+quietly with friends.  They ought to live in publicity, vying with each
+other; and it seems to me that (the régime of tolerance once granted,
+and a fair field shown) the scientist has nothing to fear for his own
+interests from the liveliest possible state of fermentation in the
+religious world of his time.  Those faiths will best stand the test
+which adopt also his hypotheses, and make them integral elements of
+their own.  He should welcome therefore every species of religious
+agitation and discussion, so long as he is willing to allow that some
+religious hypothesis <I>may</I> be
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{xiii}</SPAN>
+true.  Of course there are plenty
+of scientists who would deny that dogmatically, maintaining that
+science has already ruled all possible religious hypotheses out of
+court.  Such scientists ought, I agree, to aim at imposing privacy on
+religious faiths, the public manifestation of which could only be a
+nuisance in their eyes.  With all such scientists, as well as with
+their allies outside of science, my quarrel openly lies; and I hope
+that my book may do something to persuade the reader of their crudity,
+and range him on my side.  Religious fermentation is always a symptom
+of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget
+that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative
+pretensions, that our faiths do harm.  The most interesting and
+valuable things about a man are his ideals and over-beliefs.  The same
+is true of nations and historic epochs; and the excesses of which the
+particular individuals and epochs are guilty are compensated in the
+total, and become profitable to mankind in the long run.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The essay 'On some Hegelisms' doubtless needs an apology for the
+superficiality with which it treats a serious subject.  It was written
+as a squib, to be read in a college-seminary in Hegel's logic, several
+of whose members, mature men, were devout champions of the dialectical
+method.  My blows therefore were aimed almost entirely at that.  I
+reprint the paper here (albeit with some misgivings), partly because I
+believe the dialectical method to be wholly abominable when worked by
+concepts alone, and partly because the essay casts some positive light
+on the pluralist-empiricist point of view.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{xiv}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+The paper on Psychical Research is added to the volume for convenience
+and utility.  Attracted to this study some years ago by my love of
+sportsmanlike fair play in science, I have seen enough to convince me
+of its great importance, and I wish to gain for it what interest I can.
+The American Branch of the Society is in need of more support, and if
+my article draws some new associates thereto, it will have served its
+turn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Apology is also needed for the repetition of the same passage in two
+essays (pp. 59-61 and 96-7, 100-1).  My excuse is that one cannot
+always express the same thought in two ways that seem equally forcible,
+so one has to copy one's former words.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Crillon-quotation on page 62 is due to Mr. W. M. Salter (who
+employed it in a similar manner in the 'Index' for August 24, 1882),
+and the dream-metaphor on p. 174 is a reminiscence from some novel of
+George Sand's&mdash;I forget which&mdash;read by me thirty years ago.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Finally, the revision of the essays has consisted almost entirely in
+excisions.  Probably less than a page and a half in all of new matter
+has been added.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+HARVARD UNIVERSITY,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">December, 1896.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch00fn1"></A>
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch00fn1text">1</A>] B. P. Blood: The Flaw in Supremacy: Published by the Author,
+Amsterdam, N. Y., 1893.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{x}</SPAN>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONTENTS.
+</H2>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="right">
+PAGE
+</H4>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> THE WILL TO BELIEVE </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P1">1</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Hypotheses and options, <A HREF="#P1">1</A>.  Pascal's wager, <A HREF="#P5">5</A>.  Clifford's
+veto, <A HREF="#P8">8</A>.  Psychological causes of belief, <A HREF="#P9">9</A>.  Thesis of the
+Essay, <A HREF="#P11">11</A>.  Empiricism and absolutism, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>.  Objective certitude
+and its unattainability, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>. Two different sorts of risks in
+believing, <A HREF="#P17">17</A>.  Some risk unavoidable, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>.  Faith may bring
+forth its own verification, <A HREF="#P22">22</A>.  Logical conditions of religious
+belief, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> IS LIFE WORTH LIVING  </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P32">32</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Temperamental Optimism and Pessimism, <A HREF="#P33">33</A>.  How reconcile
+with life one bent on suicide? <A HREF="#P38">38</A>.  Religious melancholy and its
+cure, <A HREF="#P39">39</A>.  Decay of Natural Theology, <A HREF="#P43">43</A>.  Instinctive antidotes
+to pessimism, <A HREF="#P46">46</A>.  Religion involves belief in an unseen
+extension of the world, <A HREF="#P51">51</A>.  Scientific positivism, <A HREF="#P52">52</A>.  Doubt
+actuates conduct as much as belief does, <A HREF="#P54">54</A>.  To deny certain
+faiths is logically absurd, for they make their objects true, <A HREF="#P56">56</A>.
+Conclusion, <A HREF="#P61">6l</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY  </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P63">63</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Rationality means fluent thinking, <A HREF="#P63">63</A>.  Simplification, <A HREF="#P65">65</A>.
+Clearness, <A HREF="#P66">66</A>.  Their antagonism, <A HREF="#P66">66</A>.  Inadequacy of the
+abstract, <A HREF="#P68">68</A>.  The thought of nonentity, <A HREF="#P71">71</A>.  Mysticism, <A HREF="#P74">74</A>.  Pure
+theory cannot banish wonder, <A HREF="#P75">75</A>.  The passage to practice may
+restore the feeling of rationality, <A HREF="#P75">75</A>.  Familiarity and
+expectancy, <A HREF="#P76">76</A>.  'Substance,' <A HREF="#P80">80</A>.  A rational world must appear
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{xvi}</SPAN>
+congruous with our powers, <A HREF="#P82">82</A>.  But these differ from man to
+man, <A HREF="#P88">88</A>.  Faith is one of them, <A HREF="#P90">90</A>.  Inseparable from doubt, <A HREF="#P95">95</A>.
+May verify itself, <A HREF="#P96">96</A>.  Its rôle in ethics, <A HREF="#P98">98</A>.  Optimism and
+pessimism, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>.  Is this a moral universe?&mdash;what does the problem
+mean? <A HREF="#P103">103</A>.  Anaesthesia <I>versus</I> energy, <A HREF="#P107">107</A>.  Active assumption
+necessary, <A HREF="#P107">107</A>.  Conclusion, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM  </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P111">111</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Prestige of Physiology, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>.  Plan of neural action, <A HREF="#P113">113</A>.  God
+the mind's adequate object, <A HREF="#P116">116</A>.  Contrast between world as
+perceived and as conceived, <A HREF="#P118">118</A>.  God, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>.  The mind's three
+departments, <A HREF="#P123">123</A>.  Science due to a subjective demand, <A HREF="#P129">129</A>.
+Theism a mean between two extremes, <A HREF="#P134">134</A>.  Gnosticism, <A HREF="#P137">137</A>.
+No intellection except for practical ends, <A HREF="#P140">140</A>.  Conclusion, <A HREF="#P142">142</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM  </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P145">145</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Philosophies seek a rational world, <A HREF="#P146">146</A>.  Determinism and
+Indeterminism defined, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.  Both are postulates of rationality,
+<A HREF="#P152">152</A>.  Objections to chance considered, <A HREF="#P153">153</A>.  Determinism
+involves pessimism, <A HREF="#P159">159</A>.  Escape <I>via</I> Subjectivism, <A HREF="#P164">164</A>.
+Subjectivism leads to corruption, <A HREF="#P170">170</A>.  A world with chance in
+it is morally the less irrational alternative, <A HREF="#P176">176</A>.  Chance not
+incompatible with an ultimate Providence, <A HREF="#P180">180</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE  </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P184">184</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The moral philosopher postulates a unified system, <A HREF="#P185">185</A>.
+Origin of moral judgments, <A HREF="#P185">185</A>.  Goods and ills are created by
+judgment?, <A HREF="#P189">189</A>.  Obligations are created by demands, <A HREF="#P192">192</A>.  The
+conflict of ideals, <A HREF="#P198">198</A>.  Its solution, <A HREF="#P205">205</A>.  Impossibility of an
+abstract system of Ethics, <A HREF="#P208">208</A>.  The easy-going and the
+strenuous mood, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.  Connection between Ethics and Religion, <A HREF="#P212">212</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT  </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P216">216</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Solidarity of causes in the world, <A HREF="#P216">216</A>.  The human mind abstracts
+in order to explain, <A HREF="#P219">219</A>.  Different cycles of operation in
+Nature, <A HREF="#P220">220</A>.  Darwin's distinction between causes that produce
+and causes that preserve a variation, <A HREF="#P221">221</A>.  Physiological causes
+produce, the environment only adopts or preserves, great men,
+<A HREF="#P225">225</A>.  When adopted they become social ferments, <A HREF="#P226">226</A>.  Messrs.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{xvii}</SPAN>
+Spencer and Allen criticised, <A HREF="#P232">232</A>.  Messrs. Wallace and
+Gryzanowski quoted, <A HREF="#P239">239</A>.  The laws of history, <A HREF="#P244">244</A>.  Mental
+evolution, <A HREF="#P245">245</A>.  Analogy between original ideas and Darwin's
+accidental variations, <A HREF="#P247">247</A>.  Criticism of Spencer's views, <A HREF="#P251">251</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS  </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P255">255</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+Small differences may be important, <A HREF="#P256">256</A>.  Individual
+differences are important because they are the causes of social
+change, <A HREF="#P259">259</A>.  Hero-worship justified, <A HREF="#P261">261</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> ON SOME HEGELISMS  </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P263">263</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The world appears as a pluralism, <A HREF="#P264">264</A>.  Elements of unity in
+the pluralism, <A HREF="#P268">268</A>.  Hegel's excessive claims, <A HREF="#P273">273</A>.  He makes of
+negation a bond of union, <A HREF="#P273">273</A>.  The principle of totality, <A HREF="#P277">277</A>.
+Monism and pluralism, <A HREF="#P279">279</A>.  The fallacy of accident in Hegel,
+<A HREF="#P280">280</A>.  The good and the bad infinite, <A HREF="#P284">284</A>.  Negation, <A HREF="#P286">286</A>.
+Conclusion, <A HREF="#P292">292</A>.&mdash;Note on the Anaesthetic revelation, <A HREF="#P294">294</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED  </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P299">299</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="intro">
+The unclassified residuum, <A HREF="#P299">299</A>.  The Society for Psychical
+Research and its history, <A HREF="#P303">303</A>.  Thought-transference, <A HREF="#P308">308</A>.
+Gurney's work, <A HREF="#P309">309</A>.  The census of hallucinations, <A HREF="#P312">312</A>.
+Mediumship, <A HREF="#P313">313</A>.  The 'subliminal self,' <A HREF="#P315">315</A>.  'Science' and her
+counter-presumptions, <A HREF="#P317">317</A>.  The scientific character of
+Mr. Myers's work, <A HREF="#P320">320</A>.  The mechanical-impersonal view of life
+versus the personal-romantic view, <A HREF="#P324">324</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<SPAN STYLE="float: left"> INDEX  </SPAN> <SPAN STYLE="float: right">  <A HREF="#P329">329</A> </SPAN>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P1"></A>1}</SPAN>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+ESSAYS
+</H2>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IN
+</H4>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE.[<A NAME="ch01fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch01fn1">1</A>]
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of his brother,
+Fitz-James, there is an account of a school to which the latter went
+when he was a boy.  The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse
+with his pupils in this wise: "Gurney, what is the difference between
+justification and sanctification?&mdash;Stephen, prove the omnipotence of
+God!" etc.  In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifference
+we are prone to imagine that here at your good old orthodox College
+conversation continues to be somewhat upon this order; and to show you
+that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects,
+I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon on
+justification by faith to read to you,&mdash;I mean an essay in
+justification <I>of</I> faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing
+attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely
+logical
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P2"></A>2}</SPAN>
+intellect may not have been coerced.  'The Will to
+Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily
+adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the
+logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to
+be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were
+personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves.
+I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own
+position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a good
+occasion to make my statements more clear.  Perhaps your minds will be
+more open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal.  I will be
+as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up some
+technical distinctions that will help us in the end.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+I.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Let us give the name of <I>hypothesis</I> to anything that may be proposed
+to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead
+wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either <I>live</I> or <I>dead</I>.  A
+live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to
+whom it is proposed.  If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion
+makes no electric connection with your nature,&mdash;it refuses to
+scintillate with any credibility at all.  As an hypothesis it is
+completely dead.  To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the
+Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities:
+it is alive.  This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis
+are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P3"></A>3}</SPAN>
+individual
+thinker.  They are measured by his willingness to act.  The maximum of
+liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably.
+Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency
+wherever there is willingness to act at all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an <I>option</I>.
+Options may be of several kinds.  They may be&mdash;1, <I>living</I> or <I>dead</I>;
+2, <I>forced</I> or <I>avoidable</I>; 3, <I>momentous</I> or <I>trivial</I>; and for our
+purposes we may call an option a <I>genuine</I> option when it is of the
+forced, living, and momentous kind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+1.  A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones.  If
+I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a
+dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive.
+But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise:
+trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small,
+to your belief.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+2.  Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella
+or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not
+forced.  You can easily avoid it by not going out at all.  Similarly,
+if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or
+call it false," your option is avoidable.  You may remain indifferent
+to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any
+judgment as to my theory.  But if I say, "Either accept this truth or
+go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing
+place outside of the alternative.  Every dilemma based on a complete
+logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option
+of this forced kind.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P4"></A>4}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+3.  Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North
+Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would
+probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would
+either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether
+or put at least the chance of it into your hands.  He who refuses to
+embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried
+and failed.  <I>Per contra</I>, the option is trivial when the opportunity
+is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is
+reversible if it later prove unwise.  Such trivial options abound in
+the scientific life.  A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to
+spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent.
+But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for
+his loss of time, no vital harm being done.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions
+well in mind.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+II.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion.
+When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and
+volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions.  When we look
+at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had
+once said its say.  Let us take the latter facts up first.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our
+opinions being modifiable at will?  Can our will either help or hinder
+our intellect in its perceptions of truth?  Can we, by just willing it,
+believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P5"></A>5}</SPAN>
+and that the
+portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else?  Can
+we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were
+true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with
+rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar
+bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars?  We can say any of these
+things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just
+such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in
+made up,&mdash;matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and
+relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if
+we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any
+action of our own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Pascal's Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known in literature
+as Pascal's wager.  In it he tries to force us into Christianity by
+reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with the
+stakes in a game of chance.  Translated freely his words are these: You
+must either believe or not believe that God is&mdash;which will you do?
+Your human reason cannot say.  A game is going on between you and the
+nature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out either
+heads or tails.  Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if you
+should stake all you have on heads, or God's existence: if you win in
+such case, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at
+all.  If there were an infinity of chances, and only one for God in
+this wager, still you ought to stake your all on God; for though you
+surely risk a finite loss by this procedure, any finite loss is
+reasonable, even a certain one is reasonable, if there is but the
+possibility of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P6"></A>6}</SPAN>
+infinite gain.  Go, then, and take holy water, and
+have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples,&mdash;<I>Cela
+vous fera croire et vous abêtira</I>.  Why should you not?  At bottom,
+what have you to lose?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in
+the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps.  Surely
+Pascal's own personal belief in masses and holy water had far other
+springs; and this celebrated page of his is but an argument for others,
+a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the
+unbelieving heart.  We feel that a faith in masses and holy water
+adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the
+inner soul of faith's reality; and if we were ourselves in the place of
+the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off
+believers of this pattern from their infinite reward.  It is evident
+that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses
+and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a
+living option.  Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water on
+its account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seem
+such foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for them
+specifically, leaves us unmoved.  As well might the Mahdi write to us,
+saying, "I am the Expected One whom God has created in his effulgence.
+You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me; otherwise you shall be
+cut off from the light of the sun.  Weigh, then, your infinite gain if
+I am genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not!"  His logic
+would be that of Pascal; but he would vainly use it on us, for the
+hypothesis he offers us is dead.  No tendency to act on it exists in us
+to any degree.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P7"></A>7}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of
+view, simply silly.  From another point of view it is worse than silly,
+it is vile.  When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical
+sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested
+moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience
+and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to
+the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar;
+how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,&mdash;then how
+besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes
+blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things
+from out of his private dream!  Can we wonder if those bred in the
+rugged and manly school of science should feel like spewing such
+subjectivism out of their mouths?  The whole system of loyalties which
+grow up in the schools of science go dead against its toleration; so
+that it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fever
+should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if the
+incorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness
+and unacceptableness to the heart in its cup.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+It fortifies my soul to know<BR>
+That, though I perish, Truth is so&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: "My only consolation lies in the
+reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they
+hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no
+reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend
+[the word 'pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have
+reached the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P8"></A>8}</SPAN>
+lowest depth of immorality."  And that delicious
+<I>enfant terrible</I> Clifford writes; "Belief is desecrated when given to
+unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private
+pleasure of the believer,...  Whoso would deserve well of his fellows
+in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very
+fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an
+unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away....
+If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though
+the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the pleasure
+is a stolen one....  It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of
+our duty to mankind.  That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs
+as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then
+spread to the rest of the town....  It is wrong always, everywhere, and
+for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+III.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by Clifford,
+with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the voice.  Free-will
+and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only
+fifth wheels to the coach.  Yet if any one should thereupon assume that
+intellectual insight is what remains after wish and will and
+sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what
+then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth
+of the facts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature is
+unable to bring to life again  But what has made them dead for us is
+for the most part
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P9"></A>9}</SPAN>
+a previous action of our willing nature of an
+antagonistic kind.  When I say 'willing nature,' I do not mean only
+such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we
+cannot now escape from,&mdash;I mean all such factors of belief as fear and
+hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the
+circumpressure of our caste and set.  As a matter of fact we find
+ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why.  Mr. Balfour gives the
+name of 'authority' to all those influences, born of the intellectual
+climate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or
+dead.  Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the
+conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in
+Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of
+the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name.  We see
+into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much
+less, than any disbeliever in them might possess.  His
+unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its
+conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the <I>prestige</I> of the
+opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our
+sleeping magazines of faith.  Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine
+hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can
+find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is
+criticised by some one else.  Our faith is faith in some one else's
+faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.  Our belief
+in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our
+minds and it are made for each other,&mdash;what is it but a passionate
+affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?  We want
+to have a truth; we want to believe that our
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P10"></A>10}</SPAN>
+experiments and
+studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better
+position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our
+thinking lives.  But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us <I>how we know</I>
+all this, can our logic find a reply?  No! certainly it cannot.  It is
+just one volition against another,&mdash;we willing to go in for life upon a
+trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.[<A NAME="ch01fn2text"></A><A HREF="#ch01fn2">2</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no
+use.  Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings.
+Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism
+in his scheme of life.  Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism,
+and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because a
+priestly system is for him an organic need and delight.  Why do so few
+'scientists' even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called?
+Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me,
+that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together
+to keep it suppressed and concealed.  It would undo the uniformity of
+Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot
+carry on their pursuits.  But if this very man had been shown something
+which as a scientist he might <I>do</I> with telepathy, he might not only
+have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough.  This
+very law which the logicians would impose upon us&mdash;if I may give the
+name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature
+here&mdash;is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all
+elements for
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P11"></A>11}</SPAN>
+which they, in their professional quality of
+logicians, can find no use.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our
+convictions.  There are passional tendencies and volitions which run
+before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter
+that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the
+previous passional work has been already in their own direction.
+Pascal's argument, instead of being powerless, then seems a regular
+clincher, and is the last stroke needed to make our faith in masses and
+holy water complete.  The state of things is evidently far from simple;
+and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the
+only things that really do produce our creeds.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IV.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to
+ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, on
+the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our
+minds.  The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this:  <I>Our passional
+nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between
+propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature
+be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such
+circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself
+a passional decision,&mdash;just like deciding yes or no,&mdash;and is attended
+with the same risk of losing the truth</I>.  The thesis thus abstractly
+expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear.  But I must first
+indulge in a bit more of preliminary work.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P12"></A>12}</SPAN>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+V.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion we are on
+'dogmatic' ground,&mdash;ground, I mean, which leaves systematic
+philosophical scepticism altogether out of account.  The postulate that
+there is truth, and that it is the destiny of our minds to attain it,
+we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make
+it.  We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point.
+But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be
+held in two ways.  We may talk of the <I>empiricist</I> way and of the
+<I>absolutist</I> way of believing in truth.  The absolutists in this matter
+say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can <I>know
+when</I> we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that
+although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when.  To <I>know</I>
+is one thing, and to know for certain <I>that</I> we know is another.  One
+may hold to the first being possible without the second; hence the
+empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic
+in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees
+of dogmatism in their lives.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist
+tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the
+absolutist tendency has had everything its own way.  The characteristic
+sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainly
+consisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or system
+that by it bottom-certitude had been attained.  "Other philosophies are
+collections of opinions, mostly false; <I>my</I> philosophy
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P13"></A>13}</SPAN>
+gives
+standing-ground forever,"&mdash;who does not recognize in this the key-note
+of every system worthy of the name?  A system, to be a system at all,
+must come as a <I>closed</I> system, reversible in this or that detail,
+perchance, but in its essential features never!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go when one wishes to
+find perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elaborated this
+absolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that of 'objective
+evidence.'  If, for example, I am unable to doubt that I now exist
+before you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortal
+then I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my intellect
+irresistibly.  The final ground of this objective evidence possessed by
+certain propositions is the <I>adaequatio intellectûs nostri cum rê</I>.
+The certitude it brings involves an <I>aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum
+assensum</I> on the part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the
+subject a <I>quietem in cognitione</I>, when once the object is mentally
+received, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and in the whole
+transaction nothing operates but the <I>entitas ipsa</I> of the object and
+the <I>entitas ipsa</I> of the mind.  We slouchy modern thinkers dislike to
+talk in Latin,&mdash;indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at
+bottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever we
+uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, and
+I do.  Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know
+that we do know.  There is something that gives a click inside of us, a
+bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept
+the dial and meet over the meridian hour.  The greatest empiricists
+among us are only empiricists on reflection: when
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P14"></A>14}</SPAN>
+left to their
+instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.  When the Cliffords
+tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficient
+evidence,' insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind.
+For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other
+way.  They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the
+universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead
+hypothesis from the start.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+VI.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in our
+quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact?  Shall
+we espouse and indorse it?  Or shall we treat it as a weakness of our
+nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can
+follow as reflective men.  Objective evidence and certitude are
+doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and
+dream-visited planet are they found?  I am, therefore, myself a
+complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes.  I
+live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on
+experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our
+opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them&mdash;I absolutely do
+not care which&mdash;as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible,
+I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the
+whole history of philosophy will bear me out.  There is but one
+indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic
+scepticism itself leaves
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P15"></A>15}</SPAN>
+standing,&mdash;the truth that the present
+phenomenon of consciousness exists.  That, however, is the bare
+starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be
+philosophized about.  The various philosophies are but so many attempts
+at expressing what this stuff really is.  And if we repair to our
+libraries what disagreement do we discover!  Where is a certainly true
+answer found?  Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as
+two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing
+by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever
+regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been
+called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by
+some one else.  The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play
+but in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as Zöllner and
+Charles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logic
+by the Hegelians, are striking instances in point.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.
+Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting
+it either in revelation, the <I>consensus gentium</I>, the instincts of the
+heart, or the systematized experience of the race.  Others make the
+perceptive moment its own test,&mdash;Descartes, for instance, with his
+clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid with
+his 'common-sense;' and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment <I>a
+priori</I>.  The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to be
+verified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity or
+self-relation, realized when a thing is its own other,&mdash;are standards
+which, in turn, have been used.  The much
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P16"></A>16}</SPAN>
+lauded objective
+evidence is never triumphantly there, it is a mere aspiration or
+<I>Grenzbegriff</I>, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking
+life.  To claim that certain truths now possess it, is simply to say
+that when you think them true and they <I>are</I> true, then their evidence
+is objective, otherwise it is not.  But practically one's conviction
+that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only
+one more subjective opinion added to the lot.  For what a contradictory
+array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been
+claimed!  The world is rational through and through,&mdash;its existence is
+an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God,&mdash;a personal God is
+inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately
+known,&mdash;the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative
+exists,&mdash;obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent
+spiritual principle is in every one,&mdash;there are only shifting states of
+mind; there is an endless chain of causes,&mdash;there is an absolute first
+cause; an eternal necessity,&mdash;a freedom; a purpose,&mdash;no purpose; a
+primal One,&mdash;a primal Many; a universal continuity,&mdash;an essential
+discontinuity in things; an infinity,&mdash;no infinity.  There is
+this,&mdash;there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not
+thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false;
+and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the
+trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even
+with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for
+knowing whether it be truth or no.  When, indeed, one remembers that
+the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of
+objective certitude has been
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P17"></A>17}</SPAN>
+the conscientious labors of the Holy
+Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the
+doctrine a respectful ear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the
+doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or
+hope of truth itself.  We still pin our faith on its existence, and
+still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by
+systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think.  Our great
+difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face.  The strength
+of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the <I>terminus a quo</I>
+of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the
+<I>terminus ad quem</I>.  Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to
+decide.  It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an
+hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by
+foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the
+total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means
+by its being true.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+VII.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done.
+There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of
+opinion,&mdash;ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference
+the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little
+concern.  <I>We must know the truth</I>; and <I>we must avoid error</I>,&mdash;these
+are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are
+not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two
+separable laws.  Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the
+truth <I>A</I>, we escape
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P18"></A>18}</SPAN>
+as an incidental consequence from believing
+the falsehood <I>B</I>, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving
+<I>B</I> we necessarily believe <I>A</I>.  We may in escaping <I>B</I> fall into
+believing other falsehoods, <I>C</I> or <I>D</I>, just as bad as <I>B</I>; or we may
+escape <I>B</I> by not believing anything at all, not even <I>A</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Believe truth!  Shun error!&mdash;these, we see, are two materially
+different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring
+differently our whole intellectual life.  We may regard the chase for
+truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may,
+on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and
+let truth take its chance.  Clifford, in the instructive passage which
+I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course.  Believe nothing, he
+tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it
+on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.  You,
+on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very
+small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be
+ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone
+indefinitely the chance of guessing true.  I myself find it impossible
+to go with Clifford.  We must remember that these feelings of our duty
+about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our
+passional life.  Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to
+grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, "Better go without
+belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant
+private horror of becoming a dupe.  He may be critical of many of his
+desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys.  He cannot imagine
+any one questioning its binding force.  For my own part, I
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P19"></A>19}</SPAN>
+have
+also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than
+being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's
+exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound.  It is like a
+general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle
+forever than to risk a single wound.  Not so are victories either over
+enemies or over nature gained.  Our errors are surely not such awfully
+solemn things.  In a world where we are so certain to incur them in
+spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier
+than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.  At any rate, it seems
+the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+VIII.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight at our
+question.  I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a matter of
+fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions,
+but that there are some options between opinions in which this
+influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful
+determinant of our choice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, and
+lend an inhospitable ear.  Two first steps of passion you have indeed
+had to admit as necessary,&mdash;we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we
+must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal
+consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take
+no further passional step.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow.  Wherever the
+option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can
+throw the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P20"></A>20}</SPAN>
+chance of <I>gaining truth</I> away, and at any rate save
+ourselves from any chance of <I>believing falsehood</I>, by not making up
+our minds at all till objective evidence has come.  In scientific
+questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in
+general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to
+act on is better than no belief at all.  Law courts, indeed, have to
+decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a
+judge's duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a
+learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time
+over: the great thing is to have them decided on <I>any</I> acceptable
+principle, and got out of the way.  But in our dealings with objective
+nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and
+decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the
+next business would be wholly out of place.  Throughout the breadth of
+physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and
+seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped
+by believing a premature theory need be faced.  The questions here are
+always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate
+not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or
+falsehood is seldom forced.  The attitude of sceptical balance is
+therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes.  What
+difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or have
+not a theory of the Röntgen rays, whether we believe or not in
+mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious
+states?  It makes no difference.  Such options are not forced on us.
+On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing
+reasons <I>pro et contra</I> with an indifferent hand.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P21"></A>21}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind.  For purposes of
+discovery such 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.  See for example the sagacity which Spencer and
+Weismann now display.  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.  The most useful investigator, because the most
+sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of
+the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become
+deceived.[<A NAME="ch01fn3text"></A><A HREF="#ch01fn3">3</A>]  Science has organized this nervousness into a regular
+<I>technique</I>, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen
+so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased
+to care for truth by itself at all.  It is only truth as technically
+verified that interests her.  The truth of truths might come in merely
+affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it.  Such truth as
+that, she might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of
+her duty to mankind.  Human passions, however, are stronger than
+technical rules.  "Le coeur a ses raisons," as Pascal says, "que la
+raison ne connaît pas;" and however indifferent to all but the bare
+rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the
+concrete players who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually,
+each one of them, in love with some pet 'live hypothesis' of his own.
+Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P22"></A>22}</SPAN>
+dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving
+us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in our
+speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at
+least as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery)
+always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have
+arrived?  It seems <I>a priori</I> improbable that the truth should be so
+nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that.  In the great
+boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom
+come out so even and leave the plates so clean.  Indeed, we should view
+them with scientific suspicion if they did.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IX.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+<I>Moral questions</I> immediately present themselves as questions whose
+solution cannot wait for sensible proof.  A moral question is a
+question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be
+good if it did exist.  Science can tell us what exists; but to compare
+the <I>worths</I>, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must
+consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.  Science herself
+consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite
+ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme
+goods for man.  Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it
+oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and
+correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn
+declares.  The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having
+them is decided by
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P23"></A>23}</SPAN>
+our will.  Are our moral preferences true or
+false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or
+bad for <I>us</I>, but in themselves indifferent?  How can your pure
+intellect decide?  If your heart does not <I>want</I> a world of moral
+reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.
+Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head's
+play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can.  Some men
+(even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the
+moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their
+supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill
+at ease.  The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naïveté
+and gullibility on his.  Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he
+clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which
+(as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no
+better than the cunning of a fox.  Moral scepticism can no more be
+refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can.  When we
+stick to it that there <I>is</I> truth (be it of either kind), we do so with
+our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results.  The
+sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which
+of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of
+questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of
+mind between one man and another.  <I>Do you like me or not?</I>&mdash;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
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P24"></A>24}</SPAN>
+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
+absolutists say, <I>ad extorquendum assensum meum</I>, ten to one your
+liking never comes.  How many women's hearts are vanquished by the mere
+sanguine insistence of some man that they <I>must</I> 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A social organism 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 any one else backs him
+up.  If we believed that the whole car-full would rise
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P25"></A>25}</SPAN>
+at once
+with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never
+even be attempted.  There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at
+all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.  <I>And where faith
+in a fact can help create the fact</I>, that would be an insane logic
+which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the
+'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking being can fall.  Yet
+such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to
+regulate our lives!
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+X.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire
+is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have
+nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question of
+religious faith.  Let us then pass on to that.  Religions differ so
+much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we
+must make it very generic and broad.  What then do we now mean by the
+religious hypothesis?  Science says things are; morality says some
+things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two
+things.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the
+overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last
+stone, so to speak, and say the final word.  "Perfection is
+eternal,"&mdash;this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting
+this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously
+cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P26"></A>26}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now
+if we believe her first affirmation to be true.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are
+<I>in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true</I>.
+(Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset.  If we are to
+discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option.  If for
+any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living
+possibility be true, then you need go no farther.  I speak to the
+'saving remnant' alone.)  So proceeding, we see, first, that religion
+offers itself as a <I>momentous</I> option.  We are supposed to gain, even
+now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital
+good.  Secondly, religion is a <I>forced</I> option, so far as that good
+goes.  We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting
+for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way <I>if
+religion be untrue</I>, we lose the good, <I>if it be true</I>, just as
+certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.  It is as if a man
+should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him
+because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after
+he brought her home.  Would he not cut himself off from that particular
+angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one
+else?  Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a
+certain particular kind of risk.  <I>Better risk loss of truth than
+chance of error</I>,&mdash;that is your faith-vetoer's exact position.  He is
+actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing
+the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is
+backing the religious hypothesis against the field.  To preach
+scepticism to us as a duty until
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P27"></A>27}</SPAN>
+'sufficient evidence' for
+religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in
+presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its
+being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may
+be true.  It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only
+intellect with one passion laying down its law.  And by what, forsooth,
+is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted?  Dupery for dupery,
+what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than
+dupery through fear?  I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse
+obedience to the scientist's command to imitate his kind of option, in
+a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to
+choose my own form of risk.  If religion be true and the evidence for
+it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher
+upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business
+in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the
+winning side,&mdash;that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to
+run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world
+religiously might be prophetic and right.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and
+right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is
+a live hypothesis which may be true.  Now, to most of us religion comes
+in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more
+illogical.  The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is
+represented in our religions as having personal form.  The universe is
+no longer a mere <I>It</I> to us, but a <I>Thou</I>, if we are religious; and any
+relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P28"></A>28}</SPAN>
+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 centres 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 from us 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,&mdash;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,
+forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that
+there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our
+logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we
+can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis.  If
+the hypothesis <I>were</I> true in all its parts, including this one, then
+pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances,
+would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature
+would be logically required.  I, therefore, for one cannot see my way
+to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to
+keep my willing nature out of the game.  I cannot do so for this plain
+reason, that <I>a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from
+acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were
+really there, would be an irrational rule</I>.  That for me
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P29"></A>29}</SPAN>
+is the
+long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the
+kinds of truth might materially be.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped.  But sad
+experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from
+radically saying with me, <I>in abstracto</I>, that we have the right to
+believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our
+will.  I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is because you have
+got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are
+thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious
+hypothesis which for you is dead.  The freedom to 'believe what we
+will' you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith
+you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, "Faith
+is when you believe something that you know ain't true."  I can only
+repeat that this is misapprehension.  <I>In concreto</I>, the freedom to
+believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the
+individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem
+absurdities to him who has them to consider.  When I look at the
+religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I
+think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically
+it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our
+heart, instincts, and courage, and wait&mdash;acting of course meanwhile
+more or less as if religion were <I>not</I> true[<A NAME="ch01fn4text"></A><A HREF="#ch01fn4">4</A>]&mdash;till
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P30"></A>30}</SPAN>
+doomsday, or
+till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have
+raked in evidence enough,&mdash;this command, I say, seems to me the
+queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave.  Were we
+scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse.  If we had an
+infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel
+ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting
+to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word.  But if we
+are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know
+for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle
+fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell.
+Indeed we <I>may</I> wait if we will,&mdash;I hope you do not think that I am
+denying that,&mdash;but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we
+believed.  In either case we <I>act</I>, taking our life in our hands.  No
+one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words
+of abuse.  We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to
+respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about
+the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner
+tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which
+is empiricism's glory; then only shall we live and let live, in
+speculative as well as in practical things.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I began by a reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation
+from him.  "What do you think
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P31"></A>31}</SPAN>
+of yourself?  What do you think of
+the world?...  These are questions with which all must deal as it seems
+good to them.  They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other
+we must deal with them....  In all important transactions of life we
+have to take a leap in the dark....  If we decide to leave the riddles
+unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is
+a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril.  If a
+man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one
+can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is
+mistaken.  If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not
+see that any one can prove that <I>he</I> is mistaken.  Each must act as he
+thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him.  We stand
+on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist,
+through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be
+deceptive.  If we stand still we shall be frozen to death.  If we take
+the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces.  We do not certainly know
+whether there is any right one.  What must we do?  'Be strong and of a
+good courage.'  Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what
+comes....  If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."[<A NAME="ch01fn5text"></A><A HREF="#ch01fn5">5</A>]
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch01fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="ch01fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="ch01fn3"></A>
+<A NAME="ch01fn4"></A>
+<A NAME="ch01fn5"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch01fn1text">1</A>] An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown
+Universities.  Published in the New World, June, 1896.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch01fn2text">2</A>] Compare the admirable page 310 in S. H. Hodgson's "Time and Space,"
+London, 1865.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch01fn3text">3</A>] Compare Wilfrid Ward's Essay, "The Wish to Believe," in his
+<I>Witnesses to the Unseen</I>, Macmillan &amp; Co., 1893.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch01fn4text">4</A>] Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe
+religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if
+we did believe it to be true.  The whole defence of religious faith
+hinges upon action.  If the action required or inspired by the
+religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the
+naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity,
+better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of
+idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds.  I myself believe, of course,
+that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which
+specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part
+unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch01fn5text">5</A>] Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 353, 2d edition.  London, 1874.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P32"></A>32}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?[<A NAME="ch02fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch02fn1">1</A>]
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some fifteen years
+ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the <I>liver</I>" had great
+currency in the newspapers.  The answer which I propose to give
+to-night cannot be jocose.  In the words of one of Shakespeare's
+prologues,&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"I come no more to make you laugh; things now,<BR>
+That bear a weighty and a serious brow,<BR>
+Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+must be my theme.  In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner
+in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not
+what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those
+whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the
+surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you
+heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests
+and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness.
+Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in
+turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder
+bass-note of life.  Let us search the lonely depths for an hour
+together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things
+our question may find.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P33"></A>33}</SPAN>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+I
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+With many men the question of life's worth is answered by a
+temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that
+anything seriously evil can exist.  Our dear old Walt Whitman's works
+are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism.  The mere joy of
+living is so immense in Walt Whitman's veins that it abolishes the
+possibility of any other kind of feeling:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"To breathe the air, how delicious!<BR>
+To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand!...<BR>
+To be this incredible God I am!...<BR>
+O amazement of things, even the least particle!<BR>
+O spirituality of things!<BR>
+I too carol the Sun, usher'd or at noon, or as now, setting;<BR>
+I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">growths of the earth....</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old,<BR>
+I sing the endless finales of things,<BR>
+I say Nature continues&mdash;glory continues.<BR>
+I praise with electric voice,<BR>
+For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,<BR>
+And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing
+but his happiness to tell:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted
+only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of
+felicity itself!  I rose with the sun, and I was happy; I went to walk,
+and I was happy; I saw 'Maman,' and I was happy; I left her, and I was
+happy.  I rambled through the woods and over the vine-slopes, I
+wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P34"></A>34}</SPAN>
+worked in the
+garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and
+happiness followed me everywhere.  It was in no one assignable thing;
+it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+If moods like this could be made permanent, and constitutions like
+these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses
+as the present one.  No philosopher would seek to prove articulately
+that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would
+vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the
+question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply.  But we
+are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and
+alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning
+life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them
+a standing refutation.  In what is called 'circular insanity,' phases
+of melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that we
+can discover; and often enough to one and the same well person life
+will present incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness
+to-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical
+books used to call "the concoction of the humors."  In the words of the
+newspaper joke, "it depends on the liver."  Rousseau's ill-balanced
+constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days
+a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear.  Some
+men seem launched upon the world even from their birth with souls as
+incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman's was of gloom, and they have
+left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his,&mdash;the
+exquisite Leopardi, for example; or our own contemporary,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P35"></A>35}</SPAN>
+James
+Thomson, in that pathetic book, The City of Dreadful Night, which I
+think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty,
+simply because men are afraid to quote its words,&mdash;they are so gloomy,
+and at the same time so sincere.  In one place the poet describes a
+congregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unillumined
+cathedral at night.  The sermon is too long to quote, but it ends
+thus:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief;<BR>
+A few short years must bring us all relief:<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Can we not bear these years of laboring breath.</SPAN><BR>
+But if you would not this poor life fulfil,<BR>
+Lo, you are free to end it when you will,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Without the fear of waking after death.'&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"The organ-like vibrations of his voice<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;</SPAN><BR>
+The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:</SPAN><BR>
+Our shadowy congregation rested still,<BR>
+As brooding on that 'End it when you will.'<BR>
+</P>
+
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 10%; letter-spacing: 2em">*****</SPAN><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Our shadowy congregation rested still,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">As musing on that message we had heard,</SPAN><BR>
+And brooding on that 'End it when you will,'<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Perchance awaiting yet some other word;</SPAN><BR>
+When keen as lightning through a muffled sky<BR>
+Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry;&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'The man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth:<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">We have no personal life beyond the grave;</SPAN><BR>
+There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Can I find here the comfort which I crave?</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'In all eternity I had one chance,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">One few years' term of gracious human life,&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+The splendors of the intellect's advance,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P36"></A>36}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'The social pleasures with their genial wit;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">The fascination of the worlds of art;</SPAN><BR>
+The glories of the worlds of Nature lit<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">By large imagination's glowing heart;</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'The rapture of mere being, full of health;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">The careless childhood and the ardent youth;</SPAN><BR>
+The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">The reverend age serene with life's long truth;</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'All the sublime prerogatives of Man;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">The storied memories of the times of old,</SPAN><BR>
+The patient tracking of the world's great plan<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Through sequences and changes myriadfold.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'This chance was never offered me before;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">For me the infinite past is blank and dumb;</SPAN><BR>
+This chance recurreth never, nevermore;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">A mockery, a delusion; and my breath</SPAN><BR>
+Of noble human life upon this earth<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,</SPAN><BR>
+I worse than lose the years which are my all:<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">What can console me for the loss supreme?</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair!</SPAN><BR>
+Our life 's a cheat, our death a black abyss:<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Hush, and be mute, envisaging despair.'</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"This vehement voice came from the northern aisle,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;</SPAN><BR>
+And none gave answer for a certain while,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;</SPAN><BR>
+At last the pulpit speaker simply said,<BR>
+With humid eyes and thoughtful, drooping head,&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P37"></A>37}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"'My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus:<BR>
+This life holds nothing good for us,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">But it ends soon and nevermore can be;</SPAN><BR>
+And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,<BR>
+And shall know nothing when consigned to earth;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 0.5em">I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.'"</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"It ends soon, and never more can be," "Lo, you are free to end it when
+you will,"&mdash;these verses flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson's
+pen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the
+world is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain
+of delight.  That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides
+declare,&mdash;an army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the
+British army, follows the sun round the world and never terminates.
+We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must 'ponder these things'
+also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life
+is the life we share.  The plainest intellectual integrity,&mdash;nay, more,
+the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"If suddenly," says Mr. Ruskin, "in the midst of the enjoyments of the
+palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of
+the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings
+who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the
+company feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible in
+destitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon the
+soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest,&mdash;would only the
+crumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, a
+passing thought, be vouchsafed to them?  Yet the actual facts, the real
+relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P38"></A>38}</SPAN>
+intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-bed,&mdash;by
+the few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate
+the merriment from the misery."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+II.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is
+to imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such
+terms with life that the only comfort left him is to brood on the
+assurance, "You may end it when you will."  What reasons can we plead
+that may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up the
+burden again?  Ordinary Christians, reasoning with would-be suicides,
+have little to offer them beyond the usual negative, "Thou shalt not."
+God alone is master of life and death, they say, and it is a
+blasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand.  But can <I>we</I> find
+nothing richer or more positive than this, no reflections to urge
+whereby the suicide may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel,
+that in spite of adverse appearances even for him life is still worth
+living?  There are suicides and suicides (in the United States about
+three thousand of them every year), and I must frankly confess that
+with perhaps the majority of these my suggestions are impotent to deal.
+Where suicide is the result of insanity or sudden frenzied impulse,
+reflection is impotent to arrest its headway; and cases like these
+belong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can only
+offer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end of
+this hour.  My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my
+words are to deal only with that metaphysical <I>tedium vitae</I> which is
+peculiar to
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P39"></A>39}</SPAN>
+reflecting men.  Most of you are devoted, for good or
+ill, to the reflective life.  Many of you are students of philosophy,
+and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality
+that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed.
+This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career.
+Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost
+as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the
+bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of
+life.  But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further
+reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholy
+and <I>Weltschmerz</I> bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing more
+recondite than religious faith.  So far as my argument is to be
+destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of
+certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith
+compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist in
+holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let
+loose these springs in a normal, natural way.  Pessimism is essentially
+a religious disease.  In the form of it to which you are most liable,
+it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no
+normal religious reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different
+levels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight
+view of things, and I must treat of them in turn.  The second stage is
+the more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exercise
+of religious
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P40"></A>40}</SPAN>
+trust and fancy.  There are, as is well known,
+persons who are naturally very free in this regard, others who are not
+at all so.  There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to
+their heart's content in prospects of immortality; and there are others
+who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem
+real to themselves at all.  These latter persons are tied to their
+senses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them,
+moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call 'hard
+facts,' which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into the
+unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment.  Minds of
+either class may, however, be intensely religious.  They may equally
+desire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and
+communion with the total soul of things.  But the craving, when the
+mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now reveals
+them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when
+it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another and
+a better world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease.  The
+nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources; but its great
+reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the
+phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind
+nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is.  What philosophers
+call 'natural theology' has been one way of appeasing this craving;
+that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has
+been another way.  Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two
+classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P41"></A>41}</SPAN>
+facts 'hard;' suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving
+for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to
+construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or
+poetically,&mdash;and what result can there be but inner discord and
+contradiction?  Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be
+relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts
+religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or,
+supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit the
+religious reading to go on.  These two ways of relief are the two
+stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I
+made allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, make
+more clear.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+III.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Starting then with nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religious
+craving, to say with Marcus Aurelius, "O Universe! what thou wishest I
+wish."  Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made
+heaven and earth, and, looking on them, saw that they were good.  Yet,
+on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth
+refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all.  Every
+phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some
+contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the
+mind.  Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep
+house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals
+over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of
+an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P42"></A>42}</SPAN>
+
+together meaninglessly to a common doom.  This is an uncanny, a
+sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar <I>unheimlichkeit</I>,
+or poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together
+which cannot possibly agree,&mdash;in our clinging, on the one hand, to the
+demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on the
+other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spirit's
+adequate manifestation and expression.  It is in the contradiction
+between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us,
+and with which we ought to have some communion, and the character of
+such a spirit as revealed by the visible world's course, that this
+particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle
+reside, Carlyle expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal
+'Sartor Resartus' entitled 'The Everlasting No.'  "I lived," writes
+poor Teufelsdröckh, "in a continual, indefinite, pining fear;
+tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as
+if all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me;
+as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring
+monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is the first stage of speculative melancholy.  No brute can have
+this sort of melancholy; no man who is irreligious can become its prey.
+It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the
+mere necessary outcome of animal experience.  Teufelsdröckh himself
+could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this
+world's experiences very well, were he not the victim of an originally
+unlimited trust and affection towards them.  If he might meet them
+piecemeal, with no suspicion
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P43"></A>43}</SPAN>
+of any whole expressing itself in
+them, shunning the bitter parts and husbanding the sweet ones, as the
+occasion served, and as the day was foul or fair, he could have
+zigzagged toward an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air
+vocal with his lamentations.  The mood of levity, of 'I don't care,' is
+for this world's ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic.  But, no!
+something deep down in Teufelsdröckh and in the rest of us tells us
+that there <I>is</I> a Spirit in things to which we owe allegiance, and for
+whose sake we must keep up the serious mood.  And so the inner fever
+and discord also are kept up; for nature taken on her visible surface
+reveals no such Spirit, and beyond the facts of nature we are at the
+present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that
+this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the
+inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naïvely and simply taken.
+There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous
+wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an
+established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round
+ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a "Moral and Intelligent
+Contriver of the World."  But those times are past; and we of the
+nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical
+philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to
+worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate
+expression.  Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature;
+but none the less so all we know of evil.  Visible nature is all
+plasticity and indifference,&mdash;a moral multiverse, as one might call it,
+and not a moral
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P44"></A>44}</SPAN>
+universe.  To such a harlot we owe no allegiance;
+with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are
+free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to
+follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such other
+particular features as will help us to our private ends.  If there be a
+divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot
+possibly be its <I>ultimate word</I> to man.  Either there is no Spirit
+revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as
+all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or
+<I>this</I> world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning
+resides in a supplementary unseen or <I>other</I> world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain (though it
+may seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that the
+naturalistic superstition, the worship of the God of nature, simply
+taken as such, should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educated
+mind.  In fact, if I am to express my personal opinion unreservedly, I
+should say (in spite of its sounding blasphemous at first to certain
+ears) that the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate
+relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the idea
+that such a God exists.  Such rebellion essentially is that which in
+the chapter I have quoted from Carlyle goes on to describe:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"'Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go
+cowering and trembling?  Despicable biped!...  Hast thou not a heart;
+canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom,
+though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes
+thee?  Let it come, then, I will meet it and defy it!'  And as I so
+thought, there rushed like a stream of fire
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P45"></A>45}</SPAN>
+over my whole soul;
+and I shook base Fear away from me forever....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the
+recesses of my being, of my Me, and then was it that my whole Me stood
+up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest.  Such a
+Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same
+Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly
+called.  The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless,
+outcast, and the Universe is mine;' to which my whole Me now made
+answer: 'I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!'  From that
+hour," Teufelsdröckh-Carlyle adds, "I began to be a man."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And our poor friend, James Thomson, similarly writes:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">I think myself, yet I would rather be</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">My miserable self than He, than He</SPAN><BR>
+Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">From whom it had its being, God and Lord!</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred,</SPAN><BR>
+Malignant and implacable!  I vow<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">For all the temples to Thy glory built,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Would I assume the ignominious guilt</SPAN><BR>
+Of having made such men in such a world."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+We are familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons
+exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their
+ancestral Calvinism,&mdash;him who made the garden and the serpent, and
+pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell.  Some of them have found
+humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology;
+but, both alike, they
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P46"></A>46}</SPAN>
+assure us that to have got rid of the
+sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward
+that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls.  Now,
+to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to
+sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be
+scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from
+which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and
+with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness may
+remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering
+mood.  With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for
+their relations with it then are only practical.  It looms up no longer
+so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance,
+as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to
+worry about their derivation from the 'one and only Power.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic
+superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers
+to his question about the worth of life.  There are in most men
+instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily when the burden
+of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off.  The certainty
+that you now <I>may</I> step out of life whenever you please, and that to do
+so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief.  The
+thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"This little life is all we must endure;<BR>
+The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,"&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+says Thomson; adding, "I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me."
+Meanwhile we can always
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P47"></A>47}</SPAN>
+stand it for twenty-four hours longer, if
+only to see what to-morrow's newspaper will contain, or what the next
+postman will bring.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But far deeper forces than this mere vital curiosity are arousable,
+even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and
+admiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will still
+respond to fit appeals.  This evil which we feel so deeply is something
+that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no
+'Substance' or 'Spirit' is behind them, are finite, and we can deal
+with each of them in turn.  It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that
+sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life;
+they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest.  The
+sovereign source of melancholy is repletion.  Need and struggle are
+what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the
+void.  Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of
+Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our
+Bible come.  Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of
+Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and
+idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French
+'milliards' were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the
+country in the shape in which we see it there to-day.  The history of
+our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with
+fighting ills.  Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been
+reading, as examples of what strong men will endure.  In 1483 a papal
+bull of Innocent VIII. enjoined their extermination.  It absolved those
+who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical
+pains and penalties, released them from
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P48"></A>48}</SPAN>
+any oath, legitimized
+their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired,
+and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"There is no town in Piedmont," says a Vaudois writer, "where some of
+our brethren have not been put to death.  Jordan Terbano was burnt
+alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin, Michael Goneto, an
+octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Meano;
+Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his living
+body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his
+entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place
+to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia;
+Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna
+Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and
+hunger on the snow at Sarcena; Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres,
+had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony at
+Penile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for having
+praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matches
+which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the
+fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and then
+lighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder, which,
+being lighted, blew his head to pieces;...  Sara Rostignol was slit
+open from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road
+between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried
+thus on a pike from San Giovanni to La Torre."[<A NAME="ch02fn2text"></A><A HREF="#ch02fn2">2</A>]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+<I>Und dergleicken mehr</I>!  In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of the
+Vaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors.  The
+places of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P49"></A>49}</SPAN>
+the
+whole Vaudois people learned French in order to follow their services.
+More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from the
+normal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand.  In
+1686 the Duke of Savoy ordered the three thousand that remained to give
+up their faith or leave the country.  Refusing, they fought the French
+and Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remained
+alive or uncaptured, when they gave up, and were sent in a body to
+Switzerland.  But in 1689, encouraged by William of Orange and led by
+one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred of
+them returned to conquer their old homes again.  They fought their way
+to Bobi, reduced to four hundred men in the first half year, and met
+every force sent against them, until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving
+up his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV.,
+restored them to comparative freedom,&mdash;since which time they have
+increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What are our woes and sufferance compared with these?  Does not the
+recital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us
+with resolution against our petty powers of darkness,&mdash;machine
+politicians, spoilsmen, and the rest?  Life is worth living, no matter
+what it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successful
+terminations and one's heel set on the tyrant's throat.  To the
+suicide, then, in his supposed world of multifarious and immoral
+nature, you can appeal&mdash;and appeal in the name of the very evils that
+make his heart sick there&mdash;to wait and see his part of the battle out.
+And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P50"></A>50}</SPAN>
+circumstances, is not the sophistical 'resignation' which devotees of
+cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of
+licking a despotic Deity's hand.  It is, on the contrary, a resignation
+based on manliness and pride.  So long as your would-be suicide leaves
+an evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly no concern with
+evil in the abstract and at large.  The submission which you demand of
+yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent
+acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at
+large is <I>none of your business</I> until your business with your private
+particular evils is liquidated and settled up.  A challenge of this
+sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made
+to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your
+reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with
+a certain interest again.  The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating
+thing.  When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts
+have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their
+lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together
+here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our
+relation to the universe in a more solemn light.  "Does not," as a
+young Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, "the
+acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?"
+Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some
+self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon
+which ours are built?  To hear this question is to answer it in but one
+possible way, if one have a normally constituted heart.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P51"></A>51}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and
+honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living
+from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to
+get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to
+religion and its more positive gifts.  A poor half-way stage, some of
+you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an
+honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instincts
+which are our nature's best equipment, and to which religion herself
+must in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IV.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the question, I
+come to what is the soul of my discourse.  Religion has meant many
+things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean
+to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called
+order of nature, which constitutes this world's experience, is only one
+portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this
+visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive,
+but in its relation to which the true significance of our present
+mundane life consists.  A man's religious faith (whatever more special
+items of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith in
+the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of
+the natural order may be found explained.  In the more developed
+religions the natural world has always been regarded as the mere
+scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal world, and affirmed
+to be a sphere of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P52"></A>52}</SPAN>
+education, trial, or redemption.  In these
+religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one
+can enter into life eternal.  The notion that this physical world of
+wind and water, where the sun rises and the moon sets, is absolutely
+and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one
+which we find only in very early religions, such as that of the most
+primitive Jews.  It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite
+of the fact that poets and men of science whose good-will exceeds their
+perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our
+contemporary ears) that, as I said a while ago, has suffered definitive
+bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must
+count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day.  For such
+persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science knows it,
+cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent.  It is
+mere <I>weather</I>, as Chauncey Wright called it, doing and undoing without
+end.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, I wish to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of this
+hour, that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a
+partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen
+spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem
+to us better worth living again.  But as such a trust will seem to some
+of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a
+word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that science
+opposes to our act.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and
+materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually
+tangible.  Of this sort of mind the entity called 'science' is the
+idol.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P53"></A>53}</SPAN>
+Fondness for the word 'scientist' is one of the notes by
+which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any
+opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it 'unscientific.'  It must
+be granted that there is no slight excuse for this.  Science has made
+such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our
+knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men of
+science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable
+virtues,&mdash;that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their
+head.  In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one
+teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already
+been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the
+picture to fill in.  But the slightest reflection on the real
+conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are.  They
+show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how
+one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so
+crude.  Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have
+arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been
+formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon
+the brevity of science's career.  It began with Galileo, not three
+hundred years ago.  Four thinkers since Galileo, each informing his
+successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might
+have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this
+room.  Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than
+the present one, an audience of some five or six score people, if each
+person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to
+the black unknown of the human species,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P54"></A>54}</SPAN>
+to days without a document
+or monument to tell their tale.  Is it credible that such a mushroom
+knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, <I>can</I> represent more than
+the minutest glimpse of what the universe will really prove to be when
+adequately understood?  No! our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.
+Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain,&mdash;that the world of
+our present natural knowledge <I>is</I> enveloped in a larger world of
+<I>some</I> sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no
+positive idea.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Agnostic positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically in
+the most cordial terms, but insists that we must not turn it to any
+practical use.  We have no right, this doctrine tells us, to dream
+dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe,
+merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our
+highest interests.  We must always wait for sensible evidence for our
+beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no
+hypotheses whatever.  Of course this is a safe enough position <I>in
+abstracto</I>.  If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs,
+to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a
+philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the
+other would be his wisest cue.  But, unfortunately, neutrality is not
+only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our
+relations to an alternative are practical and vital.  This is because,
+as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes,
+and involve conduct on our part.  Our only way, for example, of
+doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing <I>is</I>, is
+continuing to act as if it were <I>not</I>.  If, for instance,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P55"></A>55}</SPAN>
+I refuse
+to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and
+light no fire just as if it still were warm.  If I doubt that you are
+worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just
+as if you were <I>un</I>worthy of the same.  If I doubt the need of insuring
+my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no
+need.  And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can
+only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if
+it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as
+if it were <I>not</I> so, or in an irreligious way.  There are, you see,
+inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and
+must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically
+against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an
+unattainable thing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner
+interests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands?
+Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have
+no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain?
+In other cases divinations based on inner interests have proved
+prophetic enough.  Take science itself!  Without an imperious inner
+demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we
+should never have attained to proving that such harmonies be hidden
+between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world.
+Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact
+ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and
+blood, to gratify an inner need.  Whence such needs come from we do not
+know; we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes
+them with Darwin's 'accidental variations.'
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P56"></A>56}</SPAN>
+But the inner need of
+believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more
+spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative
+in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation
+ever can be in a professionally scientific head.  The toil of many
+generations has proved the latter need prophetic.  Why <I>may</I> not the
+former one be prophetic, too?  And if needs of ours outrun the visible
+universe, why <I>may</I> not that be a sign that an invisible universe is
+there?  What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our
+religious demands?  Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she
+can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic "thou shalt not
+believe without coercive sensible evidence" is simply an expression
+(free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of
+a certain peculiar kind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I
+mean by 'trusting'?  Is the word to carry with it license to define in
+detail an invisible world, and to anathematize and excommunicate those
+whose trust is different?  Certainly not!  Our faculties of belief were
+not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they
+were given us to live by.  And to trust our religious demands means
+first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the
+invisible world which they suggest were real.  It is a fact of human
+nature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that
+goes without a single dogma or definition.  The bare assurance that
+this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the
+external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces
+have the last word and are eternal,&mdash;this bare
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P57"></A>57}</SPAN>
+assurance is to
+such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every
+contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural
+plane.  Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all
+the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons
+at a stroke.  Often enough the wild-eyed look at life&mdash;the suicidal
+mood&mdash;will then set in.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And now the application comes directly home to you and me.  Probably to
+almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth
+living, if we only could be <I>certain</I> that our bravery and patience
+with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in
+an unseen spiritual world.  But granting we are not certain, does it
+then follow that a bare trust in such a world is a fool's paradise and
+lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free
+to indulge?  Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that
+is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf.
+That the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging
+multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove;
+and that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual
+atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for
+apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of
+our domestic animals.  Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but
+not of it.  They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner
+meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their
+intelligence,&mdash;events in which they themselves often play the cardinal
+part.  My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father
+demands damages.  The dog
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P58"></A>58}</SPAN>
+may be present at every step of the
+negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all
+means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with <I>him</I>; and
+he never <I>can</I> know in his natural dog's life.  Or take another case
+which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days.  Consider
+a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory.  He lies strapped
+on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark
+consciousness is literally in a sort of hell.  He cannot see a single
+redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these
+diabolical-seeming events are often controlled by human intentions with
+which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse
+of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce.
+Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and man, are to be
+bought by them.  It may be genuinely a process of redemption.  Lying on
+his back on the board there he may be performing a function
+incalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; and
+yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that
+must remain absolutely beyond his ken.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now turn from this to the life of man.  In the dog's life we see the
+world invisible to him because we live in both worlds.  In human life,
+although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing
+both these worlds a still wider world may be there, as unseen by us as
+our world is by him; and to believe in that world <I>may</I> be the most
+essential function that our lives in this world have to perform.  But
+"<I>may</I> be! <I>may</I> be!" one now hears the positivist contemptuously
+exclaim; "what use can a scientific life have for maybes?"  Well, I
+reply, the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P59"></A>59}</SPAN>
+'scientific' life itself has much to do with maybes,
+and human life at large has everything to do with them.  So far as man
+stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his
+entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes.  Not a
+victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done,
+except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a
+scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a
+mistake.  It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another
+that we live at all.  And often enough our faith beforehand in an
+uncertified result <I>is the only thing that makes the result come true</I>.
+Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have
+worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a
+terrible leap.  Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your
+feet are nerved to its accomplishment.  But mistrust yourself, and
+think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of
+maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and
+trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in
+the abyss.  In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the
+part of wisdom as well as of courage is to <I>believe what is in the line
+of your needs</I>, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled.  Refuse
+to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably
+perish.  But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save
+yourself.  You make one or the other of two possible universes true by
+your trust or mistrust,&mdash;both universes having been only <I>maybes</I>, in
+this particular, before you contributed your act.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is
+subject to conditions logically
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P60"></A>60}</SPAN>
+much like these.  It does, indeed,
+depend on you <I>the liver</I>.  If you surrender to the nightmare view and
+crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a
+picture totally black.  Pessimism, completed by your act, is true
+beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes.  Your mistrust of life has
+removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to
+it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that
+existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power.
+But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the
+nightmare view you cling to it that this world is not the <I>ultimatum</I>.
+Suppose you find yourself a very well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith<BR>
+As soldiers live by courage; as, by strength<BR>
+Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable
+subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more
+wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in
+the larger whole.  Have you not now made life worth living on these
+terms?  What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities
+ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave
+these higher faculties of yours no scope?  Please remember that
+optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own
+reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts
+of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition.
+They may even be the decisive elements in determining the definition.
+A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the
+addition
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P61"></A>61}</SPAN>
+of a feather's weight; a long phrase may have its sense
+reversed by the addition of the three letters <I>n-o-t</I>.  This life is
+worth living, we can say, <I>since it is what we make it, from the moral
+point of view</I>; and we are determined to make it from that point of
+view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have
+assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those
+efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral
+men.  Our faith in the seen world's goodness (goodness now meaning
+fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by
+leaning on our faith in the unseen world.  But will our faith in the
+unseen world similarly verify itself?  Who knows?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Once more it is a case of <I>maybe</I>; and once more maybes are the essence
+of the situation.  I confess that I do not see why the very existence
+of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response
+which any one of us may make to the religious appeal.  God himself, in
+short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our
+fidelity.  For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and
+tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this.  If
+this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained
+for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private
+theatricals from which one may withdraw at will.  But it <I>feels</I> like a
+real fight,&mdash;as if there were something really wild in the universe
+which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to
+redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and
+fears.  For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is
+adapted.  The deepest thing in our
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P62"></A>62}</SPAN>
+nature is this <I>Binnenleben</I>
+(as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the
+heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and
+unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears.  As through the cracks and
+crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which
+then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths
+of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take
+their rise.  Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature
+of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all
+abstract statements and scientific arguments&mdash;the veto, for example,
+which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith&mdash;sound to us like
+mere chatterings of the teeth.  For here possibilities, not finished
+facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to
+quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society,
+"as the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so
+the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life.  Believe
+that life <I>is</I> worth living, and your belief will help 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."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch02fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="ch02fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch02fn1text">1</A>] An Address to the Harvard Young Men's Christian Association.
+Published in the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and
+as a pocket volume by S. B. Weston, Philadelphia, 1896.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch02fn2text">2</A>] Quoted by George E. Waring in his book on Tyrol.  Compare A.
+Bérard: Les Vaudois, Lyon, Storck, 1892.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P63"></A>63}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY.[<A NAME="ch03fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch03fn1">1</A>]
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+I.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; and why
+do they philosophize at all?  Almost every one will immediately reply:
+They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall
+on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which
+every one by nature carries about with him under his hat.  But suppose
+this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize
+it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance?  The only
+answer can be that he will recognize its rationality as he recognizes
+everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him.
+When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What, then, are the marks?  A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is
+one of them.  The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to
+rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positive
+character.  Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is
+constituted merely by the absence
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P64"></A>64}</SPAN>
+of any feeling of irrationality?
+I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view.  All
+feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological
+speculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple
+discharge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest,
+impediment, or resistance.  Just as we feel no particular pleasure when
+we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the
+respiratory motions are prevented,&mdash;so any unobstructed tendency to
+action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative
+accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but
+little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought
+meets with difficulties, we experience distress.  It is only when the
+distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or to
+aspire.  When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or
+of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say
+with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such
+times, "I am sufficient as I am."  This feeling of the sufficiency of
+the present moment, of its absoluteness,&mdash;this absence of all need to
+explain it, account for it, or justify it,&mdash;is what I call the
+Sentiment of Rationality.  As soon, in short, as we are enabled from
+any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of
+seems to us <I>pro tanto</I> rational.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency,
+produce the sentiment of rationality.  Conceived in such modes, being
+vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation.  But
+this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up
+the theoretic way.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P65"></A>65}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+The facts of the world in their sensible diversity are always before
+us, but our theoretic need is that they should be conceived in a way
+that reduces their manifoldness to simplicity.  Our pleasure at finding
+that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is
+like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound
+into melodic or harmonic order.  The simplified result is handled with
+far less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophic
+conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-saving
+contrivance.  The passion for parsimony, for economy of means in
+thought, is the philosophic passion <I>par excellence</I>; and any character
+or aspect of the world's phenomena which gathers up their diversity
+into monotony will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher's mind
+stand for that essence of things compared with which all their other
+determinations may by him be overlooked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+More universality or extensiveness is, then, one mark which the
+philosopher's conceptions must possess.  Unless they apply to an
+enormous number of cases they will not bring him relief.  The knowledge
+of things by their causes, which is often given as a definition of
+rational knowledge, is useless to him unless the causes converge to a
+minimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects.
+The more multiple then are the instances, the more flowingly does his
+mind rove from fact to fact.  The phenomenal transitions are no real
+transitions; each item is the same old friend with a slightly altered
+dress.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon and the apple
+are, as far as their relation to the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P66"></A>66}</SPAN>
+earth goes, identical; of
+knowing respiration and combustion to be one; of understanding that the
+balloon rises by the same law whereby the stone sinks; of feeling that
+the warmth in one's palm when one rubs one's sleeve is identical with
+the motion which the friction checks; of recognizing the difference
+between beast and fish to be only a higher degree of that between human
+father and son; of believing our strength when we climb the mountain or
+fell the tree to be no other than the strength of the sun's rays which
+made the corn grow out of which we got our morning meal?
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But alongside of this passion for simplification there exists a sister
+passion, which in some minds&mdash;though they perhaps form the minority&mdash;is
+its rival.  This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the impulse
+to be <I>acquainted</I> with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole.
+Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred
+outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics.  It loves
+to recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more of
+these it can carry the happier it is.  It prefers any amount of
+incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literal
+details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of
+conceiving things that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the
+same time their concrete fulness.  Clearness and simplicity thus set up
+rival claims, and make a real dilemma for the thinker.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of
+these two cravings.  No system of philosophy can hope to be universally
+accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P67"></A>67}</SPAN>
+entirely
+subordinates the one to the other.  The fate of Spinosa, with his
+barren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that of
+Hume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness' of
+everything, on the other,&mdash;neither philosopher owning any strict and
+systematic disciples to-day, each being to posterity a warning as well
+as a stimulus,&mdash;show us that the only possible philosophy must be a
+compromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity.
+But the only way to mediate between diversity and unity is to class the
+diverse items as cases of a common essence which you discover in them.
+Classification of things into extensive 'kinds' is thus the first step;
+and classification of their relations and conduct into extensive 'laws'
+is the last step, in their philosophic unification.  A completed
+theoretic philosophy can thus never be anything more than a completed
+classification of the world's ingredients; and its results must always
+be abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstract
+essence embedded in the living fact,&mdash;the rest of the living fact being
+for the time ignored by the classifier.  This means that none of our
+explanations are complete.  They subsume things under heads wider or
+more familiar; but the last heads, whether of things or of their
+connections, are mere abstract genera, data which we just find in
+things and write down.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When, for example, we think that we have rationally explained the
+connection of the facts <I>A</I> and <I>B</I> by classing both under their common
+attribute <I>x</I>, it is obvious that we have really explained only so much
+of these items as <I>is x</I>.  To explain the connection of choke-damp and
+suffocation by the lack of oxygen is
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P68"></A>68}</SPAN>
+to leave untouched all the
+other peculiarities both of choke-damp and of suffocation,&mdash;such as
+convulsions and agony on the one hand, density and explosibility on the
+other.  In a word, so far as <I>A</I> and <I>B</I> contain <I>l</I>, <I>m</I>, <I>n</I>, and
+<I>o</I>, <I>p</I>, <I>q,</I> respectively, in addition to <I>x</I>, they are not explained
+by <I>x</I>.  Each additional particularity makes its distinct appeal.  A
+single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of
+view.  The entire fact is not accounted for until each and all of its
+characters have been classed with their likes elsewhere.  To apply this
+now to the case of the universe, we see that the explanation of the
+world by molecular movements explains it only so far as it actually
+<I>is</I> such movements.  To invoke the 'Unknowable' explains only so much
+as is unknowable, 'Thought' only so much as is thought, 'God' only so
+much as is God.  <I>Which</I> thought?  <I>Which</I> God?&mdash;are questions that
+have to be answered by bringing in again the residual data from which
+the general term was abstracted.  All those data that cannot be
+analytically identified with the attribute invoked as universal
+principle, remain as independent kinds or natures, associated
+empirically with the said attribute but devoid of rational kinship with
+it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hence the unsatisfactoriness of all our speculations.  On the one hand,
+so far as they retain any multiplicity in their terms, they fail to get
+us out of the empirical sand-heap world; on the other, so far as they
+eliminate multiplicity the practical man despises their empty
+barrenness.  The most they can say is that the elements of the world
+are such and such, and that each is identical with itself wherever
+found; but the question Where is it found? the practical man is left to
+answer by his own wit.  Which, of all the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P69"></A>69}</SPAN>
+essences, shall here and
+now be held the essence of this concrete thing, the fundamental
+philosophy never attempts to decide.  We are thus led to the conclusion
+that the simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the best
+possible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable
+and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the truth.  It is a
+monstrous abridgment of life, which, like all abridgments is got by the
+absolute loss and casting out of real matter.  This is why so few human
+beings truly care for philosophy.  The particular determinations which
+she ignores are the real matter exciting needs, quite as potent and
+authoritative as hers.  What does the moral enthusiast care for
+philosophical ethics?  Why does the <I>AEsthetik</I> of every German
+philosopher appear to the artist an abomination of desolation?
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie<BR>
+Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The entire man, who feels all needs by turns, will take nothing as an
+equivalent for life but the fulness of living itself.  Since the
+essences of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through the
+whole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness and
+alternation that he will enjoy them.  When weary of the concrete clash
+and dust and pettiness, he will refresh himself by a bath in the
+eternal springs, or fortify himself by a look at the immutable natures.
+But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; he will
+never carry the philosophic yoke upon his shoulders, and when tired of
+the gray monotony of her problems and insipid spaciousness of her
+results, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic
+richness of the concrete world.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P70"></A>70}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+So our study turns back here to its beginning.  Every way of
+classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular
+purpose.  Conceptions, 'kinds,' are teleological instruments.  No
+abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality
+except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver.  The
+interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but
+one of a thousand human purposes.  When others rear their heads, it
+must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs.  The
+exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their
+solutions is thus greatly reduced.  The only virtue their theoretic
+conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an
+equivalent for the world only so far as the world is simple,&mdash;the world
+meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily
+complex affair.  Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency
+in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the
+most invincible of human impulses.  The quest of the fewest elements of
+things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are men to
+think at all.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But suppose the goal attained.  Suppose that at last we have a system
+unified in the sense that has been explained.  Our world can now be
+conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief.  Our universal
+concept has made the concrete chaos rational.  But now I ask, Can that
+which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly
+called rational?  It would seem at first sight that it might.  One is
+tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is
+appeased by the identification of one
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P71"></A>71}</SPAN>
+thing with another, a datum
+which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving
+definitively, or be rational <I>in se</I>.  No otherness being left to annoy
+us, we should sit down at peace.  In other words, as the theoretic
+tranquillity of the boor results from his spinning no further
+considerations about his chaotic universe, so any datum whatever
+(provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle
+from the universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as
+there would then be for him absolutely no further considerations to
+spin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This in fact is what some persons think.  Professor Bain says,&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown to
+resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known.
+Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be apparent contradiction:
+the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity,
+fraternity.  When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation
+can go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; there
+is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire....  The
+path of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward generality, wider
+and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every
+department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends,
+perfect vision is gained."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold.  Our mind is so
+wedded to the process of seeing an <I>other</I> beside every item of its
+experience, that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented to
+it, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at the
+void beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation.  In
+short, it spins for itself the further positive consideration of a
+nonentity
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P72"></A>72}</SPAN>
+enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leads
+nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again.  But there is
+no natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and the
+thought stands oscillating to and fro, wondering "Why was there
+anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?"
+and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost.  Indeed, Bain's words are so
+untrue that in reflecting men it is just when the attempt to fuse the
+manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the
+conception of the universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection,
+that the craving for further explanation, the ontological
+wonder-sickness, arises in its extremest form.  As Schopenhauer says,
+"The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in
+motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is
+just as possible as its existence."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent of the
+philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense.  Absolute
+existence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothing
+remain unmediated to our understanding.  One philosopher only has
+pretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm.  Hegel, by trying
+to show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by a
+series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivable
+into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotary
+circulation of the mind within its bounds.  Since such unchecked
+movement gives the feeling of rationality, he must be held, if he has
+succeeded, to have eternally and absolutely quenched all rational
+demands.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But for those who deem Hegel's heroic effort to
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P73"></A>73}</SPAN>
+have failed,
+nought remains but to confess that when all things have been unified to
+the supreme degree, the notion of a possible other than the actual may
+still haunt our imagination and prey upon our system.  The bottom of
+being is left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come
+upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and
+wonder as little as possible.  The philosopher's logical tranquillity
+is thus in essence no other than the boor's.  They differ only as to
+the point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset the
+absoluteness of the data he assumes.  The boor does so immediately, and
+is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt.  The
+philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is
+warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only
+practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the
+ultimate Why?  If he cannot exorcise this question, he must ignore or
+blink it, and, assuming the data of his system as something given, and
+the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or of
+action based on it.  There is no doubt that this acting on an opaque
+necessity is accompanied by a certain pleasure.  See the reverence of
+Carlyle for brute fact: "There is an infinite significance in fact."
+"Necessity," says Dühring, and he means not rational but given
+necessity, "is the last and highest point that we can reach....  It is
+not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but also
+that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal equilibrium in
+an uttermost datum which can simply not be other than it is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism, God's fiat being
+in physics and morals such an
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P74"></A>74}</SPAN>
+uttermost datum.  Such also is the
+attitude of all hard-minded analysts and <I>Verstandesmenschen</I>.  Lotze,
+Renouvier, and Hodgson promptly say that of experience as a whole no
+account can be given, but neither seek to soften the abruptness of the
+confession nor to reconcile us with our impotence.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But mediating attempts may be made by more mystical minds.  The peace
+of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails.  To
+religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the
+world, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by
+the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish;
+nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep,&mdash;as Wordsworth says,
+"thought is not; in enjoyment it expires."  Ontological emotion so
+fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap it
+and put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence.  Even the
+least religious of men must have felt with Walt Whitman, when loafing
+on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that "swiftly arose
+and spread round him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument
+of the earth."  At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there
+were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic
+grubbing and brooding.  In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is
+at best a learned fool.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which the
+head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematized
+method would be a philosophic achievement of first-rate importance.
+But as used by mystics hitherto it has lacked universality, being
+available for few persons and at few times, and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P75"></A>75}</SPAN>
+even in these
+being apt to be followed by fits of reaction and dryness; and if men
+should agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge without logical
+pertinency, a plaster but no cure, and that the idea of non-entity can
+never be exorcised, empiricism will be the ultimate philosophy.
+Existence then will be a brute fact to which as a whole the emotion of
+ontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain eternally
+unsatisfied.  Then wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential
+attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizing
+of it will continue to be an ingredient in the philosophic industry of
+the race.  Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its
+Faust, or its Sartor Resartus.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+With this we seem to have considered the possibilities of purely
+theoretic rationality.  But we saw at the outset that rationality meant
+only unimpeded mental function.  Impediments that arise in the
+theoretic sphere might perhaps be avoided if the stream of mental
+action should leave that sphere betimes and pass into the practical.
+Let us therefore inquire what constitutes the feeling of rationality in
+its <I>practical</I> aspect.  If thought is not to stand forever pointing at
+the universe in wonder, if its movement is to be diverted from the
+issueless channel of purely theoretic contemplation, let us ask what
+conception of the universe will awaken active impulses capable of
+effecting this diversion.  A definition of the world which will give
+back to the mind the free motion which has been blocked in the purely
+contemplative path may so far make the world seem rational again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Well, of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand,
+that one which awakens the active
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P76"></A>76}</SPAN>
+impulses, or satisfies other
+aesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more
+rational conception, and will deservedly prevail.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is nothing improbable in the supposition that an analysis of the
+world may yield a number of formulae, all consistent with the facts.
+In physical science different formulae may explain the phenomena
+equally well,&mdash;the one-fluid and the two-fluid theories of electricity,
+for example.  Why may it not be so with the world?  Why may there not
+be different points of view for surveying it, within each of which all
+data harmonize, and which the observer may therefore either choose
+between, or simply cumulate one upon another?  A Beethoven
+string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses'
+tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms;
+but the application of this description in no way precludes the
+simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.  Just
+so a thorough-going interpretation of the world in terms of mechanical
+sequence is compatible with its being interpreted teleologically, for
+the mechanism itself may be designed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If, then, there were several systems excogitated, equally satisfying to
+our purely logical needs, they would still have to be passed in review,
+and approved or rejected by our aesthetic and practical nature.  Can we
+define the tests of rationality which these parts of our nature would
+use?
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere
+familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of their
+rationality.  The empiricist school has been so much struck by this
+circumstance
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P77"></A>77}</SPAN>
+as to have laid it down that the feeling of
+rationality and the feeling of familiarity are one and the same thing,
+and that no other kind of rationality than this exists.  The daily
+contemplation of phenomena juxtaposed in a certain order begets an
+acceptance of their connection, as absolute as the repose engendered by
+theoretic insight into their coherence.  To explain a thing is to pass
+easily back to its antecedents; to know it is easily to foresee its
+consequents.  Custom, which lets us do both, is thus the source of
+whatever rationality the thing may gain in our thought.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the broad sense in which rationality was defined at the outset of
+this essay, it is perfectly apparent that custom must be one of its
+factors.  We said that any perfectly fluent and easy thought was devoid
+of the sentiment of irrationality.  Inasmuch then as custom acquaints
+us with all the relations of a thing, it teaches us to pass fluently
+from that thing to others, and <I>pro tanto</I> tinges it with the rational
+character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, there is one particular relation of greater practical importance
+than all the rest,&mdash;I mean the relation of a thing to its future
+consequences.  So long as an object is unusual, our expectations are
+baffled; they are fully determined as soon as it becomes familiar.  I
+therefore propose this as the first practical requisite which a
+philosophic conception must satisfy: <I>It must, in a general way at
+least, banish uncertainty from the future</I>.  The permanent presence of
+the sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely ignored by most
+writers, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment is
+never free from the ingredient of expectancy.  Every one knows how when
+a painful thing has to be undergone in the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P78"></A>78}</SPAN>
+near future, the vague
+feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness
+and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our
+attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given
+present.  The same is true when a great happiness awaits us.  But when
+the future is neutral and perfectly certain, 'we do not mind it,' as we
+say, but give an undisturbed attention to the actual.  Let now this
+haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without
+an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind.
+But in every novel or unclassified experience this is just what occurs;
+we do not know what will come next; and novelty <I>per se</I> becomes a
+mental irritant, while custom <I>per se</I> is a mental sedative, merely
+because the one baffles while the other settles our expectations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every reader must feel the truth of this.  What is meant by coming 'to
+feel at home' in a new place, or with new people?  It is simply that,
+at first, when we take up our quarters in a new room, we do not know
+what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what
+forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and
+corners.  When after a few days we have learned the range of all these
+possibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears.  And so it does
+with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any
+essentially new manifestations from their character.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectly
+obvious; 'natural selection,' in fact, was bound to bring it about
+sooner or later.  It is of the utmost practical importance to an animal
+that he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P79"></A>79}</SPAN>
+that
+surround him, and especially that he should not come to rest in
+presence of circumstances that might be fraught either with peril or
+advantage,&mdash;go to sleep, for example, on the brink of precipices, in
+the dens of enemies, or view with indifference some new-appearing
+object that might, if chased, prove an important addition to the
+larder.  Novelty <I>ought</I> to irritate him.  All curiosity has thus a
+practical genesis.  We need only look at the physiognomy of a dog or a
+horse when a new object comes into his view, his mingled fascination
+and fear, to see that the element of conscious insecurity or perplexed
+expectation lies at the root of his emotion.  A dog's curiosity about
+the movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far as
+the point of deciding what is going to happen next.  That settled,
+curiosity is quenched.  The dog quoted by Darwin, whose behavior in
+presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to a sense
+'of the supernatural,' was merely exhibiting the irritation of an
+uncertain future.  A newspaper which could move spontaneously was in
+itself so unexpected that the poor brute could not tell what new
+wonders the next moment might bring forth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To turn back now to philosophy.  An ultimate datum, even though it be
+logically unrationalized, will, if its quality is such as to define
+expectancy, be peacefully accepted by the mind; while if it leave the
+least opportunity for ambiguity in the future, it will to that extent
+cause mental uneasiness if not distress.  Now, in the ultimate
+explanations of the universe which the craving for rationality has
+elicited from the human mind, the demands of expectancy to be satisfied
+have always played a fundamental part.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P80"></A>80}</SPAN>
+The term set up by
+philosophers as primordial has been one which banishes the
+incalculable.  'Substance,' for example, means, as Kant says, <I>das
+Beharrliche</I>, which will be as it has been, because its being is
+essential and eternal.  And although we may not be able to prophesy in
+detail the future phenomena to which the substance shall give rise, we
+may set our minds at rest in a general way, when we have called the
+substance God, Perfection, Love, or Reason, by the reflection that
+whatever is in store for us can never at bottom be inconsistent with
+the character of this term; so that our attitude even toward the
+unexpected is in a general sense defined.  Take again the notion of
+immortality, which for common people seems to be the touchstone of
+every philosophic or religious creed: what is this but a way of saying
+that the determination of expectancy is the essential factor of
+rationality?  The wrath of science against miracles, of certain
+philosophers against the doctrine of free-will, has precisely the same
+root,&mdash;dislike to admit any ultimate factor in things which may rout
+our prevision or upset the stability of our outlook.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Anti-substantialist writers strangely overlook this function in the
+doctrine of substance; "If there be such a <I>substratum</I>," says Mill,
+"suppose it at this instant miraculously annihilated, and let the
+sensations continue to occur in the same order, and how would the
+<I>substratum</I> be missed?  By what signs should we be able to discover
+that its existence had terminated?  Should we not have as much reason
+to believe that it still existed as we now have?  And if we should not
+then be warranted in believing it, how can we be so now?"  Truly
+enough, if we have
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P81"></A>81}</SPAN>
+already securely bagged our facts in a certain
+order, we can dispense with any further warrant for that order.  But
+with regard to the facts yet to come the case is far different.  It
+does not follow that if substance may be dropped from our conception of
+the irrecoverably past, it need be an equally empty complication to our
+notions of the future.  Even if it were true that, for aught we know to
+the contrary, the substance might develop at any moment a wholly new
+set of attributes, the mere logical form of referring things to a
+substance would still (whether rightly or wrongly) remain accompanied
+by a feeling of rest and future confidence.  In spite of the acutest
+nihilistic criticism, men will therefore always have a liking for any
+philosophy which explains things <I>per substantiam</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A very natural reaction against the theosophizing conceit and
+hide-bound confidence in the upshot of things, which vulgarly
+optimistic minds display, has formed one factor of the scepticism of
+empiricists, who never cease to remind us of the reservoir of
+possibilities alien to our habitual experience which the cosmos may
+contain, and which, for any warrant we have to the contrary, may turn
+it inside out to-morrow.  Agnostic substantialism like that of Mr.
+Spencer, whose Unknowable is not merely the unfathomable but the
+absolute-irrational, on which, if consistently represented in thought,
+it is of course impossible to count, performs the same function of
+rebuking a certain stagnancy and smugness in the manner in which the
+ordinary philistine feels his security.  But considered as anything
+else than as reactions against an opposite excess, these philosophies
+of uncertainty cannot be acceptable; the general mind will fail to
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P82"></A>82}</SPAN>
+come to rest in their presence, and will seek for solutions of a more
+reassuring kind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We may then, I think, with perfect confidence lay down as a first point
+gained in our inquiry, that a prime factor in the philosophic craving
+is the desire to have expectancy defined; and that no philosophy will
+definitively triumph which in an emphatic manner denies the possibility
+of gratifying this need.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+We pass with this to the next great division of our topic.  It is not
+sufficient for our satisfaction merely to know the future as
+determined, for it may be determined in either of many ways, agreeable
+or disagreeable.  For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it
+must define the future <I>congruously with our spontaneous powers</I>.  A
+philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either of two
+defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance.  First, its ultimate
+principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our
+dearest desires and most cherished powers.  A pessimistic principle
+like Schopenhauer's incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann's
+wicked jack-of-all-trades the Unconscious, will perpetually call forth
+essays at other philosophies.  Incompatibility of the future with their
+desires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of more
+fixed disquietude than uncertainty itself.  Witness the attempts to
+overcome the 'problem of evil,' the 'mystery of pain.'  There is no
+'problem of good.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But a second and worse defect in a philosophy than that of
+contradicting our active propensities is to give them no object
+whatever to press against.  A philosophy whose principle is so
+incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P83"></A>83}</SPAN>
+relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at one
+blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism.  Better face the
+enemy than the eternal Void!  This is why materialism will always fail
+of universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into an
+atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity.
+For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the
+impulses which we most cherish.  The real <I>meaning</I> of the impulses, it
+says, is something which has no emotional interest for us whatever.
+Now, what is called 'extradition' is quite as characteristic of our
+emotions as of our senses: both point to an object as the cause of the
+present feeling.  What an intensely objective reference lies in fear!
+In like manner an enraptured man and a dreary-feeling man are not
+simply aware of their subjective states; if they were, the force of
+their feelings would all evaporate.  Both believe there is outward
+cause why they should feel as they do: either, "It is a glad world! how
+good life is!" or, "What a loathsome tedium is existence!"  Any
+philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by
+explaining away its objects or translating them into terms of no
+emotional pertinency, leaves the mind with little to care or act for.
+This is the opposite condition from that of nightmare, but when acutely
+brought home to consciousness it produces a kindred horror.  In
+nightmare we have motives to act, but no power; here we have powers,
+but no motives.  A nameless <I>unheimlichkeit</I> comes over us at the
+thought of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the
+objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies.
+The monstrously lopsided equation of the universe and its
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P84"></A>84}</SPAN>
+knower,
+which we postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled
+by the no less lopsided equation of the universe and the <I>doer</I>.  We
+demand in it a character for which our emotions and active propensities
+shall be a match.  Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the
+cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that his
+reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast
+whole,&mdash;that he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do
+what it expects of him.  But as his abilities to do lie wholly in the
+line of his natural propensities; as he enjoys reacting with such
+emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the
+like; and as he very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or
+doubt,&mdash;a philosophy which should only legitimate emotions of the
+latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and
+craving.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up
+of practical interests.  The theory of evolution is beginning to do
+very good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of
+reflex action.  Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, a
+cross-section at a certain point, of what in its totality is a motor
+phenomenon.  In the lower forms of life no one will pretend that
+cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action.  The
+germinal question concerning things brought for the first time before
+consciousness is not the theoretic 'What is that?' but the practical
+'Who goes there?' or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, 'What is
+to be done?'&mdash;'Was fang' ich an?'  In all our discussions about the
+intelligence of lower animals, the only test we use is that of their
+<I>acting</I> as if for a purpose.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P85"></A>85}</SPAN>
+Cognition, in short, is incomplete
+until discharged in act; and although it is true that the later mental
+development, which attains its maximum through the hypertrophied
+cerebrum of man, gives birth to a vast amount of theoretic activity
+over and above that which is immediately ministerial to practice, yet
+the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the active nature
+asserts its rights to the end.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the cosmos in its totality is the object offered to consciousness,
+the relation is in no whit altered.  React on it we must in some
+congenial way.  It was a deep instinct in Schopenhauer which led him to
+reinforce his pessimistic argumentation by a running volley of
+invective against the practical man and his requirements.  No hope for
+pessimism unless he is slain!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Helmholtz's immortal works on the eye and ear are to a great extent
+little more than a commentary on the law that practical utility wholly
+determines which parts of our sensations we shall be aware of, and
+which parts we shall ignore.  We notice or discriminate an ingredient
+of sense only so far as we depend upon it to modify our actions.  We
+<I>comprehend</I> a thing when we synthetize it by identity with another
+thing.  But the other great department of our understanding,
+<I>acquaintance</I> (the two departments being recognized in all languages
+by the antithesis of such words as <I>wissen</I> and <I>kennen</I>; <I>scire</I> and
+<I>noscere</I>, etc.), what is that also but a synthesis,&mdash;a synthesis of a
+passive perception with a certain tendency to reaction?  We are
+acquainted with a thing as soon as we have learned how to behave
+towards it, or how to meet the behavior which we expect from it.  Up to
+that point it is still 'strange' to us.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P86"></A>86}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+If there be anything at all in this view, it follows that however
+vaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate universal datum, he
+cannot be said to leave it unknown to us so long as he in the slightest
+degree pretends that our emotional or active attitude toward it should
+be of one sort rather than another.  He who says "life is real, life is
+earnest," however much he may speak of the fundamental mysteriousness
+of things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness by
+ascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood called
+seriousness,&mdash;which means the willingness to live with energy, though
+energy bring pain.  The same is true of him who says that all is
+vanity.  For indefinable as the predicate 'vanity' may be <I>in se</I>, it
+is clearly something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape from
+suffering, to be our rule of life.  There can be no greater incongruity
+than for a disciple of Spencer to proclaim with one breath that the
+substance of things is unknowable, and with the next that the thought
+of it should inspire us with awe, reverence, and a willingness to add
+our co-operative push in the direction toward which its manifestations
+seem to be drifting.  The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it make
+such distinct demands upon our activity we surely are not ignorant of
+its essential quality.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great
+periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common,
+we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have
+said to the human being, "The inmost nature of the reality is congenial
+to <I>powers</I> which you possess."  In what did the emancipating message
+of primitive Christianity consist but in the announcement that
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P87"></A>87}</SPAN>
+God
+recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely
+overlooked?  Take repentance: the man who can do nothing rightly can at
+least repent of his failures.  But for paganism this faculty of
+repentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair.
+Christianity took it, and made it the one power within us which
+appealed straight to the heart of God.  And after the night of the
+middle ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses
+of the flesh, and defined the reality to be such that only slavish
+natures could commune with it, in what did the <I>sursum corda</I> of the
+platonizing renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype
+of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole
+aesthetic being?  What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals
+to powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them,&mdash;faith
+and self-despair,&mdash;but which were personal, requiring no priestly
+intermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God?
+What caused the wildfire influence of Rousseau but the assurance he
+gave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, if
+only the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between?
+How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time with
+cheer, except by saying, "Use all your powers; that is the only
+obedience the universe exacts"?  And Carlyle with his gospel of work,
+of fact, of veracity, how does he move us except by saying that the
+universe imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can
+perform?  Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be is
+here in the enveloping now; that man has but to obey himself,&mdash;"He who
+will rest in what he <I>is</I>,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P88"></A>88}</SPAN>
+is a part of destiny,"&mdash;is in like
+manner nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency
+of one's natural faculties.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In a word, "Son of Man, <I>stand upon thy feet</I> and I will speak unto
+thee!" is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs have
+helped the disciple.  But that has been enough to satisfy the greater
+part of his rational need.  <I>In se</I> and <I>per se</I> the universal essence
+has hardly been more defined by any of these formulas than by the
+agnostic <I>x</I>; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are,
+are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent; that it speaks to them and
+will in some way recognize their reply; that I can be a match for it if
+I will, and not a footless waif,&mdash;suffices to make it rational to my
+feeling in the sense given above.  Nothing could be more absurd than to
+hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse
+to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more
+powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies.  Fatalism, whose
+solving word in all crises of behavior is "all striving is vain," will
+never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is
+indestructible in the race.  Moral creeds which speak to that impulse
+will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and
+shadowy determination of expectancy.  Man needs a rule for his will,
+and will invent one if one be not given him.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But now observe a most important consequence.  Men's active impulses
+are so differently mixed that a philosophy fit in this respect for
+Bismarck will almost certainly be unfit for a valetudinarian poet.  In
+other words, although one can lay down in advance the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P89"></A>89}</SPAN>
+rule that a
+philosophy which utterly denies all fundamental ground for seriousness,
+for effort, for hope, which says the nature of things is radically
+alien to human nature, can never succeed,&mdash;one cannot in advance say
+what particular dose of hope, or of gnosticism of the nature of things,
+the definitely successful philosophy shall contain.  In short, it is
+almost certain that personal temperament will here make itself felt,
+and that although all men will insist on being spoken to by the
+universe in some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just the
+same way.  We have here, in short, the sphere of what Matthew Arnold
+likes to call <I>Aberglaube</I>, legitimate, inexpugnable, yet doomed to
+eternal variations and disputes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Take idealism and materialism as examples of what I mean, and suppose
+for a moment that both give a conception of equal theoretic clearness
+and consistency, and that both determine our expectations equally well.
+Idealism will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution,
+materialism by another.  At this very day all sentimental natures, fond
+of conciliation and intimacy, tend to an idealistic faith.  Why?
+Because idealism gives to the nature of things such kinship with our
+personal selves.  Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with,
+what we are least afraid of.  To say then that the universe essentially
+is thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all.
+There is no radically alien corner, but an all-pervading <I>intimacy</I>.
+Now, in certain sensitively egotistic minds this conception of reality
+is sure to put on a narrow, close, sick-room air.  Everything
+sentimental and priggish will be consecrated by it.  That element in
+reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there
+because it calls forth
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P90"></A>90}</SPAN>
+powers that he owns&mdash;the rough, harsh,
+sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the
+democratizer&mdash;is banished because it jars too much on the desire for
+communion.  Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws
+many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic
+reaction against the contrary extreme.  They sicken at a life wholly
+constituted of intimacy.  There is an overpowering desire at moments to
+escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no
+respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over
+us.  The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think,
+always be seen in philosophy.  Some men will keep insisting on the
+reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that we
+can act <I>with</I>; others, on the opacity of brute fact that we must react
+<I>against</I>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Now, there is one element of our active nature which the Christian
+religion has emphatically recognized, but which philosophers as a rule
+have with great insincerity tried to huddle out of sight in their
+pretension to found systems of absolute certainty.  I mean the element
+of faith.  Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is
+still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness
+to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the
+prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.  It is in
+fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs;
+and there will be a very widespread tendency in men of vigorous nature
+to enjoy a certain amount of uncertainty in their philosophic creed,
+just as risk lends a zest to worldly activity.  Absolutely certified
+philosophies
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P91"></A>91}</SPAN>
+seeking the <I>inconcussum</I> are fruits of mental
+natures in which the passion for identity (which we saw to be but one
+factor of the rational appetite) plays an abnormally exclusive part.
+In the average man, on the contrary, the power to trust, to risk a
+little beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function.  Any mode
+of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous
+power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to
+create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is
+willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is
+strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day;
+but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only
+legitimate when used in the interests of one particular
+proposition,&mdash;the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is
+uniform.  That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she
+follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can <I>know</I>; but
+in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or
+assume it.  As Helmholtz says: "Hier gilt nur der eine Rath: vertraue
+und handle!"  And Professor Bain urges: "Our only error is in proposing
+to give any reason or justification of the postulate, or to treat it as
+otherwise than begged at the very outset."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With regard to all other possible truths, however, a number of our most
+influential contemporaries think that an attitude of faith is not only
+illogical but shameful.  Faith in a religious dogma for which there is
+no outward proof, but which we are tempted to postulate for our
+emotional interests, just as we
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P92"></A>92}</SPAN>
+postulate the uniformity of nature
+for our intellectual interests, is branded by Professor Huxley as "the
+lowest depth of immorality."  Citations of this kind from leaders of
+the modern <I>Aufklärung</I> might be multiplied almost indefinitely.  Take
+Professor Clifford's article on the 'Ethics of Belief.'  He calls it
+'guilt' and 'sin' to believe even the truth without 'scientific
+evidence.'  But what is the use of being a genius, unless <I>with the
+same scientific evidence</I> as other men, one can reach more truth than
+they?  Why does Clifford fearlessly proclaim his belief in the
+conscious-automaton theory, although the 'proofs' before him are the
+same which make Mr. Lewes reject it?  Why does he believe in primordial
+units of 'mind-stuff' on evidence which would seem quite worthless to
+Professor Bain?  Simply because, like every human being of the
+slightest mental originality, he is peculiarly sensitive to evidence
+that bears in some one direction.  It is utterly hopeless to try to
+exorcise such sensitiveness by calling it the disturbing subjective
+factor, and branding it as the root of all evil.  'Subjective' be it
+called! and 'disturbing' to those whom it foils!  But if it helps those
+who, as Cicero says, "vim naturae magis sentiunt," it is good and not
+evil.  Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we
+form our philosophical opinions.  Intellect, will, taste, and passion
+co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the
+passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over
+the philosopher across the way.  The absurd abstraction of an intellect
+verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the
+probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose
+denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P93"></A>93}</SPAN>
+ideally as inept
+as it is actually impossible.  It is almost incredible that men who are
+themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can
+be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal
+preference, belief, or divination.  How have they succeeded in so
+stultifying their sense for the living facts of human nature as not to
+perceive that every philosopher, or man of science either, whose
+initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought, has taken
+his stand on a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in one
+direction rather than another, and a sort of preliminary assurance that
+his notion can be made to work; and has borne his best fruit in trying
+to make it work?  These mental instincts in different men are the
+spontaneous variations upon which the intellectual struggle for
+existence is based.  The fittest conceptions survive, and with them the
+names of their champions shining to all futurity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The coil is about us, struggle as we may.  The only escape from faith
+is mental nullity.  What we enjoy most in a Huxley or a Clifford is not
+the professor with his learning, but the human personality ready to go
+in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances.  The
+concrete man has but one interest,&mdash;to be right.  That for him is the
+art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.  Naked he
+is flung into the world, and between him and nature there are no rules
+of civilized warfare.  The rules of the scientific game, burdens of
+proof, presumptions, <I>experimenta crucis</I>, complete inductions, and the
+like, are only binding on those who enter that game.  As a matter of
+fact we all more or less do enter it, because it helps us to our end.
+But if the means presume to frustrate the end and call us cheats for
+being right in
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P94"></A>94}</SPAN>
+advance of their slow aid, by guesswork or by hook
+or crook, what shall we say of them?  Were all of Clifford's works,
+except the Ethics of Belief, forgotten, he might well figure in future
+treatises on psychology in place of the somewhat threadbare instance of
+the miser who has been led by the association of ideas to prefer his
+gold to all the goods he might buy therewith.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In short, if I am born with such a superior general reaction to
+evidence that I can guess right and act accordingly, and gain all that
+comes of right action, while my less gifted neighbor (paralyzed by his
+scruples and waiting for more evidence which he dares not anticipate,
+much as he longs to) still stands shivering on the brink, by what law
+shall I be forbidden to reap the advantages of my superior native
+sensitiveness?  Of course I yield to my belief in such a case as this
+or distrust it, alike at my peril, just as I do in any of the great
+practical decisions of life.  If my inborn faculties are good, I am a
+prophet; if poor, I am a failure: nature spews me out of her mouth, and
+there is an end of me.  In the total game of life we stake our persons
+all the while; and if in its theoretic part our persons will help us to
+a conclusion, surely we should also stake them there, however
+inarticulate they may be.[<A NAME="ch03fn2text"></A><A HREF="#ch03fn2">2</A>]
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P95"></A>95}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+But in being myself so very articulate in proving what to all readers
+with a sense for reality will seem a platitude, am I not wasting words?
+We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith.  Faith is
+synonymous with working hypothesis.  The only difference is that while
+some hypotheses can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy ages.
+A chemist who conjectures that a certain wall-paper contains arsenic,
+and has faith enough to lead him to take the trouble to put some of it
+into a hydrogen bottle, finds out by the results of his action whether
+he was right or wrong.  But theories like that of Darwin, or that of
+the kinetic constitution of matter, may exhaust the labors of
+generations in their corroboration, each tester of their truth
+proceeding in this simple way,&mdash;that he acts as if it were true, and
+expects the result to disappoint him if his assumption is false.  The
+longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows his faith in his
+theory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, in such questions as God, immortality, absolute morality, and
+free-will, no non-papal believer at the present day pretends his faith
+to be of an essentially different complexion; he can always doubt his
+creed.  But his intimate persuasion is that the odds in its favor are
+strong enough to warrant him in acting all along on the assumption of
+its truth.  His corroboration or repudiation by the nature of things
+may be deferred until the day of judgment.  The
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P96"></A>96}</SPAN>
+uttermost he now
+means is something like this: "I <I>expect</I> then to triumph with tenfold
+glory; but if it should turn out, as indeed it may, that I have spent
+my days in a fool's paradise, why, better have been the dupe of <I>such</I>
+a dreamland than the cunning reader of a world like that which then
+beyond all doubt unmasks itself to view."  In short, we <I>go in</I> against
+materialism very much as we should <I>go in</I>, had we a chance, against
+the second French empire or the Church of Rome, or any other system of
+things toward which our repugnance is vast enough to determine
+energetic action, but too vague to issue in distinct argumentation.
+Our reasons are ludicrously incommensurate with the volume of our
+feeling, yet on the latter we unhesitatingly act.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Now, I wish to show what to my knowledge has never been clearly pointed
+out, that belief (as measured by action) not only does and must
+continually outstrip scientific evidence, but that there is a certain
+class of truths of whose reality belief is a factor as well as a
+confessor; and that as regards this class of truths faith is not only
+licit and pertinent, but essential and indispensable.  The truths
+cannot become true till our faith has made them so.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps, and have had the
+ill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is
+by a terrible leap.  Being without similar experience, I have no
+evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and
+confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my
+feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps
+have been impossible.  But suppose that, on the contrary,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P97"></A>97}</SPAN>
+the
+emotions of fear and mistrust preponderate; or suppose that, having
+just read the Ethics of Belief, I feel it would be sinful to act upon
+an assumption unverified by previous experience,&mdash;why, then I shall
+hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launching
+myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the
+abyss.  In this case (and it is one of an immense class) the part of
+wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of
+the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its
+object.  <I>There are then cases where faith creates its own
+verification</I>.  Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save
+yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish.
+The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The future movements of the stars or the facts of past history are
+determined now once for all, whether I like them or not.  They are
+given irrespective of my wishes, and in all that concerns truths like
+these subjective preference should have no part; it can only obscure
+the judgment.  But in every fact into which there enters an element of
+personal contribution on my part, as soon as this personal contribution
+demands a certain degree of subjective energy which, in its turn, calls
+for a certain amount of faith in the result,&mdash;so that, after all, the
+future fact is conditioned by my present faith in it,&mdash;how trebly
+asinine would it be for me to deny myself the use of the subjective
+method, the method of belief based on desire!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In every proposition whose bearing is universal (and such are all the
+propositions of philosophy), the acts of the subject and their
+consequences throughout eternity should be included in the formula.  If
+<I>M</I>
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P98"></A>98}</SPAN>
+represent the entire world <I>minus</I> the reaction of the thinker
+upon it, and if <I>M</I> + <I>x</I> represent the absolutely total matter of
+philosophic propositions (<I>x</I> standing for the thinker's reaction and
+its results),&mdash;what would be a universal truth if the term x were of
+one complexion, might become egregious error if <I>x</I> altered its
+character.  Let it not be said that <I>x</I> is too infinitesimal a
+component to change the character of the immense whole in which it lies
+imbedded.  Everything depends on the point of view of the philosophic
+proposition in question.  If we have to define the universe from the
+point of view of sensibility, the critical material for our judgment
+lies in the animal kingdom, insignificant as that is, quantitatively
+considered.  The moral definition of the world may depend on phenomena
+more restricted still in range.  In short, many a long phrase may have
+its sense reversed by the addition of three letters, <I>n-o-t</I>; many a
+monstrous mass have its unstable equilibrium discharged one way or the
+other by a feather weight that falls.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let us make this clear by a few examples.  The philosophy of evolution
+offers us to-day a new criterion to serve as an ethical test between
+right and wrong.  Previous criteria, it says, being subjective, have
+left us still floundering in variations of opinion and the <I>status
+belli</I>.  Here is a criterion which is objective and fixed: <I>That is to
+be called good which is destined to prevail or survive</I>.  But we
+immediately see that this standard can only remain objective by leaving
+myself and my conduct out.  If what prevails and survives does so by my
+help, and cannot do so without that help; if something else will
+prevail in case I alter my conduct,&mdash;how can I possibly now, conscious
+of alternative courses of action open before me, either of which
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P99"></A>99}</SPAN>
+I
+may suppose capable of altering the path of events, decide which course
+to take by asking what path events will follow?  If they follow my
+direction, evidently my direction cannot wait on them.  The only
+possible manner in which an evolutionist can use his standard is the
+obsequious method of forecasting the course society would take <I>but for
+him</I>, and then putting an extinguisher on all personal idiosyncrasies
+of desire and interest, and with bated breath and tiptoe tread
+following as straight as may be at the tail, and bringing up the rear
+of everything.  Some pious creatures may find a pleasure in this; but
+not only does it violate our general wish to lead and not to follow (a
+wish which is surely not immoral if we but lead aright), but if it be
+treated as every ethical principle must be treated,&mdash;namely, as a rule
+good for all men alike,&mdash;its general observance would lead to its
+practical refutation by bringing about a general deadlock.  Each good
+man hanging back and waiting for orders from the rest, absolute
+stagnation would ensue.  Happy, then, if a few unrighteous ones
+contribute an initiative which sets things moving again!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All this is no caricature.  That the course of destiny may be altered
+by individuals no wise evolutionist ought to doubt.  Everything for him
+has small beginnings, has a bud which may be 'nipped,' and nipped by a
+feeble force.  Human races and tendencies follow the law, and have also
+small beginnings.  The best, according to evolution, is that which has
+the biggest endings.  Now, if a present race of men, enlightened in the
+evolutionary philosophy, and able to forecast the future, were able to
+discern in a tribe arising near them the potentiality of future
+supremacy; were able to see that their own
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P100"></A>100}</SPAN>
+race would eventually
+be wiped out of existence by the new-comers if the expansion of these
+were left unmolested,&mdash;these present sages would have two courses open
+to them, either perfectly in harmony with the evolutionary test:
+Strangle the new race now, and ours survives; help the new race, and it
+survives.  In both cases the action is right as measured by the
+evolutionary standard,&mdash;it is action for the winning side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus the evolutionist foundation of ethics is purely objective only to
+the herd of nullities whose votes count for zero in the march of
+events.  But for others, leaders of opinion or potentates, and in
+general those to whose actions position or genius gives a far-reaching
+import, and to the rest of us, each in his measure,&mdash;whenever we
+espouse a cause we contribute to the determination of the evolutionary
+standard of right.  The truly wise disciple of this school will then
+admit faith as an ultimate ethical factor.  Any philosophy which makes
+such questions as, What is the ideal type of humanity?  What shall be
+reckoned virtues?  What conduct is good? depend on the question, What
+is going to succeed?&mdash;must needs fall back on personal belief as one of
+the ultimate conditions of the truth.  For again and again success
+depends on energy of act; energy again depends on faith that we shall
+not fail; and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right,&mdash;which
+faith thus verifies itself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Take as an example the question of optimism or pessimism, which makes
+so much noise just now in Germany.  Every human being must sometime
+decide for himself whether life is worth living.  Suppose that in
+looking at the world and seeing how full it is of misery, of old age,
+of wickedness and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P101"></A>101}</SPAN>
+pain, and how unsafe is his own future, he
+yields to the pessimistic conclusion, cultivates disgust and dread,
+ceases striving, and finally commits suicide.  He thus adds to the mass
+<I>M</I> of mundane phenomena, independent of his subjectivity, the
+subjective complement <I>x</I>, which makes of the whole an utterly black
+picture illumined by no gleam of good.  Pessimism completed, verified
+by his moral reaction and the deed in which this ends, is true beyond a
+doubt.  <I>M</I> + <I>x</I> expresses a state of things totally bad.  The man's
+belief supplied all that was lacking to make it so, and now that it is
+made so the belief was right.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But now suppose that with the same evil facts <I>M</I>, the man's reaction
+<I>x</I> is exactly reversed; suppose that instead of giving way to the evil
+he braves it, and finds a sterner, more wonderful joy than any passive
+pleasure can yield in triumphing over pain and defying fear; suppose he
+does this successfully, and however thickly evils crowd upon him proves
+his dauntless subjectivity to be more than their match,&mdash;will not every
+one confess that the bad character of the <I>M</I> is here the <I>conditio
+sine qua non</I> of the good character of the <I>x</I>?  Will not every one
+instantly declare a world fitted only for fair-weather human beings
+susceptible of every passive enjoyment, but without independence,
+courage, or fortitude, to be from a moral point of view incommensurably
+inferior to a world framed to elicit from the man every form of
+triumphant endurance and conquering moral energy?  As James Hinton
+says,&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Little inconveniences, exertions, pains.&mdash;these are the only things in
+which we rightly feel our life at all.  If these be not there,
+existence becomes worthless, or worse;
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P102"></A>102}</SPAN>
+success in putting them
+all away is fatal.  So it is men engage in athletic sports, spend their
+holidays in climbing up mountains, find nothing so enjoyable as that
+which taxes their endurance and their energy.  This is the way we are
+made, I say.  It may or may not be a mystery or a paradox; it is a
+fact.  Now, this enjoyment in endurance is just according to the
+intensity of life: the more physical vigor and balance, the more
+endurance can be made an element of satisfaction.  A sick man cannot
+stand it.  The line of enjoyable suffering is not a fixed one; it
+fluctuates with the perfectness of the life.  That our pains are, as
+they are, unendurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne
+save in misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion alone makes
+patient,&mdash;that our pains are thus unendurable, means not that they are
+too great, but that <I>we are sick</I>.  We have not got our proper life.
+So you perceive pain is no more necessarily an evil, but an essential
+element of the highest good."[<A NAME="ch03fn3text"></A><A HREF="#ch03fn3">3</A>]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But the highest good can be achieved only by our getting our proper
+life; and that can come about only by help of a moral energy born of
+the faith that in some way or other we shall succeed in getting it if
+we try pertinaciously enough.  This world <I>is</I> good, we must say, since
+it is what we make it,&mdash;and we shall make it good.  How can we exclude
+from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation
+of the truth?  <I>M</I> has its character indeterminate, susceptible of
+forming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of a
+meliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on the
+other.  All depends on the character of the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P103"></A>103}</SPAN>
+personal contribution
+<I>x</I>.  Wherever the facts to be formulated contain such a contribution,
+we may logically, legitimately, and inexpugnably believe what we
+desire.  The belief creates its verification.  The thought becomes
+literally father to the fact, as the wish was father to the thought.[<A NAME="ch03fn4text"></A><A HREF="#ch03fn4">4</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let us now turn to the radical question of life,&mdash;the question whether
+this be at bottom a moral or an unmoral universe,&mdash;and see whether the
+method of faith may legitimately have a place there.  It is really the
+question of materialism.  Is the world a simple brute actuality, an
+existence <I>de facto</I> about which the deepest thing that can be said is
+that it happens so to be; or is the judgment of <I>better</I> or worse, of
+<I>ought</I>, as intimately pertinent to phenomena as the simple judgment
+<I>is</I> or <I>is not</I>?  The materialistic theorists say that judgments of
+worth are themselves mere matters of fact; that the words 'good' and
+'bad' have no sense apart from subjective passions and interests which
+we may, if we please, play fast and loose with at will, so far as any
+duty of ours to the non-human universe is concerned.  Thus, when a
+materialist says it is better for him to suffer great inconvenience
+than to break a promise, he only means that his social interests have
+become so knit up with
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P104"></A>104}</SPAN>
+keeping faith that, those interests once
+being granted, it is better for him to keep the promise in spite of
+everything.  But the interests themselves are neither right nor wrong,
+except possibly with reference to some ulterior order of interests
+which themselves again are mere subjective data without character,
+either good or bad.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For the absolute moralists, on the contrary, the interests are not
+there merely to be felt,&mdash;they are to be believed in and obeyed.  Not
+only is it best for my social interests to keep my promise, but best
+for me to have those interests, and best for the cosmos to have this
+me.  Like the old woman in the story who described the world as resting
+on a rock, and then explained that rock to be supported by another
+rock, and finally when pushed with questions said it was rocks all the
+way down,&mdash;he who believes this to be a radically moral universe must
+hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate
+<I>should</I>, or on a series of <I>shoulds</I> all the way down.[<A NAME="ch03fn5text"></A><A HREF="#ch03fn5">5</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The practical difference between this objective sort of moralist and
+the other one is enormous.  The subjectivist in morals, when his moral
+feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek
+harmony by toning down the sensitiveness of the feelings.  Being mere
+data, neither good nor evil in themselves, he may pervert them or lull
+them to sleep by any means at his command.  Truckling, compromise,
+time-serving, capitulations of conscience, are conventionally
+opprobrious names for what, if successfully carried out,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P105"></A>105}</SPAN>
+would be
+on his principles by far the easiest and most praiseworthy mode of
+bringing about that harmony between inner and outer relations which is
+all that he means by good.  The absolute moralist, on the other hand,
+when his interests clash with the world, is not free to gain harmony by
+sacrificing the ideal interests.  According to him, these latter should
+be as they are and not otherwise.  Resistance then, poverty, martyrdom
+if need be, tragedy in a word,&mdash;such are the solemn feasts of his
+inward faith.  Not that the contradiction between the two men occurs
+every day; in commonplace matters all moral schools agree.  It is only
+in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then
+routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.  It cannot then be
+said that the question, Is this a moral world? is a meaningless and
+unverifiable question because it deals with something non-phenomenal.
+Any question is full of meaning to which, as here, contrary answers
+lead to contrary behavior.  And it seems as if in answering such a
+question as this we might proceed exactly as does the physical
+philosopher in testing an hypothesis.  He deduces from the hypothesis
+an experimental action, <I>x</I>; this he adds to the facts <I>M</I> already
+existing.  It fits them if the hypothesis be true; if not, there is
+discord.  The results of the action corroborate or refute the idea from
+which it flowed.  So here: the verification of the theory which you may
+hold as to the objectively moral character of the world can consist
+only in this,&mdash;that if you proceed to act upon your theory it will be
+reversed by nothing that later turns up as your action's fruit; it will
+harmonize so well with the entire drift of experience that the latter
+will, as it were, adopt it, or at most give it an ampler
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P106"></A>106}</SPAN>
+interpretation, without obliging you in any way to change the essence
+of its formulation.  If this be an objectively moral universe, all acts
+that I make on that assumption, all expectations that I ground on it,
+will tend more and more completely to interdigitate with the phenomena
+already existing.  <I>M</I> + <I>x</I> will be in accord; and the more I live,
+and the more the fruits of my activity come to light, the more
+satisfactory the consensus will grow.  While if it be not such a moral
+universe, and I mistakenly assume that it is, the course of experience
+will throw ever new impediments in the way of my belief, and become
+more and more difficult to express in its language.  Epicycle upon
+epicycle of subsidiary hypothesis will have to be invoked to give to
+the discrepant terms a temporary appearance of squaring with each
+other; but at last even this resource will fail.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If, on the other hand, I rightly assume the universe to be not moral,
+in what does my verification consist?  It is that by letting moral
+interests sit lightly, by disbelieving that there is any duty about
+<I>them</I> (since duty obtains only as <I>between</I> them and other phenomena),
+and so throwing them over if I find it hard to get them satisfied,&mdash;it
+is that by refusing to take up a tragic attitude, I deal in the
+long-run most satisfactorily with the facts of life.  "All is vanity"
+is here the last word of wisdom.  Even though in certain limited series
+there may be a great appearance of seriousness, he who in the main
+treats things with a degree of good-natured scepticism and radical
+levity will find that the practical fruits of his epicurean hypothesis
+verify it more and more, and not only save him from pain but do honor
+to his sagacity.  While, on the other hand, he who contrary
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P107"></A>107}</SPAN>
+to
+reality stiffens himself in the notion that certain things absolutely
+should be, and rejects the truth that at bottom it makes no difference
+what is, will find himself evermore thwarted and perplexed and
+bemuddled by the facts of the world, and his tragic disappointment
+will, as experience accumulates, seem to drift farther and farther away
+from that final atonement or reconciliation which certain partial
+tragedies often get.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Anaesthesia</I> is the watchword of the moral sceptic brought to bay and
+put to his trumps.  <I>Energy</I> is that of the moralist.  Act on my creed,
+cries the latter, and the results of your action will prove the creed
+true, and that the nature of things is earnest infinitely.  Act on
+mine, says the epicurean, and the results will prove that seriousness
+is but a superficial glaze upon a world of fundamentally trivial
+import.  You and your acts and the nature of things will be alike
+enveloped in a single formula, a universal <I>vanitas vanitatum</I>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+For the sake of simplicity I have written as if the verification might
+occur in the life of a single philosopher,&mdash;which is manifestly untrue,
+since the theories still face each other, and the facts of the world
+give countenance to both.  Rather should we expect, that, in a question
+of this scope, the experience of the entire human race must make the
+verification, and that all the evidence will not be 'in' till the final
+integration of things, when the last man has had his say and
+contributed his share to the still unfinished <I>x</I>.  Then the proof will
+be complete; then it will appear without doubt whether the moralistic x
+has filled up the gap which alone kept the <I>M</I> of the world from
+forming an even and harmonious unity, or whether the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P108"></A>108}</SPAN>
+non-moralistic <I>x</I> has given the finishing touches which were alone
+needed to make the <I>M</I> appear outwardly as vain as it inwardly was.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But if this be so, is it not clear that the facts <I>M</I>, taken <I>per se</I>,
+are inadequate to justify a conclusion either way in advance of my
+action?  My action is the complement which, by proving congruous or
+not, reveals the latent nature of the mass to which it is applied.  The
+world may in fact be likened unto a lock, whose inward nature, moral or
+unmoral, will never reveal itself to our simply expectant gaze.  The
+positivists, forbidding us to make any assumptions regarding it,
+condemn us to eternal ignorance, for the 'evidence' which they wait for
+can never come so long as we are passive.  But nature has put into our
+hands two keys, by which we may test the lock.  If we try the moral key
+<I>and it fits</I>, it is a moral lock.  If we try the unmoral key and <I>it</I>
+fits, it is an unmoral lock.  I cannot possibly conceive of any other
+sort of 'evidence' or 'proof' than this.  It is quite true that the
+co-operation of generations is needed to educe it.  But in these
+matters the solidarity (so called) of the human race is a patent fact.
+The essential thing to notice is that our active preference is a
+legitimate part of the game,&mdash;that it is our plain business as men to
+try one of the keys, and the one in which we most confide.  If then the
+proof exist not till I have acted, and I must needs in acting run the
+risk of being wrong, how can the popular science professors be right in
+objurgating in me as infamous a 'credulity' which the strict logic of
+the situation requires?  If this really be a moral universe; if by my
+acts I be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may doubt be
+itself a moral act
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P109"></A>109}</SPAN>
+analogous to voting for a side not yet sure to
+win,&mdash;by what right shall they close in upon me and steadily negate the
+deepest conceivable function of my being by their preposterous command
+that I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in
+eternal and insoluble doubt?  Why, doubt itself is a decision of the
+widest practical reach, if only because we may miss by doubting what
+goods we might be gaining by espousing the winning side.  But more than
+that! it is often practically impossible to distinguish doubt from
+dogmatic negation.  If I refuse to stop a murder because I am in doubt
+whether it be not justifiable homicide, I am virtually abetting the
+crime.  If I refuse to bale out a boat because I am in doubt whether my
+efforts will keep her afloat, I am really helping to sink her.  If in
+the mountain precipice I doubt my right to risk a leap, I actively
+connive at my destruction.  He who commands himself not to be credulous
+of God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may again and again be
+indistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them.  Scepticism in
+moral matters is an active ally of immorality.  Who is not for is
+against.  The universe will have no neutrals in these questions.  In
+theory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wise
+scepticism, we are really doing volunteer military service for one side
+or the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet obvious as this necessity practically is, thousands of innocent
+magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow
+negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls.
+All they need to be free and hearty again in the exercise of their
+birthright is that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away.  All
+that the human
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P110"></A>110}</SPAN>
+heart wants is its chance.  It will willingly
+forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel
+that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no
+one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs.  And if
+I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few
+of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down its
+lion-strength, I shall be more than rewarded for my pains.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+To sum up: No philosophy will permanently be deemed rational by all men
+which (in addition to meeting logical demands) does not to some degree
+pretend to determine expectancy, and in a still greater degree make a
+direct appeal to all those powers of our nature which we hold in
+highest esteem.  Faith, being one of these powers, will always remain a
+factor not to be banished from philosophic constructions, the more so
+since in many ways it brings forth its own verification.  In these
+points, then, it is hopeless to look for literal agreement among
+mankind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The ultimate philosophy, we may therefore conclude, must not be too
+strait-laced in form, must not in all its parts divide heresy from
+orthodoxy by too sharp a line.  There must be left over and above the
+propositions to be subscribed, <I>ubique, semper, et ab omnibus</I>, another
+realm into which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples and
+indulge its own faith at its own risks; and all that can here be done
+will be to mark out distinctly the questions which fall within faith's
+sphere.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch03fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="ch03fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="ch03fn3"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch03fn1text">1</A>] This essay as far as page 75 consists of extracts from an article
+printed in Mind for July, 1879.  Thereafter it is a reprint of an
+address to the Harvard Philosophical Club, delivered in 1880, and
+published in the Princeton Review, July, 1882.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch03fn2text">2</A>] At most, the command laid upon us by science to believe nothing not
+yet verified by the senses is a prudential rule intended to maximize
+our right thinking and minimize our errors <I>in the long run</I>.  In the
+particular instance we must frequently lose truth by obeying it; but on
+the whole we are safer if we follow it consistently, for we are sure to
+cover our losses with our gains.  It is like those gambling and
+insurance rules based on probability, in which we secure ourselves
+against losses in detail by hedging on the total run.  But this hedging
+philosophy requires that long run should be there; and this makes it
+inapplicable to the question of religious faith as the latter comes
+home to the individual man.  He plays the game of life not to escape
+losses, for he brings nothing with him to lose; he plays it for gains;
+and it is now or never with him, for the long run which exists indeed
+for humanity, is not there for him.  Let him doubt, believe, or deny,
+he runs his risk, and has the natural right to choose which one it
+shall be.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch03fn3text">3</A>] Life of James Hinton, pp. 172, 173.  See also the excellent chapter
+on Faith and Sight in the Mystery of Matter, by J. Allanson Picton.
+Hinton's Mystery of Pain will undoubtedly always remain the classical
+utterance on this subject.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="ch03fn4"></A>
+<A NAME="ch03fn5"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch03fn4text">4</A>] Observe that in all this not a word has been said of free-will.  It
+all applies as well to a predetermined as to an indeterminate universe.
+If <I>M</I> + <I>x</I> is fixed in advance, the belief which leads to <I>x</I> and the
+desire which prompts the belief are also fixed.  But fixed or not,
+these subjective states form a phenomenal condition necessarily
+preceding the facts; necessarily constitutive, therefore, of the truth
+<I>M</I> + <I>x</I> which we seek.  If, however, free acts be possible, a faith
+in their possibility, by augmenting the moral energy which gives them
+birth, will increase their frequency in a given individual.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch03fn5text">5</A>] In either case, as a later essay explains (see p. 193), the
+<I>should</I> which the moralist regards as binding upon him must be rooted
+in the feeling of some other thinker, or collection of thinkers, to
+whose demands he individually bows.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P111"></A>111}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM.[<A NAME="ch04fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch04fn1">1</A>]
+</H3>
+
+<H4>
+MEMBERS OF THE MINISTERS' INSTITUTE:
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Let me confess to the diffidence with which I find myself standing here
+to-day.  When the invitation of your committee reached me last fall,
+the simple truth is that I accepted it as most men accept a
+challenge,&mdash;not because they wish to fight, but because they are
+ashamed to say no.  Pretending in my small sphere to be a teacher, I
+felt it would be cowardly to shrink from the keenest ordeal to which a
+teacher can be exposed,&mdash;the ordeal of teaching other teachers.
+Fortunately, the trial will last but one short hour; and I have the
+consolation of remembering Goethe's verses,&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Vor den Wissenden sich stellen,<BR>
+Sicher ist 's in allen Fällen,"&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+for if experts are the hardest people to satisfy, they have at any rate
+the liveliest sense of the difficulties of one's task, and they know
+quickest when one hits the mark.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Since it was as a teacher of physiology that I was most unworthily
+officiating when your committee's
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P112"></A>112}</SPAN>
+invitation reached me, I must
+suppose it to be for the sake of bringing a puff of the latest winds of
+doctrine which blow over that somewhat restless sea that my presence is
+desired.  Among all the healthy symptoms that characterize this age, I
+know no sounder one than the eagerness which theologians show to
+assimilate results of science, and to hearken to the conclusions of men
+of science about universal matters.  One runs a better chance of being
+listened to to-day if one can quote Darwin and Helmholtz than if one
+can only quote Schleiermacher or Coleridge.  I almost feel myself this
+moment that were I to produce a frog and put him through his
+physiological performances in a masterly manner before your eyes, I
+should gain more reverential ears for what I have to say during the
+remainder of the hour.  I will not ask whether there be not something
+of mere fashion in this prestige which the words of the physiologists
+enjoy just now.  If it be a fashion, it is certainly a beneficial one
+upon the whole; and to challenge it would come with a poor grace from
+one who at the moment he speaks is so conspicuously profiting by its
+favors.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I will therefore only say this: that the latest breeze from the
+physiological horizon need not necessarily be the most important one.
+Of the immense amount of work which the laboratories of Europe and
+America, and one may add of Asia and Australia, are producing every
+year, much is destined to speedy refutation; and of more it may be said
+that its interest is purely technical, and not in any degree
+philosophical or universal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This being the case, I know you will justify me if I fall back on a
+doctrine which is fundamental and well established rather than novel,
+and ask you whether
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P113"></A>113}</SPAN>
+by taking counsel together we may not trace
+some new consequences from it which shall interest us all alike as men.
+I refer to the doctrine of reflex action, especially as extended to the
+brain.  This is, of course, so familiar to you that I hardly need
+define it.  In a general way, all educated people know what reflex
+action means.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outward
+discharges from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges
+are themselves the result of impressions from the external world,
+carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves.  Applied at
+first to only a portion of our acts, this conception has ended by being
+generalized more and more, so that now most physiologists tell us that
+every action whatever, even the most deliberately weighed and
+calculated, does, so far as its organic conditions go, follow the
+reflex type.  There is not one which cannot be remotely, if not
+immediately, traced to an origin in some incoming impression of sense.
+There is no impression of sense which, unless inhibited by some other
+stronger one, does not immediately or remotely express itself in action
+of some kind.  There is no one of those complicated performances in the
+convolutions of the brain to which our trains of thought correspond,
+which is not a mere middle term interposed between an incoming
+sensation that arouses it and an outgoing discharge of some sort,
+inhibitory if not exciting, to which itself gives rise.  The structural
+unit of the nervous system is in fact a triad, neither of whose
+elements has any independent existence.  The sensory impression exists
+only for the sake of awaking the central process of reflection, and the
+central process of reflection exists
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P114"></A>114}</SPAN>
+only for the sake of calling
+forth the final act.  All action is thus <I>re</I>-action upon the outer
+world; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation or
+thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose
+ends have their point of application in the outer world.  If it should
+ever have no roots in the outer world, if it should ever happen that it
+led to no active measures, it would fail of its essential function, and
+would have to be considered either pathological or abortive.  The
+current of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant to run out
+at our hands, feet, or lips.  The only use of the thoughts it occasions
+while inside is to determine its direction to whichever of these organs
+shall, on the whole, under the circumstances actually present, act in
+the way most propitious to our welfare.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The willing department of our nature, in short, dominates both the
+conceiving department and the feeling department; or, in plainer
+English, perception and thinking are only there for behavior's sake.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I am sure I am not wrong in stating this result as one of the
+fundamental conclusions to which the entire drift of modern
+physiological investigation sweeps us.  If asked what great
+contribution physiology has made to psychology of late years, I am sure
+every competent authority will reply that her influence has in no way
+been so weighty as in the copious illustration, verification, and
+consolidation of this broad, general point of view.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I invite you, then, to consider what may be the possible speculative
+consequences involved in this great achievement of our generation.
+Already, it dominates all the new work done in psychology; but
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P115"></A>115}</SPAN>
+
+what I wish to ask is whether its influence may not extend far beyond
+the limits of psychology, even into those of theology herself.  The
+relations of the doctrine of reflex action with no less a matter than
+the doctrine of theism is, in fact, the topic to which I now invite
+your attention.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+We are not the first in the field.  There have not been wanting writers
+enough to say that reflex action and all that follows from it give the
+<I>coup de grâce</I> to the superstition of a God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If you open, for instance, such a book on comparative psychology, as
+der Thierische Wille of G. H. Schneider, you will find, sandwiched in
+among the admirable dealings of the author with his proper subject, and
+popping out upon us in unexpected places, the most delightfully <I>naïf</I>
+German onslaughts on the degradation of theologians, and the utter
+incompatibility of so many reflex adaptations to the environment with
+the existence of a creative intelligence.  There was a time, remembered
+by many of us here, when the existence of reflex action and all the
+other harmonies between the organism and the world were held to prove a
+God.  Now, they are held to disprove him.  The next turn of the
+whirligig may bring back proof of him again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Into this debate about his existence, I will not pretend to enter.  I
+must take up humbler ground, and limit my ambition to showing that a
+God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which,
+if he did exist, would form <I>the most adequate possible object</I> for
+minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the
+universe.  My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward
+reality of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P116"></A>116}</SPAN>
+a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is
+the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible
+for the human mind's contemplation.  <I>Anything short of God is not
+rational, anything more than God is not possible</I>, if the human mind be
+in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reaction
+which we at the outset allowed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Theism, whatever its objective warrant, would thus be seen to have a
+subjective anchorage in its congruity with our nature as thinkers; and,
+however it may fare with its truth, to derive from this subjective
+adequacy the strongest possible guaranty of its permanence.  It is and
+will be the classic mean of rational opinion, the centre of gravity of
+all attempts to solve the riddle of life,&mdash;some falling below it by
+defect, some flying above it by excess, itself alone satisfying every
+mental need in strictly normal measure.  Our gain will thus in the
+first instance be psychological.  We shall merely have investigated a
+chapter in the natural history of the mind, and found that, as a matter
+of such natural history, God may be called the normal object of the
+mind's belief.  Whether over and above this he be really the living
+truth is another question.  If he is, it will show the structure of our
+mind to be in accordance with the nature of reality.  Whether it be or
+not in such accordance is, it seems to me, one of those questions that
+belong to the province of personal faith to decide.  I will not touch
+upon the question here, for I prefer to keep to the strictly
+natural-history point of view.  I will only remind you that each one of
+us is entitled either to doubt or to believe in the harmony between his
+faculties and the truth; and that, whether he doubt or
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P117"></A>117}</SPAN>
+believe,
+he does it alike on his personal responsibility and risk.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Du musst glauben, du musst wagen,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Denn die Götter leihn kein Pfand,</SPAN><BR>
+Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">In das schöne Wunderland."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+I will presently define exactly what I mean by God and by Theism, and
+explain what theories I referred to when I spoke just now of attempts
+to fly beyond the one and to outbid the other.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But, first of all, let me ask you to linger a moment longer over what I
+have called the reflex theory of mind, so as to be sure that we
+understand it absolutely before going on to consider those of its
+consequences of which I am more particularly to speak.  I am not quite
+sure that its full scope is grasped even by those who have most
+zealously promulgated it.  I am not sure, for example, that all
+physiologists see that it commits them to regarding the mind as an
+essentially teleological mechanism.  I mean by this that the conceiving
+or theorizing faculty&mdash;the mind's middle department&mdash;functions
+<I>exclusively for the sake of ends</I> that do not exist at all in the
+world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by
+our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether.[<A NAME="ch04fn2text"></A><A HREF="#ch04fn2">2</A>]  It is a
+transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different
+world,&mdash;the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected
+in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose
+whatsoever.  Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective
+purposes, preferences,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P118"></A>118}</SPAN>
+fondnesses for certain effects, forms,
+orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order
+of our experience to be remodelled at all.  But, as we have the
+elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be
+effected; there is no escape.  The world's contents are <I>given</I> to each
+of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can
+hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is
+like.  We have to break that order altogether,&mdash;and by picking out from
+it the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far
+away, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definite
+threads of sequence and tendency; to foresee particular liabilities and
+get ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place of
+what was chaos.  Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this
+moment and impartially added together an utter chaos?  The strains of
+my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of
+the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you
+may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all?  Is
+it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them
+that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few
+others&mdash;the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering&mdash;should evoke from
+places in your memory that have nothing to do with this scene
+associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train
+of thought,&mdash;rational, because it leads to a conclusion which we have
+some organ to appreciate?  We have no organ or faculty to appreciate
+the simply given order.  The real world as it is given objectively at
+this moment is the sum total of all its beings and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P119"></A>119}</SPAN>
+events now.
+But can we think of such a sum?  Can we realize for an instant what a
+cross-section of all existence at a definite point of time would be?
+While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea-gull catches a fish at the mouth
+of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes
+in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.
+What does that mean?  Does the contemporaneity of these events with one
+another and with a million others as disjointed, form a rational bond
+between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world?
+Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the
+real order of the world.  It is an order with which we have nothing to
+do but to get away from it as fast as possible.  As I said, we break
+it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break
+it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home.  We make ten
+thousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we react
+as though the others did not exist.  We discover among its various
+parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical
+relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and
+out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and
+lawgiving, and ignore the rest.  Essential these relations are, but
+only <I>for our purpose</I>, the other relations being just as real and
+present as they; and our purpose is to <I>conceive simply</I> and to
+<I>foresee</I>.  Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends
+pure and simple?  They are the ends of what we call science; and the
+miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any
+philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling.
+It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P120"></A>120}</SPAN>
+many of our
+aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the man of affairs, the artist, or the man of science fails, he is
+not rebutted.  He tries again.  He says the impressions of sense <I>must</I>
+give way, <I>must</I> be reduced to the desiderated form.[<A NAME="ch04fn3text"></A><A HREF="#ch04fn3">3</A>]  They all
+postulate in the interests of their volitional nature a harmony between
+the latter and the nature of things.  The theologian does no more.  And
+the reflex doctrine of the mind's structure, though all theology should
+as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor
+itself at least obeyed in form the mind's most necessary law.[<A NAME="ch04fn4text"></A><A HREF="#ch04fn4">4</A>]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Now for the question I asked above: What kind of a being would God be
+if he did exist?  The word 'God' has come to mean many things in the
+history
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P121"></A>121}</SPAN>
+of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the 'Idee'
+which figures in the pages of Hegel.  Even the laws of physical nature
+have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and
+presented as the only fitting object of our reverence.[<A NAME="ch04fn5text"></A><A HREF="#ch04fn5">5</A>]  Of course,
+if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more
+definite than this.  We must not call any object of our loyalty a 'God'
+without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be
+one of God's functions.  He must have some intrinsic characteristics of
+his own besides; and theism must mean the faith of that man who
+believes that the object of <I>his</I> loyalty has those other attributes,
+negative or positive, as the case may be.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of God, and their
+amounts and mutual relations, the world has been delivered over to
+disputes.  All such may for our present purpose be considered as quite
+inessential.  Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself,
+the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection
+with our free-will, the proportion of his mercy to his justice, and the
+amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical
+relation to the phenomenal world, whether causal, substantial, ideal,
+or what not,&mdash;are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not
+concern us at all.  Whoso debates them presupposes the essential
+features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these
+essential features, the bare poles of the subject, that our business
+exclusively lies.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P122"></A>122}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Now, what are these essential features?  First, it is essential that
+God be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he
+must be conceived under the form of a mental personality.  The
+personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is
+involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition
+of our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves being
+all good and righteous things.  But, extrinsically considered, so to
+speak, God's personality is to be regarded, like any other personality,
+as something lying outside of my own and other than me, and whose
+existence I simply come upon and find.  A power not ourselves, then,
+which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which
+recognizes us,&mdash;such is the definition which I think nobody will be
+inclined to dispute.  Various are the attempts to shadow forth the
+other lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination;
+various the ways of conceiving in what mode the recognition, the
+hearkening to our cry, can come.  Some are gross and idolatrous; some
+are the most sustained efforts man's intellect has ever made to keep
+still living on that subtile edge of things where speech and thought
+expire.  But, with all these differences, the essence remains
+unchanged.  In whatever other respects the divine personality may
+differ from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous at
+least in this,&mdash;that both have purposes for which they care, and each
+can hear the other's call.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Meanwhile, we can already see one consequence and one point of
+connection with the reflex-action theory of mind.  Any mind,
+constructed on the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P123"></A>123}</SPAN>
+triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its
+impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that
+object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and
+finally react.  The stage of reaction depends on the stage of
+definition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressing
+object.  When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, our
+reactions are firm and certain enough,&mdash;often instinctive.  I see the
+desk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk.
+But the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fuse
+themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a
+whole,&mdash;the universe.  And then the object that confronts us, that
+knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided
+upon and actively met, is just this whole universe itself and its
+essence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What are <I>they</I>, and how shall I meet <I>them</I>?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The whole flood of faiths and systems here rush in.  Philosophies and
+denials of philosophy, religions and atheisms, scepticisms and
+mysticisms, confirmed emotional moods and habitual practical biases,
+jostle one another; for all are alike trials, hasty, prolix, or of
+seemly length, to answer this momentous question.  And the function of
+them all, long or short, that which the moods and the systems alike
+subserve and pass into, is the third stage,&mdash;the stage of action.  For
+no one of them itself is final.  They form but the middle segment of
+the mental curve, and not its termination.  As the last theoretic pulse
+dies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but the
+forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of
+mentality finds its rhythmic pause.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P124"></A>124}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage.  Sometimes we think
+it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in
+the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that
+it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have
+pointed out,&mdash;the function of defining the direction which our
+activity, immediate or remote, shall take.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If I simply say, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas!" I am defining the
+total nature of things in a way that carries practical consequences
+with it as decidedly as if I write a treatise De Natura Rerum in twenty
+volumes.  The treatise may trace its consequences more minutely than
+the saying; but the only worth of either treatise or saying is that the
+consequences are there.  The long definition can do no more than draw
+them; the short definition does no less.  Indeed, it may be said that
+if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should
+have identical consequences, those two definitions would really be
+identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by
+the different verbiage in which they are expressed.[<A NAME="ch04fn6text"></A><A HREF="#ch04fn6">6</A>]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+My time is unfortunately too short to stay and give to this truth the
+development it deserves; but I will assume that you grant it without
+further parley, and pass to the next step in my argument.  And here,
+too, I shall have to bespeak your close attention for a moment, while I
+pass over the subject far more
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P125"></A>125}</SPAN>
+rapidly than it deserves.  Whether
+true or false, any view of the universe which shall completely satisfy
+the mind must obey conditions of the mind's own imposing, must at least
+let the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called a
+rational universe or not.  Not any nature of things which may seem to
+be will also seem to be <I>ipso facto</I> rational; and if it do not seem
+rational, it will afflict the mind with a ceaseless uneasiness, till it
+be formulated or interpreted in some other and more congenial way.  The
+study of what the mind's criteria of rationality are, the definition of
+its exactions in this respect, form an intensely interesting subject
+into which I cannot enter now with any detail.[<A NAME="ch04fn7text"></A><A HREF="#ch04fn7">7</A>]  But so much I think
+you will grant me without argument,&mdash;that all three departments of the
+mind alike have a vote in the matter, and that no conception will pass
+muster which violates any of their essential modes of activity, or
+which leaves them without a chance to work.  By what title is it that
+every would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy which
+rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one half
+of mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creed
+of some partial sect?  Either it has dropped out of its net some of our
+impressions of sense,&mdash;what we call the facts of nature,&mdash;or it has
+left the theoretic and defining department with a lot of
+inconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands; or else,
+finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active and
+emotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-on or to
+live for.  Any one of these defects is fatal to its complete success.
+Some one
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P126"></A>126}</SPAN>
+will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system,
+and to seek another in its stead.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I need not go far to collect examples to illustrate to an audience of
+theologians what I mean.  Nor will you in particular, as champions of
+the Unitarianism of New England, be slow to furnish, from the motives
+which led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism,
+instances enough under the third or practical head.  A God who gives so
+little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all
+its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they
+say to our most cherished powers, There is no object for you.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Well, just as within the limits of theism some kinds are surviving
+others by reason of their greater practical rationality, so theism
+itself, by reason of its practical rationality, is certain to survive
+all lower creeds.  Materialism and agnosticism, even were they true,
+could never gain universal and popular acceptance; for they both,
+alike, give a solution of things which is irrational to the practical
+third of our nature, and in which we can never volitionally feel at
+home.  Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental
+functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its
+formula of formulas prepared.  The whole array of active forces of our
+nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how
+to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life.  "Well!"
+cry they, "what shall we do?"  "Ignoramus, ignorabimus!" says
+agnosticism.  "React upon atoms and their concussions!" says
+materialism.  What a collapse!  The mental train misses fire, the
+middle fails to ignite the end, the cycle breaks down half-way to its
+conclusion; and the active
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P127"></A>127}</SPAN>
+powers left alone, with no proper
+object on which to vent their energy, must either atrophy, sicken, and
+die, or else by their pent-up convulsions and excitement keep the whole
+machinery in a fever until some less incommensurable solution, some
+more practically rational formula, shall provide a normal issue for the
+currents of the soul.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, theism always stands ready with the most practically rational
+solution it is possible to conceive.  Not an energy of our active
+nature to which it does not authoritatively appeal, not an emotion of
+which it does not normally and naturally release the springs.  At a
+single stroke, it changes the dead blank <I>it</I> of the world into a
+living <I>thou</I>, with whom the whole man may have dealings.  To you, at
+any rate, I need waste no words in trying to prove its supreme
+commensurateness with all the demands that department Number Three of
+the mind has the power to impose on department Number Two.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Our volitional nature must then, until the end of time, exert a
+constant pressure upon the other departments of the mind to induce them
+to function to theistic conclusions.  No contrary formulas can be more
+than provisionally held.  Infra-theistic theories must be always in
+unstable equilibrium; for department Number Three ever lurks in ambush,
+ready to assert its rights, and on the slightest show of justification
+it makes its fatal spring, and converts them into the other form in
+which alone mental peace and order can permanently reign.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The question is, then, <I>Can</I> departments One and Two, <I>can</I> the facts
+of nature and the theoretic elaboration of them, always lead to
+theistic conclusions?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The future history of philosophy is the only
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P128"></A>128}</SPAN>
+authority capable of
+answering that question.  I, at all events, must not enter into it
+to-day, as that would be to abandon the purely natural-history point of
+view I mean to keep.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This only is certain, that the theoretic faculty lives between two
+fires which never give her rest, and make her incessantly revise her
+formulations.  If she sink into a premature, short-sighted, and
+idolatrous theism, in comes department Number One with its battery of
+facts of sense, and dislodges her from her dogmatic repose.  If she
+lazily subside into equilibrium with the same facts of sense viewed in
+their simple mechanical outwardness, up starts the practical reason
+with its demands, and makes <I>that</I> couch a bed of thorns.  From
+generation to generation thus it goes,&mdash;now a movement of reception
+from without, now one of expansion from within; department Number Two
+always worked to death, yet never excused from taking the most
+responsible part in the arrangements.  To-day, a crop of new facts;
+to-morrow, a flowering of new motives,&mdash;the theoretic faculty always
+having to effect the transition, and life growing withal so complex and
+subtle and immense that her powers of conceiving are almost ruptured
+with the strain.  See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic
+and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution,
+and how the young thinkers are at work!  See, in Great Britain, how the
+dryness of the strict associationist school, which under the
+ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday,
+gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional
+needs and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectual
+harmonies!  These are but tackings to the common
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P129"></A>129}</SPAN>
+port, to that
+ultimate <I>Weltanschauung</I> of maximum subjective as well as objective
+richness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any rate
+wear the theistic form.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Here let me say one word about a remark we often hear coming from the
+anti-theistic wing: It is base, it is vile, it is the lowest depth of
+immorality, to allow department Number Three to interpose its demands,
+and have any vote in the question of what is true and what is false;
+the mind must be a passive, reactionless sheet of white paper, on which
+reality will simply come and register its own philosophic definition,
+as the pen registers the curve on the sheet of a chronograph.  "Of all
+the cants that are canted in this canting age" this has always seemed
+to me the most wretched, especially when it comes from professed
+psychologists.  As if the mind could, consistently with its definition,
+be a reactionless sheet at all!  As if conception could possibly occur
+except for a teleological purpose, except to show us the way from a
+state of things our senses cognize to another state of things our will
+desires!  As if 'science' itself were anything else than such an end of
+desire, and a most peculiar one at that!  And as if the 'truths' of
+bare physics in particular, which these sticklers for intellectual
+purity contend to be the only uncontaminated form, were not as great an
+alteration and falsification of the simply 'given' order of the world,
+into an order conceived solely for the mind's convenience and delight,
+as any theistic doctrine possibly can be!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Physics is but one chapter in the great jugglery which our conceiving
+faculty is forever playing with
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P130"></A>130}</SPAN>
+the order of being as it presents
+itself to our reception.  It transforms the unutterable dead level and
+continuum of the 'given' world into an utterly unlike world of sharp
+differences and hierarchic subordinations for no other reason than to
+satisfy certain subjective passions we possess.[<A NAME="ch04fn8text"></A><A HREF="#ch04fn8">8</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And, so far as we can see, the given world is there only for the sake
+of the operation.  At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance
+of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the
+unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate.  To bid the man's
+subjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out the
+environment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statue
+express itself from out the stone.  Operate we must! and the only
+choice left us is that between operating to poor or to rich results.
+The only possible duty there can be in the matter is the duty of
+getting the richest results that the material given will allow.  The
+richness lies, of course, in the energy of all three departments of the
+mental cycle.  Not a sensible 'fact' of department One must be left in
+the cold, not a faculty of department Three be paralyzed; and
+department Two must form an indestructible bridge.  It is natural that
+the habitual neglect of department One by theologians should arouse
+indignation; but it is most <I>un</I>natural that the indignation should
+take the form of a wholesale denunciation of department Three.  It is
+the story of Kant's dove over again, denouncing the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P131"></A>131}</SPAN>
+pressure of
+the air.  Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us, that, amid the
+wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands
+upright,&mdash;that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but one
+commandment, but that one supreme, saying, <I>Thou shalt not be a
+theist</I>, for that would be to satisfy thy subjective propensities, and
+the satisfaction of those is intellectual damnation.  These most
+conscientious gentlemen think they have jumped off their own
+feet,&mdash;emancipated their mental operations from the control of their
+subjective propensities at large and <I>in toto</I>.  But they are deluded.
+They have simply chosen from among the entire set of propensities at
+their command those that were certain to construct, out of the
+materials given, the leanest, lowest, aridest result,&mdash;namely, the bare
+molecular world,&mdash;and they have sacrificed all the rest.[<A NAME="ch04fn9text"></A><A HREF="#ch04fn9">9</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of
+his subjective propensities,&mdash;his pre-eminence over them simply and
+solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of
+his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual.  Had his whole
+life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have
+established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
+And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his
+wants are to be trusted; that even
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P132"></A>132}</SPAN>
+when their gratification seems
+farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of
+his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present
+powers of reckoning.  Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you
+undo him.  The appetite for immediate consistency at any cost, or what
+the logicians call the 'law of parsimony,'&mdash;which is nothing but the
+passion for conceiving the universe in the most labor-saving
+way,&mdash;will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, end by blighting the
+development of the intellect itself quite as much as that of the
+feelings or the will.  The scientific conception of the world as an
+army of molecules gratifies this appetite after its fashion most
+exquisitely.  But if the religion of exclusive scientificism should
+ever succeed in suffocating all other appetites out of a nation's mind,
+and imbuing a whole race with the persuasion that simplicity and
+consistency demand a <I>tabula rasa</I> to be made of every notion that does
+not form part of the <I>soi-disant</I> scientific synthesis, that nation,
+that race, will just as surely go to ruin, and fall a prey to their
+more richly constituted neighbors, as the beasts of the field, as a
+whole, have fallen a prey to man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have myself little fear for our Anglo-Saxon race.  Its moral,
+aesthetic, and practical wants form too dense a stubble to be mown by
+any scientific Occam's razor that has yet been forged.  The knights of
+the razor will never form among us more than a sect; but when I see
+their fraternity increasing in numbers, and, what is worse, when I see
+their negations acquiring almost as much prestige and authority as
+their affirmations legitimately claim over the minds of the docile
+public, I feel as if the influences working in the direction of our
+mental barbarization were
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P133"></A>133}</SPAN>
+beginning to be rather strong, and
+needed some positive counteraction.  And when I ask myself from what
+quarter the invasion may best be checked, I can find no answer as good
+as the one suggested by casting my eyes around this room.  For this
+needful task, no fitter body of men than the Unitarian clergy exists.
+Who can uphold the rights of department Three of the mind with better
+grace than those who long since showed how they could fight and suffer
+for department One?  As, then, you burst the bonds of a narrow
+ecclesiastical tradition, by insisting that no fact of sense or result
+of science must be left out of account in the religious synthesis, so
+may you still be the champions of mental completeness and
+all-sidedness.  May you, with equal success, avert the formation of a
+narrow scientific tradition, and burst the bonds of any synthesis which
+would pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, those
+relations of reality, to which at present our active and emotional
+tendencies are our only avenues of approach.  I hear it said that
+Unitarianism is not growing in these days.  I know nothing of the truth
+of the statement; but if it be true, it is surely because the great
+ship of Orthodoxy is nearing the port and the pilot is being taken on
+board.  If you will only lead in a theistic science, as successfully as
+you have led in a scientific theology, your separate name as Unitarians
+may perish from the mouths of men; for your task will have been done,
+and your function at an end.  Until that distant day, you have work
+enough in both directions awaiting you.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Meanwhile, let me pass to the next division of our subject.  I said
+that we are forced to regard God as
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P134"></A>134}</SPAN>
+the normal object of the
+mind's belief, inasmuch as any conception that falls short of God is
+irrational, if the word 'rational' be taken in its fullest sense; while
+any conception that goes beyond God is impossible, if the human mind be
+constructed after the triadic-reflex pattern we have discussed at such
+length.  The first half of the thesis has been disposed of.
+Infra-theistic conceptions, materialisms and agnosticisms, are
+irrational because they are inadequate stimuli to man's practical
+nature.  I have now to justify the latter half of the thesis.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I dare say it may for an instant have perplexed some of you that I
+should speak of conceptions that aimed at going beyond God, and of
+attempts to fly above him or outbid him; so I will now explain exactly
+what I mean.  In defining the essential attributes of God, I said he
+was a personality lying outside our own and other than us,&mdash;a power not
+ourselves.  Now, the attempts to fly beyond theism, of which I speak,
+are attempts to get over this ultimate duality of God and his believer,
+and to transform it into some sort or other of identity.  If
+infratheistic ways of looking on the world leave it in the third
+person, a mere <I>it</I>; and if theism turns the <I>it</I> into a <I>thou</I>,&mdash;so we
+may say that these other theories try to cover it with the mantle of
+the first person, and to make it a part of <I>me</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I am well aware that I begin here to tread on ground in which trenchant
+distinctions may easily seem to mutilate the facts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That sense of emotional reconciliation with God which characterizes the
+highest moments of the theistic consciousness may be described as
+'oneness' with him, and so from the very bosom of theism a
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P135"></A>135}</SPAN>
+monistic doctrine seem to arise.  But this consciousness of
+self-surrender, of absolute practical union between one's self and the
+divine object of one's contemplation, is a totally different thing from
+any sort of substantial identity.  Still the object God and the subject
+I are two.  Still I simply come upon him, and find his existence given
+to me; and the climax of my practical union with what is given, forms
+at the same time the climax of my perception that as a numerical fact
+of existence I am something radically other than the Divinity with
+whose effulgence I am filled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, it seems to me that the only sort of union of creature with
+creator with which theism, properly so called, comports, is of this
+emotional and practical kind; and it is based unchangeably on the
+empirical fact that the thinking subject and the object thought are
+numerically two.  How my mind and will, which are not God, can yet
+cognize and leap to meet him, how I ever came to be so separate from
+him, and how God himself came to be at all, are problems that for the
+theist can remain unsolved and insoluble forever.  It is sufficient for
+him to know that he himself simply is, and needs God; and that behind
+this universe God simply is and will be forever, and will in some way
+hear his call.  In the practical assurance of these empirical facts,
+without 'Erkentnisstheorie' or philosophical ontology, without
+metaphysics of emanation or creation to justify or make them more
+intelligible, in the blessedness of their mere acknowledgment as given,
+lie all the peace and power he craves.  The floodgates of the religious
+life are opened, and the full currents can pour through.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is this empirical and practical side of the theistic position, its
+theoretic chastity and modesty, which I
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P136"></A>136}</SPAN>
+wish to accentuate here.
+The highest flights of theistic mysticism, far from pretending to
+penetrate the secrets of the <I>me</I> and the <I>thou</I> in worship, and to
+transcend the dualism by an act of intelligence, simply turn their
+backs on such attempts.  The problem for them has simply
+vanished,&mdash;vanished from the sight of an attitude which refuses to
+notice such futile theoretic difficulties.  Get but that "peace of God
+which passeth understanding," and the questions of the understanding
+will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest.  In other
+words, theistic mysticism, that form of theism which at first sight
+seems most to have transcended the fundamental otherness of God from
+man, has done it least of all in the theoretic way.  The pattern of its
+procedure is precisely that of the simplest man dealing with the
+simplest fact of his environment.  Both he and the theist tarry in
+department Two of their minds only so long as is necessary to define
+what is the presence that confronts them.  The theist decides that its
+character is such as to be fitly responded to on his part by a
+religious reaction; and into that reaction he forthwith pours his soul.
+His insight into the <I>what</I> of life leads to results so immediately and
+intimately rational that the <I>why</I>, the <I>how</I>, and the <I>whence</I> of it
+are questions that lose all urgency.  'Gefühl ist Alles,' Faust says.
+The channels of department Three have drained those of department Two
+of their contents; and happiness over the fact that being has made
+itself what it is, evacuates all speculation as to how it could make
+itself at all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But now, although to most human minds such a position as this will be
+the position of rational equilibrium, it is not difficult to bring
+forward certain
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P137"></A>137}</SPAN>
+considerations, in the light of which so simple
+and practical a mental movement begins to seem rather short-winded and
+second-rate and devoid of intellectual style.  This easy acceptance of
+an opaque limit to our speculative insight; this satisfaction with a
+Being whose character we simply apprehend without comprehending
+anything more about him, and with whom after a certain point our
+dealings can be only of a volitional and emotional sort; above all,
+this sitting down contented with a blank unmediated dualism,&mdash;are they
+not the very picture of unfaithfulness to the rights and duties of our
+theoretic reason?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Surely, if the universe is reasonable (and we must believe that it is
+so), it must be susceptible, potentially at least, of being reasoned
+<I>out</I> to the last drop without residuum.  Is it not rather an insult to
+the very word 'rational' to say that the rational character of the
+universe and its creator means no more than that we practically feel at
+home in their presence, and that our powers are a match for their
+demands?  Do they not in fact demand to be <I>understood</I> by us still
+more than to be reacted on?  Is not the unparalleled development of
+department Two of the mind in man his crowning glory and his very
+essence; and may not the <I>knowing of the truth</I> be his absolute
+vocation?  And if it is, ought he flatly to acquiesce in a spiritual
+life of 'reflex type,' whose form is no higher than that of the life
+that animates his spinal cord,&mdash;nay, indeed, that animates the writhing
+segments of any mutilated worm?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is easy to see how such arguments and queries may result in the
+erection of an ideal of our mental destiny, far different from the
+simple and practical religious one we have described.  We may well
+begin
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P138"></A>138}</SPAN>
+to ask whether such things as practical reactions can be
+the final upshot and purpose of all our cognitive energy.  Mere outward
+acts, changes in the position of parts of matter (for they are nothing
+else), can they possibly be the culmination and consummation of our
+relations with the nature of things?  Can they possibly form a result
+to which our godlike powers of insight shall be judged merely
+subservient?  Such an idea, if we scan it closely, soon begins to seem
+rather absurd.  Whence this piece of matter comes and whither that one
+goes, what difference ought that to make to the nature of things,
+except so far as with the comings and the goings our wonderful inward
+conscious harvest may be reaped?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And so, very naturally and gradually, one may be led from the theistic
+and practical point of view to what I shall call the <I>gnostical</I> one.
+We may think that department Three of the mind, with its doings of
+right and its doings of wrong, must be there only to serve department
+Two; and we may suspect that the sphere of our activity exists for no
+other purpose than to illumine our cognitive consciousness by the
+experience of its results.  Are not all sense and all emotion at bottom
+but turbid and perplexed modes of what in its clarified shape is
+intelligent cognition?  Is not all experience just the eating of the
+fruit of the tree of <I>knowledge</I> of good and evil, and nothing more?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These questions fan the fire of an unassuageable gnostic thirst, which
+is as far removed from theism in one direction as agnosticism was
+removed from it in the other; and which aspires to nothing less than an
+absolute unity of knowledge with its object, and refuses to be
+satisfied short of a fusion and solution and saturation of both
+impression and action with reason, and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P139"></A>139}</SPAN>
+an absorption of all three
+departments of the mind into one.  Time would fail us to-day (even had
+I the learning, which I have not) to speak of gnostic systems in
+detail.  The aim of all of them is to shadow forth a sort of process by
+which spirit, emerging from its beginnings and exhausting the whole
+circle of finite experience in its sweep, shall at last return and
+possess itself as its own object at the climax of its career.  This
+climax is the religious consciousness.  At the giddy height of this
+conception, whose latest and best known form is the Hegelian
+philosophy, definite words fail to serve their purpose; and the
+ultimate goal,&mdash;where object and subject, worshipped and worshipper,
+facts and the knowledge of them, fall into one, and where no other is
+left outstanding beyond this one that alone is, and that we may call
+indifferently act or fact, reality or idea, God or creation,&mdash;this
+goal, I say, has to be adumbrated to our halting and gasping
+intelligence by coarse physical metaphors, 'positings' and
+'self-returnings' and 'removals' and 'settings free,' which hardly help
+to make the matter clear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But from the midst of the curdling and the circling of it all we seem
+dimly to catch a glimpse of a state in which the reality to be known
+and the power of knowing shall have become so mutually adequate that
+each exhaustively is absorbed by the other and the twain become one
+flesh, and in which the light shall somehow have soaked up all the
+outer darkness into its own ubiquitous beams.  Like all headlong
+ideals, this apotheosis of the bare conceiving faculty has its depth
+and wildness, its pang and its charm.  To many it sings a truly siren
+strain; and so long as it is held only as a postulate, as a mere
+vanishing
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P140"></A>140}</SPAN>
+point to give perspective to our intellectual aim, it
+is hard to see any empirical title by which we may deny the legitimacy
+of gnosticism's claims.  That we are not as yet near the goal it
+prefigures can never be a reason why we might not continue indefinitely
+to approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason's
+actual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith in
+the infinite character of its potential destiny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, here it is that the physiologist's generalization, as it seems to
+me, may fairly come in, and by ruling any such extravagant faith out of
+court help to legitimate our personal mistrust of its pretensions.  I
+confess that I myself have always had a great mistrust of the
+pretensions of the gnostic faith.  Not only do I utterly fail to
+understand what a cognitive faculty erected into the absolute of being,
+with itself as its object, can mean; but even if we grant it a being
+other than itself for object, I cannot reason myself out of the belief
+that however familiar and at home we might become with the character of
+that being, the bare being of it, the fact that it is there at all,
+must always be something blankly given and presupposed in order that
+conception may begin its work; must in short lie beyond speculation,
+and not be enveloped in its sphere.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Accordingly, it is with no small pleasure that as a student of
+physiology and psychology I find the only lesson I can learn from these
+sciences to be one that corroborates these convictions.  From its first
+dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find that the cognitive
+faculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one element
+in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mental
+powers,&mdash;the powers
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P141"></A>141}</SPAN>
+of will.  Such a thing as its emancipation
+and absolution from these organic relations receives no faintest color
+of plausibility from any fact we can discern.  Arising as a part, in a
+mental and objective world which are both larger than itself, it must,
+whatever its powers of growth may be (and I am far from wishing to
+disparage them), remain a part to the end.  This is the character of
+the cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have no
+reason to suppose that that character will ever change.  On the
+contrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power of
+moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the
+deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess.  In
+every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred
+from, the grasp of every other.  God's being is sacred from ours.  To
+co-operate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems
+all he wants of us.  In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any
+chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking
+of him up, must lie the real meaning of our destiny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is nothing new.  All men know it at those rare moments when the
+soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and
+insisting about this formula or that.  In the silence of our theories
+we then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Being
+beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the
+character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe,
+is more than all theories about it put together.  The most any theory
+about it can do is to bring us to that.  Certain it is that the acutest
+theories, the greatest intellectual power, the most elaborate
+education, are a
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P142"></A>142}</SPAN>
+sheer mockery when, as too often happens, they
+feed mean motives and a nerveless will.  And it is equally certain that
+a resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped with
+learning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should never
+pay were we not satisfied that the essential root of human personality
+lay there.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+I have sketched my subject in the briefest outlines; but still I hope
+you will agree that I have established my point, and that the
+physiological view of mentality, so far from invalidating, can but give
+aid and comfort to the theistic attitude of mind.  Between agnosticism
+and gnosticism, theism stands midway, and holds to what is true in
+each.  With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannot
+know how Being made itself or us.  With gnosticism, it goes so far as
+to insist that we can know Being's character when made, and how it asks
+us to behave.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If any one fear that in insisting so strongly that behavior is the aim
+and end of every sound philosophy I have curtailed the dignity and
+scope of the speculative function in us, I can only reply that in this
+ascertainment of the <I>character</I> of Being lies an almost infinite
+speculative task.  Let the voluminous considerations by which all
+modern thought converges toward idealistic or pan-psychic conclusions
+speak for me.  Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of a Renouvier,
+reply whether within the limits drawn by purely empirical theism the
+speculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do.
+But do it little or much, its <I>place</I> in a philosophy is always the
+same, and is set by the structural form of the mind.  Philosophies,
+whether expressed in sonnets or
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P143"></A>143}</SPAN>
+systems, all must wear this form.
+The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and
+asks its meaning.  He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and
+makes a voyage long or short.  He ascends into the empyrean, and
+communes with the eternal essences.  But whatever his achievements and
+discoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some
+new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with
+which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the <I>terra
+firma</I> of concrete life again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whatever thought takes this voyage is a philosophy.  We have seen how
+theism takes it.  And in the philosophy of a thinker who, though long
+neglected, is doing much to renovate the spiritual life of his native
+France to-day (I mean Charles Renouvier, whose writings ought to be
+better known among us than they are), we have an instructive example of
+the way in which this very empirical element in theism, its confession
+of an ultimate opacity in things, of a dimension of being which escapes
+our theoretic control, may suggest a most definite practical
+conclusion,&mdash;this one, namely, that 'our wills are free.'  I will say
+nothing of Renouvier's line of reasoning; it is contained in many
+volumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention.[<A NAME="ch04fn10text"></A><A HREF="#ch04fn10">10</A>]  But to
+enforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes the
+philosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem of
+Tennyson, published last year, in which the speculative voyage is made,
+and the same conclusion reached in a few lines:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P144"></A>144}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,<BR>
+From that great deep before our world begins,<BR>
+Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will,&mdash;<BR>
+Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,<BR>
+From that true world within the world we see,<BR>
+Whereof our world is but the bounding shore,&mdash;<BR>
+Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,<BR>
+With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun<BR>
+Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.<BR>
+For in the world which is not ours, they said,<BR>
+'Let us make man,' and that which should be man,<BR>
+From that one light no man can look upon,<BR>
+Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons<BR>
+And all the shadows.  O dear Spirit, half-lost<BR>
+In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign<BR>
+That thou art thou,&mdash;who wailest being born<BR>
+And banish'd into mystery,...<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 5em">...our mortal veil</SPAN><BR>
+And shattered phantom of that Infinite One,<BR>
+Who made thee unconceivably thyself<BR>
+Out of his whole world-self and all in all,&mdash;<BR>
+Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape<BR>
+And ivyberry, choose; and still depart<BR>
+From death to death through life and life, and find<BR>
+Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought<BR>
+Not matter, nor the finite-infinite,<BR>
+<I>But this main miracle, that thou art thou,<BR>
+With power on thine own act and on the world</I>."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch04fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="ch04fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="ch04fn3"></A>
+<A NAME="ch04fn4"></A>
+<A NAME="ch04fn5"></A>
+<A NAME="ch04fn6"></A>
+<A NAME="ch04fn7"></A>
+<A NAME="ch04fn8"></A>
+<A NAME="ch04fn9"></A>
+<A NAME="ch04fn10"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch04fn1text">1</A>] Address delivered to the Unitarian Ministers' Institute at
+Princeton, Mass., 1881, and printed in the Unitarian Review for October
+of that year.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch04fn2text">2</A>] See some Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind, in the Journal of
+Speculative Philosophy for January, 1878.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch04fn3text">3</A>] "No amount of failure in the attempt to subject the world of
+sensible experience to a thorough-going system of conceptions, and to
+bring all happenings back to cases of immutably valid law, is able to
+shake our faith in the rightness of our principles.  We hold fast to
+our demand that even the greatest apparent confusion must sooner or
+later solve itself in transparent formulas.  We begin the work ever
+afresh; and, refusing to believe that nature will permanently withhold
+the reward of our exertions, think rather that we have hitherto only
+failed to push them in the right direction.  And all this pertinacity
+flows from a conviction that we have no right to renounce the
+fulfilment of our task.  What, in short sustains the courage of
+investigators is the force of obligation of an ethical idea."
+(Sigwart: Logik, bd. ii., p. 23.)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+This is a true account of the spirit of science.  Does it essentially
+differ from the spirit of religion?  And is any one entitled to say in
+advance, that, while the one form of faith shall be crowned with
+success, the other is certainly doomed to fail?
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch04fn4text">4</A>] Concerning the transformation of the given order into the order of
+conception, see S. H. Hodgson, The Philosophy of Reflection, chap. v.;
+H. Lotze, Logik, sects. 342-351; C. Sigwart, Logik, sects. 60-63, 105.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch04fn5text">5</A>] Haeckel has recently (Der Monismus, 1893, p. 37) proposed the
+Cosmic Ether as a divinity fitted to reconcile science with theistic
+faith.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch04fn6text">6</A>] See the admirably original "Illustrations of the Logic of Science,"
+by C. S. Peirce, especially the second paper, "How to make our Thoughts
+clear," in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch04fn7text">7</A>] On this subject, see the preceding Essay.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch04fn8text">8</A>] "As soon as it is recognized that our thought, as logic deals with
+it, reposes on our <I>will to think</I>, the primacy of the will, even in
+the theoretical sphere, must be conceded; and the last of
+presuppositions is not merely [Kant's] that 'I think' must accompany
+all my representations, but also that 'I will' must dominate all my
+thinking."  (Sigwart; Logik, ll. 25.)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch04fn9text">9</A>] As our ancestors said, <I>Fiat justitia, pereat mundus</I>, so we, who
+do not believe in justice or any absolute good, must, according to
+these prophets, be willing to see the world perish, in order that
+<I>scientia fiat</I>.  Was there ever a more exquisite idol of the den, or
+rather of the <I>shop</I>?  In the clean sweep to be made of superstitions,
+let the idol of stern obligation to be scientific go with the rest, and
+people will have a fair chance to understand one another.  But this
+blowing of hot and of cold makes nothing but confusion.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch04fn10text">10</A>] Especially the Essais de Critique Générale, 2me Edition, 6 vols.,
+12mo, Paris, 1875; and the Esquisse d'une Classification Systématique
+des Doctrines Philosophiques, 2 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1885.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P145"></A>145}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM.[<A NAME="ch05fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn1">1</A>]
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out
+of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than
+warm up stale arguments which every one has heard.  This is a radical
+mistake.  I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive
+genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground,&mdash;not, perhaps,
+of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our
+sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the
+ideas of fate and of free-will imply.  At our very side almost, in the
+past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press
+works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights.  Not to
+speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not
+to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here,&mdash;we see in the
+writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delboeuf[<A NAME="ch05fn2text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn2">2</A>] how completely changed
+and refreshed is the form of all the old disputes.  I cannot pretend to
+vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my
+ambition limits itself to just one little point.  If I can make two of
+the necessarily implied corollaries
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P146"></A>146}</SPAN>
+of determinism clearer to you
+than they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for you
+to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of
+what you are about.  And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to
+remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of
+your hesitation is.  I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all
+pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true.  The
+most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in
+assuming it true, and acting as if it were true.  If it be true, it
+seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case.  Its
+truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats.
+It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their
+backs upon it.  In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are
+free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free.
+This should exclude, it seems to me, from the free-will side of the
+question all hope of a coercive demonstration,&mdash;a demonstration which
+I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance.  But not
+without one more point understood as well.  The arguments I am about to
+urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories
+about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to
+attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective
+satisfaction; and, second, if there be two conceptions, and the one
+seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we are
+entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two.
+I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me;
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P147"></A>147}</SPAN>
+for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not,
+they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say.  I
+cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the
+magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science&mdash;our
+doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest&mdash;proceed
+from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational
+shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the
+crude order of our experience.  The world has shown itself, to a great
+extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality.  How much
+farther it will show itself plastic no one can say.  Our only means of
+finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions
+of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality.  If a certain
+formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral
+demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to
+doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence,
+for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as
+subjective and emotional as the other is.  The principle of causality,
+for example,&mdash;what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply
+a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper
+kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary
+juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears?  It is as much an altar
+to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens.  All our
+scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
+Uniformity is as much so as is free-will.  If this be admitted, we can
+debate on even terms.  But if any one pretends that while freedom and
+variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and
+uniformity are something
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P148"></A>148}</SPAN>
+altogether different, I do not see how
+we can debate at all.[<A NAME="ch05fn3text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn3">3</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To begin, then, I must suppose you acquainted with all the usual
+arguments on the subject.  I cannot stop to take up the old proofs from
+causation, from statistics, from the certainty with which we can
+foretell one another's conduct, from the fixity of character, and all
+the rest.  But there are two words which usually encumber these
+classical arguments,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P149"></A>149}</SPAN>
+and which we must immediately dispose of if
+we are to make any progress.  One is the eulogistic word <I>freedom</I>, and
+the other is the opprobrious word <I>chance</I>.  The word 'chance' I wish
+to keep, but I wish to get rid of the word 'freedom.'  Its eulogistic
+associations have so far overshadowed all the rest of its meaning that
+both parties claim the sole right to use it, and determinists to-day
+insist that they alone are freedom's champions.  Old-fashioned
+determinism was what we may call <I>hard</I> determinism.  It did not shrink
+from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and
+the like.  Nowadays, we have a <I>soft</I> determinism which abhors harsh
+words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination,
+says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity
+understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
+Even a writer as little used to making capital out of soft words as Mr.
+Hodgson hesitates not to call himself a 'free-will determinist.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, all this is a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of
+fact has been entirely smothered.  Freedom in all these senses presents
+simply no problem at all.  No matter what the soft determinist mean by
+it,&mdash;whether he mean the acting without external constraint; whether he
+mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law
+of the whole,&mdash;who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and
+sometimes we are not?  But there <I>is</I> a problem, an issue of fact and
+not of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is often
+decided without discussion in one sentence,&mdash;nay, in one clause of a
+sentence,&mdash;by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their
+efforts to show
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P150"></A>150}</SPAN>
+what 'true' freedom is; and that is the question
+of determinism, about which we are to talk to-night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fortunately, no ambiguities hang about this word or about its opposite,
+indeterminism.  Both designate an outward way in which things may
+happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental
+associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance.  Now,
+evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism and
+indeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible to
+find.  Let us look at the difference between them and see for
+ourselves.  What does determinism profess?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down
+absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be.  The
+future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we
+call the present is compatible with only one totality.  Any other
+future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible.  The
+whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an
+absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or
+shadow of turning.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"With earth's first clay they did the last man knead,<BR>
+And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.<BR>
+And the first morning of creation wrote<BR>
+What the last dawn of reckoning shall read."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain
+amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of
+them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be.  It
+admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that
+things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be
+ambiguous.  Of two
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P151"></A>151}</SPAN>
+alternative futures which we conceive, both
+may now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at the
+very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself.
+Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact.
+It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it
+corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things.  To that
+view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from
+out of which they are chosen; and, <I>somewhere</I>, indeterminism says,
+such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Determinism, on the contrary, says they exist <I>nowhere</I>, and that
+necessity on the one hand and impossibility on the other are the sole
+categories of the real.  Possibilities that fail to get realized are,
+for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all.
+There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all
+that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity
+virtually there.  The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass
+of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which
+'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The issue, it will be seen, is a perfectly sharp one, which no
+eulogistic terminology can smear over or wipe out.  The truth <I>must</I>
+lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side makes the
+other false.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The question relates solely to the existence of possibilities, in the
+strict sense of the term, as things that may, but need not, be.  Both
+sides admit that a volition, for instance, has occurred.  The
+indeterminists say another volition might have occurred in its place;
+the determinists swear that nothing could possibly
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P152"></A>152}</SPAN>
+have occurred
+in its place.  Now, can science be called in to tell us which of these
+two point-blank contradicters of each other is right?  Science
+professes to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters of
+fact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount of
+assurance that something actually happened give us the least grain of
+information as to whether another thing might or might not have
+happened in its place?  Only facts can be proved by other facts.  With
+things that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern.  If
+we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the
+possibility-question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And the truth is that facts practically have hardly anything to do with
+making us either determinists or indeterminists.  Sure enough, we make
+a flourish of quoting facts this way or that; and if we are
+determinists, we talk about the infallibility with which we can predict
+one another's conduct; while if we are indeterminists, we lay great
+stress on the fact that it is just because we cannot foretell one
+another's conduct, either in war or statecraft or in any of the great
+and small intrigues and businesses of men, that life is so intensely
+anxious and hazardous a game.  But who does not see the wretched
+insufficiency of this so-called objective testimony on both sides?
+What fills up the gaps in our minds is something not objective, not
+external.  What divides us into possibility men and anti-possibility
+men is different faiths or postulates,&mdash;postulates of rationality.  To
+this man the world seems more rational with possibilities in it,&mdash;to
+that man more rational with possibilities excluded; and talk as we will
+about having to yield to
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P153"></A>153}</SPAN>
+evidence, what makes us monists or
+pluralists, determinists or indeterminists, is at bottom always some
+sentiment like this.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to the
+idea of chance.  As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our
+friends, we find a number of them shaking their heads.  This notion of
+alternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one of
+several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name
+for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind
+can for an instant tolerate in the world.  What is it, they ask, but
+barefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law?  And
+if the slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the
+whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos
+from recommencing her topsy-turvy reign?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Remarks of this sort about chance will put an end to discussion as
+quickly as anything one can find.  I have already told you that
+'chance' was a word I wished to keep and use.  Let us then examine
+exactly what it means, and see whether it ought to be such a terrible
+bugbear to us.  I fancy that squeezing the thistle boldly will rob it
+of its sting.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sting of the word 'chance' seems to lie in the assumption that it
+means something positive, and that if anything happens by chance, it
+must needs be something of an intrinsically irrational and preposterous
+sort.  Now, chance means nothing of the kind.  It is a purely negative
+and relative term,[<A NAME="ch05fn4text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn4">4</A>] giving us
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P154"></A>154}</SPAN>
+no information about that of
+which it is predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with
+something else,&mdash;not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other
+things in advance of its own actual presence.  As this point is the
+most subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the point
+on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to
+it.  What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be
+in itself to call it 'chance.'  It may be a bad thing, it may be a good
+thing.  It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching
+the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an
+unimaginably perfect way.  All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that
+this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise.  For the
+system of other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing.  Its
+origin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands
+off! coming, when it comes, as a free gift, or not at all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when
+thus considered <I>ab. extra</I>, or from the point of view of previous
+things or distant things, do not preclude its having any amount of
+positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and
+moment.  All that its chance-character asserts about it is that there
+is something in it really of its own, something that is not the
+unconditional property of the whole.  If the whole wants this property,
+the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance.
+That the universe may actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this
+sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited
+powers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P155"></A>155}</SPAN>
+dose of
+disconnectedness of one part with another, the smallest modicum of
+independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, for
+example, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into a
+sort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all.  Since
+future human volitions are as a matter of fact the only ambiguous
+things we are tempted to believe in, let us stop for a moment to make
+ourselves sure whether their independent and accidental character need
+be fraught with such direful consequences to the universe as these.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after
+the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance as far as the present
+moment is concerned?  It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford
+Street are called; but that only one, and that one <I>either</I> one, shall
+be chosen.  Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of
+my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the
+choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street.
+In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and
+then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate ten
+minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door
+of this hall just as I was before the choice was made.  Imagine then
+that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and
+traverse Oxford Street.  You, as passive spectators, look on and see
+the two alternative universes,&mdash;one of them with me walking through
+Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking through
+Oxford Street.  Now, if you are determinists you believe one of these
+universes to have been from eternity impossible: you believe it to have
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P156"></A>156}</SPAN>
+been impossible because of the intrinsic irrationality or
+accidentality somewhere involved in it.  But looking outwardly at these
+universes, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one, and
+which the rational and necessary one?  I doubt if the most iron-clad
+determinist among you could have the slightest glimmer of light on this
+point.  In other words, either universe <I>after the fact</I> and once there
+would, to our means of observation and understanding, appear just as
+rational as the other.  There would be absolutely no criterion by which
+we might judge one necessary and the other matter of chance.  Suppose
+now we relieve the gods of their hypothetical task and assume my
+choice, once made, to be made forever.  I go through Divinity Avenue
+for good and all.  If, as good determinists, you now begin to affirm,
+what all good determinists punctually do affirm, that in the nature of
+things I <I>couldn't</I> have gone through Oxford Street,&mdash;had I done so it
+would have been chance, irrationality, insanity, a horrid gap in
+nature,&mdash;I simply call your attention to this, that your affirmation is
+what the Germans call a <I>Machtspruch</I>, a mere conception fulminated as
+a dogma and based on no insight into details.  Before my choice, either
+street seemed as natural to you as to me.  Had I happened to take
+Oxford Street, Divinity Avenue would have figured in your philosophy as
+the gap in nature; and you would have so proclaimed it with the best
+deterministic conscience in the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But what a hollow outcry, then, is this against a chance which, if it
+were present to us, we could by no character whatever distinguish from
+a rational necessity!  I have taken the most trivial of examples, but
+no possible example could lead to any different
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P157"></A>157}</SPAN>
+result.  For what
+are the alternatives which, in point of fact, offer themselves to human
+volition?  What are those futures that now seem matters of chance?  Are
+they not one and all like the Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street of our
+example?  Are they not all of them <I>kinds</I> of things already here and
+based in the existing frame of nature?  Is any one ever tempted to
+produce an <I>absolute</I> accident, something utterly irrelevant to the
+rest of the world?  Do not all the motives that assail us, all the
+futures that offer themselves to our choice, spring equally from the
+soil of the past; and would not either one of them, whether realized
+through chance or through necessity, the moment it was realized, seem
+to us to fit that past, and in the completest and most continuous
+manner to interdigitate with the phenomena already there?[<A NAME="ch05fn5text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn5">5</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The more one thinks of the matter, the more one wonders that so empty
+and gratuitous a hubbub as this outcry against chance should have found
+so great an echo in the hearts of men.  It is a word which tells us
+absolutely nothing about what chances, or about the <I>modus operandi</I> of
+the chancing; and the use of it as a war-cry shows only a temper of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P158"></A>158}</SPAN>
+intellectual absolutism, a demand that the world shall be a solid
+block, subject to one control,&mdash;which temper, which demand, the world
+may not be bound to gratify at all.  In every outwardly verifiable and
+practical respect, a world in which the alternatives that now actually
+distract <I>your</I> choice were decided by pure chance would be by <I>me</I>
+absolutely undistinguished from the world in which I now live.  I am,
+therefore, entirely willing to call it, so far as your choices go, a
+world of chance for me.  To <I>yourselves</I>, it is true, those very acts
+of choice, which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are the
+opposites of this, for you are within them and effect them.  To you
+they appear as decisions; and decisions, for him who makes them, are
+altogether peculiar psychic facts.  Self-luminous and self-justifying
+at the living moment at which they occur, they appeal to no outside
+moment to put its stamp upon them or make them continuous with the rest
+of nature.  Themselves it is rather who seem to make nature continuous;
+and in their strange and intense function of granting consent to one
+possibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocal
+and double future into an inalterable and simple past.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But with the psychology of the matter we have no concern this evening.
+The quarrel which determinism has with chance fortunately has nothing
+to do with this or that psychological detail.  It is a quarrel
+altogether metaphysical.  Determinism denies the ambiguity of future
+volitions, because it affirms that nothing future can be ambiguous.
+But we have said enough to meet the issue.  Indeterminate future
+volitions do mean chance.  Let us not fear to shout it from the
+house-tops if need be; for we now know that
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P159"></A>159}</SPAN>
+the idea of chance
+is, at bottom, exactly the same thing as the idea of gift,&mdash;the one
+simply being a disparaging, and the other a eulogistic, name for
+anything on which we have no effective <I>claim</I>.  And whether the world
+be the better or the worse for having either chances or gifts in it
+will depend altogether on <I>what</I> these uncertain and unclaimable things
+turn out to be.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And this at last brings us within sight of our subject.  We have seen
+what determinism means: we have seen that indeterminism is rightly
+described as meaning chance; and we have seen that chance, the very
+name of which we are urged to shrink from as from a metaphysical
+pestilence, means only the negative fact that no part of the world,
+however big, can claim to control absolutely the destinies of the
+whole.  But although, in discussing the word 'chance,' I may at moments
+have seemed to be arguing for its real existence, I have not meant to
+do so yet.  We have not yet ascertained whether this be a world of
+chance or no; at most, we have agreed that it seems so.  And I now
+repeat what I said at the outset, that, from any strict theoretical
+point of view, the question is insoluble.  To deepen our theoretic
+sense of the <I>difference</I> between a world with chances in it and a
+deterministic world is the most I can hope to do; and this I may now at
+last begin upon, after all our tedious clearing of the way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I wish first of all to show you just what the notion that this is a
+deterministic world implies.  The implications I call your attention to
+are all bound up with the fact that it is a world in which we
+constantly have to make what I shall, with your permission, call
+judgments of regret.  Hardly an hour passes in
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P160"></A>160}</SPAN>
+which we do not
+wish that something might be otherwise; and happy indeed are those of
+us whose hearts have never echoed the wish of Omar Khayam&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"That we might clasp, ere closed, the book of fate,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And make the writer on a fairer leaf</SPAN><BR>
+Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Ah!  Love, could you and I with fate conspire<BR>
+To mend this sorry scheme of things entire,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Would we not shatter it to bits, and then</SPAN><BR>
+Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Now, it is undeniable that most of these regrets are foolish, and quite
+on a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on the
+universe of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable The
+Atheist and the Acorn,&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore,<BR>
+Thy whimsies would have worked no more," etc.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Even from the point of view of our own ends, we should probably make a
+botch of remodelling the universe.  How much more then from the point
+of view of ends we cannot see!  Wise men therefore regret as little as
+they can.  But still some regrets are pretty obstinate and hard to
+stifle,&mdash;regrets for acts of wanton cruelty or treachery, for example,
+whether performed by others or by ourselves.  Hardly any one can remain
+<I>entirely</I> optimistic after reading the confession of the murderer at
+Brockton the other day: how, to get rid of the wife whose continued
+existence bored him, he inveigled her into a desert spot, shot her four
+times, and then, as she lay on the ground and said to him, "You didn't
+do it on purpose, did you, dear?" replied, "No, I
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P161"></A>161}</SPAN>
+didn't do it on
+purpose," as he raised a rock and smashed her skull.  Such an
+occurrence, with the mild sentence and self-satisfaction of the
+prisoner, is a field for a crop of regrets, which one need not take up
+in detail.  We feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the rest
+of the universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else would
+really have been better in its place.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But for the deterministic philosophy the murder, the sentence, and the
+prisoner's optimism were all necessary from eternity; and nothing else
+for a moment had a ghost of a chance of being put into their place.  To
+admit such a chance, the determinists tell us, would be to make a
+suicide of reason; so we must steel our hearts against the thought.
+And here our plot thickens, for we see the first of those difficult
+implications of determinism and monism which it is my purpose to make
+you feel.  If this Brockton murder was called for by the rest of the
+universe, if it had to come at its preappointed hour, and if nothing
+else would have been consistent with the sense of the whole, what are
+we to think of the universe?  Are we stubbornly to stick to our
+judgment of regret, and say, though it <I>couldn't</I> be, yet it <I>would</I>
+have been a better universe with something different from this Brockton
+murder in it?  That, of course, seems the natural and spontaneous thing
+for us to do; and yet it is nothing short of deliberately espousing a
+kind of pessimism.  The judgment of regret calls the murder bad.
+Calling a thing bad means, if it mean anything at all, that the thing
+ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its stead.
+Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead,
+virtually defines the universe
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P162"></A>162}</SPAN>
+as a place in which what ought to
+be is impossible,&mdash;in other words, as an organism whose constitution is
+afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw.  The pessimism
+of a Schopenhauer says no more than this,&mdash;that the murder is a
+symptom; and that it is a vicious symptom because it belongs to a
+vicious whole, which can express its nature no otherwise than by
+bringing forth just such a symptom as that at this particular spot.
+Regret for the murder must transform itself, if we are determinists and
+wise, into a larger regret.  It is absurd to regret the murder alone.
+Other things being what they are, <I>it</I> could not be different.  What we
+should regret is that whole frame of things of which the murder is one
+member.  I see no escape whatever from this pessimistic conclusion, if,
+being determinists, our judgment of regret is to be allowed to stand at
+all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to abandon
+the judgment of regret.  That this can be done, history shows to be not
+impossible.  The devil, <I>quoad existentiam</I>, may be good.  That is,
+although he be a <I>principle</I> of evil, yet the universe, with such a
+principle in it, may practically be a better universe than it could
+have been without.  On every hand, in a small way, we find that a
+certain amount of evil is a condition by which a higher form of good is
+bought.  There is nothing to prevent anybody from generalizing this
+view, and trusting that if we could but see things in the largest of
+all ways, even such matters as this Brockton murder would appear to be
+paid for by the uses that follow in their train.  An optimism <I>quand
+même</I>, a systematic and infatuated optimism like that ridiculed by
+Voltaire in his Candide, is one of the possible
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P163"></A>163}</SPAN>
+ideal ways in
+which a man may train himself to look on life.  Bereft of dogmatic
+hardness and lit up with the expression of a tender and pathetic hope,
+such an optimism has been the grace of some of the most religious
+characters that ever lived.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,<BR>
+And all is clear from east to west."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even cruelty and treachery may be among the absolutely blessed fruits
+of time, and to quarrel with any of their details may be blasphemy.
+The only real blasphemy, in short, may be that pessimistic temper of
+the soul which lets it give way to such things as regrets, remorse, and
+grief.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus, our deterministic pessimism may become a deterministic optimism
+at the price of extinguishing our judgments of regret.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But does not this immediately bring us into a curious logical
+predicament?  Our determinism leads us to call our judgments of regret
+wrong, because they are pessimistic in implying that what is impossible
+yet ought to be.  But how then about the judgments of regret
+themselves?  If they are wrong, other judgments, judgments of approval
+presumably, ought to be in their place.  But as they are necessitated,
+nothing else <I>can</I> be in their place; and the universe is just what it
+was before,&mdash;namely, a place in which what ought to be appears
+impossible.  We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog, but the
+other one sinks all the deeper.  We have rescued our actions from the
+bonds of evil, but our judgments are now held fast.  When murders and
+treacheries cease to be sins, regrets are theoretic absurdities and
+errors.  The theoretic and the active life thus play a kind of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P164"></A>164}</SPAN>
+
+see-saw with each other on the ground of evil.  The rise of either
+sends the other down.  Murder and treachery cannot be good without
+regret being bad: regret cannot be good without treachery and murder
+being bad.  Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; so
+something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world.
+It must be a place of which either sin or error forms a necessary part.
+From this dilemma there seems at first sight no escape.  Are we then so
+soon to fall back into the pessimism from which we thought we had
+emerged?  And is there no possible way by which we may, with good
+intellectual consciences, call the cruelties and the treacheries, the
+reluctances and the regrets, <I>all</I> good together?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Certainly there is such a way, and you are probably most of you ready
+to formulate it yourselves.  But, before doing so, remark how
+inevitably the question of determinism and indeterminism slides us into
+the question of optimism and pessimism, or, as our fathers called it,
+'the question of evil.'  The theological form of all these disputes is
+the simplest and the deepest, the form from which there is the least
+escape,&mdash;not because, as some have sarcastically said, remorse and
+regret are clung to with a morbid fondness by the theologians as
+spiritual luxuries, but because they are existing facts of the world,
+and as such must be taken into account in the deterministic
+interpretation of all that is fated to be.  If they are fated to be
+error, does not the bat's wing of irrationality still cast its shadow
+over the world?
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The refuge from the quandary lies, as I said, not far off.  The
+necessary acts we erroneously regret
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P165"></A>165}</SPAN>
+may be good, and yet our
+error in so regretting them may be also good, on one simple condition;
+and that condition is this: The world must not be regarded as a machine
+whose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but rather
+as a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of what
+goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are.  Not the doing either
+of good or of evil is what nature cares for, but the knowing of them.
+Life is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of <I>knowledge</I>.  I am
+in the habit, in thinking to myself, of calling this point of view the
+<I>gnostical</I> point of view.  According to it, the world is neither an
+optimism nor a pessimism, but a <I>gnosticism</I>.  But as this term may
+perhaps lead to some misunderstandings, I will use it as little as
+possible here, and speak rather of <I>subjectivism</I>, and the
+<I>subjectivistic</I> point of view.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Subjectivism has three great branches,&mdash;we may call them scientificism,
+sentimentalism, and sensualism, respectively.  They all agree
+essentially about the universe, in deeming that what happens there is
+subsidiary to what we think or feel about it.  Crime justifies its
+criminality by awakening our intelligence of that criminality, and
+eventually our remorses and regrets; and the error included in remorses
+and regrets, the error of supposing that the past could have been
+different, justifies itself by its use.  Its use is to quicken our
+sense of <I>what</I> the irretrievably lost is.  When we think of it as that
+which might have been ('the saddest words of tongue or pen'), the
+quality of its worth speaks to us with a wilder sweetness; and,
+conversely, the dissatisfaction wherewith we think of what seems to
+have driven it from its natural place gives us the severer pang.
+Admirable artifice of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P166"></A>166}</SPAN>
+nature! we might be tempted to
+exclaim,&mdash;deceiving us in order the better to enlighten us, and leaving
+nothing undone to accentuate to our consciousness the yawning distance
+of those opposite poles of good and evil between which creation swings.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We have thus clearly revealed to our view what may be called the
+dilemma of determinism, so far as determinism pretends to think things
+out at all.  A merely mechanical determinism, it is true, rather
+rejoices in not thinking them out.  It is very sure that the universe
+must satisfy its postulate of a physical continuity and coherence, but
+it smiles at any one who comes forward with a postulate of moral
+coherence as well.  I may suppose, however, that the number of purely
+mechanical or hard determinists among you this evening is small.  The
+determinism to whose seductions you are most exposed is what I have
+called soft determinism,&mdash;the determinism which allows considerations
+of good and bad to mingle with those of cause and effect in deciding
+what sort of a universe this may rationally be held to be.  The dilemma
+of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right
+horn is subjectivism.  In other words, if determinism is to escape
+pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a
+simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in
+themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and
+ethical, in us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To escape pessimism is, as we all know, no easy task.  Your own studies
+have sufficiently shown you the almost desperate difficulty of making
+the notion that there is a single principle of things, and that
+principle absolute perfection, rhyme together with
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P167"></A>167}</SPAN>
+our daily
+vision of the facts of life.  If perfection be the principle, how comes
+there any imperfection here?  If God be good, how came he to
+create&mdash;or, if he did not create, how comes he to permit&mdash;the devil?
+The evil facts must be explained as seeming: the devil must be
+whitewashed, the universe must be disinfected, if neither God's
+goodness nor his unity and power are to remain impugned.  And of all
+the various ways of operating the disinfection, and making bad seem
+less bad, the way of subjectivism appears by far the best.[<A NAME="ch05fn6text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn6">6</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For, after all, is there not something rather absurd in our ordinary
+notion of external things being good or bad in themselves?  Can murders
+and treacheries, considered as mere outward happenings, or motions of
+matter, be bad without any one to feel their badness?  And could
+paradise properly be good in the absence of a sentient principle by
+which the goodness was perceived?  Outward goods and evils seem
+practically indistinguishable except in so far as they result in
+getting moral judgments made about them.  But then the moral judgments
+seem the main thing, and the outward facts mere perishing instruments
+for their production.  This is subjectivism.  Every one must at some
+time have wondered at that strange paradox of our moral nature, that,
+though the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P168"></A>168}</SPAN>
+pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils,
+the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation and
+death.  Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or
+on earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape?  The white-robed
+harp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table
+elysium represented in Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, as the final
+consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this
+respect,&mdash;lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all.[<A NAME="ch05fn7text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn7">7</A>]  We look upon
+them from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivings
+and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations, which forms
+our present state, and <I>tedium vitae</I> is the only sentiment they awaken
+in our breasts.  To our crepuscular natures, born for the conflict, the
+Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro, the shifting struggle of the sunbeam
+in the gloom, such pictures of light upon light are vacuous and
+expressionless, and neither to be enjoyed nor understood.  If <I>this</I> be
+the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations of mankind
+suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets confessed and martyrs
+sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end
+than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should
+succeed, and protract <I>in saecula saeculorum</I> their contented and
+inoffensive lives,&mdash;why, at such a rate, better lose than win the
+battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last
+act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be
+saved from so singularly flat a winding-up.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P169"></A>169}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+All this is what I should instantly say, were I called on to plead for
+gnosticism; and its real friends, of whom you will presently perceive I
+am not one, would say without difficulty a great deal more.  Regarded
+as a stable finality, every outward good becomes a mere weariness to
+the flesh.  It must be menaced, be occasionally lost, for its goodness
+to be fully felt as such.  Nay, more than occasionally lost.  No one
+knows the worth of innocence till he knows it is gone forever, and that
+money cannot buy it back.  Not the saint, but the sinner that
+repenteth, is he to whom the full length and breadth, and height and
+depth, of life's meaning is revealed.  Not the absence of vice, but
+vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human
+state.  And there seems no reason to suppose it not a permanent human
+state.  There is a deep truth in what the school of Schopenhauer
+insists on,&mdash;the illusoriness of the notion of moral progress.  The
+more brutal forms of evil that go are replaced by others more subtle
+and more poisonous.  Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, and
+never do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves and
+the azure meet.  The final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly
+to be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness,
+through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of
+characters.  This of course obliges some of us to be vessels of wrath,
+while it calls others to be vessels of honor.  But the subjectivist
+point of view reduces all these outward distinctions to a common
+denominator.  The wretch languishing in the felon's cell may be
+drinking draughts of the wine of truth that will never pass the lips of
+the so-called favorite of fortune.  And the peculiar consciousness of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P170"></A>170}</SPAN>
+each of them is an indispensable note in the great ethical
+concert which the centuries as they roll are grinding out of the living
+heart of man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So much for subjectivism!  If the dilemma of determinism be to choose
+between it and pessimism, I see little room for hesitation from the
+strictly theoretical point of view.  Subjectivism seems the more
+rational scheme.  And the world may, possibly, for aught I know, be
+nothing else.  When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its
+forms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutal
+and the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is an
+integral part of the total richness,&mdash;why, then it seems a grudging and
+sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink from any of its
+facts and wish them not to be.  Rather take the strictly dramatic point
+of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which
+the spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, is
+eternally thinking out and representing to itself.[<A NAME="ch05fn8text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn8">8</A>]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+No one, I hope, will accuse me, after I have said all this, of
+underrating the reasons in favor of subjectivism.  And now that I
+proceed to say why those reasons, strong as they are, fail to convince
+my own mind, I trust the presumption may be that my objections are
+stronger still.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I frankly confess that they are of a practical order.  If we
+practically take up subjectivism in a sincere and radical manner and
+follow its consequences, we meet with some that make us pause.  Let a
+subjectivism
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P171"></A>171}</SPAN>
+begin in never so severe and intellectual a way, it
+is forced by the law of its nature to develop another side of itself
+and end with the corruptest curiosity.  Once dismiss the notion that
+certain duties are good in themselves, and that we are here to do them,
+no matter how we feel about them; once consecrate the opposite notion
+that our performances and our violations of duty are for a common
+purpose, the attainment of subjective knowledge and feeling, and that
+the deepening of these is the chief end of our lives,&mdash;and at what
+point on the downward slope are we to stop?  In theology, subjectivism
+develops as its 'left wing' antinomianism.  In literature, its left
+wing is romanticism.  And in practical life it is either a nerveless
+sentimentality or a sensualism without bounds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Everywhere it fosters the fatalistic mood of mind.  It makes those who
+are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless
+those whose energy is already in excess.  All through history we find
+how subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts itself in
+every sort of spiritual, moral, and practical license.  Its optimism
+turns to an ethical indifference, which infallibly brings dissolution
+in its train.  It is perfectly safe to say now that if the Hegelian
+gnosticism, which has begun to show itself here and in Great Britain,
+were to become a popular philosophy, as it once was in Germany, it
+would certainly develop its left wing here as there, and produce a
+reaction of disgust.  Already I have heard a graduate of this very
+school express in the pulpit his willingness to sin like David, if only
+he might repent like David.  You may tell me he was only sowing his
+wild, or rather his tame, oats; and perhaps he was.  But the point is
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P172"></A>172}</SPAN>
+that in the subjectivistic or gnostical philosophy oat-sowing,
+wild or tame, becomes a systematic necessity and the chief function of
+life.  After the pure and classic truths, the exciting and rancid ones
+must be experienced; and if the stupid virtues of the philistine herd
+do not then come in and save society from the influence of the children
+of light, a sort of inward putrefaction becomes its inevitable doom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Look at the last runnings of the romantic school, as we see them in
+that strange contemporary Parisian literature, with which we of the
+less clever countries are so often driven to rinse out our minds after
+they have become clogged with the dulness and heaviness of our native
+pursuits.  The romantic school began with the worship of subjective
+sensibility and the revolt against legality of which Rousseau was the
+first great prophet: and through various fluxes and refluxes, right
+wings and left wings, it stands to-day with two men of genius, M. Renan
+and M. Zola, as its principal exponents,&mdash;one speaking with its
+masculine, and the other with what might be called its feminine, voice.
+I prefer not to think now of less noble members of the school, and the
+Renan I have in mind is of course the Renan of latest dates.  As I have
+used the term gnostic, both he and Zola are gnostics of the most
+pronounced sort.  Both are athirst for the facts of life, and both
+think the facts of human sensibility to be of all facts the most worthy
+of attention.  Both agree, moreover, that sensibility seems to be there
+for no higher purpose,&mdash;certainly not, as the Philistines say, for the
+sake of bringing mere outward rights to pass and frustrating outward
+wrongs.  One dwells on the sensibilities for their energy, the other
+for their sweetness; one speaks with a voice of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P173"></A>173}</SPAN>
+bronze, the other
+with that of an Æolian harp; one ruggedly ignores the distinction of
+good and evil, the other plays the coquette between the craven
+unmanliness of his Philosophic Dialogues and the butterfly optimism of
+his Souvenirs de Jeunesse.  But under the pages of both there sounds
+incessantly the hoarse bass of <I>vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas</I>,
+which the reader may hear, whenever he will, between the lines.  No
+writer of this French romantic school has a word of rescue from the
+hour of satiety with the things of life,&mdash;the hour in which we say, "I
+take no pleasure in them,"&mdash;or from the hour of terror at the world's
+vast meaningless grinding, if perchance such hours should come.  For
+terror and satiety are facts of sensibility like any others; and at
+their own hour they reign in their own right.  The heart of the
+romantic utterances, whether poetical, critical, or historical, is this
+inward remedilessness, what Carlyle calls this far-off whimpering of
+wail and woe.  And from this romantic state of mind there is absolutely
+no possible <I>theoretic</I> escape.  Whether, like Renan, we look upon life
+in a more refined way, as a romance of the spirit; or whether, like the
+friends of M. Zola, we pique ourselves on our 'scientific' and
+'analytic' character, and prefer to be cynical, and call the world a
+'roman experimental' on an infinite scale,&mdash;in either case the world
+appears to us potentially as what the same Carlyle once called it, a
+vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The only escape is by the practical way.  And since I have mentioned
+the nowadays much-reviled name of Carlyle, let me mention it once more,
+and say it is the way of his teaching.  No matter for Carlyle's life,
+no matter for a great deal of his
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P174"></A>174}</SPAN>
+writing.  What was the most
+important thing he said to us?  He said: "Hang your sensibilities!
+Stop your snivelling complaints, and your equally snivelling raptures!
+Leave off your general emotional tomfoolery, and get to WORK like men!"
+But this means a complete rupture with the subjectivist philosophy of
+things.  It says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact for
+our recognition.  With the vision of certain works to be done, of
+certain outward changes to be wrought or resisted, it says our
+intellectual horizon terminates.  No matter how we succeed in doing
+these outward duties, whether gladly and spontaneously, or heavily and
+unwillingly, do them we somehow must; for the leaving of them undone is
+perdition.  No matter how we feel; if we are only faithful in the
+outward act and refuse to do wrong, the world will in so far be safe,
+and we quit of our debt toward it.  Take, then, the yoke upon our
+shoulders; bend our neck beneath the heavy legality of its weight;
+regard something else than our feeling as our limit, our master, and
+our law; be willing to live and die in its service,&mdash;and, at a stroke,
+we have passed from the subjective into the objective philosophy of
+things, much as one awakens from some feverish dream, full of bad
+lights and noises, to find one's self bathed in the sacred coolness and
+quiet of the air of the night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But what is the essence of this philosophy of objective conduct, so
+old-fashioned and finite, but so chaste and sane and strong, when
+compared with its romantic rival?  It is the recognition of limits,
+foreign and opaque to our understanding.  It is the willingness, after
+bringing about some external good, to feel at peace; for our
+responsibility ends with the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P175"></A>175}</SPAN>
+performance of that duty, and the
+burden of the rest we may lay on higher powers.[<A NAME="ch05fn9text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn9">9</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Look to thyself, O Universe,<BR>
+Thou art better and not worse,"<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+we may say in that philosophy, the moment we have done our stroke of
+conduct, however small.  For in the view of that philosophy the
+universe belongs to a plurality of semi-independent forces, each one of
+which may help or hinder, and be helped or hindered by, the operations
+of the rest.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But this brings us right back, after such a long detour, to the
+question of indeterminism and to the conclusion of all I came here to
+say to-night.  For the only consistent way of representing a pluralism
+and a world whose parts may affect one another through their conduct
+being either good or bad is the indeterministic way.  What interest,
+zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we
+are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural
+way,&mdash;nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way?  And what sense can
+there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we
+need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us
+as well?  I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we
+feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.  I cannot
+understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its
+happening.  I cannot understand regret without the admission of real,
+genuine possibilities in the world.  Only <I>then</I> is it
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P176"></A>176}</SPAN>
+other than
+a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an
+irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it
+must forever after mourn.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the
+eye of science and reason impossibility, and that if I act badly 'tis
+that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right
+back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism,
+from out of whose toils we have just wound our way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, we are of course free to fall back, if we please.  For my own
+part, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of
+objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply,
+determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains
+difficulties that are greater still.  But you will remember that I
+expressly repudiated awhile ago the pretension to offer any arguments
+which could be coercive in a so-called scientific fashion in this
+matter.  And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk,
+obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way.  This
+personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the
+problem; and the most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he
+can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to
+work on others as it may.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this.  The world is
+enigmatical enough in all conscience, whatever theory we may take up
+toward it.  The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular
+sense based on the judgment of regret, represents
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P177"></A>177}</SPAN>
+that world as
+vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they
+act wrong.  And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of
+possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly
+warded off.  In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency
+or of stability.  It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in
+which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to
+a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt,
+remain forever inacceptable.  A friend with such a mind once told me
+that the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the
+horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are
+repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every
+alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way.  The indeterminism
+with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the
+native absolutism of my intellect,&mdash;an absolutism which, after all,
+perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check.  But the determinism
+with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with
+no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral
+reality through and through.  When, for example, I imagine such carrion
+as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the
+universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature
+without shrinking from complicity with such a whole.  And I
+deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by
+saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of
+the whole, is not carrion.  There are some instinctive reactions which
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P178"></A>178}</SPAN>
+I, for one, will not tamper with.  The only remaining
+alternative, the attitude of gnostical romanticism, wrenches my
+personal instincts in quite as violent a way.  It falsifies the simple
+objectivity of their deliverance.  It makes the goose-flesh the murder
+excites in me a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime.
+It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic
+exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one's diseased curiosity
+pleases to carry it out.  And with its consecration of the 'roman
+naturaliste' state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of
+Parisian <I>littérateurs</I> among the eternally indispensable organs by
+which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective
+illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of
+a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the
+objective carrion I called it in to take away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our
+moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward;
+but better far than that the world of chance.  Make as great an uproar
+about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and
+nothing more.  If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the
+philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits
+me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of
+affection and an unsophisticated moral sense.  And if I still wish to
+think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a
+chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to
+pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all.  That 'chance'
+whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P179"></A>179}</SPAN>
+from my
+view of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that
+'chance' is&mdash;what?  Just this,&mdash;the chance that in moral respects the
+future may be other and better than the past has been.  This is the
+only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist.  Shame, rather,
+on its repudiation and its denial!  For its presence is the vital air
+which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see
+admitted by others to-night.  But I know that if I do stop here,
+misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you, and keep all
+I have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a few
+more words.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the first place, in spite of all my explanations, the word 'chance'
+will still be giving trouble.  Though you may yourselves be adverse to
+the deterministic doctrine, you wish a pleasanter word than 'chance' to
+name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider my
+preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part.
+It certainly <I>is</I> a bad word to make converts with; and you wish I had
+not thrust it so butt-foremost at you,&mdash;you wish to use a milder term.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Well, I admit there may be just a dash of perversity in its choice.
+The spectacle of the mere word-grabbing game played by the soft
+determinists has perhaps driven me too violently the other way; and,
+rather than be found wrangling with them for the good words, I am
+willing to take the first bad one which comes along, provided it be
+unequivocal.  The question is of things, not of eulogistic names for
+them; and the best word is the one that enables men to
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P180"></A>180}</SPAN>
+know the
+quickest whether they disagree or not about the things.  But the word
+'chance,' with its singular negativity, is just the word for this
+purpose.  Whoever uses it instead of 'freedom,' squarely and resolutely
+gives up all pretence to control the things he says are free.  For
+<I>him</I>, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be.
+It is a word of <I>impotence</I>, and is therefore the only sincere word we
+can use, if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant it
+honestly, and really risk the game.  "Who chooses me must give and
+forfeit all he hath."  Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets
+us, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretence of
+restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other
+we anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does not get
+beyond our sight.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But now you will bring up your final doubt.  Does not the admission of
+such an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a
+Providence governing the world?  Does it not leave the fate of the
+universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure?
+Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate
+peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To this my answer must be very brief.  The belief in free-will is not
+in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you
+do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but <I>fatal</I>
+decrees.  If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as
+actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those
+two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled
+even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous;
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P181"></A>181}</SPAN>
+and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be
+from all eternity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An analogy will make the meaning of this clear.  Suppose two men before
+a chessboard,&mdash;the one a novice, the other an expert player of the
+game.  The expert intends to beat.  But he cannot foresee exactly what
+any one actual move of his adversary may be.  He knows, however, all
+the <I>possible</I> moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet
+each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of
+victory.  And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how
+devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the
+novice's king.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for
+the infinite mind in which the universe lies.  Suppose the latter to be
+thinking out his universe before he actually creates it.  Suppose him
+to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not <I>now</I>[<A NAME="ch05fn10text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn10">10</A>]
+decide on all the steps thereto.  At various points, ambiguous
+possibilities shall be left
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P182"></A>182}</SPAN>
+open, <I>either</I> of which, at a given
+instant, may become actual.  But whichever branch of these bifurcations
+become real, I know what I shall do at the <I>next</I> bifurcation to keep
+things from drifting away from the final result I intend.[<A NAME="ch05fn11text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn11">11</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The creator's plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to many
+of its actual details, but all possibilities would be marked down.  The
+realization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; that
+is, would only be determined when the moment of realization came.
+Other possibilities would be <I>contingently</I> determined; that is, their
+decision would have to wait till it was seen how the matters of
+absolute chance fell out.  But the rest of the plan, including its
+final upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all.  So the
+creator himself would not need to know <I>all</I> the details of actuality
+until they came; and at any time his own view of the world would be a
+view partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours is
+now.  Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that his
+world was safe, and that no matter how much it might zig-zag he could
+surely bring it home at last.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P183"></A>183}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creator
+leave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by himself, each
+when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he
+alienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out to
+finite creatures such as we men are.  The great point is that the
+possibilities are really <I>here</I>.  Whether it be we who solve them, or
+he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate's scales
+seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks
+nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that
+the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now.  <I>That</I> is what
+gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as
+Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement.  This
+reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft
+alike, suppress by their denial that <I>anything</I> is decided here and
+now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long
+ago.  If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the error
+of continuing to believe in liberty.[<A NAME="ch05fn12text"></A><A HREF="#ch05fn12">12</A>]  It is fortunate for the
+winding up of controversy that in every discussion with determinism
+this <I>argumentum ad hominem</I> can be its adversary's last word.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch05fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn3"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn4"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn5"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn6"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn7"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn8"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn9"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn10"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn11"></A>
+<A NAME="ch05fn12"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn1text">1</A>] An Address to the Harvard Divinity Students, published in the
+Unitarian Review for September, 1884.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn2text">2</A>] And I may now say Charles S. Peirce,&mdash;see the Monist, for 1892-93.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn3text">3</A>] "The whole history of popular beliefs about Nature refutes the
+notion that the thought of a universal physical order can possibly have
+arisen from the purely passive reception and association of particular
+perceptions.  Indubitable as it is that men infer from known cases to
+unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to
+the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would
+never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the
+belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation.
+From the point of view of strict experience, nothing exists but the sum
+of particular perceptions, with their coincidences on the one hand,
+their contradictions on the other.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is
+not discovered; <I>till the order is looked for</I>.  The first impulse to
+look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained,
+or produce a result.  But the practical need is only the first occasion
+for our reflection on the conditions of true knowledge; and even were
+there no such need, motives would still be present for carrying us
+beyond the stage of mere association.  For not with an equal interest,
+or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those
+natural processes in which a thing is linked with its former mate, and
+those in which it is linked to something else.  <I>The former processes
+harmonize with the conditions of his own thinking</I>: the latter do not.
+In the former, his <I>concepts</I>, <I>general judgments</I>, and <I>inferences</I>
+apply to reality: in the latter, they have no such application.  And
+thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without
+reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized
+throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities,
+uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and
+guiding principle of his own thought."  (Sigwart, Logik, bd. 3, s. 382.)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn4text">4</A>] Speaking technically, it is a word with a positive denotation, but
+a connotation that is negative.  Other things must be silent about
+<I>what</I> it is: it alone can decide that point at the moment in which it
+reveals itself.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn5text">5</A>] A favorite argument against free-will is that if it be true, a
+man's murderer may as probably be his best friend as his worst enemy, a
+mother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first-born, and all of
+us be as ready to jump from fourth-story windows as to go out of front
+doors, etc.  Users of this argument should properly be excluded from
+debate till they learn what the real question is.  'Free-will' does not
+say that everything that is physically conceivable is also morally
+possible.  It merely says that of alternatives that really <I>tempt</I> our
+will more than one is really possible.  Of course, the alternatives
+that do thus tempt our will are vastly fewer than the physical
+possibilities we can coldly fancy.  Persons really tempted often do
+murder their best friends, mothers do strangle their first-born, people
+do jump out of fourth-story windows, etc.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn6text">6</A>] To a reader who says he is satisfied with a pessimism, and has no
+objection to thinking the whole bad, I have no more to say: he makes
+fewer demands on the world than I, who, making them, wish to look a
+little further before I give up all hope of having them satisfied.  If,
+however, all he means is that the badness of some parts does not
+prevent his acceptance of a universe whose <I>other</I> parts give him
+satisfaction, I welcome him as an ally.  He has abandoned the notion of
+the <I>Whole</I>, which is the essence of deterministic monism, and views
+things as a pluralism, just as I do in this paper.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn7text">7</A>] Compare Sir James Stephen's Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862,
+pp. 138, 318.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn8text">8</A>] Cet univers est un spectacle que Dieu se donne à lui-même.  Servons
+les intentions du grand chorège en contribuant à rendre le spectacle
+aussi brillant, aussi varié que possible.&mdash;RENAN.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn9text">9</A>] The burden, for example, of seeing to it that the <I>end</I> of all our
+righteousness be some positive universal gain.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn10text">10</A>] This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of
+time.  And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I
+have no reply to make.  A mind to whom all time is simultaneously
+present must see all things under the form of actuality, or under some
+form to us unknown.  If he thinks certain moments as ambiguous in their
+content while future, he must simultaneously know how the ambiguity
+will have been decided when they are past.  So that none of his mental
+judgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his world is one
+from which chance is excluded.  Is not, however, the timeless mind
+rather a gratuitous fiction?  And is not the notion of eternity being
+given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon
+us the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?&mdash;just
+the point to be proved.  To say that time is an illusory appearance is
+only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that
+the frame of things is an absolute unit.  Admit plurality, and time may
+be its form.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn11text">11</A>] And this of course means 'miraculous' interposition, but not
+necessarily of the gross sort our fathers took such delight in
+representing, and which has so lost its magic for us.  Emerson quotes
+some Eastern sage as saying that if evil were really done under the
+sun, the sky would incontinently shrivel to a snakeskin and cast it out
+in spasms.  But, says Emerson, the spasms of Nature are years and
+centuries; and it will tax man's patience to wait so long.  We may
+think of the reserved possibilities God keeps in his own hand, under as
+invisible and molecular and slowly self-summating a form as we please.
+We may think of them as counteracting human agencies which he inspires
+<I>ad hoc</I>.  In short, signs and wonders and convulsions of the earth and
+sky are not the only neutralizers of obstruction to a god's plans of
+which it is possible to think.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch05fn12text">12</A>] As long as languages contain a future perfect tense, determinists,
+following the bent of laziness or passion, the lines of least
+resistance, can reply in that tense, saying, "It will have been fated,"
+to the still small voice which urges an opposite course; and thus
+excuse themselves from effort in a quite unanswerable way.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P184"></A>184}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE.[<A NAME="ch06fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch06fn1">1</A>]
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing
+possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance.  We
+all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we
+contribute to the race's moral life.  In other words, there can be no
+final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has
+had his experience and said his say.  In the one case as in the other,
+however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts
+to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which
+determine what that 'say' shall be.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+First of all, what is the position of him who seeks an ethical
+philosophy?  To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who
+are satisfied to be ethical sceptics.  He <I>will</I> not be a sceptic;
+therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of
+ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual
+alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every
+would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and
+renounce his original aim.  That aim is to find an account of the moral
+relations that obtain among things, which
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P185"></A>185}</SPAN>
+will weave them into
+the unity of a stable system, and make of the world what one may call a
+genuine universe from the ethical point of view.  So far as the world
+resists reduction to the form of unity, so far as ethical propositions
+seem unstable, so far does the philosopher fail of his ideal.  The
+subject-matter of his study is the ideals he finds existing in the
+world; the purpose which guides him is this ideal of his own, of
+getting them into a certain form.  This ideal is thus a factor in
+ethical philosophy whose legitimate presence must never be overlooked;
+it is a positive contribution which the philosopher himself necessarily
+makes to the problem.  But it is his only positive contribution.  At
+the outset of his inquiry he ought to have no other ideals.  Were he
+interested peculiarly in the triumph of any one kind of good, he would
+<I>pro tanto</I> cease to be a judicial investigator, and become an advocate
+for some limited element of the case.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+There are three questions in ethics which must be kept apart.  Let them
+be called respectively the <I>psychological</I> question, the <I>metaphysical</I>
+question, and the <I>casuistic</I> question.  The psychological question
+asks after the historical <I>origin</I> of our moral ideas and judgments;
+the metaphysical question asks what the very <I>meaning</I> of the words
+'good,' 'ill,' and 'obligation' are; the casuistic question asks what
+is the <I>measure</I> of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so
+that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+I.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The psychological question is for most disputants the only question.
+When your ordinary doctor of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P186"></A>186}</SPAN>
+divinity has proved to his own
+satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called 'conscience' must
+be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your
+popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that 'apriorism' is an
+exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually
+resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons
+thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said.  The
+familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used
+now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really
+refer to the psychological question alone.  The discussion of this
+question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible
+to enter upon it at all within the limits of this paper.  I will
+therefore only express dogmatically my own belief, which is this,&mdash;that
+the Benthams, the Mills, and the Barns have done a lasting service in
+taking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must have
+arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and
+reliefs from pain.  Association with many remote pleasures will
+unquestionably make a thing significant of goodness in our minds; and
+the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will
+its source appear to be.  But it is surely impossible to explain all
+our sentiments and preferences in this simple way.  The more minutely
+psychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces
+of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment
+with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from
+those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are
+practically all that pure empiricism can admit.  Take the love of
+drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P187"></A>187}</SPAN>
+of high places, the
+tendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, the
+susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the
+passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics,&mdash;no one of
+these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility.
+They <I>go with</I> other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and
+some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing
+in us for which some use may not be found.  But their origin is in
+incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose
+original features arose with no reference to the perception of such
+discords and harmonies as these.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this
+secondary and brain-born kind.  They deal with directly felt fitnesses
+between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of
+habit and presumptions of utility.  The moment you get beyond the
+coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor
+Richard's Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the
+eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained.  The sense for
+abstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation,
+from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or
+for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of
+others.  The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual
+attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the
+essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic
+fussiness, etc.,&mdash;are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference
+of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake.  The nobler thing
+<I>tastes</I> better, and that is all that we can say.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P188"></A>188}</SPAN>
+'Experience'
+of consequences may truly teach us what things are <I>wicked</I>, but what
+have consequences to do with what is <I>mean</I> and <I>vulgar</I>?  If a man has
+shot his wife's paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in
+things is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and
+the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again?
+Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs.
+Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and
+millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a
+certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
+lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of
+emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an
+impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how
+hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as
+the fruit of such a bargain?  To what, once more, but subtile
+brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests
+against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice?&mdash;I refer to
+Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his
+substitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr.
+Heidenhain's Process), to M. Guyau with his radical condemnation of the
+punitive ideal.  All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as
+much beyond what can be ciphered out from the 'laws of association' as
+the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go
+beyond such precepts of the 'etiquette to be observed during
+engagement' as are printed in manuals of social form.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No!  Purely inward forces are certainly at work here.  All the higher,
+more penetrating ideals are
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P189"></A>189}</SPAN>
+revolutionary.  They present
+themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in
+that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the
+environment and the lessons it has so far taught as must learn to bend.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is all I can say of the psychological question now.  In the last
+chapter of a recent work[<A NAME="ch06fn2text"></A><A HREF="#ch06fn2">2</A>] I have sought to prove in a general way the
+existence, in our thought, of relations which do not merely repeat the
+couplings of experience.  Our ideals have certainly many sources.  They
+are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained,
+and pains to be escaped.  And for having so constantly perceived this
+psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school.  Whether
+or not such applause must be extended to that school's other
+characteristics will appear as we take up the following questions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The next one in order is the metaphysical question, of what we mean by
+the words 'obligation,' 'good,' and 'ill.'
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+II.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+First of all, it appears that such words can have no application or
+relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists.  Imagine an
+absolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts,
+and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested
+spectator: would there be any sense in saying of that world that one of
+its states is better than another?  Or if there were two such worlds
+possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and
+the other bad,&mdash;good or
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P190"></A>190}</SPAN>
+bad positively, I mean, and apart from
+the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the
+philosopher's private interests?  But we must leave these private
+interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and
+we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical
+facts <I>per se</I>.  Surely there is no <I>status</I> for good and evil to exist
+in, in a purely insentient world.  How can one physical fact,
+considered simply as a physical fact, be 'better' than another?
+Betterness is not a physical relation.  In its mere material capacity,
+a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant or painful.
+Good for what?  Good for the production of another physical fact, do
+you say?  But what in a purely physical universe demands the production
+of that other fact?  Physical facts simply <I>are</I> or are <I>not</I>; and
+neither when present or absent, can they be supposed to make demands.
+If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have
+ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious
+sensibility.  Goodness, badness, and obligation must be <I>realised</I>
+somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical
+philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic 'nature of things' can
+realize them.  Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing <I>in
+vacuo</I>.  Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no
+world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to
+which ethical propositions apply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the universe,
+there is a chance for goods and evils really to exist.  Moral relations
+now have their <I>status</I>, in that being's consciousness.  So far as he
+feels anything to be good, he <I>makes</I> it good.  It
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P191"></A>191}</SPAN>
+<I>is</I> good, for
+him; and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the sole
+creator of values in that universe, and outside of his opinion things
+have no moral character at all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In such a universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the
+question of whether the solitary thinker's judgments of good and ill
+are true or not.  Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to
+which he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity,
+subject to no higher judge.  Let us call the supposed universe which he
+inhabits a <I>moral solitude</I>.  In such a moral solitude it is clear that
+there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the
+god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his
+own several ideals with one another.  Some of these will no doubt be
+more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a
+profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him with
+more obstinate regrets if violated.  So the thinker will have to order
+his life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly
+discordant and unhappy.  Into whatever equilibrium he may settle,
+though, and however he may straighten out his system, it will be a
+right system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there is
+nothing moral in the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If now we introduce a second thinker with his likes and dislikes into
+the universe, the ethical situation becomes much more complex, and
+several possibilities are immediately seen to obtain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One of these is that the thinkers may ignore each other's attitude
+about good and evil altogether, and each continue to indulge his own
+preferences, indifferent to what the other may feel or do.  In such a
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P192"></A>192}</SPAN>
+case we have a world with twice as much of the ethical quality in
+it as our moral solitude, only it is without ethical unity.  The same
+object is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view
+which this one or that one of the thinkers takes.  Nor can you find any
+possible ground in such a world for saying that one thinker's opinion
+is more correct than the other's, or that either has the truer moral
+sense.  Such a world, in short, is not a moral universe but a moral
+dualism.  Not only is there no single point of view within it from
+which the values of things can be unequivocally judged, but there is
+not even a demand for such a point of view, since the two thinkers are
+supposed to be indifferent to each other's thoughts and acts.  Multiply
+the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us in the
+ethical sphere something like that world which the antique sceptics
+conceived of,&mdash;in which individual minds are the measures of all
+things, and in which no one 'objective' truth, but only a multitude of
+'subjective' opinions, can be found.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But this is the kind of world with which the philosopher, so long as he
+holds to the hope of a philosophy, will not put up.  Among the various
+ideals represented, there must be, he thinks, some which have the more
+truth or authority; and to these the others <I>ought</I> to yield, so that
+system and subordination may reign.  Here in the word 'ought' the
+notion of <I>obligation</I> comes emphatically into view, and the next thing
+in order must be to make its meaning clear.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Since the outcome of the discussion so far has been to show us that
+nothing can be good or right except
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P193"></A>193}</SPAN>
+so far as some consciousness
+feels it to be good or thinks it to be right, we perceive on the very
+threshold that the real superiority and authority which are postulated
+by the philosopher to reside in some of the opinions, and the really
+inferior character which he supposes must belong to others, cannot be
+explained by any abstract moral 'nature of things' existing
+antecedently to the concrete thinkers themselves with their ideals.
+Like the positive attributes good and bad, the comparative ones better
+and worse must be <I>realised</I> in order to be real.  If one ideal
+judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be
+made flesh by being lodged concretely in some one's actual perception.
+It cannot float in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of
+meteorological phenomenon, like the aurora borealis or the zodiacal
+light.  Its <I>esse</I> is <I>percipi</I>, like the <I>esse</I> of the ideals
+themselves between which it obtains.  The philosopher, therefore, who
+seeks to know which ideal ought to have supreme weight and which one
+ought to be subordinated, must trace the <I>ought</I> itself to the <I>de
+facto</I> constitution of some existing consciousness, behind which, as
+one of the data of the universe, he as a purely ethical philosopher is
+unable to go.  This consciousness must make the one ideal right by
+feeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong.  But
+now what particular consciousness in the universe <I>can</I> enjoy this
+prerogative of obliging others to conform to a rule which it lays down?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If one of the thinkers were obviously divine, while all the rest were
+human, there would probably be no practical dispute about the matter.
+The divine thought would be the model, to which the others should
+conform.  But still the theoretic question
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P194"></A>194}</SPAN>
+would remain, What is
+the ground of the obligation, even here?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitable
+tendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when they
+are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad.  They
+imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides;
+and each tries to prove that this pre-existing order is more accurately
+reflected in his own ideas than in those of his adversary.  It is
+because one disputant is backed by this overarching abstract order that
+we think the other should submit.  Even so, when it is a question no
+longer of two finite thinkers, but of God and ourselves,&mdash;we follow our
+usual habit, and imagine a sort of <I>de jure</I> relation, which antedates
+and overarches the mere facts, and would make it right that we should
+conform our thoughts to God's thoughts, even though he made no claim to
+that effect, and though we preferred <I>de facto</I> to go on thinking for
+ourselves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the moment we take a steady look at the question, <I>we see not only
+that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be
+no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a
+claim</I>.  Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they
+cover each other exactly.  Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves
+as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true 'in
+themselves,' is therefore either an out-and-out superstition, or else
+it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real
+Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our
+obligation must be ultimately based.  In a theistic-ethical philosophy
+that thinker in question is, of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P195"></A>195}</SPAN>
+course, the Deity to whom the
+existence of the universe is due.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I have
+called the superstitious view, to realize that every <I>de facto</I> claim
+creates in so far forth an obligation.  We inveterately think that
+something which we call the 'validity' of the claim is what gives to it
+its obligatory character, and that this validity is something outside
+of the claim's mere existence as a matter of fact.  It rains down upon
+the claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the
+moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the
+influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens.  But
+again, how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness,
+additional to the imperativeness which is in the concrete claim itself,
+<I>exist</I>?  Take any demand, however slight, which any creature, however
+weak, may make.  Ought it not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied?
+If not, prove why not.  The only possible kind of proof you could
+adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a
+demand that ran the other way.  The only possible reason there can be
+why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is
+desired.  Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it
+<I>makes</I> itself valid by the fact that it exists at all.  Some desires,
+truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant
+persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they
+bring.  But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small
+obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal
+demands.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If we must talk impersonally, to be sure we can say
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P196"></A>196}</SPAN>
+that 'the
+universe' requires, exacts, or makes obligatory such or such an action,
+whenever it expresses itself through the desires of such or such a
+creature.  But it is better not to talk about the universe in this
+personified way, unless we believe in a universal or divine
+consciousness which actually exists.  If there be such a consciousness,
+then its demands carry the most of obligation simply because they are
+the greatest in amount.  But it is even then not <I>abstractly right</I>
+that we should respect them.  It is only concretely right,&mdash;or right
+after the fact, and by virtue of the fact, that they are actually made.
+Suppose we do not respect them, as seems largely to be the case in this
+queer world.  That ought not to be, we say; that is wrong.  But in what
+way is this fact of wrongness made more acceptable or intelligible when
+we imagine it to consist rather in the laceration of an <I>à priori</I>
+ideal order than in the disappointment of a living personal God?  Do
+we, perhaps, think that we cover God and protect him and make his
+impotence over us less ultimate, when we back him up with this <I>à
+priori</I> blanket from which he may draw some warmth of further appeal?
+But the only force of appeal to <I>us</I>, which either a living God or an
+abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the 'everlasting ruby
+vaults' of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and
+not irresponsive to the claim.  So far as they do feel it when made by
+a living consciousness, it is life answering to life.  A claim thus
+livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which
+no thought of an 'ideal' backing can render more complete; while if, on
+the other hand, the heart's response is withheld, the stubborn
+phenomenon is there of an impotence in the claims
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P197"></A>197}</SPAN>
+which the
+universe embodies, which no talk about an eternal nature of things can
+gloze over or dispel.  An ineffective <I>à priori</I> order is as impotent a
+thing as an ineffective God; and in the eye of philosophy, it is as
+hard a thing to explain.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+We may now consider that what we distinguished as the metaphysical
+question in ethical philosophy is sufficiently answered, and that we
+have learned what the words 'good,' 'bad,' and 'obligation' severally
+mean.  They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support.
+They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or
+anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wherever such minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demands
+upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features.
+Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out
+from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving
+souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution
+as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could
+harbor.  It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock's
+inhabitants would die.  But while they lived, there would be real good
+things and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations,
+claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments;
+compunctions and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace
+of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral
+life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of
+interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P198"></A>198}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just
+like the inhabitants of such a rock.  Whether a God exist, or whether
+no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an
+ethical republic here below.  And the first reflection which this leads
+to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe
+where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there
+is a God as well.  'The religion of humanity' affords a basis for
+ethics as well as theism does.  Whether the purely human system can
+gratify the philosopher's demand as well as the other is a different
+question, which we ourselves must answer ere we close.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+III.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The last fundamental question in Ethics was, it will be remembered, the
+<I>casuistic</I> question.  Here we are, in a world where the existence of a
+divine thinker has been and perhaps always will be doubted by some of
+the lookers-on, and where, in spite of the presence of a large number
+of ideals in which human beings agree, there are a mass of others about
+which no general consensus obtains.  It is hardly necessary to present
+a literary picture of this, for the facts are too well known.  The wars
+of the flesh and the spirit in each man, the concupiscences of
+different individuals pursuing the same unshareable material or social
+prizes, the ideals which contrast so according to races, circumstances,
+temperaments, philosophical beliefs, etc.,&mdash;all form a maze of
+apparently inextricable confusion with no obvious Ariadne's thread to
+lead one out.  Yet the philosopher, just because he is a philosopher,
+adds his own peculiar ideal to the confusion
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P199"></A>199}</SPAN>
+(with which if he
+were willing to be a sceptic he would be passably content), and insists
+that over all these individual opinions there is a <I>system of truth</I>
+which he can discover if he only takes sufficient pains.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We stand ourselves at present in the place of that philosopher, and
+must not fail to realize all the features that the situation comports.
+In the first place we will not be sceptics; we hold to it that there is
+a truth to be ascertained.  But in the second place we have just gained
+the insight that that truth cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws,
+or an abstract 'moral reason,' but can only exist in act, or in the
+shape of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found.  There is,
+however, no visible thinker invested with authority.  Shall we then
+simply proclaim our own ideals as the lawgiving ones?  No; for if we
+are true philosophers we must throw our own spontaneous ideals, even
+the dearest, impartially in with that total mass of ideals which are
+fairly to be judged.  But how then can we as philosophers ever find a
+test; how avoid complete moral scepticism on the one hand, and on the
+other escape bringing a wayward personal standard of our own along with
+us, on which we simply pin our faith?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The dilemma is a hard one, nor does it grow a bit more easy as we
+revolve it in our minds.  The entire undertaking of the philosopher
+obliges him to seek an impartial test.  That test, however, must be
+incarnated in the demand of some actually existent person; and how can
+he pick out the person save by an act in which his own sympathies and
+prepossessions are implied?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One method indeed presents itself, and has as a matter of history been
+taken by the more serious
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P200"></A>200}</SPAN>
+ethical schools.  If the heap of things
+demanded proved on inspection less chaotic than at first they seemed,
+if they furnished their own relative test and measure, then the
+casuistic problem would be solved.  If it were found that all goods
+<I>quâ</I> goods contained a common essence, then the amount of this essence
+involved in any one good would show its rank in the scale of goodness,
+and order could be quickly made; for this essence would be <I>the</I> good
+upon which all thinkers were agreed, the relatively objective and
+universal good that the philosopher seeks.  Even his own private ideals
+would be measured by their share of it, and find their rightful place
+among the rest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Various essences of good have thus been found and proposed as bases of
+the ethical system.  Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to be
+recognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy for
+the moment; to make others as well as him happy in the long run; to add
+to his perfection or dignity; to harm no one; to follow from reason or
+flow from universal law; to be in accordance with the will of God; to
+promote the survival of the human species on this planet,&mdash;are so many
+tests, each of which has been maintained by somebody to constitute the
+essence of all good things or actions so far as they are good.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No one of the measures that have been actually proposed has, however,
+given general satisfaction.  Some are obviously not universally present
+in all cases,&mdash;<I>e. g.</I>, the character of harming no one, or that of
+following a universal law; for the best course is often cruel; and many
+acts are reckoned good on the sole condition that they be exceptions,
+and serve not as examples of a universal law.  Other
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P201"></A>201}</SPAN>
+characters,
+such as following the will of God, are unascertainable and vague.
+Others again, like survival, are quite indeterminate in their
+consequences, and leave us in the lurch where we most need their help:
+a philosopher of the Sioux Nation, for example, will be certain to use
+the survival-criterion in a very different way from ourselves.  The
+best, on the whole, of these marks and measures of goodness seems to be
+the capacity to bring happiness.  But in order not to break down
+fatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and impulses
+that never <I>aim</I> at happiness; so that, after all, in seeking for a
+universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most
+universal principle,&mdash;that <I>the essence of good is simply to satisfy
+demand</I>.  The demand may be for anything under the sun.  There is
+really no more ground for supposing that all our demands can be
+accounted for by one universal underlying kind of motive than there is
+ground for supposing that all physical phenomena are cases of a single
+law.  The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those
+of physics are.  The various ideals have no common character apart from
+the fact that they are ideals.  No single abstract principle can be so
+used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientifically
+accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+A look at another peculiarity of the ethical universe, as we find it,
+will still further show us the philosopher's perplexities.  As a purely
+theoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly ever
+come up at all.  If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the
+best <I>imaginable</I> system of goods he would indeed have an easy task;
+for all demands as
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P202"></A>202}</SPAN>
+such are <I>primâ facie</I> respectable, and the
+best simply imaginary world would be one in which <I>every</I> demand was
+gratified as soon as made.  Such a world would, however, have to have a
+physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we
+inhabit.  It would need not only a space, but a time, 'of
+<I>n</I>-dimensions,' to include all the acts and experiences incompatible
+with one another here below, which would then go on in
+conjunction,&mdash;such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking our
+holiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yet
+doing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keeping
+our youthful freshness of heart; and the like.  There can be no
+question that such a system of things, however brought about, would be
+the absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could create
+universes <I>à priori</I>, and provide all the mechanical conditions, that
+is the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and
+the casuistic question here is most tragically practical.  The actually
+possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded;
+and there is always a <I>pinch</I> between the ideal and the actual which
+can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind.  There is
+hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the
+possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined
+good.  Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of
+some other end of desire.  Shall a man drink and smoke, <I>or</I> keep his
+nerves in condition?&mdash;he cannot do both.  Shall he follow his fancy for
+Amelia, <I>or</I> for Henrietta?&mdash;both cannot be the choice of his heart.
+Shall he have the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P203"></A>203}</SPAN>
+dear old Republican party, <I>or</I> a spirit of
+unsophistication in public affairs?&mdash;he cannot have both, etc.  So that
+the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination
+in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need.  Some part of
+the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part.  It is a
+tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has
+to deal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now we are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopher's task by
+the fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largely
+ordered already.  If we follow the ideal which is conventionally
+highest, the others which we butcher either die and do not return to
+haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, every one
+applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear.  In other words, our
+environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.  The
+philosopher, however, cannot, so long as he clings to his own ideal of
+objectivity, rule out any ideal from being heard.  He is confident, and
+rightly confident, that the simple taking counsel of his own intuitive
+preferences would be certain to end in a mutilation of the fulness of
+the truth.  The poet Heine is said to have written 'Bunsen' in the
+place of 'Gott' in his copy of that author's work entitled "God in
+History," so as to make it read 'Bunsen in der Geschichte.'  Now, with
+no disrespect to the good and learned Baron, is it not safe to say that
+any single philosopher, however wide his sympathies, must be just such
+a Bunsen in der Geschichte of the moral world, so soon as he attempts
+to put his own ideas of order into that howling mob of desires, each
+struggling to get breathing-room for the ideal to which it clings?  The
+very best of men must not only be insensible, but
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P204"></A>204}</SPAN>
+be ludicrously
+and peculiarly insensible, to many goods.  As a militant, fighting
+free-handed that the goods to which he is sensible may not be submerged
+and lost from out of life, the philosopher, like every other human
+being, is in a natural position.  But think of Zeno and of Epicurus,
+think of Calvin and of Paley, think of Kant and Schopenhauer, of
+Herbert Spencer and John Henry Newman, no longer as one-sided champions
+of special ideals, but as schoolmasters deciding what all must
+think,&mdash;and what more grotesque topic could a satirist wish for on
+which to exercise his pen?  The fabled attempt of Mrs. Partington to
+arrest the rising tide of the North Atlantic with her broom was a
+reasonable spectacle compared with their effort to substitute the
+content of their clean-shaven systems for that exuberant mass of goods
+with which all human nature is in travail, and groaning to bring to the
+light of day.  Think, furthermore, of such individual moralists, no
+longer as mere schoolmasters, but as pontiffs armed with the temporal
+power, and having authority in every concrete case of conflict to order
+which good shall be butchered and which shall be suffered to
+survive,&mdash;and the notion really turns one pale.  All one's slumbering
+revolutionary instincts waken at the thought of any single moralist
+wielding such powers of life and death.  Better chaos forever than an
+order based on any closet-philosopher's rule, even though he were the
+most enlightened possible member of his tribe.  No! if the philosopher
+is to keep his judicial position, he must never become one of the
+parties to the fray.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+What can he do, then, it will now be asked, except to fall back on
+scepticism and give up the notion of being a philosopher at all?
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P205"></A>205}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+But do we not already see a perfectly definite path of escape which is
+open to him just because he is a philosopher, and not the champion of
+one particular ideal?  Since everything which is demanded is by that
+fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy
+(since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world)
+be simply to satisfy at all times <I>as many demands as we can</I>?  That
+act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole,
+in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions.  In the
+casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which
+<I>prevail at the least cost</I>, or by whose realization the least possible
+number of other ideals are destroyed.  Since victory and defeat there
+must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the
+more inclusive side,&mdash;of the side which even in the hour of triumph
+will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished
+party's interests lay.  The course of history is nothing but the story
+of men's struggles from generation to generation to find the more and
+more inclusive order.  <I>Invent some manner</I> of realizing your own
+ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands,&mdash;that and that only
+is the path of peace!  Following this path, society has shaken itself
+into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of
+social discoveries quite analogous to those of science.  Polyandry and
+polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial
+torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually
+aroused complaints; and though some one's ideals are unquestionably the
+worse off for each improvement, yet a vastly greater total number of
+them find shelter in our civilized society than in the older
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P206"></A>206}</SPAN>
+savage ways.  So far then, and up to date, the casuistic scale is made
+for the philosopher already far better than he can ever make it for
+himself.  An experiment of the most searching kind has proved that the
+laws and usages of the land are what yield the maximum of satisfaction
+to the thinkers taken all together.  The presumption in cases of
+conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good.
+The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of his
+casuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customs
+of the community on top.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And yet if he be a true philosopher he must see that there is nothing
+final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, as
+our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones,
+so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order
+which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without
+producing others louder still.  "Rules are made for man, not man for
+rules,"&mdash;that one sentence is enough to immortalize Green's Prolegomena
+to Ethics.  And although a man always risks much when he breaks away
+from established rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole than
+they permit, yet the philosopher must allow that it is at all times
+open to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake
+his life and character upon the throw.  The pinch is always here.  Pent
+in under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom it
+weighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are always
+rumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue by
+which they may get free.  See the abuses which the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P207"></A>207}</SPAN>
+institution of
+private property covers, so that even to-day it is shamelessly asserted
+among us that one of the prime functions of the national government is
+to help the adroiter citizens to grow rich.  See the unnamed and
+unnamable sorrows which the tyranny, on the whole so beneficent, of the
+marriage-institution brings to so many, both of the married and the
+unwed.  See the wholesale loss of opportunity under our <I>régime</I> of
+so-called equality and industrialism, with the drummer and the
+counter-jumper in the saddle, for so many faculties and graces which
+could flourish in the feudal world.  See our kindliness for the humble
+and the outcast, how it wars with that stern weeding-out which until
+now has been the condition of every perfection in the breed.  See
+everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem
+how to make them less.  The anarchists, nihilists, and free-lovers; the
+free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and
+civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists;
+the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the
+weak,&mdash;these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed
+against them, are simply deciding through actual experiment by what
+sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in
+this world.  These experiments are to be judged, not <I>à priori</I>, but by
+actually finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcry
+or how much appeasement comes about.  What closet-solutions can
+possibly anticipate the result of trials made on such a scale?  Or what
+can any superficial theorist's judgment be worth, in a world where
+every one of hundreds of ideals has its special champion already
+provided
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P208"></A>208}</SPAN>
+in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it,
+and to fight to death in its behalf?  The pure philosopher can only
+follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least
+resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive
+arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the
+kingdom of heaven is incessantly made.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IV.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+All this amounts to saying that, so far as the casuistic question goes,
+ethical science is just like physical science, and instead of being
+deducible all at once from abstract principles, must simply bide its
+time, and be ready to revise its conclusions from day to day.  The
+presumption of course, in both sciences, always is that the vulgarly
+accepted opinions are true, and the right casuistic order that which
+public opinion believes in; and surely it would be folly quite as
+great, in most of us, to strike out independently and to aim at
+originality in ethics as in physics.  Every now and then, however, some
+one is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary
+thought or action may bear prosperous fruit.  He may replace old 'laws
+of nature' by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in a
+certain place, bring in a total condition of things more ideal than
+would have followed had the rules been kept.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the whole, then, we must conclude that no philosophy of ethics is
+possible in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term.  Everywhere
+the ethical philosopher must wait on facts.  The thinkers who create
+the ideals come he knows not whence, their sensibilities are evolved he
+knows not how; and the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P209"></A>209}</SPAN>
+question as to which of two conflicting
+ideals will give the best universe then and there, can be answered by
+him only through the aid of the experience of other men.  I said some
+time ago, in treating of the 'first' question, that the intuitional
+moralists deserve credit for keeping most clearly to the psychological
+facts.  They do much to spoil this merit on the whole, however, by
+mixing with it that dogmatic temper which, by absolute distinctions and
+unconditional 'thou shalt nots,' changes a growing, elastic, and
+continuous life into a superstitious system of relics and dead bones.
+In point of fact, there are no absolute evils, and there are no
+non-moral goods; and the <I>highest</I> ethical life&mdash;however few may be
+called to bear its burdens&mdash;consists at all times in the breaking of
+rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case.  There is but
+one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek
+incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring
+about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
+Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as
+our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for
+the moral life.  For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a
+unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and
+ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe
+without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists.
+The philosopher, then, <I>quâ</I> philosopher, is no better able to
+determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than other men.
+He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most men, what the question
+always is,&mdash;not a question of this good or that good simply taken, but
+of the two total
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P210"></A>210}</SPAN>
+universes with which these goods respectively
+belong.  He knows that he must vote always for the richer universe, for
+the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter into complex
+combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole.  But
+which particular universe this is he cannot know for certain in
+advance; he only knows that if he makes a bad mistake the cries of the
+wounded will soon inform him of the fact.  In all this the philosopher
+is just like the rest of us non-philosophers, so far as we are just and
+sympathetic instinctively, and so far as we are open to the voice of
+complaint.  His function is in fact indistinguishable from that of the
+best kind of statesman at the present day.  His books upon ethics,
+therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and
+more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative
+and suggestive rather than dogmatic,&mdash;I mean with novels and dramas of
+the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and
+philanthropy and social and economical reform.  Treated in this way
+ethical treatises may be voluminous and luminous as well; but they
+never can be <I>final</I>, except in their abstractest and vaguest features;
+and they must more and more abandon the old-fashioned, clear-cut, and
+would-be 'scientific' form.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+V.
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The chief of all the reasons why concrete ethics cannot be final is
+that they have to wait on metaphysical and theological beliefs.  I said
+some time back that real ethical relations existed in a purely human
+world.  They would exist even in what we called a moral solitude if the
+thinker had various
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P211"></A>211}</SPAN>
+ideals which took hold of him in turn.  His
+self of one day would make demands on his self of another; and some of
+the demands might be urgent and tyrannical, while others were gentle
+and easily put aside.  We call the tyrannical demands <I>imperatives</I>.
+If we ignore these we do not hear the last of it.  The good which we
+have wounded returns to plague us with interminable crops of
+consequential damages, compunctions, and regrets.  Obligation can thus
+exist inside a single thinker's consciousness; and perfect peace can
+abide with him only so far as he lives according to some sort of a
+casuistic scale which keeps his more imperative goods on top.  It is
+the nature of these goods to be cruel to their rivals.  Nothing shall
+avail when weighed in the balance against them.  They call out all the
+mercilessness in our disposition, and do not easily forgive us if we
+are so soft-hearted as to shrink from sacrifice in their behalf.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The deepest difference, practically, in the moral life of man is the
+difference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood.  When in the
+easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling
+consideration.  The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite
+indifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained.  The
+capacity for the strenuous mood probably lies slumbering in every man,
+but it has more difficulty in some than in others in waking up.  It
+needs the wilder passions to arouse it, the big fears, loves, and
+indignations; or else the deeply penetrating appeal of some one of the
+higher fidelities, like justice, truth, or freedom.  Strong relief is a
+necessity of its vision; and a world where all the mountains are
+brought down and all the valleys are
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P212"></A>212}</SPAN>
+exalted is no congenial
+place for its habitation.  This is why in a solitary thinker this mood
+might slumber on forever without waking.  His various ideals, known to
+him to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the same
+denominational value: he can play fast or loose with them at will.
+This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to
+our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power.  Life,
+to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but
+it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the
+infinite scale of values fails to open up.  Many of us, indeed,&mdash;like
+Sir James Stephen in those eloquent 'Essays by a Barrister,'&mdash;would
+openly laugh at the very idea of the strenuous mood being awakened in
+us by those claims of remote posterity which constitute the last appeal
+of the religion of humanity.  We do not love these men of the future
+keenly enough; and we love them perhaps the less the more we hear of
+their evolutionized perfection, their high average longevity and
+education, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunity
+from pain and zymotic disease, and all their other negative
+superiorities.  This is all too finite, we say; we see too well the
+vacuum beyond.  It lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and may
+all be dealt with in the don't-care mood.  No need of agonizing
+ourselves or making others agonize for these good creatures just at
+present.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of
+the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out.  The scale of the
+symphony is incalculably prolonged.  The more imperative ideals now
+begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and
+to utter the penetrating, shattering,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P213"></A>213}</SPAN>
+tragically challenging note
+of appeal.  They ring out like the call of Victor Hugo's alpine eagle,
+"qui parle au précipice et que le gouffre entend," and the strenuous
+mood awakens at the sound.  It saith among the trumpets, ha, ha! it
+smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the
+shouting.  Its blood is up; and cruelty to the lesser claims, so far
+from being a deterrent element, does but add to the stern joy with
+which it leaps to answer to the greater.  All through history, in the
+periodical conflicts of puritanism with the don't-care temper, we see
+the antagonism of the strenuous and genial moods, and the contrast
+between the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation from on high,
+and those of prudence and the satisfaction of merely finite need.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural
+human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or
+traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one
+simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of
+existence its keenest possibilities of zest.  Our attitude towards
+concrete evils is entirely different in a world where we believe there
+are none but finite demanders, from what it is in one where we joyously
+face tragedy for an infinite demander's sake.  Every sort of energy and
+endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set
+free in those who have religious faith.  For this reason the strenuous
+type of character will on the battle-field of human history always
+outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the
+wall.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It would seem, too,&mdash;and this is my final conclusion,&mdash;that the stable
+and systematic moral universe
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P214"></A>214}</SPAN>
+for which the ethical philosopher
+asks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine thinker
+with all-enveloping demands.  If such a thinker existed, his way of
+subordinating the demands to one another would be the finally valid
+casuistic scale; his claims would be the most appealing; his ideal
+universe would be the most inclusive realizable whole.  If he now
+exist, then actualized in his thought already must be that ethical
+philosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermore
+approach.[<A NAME="ch06fn3text"></A><A HREF="#ch06fn3">3</A>]  In the interests of our own ideal of systematically
+unified moral truth, therefore, we, as would-be philosophers, must
+postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religious
+cause.  Meanwhile, exactly what the thought of the infinite thinker may
+be is hidden from us even were we sure of his existence; so that our
+postulation of him after all serves only to let loose in us the
+strenuous mood.  But this is what it does in all men, even those who
+have no interest in philosophy.  The ethical philosopher, therefore,
+whenever he ventures to say which course of action is the best, is on
+no essentially different level from the common man.  "See, I have set
+before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; therefore,
+choose life that thou and thy seed may live,"&mdash;when this challenge
+comes to us, it is simply our total character and personal genius that
+are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and
+use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or
+incapacity for moral life.  From this unsparing practical ordeal no
+professor's lectures and no array of books
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P215"></A>215}</SPAN>
+can save us.  The
+solving word, for the learned and the unlearned man alike, lies in the
+last resort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of their
+interior characters, and nowhere else.  It is not in heaven, neither is
+it beyond the sea; but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth
+and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch06fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="ch06fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="ch06fn3"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch06fn1text">1</A>] An Address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the
+International Journal of Ethics, April, 1891.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch06fn2text">2</A>] The Principles of Psychology, New York, H. Holt &amp; Co, 1890.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch06fn3text">3</A>] All this is set forth with great freshness and force in the work of
+my colleague, Professor Josiah Royce: "The Religious Aspect of
+Philosophy."  Boston, 1885.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P216"></A>216}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT.[<A NAME="ch07fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn1">1</A>]
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains
+between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of
+zoölogical evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It will be best to prepare the ground for my thesis by a few very
+general remarks on the method of getting at scientific truth.  It is a
+common platitude that a complete acquaintance with any one thing,
+however small, would require a knowledge of the entire universe.  Not a
+sparrow falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of his
+fall are to be found in the milky way, in our federal constitution, or
+in the early history of Europe.  That is to say, alter the milky way,
+alter the federal constitution, alter the facts of our barbarian
+ancestry, and the universe would so far be a different universe from
+what it now is.  One fact involved in the difference might be that the
+particular little street-boy who threw the stone which brought down the
+sparrow might not find himself opposite the sparrow at that particular
+moment; or, finding himself there, he might not be in that particular
+serene and disengaged mood of mind which expressed itself in throwing
+the stone.  But, true as all this is, it would be very foolish for any
+one who
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P217"></A>217}</SPAN>
+was inquiring the cause of the sparrow's fall to overlook
+the boy as too personal, proximate, and so to speak anthropomorphic an
+agent, and to say that the true cause is the federal constitution, the
+westward migration of the Celtic race, or the structure of the milky
+way.  If we proceeded on that method, we might say with perfect
+legitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon his
+door-step and cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteen
+at the table, died because of that ominous feast.  I know, in fact, one
+such instance; and I might, if I chose, contend with perfect logical
+propriety that the slip on the ice was no real accident.  "There are no
+accidents," I might say, "for science.  The whole history of the world
+converged to produce that slip.  If anything had been left out, the
+slip would not have occurred just there and then.  To say it would is
+to deny the relations of cause and effect throughout the universe.  The
+real cause of the death was not the slip, <I>but the conditions which
+engendered the slip</I>,&mdash;and among them his having sat at a table, six
+months previous, one among thirteen.  <I>That</I> is truly the reason why he
+died within the year."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It will soon be seen whose arguments I am, in form, reproducing here.
+I would fain lay down the truth without polemics or recrimination.  But
+unfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statement
+until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement
+would be.  The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark
+background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.  And
+the error which I am going to use as a foil to set off what seems to me
+the truth of my own statements is contained in the philosophy of Mr.
+Herbert Spencer and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P218"></A>218}</SPAN>
+his disciples.  Our problem is, What are the
+causes that make communities change from generation to
+generation,&mdash;that make the England of Queen Anne so different from the
+England of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so different from
+that of thirty years ago?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the accumulated
+influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and
+their decisions.  The Spencerian school replies, The changes are
+irrespective of persons, and independent of individual control.  They
+are due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physical
+geography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer
+relations; to everything, in fact, except the Grants and the Bismarcks,
+the Joneses and the Smiths.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Now, I say that these theorizers are guilty of precisely the same
+fallacy as he who should ascribe the death of his friend to the dinner
+with thirteen, or the fall of the sparrow to the milky way.  Like the
+dog in the fable, who drops his real bone to snatch at its image, they
+drop the real causes to snatch at others, which from no possible human
+point of view are available or attainable.  Their fallacy is a
+practical one.  Let us see where it lies.  Although I believe in
+free-will myself, I will waive that belief in this discussion, and
+assume with the Spencerians the predestination of all human actions.
+On that assumption I gladly allow that were the intelligence
+investigating the man's or the sparrow's death omniscient and
+omnipresent, able to take in the whole of time and space at a single
+glance, there would not be the slightest objection to the milky way or
+the fatal feast being
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P219"></A>219}</SPAN>
+invoked among the sought-for causes.  Such
+a divine intelligence would see instantaneously all the infinite lines
+of convergence towards a given result, and it would, moreover, see
+impartially: it would see the fatal feast to be as much a condition of
+the sparrow's death as of the man's; it would see the boy with the
+stone to be as much a condition of the man's fall as of the sparrow's.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The human mind, however, is constituted on an entirely different plan.
+It has no such power of universal intuition.  Its finiteness obliges it
+to see but two or three things at a time.  If it wishes to take wider
+sweeps it has to use 'general ideas,' as they are called, and in so
+doing to drop all concrete truths.  Thus, in the present case, if we as
+men wish to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy and
+the dinner and the sparrow and the man's death, we can do so only by
+falling back on the enormous emptiness of what is called an abstract
+proposition.  We must say, All things in the world are fatally
+predetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a system
+of natural law.  But in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have
+lost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters the
+concrete links are the only things of importance.  The human mind is
+essentially partial.  It can be efficient at all only by <I>picking out</I>
+what to attend to, and ignoring everything else,&mdash;by narrowing its
+point of view.  Otherwise, what little strength it has is dispersed,
+and it loses its way altogether.  Man always wants his curiosity
+gratified for a particular purpose.  If, in the case of the sparrow,
+the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from the
+cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, to
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P220"></A>220}</SPAN>
+survey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhile
+escape.  And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves
+in contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice
+the ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor fellow,
+who never dined out in his life, may slip on it in coming to the door,
+and fall and break his head too.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our
+view.  In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring and
+neglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adopted
+in the differential calculus.  The calculator throws out all the
+'infinitesimals' of the quantities he is considering.  He treats them
+(under certain rules) as if they did not exist.  In themselves they
+exist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist
+for the purposes of his calculation.  Just so an astronomer, in dealing
+with the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no account of the waves
+made by the wind, or by the pressure of all the steamers which day and
+night are moving their thousands of tons upon its surface.  Just so the
+marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, but
+not for the equally real motion of the earth and solar system.  Just so
+a business man's punctuality may overlook an error of five minutes,
+while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must count each
+thousandth of a second.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are, in short, <I>different cycles of operation</I> in nature;
+different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one
+another, so that what goes on at any moment in one may be compatible
+with almost any condition of things at the same time in the next.  The
+mould on the biscuit in the store-room of a
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P221"></A>221}</SPAN>
+man-of-war vegetates
+in absolute indifference to the nationality of the flag, the direction
+of the voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on on
+board; and a mycologist may study it in complete abstraction from all
+these larger details.  Only by so studying it, in fact, is there any
+chance of the mental concentration by which alone he may hope to learn
+something of its nature.  On the other hand, the captain who in
+manoeuvring the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary
+to bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likely
+lose the battle by reason of the excessive 'thoroughness' of his mind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected
+with one another only <I>if we take the whole universe into account</I>.
+For all lesser points of view it is lawful&mdash;nay, more, it is for human
+wisdom necessary&mdash;to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one
+another.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And this brings us nearer to our special topic.  If we look at an
+animal or a human being, distinguished from the rest of his kind by the
+possession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall be
+able to discriminate between the causes which originally <I>produced</I> the
+peculiarity in him and the causes that <I>maintain</I> it after it is
+produced; and we shall see, if the peculiarity be one that he was born
+with, that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevant
+cycles.  It was the triumphant originality of Darwin to see this, and
+to act accordingly.  Separating the causes of production under the
+title of 'tendencies to spontaneous variation,' and relegating them to
+a physiological cycle which he forthwith
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P222"></A>222}</SPAN>
+agreed to ignore
+altogether,[<A NAME="ch07fn2text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn2">2</A>] he confined his attention to the causes of preservation,
+and under the names of natural selection and sexual selection studied
+them exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Pre-Darwinian philosophers had also tried to establish the doctrine of
+descent with modification; but they all committed the blunder of
+clumping the two cycles of causation into one.  What preserves an
+animal with his peculiarity, if it be a useful one, they saw to be the
+nature of the environment to which the peculiarity was adjusted.  The
+giraffe with his peculiar neck is preserved by the fact that there are
+in his environment tall trees whose leaves he can digest.  But these
+philosophers went further, and said that the presence of the trees not
+only maintained an animal with a long neck to browse upon their
+branches, but also produced him.  They <I>made</I> his neck long by the
+constant striving they aroused in him to reach up to them.  The
+environment, in short, was supposed by these writers to mould the
+animal by a kind of direct pressure, very much as a seal presses the
+wax into harmony with itself.  Numerous instances were given of the way
+in which this goes on under our eyes.  The exercise of the forge makes
+the right arm strong, the palm grows callous to the oar, the mountain
+air distends the chest, the chased fox grows cunning and the chased
+bird shy, the arctic cold stimulates the animal combustion, and so
+forth.  Now these changes, of which many more examples might be
+adduced, are
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P223"></A>223}</SPAN>
+at present distinguished by the special name of
+<I>adaptive</I> changes.  Their peculiarity is that that very feature in the
+environment to which the animal's nature grows adjusted, itself
+produces the adjustment.  The 'inner relation,' to use Mr. Spencer's
+phrase, 'corresponds' with its own efficient cause.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Darwin's first achievement was to show the utter insignificance in
+amount of these changes produced by direct adaptation, the immensely
+greater mass of changes being produced by internal molecular accidents,
+of which we know nothing.  His next achievement was to define the true
+problem with which we have to deal when we study the effects of the
+visible environment on the animal.  That problem is simply this; Is the
+environment more likely to <I>preserve or to destroy him</I>, on account of
+this or that peculiarity with which he may be born?  In giving the name
+of 'accidental variations' to those peculiarities with which an animal
+is born, Darwin does not for a moment mean to suggest that they are not
+the fixed outcome of natural law.  If the total system of the universe
+be taken into account, the causes of these variations and the visible
+environment which preserves or destroys them, undoubtedly do, in some
+remote and roundabout way, hang together.  What Darwin means is, that,
+since that environment is a perfectly known thing, and its relations to
+the organism in the way of destruction or preservation are tangible and
+distinct, it would utterly confuse our finite understandings and
+frustrate our hopes of science to mix in with it facts from such a
+disparate and incommensurable cycle as that in which the variations are
+produced.  This last cycle is that of occurrences before the animal is
+born.  It is the cycle of influences upon ova and embryos;
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P224"></A>224}</SPAN>
+in
+which lie the causes that tip them and tilt them towards masculinity or
+femininity, towards strength or weakness, towards health or disease,
+and towards divergence from the parent type.  What are the causes there?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the first place, they are molecular and invisible,&mdash;inaccessible,
+therefore, to direct observation of any kind.  Secondly, their
+operations are compatible with any social, political, and physical
+conditions of environment.  The same parents, living in the same
+environing conditions, may at one birth produce a genius, at the next
+an idiot or a monster.  The visible external conditions are therefore
+not direct determinants of this cycle; and the more we consider the
+matter, the more we are forced to believe that two children of the same
+parents are made to differ from each other by causes as
+disproportionate to their ultimate effects as is the famous pebble on
+the Rocky Mountain crest, which separates two rain-drops, to the Gulf
+of St. Lawrence and the Pacific Ocean toward which it makes them
+severally flow.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The great mechanical distinction between transitive forces and
+discharging forces is nowhere illustrated on such a scale as in
+physiology.  Almost all causes there are forces of <I>detent</I>, which
+operate by simply unlocking energy already stored up.  They are
+upsetters of unstable equilibria, and the resultant effect depends
+infinitely more on the nature of the materials upset than on that of
+the particular stimulus which joggles them down.  Galvanic work, equal
+to unity, done on a frog's nerve will discharge from the muscle to
+which the nerve belongs mechanical work equal to seventy thousand; and
+exactly the same muscular
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P225"></A>225}</SPAN>
+effect will emerge if other irritants
+than galvanism are employed.  The irritant has merely started or
+provoked something which then went on of itself,&mdash;as a match may start
+a fire which consumes a whole town.  And qualitatively as well as
+quantitatively the effect may be absolutely incommensurable with the
+cause.  We find this condition of things in ail organic matter.
+Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which the instability of
+albuminoid compounds opposes to their study.  Two specimens, treated in
+what outwardly seem scrupulously identical conditions, behave in quite
+different ways.  You know about the invisible factors of fermentation,
+and how the fate of a jar of milk&mdash;whether it turn into a sour clot or
+a mass of koumiss&mdash;depends on whether the lactic acid ferment or the
+alcoholic is introduced first, and gets ahead of the other in starting
+the process.  Now, when the result is the tendency of an ovum, itself
+invisible to the naked eye, to tip towards this direction or that in
+its further evolution,&mdash;to bring forth a genius or a dunce, even as the
+rain-drop passes east or west of the pebble,&mdash;is it not obvious that
+the deflecting cause must lie in a region so recondite and minute, must
+be such a ferment of a ferment, an infinitesimal of so high an order,
+that surmise itself may never succeed even in attempting to frame an
+image of it?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Such being the case, was not Darwin right to turn his back upon that
+region altogether, and to keep his own problem carefully free from all
+entanglement with matters such as these?  The success of his work is a
+sufficiently affirmative reply.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And this brings us at last to the heart of our subject.  The causes of
+production of great men lie in a
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P226"></A>226}</SPAN>
+sphere wholly inaccessible to
+the social philosopher.  He must simply accept geniuses as data, just
+as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations.  For him, as for Darwin,
+the only problem is, these data being given, How does the environment
+affect them, and how do they affect the environment?  Now, I affirm
+that the relation of the visible environment to the great man is in the
+main exactly what it is to the 'variation' in the Darwinian philosophy.
+It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short <I>selects</I>
+him.[<A NAME="ch07fn3text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn3">3</A>]  And whenever it adopts and preserves the great man, it becomes
+modified by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way.  He
+acts as a ferment, and changes its constitution, just as the advent of
+a new zoölogical species changes the faunal and floral equilibrium of
+the region in which it appears.  We all recollect Mr. Darwin's famous
+statement of the influence of cats on the growth of clover in their
+neighborhood.  We all have read of the effects of the European rabbit
+in New Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in the controversy
+about the English sparrow here,&mdash;whether he kills most canker-worms, or
+drives away most native birds.  Just so the great man, whether he be an
+importation from without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, or
+whether he spring from the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about
+a rearrangement, on a large or a small scale, of the pre-existing
+social relations.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P227"></A>227}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are in
+the main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the example of
+individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the
+moment, or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that
+they became ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent or
+fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose
+gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another
+direction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We see this power of individual initiative exemplified on a small scale
+all about us, and on a large scale in the case of the leaders of
+history.  It is only following the common-sense method of a Lyell, a
+Darwin, and a Whitney to interpret the unknown by the known, and reckon
+up cumulatively the only causes of social change we can directly
+observe.  Societies of men are just like individuals, in that both at
+any given moment offer ambiguous potentialities of development.
+Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on a
+decision which has to be made before a certain day.  He takes the place
+offered in the counting-house, and is <I>committed</I>.  Little by little,
+the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so
+near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities.  At first, he
+may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hour
+might not have been the better of the two; but with the years such
+questions themselves expire, and the old alternative <I>ego</I>, once so
+vivid, fades into something less substantial than a dream.  It is no
+otherwise with nations.  They may be committed by kings and ministers
+to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P228"></A>228}</SPAN>
+religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science,
+or industry.  A war is a true point of bifurcation of future
+possibilities.  Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be the
+starting-point of new policies.  Just so does a revolution, or any
+great civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose operations
+widen with the course of time.  Communities obey their ideals; and an
+accidental success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Would England have to-day the 'imperial' ideal which she now has, if a
+certain boy named Bob Clive had shot himself, as he tried to do, at
+Madras?  Would she be the drifting raft she is now in European
+affairs[<A NAME="ch07fn4text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn4">4</A>] if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead of
+a Victoria, and if Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had all
+been born in Prussia?  England has, no doubt, to-day precisely the same
+intrinsic value relatively to the other nations that she ever had.
+There is no such fine accumulation of human material upon the globe.
+But in England the material has lost effective form, while in Germany
+it has found it.  Leaders give the form.  Would England be crying
+forward and backward at once, as she does now, 'letting I will not wait
+upon I would,' wishing to conquer but not to fight, if her ideal had in
+all these years been fixed by a succession of statesmen of supremely
+commanding personality, working in one direction?  Certainly not.  She
+would have espoused, for better or worse, either one course or another.
+Had Bismarck died in his cradle, the Germans would still be satisfied
+with appearing to themselves as a race of spectacled <I>Gelehrten</I> and
+political herbivora, and to the French as <I>ces bons</I>, or <I>ces naifs</I>,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P229"></A>229}</SPAN>
+<I>Allemands</I>.  Bismarck's will showed them, to their own great
+astonishment, that they could play a far livelier game.  The lesson
+will not be forgotten.  Germany may have many vicissitudes, but they&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">"will never do away, I ween,</SPAN><BR>
+The marks of that which once hath been"&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+of Bismarck's initiative, namely, from 1860 to 1873.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as, at any
+rate, one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution.  The
+community <I>may</I> evolve in many ways.  The accidental presence of this
+or that ferment decides in which way it <I>shall</I> evolve.  Why, the very
+birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human
+speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to
+teach them.  So with us individuals.  Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy
+the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical
+effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to
+our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us.  But it is like
+Columbus's egg.  "All can raise the flowers now, for all have got the
+seed."  But if this be true of the individuals in the community, how
+can it be false of the community as a whole?  If shown a certain way, a
+community may take it; if not, it will never find it.  And the ways are
+to a large extent indeterminate in advance.  A nation may obey either
+of many alternative impulses given by different men of genius, and
+still live and be prosperous, just as a man may enter either of many
+businesses.  Only, the prosperities may differ in their type.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the indeterminism is not absolute.  Not every
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P230"></A>230}</SPAN>
+'man' fits
+every 'hour.'  Some incompatibilities there are.  A given genius may
+come either too early or too late.  Peter the Hermit would now be sent
+to a lunatic asylum.  John Mill in the tenth century would have lived
+and died unknown.  Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant
+his civil war.  An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted
+rifles; and, to express differently an instance which Spencer uses,
+what could a Watt have effected in a tribe which no precursive genius
+had taught to smelt iron or to turn a lathe?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes a certain genius
+now incompatible with his surroundings is usually the fact that some
+previous genius of a different strain has warped the community away
+from the sphere of his possible effectiveness.  After Voltaire, no
+Peter the Hermit; after Charles IX. and Louis XIV., no general
+protestantization of France; after a Manchester school, a
+Beaconsfield's success is transient; after a Philip II., a Castelar
+makes little headway; and so on.  Each bifurcation cuts off certain
+sides of the field altogether, and limits the future possible angles of
+deflection.  A community is a living thing, and in words which I can do
+no better than quote from Professor Clifford,[<A NAME="ch07fn5text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn5">5</A>] "it is the peculiarity
+of living things not merely that they change under the influence of
+surrounding circumstances, but that any change which takes place in
+them is not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organism
+to serve as the foundation for future actions.  If you cause any
+distortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever you
+may do afterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P231"></A>231}</SPAN>
+distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part of
+the tree's nature....  Suppose, however, that you take a lump of gold,
+melt it, and let it cool....  No one can tell by examining a piece of
+gold how often it has been melted and cooled in geologic ages, or even
+in the last year by the hand of man.  Any one who cuts down an oak can
+tell by the rings in its trunk how many times winter has frozen it into
+widowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it into life.  A living
+being must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its
+own existence, but of all its ancestors."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects his picture in a
+certain sense.  Whatever lines follow must be built on those first laid
+down.  Every author who starts to rewrite a piece of work knows how
+impossible it becomes to use any of the first-written pages again.  The
+new beginning has already excluded the possibility of those earlier
+phrases and transitions, while it has at the same time created the
+possibility of an indefinite set of new ones, no one of which, however,
+is completely determined in advance.  Just so the social surroundings
+of the past and present hour exclude the possibility of accepting
+certain contributions from individuals; but they do not positively
+define what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they are
+powerless to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shall
+be.[<A NAME="ch07fn6text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn6">6</A>]
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P232"></A>232}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly
+distinct factors,&mdash;the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the
+play of physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the
+power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the
+social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him
+and his gifts.  Both factors are essential to change.  The community
+stagnates without the impulse of the individual.  The impulse dies away
+without the sympathy of the community.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All this seems nothing more than common-sense.  All who wish to see it
+developed by a man of genius should read that golden little work,
+Bagehot's Physics and Politics, in which (it seems to me) the complete
+sense of the way in which concrete things grow and change is as
+livingly present as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy of
+evolution is livingly absent.  But there are never wanting minds to
+whom such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to an
+anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of knowledge.  "The
+individual withers, and the world is more and more," to these writers;
+and in a Buckle, a Draper, and a Taine we all know how much the 'world'
+has come to be almost synonymous with the <I>climate</I>.  We all know, too,
+how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a
+'science of history' and those who deny the existence of anything like
+necessary 'laws' where human societies are concerned.  Mr. Spencer, at
+the opening of his Study of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the
+'great-man theory' of history, from which a few passages may be
+quoted:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably
+believed so long as, resting in general
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P233"></A>233}</SPAN>
+notions, you do not ask
+for particulars.  But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand
+that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we
+discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent.  If, not stopping at
+the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back
+a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory
+breaks down completely.  The question has two conceivable answers: his
+origin is supernatural, or it is natural.  Is his origin supernatural?
+Then he is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed,&mdash;or,
+rather, not removed at all....  Is this an unacceptable solution?  Then
+the origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is
+recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society
+that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents.  Along with the
+whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its
+institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts
+and appliances, he is a <I>resultant</I>....  You must admit that the
+genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex
+influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the
+social state into which that race has slowly grown....  Before he can
+remake his society, his society must make him.  All those changes of
+which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the
+generations he descended from.  If there is to be anything like a real
+explanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of
+conditions out of which both he and they have arisen."[<A NAME="ch07fn7text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn7">7</A>]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost call
+impudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the first sentence
+of this extract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those who
+believe in the power of initiative of the great man.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P234"></A>234}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes
+social, political, and religious discussion in England, and contrasts
+so strongly with the bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, is
+largely due to J. S. Mill's example.  I may possibly be wrong about the
+facts; but I am, at any rate, 'asking for particulars,' and not
+'resting in general notions.'  And if Mr. Spencer should tell me it
+started from no personal influence whatever, but from the 'aggregate of
+conditions,' the 'generations,' Mill and all his contemporaries
+'descended from,' the whole past order of nature in short, surely he,
+not I, would be the person 'satisfied with vagueness.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fact is that Mr. Spencer's sociological method is identical with
+that of one who would invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the
+sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death.
+It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of
+replying to whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, "God
+is great."  <I>Not</I> to fall back on the gods, where a proximate principle
+may be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of an
+efficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its
+antecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal
+and consummation, of science.  If she is simply to lead us out of the
+labyrinth by the same hole we went in by three or four thousand years
+ago, it seems hardly worth while to have followed her through the
+darkness at all.  If anything is humanly certain it is that the great
+man's society, properly so called, does not make him before he can
+remake it.  Physiological forces, with which
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P235"></A>235}</SPAN>
+the social,
+political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological
+conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition
+of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by
+which I write, are what make him.  Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the
+convergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged on
+Stratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W.
+Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born
+there,&mdash;as the pressure of water outside a certain boat will cause a
+stream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak?  And does he
+mean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera
+infantum, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon would needs have
+engendered a duplicate copy of him, to restore the sociologic
+equilibrium,&mdash;just as the same stream of water will reappear, no matter
+how often you pass a sponge over the leak, so long as the outside level
+remains unchanged?  Or might the substitute arise at
+'Stratford-atte-Bowe'?  Here, as elsewhere, it is very hard, in the
+midst of Mr. Spencer's vagueness, to tell what he does mean at all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We have, however, in his disciple, Mr. Grant Allen, one who leaves us
+in no doubt whatever of his precise meaning.  This widely informed,
+suggestive, and brilliant writer published last year a couple of
+articles in the Gentleman's Magazine, in which he maintained that
+individuals have no initiative in determining social change.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect,
+commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend, not
+upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other
+unknown and unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P236"></A>236}</SPAN>
+physical circumstances to which they are exposed.  If it be a
+fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizably
+from the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably from
+the people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspicuous differences
+between them are wholly due to the geographical position of the various
+races.  If the people who went to Hamburg had gone to Timbuctoo, they
+would now be indistinguishable from the semi-barbarian negroes who
+inhabit that central African metropolis;[<A NAME="ch07fn8text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn8">8</A>] and if the people who went
+to Timbuctoo had gone to Hamburg, they would now have been
+white-skinned merchants driving a roaring trade in imitation sherry and
+indigestible port....  The differentiating agency must be sought in the
+great permanent geographical features of land and sea; ... these have
+necessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories of
+every nation upon the earth....  We cannot regard any nation as an
+active agent in differentiating itself.  Only the surrounding
+circumstances can have any effect in such a direction.  [These two
+sentences dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively independent
+physiological cycle of causation.]  To suppose otherwise is to suppose
+that the mind of man is exempt from the universal law of causation.
+There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors.  Even
+tastes and inclinations <I>must</I> themselves be the result of surrounding
+causes."[<A NAME="ch07fn9text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn9">9</A>]
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P237"></A>237}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical
+Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan
+brain,...  To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing
+whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the
+physical conditions in which they are set,&mdash;including, of course, under
+the term <I>physical conditions</I> the relations of place and time in which
+they stand with regard to other bodies of men.  To suppose otherwise is
+to deny the primordial law of causation.  To imagine that the mind can
+differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated
+without a cause."[<A NAME="ch07fn10text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn10">10</A>]
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the
+moment we refuse to invest in the kind of causation which is peddled
+round by a particular school, makes one impatient.  These writers have
+no imagination of alternatives.  With them there is no <I>tertium quid</I>
+between outward environment and miracle.  <I>Aut Caesar, aut nullus</I>!
+<I>Aut</I> Spencerism, <I>aut</I> catechism!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If by 'physical conditions' Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the
+outward cycle of visible nature and man, his assertion is simply
+physiologically false.  For a national mind differentiates 'itself'
+whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the
+invisible and molecular cycle.  But if Mr. Allen means by 'physical
+conditions' the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but
+the vague Asiatic
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P238"></A>238}</SPAN>
+profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate,
+which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or
+scientific character.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have distinguished
+in these matters between <I>necessary</I> conditions and <I>sufficient</I>
+conditions of a given result?  The French say that to have an omelet we
+must break our eggs; that is, the breaking of eggs is a necessary
+condition of the omelet.  But is it a sufficient condition?  Does an
+omelet appear whenever three eggs are broken?  So of the Greek mind.
+To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such commercial
+dealings with the world as the geographical Hellas afforded are a
+necessary condition.  But if they are a sufficient condition, why did
+not the Phoenicians outstrip the Greeks in intelligence?  No
+geographical environment can produce a given type of mind.  It can only
+foster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and
+frustrate others.  Once again, its function is simply selective, and
+determines what shall actually be only by destroying what is positively
+incompatible.  An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvident
+habits in its denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a region
+shall unite with their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or the
+pugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, an
+accident.  Evolutionists should not forget that we all have five
+fingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merely
+because the first vertebrate above the fishes <I>happened</I> to have that
+number.  He owed his prodigious success in founding a line of descent
+to some entirely other quality,&mdash;we know
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P239"></A>239}</SPAN>
+not which,&mdash;but the
+inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the present
+day.  So of most social peculiarities.  Which of them shall be taken in
+tow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is a
+matter of what physiological accidents shall happen among individuals.
+Mr. Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples of
+China, India, England, Rome, etc.  I have not the smallest hesitation
+in predicting that he will do no more with these examples than he has
+done with Hellas.  He will appear upon the scene after the fact, and
+show that the quality developed by each race was, naturally enough, not
+incompatible with its habitat.  But he will utterly fail to show that
+the particular form of compatibility fallen into in each case was the
+one necessary and only possible form.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a
+fauna and its environment are.  An animal may better his chances of
+existence in either of many ways,&mdash;growing aquatic, arboreal, or
+subterranean; small and swift, or massive and bulky; spiny, horny,
+slimy, or venomous; more timid or more pugnacious; more cunning or more
+fertile of offspring; more gregarious or more solitary; or in other
+ways besides,&mdash;and any one of these ways may suit him to many widely
+different environments.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the striking
+illustrations of this in his Malay Archipelago:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its vast size and its
+freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geological structure, its
+uniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forest vegetation
+that clothes its surface; the Moluccas are the counterpart of the
+Philippines
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P240"></A>240}</SPAN>
+in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility,
+their luxuriant forests, and their frequent earthquakes; and Bali, with
+the east end of Java, has a climate almost as dry and a soil almost as
+arid as that of Timor.  Yet between these corresponding groups of
+islands, constructed, as it were, after the same pattern, subjected to
+the same climate, and bathed by the same oceans, there exists the
+greatest possible contrast when we compare their animal productions.
+Nowhere does the ancient doctrine that differences or similarities in
+the various forms of life that inhabit different countries are due to
+corresponding physical differences or similarities in the countries
+themselves, meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction.  Borneo
+and New Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be,
+are zoölogically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its
+dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its temperate
+climate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related to
+those inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhere
+clothe the plains and mountains of New Guinea."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Here we have similar physical-geography environments harmonizing with
+widely differing animal lives, and similar animal lives harmonizing
+with widely differing geographical environments.  A singularly
+accomplished writer, E. Gryzanowski, in the North American Review,[<A NAME="ch07fn11text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn11">11</A>]
+uses the instances of Sardinia and Corsica in support of this thesis
+with great effect He says:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"These sister islands, lying in the very centre of the Mediterranean,
+at almost equal distances from the centres of Latin and Neo-Latin
+civilization, within easy reach of the Phoenician, the Greek, and the
+Saracen, with a
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P241"></A>241}</SPAN>
+coast-line of more than a thousand miles, endowed
+with obvious and tempting advantages, and hiding untold sources of
+agricultural and mineral wealth, have nevertheless remained unknown,
+unheeded, and certainly uncared for during the thirty centuries of
+European history....  These islands have dialects, but no language;
+records of battles, but no history.  They have customs, but no laws;
+the <I>vendetta</I>, but no justice.  They have wants and wealth, but no
+commerce, timber and ports, but no shipping.  They have legends, but no
+poetry, beauty, but no art; and twenty years ago it could still be said
+that they had universities, but no students....  That Sardinia, with
+all her emotional and picturesque barbarism, has never produced a
+single artist is almost as strange as her barbarism itself....  Near
+the focus of European civilization, in the very spot which an <I>à
+priori</I> geographer would point out as the most favorable place for
+material and intellectual, commercial, and political development, these
+strange sister islands have slept their secular sleep, like <I>nodes</I> on
+the sounding-board of history."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with some
+detail.  All the material advantages are in favor of Sardinia, "and the
+Sardinian population, being of an ancestry more mixed than that of the
+English race, would justify far higher expectations than that of
+Sicily."  Yet Sicily's past history has been brilliant in the extreme,
+and her commerce to-day is great.  Dr. Gryzanowski has his own theory
+of the historic torpor of these favored isles.  He thinks they
+stagnated because they never gained political autonomy, being always
+owned by some Continental power.  I will not dispute the theory; but I
+will ask, Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately: Simply
+because no individuals were
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P242"></A>242}</SPAN>
+born there with patriotism and
+ability enough to inflame their countrymen with national pride,
+ambition, and thirst for independent life.  Corsicans and Sardinians
+are probably as good stuff as any of their neighbors.  But the best
+wood-pile will not blaze till a torch is applied, and the appropriate
+torches seem to have been wanting.[<A NAME="ch07fn12text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn12">12</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sporadic great men come everywhere.  But for a community to get
+vibrating through and through
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P243"></A>243}</SPAN>
+with intensely active life, many
+geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required.  This is
+why great epochs are so rare,&mdash;why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an
+early Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery.  Blow must follow blow so
+fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals.  Then the mass of the
+nation grows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertia
+long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away.
+We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human
+affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but
+that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant.  This
+mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why
+great rivers flow by great towns.  It is true that great public
+fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses, who in more torpid times
+would have had no chance to work.  But over and above this there must
+be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the
+fermentation begin at all.  The unlikeliness of the concourse is far
+greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the
+rarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they always
+wear.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P244"></A>244}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+It is folly, then, to speak of the 'laws of history' as of something
+inevitable, which science has only to discover, and whose consequences
+any one can then foretell but do nothing to alter or avert.  Why, the
+very laws of physics are conditional, and deal with <I>ifs</I>.  The
+physicist does not say, "The water will boil anyhow;" he only says it
+will boil if a fire be kindled beneath it.  And so the utmost the
+student of sociology can ever predict is that <I>if</I> a genius of a
+certain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow.  It might
+long ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy and
+Germany would reach a stable unity if some one could but succeed in
+starting the process.  It could not have been predicted, however, that
+the <I>modus operandi</I> in each case would be subordination to a paramount
+state rather than federation, because no historian could have
+calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same
+moment such positions of authority to three such peculiar individuals
+as Napoleon III., Bismarck, and Cavour.  So of our own politics.  It is
+certain now that the movement of the independents, reformers, or
+whatever one please to call them, will triumph.  But whether it do so
+by converting the Republican party to its ends, or by rearing a new
+party on the ruins of both our present factions, the historian cannot
+say.  There can be no doubt that the reform movement would make more
+progress in one year with an adequate personal leader than as now in
+ten without one.  Were there a great citizen, splendid with every civic
+gift, to be its candidate, who can doubt that he would lead us to
+victory?  But, at present, we, his environment, who sigh for him and
+would so gladly preserve and adopt him if he came, can neither
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P245"></A>245}</SPAN>
+move without him, nor yet do anything to bring him forth.[<A NAME="ch07fn13text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn13">13</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To conclude: The evolutionary view of history, when it denies the vital
+importance of individual initiative, is, then, an utterly vague and
+unscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinism
+into the most ancient oriental fatalism.  The lesson of the analysis
+that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with
+which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the
+energy of the individual.  Even the dogged resistance of the
+reactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely to
+defeat is justified and shown to be effective.  He retards the
+movement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives it
+a resultant momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries'
+speed; and keeps up, in short, a constant lateral pressure, which, to
+be sure, never heads it round about, but brings it up at last at a goal
+far to the right or left of that to which it would have drifted had he
+allowed it to drift alone.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function of the
+environment in <I>mental</I> evolution.  After what I have already said, I
+may be quite concise.  Here, if anywhere, it would seem at first sight
+as if that school must be right which makes the mind passively plastic,
+and the environment actively productive of the form and order of its
+conceptions; which, in a word, thinks that all mental progress must
+result from
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P246"></A>246}</SPAN>
+a series of adaptive changes, in the sense already
+defined of that word.  We know what a vast part of our mental furniture
+consists of purely remembered, not reasoned, experience.  The entire
+field of our habits and associations by contiguity belongs here.  The
+entire field of those abstract conceptions which were taught us with
+the language into which we were born belongs here also.  And, more than
+this, there is reason to think that the order of 'outer relations'
+experienced by the individual may itself determine the order in which
+the general characters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extracted
+by his mind.[<A NAME="ch07fn14text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn14">14</A>]  The pleasures and benefits, moreover, which certain
+parts of the environment yield, and the pains and hurts which other
+parts inflict, determine the direction of our interest and our
+attention, and so decide at which points the accumulation of mental
+experiences shall begin.  It might, accordingly, seem as if there were
+no room for any other agency than this; as if the distinction we have
+found so useful between 'spontaneous variation,' as the producer of
+changed forms, and the environment, as their preserver and destroyer,
+did not hold in the case of mental progress; as if, in a word, the
+parallel with darwinism might no longer obtain, and Spencer might be
+quite right with his fundamental law of intelligence, which says, "The
+cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency
+with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has
+been repeated in experience."[<A NAME="ch07fn15text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn15">15</A>]
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P247"></A>247}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+But, in spite of all these facts, I have no hesitation whatever in
+holding firm to the darwinian distinction even here.  I maintain that
+the facts in question are all drawn from the lower strata of the mind,
+so to speak,&mdash;from the sphere of its least evolved functions, from the
+region of intelligence which man possesses in common with the brutes.
+And I can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those mental
+departments which are highest, which are most characteristically human,
+Spencer's law is violated at every step; and that as a matter of fact
+the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are
+originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental
+out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the
+excessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simply
+confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or
+destroys,&mdash;selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and
+social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of a
+simple order are very literal.  They are slaves of habit, doing what
+they have been taught without variation; dry, prosaic, and
+matter-of-fact in their remarks; devoid of humor, except of the coarse
+physical kind which rejoices in a practical joke; taking the world for
+granted; and possessing in their faithfulness and honesty the single
+gift by which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration.  But
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P248"></A>248}</SPAN>
+even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic ring,
+and to remind us more of the immutable properties of a piece of
+inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable of
+alternative choice.  When we descend to the brutes, all these
+peculiarities are intensified.  No reader of Schopenhauer can forget
+his frequent allusions to the <I>trockener ernst</I> of dogs and horses, nor
+to their <I>ehrlichkeit</I>.  And every noticer of their ways must receive a
+deep impression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple,
+and treadmill-like operations of their minds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change!  Instead of
+thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten
+track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and
+transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions
+and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the
+subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly
+introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is
+fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where
+partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine
+is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law.  According to the
+idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have one
+character or another.  They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will
+be flashes of poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions of
+dramatic fiction or of mechanical device, logical or philosophic
+abstractions, business projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trains
+of experimental consequences based thereon; they will be musical
+sounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or visions of
+moral harmony.  But, whatever their
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P249"></A>249}</SPAN>
+differences may be, they will
+all agree in this,&mdash;that their genesis is sudden and, as it were,
+spontaneous.  That is to say, the same premises would not, in the mind
+of another individual, have engendered just that conclusion; although,
+when the conclusion is offered to the other individual, he may
+thoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of him to whom
+it first occurred.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically
+pointed out[<A NAME="ch07fn16text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn16">16</A>] how the genius of discovery depends altogether on the
+number of these random notions and guesses which visit the
+investigator's mind.  To be fertile in hypotheses is the first
+requisite, and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience
+contradicts them is the next.  The Baconian method of collating tables
+of instances may be a useful aid at certain times.  But one might as
+well expect a chemist's note-book to write down the name of the body
+analyzed, or a weather table to sum itself up into a prediction of
+probabilities of its own accord, as to hope that the mere fact of
+mental confrontation with a certain series of facts will be sufficient
+to make <I>any</I> brain conceive their law.  The conceiving of the law is a
+spontaneous variation in the strictest sense of the term.  It flashes
+out of one brain, and no other, because the instability of that brain
+is such as to tip and upset itself in just that particular direction.
+But the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad
+flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an
+exact equality in respect of their origin.  Aristotle's absurd Physics
+and his immortal Logic flow from one source: the forces that produce
+the one produce the other.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P250"></A>250}</SPAN>
+When walking along the street, thinking of the blue sky or the
+fine spring weather, I may either smile at some grotesque whim which
+occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an intuition of the solution of a
+long-unsolved problem, which at that moment was far from my thoughts.
+Both notions are shaken out of the same reservoir,&mdash;the reservoir of a
+brain in which the reproduction of images in the relations of their
+outward persistence or frequency has long ceased to be the dominant
+law.  But to the thought, when it is once engendered, the consecration
+of agreement with outward relations may come.  The conceit perishes in
+a moment, and is forgotten.  The scientific hypothesis arouses in me a
+fever of desire for verification.  I read, write, experiment, consult
+experts.  Everything corroborates my notion, which being then published
+in a book spreads from review to review and from mouth to mouth, till
+at last there is no doubt I am enshrined in the Pantheon of the great
+diviners of nature's ways.  The environment <I>preserves</I> the conception
+which it was unable to <I>produce</I> in any brain less idiosyncratic than
+my own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, the spontaneous upsettings of brains this way and that at
+particular moments into particular ideas and combinations are matched
+by their equally spontaneous permanent tiltings or saggings towards
+determinate directions.  The humorous bent is quite characteristic; the
+sentimental one equally so.  And the personal tone of each mind, which
+makes it more alive to certain classes of experience than others, more
+attentive to certain impressions, more open to certain reasons, is
+equally the result of that invisible and unimaginable play of the
+forces of growth within the nervous system which, irresponsibly to the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P251"></A>251}</SPAN>
+environment, makes the brain peculiarly apt to function in a
+certain way.  Here again the selection goes on.  The products of the
+mind with the determined aesthetic bent please or displease the
+community.  We adopt Wordsworth, and grow unsentimental and serene.  We
+are fascinated by Schopenhauer, and learn from him the true luxury of
+woe.  The adopted bent becomes a ferment in the community, and alters
+its tone.  The alteration may be a benefit or a misfortune, for it is
+(<I>pace</I> Mr. Allen) a differentiation from within, which has to run the
+gauntlet of the larger environment's selective power.  Civilized
+Languedoc, taking the tone of its scholars, poets, princes, and
+theologians, fell a prey to its rude Catholic environment in the
+Albigensian crusade.  France in 1792, taking the tone of its St. Justs
+and Marats, plunged into its long career of unstable outward relations.
+Prussia in 1806, taking the tone of its Humboldts and its Steins,
+proved itself in the most signal way 'adjusted' to its environment in
+1872.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Spencer, in one of the strangest chapters of his Psychology,[<A NAME="ch07fn17text"></A><A HREF="#ch07fn17">17</A>]
+tries to show the necessary order in which the development of
+conceptions in the human race occurs.  No abstract conception can be
+developed, according to him, until the outward experiences have reached
+a certain degree of heterogeneity, definiteness, coherence, and so
+forth.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Thus the belief in an unchanging order, the belief in <I>law</I>, is a
+belief of which the primitive man is absolutely incapable....
+Experiences such as he receives furnish but few data for the conception
+of uniformity, whether as displayed in things or in relations....  The
+daily
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P252"></A>252}</SPAN>
+impressions which the savage gets yield the notion very
+imperfectly, and in but few cases.  Of all the objects around,&mdash;trees,
+stones, hills, pieces of water, clouds, and so forth,&mdash;most differ
+widely, ... and few approach complete likeness so nearly as to make
+discrimination difficult.  Even between animals of the same species it
+rarely happens that, whether alive or dead, they are presented in just
+the same attitudes....  It is only along with a gradual development of
+the arts ... that there come frequent experiences of perfectly straight
+lines admitting of complete apposition, bringing the perceptions of
+equality and inequality.  Still more devoid is savage life of the
+experiences which generate the conception of the uniformity of
+succession.  The sequences observed from hour to hour and day to day
+seem anything but uniform, difference is a far more conspicuous trait
+among them....  So that if we contemplate primitive human life as a
+whole, we see that multiformity of sequence, rather than uniformity, is
+the notion which it tends to generate....  Only as fast as the practice
+of the arts develops the idea of measure can the consciousness of
+uniformity become clear....  Those conditions furnished by advancing
+civilization which make possible the notion of uniformity
+simultaneously make possible the notion of <I>exactness</I>....  Hence the
+primitive man has little experience which cultivates the consciousness
+of what we call <I>truth</I>.  How closely allied this is to the
+consciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is implied even
+in language.  We speak of a true surface as well as a true statement.
+Exactness describes perfection in a mechanical fit, as well as perfect
+agreement between the results of calculations."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The whole burden of Mr. Spencer's book is to show the fatal way in
+which the mind, supposed passive, is moulded by its experiences of
+'outer
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P253"></A>253}</SPAN>
+relations.'  In this chapter the yard-stick, the balance,
+the chronometer, and other machines and instruments come to figure
+among the 'relations' external to the mind.  Surely they are so, after
+they have been manufactured; but only because of the preservative power
+of the social environment.  Originally all these things and all other
+institutions were flashes of genius in an individual head, of which the
+outer environment showed no sign.  Adopted by the race and become its
+heritage, they then supply instigations to new geniuses whom they
+environ to make new inventions and discoveries; and so the ball of
+progress rolls.  But take out the geniuses, or alter their
+idiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformities will the environment
+show?  We defy Mr. Spencer or any one else to reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The plain truth is that the 'philosophy' of evolution (as distinguished
+from our special information about particular cases of change) is a
+metaphysical creed, and nothing else.  It is a mood of contemplation,
+an emotional attitude, rather than a system of thought,&mdash;a mood which
+is old as the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation of
+it (such as the spencerian philosophy) will dispel; the mood of
+fatalistic pantheism, with its intuition of the One and All, which was,
+and is, and ever shall be, and from whose womb each single thing
+proceeds.  Far be it from us to speak slightingly here of so hoary and
+mighty a style of looking on the world as this.  What we at present
+call scientific discoveries had nothing to do with bringing it to
+birth, nor can one easily conceive that they should ever give it its
+<I>quietus</I>, no matter how logically incompatible with its spirit the
+ultimate phenomenal distinctions which
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P254"></A>254}</SPAN>
+science accumulates should
+turn out to be.  It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions on which
+science is based, for it draws its vital breath from a region
+which&mdash;whether above or below&mdash;is at least altogether different from
+that in which science dwells.  A critic, however, who cannot disprove
+the truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in
+protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes.  I think
+that all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agree
+that the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and intellectual progress is
+an obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought,
+just as the spencerian philosophy of 'Force,' effacing all the previous
+distinctions between actual and potential energy, momentum, work,
+force, mass, etc., which physicists have with so much agony achieved,
+carries us back to a pre-galilean age.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch07fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn3"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn4"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn5"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn6"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn7"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn8"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn9"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn10"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn11"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn12"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn13"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn14"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn15"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn16"></A>
+<A NAME="ch07fn17"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn1text">1</A>] A lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society; published in
+the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1880.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn2text">2</A>] Darwin's theory of pangenesis is, it is true, an attempt to account
+(among other things) for variation.  But it occupies its own separate
+place, and its author no more invokes the environment when he talks of
+the adhesions of gemmules than he invokes these adhesions when he talks
+of the relations of the whole animal to the environment.  <I>Divide et
+impera!</I>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn3text">3</A>] It is true that it remodels him, also, to some degree, by its
+educative influence, and that this constitutes a considerable
+difference between the social case and the zoölogical case, I neglect
+this aspect of the relation here, for the other is the more important.
+At the end of the article I will return to it incidentally.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn4text">4</A>] The reader will remember when this was written.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn5text">5</A>] Lectures and Essays, i. 82.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn6text">6</A>] Mr. Grant Allen himself, in an article from which I shall presently
+quote, admits that a set of people who, if they had been exposed ages
+ago to the geographical agencies of Timbuctoo, would have developed
+into negroes might now, after a protracted exposure to the conditions
+of Hamburg, never become negroes if transplanted to Timbuctoo.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn7text">7</A>] Study of Sociology, pages 33-35.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn8text">8</A>] No! not even though they were bodily brothers!  The geographical
+factor utterly vanishes before the ancestral factor.  The difference
+between Hamburg and Timbuctoo as a cause of ultimate divergence of two
+races is as nothing to the difference of constitution of the ancestors
+of the two races, even though as in twin brothers, this difference
+might be invisible to the naked eye.  No two couples of the most
+homogeneous race could possibly be found so identical as, if set in
+identical environments, to give rise to two identical lineages.  The
+minute divergence at the start grows broader with each generation, and
+ends with entirely dissimilar breeds.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn9text">9</A>] Article 'Nation Making,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878.  I quote
+from the reprint in the Popular Science Monthly Supplement December,
+1878, pages 121, 123, 126.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn10text">10</A>] Article 'Hellas,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878.  Reprint in
+Popular Science Monthly Supplement, September, 1878.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn11text">11</A>] Vol. cxiii. p. 318 (October, 1871).
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn12text">12</A>] I am well aware that in much that follows (though in nothing that
+precedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily shotted bows of Mr. Galton,
+for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of genius I have
+the greatest respect.  Mr. Galton inclines to think that genius of
+intellect and passion is bound to express itself, whatever the outward
+opportunity, and that within any given race an equal number of geniuses
+of each grade must needs be born in every equal period of time; a
+subordinate race cannot possibly engender a large number of high-class
+geniuses, etc.  He would, I suspect, infer the suppositions I go on to
+make&mdash;of great men fortuitously assembling around a given epoch and
+making it great, and of their being fortuitously absent from certain
+places and times (from Sardinia, from Boston now, etc.)&mdash;to be
+radically vicious.  I hardly think, however, that he does justice to
+the great complexity of the conditions of <I>effective</I> greatness, and to
+the way in which the physiological averages of production may be masked
+entirely during long periods, either by the accidental mortality of
+geniuses in infancy, or by the fact that the particular geniuses born
+happened not to find tasks.  I doubt the truth of his assertion that
+<I>intellectual</I> genius, like murder, 'will out.' It is true that certain
+types are irrepressible.  Voltaire, Shelley, Carlyle, can hardly be
+conceived leading a dumb and vegetative life in any epoch.  But take
+Mr. Galton himself, take his cousin Mr. Darwin, and take Mr. Spencer:
+nothing is to me more have died 'with all their music in them,' known
+only to their friends as persons of strong and original character and
+judgment.  What has started them on their career of effective greatness
+is simply the accident of each stumbling upon a task vast, brilliant,
+and congenial enough to call out the convergence of all his passions
+and powers.  I see no more reason why, in case they had not fallen in
+with their several hobbies at propitious periods in their life, they
+need necessarily have hit upon other hobbies, and made themselves
+equally great.  Their case seems similar to that of the Washingtons,
+Cromwells, and Grants, who simply rose to their occasions.  But apart
+from these causes of fallacy, I am strongly disposed to think that
+where transcendent geniuses are concerned the numbers anyhow are so
+small that their appearance will not fit into any scheme of averages.
+That is, two or three might appear together, just as the two or three
+balls nearest the target centre might be fired consecutively.  Take
+longer epochs and more firing, and the great geniuses and near balls
+would on the whole be more spread out.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn13text">13</A>] Since this paper was written, President Cleveland has to a certain
+extent met the need.  But who can doubt that if he had certain other
+qualities which he has not yet shown, his influence would have been
+still more decisive?  (1896.)
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn14text">14</A>] That is, if a certain general character be rapidly repeated in our
+outer experience with a number of strongly contrasted concomitants, it
+will be sooner abstracted than if its associates are invariable or
+monotonous.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn15text">15</A>] Principles of Psychology, i. 460.  See also pp. 463, 464, 500.  On
+page 408 the law is formulated thus: The <I>persistence</I> of the
+connection in consciousness is proportionate to the <I>persistence</I> of
+the outer connection.  Mr. Spencer works most with the law of
+frequency.  Either law, from my point of view, is false; but Mr.
+Spencer ought not to think them synonymous.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn16text">16</A>] In his Principles of Science, chapters xi., xii., xxvi.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch07fn17text">17</A>] Part viii. chap. iii.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P255"></A>255}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS.
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The previous Essay, on Great Men, etc., called forth two replies,&mdash;one
+by Mr. Grant Allen, entitled the 'Genesis of Genius,' in the Atlantic
+Monthly, vol. xlvii. p. 351; the other entitled 'Sociology and Hero
+Worship,' by Mr. John Fiske, <I>ibidem</I>, p. 75.  The article which
+follows is a rejoinder to Mr. Allen's article.  It was refused at the
+time by the Atlantic, but saw the day later in the Open Court for
+August, 1890.  It appears here as a natural supplement to the foregoing
+article, on which it casts some explanatory light.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Mr. Allen's contempt for hero-worship is based on very simple
+considerations.  A nation's great men, he says, are but slight
+deviations from the general level.  The hero is merely a special
+complex of the ordinary qualities of his race.  The petty differences
+impressed upon ordinary Greek minds by Plato or Aristotle or Zeno, are
+nothing at all compared with the vast differences between every Greek
+mind and every Egyptian or Chinese mind.  We may neglect them in a
+philosophy of history, just as in calculating the impetus of a
+locomotive we neglect the extra impetus given by a single piece of
+better coal.  What each man adds is but an infinitesimal fraction
+compared with what he derives from his parents, or
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P256"></A>256}</SPAN>
+indirectly
+from his earlier ancestry.  And if what the past gives to the hero is
+so much bulkier than what the future receives from him, it is what
+really calls for philosophical treatment.  The problem for the
+sociologist is as to what produces the average man; the extraordinary
+men and what they produce may by the philosophers be taken for granted,
+as too trivial variations to merit deep inquiry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, as I wish to vie with Mr. Allen's unrivalled polemic amiability
+and be as conciliatory as possible, I will not cavil at his facts or
+try to magnify the chasm between an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Napoleon
+and the average level of their respective tribes.  Let it be as small
+as Mr. Allen thinks.  All that I object to is that he should think the
+mere <I>size</I> of a difference is capable of deciding whether that
+difference be or be not a fit subject for philosophic study.  Truly
+enough, the details vanish in the bird's-eye view; but so does the
+bird's-eye view vanish in the details.  Which is the right point of
+view for philosophic vision?  Nature gives no reply, for both points of
+view, being equally real, are equally natural; and no one natural
+reality <I>per se</I> is any more emphatic than any other.  Accentuation,
+foreground, and background are created solely by the interested
+attention of the looker-on; and if the small difference between the
+genius and his tribe interests me most, while the large one between
+that tribe and another tribe interests Mr. Allen, our controversy
+cannot be ended until a complete philosophy, accounting for all
+differences impartially, shall justify us both.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing:
+"There is very little difference between one man and another; but what
+little there
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P257"></A>257}</SPAN>
+is, <I>is very important</I>."  This distinction seems to
+me to go to the root of the matter.  It is not only the size of the
+difference which concerns the philosopher, but also its place and its
+kind.  An inch is a small thing, but we know the proverb about an inch
+on a man's nose.  Messrs. Allen and Spencer, in inveighing against
+hero-worship, are thinking exclusively of the size of the inch; I, as a
+hero-worshipper, attend to its seat and function.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, there is a striking law over which few people seem to have
+pondered.  It is this: That among all the differences which exist, the
+only ones that interest us strongly are those <I>we do not take for
+granted</I>.  We are not a bit elated that our friend should have two
+hands and the power of speech, and should practise the matter-of-course
+human virtues; and quite as little are we vexed that our dog goes on
+all fours and fails to understand our conversation.  Expecting no more
+from the latter companion, and no less from the former, we get what we
+expect and are satisfied.  We never think of communing with the dog by
+discourse of philosophy, or with the friend by head-scratching or the
+throwing of crusts to be snapped at.  But if either dog or friend fall
+above or below the expected standard, they arouse the most lively
+emotion.  On our brother's vices or genius we never weary of
+descanting; to his bipedism or his hairless skin we do not consecrate a
+thought.  <I>What</I> he says may transport us; that he is able to speak at
+all leaves us stone cold.  The reason of all this is that his virtues
+and vices and utterances might, compatibly with the current range of
+variation in our tribe, be just the opposites of what they are, while
+his zoölogically human attributes cannot possibly go astray.  There
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P258"></A>258}</SPAN>
+is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the
+dramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the
+stage.  This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the
+race's average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of
+the social community in which it occurs.  It is like the soft layer
+beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year's growth is going
+on.  Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which stands inert and
+belongs almost to the inorganic world.  Layer after layer of human
+perfection separates me from the central Africans who pursued Stanley
+with cries of "meat, meat!"  This vast difference ought, on Mr. Allen's
+principles, to rivet my attention far more than the petty one which
+obtains between two such birds of a feather as Mr. Allen and myself.
+Yet while I never feel proud that the sight of a passer-by awakens in
+me no cannibalistic waterings of the mouth, I am free to confess that I
+shall feel very proud if I do not publicly appear inferior to Mr. Allen
+in the conduct of this momentous debate.  To me as a teacher the
+intellectual gap between my ablest and my dullest student counts for
+infinitely more than that between the latter and the amphioxus: indeed,
+I never thought of the latter chasm till this moment.  Will Mr. Allen
+seriously say that this is all human folly, and tweedledum and
+tweedledee?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To a Veddah's eyes the differences between two white literary men seem
+slight indeed,&mdash;same clothes, same spectacles, same harmless
+disposition, same habit of scribbling on paper and poring over books,
+etc.  "Just two white fellows," the Veddah will say, "with no
+perceptible difference."  But what a difference to the literary men
+themselves!  Think, Mr. Allen, of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P259"></A>259}</SPAN>
+confounding our philosophies
+together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are
+indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah!  Our flesh creeps at the
+thought.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But in judging of history Mr. Allen deliberately prefers to place
+himself at the Veddah's point of view, and to see things <I>en gros</I> and
+out of focus, rather than minutely.  It is quite true that there are
+things and differences enough to be seen either way.  But which are the
+humanly important ones, those most worthy to arouse our interest,&mdash;the
+large distinctions or the small?  In the answer to this question lies
+the whole divergence of the hero-worshippers from the sociologists.  As
+I said at the outset, it is merely a quarrel of emphasis; and the only
+thing I can do is to state my personal reasons for the emphasis I
+prefer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The zone of the individual differences, and of the social 'twists'
+which by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formative
+processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where
+past and future meet.  It is the theatre of all we do not take for
+granted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow its
+scope, it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions.
+The sphere of the race's average, on the contrary, no matter how large
+it may be, is a dead and stagnant thing, an achieved possession, from
+which all insecurity has vanished.  Like the trunk of a tree, it has
+been built up by successive concretions of successive active zones.
+The moving present in which we live with its problems and passions, its
+individual rivalries, victories, and defeats, will soon pass over to
+the majority and leave its small deposit on this static mass, to make
+room for fresh actors and a newer play.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P260"></A>260}</SPAN>
+And though it may be
+true, as Mr. Spencer predicts, that each later zone shall fatally be
+narrower than its forerunners; and that when the ultimate lady-like
+tea-table elysium of the Data of Ethics shall prevail, such questions
+as the breaking of eggs at the large or the small end will span the
+whole scope of possible human warfare,&mdash;still even in this shrunken and
+enfeebled generation, <I>spatio aetatis defessa vetusto</I>, what eagerness
+there will be!  Battles and defeats will occur, the victors will be
+glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of
+yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in
+safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those
+evanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver in fate's scale.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And is not its instinct right?  Do not we here grasp the
+race-differences <I>in the making</I>, and catch the only glimpse it is
+allotted to us to attain of the working units themselves, of whose
+differentiating action the race-gaps form but the stagnant sum?  What
+strange inversion of scientific procedure does Mr. Allen practise when
+he teaches us to neglect elements and attend only to aggregate
+resultants?  On the contrary, simply because the active ring, whatever
+its bulk, <I>is elementary</I>, I hold that the study of its conditions (be
+these never so 'proximate') is the highest of topics for the social
+philosopher.  If individual variations determine its ups and downs and
+hair-breadth escapes and twists and turns, as Mr. Allen and Mr. Fiske
+both admit, Heaven forbid us from tabooing the study of these in favor
+of the average!  On the contrary, let us emphasize these, and the
+importance of these; and in picking out from history our heroes, and
+communing with their
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P261"></A>261}</SPAN>
+kindred spirits,&mdash;in imagining as strongly
+as possible what differences their individualities brought about in
+this world, while its surface was still plastic in their hands, and
+what whilom feasibilities they made impossible,&mdash;each one of us may
+best fortify and inspire what creative energy may lie in his own
+soul.[<A NAME="ch08fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch08fn1">1</A>]
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is the lasting justification of hero-worship, and the pooh-poohing
+of it by 'sociologists' is the ever-lasting excuse for popular
+indifference to their general laws and averages.  The difference
+between an America rescued by a Washington or by a 'Jenkins' may, as
+Mr. Allen says, be 'little,' but it is, in the words of my carpenter
+friend, 'important.'  Some organizing genius must in the nature of
+things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will
+affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should
+have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte?  What animal,
+domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a word
+of sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings of
+Jesus of Nazareth?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The preferences of sentient creatures are what <I>create</I> the importance
+of topics.  They are the absolute and ultimate law-giver here.  And I
+for my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary
+sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined
+tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of
+individual
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P262"></A>262}</SPAN>
+differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of
+fatalisms.  Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is
+it to be,&mdash;that of your preference, or mine?  There lies the question
+of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch08fn1"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch08fn1text">1</A>] M. G. Tarde's book (itself a work of genius), Les Lois de
+l'Imitation, Étude Sociologique (2me Édition, Paris, Alcan, 1895), is
+the best possible commentary on this text,&mdash;'invention' on the one
+hand, and 'imitation' on the other, being for this author the two sole
+factors of social change.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P263"></A>263}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON SOME HEGELISMS.[<A NAME="ch09fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch09fn1">1</A>]
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British and
+American philosophy.  Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that I
+believe but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be counted
+among the privat-docenten and younger professors of Germany, and whose
+older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so
+zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be
+reckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higher
+walks of thought.  And there is no doubt that, as a movement of
+reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian
+influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a
+certain kind.  Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly
+indulgent.  Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption
+with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become
+quasi-official, make ready to defend itself as well as to attack
+others.  It is with no hope of converting independent thinkers, but
+rather with the sole aspiration of showing some chance youthful
+disciple that there <I>is</I> another point of view in philosophy that I
+fire this skirmisher's shot, which may, I hope, soon be followed by
+somebody else's heavier musketry.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P264"></A>264}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+The point of view I have in mind will become clearer if I begin with a
+few preparatory remarks on the motives and difficulties of
+philosophizing in general.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+To show that the real is identical with the ideal may roughly be set
+down as the mainspring of philosophic activity.  The atomic and
+mechanical conception of the world is as ideal from the point of view
+of some of our faculties as the teleological one is from the point of
+view of others.  In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere and
+roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member
+calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity.
+Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong together by inward
+kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers
+of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law.
+The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us.
+Each asserts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest,
+which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without
+it.  Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous&mdash;are the adjectives by
+which we are tempted to describe it.  And yet from out the bosom of it
+a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration
+that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form.  Not only do
+the materials lend themselves under certain circumstances to aesthetic
+manipulation, but underlying their worst disjointedness are three great
+continua in which for each of us reason's ideal is actually reached.  I
+mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of
+space.  In
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P265"></A>265}</SPAN>
+these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely
+at home.  The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself,
+and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is
+not lost.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Consider, for example, space.  It is a unit.  No force can in any way
+break, wound, or tear it.  It has no joints between which you can pass
+your amputating knife, for it penetrates the knife and is not split,
+Try to make a hole in space by annihilating an inch of it.  To make a
+hole you must drive something else through.  But what can you drive
+through space except what is itself spatial?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, space in its
+parts contains an infinite variety, and the unity and the variety do
+not contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects.  The
+one is the whole, the many are the parts.  Each part is one again, but
+only one fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, the
+very picture of peace and non-contradiction.  It is true that the space
+between two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of a
+dumb-bell both unites and divides the two balls.  But the union and the
+division are not <I>secundum idem</I>: it divides them by keeping them out
+of the space between, it unites them by keeping them out of the space
+beyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency.
+Self-contradiction in space could only ensue if one part tried to oust
+another from its position; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishes
+in the framing, and cannot stay to vex the mind.[<A NAME="ch09fn2text"></A><A HREF="#ch09fn2">2</A>]  Beyond the parts
+we see or think at any
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P266"></A>266}</SPAN>
+given time extend further parts; but the
+beyond is homogeneous with what is embraced, and follows the same law;
+so that no surprises, no foreignness, can ever emerge from space's womb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus with space our intelligence is absolutely intimate; it is
+rationality and transparency incarnate.  The same may be said of the
+ego and of time.  But if for simplicity's sake we ignore them, we may
+truly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world the
+standard set by our knowledge of space is what governs our desire.[<A NAME="ch09fn3text"></A><A HREF="#ch09fn3">3</A>]
+Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the margin of foreignness, be exorcised
+from other things and leave them unitary like the space they fill?
+Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the moment we turn to the material qualities
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P267"></A>267}</SPAN>
+of being, we
+find the continuity ruptured on every side.  A fearful jolting begins.
+Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its mechanical bare
+poles,&mdash;atoms and their motions,&mdash;the discontinuity is bad enough.  The
+laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion,
+all seem arbitrary collocations of data.  The atoms themselves are so
+many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise
+seems to involve the existence of the rest.  We have not banished
+discontinuity, we have only made it finer-grained.  And to get even
+that degree of rationality into the universe we have had to butcher a
+great part of its contents.  The secondary qualities we stripped off
+from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled 'subjective
+illusion,' still <I>as such</I> are facts, and must themselves be
+rationalized in some way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are
+farther than ever from the goal.  We have not now the refuge of
+distinguishing between the 'reality' and its appearances.  Facts of
+thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only
+differences, and identities of thought the only identities there are.
+Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity.  We can
+no longer speak of heat and light being reconciled in any <I>tertium
+quid</I> like wave-motion.  For motion is motion, and light is light, and
+heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their
+existence.  Together with the other attributes and things we conceive,
+they make up Plato's realm of immutable ideas.  Neither <I>per se</I> calls
+for the other, hatches it out, is its 'truth,' creates it, or has any
+sort of inward community with it except that of being comparable
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P268"></A>268}</SPAN>
+in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling,
+as the case may be.  The world of qualities is a world of things almost
+wholly discontinuous <I>inter se</I>.  Each only says, "I am that I am," and
+each says it on its own account and with absolute monotony.  The
+continuities of which they <I>partake</I>, in Plato's phrase, the ego,
+space, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they
+possess.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It might seem as if in the mere 'partaking' there lay a contradiction
+of the discontinuity.  If the white must partake of space, the heat of
+time, and so forth,&mdash;do not whiteness and space, heat and time,
+mutually call for or help to create each other?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yes; a few such <I>à priori</I> couplings must be admitted.  They are the
+axioms: no feeling except as occupying some space and time, or as a
+moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of
+an object; no time without a previous time,&mdash;and the like.  But they
+are limited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad
+genera of concepts, and leave quite undetermined what the
+specifications of those genera shall be.  What feeling shall fill
+<I>this</I> time, what substance execute <I>this</I> motion, what qualities
+combine in <I>this</I> being, are as much unanswered questions as if the
+metaphysical axioms never existed at all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly
+mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pass over the facts of the
+world.  Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few
+vague enveloping laws, independent in all besides.&mdash;such seems the
+truth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P269"></A>269}</SPAN>
+apart that
+their conjunction seems quite hopeless.  To eat our cake and have it,
+to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of
+selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be
+the ideal.  But the real offers us these terms in the shape of mutually
+exclusive alternatives of which only one can be true at once; so that
+we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility.  The wrench is
+absolute: "Either&mdash;or!"  Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on an
+event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or
+poorer without any intermediate degrees passed over; just as my
+wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me
+from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are
+compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the
+conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and
+impossibility in all its fulness for the other,&mdash;so the bachelor joys
+are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must
+henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good
+enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible
+living in the sunshine, the 'unbuttoning after supper and sleeping upon
+benches in the afternoon,' are stars that have set upon the path of him
+who in good earnest makes himself a moralist.  The transitions are
+abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many
+possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all
+their sudden completeness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Must we then think that the world that fills space and time can yield
+us no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty space
+and time themselves?  Is what unity there is in the world
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P270"></A>270}</SPAN>
+mainly
+derived from the fact that the world is <I>in</I> space and time and
+'partakes' of them?  Can no vision of it forestall the facts of it, or
+know from some fractions the others before the others have arrived?
+Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid there
+being any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happening
+itself?  Can we gain no anticipatory assurance that what is to come
+will have no strangeness?  Is there no substitute, in short, for life
+but the living itself in all its long-drawn weary length and breadth
+and thickness?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sense
+finds no difficulty in acquiescing.  To such a way of thinking the
+notion of 'partaking' has a deep and real significance.  Whoso partakes
+of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and
+its other partakers.  But he claims no more.  His share in no wise
+negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession
+of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and
+which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing.  Why may
+not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all
+the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet
+sit at the common table of space and time?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To me this view seems deeply probable.  Things cohere, but the act of
+cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of
+their qualifications indeterminate.  As the first three notes of a tune
+comport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till a
+particular ending has actually come,&mdash;so the parts actually known of
+the universe may comport many ideally possible complements.  But as
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P271"></A>271}</SPAN>
+the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one is
+not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary
+elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all.
+Why, if one act of knowledge could from one point take in the total
+perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever
+have been anything more than that act?  Why duplicate it by the tedious
+unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality?  No answer seems
+possible.  On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community
+of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part
+controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually
+given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at
+all.  This is the moral view, the view that gives to other powers the
+same freedom it would have itself,&mdash;not the ridiculous 'freedom to do
+right,' which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as <I>I</I> think
+right, but the freedom to do as <I>they</I> think right, or wrong either.
+After all, what accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe
+to me?  By what insatiate conceit and lust of intellectual despotism do
+I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic
+throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the
+Lord's anointed?  Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right?
+And shall it be given before they are given?  <I>Data! gifts!</I> something
+to be thankful for!  It is a gift that we can approach things at all,
+and, by means of the time and space of which our minds and they
+partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are 'bounds of ord'nance' set for all things, where they must
+pause or rue it.  'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for
+it, not by it.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P272"></A>272}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Now, to a mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply
+loathsome.  Bounds that we can't overpass!  Data! facts that say,
+"Hands off, till we are given"! possibilities we can't control! a
+banquet of which we merely share!  Heavens, this is intolerable; such a
+world is no world for a philosopher to have to do with.  He must have
+all or nothing.  If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the
+sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational
+at all.  It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose
+haphazard sway I will not truckle.  But, no! this is not the world.
+The world is philosophy's own,&mdash;a single block, of which, if she once
+get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey
+and feed her all-devouring theoretic maw.  Naught shall be but the
+necessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom
+to obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her
+champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The insolence of sway, the <I>hubris</I> on which gods take vengeance, is in
+temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice.  A
+Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters.  But when an
+<I>intellect</I> is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence
+must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a
+monster, but a philosophic prophet.  May not this be all wrong?  Is
+there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of
+liability to excess?  And where everything else must be contented with
+its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod
+over the whole?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I confess I can see no <I>à priori</I> reason for the exception.  He who
+claims it must be judged by the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P273"></A>273}</SPAN>
+consequences of his acts, and by
+them alone.  Let Hegel then confront the universe with his claim, and
+see how he can make the two match.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The universe absolutely refuses to let him travel without jolt.  Time,
+space, and his ego are continuous; so are degrees of heat, shades of
+light and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes call
+for salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows what
+salt and sugar are.  But on the whole there is nought to soften the
+shock of surprise to his intelligence, as it passes from one quality of
+being to another.  Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him who
+holds the one the other is not given till it give itself.  Real being
+comes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with no
+permission asked of the conceiver.  In despair must Hegel lift vain
+hands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, he
+must throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature of
+things an <I>absolute</I> muddle and incoherence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But, hark!  What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear?
+Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require?
+Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency?  Is not
+jolt passage?  Is friction other than a kind of lubrication?  Is not a
+chasm a filling?&mdash;a queer kind of filling, but a filling still.  Why
+seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart
+is the only glue you need?  Let all that negation which seemed to
+disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the
+problem stands solved.  The paradoxical character of the notion could
+not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P274"></A>274}</SPAN>
+Germany,
+where mental excess is endemic.  Richard, for a moment brought to bay,
+is himself again.  He vaults into the saddle, and from that time his
+career is that of a philosophic desperado,&mdash;one series of outrages upon
+the chastity of thought.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree?  The
+old receipts of squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns
+have many applications.  An evil frankly accepted loses half its sting
+and all its terror.  The Stoics had their cheap and easy way of dealing
+with evil.  <I>Call</I> your woes goods, they said; refuse to <I>call</I> your
+lost blessings by that name,&mdash;and you are happy.  So of the
+unintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and what
+further do you require?  There is even a more legitimate excuse than
+that.  In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas lies
+a standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to say
+anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling
+words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability.  Thus
+Baron Bunsen writes to his wife: "Nothing is near but the far; nothing
+true but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothing
+so real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing so
+visible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death."  Of
+these ecstatic moments the <I>credo quia impossibile</I> is the classical
+expression.  Hegel's originality lies in his making their mood
+permanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others,&mdash;not
+as a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens of
+her intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is always
+ready), but as the very form of intellectual responsibility itself.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P275"></A>275}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel's ways
+of applying his discovery.  His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which
+if you once pass the door you may be lost forever.  Safety lies in not
+entering.  Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance with
+various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so
+plausible as to slide us unresistingly and almost unwittingly through
+the fatal arch.  It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it
+is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that
+its premises are rotten.  I shall accordingly confine myself to a few
+of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they
+break down, so must the system which they prop.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing and
+partaking business he so much loathes.  He will not call contradiction
+the glue in one place and identity in another; that is too
+half-hearted.  Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must derive
+its credit from being shown to be latently involved in cases that we
+hitherto supposed to embody pure continuity.  Thus, the relations of an
+ego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place with
+another place, of a cause with its effect, of a thing with its
+properties, and especially of parts with wholes, must be shown to
+involve contradiction.  Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heart
+of coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them,
+and must be taken as the universal solvent,&mdash;or, rather, there is no
+longer any need of a solvent.  To 'dissolve' things in identity was the
+dream of earlier cruder schools.  Hegel will show that their very
+difference is their identity, and that
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P276"></A>276}</SPAN>
+in the act of detachment
+the detachment is undone, and they fall into each other's arms.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher who
+pretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words that
+it can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (the
+identity of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, and
+obliges him in fact to use the word 'understanding,' whenever it occurs
+in his pages, as a term of contempt.  Take the case of space we used
+above.  The common man who looks at space believes there is nothing in
+it to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, no
+secrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make the
+static whole.  His intellect is satisfied with accepting space as an
+ultimate genus of the given.  But Hegel cries to him: "Dupe! dost thou
+not see it to be one nest of incompatibilities?  Do not the unity of
+its wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patent
+contradiction?  Does it not both unite and divide things; and but for
+this strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all?  The
+hidden dynamism of self-contradiction is what incessantly produces the
+static appearance by which your sense is fooled."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But if the man ask how self-contradiction <I>can</I> do all this, and how
+its dynamism may be seen to work, Hegel can only reply by showing him
+the space itself and saying: "Lo, <I>thus</I>."  In other words, instead of
+the principle of explanation being more intelligible than the thing to
+be explained, it is absolutely unintelligible if taken by itself, and
+must appeal to its pretended product to prove its existence.  Surely,
+such a system of explaining <I>notum per ignotum</I>, of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P277"></A>277}</SPAN>
+making the
+<I>explicans</I> borrow credentials from the <I>explicand</I>, and of creating
+paradoxes and impossibilities where none were suspected, is a strange
+candidate for the honor of being a complete rationalizer of the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The principle of the contradictoriness of identity and the identity of
+contradictories is the essence of the hegelian system.  But what
+probably washes this principle down most with beginners is the
+combination in which its author works it with another principle which
+is by no means characteristic of his system, and which, for want of a
+better name, might be called the 'principle of totality.'  This
+principle says that you cannot adequately know even a part until you
+know of what whole it forms a part.  As Aristotle writes and Hegel
+loves to quote, an amputated hand is not even a hand.  And as Tennyson
+says,&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Little flower&mdash;but if I could understand<BR>
+What you are, root and all, and all in all,<BR>
+I should know what God and man is."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Obviously, until we have taken in all the relations, immediate or
+remote, into which the thing actually enters or potentially may enter,
+we do not know all <I>about</I> the thing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And obviously for such an exhaustive acquaintance with the thing, an
+acquaintance with every other thing, actual and potential, near and
+remote, is needed; so that it is quite fair to say that omniscience
+alone can completely know any one thing as it stands.  Standing in a
+world of relations, that world must be known before the thing is fully
+known.  This doctrine is of course an integral part of empiricism, an
+integral part of common-sense.  Since when could good men not apprehend
+the passing hour
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P278"></A>278}</SPAN>
+in the light of life's larger sweep,&mdash;not grow
+dispassionate the more they stretched their view?  Did the 'law of
+sharing' so little legitimate their procedure that a law of identity of
+contradictories, forsooth, must be trumped up to give it scope?  Out
+upon the idea!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hume's account of causation is a good illustration of the way in which
+empiricism may use the principle of totality.  We call something a
+cause; but we at the same time deny its effect to be in any latent way
+contained in or substantially identical with it.  We thus cannot tell
+what its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened.
+The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thing
+to be so far as it is a cause.  Humism thus says that its causality is
+something adventitious and not necessarily given when its other
+attributes are there.  Generalizing this, empiricism contends that we
+must everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing and
+its relations, and, among these, between those that are essential to
+our knowing it at all and those that may be called adventitious.  The
+thing as actually present in a given world is there with <I>all</I> its
+relations; for it to be known as it <I>there</I> exists, they must be known
+too, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness large
+enough to embrace that world as a unity.  But what constitutes this
+singleness of fact, this unity?  Empiricism says, Nothing but the
+relation-yielding matrix in which the several items of the world find
+themselves embedded,&mdash;time, namely, and space, and the mind of the
+knower.  And it says that were some of the items quite different from
+what they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, an
+equally unitary world might be, provided each
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P279"></A>279}</SPAN>
+item were an object
+for consciousness and occupied a determinate point in space and time.
+All the adventitious relations would in such a world be changed, along
+with the intrinsic natures and places of the beings between which they
+obtained; but the 'principle of totality' in knowledge would in no wise
+be affected.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Hegelism dogmatically denies all this to be possible.  In the first
+place it says there are no intrinsic natures that may change; in the
+second it says there are no adventitious relations.  When the relations
+of what we call a thing are told, no <I>caput mortuum</I> of intrinsicality,
+no 'nature,' is left.  The relations soak up all there is of the thing;
+the 'items' of the world are but <I>foci</I> of relation with other <I>foci</I>
+of relation; and all the relations are necessary.  The unity of the
+world has nothing to do with any 'matrix.'  The matrix and the items,
+each with all, make a unity, simply because each in truth is all the
+rest.  The proof lies in the <I>hegelian</I> principle of totality, which
+demands that if any one part be posited alone all the others shall
+forthwith <I>emanate</I> from it and infallibly reproduce the whole.  In the
+<I>modus operandi</I> of the emanation comes in, as I said, that partnership
+of the principle of totality with that of the identity of
+contradictories which so recommends the latter to beginners in Hegel's
+philosophy.  To posit one item alone is to deny the rest; to deny them
+is to refer to them; to refer to them is to begin, at least, to bring
+them on the scene; and to begin is in the fulness of time to end.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+If we call this a monism, Hegel is quick to cry, Not so!  To say simply
+that the one item is the rest
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P280"></A>280}</SPAN>
+of the universe is as false and
+one-sided as to say that it is simply itself.  It is both and neither;
+and the only condition on which we gain the right to affirm that it is,
+is that we fail not to keep affirming all the while that it is not, as
+well.  Thus the truth refuses to be expressed in any single act of
+judgment or sentence.  The world appears as a monism <I>and</I> a pluralism,
+just as it appeared in our own introductory exposition.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the trouble that keeps us and Hegel from ever joining hands over
+this apparent formula of brotherhood is that we distinguish, or try to
+distinguish, the respects in which the world is one from those in which
+it is many, while all such stable distinctions are what he most
+abominates.  The reader may decide which procedure helps his reason
+most.  For my own part, the time-honored formula of empiricist
+pluralism, that the world cannot be set down in any single proposition,
+grows less instead of more intelligible when I add, "And yet the
+different propositions that express it are one!"  The unity of the
+propositions is that of the mind that harbors them.  Any one who
+insists that their diversity is in any way itself their unity, can only
+do so because he loves obscurity and mystification for their own pure
+sakes.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Where you meet with a contradiction among realities, Herbart used to
+say, it shows you have failed to make a real distinction.  Hegel's
+sovereign method of going to work and saving all possible
+contradictions, lies in pertinaciously refusing to distinguish.  He
+takes what is true of a term <I>secundum quid</I>, treats it as true of the
+same term <I>simpliciter</I>, and then, of course, applies it to the term
+<I>secundum aliud</I>.  A
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P281"></A>281}</SPAN>
+good example of this is found in the first
+triad.  This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due
+to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever <I>is</I> by
+the same act <I>is not</I>, and gets undone and swept away; and that thus
+the irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has been
+written has its roots in an ineluctable necessity which lies revealed
+to our logical reason.  This notion of a being which forever stumbles
+over its own feet, and has to change in order to exist at all, is a
+very picturesque symbol of the reality, and is probably one of the
+points that make young readers feel as if a deep core of truth lay in
+the system.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But how is the reasoning done?  Pure being is assumed, without
+determinations, being <I>secundum quid</I>.  In this respect it agrees with
+nothing.  Therefore <I>simpliciter</I> it is nothing; wherever we find it,
+it is nothing; crowned with complete determinations then, or <I>secundum
+aliud</I>, it is nothing still, and <I>hebt sich auf</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is as if we said, Man without his clothes may be named 'the naked.'
+Therefore man <I>simpliciter</I> is the naked; and finally man with his hat,
+shoes, and overcoat on is the naked still.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of course we may in this instance or any other repeat that the
+conclusion is strictly true, however comical it seems.  Man within the
+clothes is naked, just as he is without them.  Man would never have
+invented the clothes had he not been naked.  The fact of his being clad
+at all does prove his essential nudity.  And so in general,&mdash;the form
+of any judgment, being the addition of a predicate to a subject, shows
+that the subject has been conceived without the predicate, and thus by
+a strained metaphor may
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P282"></A>282}</SPAN>
+be called the predicate's negation.  Well
+and good! let the expression pass.  But we must notice this.  The
+judgment has now created a new subject, the naked-clad, and all
+propositions regarding this must be judged on their own merits; for
+those true of the old subject, 'the naked,' are no longer true of this
+one.  For instance, we cannot say because the naked pure and simple
+must not enter the drawing-room or is in danger of taking cold, that
+the naked with his clothes on will also take cold or must stay in his
+bedroom.  Hold to it eternally that the clad man <I>is</I> still naked if it
+amuse you,&mdash;'tis designated in the bond; but the so-called
+contradiction is a sterile boon.  Like Shylock's pound of flesh, it
+leads to no consequences.  It does not entitle you to one drop of his
+Christian blood either in the way of catarrh, social exclusion, or what
+further results pure nakedness may involve.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In a version of the first step given by our foremost American
+Hegelian,[<A NAME="ch09fn4text"></A><A HREF="#ch09fn4">4</A>] we find this playing with the necessary form of judgment.
+Pure being, he says, has no determinations.  But the having none is
+itself a determination.  Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self,
+and so on.  Why not take heed to the <I>meaning</I> of what is said?  When
+we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely
+the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make.
+The showman who advertised his elephant as 'larger than any elephant in
+the world except himself' must have been in an hegelian country where
+he was afraid that if he were less explicit the audience would
+dialectically proceed to say:
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P283"></A>283}</SPAN>
+"This elephant, larger than any in
+the world, involves a contradiction; for he himself is in the world,
+and so stands endowed with the virtue of being both larger and smaller
+than himself,&mdash;a perfect hegelian elephant, whose immanent
+self-contradictoriness can only be removed in a higher synthesis.  Show
+us the higher synthesis!  We don't care to see such a mere abstract
+creature as your elephant."  It may be (and it was indeed suggested in
+antiquity) that all things are of their own size by being both larger
+and smaller than themselves.  But in the case of this elephant the
+scrupulous showman nipped such philosophizing and all its inconvenient
+consequences in the bud, by explicitly intimating that larger than any
+<I>other</I> elephant was all he meant.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Hegel's quibble with this word <I>other</I> exemplifies the same fallacy.
+All 'others,' as such, are according to him identical.  That is,
+'otherness,' which can only be predicated of a given thing <I>A</I>,
+<I>secundum quid</I> (as other than <I>B</I>, etc.), is predicated <I>simpliciter</I>,
+and made to identify the <I>A</I> in question with <I>B</I>, which is other only
+<I>secundum aliud</I>,&mdash;namely other than <I>A</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Another maxim that Hegelism is never tired of repeating is that "to
+know a limit is already to be beyond it."  "Stone walls do not a prison
+make, nor iron bars a cage."  The inmate of the penitentiary shows by
+his grumbling that he is still in the stage of abstraction and of
+separative thought.  The more keenly he thinks of the fun he might be
+having outside, the more deeply he ought to feel that the walls
+identify him with it.  They set him beyond them <I>secundum quid</I>, in
+imagination, in longing, in despair; <I>argal</I> they take him there
+<I>simpliciter</I> and
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P284"></A>284}</SPAN>
+in every way,&mdash;in flesh, in power, in deed.
+Foolish convict, to ignore his blessings!
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Another mode of stating his principle is this: "To know the finite as
+such, is also to know the infinite."  Expressed in this abstract shape,
+the formula is as insignificant as it is unobjectionable.  We can cap
+every word with a negative particle, and the word <I>finished</I>
+immediately suggests the word <I>unfinished</I>, and we know the two words
+together.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But it is an entirely different thing to take the knowledge of a
+concrete case of ending, and to say that it virtually makes us
+acquainted with other concrete facts <I>in infinitum</I>.  For, in the first
+place, the end may be an absolute one.  The <I>matter</I> of the universe,
+for instance, is according to all appearances in finite amount; and if
+we knew that we had counted the last bit of it, infinite knowledge in
+that respect, so far from being given, would be impossible.  With
+regard to <I>space</I>, it is true that in drawing a bound we are aware of
+more.  But to treat this little fringe as the equal of infinite space
+is ridiculous.  It resembles infinite space <I>secundum quid</I>, or in but
+one respect,&mdash;its spatial quality.  We believe it homogeneous with
+whatever spaces may remain; but it would be fatuous to say, because one
+dollar in my pocket is homogeneous with all the dollars in the country,
+that to have it is to have them.  The further points of space are as
+numerically distinct from the fringe as the dollars from the dollar,
+and not until we have actually intuited them can we be said to 'know'
+them <I>simpliciter</I>.  The hegelian reply is that the <I>quality</I> of space
+constitutes its only <I>worth</I>; and that there is nothing true, good, or
+beautiful to be known
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P285"></A>285}</SPAN>
+in the spaces beyond which is not already
+known in the fringe.  This introduction of a eulogistic term into a
+mathematical question is original.  The 'true' and the 'false' infinite
+are about as appropriate distinctions in a discussion of cognition as
+the good and the naughty rain would be in a treatise on meteorology.
+But when we grant that all the worth of the knowledge of distant spaces
+is due to the knowledge of what they may carry in them, it then appears
+more than ever absurd to say that the knowledge of the fringe is an
+equivalent for the infinitude of the distant knowledge.  The distant
+spaces even <I>simpliciter</I> are not yet yielded to our thinking; and if
+they were yielded <I>simpliciter</I>, would not be yielded <I>secundum aliud</I>,
+or in respect to their material filling out.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Shylock's bond was an omnipotent instrument compared with this
+knowledge of the finite, which remains the ignorance it always was,
+till the infinite by its own act has piece by piece placed itself in
+our hands.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here Hegelism cries out: "By the identity of the knowledges of infinite
+and finite I never meant that one could be a <I>substitute</I> for the
+other; nor does true philosophy ever mean by identity capacity for
+substitution."  This sounds suspiciously like the good and the naughty
+infinite, or rather like the mysteries of the Trinity and the
+Eucharist.  To the unsentimental mind there are but two sorts of
+identity,&mdash;total identity and partial identity.  Where the identity is
+total, the things can be substituted wholly for one another.  Where
+substitution is impossible, it must be that the identity is incomplete.
+It is the duty of the student then to ascertain the exact <I>quid,
+secundum</I> which it obtains, as we have tried to do above.  Even the
+Catholic will tell you that when he believes in the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P286"></A>286}</SPAN>
+identity of
+the wafer with Christ's body, he does not mean in all respects,&mdash;so
+that he might use it to exhibit muscular fibre, or a cook make it smell
+like baked meat in the oven.  He means that in the one sole respect of
+nourishing his being in a certain way, it is identical with and can be
+substituted for the very body of his Redeemer.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+'The knowledge of opposites is one,' is one of the hegelian first
+principles, of which the preceding are perhaps only derivatives.  Here
+again Hegelism takes 'knowledge' <I>simpliciter</I>, and substituting it for
+knowledge in a particular respect, avails itself of the confusion to
+cover other respects never originally implied.  When the knowledge of a
+thing is given us, we no doubt think that the thing may or must have an
+opposite.  This postulate of something opposite we may call a
+'knowledge of the opposite' if we like; but it is a knowledge of it in
+only that one single respect, that it is something opposite.  No number
+of opposites to a quality we have never directly experienced could ever
+lead us positively to infer what that quality is.  There is a jolt
+between the negation of them and the actual positing of it in its
+proper shape, that twenty logics of Hegel harnessed abreast cannot
+drive us smoothly over.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The use of the maxim 'All determination is negation' is the fattest and
+most full-blown application of the method of refusing to distinguish.
+Taken in its vague confusion, it probably does more than anything else
+to produce the sort of flicker and dazzle which are the first mental
+conditions for the reception of Hegel's system.  The word 'negation'
+taken <I>simpliciter</I> is treated as if it covered an indefinite number of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P287"></A>287}</SPAN>
+<I>secundums</I>, culminating in the very peculiar one of
+self-negation.  Whence finally the conclusion is drawn that assertions
+are universally self-contradictory.  As this is an important matter, it
+seems worth while to treat it a little minutely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When I measure out a pint, say of milk, and so determine it, what do I
+do?  I virtually make two assertions regarding it,&mdash;it is this pint; it
+is not those other gallons.  One of these is an affirmation, the other
+a negation.  Both have a common subject; but the predicates being
+mutually exclusive, the two assertions lie beside each other in endless
+peace.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I may with propriety be said to make assertions more remote
+still,&mdash;assertions of which those other gallons are the subject.  As it
+is not they, so are they not the pint which it is.  The determination
+"this is the pint" carries with it the negation,&mdash;"those are not the
+pints."  Here we have the same predicate; but the subjects are
+exclusive of each other, so there is again endless peace.  In both
+couples of propositions negation and affirmation are <I>secundum aliud</I>:
+this is <I>a</I>; this is n't not-<I>a</I>.  This kind of negation involved in
+determination cannot possibly be what Hegel wants for his purposes.
+The table is not the chair, the fireplace is not the cupboard,&mdash;these
+are literal expressions of the law of identity and contradiction, those
+principles of the abstracting and separating understanding for which
+Hegel has so sovereign a contempt, and which his logic is meant to
+supersede.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And accordingly Hegelians pursue the subject further, saying there is
+in every determination an element of real conflict.  Do you not in
+determining the milk to be this pint exclude it forever from the chance
+of being those gallons, frustrate it from
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P288"></A>288}</SPAN>
+expansion?  And so do
+you not equally exclude them from the being which it now maintains as
+its own?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Assuredly if you had been hearing of a land flowing with milk and
+honey, and had gone there with unlimited expectations of the rivers the
+milk would fill; and if you found there was but this single pint in the
+whole country,&mdash;the determination of the pint would exclude another
+determination which your mind had previously made of the milk.  There
+would be a real conflict resulting in the victory of one side.  The
+rivers would be negated by the single pint being affirmed; and as
+rivers and pint are affirmed of the same milk (first as supposed and
+then as found), the contradiction would be complete.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But it is a contradiction that can never by any chance occur in real
+nature or being.  It can only occur between a false representation of a
+being and the true idea of the being when actually cognized.  The first
+got into a place where it had no rights and had to be ousted.  But in
+<I>rerum naturâ</I> things do not get into one another's logical places.
+The gallons first spoken of never say, "We are the pint;" the pint
+never says, "I am the gallons."  It never tries to expand; and so there
+is no chance for anything to exclude or negate it.  It thus remains
+affirmed absolutely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Can it be believed in the teeth of these elementary truths that the
+principle <I>determinatio negatio</I> is held throughout Hegel to imply an
+active contradiction, conflict, and exclusion?  Do the horse-cars
+jingling outside negate me writing in this room?  Do I, reader, negate
+you?  Of course, if I say, "Reader, we are two, and therefore I am
+two," I negate you, for I am actually thrusting a part into the seat of
+the whole.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P289"></A>289}</SPAN>
+The orthodox logic expresses the fallacy by saying
+the we is taken by me distributively instead of collectively; but as
+long as I do not make this blunder, and am content with my part, we all
+are safe.  In <I>rerum naturâ</I>, parts remain parts.  Can you imagine one
+position in space trying to get into the place of another position and
+having to be 'contradicted' by that other?  Can you imagine your
+thought of an object trying to dispossess the real object from its
+being, and so being negated by it?  The great, the sacred law of
+partaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegel
+cannot possibly understand.  All or nothing is his one idea.  For him
+each point of space, of time, each feeling in the ego, each quality of
+being, is clamoring, "I am the all,&mdash;there is nought else but me."
+This clamor is its essence, which has to be negated in another act
+which gives it its true determination.  What there is of affirmative in
+this determination is thus the mere residuum left from the negation by
+others of the negation it originally applied to them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But why talk of residuum?  The Kilkenny cats of fable could leave a
+residuum in the shape of their undevoured tails.  But the Kilkenny cats
+of existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel are all-devouring, and
+leave no residuum.  Such is the unexampled fury of their onslaught that
+they get clean out of themselves and into each other, nay more, pass
+right through each other, and then "return into themselves" ready for
+another round, as insatiate, but as inconclusive, as the one that went
+before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If I characterized Hegel's own mood as <I>hubris</I>, the insolence of
+excess, what shall I say of the mood he ascribes to being?  Man makes
+the gods in his
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P290"></A>290}</SPAN>
+image; and Hegel, in daring to insult the
+spotless <I>sôphrosune</I> of space and time, the bound-respecters, in
+branding as strife that law of sharing under whose sacred keeping, like
+a strain of music, like an odor of incense (as Emerson says), the dance
+of the atoms goes forward still, seems to me but to manifest his own
+deformity.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+This leads me to animadvert on an erroneous inference which hegelian
+idealism makes from the form of the negative judgment.  Every negation,
+it says, must be an intellectual act.  Even the most <I>naïf</I> realism
+will hardly pretend that the non-table as such exists <I>in se</I> after the
+same fashion as the table does.  But table and non-table, since they
+are given to our thought together, must be consubstantial.  Try to make
+the position or affirmation of the table as simple as you can, it is
+also the negation of the non-table; and thus positive being itself
+seems after all but a function of intelligence, like negation.
+Idealism is proved, realism is unthinkable.  Now I have not myself the
+least objection to idealism,&mdash;an hypothesis which voluminous
+considerations make plausible, and whose difficulties may be cleared
+away any day by new discriminations or discoveries.  But I object to
+proving by these patent ready-made <I>à priori</I> methods that which can
+only be the fruit of a wide and patient induction.  For the truth is
+that our affirmations and negations do not stand on the same footing at
+all, and are anything but consubstantial.  An affirmation says
+something about an objective existence.  A negation says something
+<I>about an affirmation</I>,&mdash;namely, that it is false.  There are no
+negative predicates or falsities in nature.  Being makes no false
+hypotheses that have
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P291"></A>291}</SPAN>
+to be contradicted.  The only denials she
+can be in any way construed to perform are denials of our errors.  This
+shows plainly enough that denial must be of something mental, since the
+thing denied is always a fiction.  "The table is not the chair"
+supposes the speaker to have been playing with the false notion that it
+may have been the chair.  But affirmation may perfectly well be of
+something having no such necessary and constitutive relation to
+thought.  Whether it really is of such a thing is for harder
+considerations to decide.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+If idealism be true, the great question that presents itself is whether
+its truth involve the necessity of an infinite, unitary, and omniscient
+consciousness, or whether a republic of semi-detached consciousnesses
+will do,&mdash;consciousnesses united by a certain common fund of
+representations, but each possessing a private store which the others
+do not share.  Either hypothesis is to me conceivable.  But whether the
+egos be one or many, the <I>nextness</I> of representations to one another
+within them is the principle of unification of the universe.  To be
+thus consciously next to some other representation is the condition to
+which each representation must submit, under penalty of being excluded
+from this universe, and like Lord Dundreary's bird 'flocking all
+alone,' and forming a separate universe by itself.  But this is only a
+condition of which the representations <I>partake</I>; it leaves all their
+other determinations undecided.  To say, because representation <I>b</I>
+cannot be in the same universe with <I>a</I> without being <I>a's neighbor</I>;
+that therefore <I>a</I> possesses, involves, or necessitates <I>b</I>, hide and
+hair, flesh and fell, all appurtenances and belongings,&mdash;is
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P292"></A>292}</SPAN>
+only
+the silly hegelian all-or-nothing insatiateness once more.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hegel's own logic, with all the senseless hocus-pocus of its triads,
+utterly fails to prove his position.  The only evident compulsion which
+representations exert upon one another is compulsion to submit to the
+conditions of entrance into the same universe with them&mdash;the conditions
+of continuity, of selfhood, space, and time&mdash;under penalty of being
+excluded.  But what this universe shall be is a matter of fact which we
+cannot decide till we know what representations <I>have</I> submitted to
+these its sole conditions.  The conditions themselves impose no further
+requirements.  In short, the notion that real contingency and ambiguity
+may be features of the real world is a perfectly unimpeachable
+hypothesis.  Only in such a world can moral judgments have a claim to
+be.  For the bad is that which takes the place of something else which
+possibly might have been where it now is, and the better is that which
+absolutely might be where it absolutely is not.  In the universe of
+Hegel&mdash;the absolute block whose parts have no loose play, the pure
+plethora of necessary being with the oxygen of possibility all
+suffocated out of its lungs&mdash;there can be neither good nor bad, but one
+dead level of mere fate.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But I have tired the reader out.  The worst of criticising Hegel is
+that the very arguments we use against him give forth strange and
+hollow sounds that make them seem almost as fantastic as the errors to
+which they are addressed.  The sense of a universal mirage, of a
+ghostly unreality, steals over us, which is the very moonlit atmosphere
+of Hegelism itself.  What wonder then if, instead of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P293"></A>293}</SPAN>
+converting,
+our words do but rejoice and delight, those already baptized in the
+faith of confusion?  To their charmed senses we all seem children of
+Hegel together, only some of us have not the wit to know our own
+father.  Just as Romanists are sure to inform us that our reasons
+against Papal Christianity unconsciously breathe the purest spirit of
+Catholicism, so Hegelism benignantly smiles at our exertions, and
+murmurs, "If the red slayer think he slays;" "When me they fly, I am
+the wings," etc.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To forefend this unwelcome adoption, let me recapitulate in a few
+propositions the reasons why I am not an hegelian.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real
+contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the
+other false.  When this happens, one must go forever; nor is there any
+'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere
+negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges, because they
+are without chasm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only
+partially.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+5. This partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a
+common world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+7. But the same quality appears in many times and spaces.  Generic
+sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by
+which the jolts are reduced.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+8. What between different qualities jolts remain.
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P294"></A>294}</SPAN>
+Each, as far
+as the other is concerned, is an absolutely separate and contingent
+being.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+9. The moral judgment may lead us to postulate as irreducible the
+contingencies of the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+10. Elements mutually contingent are not in conflict so long as they
+partake of the continua of time, space, etc.,&mdash;partaking being the
+exact opposite of strife.  They conflict only when, as mutually
+exclusive possibilities, they strive to possess themselves of the same
+parts of time, space, and ego.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+11. That there are such real conflicts, irreducible to any
+intelligence, and giving rise to an excess of possibility over
+actuality, is an hypothesis, but a credible one.  No philosophy should
+pretend to be anything more.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+NOTE.&mdash;Since the preceding article was written, some observations on
+the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted to
+make by reading the pamphlet called The Anaesthetic Revelation and the
+Gist of Philosophy, by Benjamin Paul Blood, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874,
+have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and
+the weakness of Hegel's philosophy.  I strongly urge others to repeat
+the experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough.  The
+effects will of course vary with the individual.  Just as they vary in
+the same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in the
+former case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain.  With
+me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the
+experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense
+metaphysical illumination.  Truth lies open to the view in depth
+beneath depth of almost blinding evidence.  The mind sees all the
+logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity
+to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety
+returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly
+at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a
+cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled,
+or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P295"></A>295}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+The immense emotional sense of <I>reconciliation</I> which characterizes the
+'maudlin' stage of alcoholic drunkenness,&mdash;a stage which seems silly to
+lookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes a
+chief part of the temptation to the vice,&mdash;is well known.  The centre
+and periphery of things seem to come together.  The ego and its
+objects, the <I>meum</I> and the <I>tuum</I>, are one.  Now this, only a
+thousandfold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first
+result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the
+conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepest
+convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong.  Whatever idea or
+representation occurred to the mind was seized by the same logical
+forceps, and served to illustrate the same truth; and that truth was
+that every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a higher
+unity in which it is based; that all contradictions, so-called, are but
+differences; that all differences are of degree; that all degrees are
+of a common kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being;
+and that we are literally in the midst of <I>an infinite</I>, to perceive
+the existence of which is the utmost we can attain.  Without the <I>same</I>
+as a basis, how could strife occur?  Strife presupposes something to be
+striven about; and in this common topic, the same for both parties, the
+differences merge.  From the hardest contradiction to the tenderest
+diversity of verbiage differences evaporate; <I>yes</I> and <I>no</I> agree at
+least in being assertions; a denial of a statement is but another mode
+of stating the same, contradiction can only occur of the same
+thing,&mdash;all opinions are thus synonyms, are synonymous, are the same.
+But the same phrase by difference of emphasis is two; and here again
+difference and no-difference merge in one.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the
+identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this
+experience.  I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written
+during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless
+drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire
+of infinite rationality.  God and devil, good and evil, life and death,
+I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity
+and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and
+swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and
+small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty
+other
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P296"></A>296}</SPAN>
+contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way.
+The mind saw how each term <I>belonged</I> to its contrast through a
+knife-edge moment of transition which <I>it</I> effected, and which,
+perennial and eternal, was the <I>nunc stans</I> of life.  The thought of
+mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgment of
+opposition, as 'nothing&mdash;but,' 'no more&mdash;than,' 'only&mdash;if,' etc.,
+produced a perfect delirium of theoretic rapture.  And at last, when
+definite ideas to work on came slowly, the mind went through the mere
+<I>form</I> of recognizing sameness in identity by contrasting the same word
+with itself, differently emphasized, or shorn of its initial letter.
+Let me transcribe a few sentences:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+What's mistake but a kind of take?<BR>
+What's nausea but a kind of -ausea?<BR>
+Sober, drunk, -<I>unk</I>, astonishment.<BR>
+Everything can become the subject of criticism&mdash;how<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">criticise without something <I>to</I> criticise?</SPAN><BR>
+Agreement&mdash;disagreement!!<BR>
+Emotion&mdash;motion!!!<BR>
+Die away from, <I>from</I>, die away (without the <I>from</I>).<BR>
+Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!<BR>
+Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!<BR>
+It escapes, it escapes!<BR>
+But&mdash;&mdash;<BR>
+What escapes, WHAT escapes?<BR>
+Emphasis, EMphasis; there must be some emphasis in order<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">for there to be a phasis.</SPAN><BR>
+No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is <I>other</I>.<BR>
+<I>In</I>coherent, coherent&mdash;same.<BR>
+And it fades!  And it's infinite!  AND it's infinite!<BR>
+If it was n't <I>going</I>, why should you hold on to it?<BR>
+Don't you see the difference, don't you see the identity?<BR>
+Constantly opposites united!<BR>
+The same me telling you to write and not to write!<BR>
+Extreme&mdash;extreme, extreme!  Within the <I>ex</I>tensity that<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">'extreme' contains is contained the '<I>extreme</I>' of intensity.</SPAN><BR>
+Something, and <I>other</I> than that thing!<BR>
+Intoxication, and <I>otherness</I> than intoxication.<BR>
+Every attempt at betterment,&mdash;every attempt at otherment,&mdash;is a&mdash;&mdash;.<BR>
+It fades forever and forever as we move.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P297"></A>297}</SPAN>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+There <I>is</I> a reconciliation!<BR>
+Reconciliation&mdash;<I>e</I>conciliation!<BR>
+By God, how that hurts!  By God, how it <I>does n't</I> hurt!<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">Reconciliation of two extremes.</SPAN><BR>
+By George, nothing but <I>o</I>thing!<BR>
+That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure <I>on</I>sense!<BR>
+Thought deeper than speech&mdash;&mdash;!<BR>
+Medical school; divinity school, <I>school</I>!  SCHOOL!  Oh my<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">God, oh God, oh God!</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are no differences but differences of degree between different
+degrees of difference and no difference.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This phrase has the true Hegelian ring, being in fact a regular <I>sich
+als sich auf sich selbst beziehende Negativität</I>.  And true Hegelians
+will <I>überhaupt</I> be able to read between the lines and feel, at any
+rate, what <I>possible</I> ecstasies of cognitive emotion might have bathed
+these tattered fragments of thought when they were alive.  But for the
+assurance of a certain amount of respect from them, I should hardly
+have ventured to print what must be such caviare to the general.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+But now comes the reverse of the medal.  What is the principle of unity
+in all this monotonous rain of instances?  Although I did not see it at
+first, I soon found that it was in each case nothing but the abstract
+<I>genus</I> of which the conflicting terms were opposite species.  In other
+words, although the flood of ontologic <I>emotion</I> was Hegelian through
+and through, the <I>ground</I> for it was nothing but the world-old
+principle that things are the same only so far and no farther than they
+<I>are</I> the same, or partake of a common nature,&mdash;the principle that
+Hegel most tramples under foot.  At the same time the rapture of
+beholding a process that was infinite, changed (as the nature of the
+infinitude was realized by the mind) into the sense of a dreadful and
+ineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort is
+incommensurable and in the light of which whatever happens is
+indifferent.  This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture to
+horror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced.  I
+got it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough to
+produce incipient nausea; and I cannot but regard it as the normal and
+inevitable outcome of the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P298"></A>298}</SPAN>
+intoxication, if sufficiently
+prolonged.  A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and
+indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis,
+but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one,&mdash;this is the
+upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader will
+have noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing the
+clue.  Something 'fades,' 'escapes;' and the feeling of insight is
+changed into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion,
+astonishment.  I know no more singular sensation than this intense
+bewilderment, with nothing particular left to be bewildered at save the
+bewilderment itself.  It seems, indeed, <I>a causa sui</I>, or 'spirit
+become its own object.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the
+law of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived,
+engender a very powerful emotion, that Hegel was so unusually
+susceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratification
+became his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to the
+means he employed; that <I>indifferentism</I> is the true outcome of every
+view of the world which makes infinity and continuity to be its
+essence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the
+mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the
+identification of contradictories, so far from being the
+self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a
+self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and
+terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood
+of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch09fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="ch09fn2"></A>
+<A NAME="ch09fn3"></A>
+<A NAME="ch09fn4"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch09fn1text">1</A>] Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch09fn2text">2</A>] The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and the
+fact that it is all finished and given and there, can be got over in
+more than one way.  The simplest way is by idealism, which
+distinguishes between space as actual and space as potential.  For
+idealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but all
+actually represented spaces are finite; it is only possibly
+representable spaces that are infinite.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch09fn3text">3</A>] Not only for simplicity's sake do we select space as the paragon of
+a rationalizing continuum.  Space determines the relations of the items
+that enter it in a far more intricate way than does time; in a far more
+fixed way than does the ego.  By this last clause I mean that if things
+are in space at all, they must conform to geometry; while the being in
+an ego at all need not make them conform to logic or any other manner
+of rationality.  Under the sheltering wings of a self the matter of
+unreason can lodge itself as safely as any other kind of content.  One
+cannot but respect the devoutness of the ego-worship of some of our
+English-writing Hegelians.  But at the same time one cannot help
+fearing lest the monotonous contemplation of so barren a principle as
+that of the pure formal self (which, be it never so essential a
+condition of the existence of a world of organized experience at all,
+must notwithstanding take its own <I>character</I> from, not give the
+character to, the separate empirical data over which its mantle is
+cast), one cannot but fear, I say, lest the religion of the
+transcendental ego should, like all religions of the 'one thing
+needful,' end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch09fn4text">4</A>] Journal of Speculative Philosophy, viii. 37.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap10"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P299"></A>299}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED.[<A NAME="ch10fn1text"></A><A HREF="#ch10fn1">1</A>]
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+"The great field for new discoveries," said a scientific friend to me
+the other day, "is always the unclassified residuum."  Round about the
+accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort
+of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and
+irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to
+ignore than to attend to.  The ideal of every science is that of a
+closed and completed system of truth.  The charm of most sciences to
+their more passive disciples consists in their appearing, in fact, to
+wear just this ideal form.  Each one of our various <I>ologies</I> seems to
+offer a definite head of classification for every possible phenomenon
+of the sort which it professes to cover; and so far from free is most
+men's fancy, that, when a consistent and organized scheme of this sort
+has once been comprehended and assimilated, a different scheme is
+unimaginable.  No alternative, whether to whole or parts, can any
+longer be conceived as possible.  Phenomena unclassifiable within the
+system are therefore paradoxical
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P300"></A>300}</SPAN>
+absurdities, and must be held
+untrue.  When, moreover, as so often happens, the reports of them are
+vague and indirect; when they come as mere marvels and oddities rather
+than as things of serious moment,&mdash;one neglects or denies them with the
+best of scientific consciences.  Only the born geniuses let themselves
+be worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get no
+peace till they are brought within the fold.  Your Galileos, Galvanis,
+Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins are always getting confounded and
+troubled by insignificant things.  Any one will renovate his science
+who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena.  And when the
+science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of
+the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No part of the unclassified residuum has usually been treated with a
+more contemptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomena
+generally called <I>mystical</I>.  Physiology will have nothing to do with
+them.  Orthodox psychology turns its back upon them.  Medicine sweeps
+them out; or, at most, when in an anecdotal vein, records a few of them
+as 'effects of the imagination,'&mdash;a phrase of mere dismissal, whose
+meaning, in this connection, it is impossible to make precise.  All the
+while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the
+surface of history.  No matter where you open its pages, you find
+things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal
+possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and
+productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiar
+individuals over persons and things in their neighborhood.  We suppose
+that 'mediumship'
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P301"></A>301}</SPAN>
+originated in Rochester, N. Y., and animal
+magnetism with Mesmer; but once look behind the pages of official
+history, in personal memoirs, legal documents, and popular narratives
+and books of anecdote, and you will find that there never was a time
+when these things were not reported just as abundantly as now.  We
+college-bred gentry, who follow the stream of cosmopolitan culture
+exclusively, not infrequently stumble upon some old-established
+journal, or some voluminous native author, whose names are never heard
+of in <I>our</I> circle, but who number their readers by the
+quarter-million.  It always gives us a little shock to find this mass
+of human beings not only living and ignoring us and all our gods, but
+actually reading and writing and cogitating without ever a thought of
+our canons and authorities.  Well, a public no less large keeps and
+transmits from generation to generation the traditions and practices of
+the occult; but academic science cares as little for its beliefs and
+opinions as you, gentle reader, care for those of the readers of the
+Waverley and the Fireside Companion.  To no one type of mind is it
+given to discern the totality of truth.  Something escapes the best of
+us,&mdash;not accidentally, but systematically, and because we have a twist.
+The scientific-academic mind and the feminine-mystical mind shy from
+each other's facts, just as they fly from each other's temper and
+spirit.  Facts are there only for those who have a mental affinity with
+them.  When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the
+academic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to
+interpret and discuss them,&mdash;for surely to pass from mystical to
+scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity; but on
+the other hand if there is
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P302"></A>302}</SPAN>
+anything which human history
+demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary
+academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present
+themselves as wild facts, with no stall or pigeon-hole, or as facts
+which threaten to break up the accepted system.  In psychology,
+physiology, and medicine, wherever a debate between the mystics and the
+scientifics has been once for all decided, it is the mystics who have
+usually proved to be right about the <I>facts</I>, while the scientifics had
+the better of it in respect to the theories.  The most recent and
+flagrant example of this is 'animal magnetism,' whose facts were
+stoutly dismissed as a pack of lies by academic medical science the
+world over, until the non-mystical theory of 'hypnotic suggestion' was
+found for them,&mdash;when they were admitted to be so excessively and
+dangerously common that special penal laws, forsooth, must be passed to
+keep all persons unequipped with medical diplomas from taking part in
+their production.  Just so stigmatizations, invulnerabilities,
+instantaneous cures, inspired discourses, and demoniacal possessions,
+the records of which were shelved in our libraries but yesterday in the
+alcove headed 'superstitions,' now, under the brand-new title of 'cases
+of hystero-epilepsy,' are republished, reobserved, and reported with an
+even too credulous avidity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Repugnant as the mystical style of philosophizing maybe (especially
+when self-complacent), there is no sort of doubt that it goes with a
+gift for meeting with certain kinds of phenomenal experience.  The
+writer of these pages has been forced in the past few years to this
+admission; and he now believes that he who will pay attention to facts
+of the sort dear to mystics,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P303"></A>303}</SPAN>
+while reflecting upon them in
+academic-scientific ways, will be in the best possible position to help
+philosophy.  It is a circumstance of good augury that certain
+scientifically trained minds in all countries seem drifting to the same
+conclusion.  The Society for Psychical Research has been one means of
+bringing science and the occult together in England and America; and
+believing that this Society fulfils a function which, though limited,
+is destined to be not unimportant in the organization of human
+knowledge, I am glad to give a brief account of it to the uninstructed
+reader.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+According to the newspaper and drawing-room myth, soft-headedness and
+idiotic credulity are the bond of sympathy in this Society, and general
+wonder-sickness its dynamic principle.  A glance at the membership
+fails, however, to corroborate this view.  The president is Prof. Henry
+Sidgwick,[<A NAME="ch10fn2text"></A><A HREF="#ch10fn2">2</A>] known by his other deeds as the most incorrigibly and
+exasperatingly critical and sceptical mind in England.  The hard-headed
+Arthur Balfour is one vice-president, and the hard-headed Prof. J. P.
+Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is another.  Such
+men as Professor Lodge, the eminent English physicist, and Professor
+Richet, the eminent French physiologist, are among the most active
+contributors to the Society's Proceedings; and through the catalogue of
+membership are sprinkled names honored throughout the world for their
+scientific capacity.  In fact, were I asked to point to a scientific
+journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources
+of error might be seen in their full bloom,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P304"></A>304}</SPAN>
+I think I should have
+to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
+The common run of papers, say on physiological subjects, which one
+finds in other professional organs, are apt to show a far lower level
+of critical consciousness.  Indeed, the rigorous canons of evidence
+applied a few years ago to testimony in the case of certain 'mediums'
+led to the secession from the Society of a number of spiritualists.
+Messrs. Stainton Moses and A. R. Wallace, among others, thought that no
+experiences based on mere eyesight could ever have a chance to be
+admitted as true, if such an impossibly exacting standard of proof were
+insisted on in every case.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The S. P. R., as I shall call it for convenience, was founded in 1882
+by a number of gentlemen, foremost among whom seem to have been
+Professors Sidgwick, W. F. Barrett, and Balfour Stewart, and Messrs. R.
+H. Hutton, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers.
+Their purpose was twofold,&mdash;first, to carry on systematic
+experimentation with hypnotic subjects, mediums, clairvoyants, and
+others; and, secondly, to collect evidence concerning apparitions,
+haunted houses, and similar phenomena which are incidentally reported,
+but which, from their fugitive character, admit of no deliberate
+control.  Professor Sidgwick, in his introductory address, insisted
+that the divided state of public opinion on all these matters was a
+scandal to science,&mdash;absolute disdain on <I>à priori</I> grounds
+characterizing what may be called professional opinion, while
+indiscriminate credulity was too often found among those who pretended
+to have a first-hand acquaintance with the facts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As a sort of weather bureau for accumulating
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P305"></A>305}</SPAN>
+reports of such
+meteoric phenomena as apparitions, the S. P. R. has done an immense
+amount of work.  As an experimenting body, it cannot be said to have
+completely fulfilled the hopes of its founders.  The reasons for this
+lie in two circumstances: first, the clairvoyant and other subjects who
+will allow themselves to be experimented upon are few and far between;
+and, secondly, work with them takes an immense amount of time, and has
+had to be carried on at odd intervals by members engaged in other
+pursuits.  The Society has not yet been rich enough to control the
+undivided services of skilled experimenters in this difficult field.
+The loss of the lamented Edmund Gurney, who more than any one else had
+leisure to devote, has been so far irreparable.  But were there no
+experimental work at all, and were the S. P. R. nothing but a
+weather-bureau for catching sporadic apparitions, etc., in their
+freshness, I am disposed to think its function indispensable in the
+scientific organism.  If any one of my readers, spurred by the thought
+that so much smoke must needs betoken fire, has ever looked into the
+existing literature of the supernatural for proof, he will know what I
+mean.  This literature is enormous, but it is practically worthless for
+evidential purposes.  Facts enough are cited, indeed; but the records
+of them are so fallible and imperfect that at most they lead to the
+opinion that it may be well to keep a window open upon that quarter in
+one's mind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the S. P. R.'s Proceedings, on the contrary, a different law
+prevails.  Quality, and not mere quantity, is what has been mainly kept
+in mind.  The witnesses, where possible, have in every reported case
+been cross-examined personally, the collateral facts
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P306"></A>306}</SPAN>
+have been
+looked up, and the story appears with its precise coefficient of
+evidential worth stamped on it, so that all may know just what its
+weight as proof may be.  Outside of these Proceedings, I know of no
+systematic attempt to <I>weigh</I> the evidence for the supernatural.  This
+makes the value of the volumes already published unique; and I firmly
+believe that as the years go on and the ground covered grows still
+wider, the Proceedings will more and more tend to supersede all other
+sources of information concerning phenomena traditionally deemed
+occult.  Collections of this sort are usually best appreciated by the
+rising generation.  The young anthropologists and psychologists who
+will soon have full occupancy of the stage will feel how great a
+scientific scandal it has been to leave a great mass of human
+experience to take its chances between vague tradition and credulity on
+the one hand and dogmatic denial at long range on the other, with no
+body of persons extant who are willing and competent to study the
+matter with both patience and rigor.  If the Society lives long enough
+for the public to become familiar with its presence, so that any
+apparition, or house or person infested with unaccountable noises or
+disturbances of material objects, will as a matter of course be
+reported to its officers, we shall doubtless end by having a mass of
+facts concrete enough to theorize upon.  Its sustainers, therefore,
+should accustom themselves to the idea that its first duty is simply to
+exist from year to year and perform this recording function well,
+though no conclusive results of any sort emerge at first.  All our
+learned societies have begun in some such modest way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But one cannot by mere outward organization make much progress in
+matters scientific.  Societies can
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P307"></A>307}</SPAN>
+back men of genius, but can
+never take their place.  The contrast between the parent Society and
+the American Branch illustrates this.  In England, a little group of
+men with enthusiasm and genius for the work supplied the nucleus; in
+this country, Mr. Hodgson had to be imported from Europe before any
+tangible progress was made.  What perhaps more than anything else has
+held the Society together in England is Professor Sidgwick's
+extraordinary gift of inspiring confidence in diverse sorts of people.
+Such tenacity of interest in the result and such absolute impartiality
+in discussing the evidence are not once in a century found in an
+individual.  His obstinate belief that there is something yet to be
+brought to light communicates patience to the discouraged; his
+constitutional inability to draw any precipitate conclusion reassures
+those who are afraid of being dupes.  Mrs. Sidgwick&mdash;a sister, by the
+way, of the great Arthur Balfour&mdash;is a worthy ally of her husband in
+this matter, showing a similarly rare power of holding her judgment in
+suspense, and a keenness of observation and capacity for experimenting
+with human subjects which are rare in either sex.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The <I>worker</I> of the Society, as originally constituted, was Edmund
+Gurney.  Gurney was a man of the rarest sympathies and gifts.
+Although, like Carlyle, he used to groan under the burden of his
+labors, he yet exhibited a colossal power of dispatching business and
+getting through drudgery of the most repulsive kind.  His two thick
+volumes on 'Phantasms of the Living,' collected and published in three
+years, are a proof of this.  Besides this, he had exquisite artistic
+instincts, and his massive volume on 'The Power of Sound' was, when it
+appeared, the most important
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P308"></A>308}</SPAN>
+work on aesthetics in the English
+language.  He had also the tenderest heart and a mind of rare
+metaphysical power, as his volumes of essays, 'Tertium Quid,' will
+prove to any reader.  Mr. Frederic Myers, already well known as one of
+the most brilliant of English essayists, is the <I>ingenium praefervidum</I>
+of the S. P. R.  Of the value of Mr. Myers's theoretic writings I will
+say a word later.  Dr. Hodgson, the American secretary, is
+distinguished by a balance of mind almost as rare in its way as
+Sidgwick's.  He is persuaded of the reality of many of the phenomena
+called spiritualistic, but he also has uncommon keenness in detecting
+error; and it is impossible to say in advance whether it will give him
+more satisfaction to confirm or to smash a given case offered to his
+examination.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It is now time to cast a brief look upon the actual contents of these
+Proceedings.  The first two years were largely taken up with
+experiments in thought-transference.  The earliest lot of these were
+made with the daughters of a clergyman named Creery, and convinced
+Messrs. Balfour Stewart, Barrett, Myers, and Gurney that the girls had
+an inexplicable power of guessing names and objects thought of by other
+persons.  Two years later, Mrs. Sidgwick and Mr. Gurney, recommencing
+experiments with the same girls, detected them signalling to each
+other.  It is true that for the most part the conditions of the earlier
+series had excluded signalling, and it is also possible that the
+cheating may have grafted itself on what was originally a genuine
+phenomenon.  Yet Gurney was wise in abandoning the entire series to the
+scepticism of the reader.  Many critics of the S. P. R. seem out of all
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P309"></A>309}</SPAN>
+its labors to have heard only of this case.  But there are
+experiments recorded with upwards of thirty other subjects.  Three were
+experimented upon at great length during the first two years: one was
+Mr. G. A. Smith; the other two were young ladies in Liverpool in the
+employment of Mr. Malcolm Guthrie.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is the opinion of all who took part in these latter experiments that
+sources of conscious and unconscious deception were sufficiently
+excluded, and that the large percentage of correct reproductions by the
+subjects of words, diagrams, and sensations occupying other persons'
+consciousness were entirely inexplicable as results of chance.  The
+witnesses of these performances were in fact all so satisfied of the
+genuineness of the phenomena, that 'telepathy' has figured freely in
+the papers of the Proceedings and in Gurney's book on Phantasms as a
+<I>vera causa</I> on which additional hypotheses might be built.  No mere
+reader can be blamed, however, if he demand, for so revolutionary a
+belief, a more overwhelming bulk of testimony than has yet been
+supplied.  Any day, of course, may bring in fresh experiments in
+successful picture-guessing.  But meanwhile, and lacking that, we can
+only point out that the present data are strengthened in the flank, so
+to speak, by all observations that tend to corroborate the possibility
+of other kindred phenomena, such as telepathic impression,
+clairvoyance, or what is called 'test-mediumship.'  The wider genus
+will naturally cover the narrower species with its credit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gurney's papers on hypnotism must be mentioned next.  Some of them are
+less concerned with establishing new facts than with analyzing old
+ones.  But omitting these, we find that in the line of pure
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P310"></A>310}</SPAN>
+observation Gurney claims to have ascertained in more than one subject
+the following phenomenon: The subject's hands are thrust through a
+blanket, which screens the operator from his eyes, and his mind is
+absorbed in conversation with a third person.  The operator meanwhile
+points with his finger to one of the fingers of the subject, which
+finger alone responds to this silent selection by becoming stiff or
+anaesthetic, as the case may be.  The interpretation is difficult, but
+the phenomenon, which I have myself witnessed, seems authentic.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Another observation made by Gurney seems to prove the possibility of
+the subject's mind being directly influenced by the operator's.  The
+hypnotized subject responds, or fails to respond, to questions asked by
+a third party according to the operator's silent permission or refusal.
+Of course, in these experiments all obvious sources of deception were
+excluded.  But Gurney's most important contribution to our knowledge of
+hypnotism was his series of experiments on the automatic writing of
+subjects who had received post-hypnotic suggestions.  For example, a
+subject during trance is told that he will poke the fire in six minutes
+after waking.  On being waked he has no memory of the order, but while
+he is engaged in conversation his hand is placed on a <I>planchette</I>,
+which immediately writes the sentence, "P., you will poke the fire in
+six minutes."  Experiments like this, which were repeated in great
+variety, seem to prove that below the upper consciousness the hypnotic
+consciousness persists, engrossed with the suggestion and able to
+express itself through the involuntarily moving hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Gurney shares, therefore, with Janet and Binet, the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P311"></A>311}</SPAN>
+credit of
+demonstrating the simultaneous existence of two different strata of
+consciousness, ignorant of each other, in the same person.  The
+'extra-consciousness,' as one may call it, can be kept on tap, as it
+were, by the method of automatic writing.  This discovery marks a new
+era in experimental psychology, and it is impossible to overrate its
+importance.  But Gurney's greatest piece of work is his laborious
+'Phantasms of the Living.'  As an example of the drudgery stowed away
+in the volumes, it may suffice to say that in looking up the proofs for
+the alleged physical phenomena of witchcraft, Gurney reports a careful
+search through two hundred and sixty books on the subject, with the
+result of finding no first-hand evidence recorded in the trials except
+the confessions of the victims themselves; and these, of course, are
+presumptively due to either torture or hallucination.  This statement,
+made in an unobtrusive note, is only one instance of the care displayed
+throughout the volumes.  In the course of these, Gurney discusses about
+seven hundred cases of apparitions which he collected.  A large number
+of these were 'veridical,' in the sense of coinciding with some
+calamity happening to the person who appeared.  Gurney's explanation is
+that the mind of the person undergoing the calamity was at that moment
+able to impress the mind of the percipient with an hallucination.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Apparitions, on this 'telepathic' theory, may be called 'objective'
+facts, although they are not 'material' facts.  In order to test the
+likelihood of such veridical hallucinations being due to mere chance,
+Gurney instituted the 'census of hallucinations,' which has been
+continued with the result of obtaining answers from over twenty-five
+thousand persons, asked
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P312"></A>312}</SPAN>
+at random in different countries whether,
+when in good health and awake, they had ever heard a voice, seen a
+form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for.
+The result seems to be, roughly speaking, that in England about one
+adult in ten has had such an experience at least once in his life, and
+that of the experiences themselves a large number coincide with some
+distant event.  The question is, Is the frequency of these latter cases
+too great to be deemed fortuitous, and must we suppose an occult
+connection between the two events?  Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick have worked
+out this problem on the basis of the English returns, seventeen
+thousand in number, with a care and thoroughness that leave nothing to
+be desired.  Their conclusion is that the cases where the apparition of
+a person is seen on the day of his death are four hundred and forty
+times too numerous to be ascribed to chance.  The reasoning employed to
+calculate this number is simple enough.  If there be only a fortuitous
+connection between the death of an individual and the occurrence of his
+apparition to some one at a distance, the death is no more likely to
+fall on the same day as the apparition than it is to occur on the same
+day with any other event in nature.  But the chance-probability that
+any individual's death will fall on any given day marked in advance by
+some other event is just equal to the chance-probability that the
+individual will die at all on any specified day; and the national
+death-rate gives that probability as one in nineteen thousand.  If,
+then, when the death of a person coincides with an apparition of the
+same person, the coincidence be merely fortuitous, it ought not to
+occur oftener than once in nineteen thousand cases.  As a matter of
+fact,
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P313"></A>313}</SPAN>
+however, it does occur (according to the census) once in
+forty-three cases, a number (as aforesaid) four hundred and forty times
+too great.  The American census, of some seven thousand answers, gives
+a remarkably similar result.  Against this conclusion the only rational
+answer that I can see is that the data are still too few; that the net
+was not cast wide enough; and that we need, to get fair averages, far
+more than twenty-four thousand answers to the census question.  This
+may, of course, be true, though it seems exceedingly unlikely; and in
+our own twenty-four thousand answers veridical cases may possibly have
+heaped themselves unduly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The next topic worth mentioning in the Proceedings is the discussion of
+the physical phenomena of mediumship (slate-writing, furniture-moving,
+and so forth) by Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr. Hodgson, and 'Mr. Davey.'  This, so
+far as it goes, is destructive of the claims of all the mediums
+examined.  'Mr. Davey' himself produced fraudulent slate-writing of the
+highest order, while Mr. Hodgson, a 'sitter' in his confidence,
+reviewed the written reports of the series of his other sitters,&mdash;all
+of them intelligent persons,&mdash;and showed that in every case they failed
+to see the essential features of what was done before their eyes.  This
+Davey-Hodgson contribution is probably the most damaging document
+concerning eye-witnesses' evidence that has ever been produced.
+Another substantial bit of work based on personal observation is Mr.
+Hodgson's report on Madame Blavatsky's claims to physical mediumship.
+This is adverse to the lady's pretensions; and although some of Madame
+Blavatsky's friends make light of it, it is a stroke from which her
+reputation will not recover.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P314"></A>314}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+Physical mediumship in all its phases has fared hard in the
+Proceedings.  The latest case reported on is that of the famous Eusapia
+Paladino, who being detected in fraud at Cambridge, after a brilliant
+career of success on the continent, has, according to the draconian
+rules of method which govern the Society, been ruled out from a further
+hearing.  The case of Stainton Moses, on the other hand, concerning
+which Mr. Myers has brought out a mass of unpublished testimony, seems
+to escape from the universal condemnation, and appears to force upon us
+what Mr. Andrew Lang calls the choice between a moral and a physical
+miracle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the case of Mrs. Piper, not a physical but a trance medium, we seem
+to have no choice offered at all.  Mr. Hodgson and others have made
+prolonged study of this lady's trances, and are all convinced that
+super-normal powers of cognition are displayed therein.  These are
+<I>primâ facie</I> due to 'spirit-control.'  But the conditions are so
+complex that a dogmatic decision either for or against the
+spirit-hypothesis must as yet be postponed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One of the most important experimental contributions to the Proceedings
+is the article of Miss X. on 'Crystal Vision.'  Many persons who look
+fixedly into a crystal or other vaguely luminous surface fall into a
+kind of daze, and see visions.  Miss X. has this susceptibility in a
+remarkable degree, and is, moreover, an unusually intelligent critic.
+She reports many visions which can only be described as apparently
+clairvoyant, and others which beautifully fill a vacant niche incur
+knowledge of subconscious mental operations.  For example, looking into
+the crystal before breakfast one morning she reads in printed
+characters of the
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P315"></A>315}</SPAN>
+death of a lady of her acquaintance, the date
+and other circumstances all duly appearing in type.  Startled by this,
+she looks at the 'Times' of the previous day for verification, and
+there among the deaths are the identical words which she has seen.  On
+the same page of the Times are other items which she remembers reading
+the day before; and the only explanation seems to be that her eyes then
+inattentively observed, so to speak, the death-item, which forthwith
+fell into a special corner of her memory, and came out as a visual
+hallucination when the peculiar modification of consciousness induced
+by the crystal-gazing set in.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Passing from papers based on observation to papers based on narrative,
+we have a number of ghost stories, etc., sifted by Mrs. Sidgwick and
+discussed by Messrs. Myers and Podmore.  They form the best ghost
+literature I know of from the point of view of emotional interest.  As
+to the conclusions drawn, Mrs. Sidgwick is rigorously non-committal,
+while Mr. Myers and Mr. Podmore show themselves respectively hospitable
+and inhospitable to the notion that such stories have a basis of
+objectivity dependent on the continued existence of the dead.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I must close my gossip about the Proceedings by naming what, after all,
+seems to me the most important part of its contents.  This is the long
+series of articles by Mr. Myers on what he now calls the 'subliminal
+self,' or what one might designate as ultra-marginal consciousness.
+The result of Myers's learned and ingenious studies in hypnotism,
+hallucinations, automatic writing, mediumship, and the whole series of
+allied phenomena is a conviction which he expresses in the following
+terms:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P316"></A>316}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+"Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more
+extensive than he knows,&mdash;an individuality which can never express
+itself completely through any corporeal manifestation.  The self
+manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of
+the self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organic
+expression in abeyance or reserve."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The ordinary consciousness Mr. Myers likens to the visible part of the
+solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged
+by the inclusion of the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays.  In the
+psychic spectrum the 'ultra' parts may embrace a far wider range, both
+of physiological and of psychical activity, than is open to our
+ordinary consciousness and memory.  At the lower end we have the
+<I>physiological</I> extension, mind-cures, 'stigmatization' of ecstatics,
+etc.; in the upper, the hyper-normal cognitions of the medium-trance.
+Whatever the judgment of the future may be on Mr. Myers's speculations,
+the credit will always remain to them of being the first attempt in any
+language to consider the phenomena of hallucination, hypnotism,
+automatism, double personality, and mediumship as connected parts of
+one whole subject.  All constructions in this field must be
+provisional, and it is as something provisional that Mr. Myers offers
+us his formulations.  But, thanks to him, we begin to see for the first
+time what a vast interlocked and graded system these phenomena, from
+the rudest motor-automatisms to the most startling sensory-apparition,
+form.  Quite apart from Mr. Myers's conclusions, his methodical
+treatment of them by classes and series is the first great step toward
+overcoming the distaste of orthodox science to look at them at all.
+</P>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P317"></A>317}</SPAN>
+
+<P>
+One's reaction on hearsay testimony is always determined by one's own
+experience.  Most men who have once convinced themselves, by what seems
+to them a careful examination, that any one species of the supernatural
+exists, begin to relax their vigilance as to evidence, and throw the
+doors of their minds more or less wide open to the supernatural along
+its whole extent.  To a mind that has thus made its <I>salto mortale</I>,
+the minute work over insignificant cases and quiddling discussion of
+'evidential values,' of which the Society's reports are full, seems
+insufferably tedious.  And it is so; few species of literature are more
+truly dull than reports of phantasms.  Taken simply by themselves, as
+separate facts to stare at, they appear so devoid of meaning and sweep,
+that, even were they certainly true, one would be tempted to leave them
+out of one's universe for being so idiotic.  Every other sort of fact
+has some context and continuity with the rest of nature.  These alone
+are contextless and discontinuous.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hence I think that the sort of loathing&mdash;no milder word will do&mdash;which
+the very words 'psychical research' and 'psychical researcher' awaken
+in so many honest scientific breasts is not only natural, but in a
+sense praiseworthy.  A man who is unable himself to conceive of any
+<I>orbit</I> for these mental meteors can only suppose that Messrs. Gurney,
+Myers, &amp; Co.'s mood in dealing with them must be that of silly
+marvelling at so many detached prodigies.  And such prodigies!  So
+science simply falls back on her general <I>non-possumus</I>; and most of
+the would-be critics of the Proceedings have been contented to oppose
+to the phenomena recorded the simple presumption that in some way or
+other the reports <I>must</I> be
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P318"></A>318}</SPAN>
+fallacious,&mdash;for so far as the order
+of nature has been subjected to really scientific scrutiny, it always
+has been proved to run the other way.  But the oftener one is forced to
+reject an alleged sort of fact by the use of this mere presumption, the
+weaker does the presumption itself get to be; and one might in course
+of time use up one's presumptive privileges in this way, even though
+one started (as our anti-telepathists do) with as good a case as the
+great induction of psychology that all our knowledge comes by the use
+of our eyes and ears and other senses.  And we must remember also that
+this undermining of the strength of a presumption by reiterated report
+of facts to the contrary does not logically require that the facts in
+question should all be well proved.  A lot of rumors in the air against
+a business man's credit, though they might all be vague, and no one of
+them amount to proof that he is unsound, would certainly weaken the
+<I>presumption</I> of his soundness.  And all the more would they have this
+effect if they formed what Gurney called a fagot and not a chain,&mdash;that
+is, if they were independent of one another, and came from different
+quarters.  Now, the evidence for telepathy, weak and strong, taken just
+as it comes, forms a fagot and not a chain.  No one item cites the
+content of another item as part of its own proof.  But taken together
+the items have a certain general consistency; there is a method in
+their madness, so to speak.  So each of them adds presumptive value to
+the lot; and cumulatively, as no candid mind can fail to see, they
+subtract presumptive force from the orthodox belief that there can be
+nothing in any one's intellect that has not come in through ordinary
+experiences of sense.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But it is a miserable thing for a question of truth
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P319"></A>319}</SPAN>
+to be
+confined to mere presumption and counter-presumption, with no decisive
+thunderbolt of fact to clear the baffling darkness.  And, sooth to say,
+in talking so much of the merely presumption-weakening value of our
+records, I have myself been wilfully taking the point of view of the
+so-called 'rigorously scientific' disbeliever, and making an <I>ad
+hominem</I> plea.  My own point of view is different.  For me the
+thunderbolt <I>has</I> fallen, and the orthodox belief has not merely had
+its presumption weakened, but the truth itself of the belief is
+decisively overthrown.  If I may employ the language of the
+professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by
+a particular instance.  If you wish to upset the law that all crows are
+black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you
+prove one single crow to be white.  My own white crow is Mrs. Piper.
+In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that
+knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use
+of her eyes and ears and wits.  What the source of this knowledge may
+be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to
+make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no
+escape.  So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I
+cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the 'rigorously
+scientific' mind, with its presumption as to what the true order of
+nature ought to be.  I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in
+spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight.  The
+rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark.
+Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method.  To
+suppose that it means a certain set of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P320"></A>320}</SPAN>
+results that one should
+pin one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius,
+and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We all, scientists and non-scientists, live on some inclined plane of
+credulity.  The plane tips one way in one man, another way in another;
+and may he whose plane tips in no way be the first to cast a stone!  As
+a matter of fact, the trances I speak of have broken down for my own
+mind the limits of the admitted order of nature.  Science, so far as
+science denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dust
+for me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present
+is that science be built up again in a form in which such things may
+have a positive place.  Science, like life, feeds on its own decay.
+New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and
+new together into a reconciling law.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And here is the real instructiveness of Messrs. Myers and Gurney's
+work.  They are trying with the utmost conscientiousness to find a
+reconciling conception which shall subject the old laws of nature to
+the smallest possible strain.  Mr. Myers uses that method of gradual
+approach which has performed such wonders in Darwin's hands.  When
+Darwin met a fact which seemed a poser to his theory, his regular
+custom, as I have heard an able colleague say, was to fill in all round
+it with smaller facts, as a wagoner might heap dirt round a big rock in
+the road, and thus get his team over without upsetting.  So Mr. Myers,
+starting from the most ordinary facts of inattentive consciousness,
+follows this clue through a long series which terminates in ghosts, and
+seeks to show that these are but extreme manifestations of a
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P321"></A>321}</SPAN>
+common truth,&mdash;the truth that the invisible segments of our minds are
+susceptible, under rarely realized conditions, of acting and being
+acted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives.  This
+may not be ultimately true (for the theosophists, with their astral
+bodies and the like, may, for aught I now know, prove to be on the
+correcter trail), but no one can deny that it is in good scientific
+form,&mdash;for science always takes a known kind of phenomenon, and tries
+to extend its range.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have myself, as American agent for the census, collected hundreds of
+cases of hallucination in healthy persons.  The result is to make me
+feel that we all have potentially a 'subliminal' self, which may make
+at any time irruption into our ordinary lives.  At its lowest, it is
+only the depository of our forgotten memories; at its highest, we do
+not know what it is at all.  Take, for instance, a series of cases.
+During sleep, many persons have something in them which measures the
+flight of time better than the waking self does.  It wakes them at a
+preappointed hour; it acquaints them with the moment when they first
+awake.  It may produce an hallucination,&mdash;as in a lady who informs me
+that at the instant of waking she has a vision of her watch-face with
+the hands pointing (as she has often verified) to the exact time.  It
+may be the feeling that some physiological period has elapsed; but,
+whatever it is, it is subconscious.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A subconscious something may also preserve experiences to which we do
+not openly attend.  A lady taking her lunch in town finds herself
+without her purse.  Instantly a sense comes over her of rising from the
+breakfast-table and hearing her purse drop upon the floor.  On reaching
+home she finds
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P322"></A>322}</SPAN>
+nothing under the table, but summons the servant
+to say where she has put the purse.  The servant produces it, saying;
+"How did you know where it was?  You rose and left the room as if you
+did n't know you 'd dropped it."  The same subconscious something may
+recollect what we have forgotten.  A lady accustomed to taking
+salicylate of soda for muscular rheumatism wakes one early winter
+morning with an aching neck.  In the twilight she takes what she
+supposes to be her customary powder from a drawer, dissolves it in a
+glass of water, and is about to drink it down, when she feels a sharp
+slap on her shoulder and hears a voice in her ear saying, "Taste it!"
+On examination, she finds she has got a morphine powder by mistake.
+The natural interpretation is that a sleeping memory of the morphine
+powders awoke in this quasi-explosive way.  A like explanation offers
+itself as most plausible for the following case: A lady, with little
+time to catch the train, and the expressman about to call, is excitedly
+looking for the lost key of a packed trunk.  Hurrying upstairs with a
+bunch of keys, proved useless, in her hand, she hears an 'objective'
+voice distinctly say, "Try the key of the cake-box."  Being tried, it
+fits.  This also may well have been the effect of forgotten experience.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, the effect is doubtless due to the same hallucinatory mechanism;
+but the source is less easily assigned as we ascend the scale of cases.
+A lady, for instance, goes after breakfast to see about one of her
+servants who has become ill over night.  She is startled at distinctly
+reading over the bedroom door in gilt letters the word 'small-pox.'
+The doctor is sent for, and ere long pronounces small-pox to be the
+disease, although the lady says, "The thought of
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P323"></A>323}</SPAN>
+the girl's
+having small-pox never entered my mind till I saw the apparent
+inscription."  Then come other cases of warning; for example, that of a
+youth sitting in a wagon under a shed, who suddenly hears his dead
+mother's voice say, "Stephen, get away from here quick!" and jumps out
+just in time to see the shed-roof fall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After this come the experiences of persons appearing to distant friends
+at or near the hour of death.  Then, too, we have the trance-visions
+and utterances, which may appear astonishingly profuse and continuous,
+and maintain a fairly high intellectual level.  For all these higher
+phenomena, it seems to me that while the proximate mechanism is that of
+'hallucination,' it is straining an hypothesis unduly to name any
+ordinary subconscious mental operation&mdash;such as expectation,
+recollection, or inference from inattentive perception&mdash;as the ultimate
+cause that starts it up.  It is far better tactics, if you wish to get
+rid of mystery, to brand the narratives themselves as unworthy of
+trust.  The trustworthiness of most of them is to my own mind far from
+proved.  And yet in the light of the medium-trance, which is proved, it
+seems as if they might well all be members of a natural kind of fact of
+which we do not yet know the full extent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States to-day live
+as steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferent
+to modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the twelfth century.
+They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously
+indifferent to their experiences.  Although in its essence science only
+stands for a method and for no fixed belief, yet as habitually taken,
+both by its votaries and outsiders, it is
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P324"></A>324}</SPAN>
+identified with a
+certain fixed belief,&mdash;the belief that the hidden order of nature is
+mechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories are
+irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such things as human
+life.  Now, this mechanical rationalism, as one may call it, makes, if
+it becomes one's only way of thinking, a violent breach with the ways
+of thinking that have played the greatest part in human history.
+Religious thinking, ethical thinking, poetical thinking, teleological,
+emotional, sentimental thinking, what one might call the personal view
+of life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and the
+romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view,
+have been, and even still are, outside of well-drilled scientific
+circles, the dominant forms of thought.  But for mechanical
+rationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion.  The chronic
+belief of mankind, that events may happen for the sake of their
+personal significance, is an abomination; and the notions of our
+grandfathers about oracles and omens, divinations and apparitions,
+miraculous changes of heart and wonders worked by inspired persons,
+answers to prayer and providential leadings, are a fabric absolutely
+baseless, a mass of sheer <I>un</I>truth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which the
+romantic and personal view of nature may lead, if wholly unchecked by
+impersonal rationalism, are direful.  Central African Mumbo-jumboism is
+one of unchecked romanticism's fruits.  One ought accordingly to
+sympathize with that abhorrence of romanticism as a sufficient
+world-theory; one ought to understand that lively intolerance of the
+least grain of romanticism in the views of life of other people, which
+are such characteristic marks of those who
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P325"></A>325}</SPAN>
+follow the scientific
+professions to-day.  Our debt to science is literally boundless, and
+our gratitude for what is positive in her teachings must be
+correspondingly immense.  But the S. P. R.'s Proceedings have, it seems
+to me, conclusively proved one thing to the candid reader; and that is
+that the verdict of pure insanity, of gratuitous preference for error,
+of superstition without an excuse, which the scientists of our day are
+led by their intellectual training to pronounce upon the entire thought
+of the past, is a most shallow verdict.  The personal and romantic view
+of life has other roots besides wanton exuberance of imagination and
+perversity of heart.  It is perennially fed by <I>facts of experience</I>,
+whatever the ulterior interpretation of those facts may prove to be;
+and at no time in human history would it have been less easy than
+now&mdash;at most times it would have been much more easy&mdash;for advocates
+with a little industry to collect in its favor an array of contemporary
+documents as good as those which our publications present.  These
+documents all relate to real experiences of persons.  These experiences
+have three characters in common: They are capricious, discontinuous,
+and not easily controlled; they require peculiar persons for their
+production; their significance seems to be wholly for personal life.
+Those who preferentially attend to them, and still more those who are
+individually subject to them, not only easily may find, but are
+logically bound to find, in them valid arguments for their romantic and
+personal conception of the world's course.  Through my slight
+participation in the investigations of the S. P. R. I have become
+acquainted with numbers of persons of this sort, for whom the very word
+'science' has become a name of reproach, for reasons that I now both
+understand
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P326"></A>326}</SPAN>
+and respect.  It is the intolerance of science for
+such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of
+their existence or of their significance (except as proofs of man's
+absolute innate folly), that has set science so apart from the common
+sympathies of the race.  I confess that it is on this, its humanizing
+mission, that the Society's best claim to the gratitude of our
+generation seems to me to depend.  It has restored continuity to
+history.  It has shown some reasonable basis for the most superstitious
+aberrations of the foretime.  It has bridged the chasm, healed the
+hideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot into
+the human world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I will even go one step farther.  When from our present advanced
+standpoint we look back upon the past stages of human thought, whether
+it be scientific thought or theological thought, we are amazed that a
+universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication
+should ever have seemed to any one so little and plain a thing.
+Whether it be Descartes's world or Newton's, whether it be that of the
+materialists of the last century or that of the Bridgewater treatises
+of our own, it always looks the same to us,&mdash;incredibly perspectiveless
+and short.  Even Lyell's, Faraday's, Mill's, and Darwin's consciousness
+of their respective subjects are already beginning to put on an
+infantile and innocent look.  Is it then likely that the science of our
+own day will escape the common doom; that the minds of its votaries
+will never look old-fashioned to the grandchildren of the latter?  It
+would be folly to suppose so.  Yet if we are to judge by the analogy of
+the past, when our science once becomes old-fashioned, it will be more
+for its omissions of fact, for its
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P327"></A>327}</SPAN>
+ignorance of whole ranges and
+orders of complexity in the phenomena to be explained, than for any
+fatal lack in its spirit and principles.  The spirit and principles of
+science are mere affairs of method; there is nothing in them that need
+hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal
+forces are the starting-point of new effects.  The only form of thing
+that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely
+have, is our own personal life.  The only complete category of our
+thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category of
+personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements of
+that.  And this systematic denial on science's part of personality as a
+condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and
+innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may,
+conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very
+defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own
+boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make
+it look perspectiveless and short.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="ch10fn1"></A>
+<A NAME="ch10fn2"></A>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch10fn1text">1</A>] This Essay is formed of portions of an article in Scribner's
+Magazine for March, 1890, of an article in the Forum for July, 1892,
+and of the President's Address before the Society for Psychical
+Research, published in the Proceedings for June, 1896, and in Science.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+[<A HREF="#ch10fn2text">2</A>] Written in 1891.  Since then, Mr. Balfour, the present writer, and
+Professor William Crookes have held the presidential office.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap11"></A>
+
+<SPAN CLASS="pagenum">{<A NAME="P329"></A>329}</SPAN>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+INDEX.
+</H3>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+ABSOLUTISM, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P30">30</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Abstract conceptions, <A HREF="#P219">219</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Action, as a measure of belief, <A HREF="#P3">3</A>, <A HREF="#P29">29-30</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Actual world narrower than ideal, <A HREF="#P202">202</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Agnosticism, <A HREF="#P54">54</A>, <A HREF="#P81">81</A>, <A HREF="#P126">126</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Allen, G., <A HREF="#P231">231</A>, <A HREF="#P235">235</A>, <A HREF="#P256">256</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Alps, leap in the, <A HREF="#P59">59</A>, <A HREF="#P96">96</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Alternatives, <A HREF="#P156">156</A>, <A HREF="#P161">161</A>, <A HREF="#P202">202</A>, <A HREF="#P269">269</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ambiguity of choice, <A HREF="#P156">156</A>; of being, <A HREF="#P292">292</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Anaesthetic revelation, <A HREF="#P294">294</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+A priori truths, <A HREF="#P268">268</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Apparitions, <A HREF="#P311">311</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Aristotle, <A HREF="#P249">249</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Associationism, in Ethics, <A HREF="#P186">186</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Atheist and acorn, <A HREF="#P160">160</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Authorities in Ethics, <A HREF="#P204">204</A>; <I>versus</I> champions, <A HREF="#P207">207</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Axioms, <A HREF="#P268">268</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+BAGEHOT, <A HREF="#P232">232</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bain, <A HREF="#P71">71</A>, <A HREF="#P91">91</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Balfour, <A HREF="#P9">9</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Being, its character, <A HREF="#P142">142</A>; in Hegel, <A HREF="#P281">281</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Belief, <A HREF="#P59">59</A>. See 'Faith.'
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bellamy, <A HREF="#P188">188</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bismarck, <A HREF="#P228">228</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Block-universe, <A HREF="#P292">292</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Blood, B. P., vi, <A HREF="#P294">294</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Brockton murderer, <A HREF="#P160">160</A>, <A HREF="#P177">177</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Bunsen, <A HREF="#P203">203</A>, <A HREF="#P274">274</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+CALVINISM, <A HREF="#P45">45</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Carlyle, <A HREF="#P42">42</A>, <A HREF="#P44">44</A>, <A HREF="#P45">45</A>, <A HREF="#P73">73</A>, <A HREF="#P87">87</A>, <A HREF="#P173">173</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+'Casuistic question' in Ethics, <A HREF="#P198">198</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Causality, <A HREF="#P147">147</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Causation, Hume's doctrine of, <A HREF="#P278">278</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Census of hallucinations, <A HREF="#P312">312</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Certitude, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>, <A HREF="#P30">30</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Chance, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>, <A HREF="#P153">153-9</A>, <A HREF="#P178">178-180</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Choice, <A HREF="#P156">156</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Christianity, <A HREF="#P5">5</A>, <A HREF="#P14">14</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cicero, <A HREF="#P92">92</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+City of dreadful night, <A HREF="#P35">35</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Clark, X., <A HREF="#P50">50</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Classifications, <A HREF="#P67">67</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Clifford, <A HREF="#P6">6</A>, <A HREF="#P7">7</A>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P14">14</A>, <A HREF="#P19">19</A>, <A HREF="#P21">21</A>, <A HREF="#P92">92</A>, <A HREF="#P230">230</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Clive, <A HREF="#P228">228</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Clough, <A HREF="#P6">6</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Common-sense, <A HREF="#P270">270</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Conceptual order of world, <A HREF="#P118">118</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Conscience, <A HREF="#P186">186-8</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Contradiction, as used by Hegel, <A HREF="#P275">275-277</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Contradictions of philosophers, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Crillon, <A HREF="#P62">62</A>
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Criterion of truth, <A HREF="#P15">15</A>, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>; in Ethics, <A HREF="#P205">205</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Crude order of experience, <A HREF="#P118">118</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Crystal vision, <A HREF="#P314">314</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Cycles in Nature, <A HREF="#P220">220</A>, <A HREF="#P223">223-4</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+DARWIN, <A HREF="#P221">221</A>, <A HREF="#P223">223</A>, <A HREF="#P226">226</A>, <A HREF="#P320">320</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Data, <A HREF="#P271">271</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Davey, <A HREF="#P313">313</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Demands, as creators of value, <A HREF="#P201">201</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+'Determination is negation,' <A HREF="#P286">286-290</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Determinism, <A HREF="#P150">150</A>; the Dilemma of;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P145">145-183</A>; <A HREF="#P163">163</A>, <A HREF="#P166">166</A>; hard and soft, <A HREF="#P149">149</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dogs, <A HREF="#P57">57</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dogmatism, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Doubt, <A HREF="#P54">54</A>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Dupery, <A HREF="#P27">27</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+EASY-GOING mood, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>, <A HREF="#P213">213</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Elephant, <A HREF="#P282">282</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Emerson, <A HREF="#P23">23</A>, <A HREF="#P175">175</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Empiricism, i., <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P14">14</A>, <A HREF="#P17">17</A>, <A HREF="#P278">278</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+England, <A HREF="#P228">228</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Environment, its relation to great men,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P223">223</A>, <A HREF="#P226">226</A>; to great thoughts, <A HREF="#P250">250</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Error, <A HREF="#P163">163</A>; duty of avoiding, <A HREF="#P18">18</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Essence of good and bad, <A HREF="#P200">200-1</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ethical ideals, <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ethical philosophy, <A HREF="#P208">208</A>, <A HREF="#P210">210</A>, <A HREF="#P216">216</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ethical standards, <A HREF="#P205">205</A>; diversity of, <A HREF="#P200">200</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ethics, its three questions, <A HREF="#P185">185</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Evidence, objective, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>, <A HREF="#P15">15</A>, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Evil, <A HREF="#P46">46</A>, <A HREF="#P49">49</A>, <A HREF="#P161">161</A>, <A HREF="#P190">190</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Evolution, social, <A HREF="#P232">232</A>, <A HREF="#P237">237</A>; mental, <A HREF="#P245">245</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Evolutionism, its test of right, <A HREF="#P98">98-100</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Expectancy, <A HREF="#P77">77-80</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Experience, crude, <I>versus</I> rationalized,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P118">118</A>; tests our faiths, <A HREF="#P105">105</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+FACTS, <A HREF="#P271">271</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Faith, that truth exists, <A HREF="#P9">9</A>, <A HREF="#P23">23</A>; in our
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+fellows, <A HREF="#P24">24-5</A>; school boys' definition of, <A HREF="#P29">29</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+a remedy for pessimism, <A HREF="#P60">60</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>; religious, <A HREF="#P56">56</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+defined, <A HREF="#P90">90</A>; defended against 'scientific'
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+objections, viii-xi, <A HREF="#P91">91-4</A>; may
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+create its own verification, <A HREF="#P59">59</A>, <A HREF="#P96">96-103</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Familiarity confers rationality, <A HREF="#P76">76</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fatalism, <A HREF="#P88">88</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fiske, <A HREF="#P255">255</A>, <A HREF="#P260">260</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Fitzgerald, <A HREF="#P160">160</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Freedom, <A HREF="#P103">103</A>, <A HREF="#P271">271</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Free-will, <A HREF="#P103">103</A>, <A HREF="#P145">145</A>, <A HREF="#P157">157</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+GALTON, <A HREF="#P242">242</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Geniuses, <A HREF="#P226">226</A>, <A HREF="#P229">229</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ghosts, <A HREF="#P315">315</A>,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gnosticism, <A HREF="#P138">138-140</A>, <A HREF="#P165">165</A>, <A HREF="#P169">169</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+God, <A HREF="#P61">61</A>, <A HREF="#P68">68</A>; of Nature, <A HREF="#P43">43</A>; the most
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+adequate object for our mind, <A HREF="#P116">116</A>,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P122">122</A>; our relations to him, <A HREF="#P134">134-6</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+his providence, <A HREF="#P182">182</A>; his demands
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+create obligation, <A HREF="#P193">193</A>; his function
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+in Ethics, <A HREF="#P212">212-215</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Goethe, <A HREF="#P111">111</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Good, <A HREF="#P168">168</A>, <A HREF="#P200">200</A>, <A HREF="#P201">201</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Goodness, <A HREF="#P190">190</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Great-man theory of history, <A HREF="#P232">232</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Great men and their environment, <A HREF="#P216">216-254</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Green, <A HREF="#P206">206</A>,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gryzanowski, <A HREF="#P240">240</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Gurney, <A HREF="#P306">306</A>, <A HREF="#P307">307</A>, <A HREF="#P311">311</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Guthrie, <A HREF="#P309">309</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Guyau, <A HREF="#P188">188</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+HALLUCINATIONS, Census of, <A HREF="#P312">312</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Happiness, <A HREF="#P33">33</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Harris, <A HREF="#P282">282</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hegel, <A HREF="#P72">72</A>, <A HREF="#P263">263</A>; his excessive claims,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P272">272</A>; his use of negation, <A HREF="#P273">273</A>, <A HREF="#P290">290</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+of contradiction, <A HREF="#P274">274</A>, <A HREF="#P276">276</A>; on being,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P281">281</A>; on otherness, <A HREF="#P283">283</A>; on infinity,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P284">284</A>; on identity, <A HREF="#P285">285</A>; on determination,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P289">289</A>; his ontological emotion, <A HREF="#P297">297</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hegelisms, on some, <A HREF="#P263">263-298</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Heine, <A HREF="#P203">203</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Helmholtz, <A HREF="#P85">85</A>, <A HREF="#P91">91</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Henry IV., <A HREF="#P62">62</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Herbart, <A HREF="#P280">280</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hero-worship, <A HREF="#P261">261</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hinton, C. H., <A HREF="#P15">15</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hinton, J., <A HREF="#P101">101</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hodgson, R., <A HREF="#P308">308</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hodgson, S, H., <A HREF="#P10">10</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Honor, <A HREF="#P50">50</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hugo, <A HREF="#P213">213</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Human mind, its habit of abstracting, <A HREF="#P219">219</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hume on causation, <A HREF="#P278">278</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Huxley, <A HREF="#P6">6</A>, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P92">92</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hypnotism, <A HREF="#P302">302</A>, <A HREF="#P309">309</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Hypotheses, live or dead, <A HREF="#P2">2</A>; their
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+verification, <A HREF="#P105">105</A>; of genius, <A HREF="#P249">249</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+IDEALS, <A HREF="#P200">200</A>; their conflict, <A HREF="#P202">202</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Idealism, <A HREF="#P89">89</A>, <A HREF="#P291">291</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Identity, <A HREF="#P285">285</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Imperatives, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Importance of individuals, the, <A HREF="#P255">255-262</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+of things, its ground, <A HREF="#P257">257</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Indeterminism, <A HREF="#P150">150</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Individual differences, <A HREF="#P259">259</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Individuals, the importance of, <A HREF="#P255">255-262</A>
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Infinite, <A HREF="#P284">284</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Intuitionism, in Ethics, <A HREF="#P186">186</A>, <A HREF="#P189">189</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+JEVONS, <A HREF="#P249">249</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Judgments of regret, <A HREF="#P159">159</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+KNOWING, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Knowledge, <A HREF="#P85">85</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+LEAP on precipice, <A HREF="#P59">59</A>, <A HREF="#P96">96</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Leibnitz, <A HREF="#P43">43</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Life, is it worth living, <A HREF="#P32">32-62</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+MAGGOTS, <A HREF="#P176">176-7</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mahdi, the, <A HREF="#P2">2</A>, <A HREF="#P6">6</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mallock, <A HREF="#P32">32</A>, <A HREF="#P183">183</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Marcus Aurelius, <A HREF="#P41">41</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Materialism, <A HREF="#P126">126</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+'Maybes,' <A HREF="#P59">59</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Measure of good, <A HREF="#P205">205</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mediumship, physical, <A HREF="#P313">313</A>, <A HREF="#P314">314</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Melancholy, <A HREF="#P34">34</A>, <A HREF="#P39">39</A>, <A HREF="#P42">42</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mental evolution, <A HREF="#P246">246</A>; structure, <A HREF="#P114">114</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mill, <A HREF="#P234">234</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mind, its triadic structure, <A HREF="#P114">114</A>, <A HREF="#P117">117</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+its evolution, <A HREF="#P246">246</A>; its three departments,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P114">114</A>, <A HREF="#P122">122</A>, <A HREF="#P127">127-8</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Monism, <A HREF="#P279">279</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Moods, the strenuous and the easy, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>, <A HREF="#P213">213</A>
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Moralists, objective and subjective, <A HREF="#P103">103-108</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Moral judgments, their origin, <A HREF="#P186">186-8</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+obligation, <A HREF="#P192">192-7</A>; order, <A HREF="#P193">193</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+philosophy, <A HREF="#P184">184-5</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Moral philosopher and the moral life, the, <A HREF="#P184">184-215</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Murder, <A HREF="#P178">178</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Murderer, <A HREF="#P160">160</A>, <A HREF="#P177">177</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Myers, <A HREF="#P308">308</A>, <A HREF="#P315">315</A>, <A HREF="#P320">320</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mystical phenomena, <A HREF="#P300">300</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Mysticism, <A HREF="#P74">74</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+NAKED, the, <A HREF="#P281">281</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Natural theology, <A HREF="#P40">40-4</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nature, <A HREF="#P20">20</A>, <A HREF="#P41">41-4</A>, <A HREF="#P56">56</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Negation, as used by Hegel, <A HREF="#P273">273</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Newman, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nitrous oxide, <A HREF="#P294">294</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Nonentity, <A HREF="#P72">72</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+OBJECTIVE evidence, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>, <A HREF="#P15">15</A>, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Obligation, <A HREF="#P192">192-7</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Occult phenomena, <A HREF="#P300">300</A>; examples of, <A HREF="#P323">323</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Omar Khayam, <A HREF="#P160">160</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Optimism, <A HREF="#P60">60</A>, <A HREF="#P102">102</A>, <A HREF="#P163">163</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Options offered to belief, <A HREF="#P3">3</A>, <A HREF="#P11">11</A>, <A HREF="#P27">27</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Origin of moral judgments, <A HREF="#P186">186-8</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+'Other,' in Hegel, <A HREF="#P283">283</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+PARSIMONY, law of, <A HREF="#P132">132</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Partaking, <A HREF="#P268">268</A>, <A HREF="#P270">270</A>, <A HREF="#P275">275</A>, <A HREF="#P291">291</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pascal's wager, <A HREF="#P5">5</A>, <A HREF="#P11">11</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Personality, <A HREF="#P324">324</A>, <A HREF="#P327">327</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pessimism, <A HREF="#P39">39</A>, <A HREF="#P40">40</A>, <A HREF="#P47">47</A>, <A HREF="#P60">60</A>, <A HREF="#P100">100</A>, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>, <A HREF="#P161">161</A>, <A HREF="#P167">167</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Philosophy, <A HREF="#P65">65</A>; depends on personal
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+demands, <A HREF="#P93">93</A>; makes world unreal,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P39">39</A>; seeks unification, <A HREF="#P67">67-70</A>; the
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+ultimate, <A HREF="#P110">110</A>; its contradictions, <A HREF="#P16">16</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Physiology, its <I>prestige</I>, <A HREF="#P112">112</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Piper, Mrs., <A HREF="#P314">314</A>, <A HREF="#P319">319</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Plato, <A HREF="#P268">268</A>
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pluralism, vi, <A HREF="#P151">151</A>, <A HREF="#P178">178</A>, <A HREF="#P192">192</A>, <A HREF="#P264">264</A>, <A HREF="#P267">267</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Positivism, <A HREF="#P54">54</A>, <A HREF="#P108">108</A>
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Possibilities, <A HREF="#P151">151</A>, <A HREF="#P181">181-2</A>, <A HREF="#P292">292</A>, <A HREF="#P294">294</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Postulates, <A HREF="#P91">91-2</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Powers, our powers as congruous with the world, <A HREF="#P86">86</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Providence, <A HREF="#P180">180</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Psychical research, what it has accomplished, <A HREF="#P299">299-327</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Society for, <A HREF="#P303">303</A>, <A HREF="#P305">305</A>, <A HREF="#P325">325</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Pugnacity, <A HREF="#P49">49</A>, <A HREF="#P51">51</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+QUESTIONS, three, in Ethics, <A HREF="#P185">185</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+RATIONALISM, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P30">30</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rationality, the sentiment of, <A HREF="#P63">63-110</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+limits of theoretic, <A HREF="#P65">65-74</A>; mystical,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P74">74</A>; practical, <A HREF="#P82">82-4</A>; postulates of, <A HREF="#P152">152</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rational order of world, <A HREF="#P118">118</A>, <A HREF="#P125">125</A>, <A HREF="#P147">147</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Reflex action and theism, <A HREF="#P111">111-144</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Reflex action defined, <A HREF="#P113">113</A>; it refutes gnosticism, <A HREF="#P140">140-1</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Regret, judgments of, <A HREF="#P159">159</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Religion, natural, <A HREF="#P52">52</A>; of humanity, <A HREF="#P198">198</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Religious hypothesis, <A HREF="#P25">25</A>, <A HREF="#P28">28</A>, <A HREF="#P51">51</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Religious minds, <A HREF="#P40">40</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Renan, <A HREF="#P170">170</A>, <A HREF="#P172">172</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Renouvier, <A HREF="#P143">143</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Risks of belief or disbelief, ix, <A HREF="#P26">26</A>; rules for minimizing, <A HREF="#P94">94</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Romantic view of world, <A HREF="#P324">324</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Romanticism, <A HREF="#P172">172-3</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Rousseau, <A HREF="#P4">4</A>, <A HREF="#P33">33</A>, <A HREF="#P87">87</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Ruskin, <A HREF="#P37">37</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+SALTER, <A HREF="#P62">62</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Scepticism, <A HREF="#P12">12</A>, <A HREF="#P23">23</A>, <A HREF="#P109">109</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Scholasticism, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Schopenhauer, <A HREF="#P72">72</A>, <A HREF="#P169">169</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Science, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P21">21</A>; its recency, <A HREF="#P52">52-4</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+due to peculiar desire, <A HREF="#P129">129-132</A>, <A HREF="#P147">147</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+its disbelief of the occult, <A HREF="#P317">317-320</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+its negation of personality, <A HREF="#P324">324-6</A>;
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+cannot decide question of determinism, <A HREF="#P152">152</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Science of Ethics, <A HREF="#P208">208-210</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Selection of great men, <A HREF="#P226">226</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sentiment of rationality, <A HREF="#P63">63</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Seriousness, <A HREF="#P86">86</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Shakespeare, <A HREF="#P32">32</A>, <A HREF="#P235">235</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sidgwick, <A HREF="#P303">303</A>, <A HREF="#P307">307</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sigwart, <A HREF="#P120">120</A>, <A HREF="#P148">148</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Society for psychical research, <A HREF="#P303">303</A>; its 'Proceedings,' <A HREF="#P305">305</A>, <A HREF="#P325">325</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Sociology, <A HREF="#P259">259</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Solitude, moral, <A HREF="#P191">191</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Space, <A HREF="#P265">265</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Spencer, <A HREF="#P168">168</A>, <A HREF="#P218">218</A>, <A HREF="#P232">232-235</A>, <A HREF="#P246">246</A>, <A HREF="#P251">251</A>, <A HREF="#P260">260</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Stephen, L., <A HREF="#P1">1</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Stephen, Sir J., <A HREF="#P1">1</A>, <A HREF="#P30">30</A>, <A HREF="#P212">212</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Stoics, <A HREF="#P274">274</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Strenuous mood, <A HREF="#P211">211</A>, <A HREF="#P213">213</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Subjectivism, <A HREF="#P165">165</A>, <A HREF="#P170">170</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+'Subliminal self,' <A HREF="#P315">315</A>, <A HREF="#P321">321</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Substance, <A HREF="#P80">80</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Suicide, <A HREF="#P38">38</A>, <A HREF="#P50">50</A>, <A HREF="#P60">60</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+System in philosophy, <A HREF="#P13">13</A>, <A HREF="#P185">185</A>, <A HREF="#P199">199</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+TELEPATHY, <A HREF="#P10">10</A>, <A HREF="#P309">309</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Theism, and reflex action, <A HREF="#P111">111-144</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Theism, <A HREF="#P127">127</A>, <A HREF="#P134">134-6</A>; see 'God.'
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Theology, natural, <A HREF="#P41">41</A>; Calvinistic, <A HREF="#P45">45</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Theoretic faculty, <A HREF="#P128">128</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Thought-transference, <A HREF="#P309">309</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Thomson, <A HREF="#P35">35-7</A>, <A HREF="#P45">45</A>, <A HREF="#P46">46</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Toleration, <A HREF="#P30">30</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Tolstoi, <A HREF="#P188">188</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+'Totality,' the principle of, <A HREF="#P277">277</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Triadic structure of mind, <A HREF="#P123">123</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Truth, criteria of, <A HREF="#P15">15</A>; and error, <A HREF="#P18">18</A>; moral, <A HREF="#P190">190-1</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+UNITARIANS, <A HREF="#P126">126</A>, <A HREF="#P133">133</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Unknowable, the, <A HREF="#P68">68</A>, <A HREF="#P81">81</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Universe = M + x, <A HREF="#P101">101</A>; its rationality, <A HREF="#P125">125</A>, <A HREF="#P137">137</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Unseen world, <A HREF="#P51">51</A>, <A HREF="#P54">54</A>, <A HREF="#P56">56</A>, <A HREF="#P61">61</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Utopias, <A HREF="#P168">168</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+VALUE, judgments of, <A HREF="#P103">103</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Variations, in heredity, etc., <A HREF="#P225">225</A>, <A HREF="#P249">249</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Vaudois, <A HREF="#P48">48</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Veddah, <A HREF="#P258">258</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Verification of theories, <A HREF="#P95">95</A>, <A HREF="#P105">105-8</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Vivisection, <A HREF="#P58">58</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+WALDENSES, <A HREF="#P47">47-9</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wallace, <A HREF="#P239">239</A>, <A HREF="#P304">304</A>,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Whitman, <A HREF="#P33">33</A>, <A HREF="#P64">64</A>, <A HREF="#P74">74</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wordsworth, <A HREF="#P60">60</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+World, its ambiguity, <A HREF="#P76">76</A>; the invisible,
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+<A HREF="#P51">51</A>, <A HREF="#P54">54</A>, <A HREF="#P56">56</A>; two orders of, <A HREF="#P118">118</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Worth, judgments of, <A HREF="#P103">103</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Wright, <A HREF="#P52">52</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+X., Miss, <A HREF="#P314">314</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="index">
+ZOLA, <A HREF="#P172">172</A>.
+</P>
+<P CLASS="index">
+Zöllner, <A HREF="#P15">15</A>.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap12"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+By the Same Author
+</H3>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.<BR>
+2 vols.  8vo.  New York: Henry Holt & Co.  London;<BR>
+Macmillan & Co.  1890<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+PSYCHOLOGY: BRIEFER COURSE (TEXT BOOK).<BR>
+12mo.  New York: Henry Holt & Co.  London:<BR>
+Macmillan & Co.  1892.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS<BR>
+IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.<BR>
+12mo.  New York, London.  Bombay and Calcutta:<BR>
+Longmans, Green & Co.  1897.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+HUMAN IMMORTALITY: TWO SUPPOSED<BR>
+OBJECTIONS TO THE DOCTRINE.<BR>
+16mo.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.  1898.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND<BR>
+TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS.<BR>
+12mo.  New York: Henry Holt & Co.  London,<BR>
+Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co.  1899.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE:<BR>
+A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE.<BR>
+Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902.<BR>
+8vo.  New York, London, Bombay and Calcutta:<BR>
+Longmans, Green & Co.  1902.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+PRAGMATISM: A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD<BR>
+WAYS OF THINKING: POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY.<BR>
+New York, London, Bombay and Calcutta:<BR>
+Longmans, Green & Co.  1907.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE: HIBBERT<BR>
+LECTURES AT MANCHESTER COLLEGE ON THE<BR>
+PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY.<BR>
+New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta:<BR>
+Longmans, Green & Co.  1909.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE MEANING OF TRUTH; A SEQUEL TO "PRAGMATISM."<BR>
+New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta;<BR>
+Longmans, Green & Co.  1909.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+THE LITERARY REMAINS OF HENRY JAMES<BR>
+Edited, with an Introduction, by WILLIAM JAMES.<BR>
+With Portrait.  Crown 8vo.  Boston: Houghton<BR>
+Mifflin Co.  1885.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<HR>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3>
+Transcriber's notes:
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly
+braces, e.g. {99}.  They have been located where page breaks occurred
+in the original book, in accordance with Project Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99.
+For its Index, a page number has been placed only at the start of that
+section.  In the HTML version of this book, page numbers are placed in
+the left margin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Footnotes are indicated by numbers enclosed in square brackets, e.g.
+[2].  They have been renumbered sequentially and moved to the end of
+their respective chapters.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Will to Believe, by William James
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILL TO BELIEVE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 26659-h.htm or 26659-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/2/6/6/5/26659/
+
+Produced by Al Haines. (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</BODY>
+
+</HTML>
+
diff --git a/26659-page-images/f0001-image1.jpg b/26659-page-images/f0001-image1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1fc0255
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/f0001-image1.jpg
diff --git a/26659-page-images/f0001.png b/26659-page-images/f0001.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c230705
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/f0001.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/f0002.png b/26659-page-images/f0002.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c8147d1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/f0002.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/f0003.png b/26659-page-images/f0003.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0f77aca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/f0003.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/f0005.png b/26659-page-images/f0005.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c28a815
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/f0005.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/f0006.png b/26659-page-images/f0006.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0610de3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/f0006.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/f0007.png b/26659-page-images/f0007.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a4f2935
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/f0007.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/f0009.png b/26659-page-images/f0009.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..783a028
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/f0009.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0001.png b/26659-page-images/p0001.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..700d6a0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0001.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0002.png b/26659-page-images/p0002.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3d2ffd1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0002.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0003.png b/26659-page-images/p0003.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fe11f26
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0003.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0004.png b/26659-page-images/p0004.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..22bf44b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0004.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0005.png b/26659-page-images/p0005.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1269a4b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0005.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0006.png b/26659-page-images/p0006.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..32139cb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0006.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0007.png b/26659-page-images/p0007.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..06b3623
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0007.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0008.png b/26659-page-images/p0008.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..33db4d5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0008.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0009.png b/26659-page-images/p0009.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0639730
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0009.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0010.png b/26659-page-images/p0010.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8032b62
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0010.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0011.png b/26659-page-images/p0011.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6b3668a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0011.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0012.png b/26659-page-images/p0012.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5b2ca81
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0012.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0013.png b/26659-page-images/p0013.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..323a4d9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0013.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0014.png b/26659-page-images/p0014.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..edd7e11
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0014.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0015.png b/26659-page-images/p0015.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..89b8def
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0015.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0016.png b/26659-page-images/p0016.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5ad268a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0016.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0017.png b/26659-page-images/p0017.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..329ffa3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0017.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0018.png b/26659-page-images/p0018.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0d8834f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0018.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0019.png b/26659-page-images/p0019.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2d3c686
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0019.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0020.png b/26659-page-images/p0020.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c2d6a50
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0020.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0021.png b/26659-page-images/p0021.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..427c250
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0021.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0022.png b/26659-page-images/p0022.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..562521f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0022.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0023.png b/26659-page-images/p0023.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b194d67
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0023.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0024.png b/26659-page-images/p0024.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9ce6b62
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0024.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0025.png b/26659-page-images/p0025.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..87a3d8c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0025.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0026.png b/26659-page-images/p0026.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..edbf22c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0026.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0027.png b/26659-page-images/p0027.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..76efaae
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0027.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0028.png b/26659-page-images/p0028.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..796f173
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0028.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0029.png b/26659-page-images/p0029.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..529e143
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0029.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0030.png b/26659-page-images/p0030.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4c4b888
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0030.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0031.png b/26659-page-images/p0031.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..93df42d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0031.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0032.png b/26659-page-images/p0032.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d5d731d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0032.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0033.png b/26659-page-images/p0033.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9571376
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0033.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0034.png b/26659-page-images/p0034.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fdfaf19
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0034.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0035.png b/26659-page-images/p0035.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4258cd2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0035.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0036.png b/26659-page-images/p0036.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8d5917c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0036.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0037.png b/26659-page-images/p0037.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..accc4c3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0037.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0038.png b/26659-page-images/p0038.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f03a90f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0038.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0039.png b/26659-page-images/p0039.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a11c96e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0039.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0040.png b/26659-page-images/p0040.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9717826
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0040.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0041.png b/26659-page-images/p0041.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b00f3aa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0041.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0042.png b/26659-page-images/p0042.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9f40b6f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0042.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0043.png b/26659-page-images/p0043.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d4b8eec
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0043.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0044.png b/26659-page-images/p0044.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0c68b76
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0044.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0045.png b/26659-page-images/p0045.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a340f41
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0045.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0046.png b/26659-page-images/p0046.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5509bf3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0046.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0047.png b/26659-page-images/p0047.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f7d659e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0047.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0048.png b/26659-page-images/p0048.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..005524c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0048.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0049.png b/26659-page-images/p0049.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..19eb8f9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0049.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0050.png b/26659-page-images/p0050.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..14d964a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0050.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0051.png b/26659-page-images/p0051.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ac4acb6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0051.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0052.png b/26659-page-images/p0052.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4b848a9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0052.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0053.png b/26659-page-images/p0053.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4448bfe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0053.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0054.png b/26659-page-images/p0054.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..189bcc9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0054.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0055.png b/26659-page-images/p0055.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f968b45
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0055.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0056.png b/26659-page-images/p0056.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..75ad847
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0056.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0057.png b/26659-page-images/p0057.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..27f533d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0057.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0058.png b/26659-page-images/p0058.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f4d9f7b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0058.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0059.png b/26659-page-images/p0059.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6ac98de
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0059.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0060.png b/26659-page-images/p0060.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dd71594
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0060.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0061.png b/26659-page-images/p0061.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d5dfce6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0061.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0062.png b/26659-page-images/p0062.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..99c0ad6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0062.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0063.png b/26659-page-images/p0063.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6609f8a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0063.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0064.png b/26659-page-images/p0064.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..71bb9f8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0064.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0065.png b/26659-page-images/p0065.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..24157dc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0065.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0066.png b/26659-page-images/p0066.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fb420ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0066.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0067.png b/26659-page-images/p0067.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..42579ee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0067.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0068.png b/26659-page-images/p0068.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8bdf4dd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0068.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0069.png b/26659-page-images/p0069.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9c293d3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0069.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0070.png b/26659-page-images/p0070.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f641211
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0070.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0071.png b/26659-page-images/p0071.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..61a7694
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0071.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0072.png b/26659-page-images/p0072.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9001227
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0072.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0073.png b/26659-page-images/p0073.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..85488e5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0073.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0074.png b/26659-page-images/p0074.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0999cb9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0074.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0075.png b/26659-page-images/p0075.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b90592f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0075.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0076.png b/26659-page-images/p0076.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cfad0fc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0076.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0077.png b/26659-page-images/p0077.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..861273f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0077.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0078.png b/26659-page-images/p0078.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0838f72
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0078.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0079.png b/26659-page-images/p0079.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6dcfb9a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0079.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0080.png b/26659-page-images/p0080.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e30498f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0080.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0081.png b/26659-page-images/p0081.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..84120a0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0081.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0082.png b/26659-page-images/p0082.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f0ad274
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0082.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0083.png b/26659-page-images/p0083.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..44e897a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0083.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0084.png b/26659-page-images/p0084.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a4b6f12
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0084.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0085.png b/26659-page-images/p0085.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8a32dde
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0085.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0086.png b/26659-page-images/p0086.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..578e135
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0086.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0087.png b/26659-page-images/p0087.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c26f59a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0087.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0088.png b/26659-page-images/p0088.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..23940c2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0088.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0089.png b/26659-page-images/p0089.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5e6a2be
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0089.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0090.png b/26659-page-images/p0090.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5e8cf6a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0090.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0091.png b/26659-page-images/p0091.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..acadc40
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0091.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0092.png b/26659-page-images/p0092.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bb9841f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0092.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0093.png b/26659-page-images/p0093.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..782c088
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0093.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0094.png b/26659-page-images/p0094.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..22a1f91
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0094.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0095.png b/26659-page-images/p0095.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c08abd6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0095.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0096.png b/26659-page-images/p0096.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..962943a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0096.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0097.png b/26659-page-images/p0097.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7d9cf1a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0097.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0098.png b/26659-page-images/p0098.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bf19424
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0098.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0099.png b/26659-page-images/p0099.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a7de40c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0099.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0100.png b/26659-page-images/p0100.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..33323dd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0100.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0101.png b/26659-page-images/p0101.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3f0272d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0101.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0102.png b/26659-page-images/p0102.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e32bbc7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0102.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0103.png b/26659-page-images/p0103.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cefc3c0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0103.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0104.png b/26659-page-images/p0104.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9679587
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0104.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0105.png b/26659-page-images/p0105.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..21949d3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0105.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0106.png b/26659-page-images/p0106.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4f9576e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0106.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0107.png b/26659-page-images/p0107.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f51687f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0107.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0108.png b/26659-page-images/p0108.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..80855ca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0108.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0109.png b/26659-page-images/p0109.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7cb8b98
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0109.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0110.png b/26659-page-images/p0110.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2c95ca1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0110.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0111.png b/26659-page-images/p0111.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1a598d7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0111.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0112.png b/26659-page-images/p0112.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..678646b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0112.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0113.png b/26659-page-images/p0113.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5e02bc7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0113.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0114.png b/26659-page-images/p0114.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..feb0db7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0114.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0115.png b/26659-page-images/p0115.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..63891d6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0115.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0116.png b/26659-page-images/p0116.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5016a7a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0116.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0117.png b/26659-page-images/p0117.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c90fb2f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0117.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0118.png b/26659-page-images/p0118.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..717ab34
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0118.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0119.png b/26659-page-images/p0119.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..447e023
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0119.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0120.png b/26659-page-images/p0120.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8c1899a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0120.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0121.png b/26659-page-images/p0121.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..44a5f02
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0121.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0122.png b/26659-page-images/p0122.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..91dff0b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0122.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0123.png b/26659-page-images/p0123.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ba8d2e7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0123.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0124.png b/26659-page-images/p0124.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8da17bb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0124.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0125.png b/26659-page-images/p0125.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7b2281f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0125.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0126.png b/26659-page-images/p0126.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5fd2b56
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0126.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0127.png b/26659-page-images/p0127.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9200ff7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0127.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0128.png b/26659-page-images/p0128.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..201bd8c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0128.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0129.png b/26659-page-images/p0129.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6640238
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0129.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0130.png b/26659-page-images/p0130.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f8d961b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0130.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0131.png b/26659-page-images/p0131.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b0e9b77
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0131.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0132.png b/26659-page-images/p0132.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..49093ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0132.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0133.png b/26659-page-images/p0133.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8e4fed5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0133.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0134.png b/26659-page-images/p0134.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3c0eb7a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0134.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0135.png b/26659-page-images/p0135.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a2b0b4b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0135.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0136.png b/26659-page-images/p0136.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7c75d9f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0136.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0137.png b/26659-page-images/p0137.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8027133
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0137.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0138.png b/26659-page-images/p0138.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dbbedbe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0138.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0139.png b/26659-page-images/p0139.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..42233eb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0139.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0140.png b/26659-page-images/p0140.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..da88cca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0140.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0141.png b/26659-page-images/p0141.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dbe7ee5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0141.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0142.png b/26659-page-images/p0142.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1385914
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0142.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0143.png b/26659-page-images/p0143.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3dfc1f0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0143.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0144.png b/26659-page-images/p0144.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1c498fa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0144.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0145.png b/26659-page-images/p0145.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b126212
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0145.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0146.png b/26659-page-images/p0146.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d19386b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0146.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0147.png b/26659-page-images/p0147.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7d13e13
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0147.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0148.png b/26659-page-images/p0148.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eb72bf4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0148.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0149.png b/26659-page-images/p0149.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4accdc5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0149.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0150.png b/26659-page-images/p0150.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..17ea3c0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0150.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0151.png b/26659-page-images/p0151.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8ad49df
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0151.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0152.png b/26659-page-images/p0152.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3d7a47d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0152.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0153.png b/26659-page-images/p0153.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dac4d4b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0153.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0154.png b/26659-page-images/p0154.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..50bccbc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0154.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0155.png b/26659-page-images/p0155.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..510822c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0155.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0156.png b/26659-page-images/p0156.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..077e1a4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0156.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0157.png b/26659-page-images/p0157.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..300b9f0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0157.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0158.png b/26659-page-images/p0158.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5fd4365
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0158.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0159.png b/26659-page-images/p0159.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..10c850f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0159.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0160.png b/26659-page-images/p0160.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3f2c834
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0160.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0161.png b/26659-page-images/p0161.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b609b07
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0161.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0162.png b/26659-page-images/p0162.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dcf9834
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0162.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0163.png b/26659-page-images/p0163.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b6867ae
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0163.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0164.png b/26659-page-images/p0164.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c80051f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0164.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0165.png b/26659-page-images/p0165.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..711a99a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0165.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0166.png b/26659-page-images/p0166.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..28661be
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0166.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0167.png b/26659-page-images/p0167.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..784a11a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0167.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0168.png b/26659-page-images/p0168.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b11858e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0168.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0169.png b/26659-page-images/p0169.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4738f01
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0169.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0170.png b/26659-page-images/p0170.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2d9e878
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0170.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0171.png b/26659-page-images/p0171.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..66f887f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0171.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0172.png b/26659-page-images/p0172.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..592e7f8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0172.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0173.png b/26659-page-images/p0173.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..92243df
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0173.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0174.png b/26659-page-images/p0174.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4f2ab52
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0174.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0175.png b/26659-page-images/p0175.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d0e1843
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0175.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0176.png b/26659-page-images/p0176.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2b0eb76
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0176.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0177.png b/26659-page-images/p0177.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ec042ab
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0177.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0178.png b/26659-page-images/p0178.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5bccb39
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0178.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0179.png b/26659-page-images/p0179.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eb572c0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0179.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0180.png b/26659-page-images/p0180.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1d49295
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0180.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0181.png b/26659-page-images/p0181.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c97219a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0181.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0182.png b/26659-page-images/p0182.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9962936
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0182.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0183.png b/26659-page-images/p0183.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..348530d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0183.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0184.png b/26659-page-images/p0184.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0cffaf4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0184.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0185.png b/26659-page-images/p0185.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..07e3c9b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0185.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0186.png b/26659-page-images/p0186.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1fb8dac
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0186.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0187.png b/26659-page-images/p0187.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e210d1e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0187.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0188.png b/26659-page-images/p0188.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e2b7936
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0188.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0189.png b/26659-page-images/p0189.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..04518a6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0189.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0190.png b/26659-page-images/p0190.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7309fd2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0190.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0191.png b/26659-page-images/p0191.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8266c3a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0191.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0192.png b/26659-page-images/p0192.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..40cfeda
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0192.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0193.png b/26659-page-images/p0193.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c1ffb8a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0193.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0194.png b/26659-page-images/p0194.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0a6076a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0194.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0195.png b/26659-page-images/p0195.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..976871b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0195.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0196.png b/26659-page-images/p0196.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..57c8aed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0196.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0197.png b/26659-page-images/p0197.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ccde1f7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0197.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0198.png b/26659-page-images/p0198.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2317592
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0198.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0199.png b/26659-page-images/p0199.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f05004b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0199.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0200.png b/26659-page-images/p0200.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a9726a0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0200.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0201.png b/26659-page-images/p0201.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6bbbc92
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0201.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0202.png b/26659-page-images/p0202.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2e68c61
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0202.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0203.png b/26659-page-images/p0203.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..863915e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0203.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0204.png b/26659-page-images/p0204.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..23c93c6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0204.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0205.png b/26659-page-images/p0205.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4abb3b1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0205.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0206.png b/26659-page-images/p0206.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..06c4d6f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0206.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0207.png b/26659-page-images/p0207.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6f6ea26
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0207.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0208.png b/26659-page-images/p0208.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9d1cbfb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0208.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0209.png b/26659-page-images/p0209.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7198820
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0209.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0210.png b/26659-page-images/p0210.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5abd275
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0210.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0211.png b/26659-page-images/p0211.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..941e568
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0211.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0212.png b/26659-page-images/p0212.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9d6401b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0212.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0213.png b/26659-page-images/p0213.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a28a568
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0213.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0214.png b/26659-page-images/p0214.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fd3d6ce
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0214.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0215.png b/26659-page-images/p0215.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f7139d1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0215.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0216.png b/26659-page-images/p0216.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..45ac670
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0216.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0217.png b/26659-page-images/p0217.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3da34f9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0217.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0218.png b/26659-page-images/p0218.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2f1eb06
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0218.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0219.png b/26659-page-images/p0219.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8d8a52b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0219.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0220.png b/26659-page-images/p0220.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d32a964
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0220.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0221.png b/26659-page-images/p0221.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1dc48b0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0221.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0222.png b/26659-page-images/p0222.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0075114
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0222.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0223.png b/26659-page-images/p0223.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d5550d3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0223.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0224.png b/26659-page-images/p0224.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c50feaf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0224.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0225.png b/26659-page-images/p0225.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ee8be4b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0225.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0226.png b/26659-page-images/p0226.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a5c9cf7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0226.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0227.png b/26659-page-images/p0227.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5be377c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0227.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0228.png b/26659-page-images/p0228.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1eb8c49
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0228.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0229.png b/26659-page-images/p0229.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..93fa9a7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0229.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0230.png b/26659-page-images/p0230.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eaa8b88
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0230.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0231.png b/26659-page-images/p0231.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cadf866
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0231.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0232.png b/26659-page-images/p0232.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..50f7825
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0232.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0233.png b/26659-page-images/p0233.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b59fcaa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0233.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0234.png b/26659-page-images/p0234.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0e84062
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0234.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0235.png b/26659-page-images/p0235.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8b88dd9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0235.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0236.png b/26659-page-images/p0236.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f25867f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0236.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0237.png b/26659-page-images/p0237.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..57d9239
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0237.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0238.png b/26659-page-images/p0238.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..80676a4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0238.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0239.png b/26659-page-images/p0239.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b514018
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0239.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0240.png b/26659-page-images/p0240.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0f604d1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0240.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0241.png b/26659-page-images/p0241.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f10f8ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0241.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0242.png b/26659-page-images/p0242.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2e428a1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0242.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0243.png b/26659-page-images/p0243.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2bbd565
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0243.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0244.png b/26659-page-images/p0244.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..511b76b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0244.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0245.png b/26659-page-images/p0245.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..13c58a1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0245.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0246.png b/26659-page-images/p0246.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7dba6fa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0246.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0247.png b/26659-page-images/p0247.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..14e03d8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0247.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0248.png b/26659-page-images/p0248.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a025315
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0248.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0249.png b/26659-page-images/p0249.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7d13721
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0249.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0250.png b/26659-page-images/p0250.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..62a4052
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0250.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0251.png b/26659-page-images/p0251.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0e07f4a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0251.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0252.png b/26659-page-images/p0252.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..63c87a6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0252.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0253.png b/26659-page-images/p0253.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..397d7f4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0253.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0254.png b/26659-page-images/p0254.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..faf57e1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0254.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0255.png b/26659-page-images/p0255.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0875e59
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0255.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0256.png b/26659-page-images/p0256.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a999ad7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0256.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0257.png b/26659-page-images/p0257.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..53c0253
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0257.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0258.png b/26659-page-images/p0258.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bb99639
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0258.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0259.png b/26659-page-images/p0259.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..01571f1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0259.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0260.png b/26659-page-images/p0260.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f6a1ab7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0260.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0261.png b/26659-page-images/p0261.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..334c59b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0261.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0262.png b/26659-page-images/p0262.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b98b439
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0262.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0263.png b/26659-page-images/p0263.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..98e91b8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0263.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0264.png b/26659-page-images/p0264.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f955256
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0264.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0265.png b/26659-page-images/p0265.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d5425e8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0265.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0266.png b/26659-page-images/p0266.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7f39be5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0266.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0267.png b/26659-page-images/p0267.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..646241f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0267.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0268.png b/26659-page-images/p0268.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b728631
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0268.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0269.png b/26659-page-images/p0269.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..27d9fee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0269.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0270.png b/26659-page-images/p0270.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f26860c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0270.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0271.png b/26659-page-images/p0271.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..36bdb26
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0271.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0272.png b/26659-page-images/p0272.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d3cf17b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0272.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0273.png b/26659-page-images/p0273.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..27c16bf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0273.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0274.png b/26659-page-images/p0274.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dd105f7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0274.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0275.png b/26659-page-images/p0275.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cc5a9e4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0275.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0276.png b/26659-page-images/p0276.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..11d5c60
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0276.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0277.png b/26659-page-images/p0277.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..da5fe9c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0277.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0278.png b/26659-page-images/p0278.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7b8c39c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0278.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0279.png b/26659-page-images/p0279.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b012918
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0279.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0280.png b/26659-page-images/p0280.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2e7ba35
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0280.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0281.png b/26659-page-images/p0281.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7bdd13
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0281.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0282.png b/26659-page-images/p0282.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a1d6c39
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0282.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0283.png b/26659-page-images/p0283.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b3da64f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0283.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0284.png b/26659-page-images/p0284.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bf63eee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0284.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0285.png b/26659-page-images/p0285.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e1362ab
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0285.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0286.png b/26659-page-images/p0286.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c2d216e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0286.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0287.png b/26659-page-images/p0287.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eb1f808
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0287.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0288.png b/26659-page-images/p0288.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bb118ae
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0288.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0289.png b/26659-page-images/p0289.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0ed5b5e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0289.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0290.png b/26659-page-images/p0290.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cddb509
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0290.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0291.png b/26659-page-images/p0291.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..454398f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0291.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0292.png b/26659-page-images/p0292.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..196a36d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0292.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0293.png b/26659-page-images/p0293.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..272ccf8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0293.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0294.png b/26659-page-images/p0294.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1d83a2d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0294.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0295.png b/26659-page-images/p0295.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4aa06f5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0295.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0296.png b/26659-page-images/p0296.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8fdc340
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0296.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0297.png b/26659-page-images/p0297.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3504d43
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0297.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0298.png b/26659-page-images/p0298.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3314837
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0298.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0299.png b/26659-page-images/p0299.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..56a9f31
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0299.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0300.png b/26659-page-images/p0300.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4fe0382
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0300.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0301.png b/26659-page-images/p0301.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0b7a194
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0301.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0302.png b/26659-page-images/p0302.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1757031
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0302.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0303.png b/26659-page-images/p0303.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..046976c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0303.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0304.png b/26659-page-images/p0304.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c9050fc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0304.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0305.png b/26659-page-images/p0305.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..66fd7ee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0305.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0306.png b/26659-page-images/p0306.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..817c544
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0306.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0307.png b/26659-page-images/p0307.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c0035b8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0307.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0308.png b/26659-page-images/p0308.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..027ac1f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0308.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0309.png b/26659-page-images/p0309.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..febfc64
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0309.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0310.png b/26659-page-images/p0310.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..36a48e2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0310.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0311.png b/26659-page-images/p0311.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bc0043c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0311.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0312.png b/26659-page-images/p0312.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c188192
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0312.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0313.png b/26659-page-images/p0313.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..54713f6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0313.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0314.png b/26659-page-images/p0314.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8ef4241
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0314.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0315.png b/26659-page-images/p0315.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..08209d2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0315.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0316.png b/26659-page-images/p0316.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2f8f29f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0316.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0317.png b/26659-page-images/p0317.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a98e994
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0317.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0318.png b/26659-page-images/p0318.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..68545ef
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0318.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0319.png b/26659-page-images/p0319.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f87c12b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0319.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0320.png b/26659-page-images/p0320.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..925ed17
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0320.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0321.png b/26659-page-images/p0321.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..399edd8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0321.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0322.png b/26659-page-images/p0322.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..14e1821
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0322.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0323.png b/26659-page-images/p0323.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7753ca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0323.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0324.png b/26659-page-images/p0324.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..aecf678
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0324.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0325.png b/26659-page-images/p0325.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2b7ac5d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0325.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0326.png b/26659-page-images/p0326.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..377639c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0326.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0327.png b/26659-page-images/p0327.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cb9430b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0327.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0328.png b/26659-page-images/p0328.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..04a0041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0328.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0329.png b/26659-page-images/p0329.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e0bacd1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0329.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0330.png b/26659-page-images/p0330.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7cc8aa8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0330.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0331.png b/26659-page-images/p0331.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..63ee587
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0331.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0332.png b/26659-page-images/p0332.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..88d306a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0332.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0333.png b/26659-page-images/p0333.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eef1927
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0333.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0334.png b/26659-page-images/p0334.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..740f97f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0334.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0335.png b/26659-page-images/p0335.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..35e2951
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0335.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0336.png b/26659-page-images/p0336.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fdc9966
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0336.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0337.png b/26659-page-images/p0337.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..43fa03f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0337.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0338.png b/26659-page-images/p0338.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d2dbf90
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0338.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/p0339.png b/26659-page-images/p0339.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..399b479
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/p0339.png
diff --git a/26659-page-images/q0001-image1.jpg b/26659-page-images/q0001-image1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3be3270
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/q0001-image1.jpg
diff --git a/26659-page-images/q0001.png b/26659-page-images/q0001.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..65d65d2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659-page-images/q0001.png
diff --git a/26659.txt b/26659.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c205a8b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10602 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Will to Believe, by William James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Will to Believe
+       and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
+
+Author: William James
+
+Release Date: May 8, 2009 [EBook #26659]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILL TO BELIEVE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines. (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE
+
+
+AND OTHER ESSAYS IN
+
+POPULAR PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+
+BY WILLIAM JAMES
+
+
+
+
+NEW IMPRESSION
+
+
+
+LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
+
+FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
+
+LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+_Copyright, 1896_
+
+BY WILLIAM JAMES
+
+
+  First Edition. February, 1897,
+
+  Reprinted, May, 1897, September, 1897,
+  March, 1898, August, 1899, June, 1902,
+  January, 1903, May, 1904, June, 1905,
+  March, 1907, April, 1908,
+  September, 1909, December, 1910,
+  November, 1911, November, 1912
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+My Old Friend,
+
+CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE,
+
+  To whose philosophic comradeship in old times
+  and to whose writings in more recent years
+  I owe more incitement and help than
+  I can express or repay.
+
+
+
+
+{vii}
+
+PREFACE.
+
+At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the students
+devoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have the
+laudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholar
+to address them, the occasion often being made a public one.  I have
+from time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had my
+discourse printed in one or other of the Reviews.  It has seemed to me
+that these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, as
+they shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together express
+a tolerably definite philosophic attitude in a very untechnical way.
+
+Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I
+should call it that of _radical empiricism_, in spite of the fact that
+such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy.  I
+say 'empiricism,' because it is contented to regard its most assured
+conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to
+modification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical,'
+because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and,
+{viii} unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under
+the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does
+not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience
+has got to square.  The difference between monism and pluralism is
+perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy.  _Prima
+facie_ the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be
+that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an
+effort to redeem it from that first crude form.  Postulating more unity
+than the first experiences yield, we also discover more.  But absolute
+unity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains
+undiscovered, still remains a _Grenzbegriff_.  "Ever not quite" must be
+the rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it.  After
+all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity
+of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities
+mutually unmediated and unexplained.  To the very last, there are the
+various 'points of view' which the philosopher must distinguish in
+discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains
+a bare externality and datum to the other.  The negative, the alogical,
+is never wholly banished.  Something--"call it fate, chance, freedom,
+spontaneity, the devil, what you will"--is still wrong and other and
+outside and unincluded, from _your_ point of view, even though you be
+the greatest of philosophers.  Something is always mere fact and
+_givenness_; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of
+view extant from which this would not be found to be the case.
+"Reason," as a gifted writer says, "is {ix} but one item in the
+mystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned,
+reason and wonder blushed face to face.  The inevitable stales, while
+doubt and hope are sisters.  Not unfortunately the universe is
+wild,--game-flavored as a hawk's wing.  Nature is miracle all; the same
+returns not save to bring the different.  The slow round of the
+engraver's lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is
+distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true,--ever not
+quite."[1]
+
+This is pluralism, somewhat rhapsodically expressed.  He who takes for
+his hypothesis the notion that it is the permanent form of the world is
+what I call a radical empiricist.  For him the crudity of experience
+remains an eternal element thereof.  There is no possible point of view
+from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact.  Real
+possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real
+evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real
+moral life, just as common-sense conceives these things, may remain in
+empiricism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt
+either to 'overcome' or to reinterpret in monistic form.
+
+Many of my professionally trained _confreres_ will smile at the
+irrationalism of this view, and at the artlessness of my essays in
+point of technical form.  But they should be taken as illustrations of
+the radically empiricist attitude rather than as argumentations for its
+validity.  That admits meanwhile of {x} being argued in as technical a
+shape as any one can desire, and possibly I may be spared to do later a
+share of that work.  Meanwhile these essays seem to light up with a
+certain dramatic reality the attitude itself, and make it visible
+alongside of the higher and lower dogmatisms between which in the pages
+of philosophic history it has generally remained eclipsed from sight.
+
+The first four essays are largely concerned with defending the
+legitimacy of religious faith.  To some rationalizing readers such
+advocacy will seem a sad misuse of one's professional position.
+Mankind, they will say, is only too prone to follow faith
+unreasoningly, and needs no preaching nor encouragement in that
+direction.  I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks is
+criticism and caution, not faith.  Its cardinal weakness is to let
+belief follow recklessly upon lively conception, especially when the
+conception has instinctive liking at its back.  I admit, then, that
+were I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowd
+it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing
+as I have in these pages preached it.  What such audiences most need is
+that their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that the
+northwest wind of science should get into them and blow their
+sickliness and barbarism away.  But academic audiences, fed already on
+science, have a very different need.  Paralysis of their native
+capacity for faith and timorous _abulia_ in the religious field are
+their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion,
+carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence
+by {xi} waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in
+regard to truth.  But there is really no scientific or other method by
+which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing
+too little or of believing too much.  To face such dangers is
+apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the
+measure of our wisdom as men.  It does not follow, because recklessness
+may be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached to
+them.  What _should_ be preached is courage weighted with
+responsibility,--such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons never
+failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might
+tell against their success, and made every provision to minimize
+disaster in case they met defeat.  I do not think that any one can
+accuse me of preaching reckless faith.  I have preached the right of
+the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk.  I
+have discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of us
+escape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to face
+them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there.
+
+After all, though, you will say, Why such an ado about a matter
+concerning which, however we may theoretically differ, we all
+practically agree?  In this age of toleration, no scientist will ever
+try actively to interfere with our religious faith, provided we enjoy
+it quietly with our friends and do not make a public nuisance of it in
+the market-place.  But it is just on this matter of the market-place
+that I think the utility of such essays as mine may turn.  If {xii}
+religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the
+active faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in
+life, are the experimental tests by which they are verified, and the
+only means by which their truth or falsehood can be wrought out.  The
+truest scientific hypothesis is that which, as we say, 'works' best;
+and it can be no otherwise with religious hypotheses.  Religious
+history proves that one hypothesis after another has worked ill, has
+crumbled at contact with a widening knowledge of the world, and has
+lapsed from the minds of men.  Some articles of faith, however, have
+maintained themselves through every vicissitude, and possess even more
+vitality to-day than ever before: it is for the 'science of religions'
+to tell us just which hypotheses these are.  Meanwhile the freest
+competition of the various faiths with one another, and their openest
+application to life by their several champions, are the most favorable
+conditions under which the survival of the fittest can proceed.  They
+ought therefore not to lie hid each under its bushel, indulged-in
+quietly with friends.  They ought to live in publicity, vying with each
+other; and it seems to me that (the regime of tolerance once granted,
+and a fair field shown) the scientist has nothing to fear for his own
+interests from the liveliest possible state of fermentation in the
+religious world of his time.  Those faiths will best stand the test
+which adopt also his hypotheses, and make them integral elements of
+their own.  He should welcome therefore every species of religious
+agitation and discussion, so long as he is willing to allow that some
+religious hypothesis _may_ be {xiii} true.  Of course there are plenty
+of scientists who would deny that dogmatically, maintaining that
+science has already ruled all possible religious hypotheses out of
+court.  Such scientists ought, I agree, to aim at imposing privacy on
+religious faiths, the public manifestation of which could only be a
+nuisance in their eyes.  With all such scientists, as well as with
+their allies outside of science, my quarrel openly lies; and I hope
+that my book may do something to persuade the reader of their crudity,
+and range him on my side.  Religious fermentation is always a symptom
+of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget
+that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative
+pretensions, that our faiths do harm.  The most interesting and
+valuable things about a man are his ideals and over-beliefs.  The same
+is true of nations and historic epochs; and the excesses of which the
+particular individuals and epochs are guilty are compensated in the
+total, and become profitable to mankind in the long run.
+
+The essay 'On some Hegelisms' doubtless needs an apology for the
+superficiality with which it treats a serious subject.  It was written
+as a squib, to be read in a college-seminary in Hegel's logic, several
+of whose members, mature men, were devout champions of the dialectical
+method.  My blows therefore were aimed almost entirely at that.  I
+reprint the paper here (albeit with some misgivings), partly because I
+believe the dialectical method to be wholly abominable when worked by
+concepts alone, and partly because the essay casts some positive light
+on the pluralist-empiricist point of view.
+
+{xiv}
+
+The paper on Psychical Research is added to the volume for convenience
+and utility.  Attracted to this study some years ago by my love of
+sportsmanlike fair play in science, I have seen enough to convince me
+of its great importance, and I wish to gain for it what interest I can.
+The American Branch of the Society is in need of more support, and if
+my article draws some new associates thereto, it will have served its
+turn.
+
+Apology is also needed for the repetition of the same passage in two
+essays (pp. 59-61 and 96-7, 100-1).  My excuse is that one cannot
+always express the same thought in two ways that seem equally forcible,
+so one has to copy one's former words.
+
+The Crillon-quotation on page 62 is due to Mr. W. M. Salter (who
+employed it in a similar manner in the 'Index' for August 24, 1882),
+and the dream-metaphor on p. 174 is a reminiscence from some novel of
+George Sand's--I forget which--read by me thirty years ago.
+
+Finally, the revision of the essays has consisted almost entirely in
+excisions.  Probably less than a page and a half in all of new matter
+has been added.
+
+
+HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
+  CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,
+    December, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+[1] B. P. Blood: The Flaw in Supremacy: Published by the Author,
+Amsterdam, N. Y., 1893.
+
+
+
+
+{x}
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                                                 PAGE
+
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1
+
+  Hypotheses and options, 1.  Pascal's wager, 5.  Clifford's
+  veto, 8.  Psychological causes of belief, 9.  Thesis of the
+  Essay, 11.  Empiricism and absolutism, 12.  Objective certitude
+  and its unattainability, 13. Two different sorts of risks in
+  believing, 17.  Some risk unavoidable, 19.  Faith may bring
+  forth its own verification, 22.  Logical conditions of religious
+  belief, 25.
+
+
+IS LIFE WORTH LIVING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   32
+
+  Temperamental Optimism and Pessimism, 33.  How reconcile
+  with life one bent on suicide? 38.  Religious melancholy and its
+  cure, 39.  Decay of Natural Theology, 43.  Instinctive antidotes
+  to pessimism, 46.  Religion involves belief in an unseen
+  extension of the world, 51.  Scientific positivism, 52.  Doubt
+  actuates conduct as much as belief does, 54.  To deny certain
+  faiths is logically absurd, for they make their objects true, 56.
+  Conclusion, 6l.
+
+
+THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   63
+
+  Rationality means fluent thinking, 63.  Simplification, 65.
+  Clearness, 66.  Their antagonism, 66.  Inadequacy of the
+  abstract, 68.  The thought of nonentity, 71.  Mysticism, 74.  Pure
+  theory cannot banish wonder, 75.  The passage to practice may
+  restore the feeling of rationality, 75.  Familiarity and
+  expectancy, 76.  'Substance,' 80.  A rational world must appear
+
+{xvi}
+
+  congruous with our powers, 82.  But these differ from man to
+  man, 88.  Faith is one of them, 90.  Inseparable from doubt, 95.
+  May verify itself, 96.  Its role in ethics, 98.  Optimism and
+  pessimism, 101.  Is this a moral universe?--what does the problem
+  mean? 103.  Anaesthesia _versus_ energy, 107.  Active assumption
+  necessary, 107.  Conclusion, 110.
+
+
+REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  111
+
+  Prestige of Physiology, 112.  Plan of neural action, 113.  God
+  the mind's adequate object, 116.  Contrast between world as
+  perceived and as conceived, 118.  God, 120.  The mind's three
+  departments, 123.  Science due to a subjective demand, 129.
+  Theism a mean between two extremes, 134.  Gnosticism, 137.
+  No intellection except for practical ends, 140.  Conclusion, 142.
+
+
+
+THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  145
+
+  Philosophies seek a rational world, 146.  Determinism and
+  Indeterminism defined, 149.  Both are postulates of rationality,
+  152.  Objections to chance considered, 153.  Determinism
+  involves pessimism, 159.  Escape _via_ Subjectivism, 164.
+  Subjectivism leads to corruption, 170.  A world with chance in
+  it is morally the less irrational alternative, 176.  Chance not
+  incompatible with an ultimate Providence, 180.
+
+
+THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . .  184
+
+  The moral philosopher postulates a unified system, 185.
+  Origin of moral judgments, 185.  Goods and ills are created by
+  judgment?, 189.  Obligations are created by demands, 192.  The
+  conflict of ideals, 198.  Its solution, 205.  Impossibility of an
+  abstract system of Ethics, 208.  The easy-going and the
+  strenuous mood, 211.  Connection between Ethics and Religion, 212.
+
+
+GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  216
+
+  Solidarity of causes in the world, 216.  The human mind abstracts
+  in order to explain, 219.  Different cycles of operation in
+  Nature, 220.  Darwin's distinction between causes that produce
+  and causes that preserve a variation, 221.  Physiological causes
+  produce, the environment only adopts or preserves, great men,
+  225.  When adopted they become social ferments, 226.  Messrs.
+
+{xvii}
+
+  Spencer and Allen criticised, 232.  Messrs. Wallace and
+  Gryzanowski quoted, 239.  The laws of history, 244.  Mental
+  evolution, 245.  Analogy between original ideas and Darwin's
+  accidental variations, 247.  Criticism of Spencer's views, 251.
+
+
+THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  255
+
+  Small differences may be important, 256.  Individual
+  differences are important because they are the causes of social
+  change, 259.  Hero-worship justified, 261.
+
+
+ON SOME HEGELISMS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  263
+
+  The world appears as a pluralism, 264.  Elements of unity in
+  the pluralism, 268.  Hegel's excessive claims, 273.  He makes of
+  negation a bond of union, 273.  The principle of totality, 277.
+  Monism and pluralism, 279.  The fallacy of accident in Hegel,
+  280.  The good and the bad infinite, 284.  Negation, 286.
+  Conclusion, 292.--Note on the Anaesthetic revelation, 294.
+
+
+WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED . . . . . . . . . . . .  299
+
+  The unclassified residuum, 299.  The Society for Psychical
+  Research and its history, 303.  Thought-transference, 308.
+  Gurney's work, 309.  The census of hallucinations, 312.
+  Mediumship, 313.  The 'subliminal self,' 315.  'Science' and her
+  counter-presumptions, 317.  The scientific character of
+  Mr. Myers's work, 320.  The mechanical-impersonal view of life
+  versus the personal-romantic view, 324.
+
+
+INDEX  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  329
+
+
+
+
+{1}
+
+ESSAYS
+
+IN
+
+POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.
+
+
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE.[1]
+
+In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of his brother,
+Fitz-James, there is an account of a school to which the latter went
+when he was a boy.  The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse
+with his pupils in this wise: "Gurney, what is the difference between
+justification and sanctification?--Stephen, prove the omnipotence of
+God!" etc.  In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifference
+we are prone to imagine that here at your good old orthodox College
+conversation continues to be somewhat upon this order; and to show you
+that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects,
+I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon on
+justification by faith to read to you,--I mean an essay in
+justification _of_ faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing
+attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely
+logical {2} intellect may not have been coerced.  'The Will to
+Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper.
+
+I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily
+adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the
+logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to
+be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were
+personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves.
+I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own
+position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a good
+occasion to make my statements more clear.  Perhaps your minds will be
+more open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal.  I will be
+as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up some
+technical distinctions that will help us in the end.
+
+
+I.
+
+Let us give the name of _hypothesis_ to anything that may be proposed
+to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead
+wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either _live_ or _dead_.  A
+live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to
+whom it is proposed.  If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion
+makes no electric connection with your nature,--it refuses to
+scintillate with any credibility at all.  As an hypothesis it is
+completely dead.  To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the
+Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities:
+it is alive.  This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis
+are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the {3} individual
+thinker.  They are measured by his willingness to act.  The maximum of
+liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably.
+Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency
+wherever there is willingness to act at all.
+
+Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an _option_.
+Options may be of several kinds.  They may be--1, _living_ or _dead_;
+2, _forced_ or _avoidable_; 3, _momentous_ or _trivial_; and for our
+purposes we may call an option a _genuine_ option when it is of the
+forced, living, and momentous kind.
+
+1.  A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones.  If
+I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a
+dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive.
+But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise:
+trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small,
+to your belief.
+
+2.  Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella
+or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not
+forced.  You can easily avoid it by not going out at all.  Similarly,
+if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or
+call it false," your option is avoidable.  You may remain indifferent
+to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any
+judgment as to my theory.  But if I say, "Either accept this truth or
+go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing
+place outside of the alternative.  Every dilemma based on a complete
+logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option
+of this forced kind.
+
+{4}
+
+3.  Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North
+Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would
+probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would
+either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether
+or put at least the chance of it into your hands.  He who refuses to
+embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried
+and failed.  _Per contra_, the option is trivial when the opportunity
+is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is
+reversible if it later prove unwise.  Such trivial options abound in
+the scientific life.  A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to
+spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent.
+But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for
+his loss of time, no vital harm being done.
+
+It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions
+well in mind.
+
+
+II.
+
+The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion.
+When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and
+volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions.  When we look
+at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had
+once said its say.  Let us take the latter facts up first.
+
+Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our
+opinions being modifiable at will?  Can our will either help or hinder
+our intellect in its perceptions of truth?  Can we, by just willing it,
+believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, {5} and that the
+portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else?  Can
+we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were
+true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with
+rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar
+bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars?  We can say any of these
+things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just
+such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in
+made up,--matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and
+relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if
+we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any
+action of our own.
+
+In Pascal's Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known in literature
+as Pascal's wager.  In it he tries to force us into Christianity by
+reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with the
+stakes in a game of chance.  Translated freely his words are these: You
+must either believe or not believe that God is--which will you do?
+Your human reason cannot say.  A game is going on between you and the
+nature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out either
+heads or tails.  Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if you
+should stake all you have on heads, or God's existence: if you win in
+such case, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at
+all.  If there were an infinity of chances, and only one for God in
+this wager, still you ought to stake your all on God; for though you
+surely risk a finite loss by this procedure, any finite loss is
+reasonable, even a certain one is reasonable, if there is but the
+possibility of {6} infinite gain.  Go, then, and take holy water, and
+have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples,--_Cela
+vous fera croire et vous abetira_.  Why should you not?  At bottom,
+what have you to lose?
+
+You probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in
+the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps.  Surely
+Pascal's own personal belief in masses and holy water had far other
+springs; and this celebrated page of his is but an argument for others,
+a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the
+unbelieving heart.  We feel that a faith in masses and holy water
+adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the
+inner soul of faith's reality; and if we were ourselves in the place of
+the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off
+believers of this pattern from their infinite reward.  It is evident
+that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses
+and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a
+living option.  Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water on
+its account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seem
+such foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for them
+specifically, leaves us unmoved.  As well might the Mahdi write to us,
+saying, "I am the Expected One whom God has created in his effulgence.
+You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me; otherwise you shall be
+cut off from the light of the sun.  Weigh, then, your infinite gain if
+I am genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not!"  His logic
+would be that of Pascal; but he would vainly use it on us, for the
+hypothesis he offers us is dead.  No tendency to act on it exists in us
+to any degree.
+
+{7}
+
+The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of
+view, simply silly.  From another point of view it is worse than silly,
+it is vile.  When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical
+sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested
+moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience
+and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to
+the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar;
+how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,--then how
+besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes
+blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things
+from out of his private dream!  Can we wonder if those bred in the
+rugged and manly school of science should feel like spewing such
+subjectivism out of their mouths?  The whole system of loyalties which
+grow up in the schools of science go dead against its toleration; so
+that it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fever
+should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if the
+incorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness
+and unacceptableness to the heart in its cup.
+
+  It fortifies my soul to know
+  That, though I perish, Truth is so--
+
+sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: "My only consolation lies in the
+reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they
+hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no
+reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend
+[the word 'pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have
+reached the {8} lowest depth of immorality."  And that delicious
+_enfant terrible_ Clifford writes; "Belief is desecrated when given to
+unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private
+pleasure of the believer,...  Whoso would deserve well of his fellows
+in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very
+fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an
+unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away....
+If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though
+the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the pleasure
+is a stolen one....  It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of
+our duty to mankind.  That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs
+as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then
+spread to the rest of the town....  It is wrong always, everywhere, and
+for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
+
+
+III.
+
+All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by Clifford,
+with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the voice.  Free-will
+and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only
+fifth wheels to the coach.  Yet if any one should thereupon assume that
+intellectual insight is what remains after wish and will and
+sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what
+then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth
+of the facts.
+
+It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature is
+unable to bring to life again  But what has made them dead for us is
+for the most part {9} a previous action of our willing nature of an
+antagonistic kind.  When I say 'willing nature,' I do not mean only
+such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we
+cannot now escape from,--I mean all such factors of belief as fear and
+hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the
+circumpressure of our caste and set.  As a matter of fact we find
+ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why.  Mr. Balfour gives the
+name of 'authority' to all those influences, born of the intellectual
+climate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or
+dead.  Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the
+conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in
+Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of
+the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name.  We see
+into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much
+less, than any disbeliever in them might possess.  His
+unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its
+conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the _prestige_ of the
+opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our
+sleeping magazines of faith.  Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine
+hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can
+find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is
+criticised by some one else.  Our faith is faith in some one else's
+faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.  Our belief
+in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our
+minds and it are made for each other,--what is it but a passionate
+affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?  We want
+to have a truth; we want to believe that our {10} experiments and
+studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better
+position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our
+thinking lives.  But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us _how we know_
+all this, can our logic find a reply?  No! certainly it cannot.  It is
+just one volition against another,--we willing to go in for life upon a
+trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.[2]
+
+As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no
+use.  Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings.
+Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism
+in his scheme of life.  Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism,
+and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because a
+priestly system is for him an organic need and delight.  Why do so few
+'scientists' even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called?
+Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me,
+that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together
+to keep it suppressed and concealed.  It would undo the uniformity of
+Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot
+carry on their pursuits.  But if this very man had been shown something
+which as a scientist he might _do_ with telepathy, he might not only
+have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough.  This
+very law which the logicians would impose upon us--if I may give the
+name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature
+here--is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all
+elements for {11} which they, in their professional quality of
+logicians, can find no use.
+
+Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our
+convictions.  There are passional tendencies and volitions which run
+before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter
+that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the
+previous passional work has been already in their own direction.
+Pascal's argument, instead of being powerless, then seems a regular
+clincher, and is the last stroke needed to make our faith in masses and
+holy water complete.  The state of things is evidently far from simple;
+and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the
+only things that really do produce our creeds.
+
+
+IV.
+
+Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to
+ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, on
+the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our
+minds.  The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this:  _Our passional
+nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between
+propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature
+be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such
+circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself
+a passional decision,--just like deciding yes or no,--and is attended
+with the same risk of losing the truth_.  The thesis thus abstractly
+expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear.  But I must first
+indulge in a bit more of preliminary work.
+
+
+{12}
+
+V.
+
+It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion we are on
+'dogmatic' ground,--ground, I mean, which leaves systematic
+philosophical scepticism altogether out of account.  The postulate that
+there is truth, and that it is the destiny of our minds to attain it,
+we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make
+it.  We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point.
+But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be
+held in two ways.  We may talk of the _empiricist_ way and of the
+_absolutist_ way of believing in truth.  The absolutists in this matter
+say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can _know
+when_ we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that
+although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when.  To _know_
+is one thing, and to know for certain _that_ we know is another.  One
+may hold to the first being possible without the second; hence the
+empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic
+in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees
+of dogmatism in their lives.
+
+If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist
+tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the
+absolutist tendency has had everything its own way.  The characteristic
+sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainly
+consisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or system
+that by it bottom-certitude had been attained.  "Other philosophies are
+collections of opinions, mostly false; _my_ philosophy {13} gives
+standing-ground forever,"--who does not recognize in this the key-note
+of every system worthy of the name?  A system, to be a system at all,
+must come as a _closed_ system, reversible in this or that detail,
+perchance, but in its essential features never!
+
+Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go when one wishes to
+find perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elaborated this
+absolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that of 'objective
+evidence.'  If, for example, I am unable to doubt that I now exist
+before you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortal
+then I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my intellect
+irresistibly.  The final ground of this objective evidence possessed by
+certain propositions is the _adaequatio intellectus nostri cum re_.
+The certitude it brings involves an _aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum
+assensum_ on the part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the
+subject a _quietem in cognitione_, when once the object is mentally
+received, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and in the whole
+transaction nothing operates but the _entitas ipsa_ of the object and
+the _entitas ipsa_ of the mind.  We slouchy modern thinkers dislike to
+talk in Latin,--indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at
+bottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever we
+uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, and
+I do.  Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know
+that we do know.  There is something that gives a click inside of us, a
+bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept
+the dial and meet over the meridian hour.  The greatest empiricists
+among us are only empiricists on reflection: when {14} left to their
+instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.  When the Cliffords
+tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficient
+evidence,' insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind.
+For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other
+way.  They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the
+universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead
+hypothesis from the start.
+
+
+VI.
+
+But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in our
+quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact?  Shall
+we espouse and indorse it?  Or shall we treat it as a weakness of our
+nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can?
+
+I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can
+follow as reflective men.  Objective evidence and certitude are
+doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and
+dream-visited planet are they found?  I am, therefore, myself a
+complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes.  I
+live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on
+experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our
+opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them--I absolutely do
+not care which--as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible,
+I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the
+whole history of philosophy will bear me out.  There is but one
+indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic
+scepticism itself leaves {15} standing,--the truth that the present
+phenomenon of consciousness exists.  That, however, is the bare
+starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be
+philosophized about.  The various philosophies are but so many attempts
+at expressing what this stuff really is.  And if we repair to our
+libraries what disagreement do we discover!  Where is a certainly true
+answer found?  Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as
+two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing
+by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever
+regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been
+called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by
+some one else.  The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play
+but in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as Zoellner and
+Charles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logic
+by the Hegelians, are striking instances in point.
+
+No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.
+Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting
+it either in revelation, the _consensus gentium_, the instincts of the
+heart, or the systematized experience of the race.  Others make the
+perceptive moment its own test,--Descartes, for instance, with his
+clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid with
+his 'common-sense;' and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment _a
+priori_.  The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to be
+verified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity or
+self-relation, realized when a thing is its own other,--are standards
+which, in turn, have been used.  The much {16} lauded objective
+evidence is never triumphantly there, it is a mere aspiration or
+_Grenzbegriff_, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking
+life.  To claim that certain truths now possess it, is simply to say
+that when you think them true and they _are_ true, then their evidence
+is objective, otherwise it is not.  But practically one's conviction
+that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only
+one more subjective opinion added to the lot.  For what a contradictory
+array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been
+claimed!  The world is rational through and through,--its existence is
+an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God,--a personal God is
+inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately
+known,--the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative
+exists,--obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent
+spiritual principle is in every one,--there are only shifting states of
+mind; there is an endless chain of causes,--there is an absolute first
+cause; an eternal necessity,--a freedom; a purpose,--no purpose; a
+primal One,--a primal Many; a universal continuity,--an essential
+discontinuity in things; an infinity,--no infinity.  There is
+this,--there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not
+thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false;
+and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the
+trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even
+with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for
+knowing whether it be truth or no.  When, indeed, one remembers that
+the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of
+objective certitude has been {17} the conscientious labors of the Holy
+Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the
+doctrine a respectful ear.
+
+But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the
+doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or
+hope of truth itself.  We still pin our faith on its existence, and
+still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by
+systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think.  Our great
+difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face.  The strength
+of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the _terminus a quo_
+of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the
+_terminus ad quem_.  Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to
+decide.  It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an
+hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by
+foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the
+total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means
+by its being true.
+
+
+VII.
+
+One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done.
+There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of
+opinion,--ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference
+the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little
+concern.  _We must know the truth_; and _we must avoid error_,--these
+are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are
+not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two
+separable laws.  Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the
+truth _A_, we escape {18} as an incidental consequence from believing
+the falsehood _B_, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving
+_B_ we necessarily believe _A_.  We may in escaping _B_ fall into
+believing other falsehoods, _C_ or _D_, just as bad as _B_; or we may
+escape _B_ by not believing anything at all, not even _A_.
+
+Believe truth!  Shun error!--these, we see, are two materially
+different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring
+differently our whole intellectual life.  We may regard the chase for
+truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may,
+on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and
+let truth take its chance.  Clifford, in the instructive passage which
+I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course.  Believe nothing, he
+tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it
+on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.  You,
+on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very
+small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be
+ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone
+indefinitely the chance of guessing true.  I myself find it impossible
+to go with Clifford.  We must remember that these feelings of our duty
+about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our
+passional life.  Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to
+grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, "Better go without
+belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant
+private horror of becoming a dupe.  He may be critical of many of his
+desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys.  He cannot imagine
+any one questioning its binding force.  For my own part, I {19} have
+also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than
+being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's
+exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound.  It is like a
+general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle
+forever than to risk a single wound.  Not so are victories either over
+enemies or over nature gained.  Our errors are surely not such awfully
+solemn things.  In a world where we are so certain to incur them in
+spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier
+than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.  At any rate, it seems
+the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.
+
+
+VIII.
+
+And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight at our
+question.  I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a matter of
+fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions,
+but that there are some options between opinions in which this
+influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful
+determinant of our choice.
+
+I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, and
+lend an inhospitable ear.  Two first steps of passion you have indeed
+had to admit as necessary,--we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we
+must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal
+consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take
+no further passional step.
+
+Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow.  Wherever the
+option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can
+throw the {20} chance of _gaining truth_ away, and at any rate save
+ourselves from any chance of _believing falsehood_, by not making up
+our minds at all till objective evidence has come.  In scientific
+questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in
+general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to
+act on is better than no belief at all.  Law courts, indeed, have to
+decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a
+judge's duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a
+learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time
+over: the great thing is to have them decided on _any_ acceptable
+principle, and got out of the way.  But in our dealings with objective
+nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and
+decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the
+next business would be wholly out of place.  Throughout the breadth of
+physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and
+seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped
+by believing a premature theory need be faced.  The questions here are
+always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate
+not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or
+falsehood is seldom forced.  The attitude of sceptical balance is
+therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes.  What
+difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or have
+not a theory of the Roentgen rays, whether we believe or not in
+mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious
+states?  It makes no difference.  Such options are not forced on us.
+On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing
+reasons _pro et contra_ with an indifferent hand.
+
+{21}
+
+I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind.  For purposes of
+discovery such 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.  See for example the sagacity which Spencer and
+Weismann now display.  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.  The most useful investigator, because the most
+sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of
+the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become
+deceived.[3]  Science has organized this nervousness into a regular
+_technique_, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen
+so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased
+to care for truth by itself at all.  It is only truth as technically
+verified that interests her.  The truth of truths might come in merely
+affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it.  Such truth as
+that, she might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of
+her duty to mankind.  Human passions, however, are stronger than
+technical rules.  "Le coeur a ses raisons," as Pascal says, "que la
+raison ne connait pas;" and however indifferent to all but the bare
+rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the
+concrete players who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually,
+each one of them, in love with some pet 'live hypothesis' of his own.
+Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the
+{22} dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving
+us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.
+
+The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in our
+speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at
+least as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery)
+always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have
+arrived?  It seems _a priori_ improbable that the truth should be so
+nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that.  In the great
+boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom
+come out so even and leave the plates so clean.  Indeed, we should view
+them with scientific suspicion if they did.
+
+
+IX.
+
+_Moral questions_ immediately present themselves as questions whose
+solution cannot wait for sensible proof.  A moral question is a
+question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be
+good if it did exist.  Science can tell us what exists; but to compare
+the _worths_, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must
+consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.  Science herself
+consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite
+ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme
+goods for man.  Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it
+oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and
+correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn
+declares.  The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having
+them is decided by {23} our will.  Are our moral preferences true or
+false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or
+bad for _us_, but in themselves indifferent?  How can your pure
+intellect decide?  If your heart does not _want_ a world of moral
+reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.
+Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head's
+play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can.  Some men
+(even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the
+moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their
+supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill
+at ease.  The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naivete
+and gullibility on his.  Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he
+clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which
+(as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no
+better than the cunning of a fox.  Moral scepticism can no more be
+refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can.  When we
+stick to it that there _is_ truth (be it of either kind), we do so with
+our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results.  The
+sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which
+of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.
+
+Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain 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 {24} 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
+absolutists 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.
+
+A social organism 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 any one else backs him
+up.  If we believed that the whole car-full would rise {25} at once
+with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never
+even be attempted.  There are, then, cases 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 should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the
+'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking being can fall.  Yet
+such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to
+regulate our lives!
+
+
+X.
+
+In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire
+is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.
+
+But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have
+nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question of
+religious faith.  Let us then pass on to that.  Religions differ so
+much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we
+must make it very generic and broad.  What then do we now mean by the
+religious hypothesis?  Science says things are; morality says some
+things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two
+things.
+
+First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the
+overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last
+stone, so to speak, and say the final word.  "Perfection is
+eternal,"--this phrase of Charles Secretan seems a good way of putting
+this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously
+cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.
+
+{26}
+
+The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now
+if we believe her first affirmation to be true.
+
+Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are
+_in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true_.
+(Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset.  If we are to
+discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option.  If for
+any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living
+possibility be true, then you need go no farther.  I speak to the
+'saving remnant' alone.)  So proceeding, we see, first, that religion
+offers itself as a _momentous_ option.  We are supposed to gain, even
+now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital
+good.  Secondly, religion is a _forced_ option, so far as that good
+goes.  We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting
+for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way _if
+religion be untrue_, we lose the good, _if it be true_, just as
+certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.  It is as if a man
+should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him
+because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after
+he brought her home.  Would he not cut himself off from that particular
+angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one
+else?  Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a
+certain particular kind of risk.  _Better risk loss of truth than
+chance of error_,--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position.  He is
+actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing
+the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is
+backing the religious hypothesis against the field.  To preach
+scepticism to us as a duty until {27} 'sufficient evidence' for
+religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in
+presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its
+being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may
+be true.  It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only
+intellect with one passion laying down its law.  And by what, forsooth,
+is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted?  Dupery for dupery,
+what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than
+dupery through fear?  I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse
+obedience to the scientist's command to imitate his kind of option, in
+a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to
+choose my own form of risk.  If religion be true and the evidence for
+it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher
+upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business
+in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the
+winning side,--that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to
+run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world
+religiously might be prophetic and right.
+
+All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and
+right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is
+a live hypothesis which may be true.  Now, to most of us religion comes
+in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more
+illogical.  The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is
+represented in our religions as having 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
+{28} 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 centres 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 from us 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,
+forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that
+there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our
+logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we
+can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis.  If
+the hypothesis _were_ true in all its parts, including this one, then
+pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances,
+would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature
+would be logically required.  I, therefore, for one cannot see my way
+to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to
+keep my willing nature out of the game.  I cannot do so for this plain
+reason, that _a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from
+acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were
+really there, would be an irrational rule_.  That for me {29} is the
+long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the
+kinds of truth might materially be.
+
+
+I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped.  But sad
+experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from
+radically saying with me, _in abstracto_, that we have the right to
+believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our
+will.  I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is because you have
+got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are
+thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious
+hypothesis which for you is dead.  The freedom to 'believe what we
+will' you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith
+you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, "Faith
+is when you believe something that you know ain't true."  I can only
+repeat that this is misapprehension.  _In concreto_, the freedom to
+believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the
+individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem
+absurdities to him who has them to consider.  When I look at the
+religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I
+think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically
+it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our
+heart, instincts, and courage, and wait--acting of course meanwhile
+more or less as if religion were _not_ true[4]--till {30} doomsday, or
+till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have
+raked in evidence enough,--this command, I say, seems to me the
+queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave.  Were we
+scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse.  If we had an
+infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel
+ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting
+to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word.  But if we
+are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know
+for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle
+fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell.
+Indeed we _may_ wait if we will,--I hope you do not think that I am
+denying that,--but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we
+believed.  In either case we _act_, taking our life in our hands.  No
+one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words
+of abuse.  We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to
+respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about
+the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner
+tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which
+is empiricism's glory; then only shall we live and let live, in
+speculative as well as in practical things.
+
+I began by a reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation
+from him.  "What do you think {31} of yourself?  What do you think of
+the world?...  These are questions with which all must deal as it seems
+good to them.  They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other
+we must deal with them....  In all important transactions of life we
+have to take a leap in the dark....  If we decide to leave the riddles
+unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is
+a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril.  If a
+man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one
+can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is
+mistaken.  If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not
+see that any one can prove that _he_ is mistaken.  Each must act as he
+thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him.  We stand
+on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist,
+through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be
+deceptive.  If we stand still we shall be frozen to death.  If we take
+the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces.  We do not certainly know
+whether there is any right one.  What must we do?  'Be strong and of a
+good courage.'  Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what
+comes....  If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."[5]
+
+
+[1] An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown
+Universities.  Published in the New World, June, 1896.
+
+[2] Compare the admirable page 310 in S. H. Hodgson's "Time and Space,"
+London, 1865.
+
+[3] Compare Wilfrid Ward's Essay, "The Wish to Believe," in his
+_Witnesses to the Unseen_, Macmillan & Co., 1893.
+
+[4] Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe
+religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if
+we did believe it to be true.  The whole defence of religious faith
+hinges upon action.  If the action required or inspired by the
+religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the
+naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity,
+better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of
+idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds.  I myself believe, of course,
+that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which
+specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part
+unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief.
+
+[5] Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 353, 2d edition.  London, 1874.
+
+
+
+
+{32}
+
+IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?[1]
+
+When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some fifteen years
+ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the _liver_" had great
+currency in the newspapers.  The answer which I propose to give
+to-night cannot be jocose.  In the words of one of Shakespeare's
+prologues,--
+
+  "I come no more to make you laugh; things now,
+  That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
+  Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"--
+
+must be my theme.  In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner
+in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not
+what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those
+whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the
+surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you
+heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests
+and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness.
+Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in
+turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder
+bass-note of life.  Let us search the lonely depths for an hour
+together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things
+our question may find.
+
+{33}
+
+I.
+
+With many men the question of life's worth is answered by a
+temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that
+anything seriously evil can exist.  Our dear old Walt Whitman's works
+are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism.  The mere joy of
+living is so immense in Walt Whitman's veins that it abolishes the
+possibility of any other kind of feeling:--
+
+  "To breathe the air, how delicious!
+  To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand!...
+  To be this incredible God I am!...
+  O amazement of things, even the least particle!
+  O spirituality of things!
+  I too carol the Sun, usher'd or at noon, or as now, setting;
+  I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the
+    growths of the earth....
+
+  I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old,
+  I sing the endless finales of things,
+  I say Nature continues--glory continues.
+  I praise with electric voice,
+  For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
+  And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last."
+
+So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing
+but his happiness to tell:--
+
+
+"How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted
+only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of
+felicity itself!  I rose with the sun, and I was happy; I went to walk,
+and I was happy; I saw 'Maman,' and I was happy; I left her, and I was
+happy.  I rambled through the woods and over the vine-slopes, I
+wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I {34} worked in the
+garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and
+happiness followed me everywhere.  It was in no one assignable thing;
+it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant."
+
+
+If moods like this could be made permanent, and constitutions like
+these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses
+as the present one.  No philosopher would seek to prove articulately
+that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would
+vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the
+question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply.  But we
+are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and
+alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning
+life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them
+a standing refutation.  In what is called 'circular insanity,' phases
+of melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that we
+can discover; and often enough to one and the same well person life
+will present incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness
+to-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical
+books used to call "the concoction of the humors."  In the words of the
+newspaper joke, "it depends on the liver."  Rousseau's ill-balanced
+constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days
+a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear.  Some
+men seem launched upon the world even from their birth with souls as
+incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman's was of gloom, and they have
+left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his,--the
+exquisite Leopardi, for example; or our own contemporary, {35} James
+Thomson, in that pathetic book, The City of Dreadful Night, which I
+think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty,
+simply because men are afraid to quote its words,--they are so gloomy,
+and at the same time so sincere.  In one place the poet describes a
+congregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unillumined
+cathedral at night.  The sermon is too long to quote, but it ends
+thus:--
+
+  "'O Brothers of sad lives! they are so brief;
+  A few short years must bring us all relief:
+   Can we not bear these years of laboring breath.
+  But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
+  Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
+   Without the fear of waking after death.'--
+
+  "The organ-like vibrations of his voice
+   Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away;
+  The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice
+   Was sad and tender as a requiem lay:
+  Our shadowy congregation rested still,
+  As brooding on that 'End it when you will.'
+
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+  "Our shadowy congregation rested still,
+   As musing on that message we had heard,
+  And brooding on that 'End it when you will,'
+   Perchance awaiting yet some other word;
+  When keen as lightning through a muffled sky
+  Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry;--
+
+  "'The man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth:
+   We have no personal life beyond the grave;
+  There is no God; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth:
+   Can I find here the comfort which I crave?
+
+  "'In all eternity I had one chance,
+   One few years' term of gracious human life,--
+  The splendors of the intellect's advance,
+   The sweetness of the home with babes and wife;
+
+{36}
+
+  "'The social pleasures with their genial wit;
+   The fascination of the worlds of art;
+  The glories of the worlds of Nature lit
+   By large imagination's glowing heart;
+
+  "'The rapture of mere being, full of health;
+   The careless childhood and the ardent youth;
+  The strenuous manhood winning various wealth,
+   The reverend age serene with life's long truth;
+
+  "'All the sublime prerogatives of Man;
+   The storied memories of the times of old,
+  The patient tracking of the world's great plan
+   Through sequences and changes myriadfold.
+
+  "'This chance was never offered me before;
+   For me the infinite past is blank and dumb;
+  This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
+   Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.
+
+  "'And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
+   A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
+  Of noble human life upon this earth
+   So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.
+
+  "'My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,
+   My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
+  I worse than lose the years which are my all:
+   What can console me for the loss supreme?
+
+  "'Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
+   Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair!
+  Our life 's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
+   Hush, and be mute, envisaging despair.'
+
+  "This vehement voice came from the northern aisle,
+   Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close;
+  And none gave answer for a certain while,
+   For words must shrink from these most wordless woes;
+  At last the pulpit speaker simply said,
+  With humid eyes and thoughtful, drooping head,--
+
+{37}
+
+  "'My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus:
+  This life holds nothing good for us,
+   But it ends soon and nevermore can be;
+  And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
+  And shall know nothing when consigned to earth;
+   I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.'"
+
+
+"It ends soon, and never more can be," "Lo, you are free to end it when
+you will,"--these verses flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson's
+pen, and are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the
+world is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain
+of delight.  That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides
+declare,--an army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the
+British army, follows the sun round the world and never terminates.
+We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must 'ponder these things'
+also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life
+is the life we share.  The plainest intellectual integrity,--nay, more,
+the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case.
+
+
+"If suddenly," says Mr. Ruskin, "in the midst of the enjoyments of the
+palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of
+the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings
+who were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the
+company feasting and fancy free; if, pale from death, horrible in
+destitution, broken by despair, body by body they were laid upon the
+soft carpet, one beside the chair of every guest,--would only the
+crumbs of the dainties be cast to them; would only a passing glance, a
+passing thought, be vouchsafed to them?  Yet the actual facts, the real
+relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the {38}
+intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-bed,--by
+the few feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate
+the merriment from the misery."
+
+
+II.
+
+To come immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is
+to imagine ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such
+terms with life that the only comfort left him is to brood on the
+assurance, "You may end it when you will."  What reasons can we plead
+that may render such a brother (or sister) willing to take up the
+burden again?  Ordinary Christians, reasoning with would-be suicides,
+have little to offer them beyond the usual negative, "Thou shalt not."
+God alone is master of life and death, they say, and it is a
+blasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand.  But can _we_ find
+nothing richer or more positive than this, no reflections to urge
+whereby the suicide may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel,
+that in spite of adverse appearances even for him life is still worth
+living?  There are suicides and suicides (in the United States about
+three thousand of them every year), and I must frankly confess that
+with perhaps the majority of these my suggestions are impotent to deal.
+Where suicide is the result of insanity or sudden frenzied impulse,
+reflection is impotent to arrest its headway; and cases like these
+belong to the ultimate mystery of evil, concerning which I can only
+offer considerations tending toward religious patience at the end of
+this hour.  My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my
+words are to deal only with that metaphysical _tedium vitae_ which is
+peculiar to {39} reflecting men.  Most of you are devoted, for good or
+ill, to the reflective life.  Many of you are students of philosophy,
+and have already felt in your own persons the scepticism and unreality
+that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed.
+This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career.
+Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost
+as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the
+bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of
+life.  But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further
+reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholy
+and _Weltschmerz_ bred of reflection that I now proceed to speak.
+
+Let me say, immediately, that my final appeal is to nothing more
+recondite than religious faith.  So far as my argument is to be
+destructive, it will consist in nothing more than the sweeping away of
+certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith
+compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive, it will consist in
+holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let
+loose these springs in a normal, natural way.  Pessimism is essentially
+a religious disease.  In the form of it to which you are most liable,
+it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no
+normal religious reply.
+
+Now, there are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different
+levels upon which one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight
+view of things, and I must treat of them in turn.  The second stage is
+the more complete and joyous, and it corresponds to the freer exercise
+of religious {40} trust and fancy.  There are, as is well known,
+persons who are naturally very free in this regard, others who are not
+at all so.  There are persons, for instance, whom we find indulging to
+their heart's content in prospects of immortality; and there are others
+who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem
+real to themselves at all.  These latter persons are tied to their
+senses, restricted to their natural experience; and many of them,
+moreover, feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call 'hard
+facts,' which is positively shocked by the easy excursions into the
+unseen that other people make at the bare call of sentiment.  Minds of
+either class may, however, be intensely religious.  They may equally
+desire atonement and reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and
+communion with the total soul of things.  But the craving, when the
+mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as science now reveals
+them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when
+it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another and
+a better world.
+
+That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease.  The
+nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources; but its great
+reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the
+phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind
+nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is.  What philosophers
+call 'natural theology' has been one way of appeasing this craving;
+that poetry of nature in which our English literature is so rich has
+been another way.  Now, suppose a mind of the latter of our two
+classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its
+{41} facts 'hard;' suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving
+for communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to
+construe the scientific order of nature either theologically or
+poetically,--and what result can there be but inner discord and
+contradiction?  Now, this inner discord (merely as discord) can be
+relieved in either of two ways: The longing to read the facts
+religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves; or,
+supplementary facts may be discovered or believed-in, which permit the
+religious reading to go on.  These two ways of relief are the two
+stages of recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I
+made allusion a moment ago, and which the sequel will, I trust, make
+more clear.
+
+
+III.
+
+Starting then with nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religious
+craving, to say with Marcus Aurelius, "O Universe! what thou wishest I
+wish."  Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made
+heaven and earth, and, looking on them, saw that they were good.  Yet,
+on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth
+refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all.  Every
+phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some
+contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the
+mind.  Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep
+house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals
+over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of
+an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things {42}
+together meaninglessly to a common doom.  This is an uncanny, a
+sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar _unheimlichkeit_,
+or poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together
+which cannot possibly agree,--in our clinging, on the one hand, to the
+demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole; and, on the
+other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a spirit's
+adequate manifestation and expression.  It is in the contradiction
+between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us,
+and with which we ought to have some communion, and the character of
+such a spirit as revealed by the visible world's course, that this
+particular death-in-life paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle
+reside, Carlyle expresses the result in that chapter of his immortal
+'Sartor Resartus' entitled 'The Everlasting No.'  "I lived," writes
+poor Teufelsdroeckh, "in a continual, indefinite, pining fear;
+tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as
+if all things in the heavens above and the earth beneath would hurt me;
+as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring
+monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured."
+
+This is the first stage of speculative melancholy.  No brute can have
+this sort of melancholy; no man who is irreligious can become its prey.
+It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the
+mere necessary outcome of animal experience.  Teufelsdroeckh himself
+could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this
+world's experiences very well, were he not the victim of an originally
+unlimited trust and affection towards them.  If he might meet them
+piecemeal, with no suspicion {43} of any whole expressing itself in
+them, shunning the bitter parts and husbanding the sweet ones, as the
+occasion served, and as the day was foul or fair, he could have
+zigzagged toward an easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air
+vocal with his lamentations.  The mood of levity, of 'I don't care,' is
+for this world's ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic.  But, no!
+something deep down in Teufelsdroeckh and in the rest of us tells us
+that there _is_ a Spirit in things to which we owe allegiance, and for
+whose sake we must keep up the serious mood.  And so the inner fever
+and discord also are kept up; for nature taken on her visible surface
+reveals no such Spirit, and beyond the facts of nature we are at the
+present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look.
+
+Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that
+this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the
+inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naively and simply taken.
+There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous
+wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an
+established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round
+ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a "Moral and Intelligent
+Contriver of the World."  But those times are past; and we of the
+nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical
+philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to
+worship unreservedly any God of whose character she can be an adequate
+expression.  Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature;
+but none the less so all we know of evil.  Visible nature is all
+plasticity and indifference,--a moral multiverse, as one might call it,
+and not a moral {44} universe.  To such a harlot we owe no allegiance;
+with her as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are
+free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or destroy, and to
+follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such other
+particular features as will help us to our private ends.  If there be a
+divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot
+possibly be its _ultimate word_ to man.  Either there is no Spirit
+revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as
+all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or
+_this_ world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning
+resides in a supplementary unseen or _other_ world.
+
+I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain (though it
+may seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that the
+naturalistic superstition, the worship of the God of nature, simply
+taken as such, should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educated
+mind.  In fact, if I am to express my personal opinion unreservedly, I
+should say (in spite of its sounding blasphemous at first to certain
+ears) that the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate
+relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the idea
+that such a God exists.  Such rebellion essentially is that which in
+the chapter I have quoted from Carlyle goes on to describe:--
+
+
+"'Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go
+cowering and trembling?  Despicable biped!...  Hast thou not a heart;
+canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom,
+though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes
+thee?  Let it come, then, I will meet it and defy it!'  And as I so
+thought, there rushed like a stream of fire {45} over my whole soul;
+and I shook base Fear away from me forever....
+
+"Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the
+recesses of my being, of my Me, and then was it that my whole Me stood
+up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest.  Such a
+Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same
+Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly
+called.  The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless,
+outcast, and the Universe is mine;' to which my whole Me now made
+answer: 'I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!'  From that
+hour," Teufelsdroeckh-Carlyle adds, "I began to be a man."
+
+
+And our poor friend, James Thomson, similarly writes:--
+
+  "Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
+    I think myself, yet I would rather be
+    My miserable self than He, than He
+  Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.
+
+  The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
+    From whom it had its being, God and Lord!
+    Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred,
+  Malignant and implacable!  I vow
+
+  That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
+    For all the temples to Thy glory built,
+    Would I assume the ignominious guilt
+  Of having made such men in such a world."
+
+
+We are familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons
+exulting in their emancipation from belief in the God of their
+ancestral Calvinism,--him who made the garden and the serpent, and
+pre-appointed the eternal fires of hell.  Some of them have found
+humaner gods to worship, others are simply converts from all theology;
+but, both alike, they {46} assure us that to have got rid of the
+sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty toward
+that impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls.  Now,
+to make an idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to
+sophistication; and in souls that are religious and would also be
+scientific the sophistication breeds a philosophical melancholy, from
+which the first natural step of escape is the denial of the idol; and
+with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of positive joyousness may
+remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering and cowering
+mood.  With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for
+their relations with it then are only practical.  It looms up no longer
+so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance,
+as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to
+worry about their derivation from the 'one and only Power.'
+
+Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic
+superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers
+to his question about the worth of life.  There are in most men
+instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily when the burden
+of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off.  The certainty
+that you now _may_ step out of life whenever you please, and that to do
+so is not blasphemous or monstrous, is itself an immense relief.  The
+thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty challenge and obsession.
+
+  "This little life is all we must endure;
+  The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,"--
+
+says Thomson; adding, "I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me."
+Meanwhile we can always {47} stand it for twenty-four hours longer, if
+only to see what to-morrow's newspaper will contain, or what the next
+postman will bring.
+
+But far deeper forces than this mere vital curiosity are arousable,
+even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and
+admiring impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will still
+respond to fit appeals.  This evil which we feel so deeply is something
+that we can also help to overthrow; for its sources, now that no
+'Substance' or 'Spirit' is behind them, are finite, and we can deal
+with each of them in turn.  It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that
+sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life;
+they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest.  The
+sovereign source of melancholy is repletion.  Need and struggle are
+what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the
+void.  Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of
+Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our
+Bible come.  Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of
+Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and
+idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French
+'milliards' were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the
+country in the shape in which we see it there to-day.  The history of
+our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with
+fighting ills.  Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been
+reading, as examples of what strong men will endure.  In 1483 a papal
+bull of Innocent VIII. enjoined their extermination.  It absolved those
+who should take up the crusade against them from all ecclesiastical
+pains and penalties, released them from {48} any oath, legitimized
+their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired,
+and promised remission of sins to all who should kill the heretics.
+
+
+"There is no town in Piedmont," says a Vaudois writer, "where some of
+our brethren have not been put to death.  Jordan Terbano was burnt
+alive at Susa; Hippolite Rossiero at Turin, Michael Goneto, an
+octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Meano;
+Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his living
+body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his
+entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place
+to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia;
+Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna
+Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and
+hunger on the snow at Sarcena; Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres,
+had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony at
+Penile; Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for having
+praised God; James Baridari perished covered with sulphurous matches
+which had been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the
+fingers, in the nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body, and then
+lighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder, which,
+being lighted, blew his head to pieces;...  Sara Rostignol was slit
+open from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road
+between Eyral and Lucerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried
+thus on a pike from San Giovanni to La Torre."[2]
+
+
+_Und dergleicken mehr_!  In 1630 the plague swept away one-half of the
+Vaudois population, including fifteen of their seventeen pastors.  The
+places of these were supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and {49} the
+whole Vaudois people learned French in order to follow their services.
+More than once their number fell, by unremitting persecution, from the
+normal standard of twenty-five thousand to about four thousand.  In
+1686 the Duke of Savoy ordered the three thousand that remained to give
+up their faith or leave the country.  Refusing, they fought the French
+and Piedmontese armies till only eighty of their fighting men remained
+alive or uncaptured, when they gave up, and were sent in a body to
+Switzerland.  But in 1689, encouraged by William of Orange and led by
+one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and nine hundred of
+them returned to conquer their old homes again.  They fought their way
+to Bobi, reduced to four hundred men in the first half year, and met
+every force sent against them, until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving
+up his alliance with that abomination of desolation, Louis XIV.,
+restored them to comparative freedom,--since which time they have
+increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to this day.
+
+What are our woes and sufferance compared with these?  Does not the
+recital of such a fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us
+with resolution against our petty powers of darkness,--machine
+politicians, spoilsmen, and the rest?  Life is worth living, no matter
+what it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successful
+terminations and one's heel set on the tyrant's throat.  To the
+suicide, then, in his supposed world of multifarious and immoral
+nature, you can appeal--and appeal in the name of the very evils that
+make his heart sick there--to wait and see his part of the battle out.
+And the consent to live on, which you ask of him under these {50}
+circumstances, is not the sophistical 'resignation' which devotees of
+cowering religions preach: it is not resignation in the sense of
+licking a despotic Deity's hand.  It is, on the contrary, a resignation
+based on manliness and pride.  So long as your would-be suicide leaves
+an evil of his own unremedied, so long he has strictly no concern with
+evil in the abstract and at large.  The submission which you demand of
+yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent
+acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at
+large is _none of your business_ until your business with your private
+particular evils is liquidated and settled up.  A challenge of this
+sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made
+to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your
+reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with
+a certain interest again.  The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating
+thing.  When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts
+have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their
+lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together
+here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our
+relation to the universe in a more solemn light.  "Does not," as a
+young Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, "the
+acceptance of a happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?"
+Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some
+self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon
+which ours are built?  To hear this question is to answer it in but one
+possible way, if one have a normally constituted heart.
+
+{51}
+
+Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and
+honor may make life on a purely naturalistic basis seem worth living
+from day to day to men who have cast away all metaphysics in order to
+get rid of hypochondria, but who are resolved to owe nothing as yet to
+religion and its more positive gifts.  A poor half-way stage, some of
+you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant it to be an
+honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these instincts
+which are our nature's best equipment, and to which religion herself
+must in the last resort address her own peculiar appeals.
+
+
+IV.
+
+And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the question, I
+come to what is the soul of my discourse.  Religion has meant many
+things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean
+to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called
+order of nature, which constitutes this world's experience, is only one
+portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this
+visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive,
+but in its relation to which the true significance of our present
+mundane life consists.  A man's religious faith (whatever more special
+items of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith in
+the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of
+the natural order may be found explained.  In the more developed
+religions the natural world has always been regarded as the mere
+scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal world, and affirmed
+to be a sphere of {52} education, trial, or redemption.  In these
+religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one
+can enter into life eternal.  The notion that this physical world of
+wind and water, where the sun rises and the moon sets, is absolutely
+and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one
+which we find only in very early religions, such as that of the most
+primitive Jews.  It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite
+of the fact that poets and men of science whose good-will exceeds their
+perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our
+contemporary ears) that, as I said a while ago, has suffered definitive
+bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must
+count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day.  For such
+persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science knows it,
+cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent.  It is
+mere _weather_, as Chauncey Wright called it, doing and undoing without
+end.
+
+Now, I wish to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of this
+hour, that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a
+partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen
+spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem
+to us better worth living again.  But as such a trust will seem to some
+of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a
+word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that science
+opposes to our act.
+
+There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and
+materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually
+tangible.  Of this sort of mind the entity called 'science' is the
+idol.  {53} Fondness for the word 'scientist' is one of the notes by
+which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any
+opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it 'unscientific.'  It must
+be granted that there is no slight excuse for this.  Science has made
+such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our
+knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; men of
+science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable
+virtues,--that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their
+head.  In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one
+teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already
+been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the
+picture to fill in.  But the slightest reflection on the real
+conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are.  They
+show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how
+one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so
+crude.  Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have
+arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been
+formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon
+the brevity of science's career.  It began with Galileo, not three
+hundred years ago.  Four thinkers since Galileo, each informing his
+successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might
+have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this
+room.  Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than
+the present one, an audience of some five or six score people, if each
+person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to
+the black unknown of the human species, {54} to days without a document
+or monument to tell their tale.  Is it credible that such a mushroom
+knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, _can_ represent more than
+the minutest glimpse of what the universe will really prove to be when
+adequately understood?  No! our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.
+Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain,--that the world of
+our present natural knowledge _is_ enveloped in a larger world of
+_some_ sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no
+positive idea.
+
+Agnostic positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically in
+the most cordial terms, but insists that we must not turn it to any
+practical use.  We have no right, this doctrine tells us, to dream
+dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe,
+merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our
+highest interests.  We must always wait for sensible evidence for our
+beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no
+hypotheses whatever.  Of course this is a safe enough position _in
+abstracto_.  If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs,
+to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a
+philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the
+other would be his wisest cue.  But, unfortunately, neutrality is not
+only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our
+relations to an alternative are practical and vital.  This is because,
+as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes,
+and involve conduct on our part.  Our only way, for example, of
+doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing _is_, is
+continuing to act as if it were _not_.  If, for instance, {55} I refuse
+to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and
+light no fire just as if it still were warm.  If I doubt that you are
+worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just
+as if you were _un_worthy of the same.  If I doubt the need of insuring
+my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no
+need.  And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can
+only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if
+it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as
+if it were _not_ so, or in an irreligious way.  There are, you see,
+inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and
+must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically
+against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an
+unattainable thing.
+
+And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner
+interests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands?
+Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have
+no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain?
+In other cases divinations based on inner interests have proved
+prophetic enough.  Take science itself!  Without an imperious inner
+demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we
+should never have attained to proving that such harmonies be hidden
+between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world.
+Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact
+ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and
+blood, to gratify an inner need.  Whence such needs come from we do not
+know; we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes
+them with Darwin's 'accidental variations.' {56} But the inner need of
+believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more
+spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative
+in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation
+ever can be in a professionally scientific head.  The toil of many
+generations has proved the latter need prophetic.  Why _may_ not the
+former one be prophetic, too?  And if needs of ours outrun the visible
+universe, why _may_ not that be a sign that an invisible universe is
+there?  What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our
+religious demands?  Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she
+can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic "thou shalt not
+believe without coercive sensible evidence" is simply an expression
+(free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of
+a certain peculiar kind.
+
+Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I
+mean by 'trusting'?  Is the word to carry with it license to define in
+detail an invisible world, and to anathematize and excommunicate those
+whose trust is different?  Certainly not!  Our faculties of belief were
+not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they
+were given us to live by.  And to trust our religious demands means
+first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the
+invisible world which they suggest were real.  It is a fact of human
+nature, that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that
+goes without a single dogma or definition.  The bare assurance that
+this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the
+external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces
+have the last word and are eternal,--this bare {57} assurance is to
+such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every
+contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural
+plane.  Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all
+the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons
+at a stroke.  Often enough the wild-eyed look at life--the suicidal
+mood--will then set in.
+
+And now the application comes directly home to you and me.  Probably to
+almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth
+living, if we only could be _certain_ that our bravery and patience
+with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in
+an unseen spiritual world.  But granting we are not certain, does it
+then follow that a bare trust in such a world is a fool's paradise and
+lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free
+to indulge?  Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that
+is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf.
+That the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging
+multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove;
+and that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual
+atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for
+apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of
+our domestic animals.  Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but
+not of it.  They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner
+meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their
+intelligence,--events in which they themselves often play the cardinal
+part.  My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father
+demands damages.  The dog {58} may be present at every step of the
+negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all
+means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with _him_; and
+he never _can_ know in his natural dog's life.  Or take another case
+which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days.  Consider
+a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory.  He lies strapped
+on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark
+consciousness is literally in a sort of hell.  He cannot see a single
+redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these
+diabolical-seeming events are often controlled by human intentions with
+which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse
+of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce.
+Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and man, are to be
+bought by them.  It may be genuinely a process of redemption.  Lying on
+his back on the board there he may be performing a function
+incalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; and
+yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that
+must remain absolutely beyond his ken.
+
+Now turn from this to the life of man.  In the dog's life we see the
+world invisible to him because we live in both worlds.  In human life,
+although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing
+both these worlds a still wider world may be there, as unseen by us as
+our world is by him; and to believe in that world _may_ be the most
+essential function that our lives in this world have to perform.  But
+"_may_ be! _may_ be!" one now hears the positivist contemptuously
+exclaim; "what use can a scientific life have for maybes?"  Well, I
+reply, the {59} 'scientific' life itself has much to do with maybes,
+and human life at large has everything to do with them.  So far as man
+stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his
+entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes.  Not a
+victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done,
+except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a
+scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a
+mistake.  It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another
+that we live at all.  And often enough our faith beforehand in an
+uncertified result _is the only thing that makes the result come true_.
+Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have
+worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a
+terrible leap.  Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your
+feet are nerved to its accomplishment.  But mistrust yourself, and
+think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of
+maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and
+trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in
+the abyss.  In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the
+part of wisdom as well as of courage is to _believe what is in the line
+of your needs_, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled.  Refuse
+to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably
+perish.  But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save
+yourself.  You make one or the other of two possible universes true by
+your trust or mistrust,--both universes having been only _maybes_, in
+this particular, before you contributed your act.
+
+Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is
+subject to conditions logically {60} much like these.  It does, indeed,
+depend on you _the liver_.  If you surrender to the nightmare view and
+crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a
+picture totally black.  Pessimism, completed by your act, is true
+beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes.  Your mistrust of life has
+removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to
+it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that
+existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power.
+But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the
+nightmare view you cling to it that this world is not the _ultimatum_.
+Suppose you find yourself a very well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of--
+
+  "Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith
+  As soldiers live by courage; as, by strength
+  Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas."
+
+Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable
+subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more
+wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in
+the larger whole.  Have you not now made life worth living on these
+terms?  What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities
+ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave
+these higher faculties of yours no scope?  Please remember that
+optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own
+reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts
+of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition.
+They may even be the decisive elements in determining the definition.
+A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the
+addition {61} of a feather's weight; a long phrase may have its sense
+reversed by the addition of the three letters _n-o-t_.  This life is
+worth living, we can say, _since it is what we make it, from the moral
+point of view_; and we are determined to make it from that point of
+view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success.
+
+Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have
+assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those
+efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral
+men.  Our faith in the seen world's goodness (goodness now meaning
+fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by
+leaning on our faith in the unseen world.  But will our faith in the
+unseen world similarly verify itself?  Who knows?
+
+Once more it is a case of _maybe_; and once more maybes are the essence
+of the situation.  I confess that I do not see why the very existence
+of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response
+which any one of us may make to the religious appeal.  God himself, in
+short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our
+fidelity.  For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and
+tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this.  If
+this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained
+for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private
+theatricals from which one may withdraw at will.  But it _feels_ like a
+real fight,--as if there were something really wild in the universe
+which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to
+redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and
+fears.  For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is
+adapted.  The deepest thing in our {62} nature is this _Binnenleben_
+(as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the
+heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and
+unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears.  As through the cracks and
+crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which
+then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths
+of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take
+their rise.  Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature
+of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all
+abstract statements and scientific arguments--the veto, for example,
+which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith--sound to us like
+mere chatterings of the teeth.  For here possibilities, not finished
+facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to
+quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society,
+"as the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so
+the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists."
+
+
+These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life.  Believe
+that life _is_ worth living, and your belief will help 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."
+
+
+
+[1] An Address to the Harvard Young Men's Christian Association.
+Published in the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and
+as a pocket volume by S. B. Weston, Philadelphia, 1896.
+
+[2] Quoted by George E. Waring in his book on Tyrol.  Compare A.
+Berard: Les Vaudois, Lyon, Storck, 1892.
+
+
+
+
+{63}
+
+THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY.[1]
+
+I.
+
+What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; and why
+do they philosophize at all?  Almost every one will immediately reply:
+They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall
+on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which
+every one by nature carries about with him under his hat.  But suppose
+this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize
+it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance?  The only
+answer can be that he will recognize its rationality as he recognizes
+everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him.
+When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality.
+
+What, then, are the marks?  A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is
+one of them.  The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to
+rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.
+
+But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positive
+character.  Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is
+constituted merely by the absence {64} of any feeling of irrationality?
+I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view.  All
+feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological
+speculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple
+discharge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest,
+impediment, or resistance.  Just as we feel no particular pleasure when
+we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the
+respiratory motions are prevented,--so any unobstructed tendency to
+action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative
+accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but
+little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought
+meets with difficulties, we experience distress.  It is only when the
+distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or to
+aspire.  When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or
+of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say
+with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such
+times, "I am sufficient as I am."  This feeling of the sufficiency of
+the present moment, of its absoluteness,--this absence of all need to
+explain it, account for it, or justify it,--is what I call the
+Sentiment of Rationality.  As soon, in short, as we are enabled from
+any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of
+seems to us _pro tanto_ rational.
+
+Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency,
+produce the sentiment of rationality.  Conceived in such modes, being
+vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation.  But
+this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up
+the theoretic way.
+
+{65}
+
+The facts of the world in their sensible diversity are always before
+us, but our theoretic need is that they should be conceived in a way
+that reduces their manifoldness to simplicity.  Our pleasure at finding
+that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is
+like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound
+into melodic or harmonic order.  The simplified result is handled with
+far less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophic
+conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-saving
+contrivance.  The passion for parsimony, for economy of means in
+thought, is the philosophic passion _par excellence_; and any character
+or aspect of the world's phenomena which gathers up their diversity
+into monotony will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher's mind
+stand for that essence of things compared with which all their other
+determinations may by him be overlooked.
+
+More universality or extensiveness is, then, one mark which the
+philosopher's conceptions must possess.  Unless they apply to an
+enormous number of cases they will not bring him relief.  The knowledge
+of things by their causes, which is often given as a definition of
+rational knowledge, is useless to him unless the causes converge to a
+minimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects.
+The more multiple then are the instances, the more flowingly does his
+mind rove from fact to fact.  The phenomenal transitions are no real
+transitions; each item is the same old friend with a slightly altered
+dress.
+
+Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon and the apple
+are, as far as their relation to the {66} earth goes, identical; of
+knowing respiration and combustion to be one; of understanding that the
+balloon rises by the same law whereby the stone sinks; of feeling that
+the warmth in one's palm when one rubs one's sleeve is identical with
+the motion which the friction checks; of recognizing the difference
+between beast and fish to be only a higher degree of that between human
+father and son; of believing our strength when we climb the mountain or
+fell the tree to be no other than the strength of the sun's rays which
+made the corn grow out of which we got our morning meal?
+
+
+But alongside of this passion for simplification there exists a sister
+passion, which in some minds--though they perhaps form the minority--is
+its rival.  This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the impulse
+to be _acquainted_ with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole.
+Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred
+outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics.  It loves
+to recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more of
+these it can carry the happier it is.  It prefers any amount of
+incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literal
+details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of
+conceiving things that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the
+same time their concrete fulness.  Clearness and simplicity thus set up
+rival claims, and make a real dilemma for the thinker.
+
+A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of
+these two cravings.  No system of philosophy can hope to be universally
+accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or {67} entirely
+subordinates the one to the other.  The fate of Spinosa, with his
+barren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that of
+Hume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness' of
+everything, on the other,--neither philosopher owning any strict and
+systematic disciples to-day, each being to posterity a warning as well
+as a stimulus,--show us that the only possible philosophy must be a
+compromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity.
+But the only way to mediate between diversity and unity is to class the
+diverse items as cases of a common essence which you discover in them.
+Classification of things into extensive 'kinds' is thus the first step;
+and classification of their relations and conduct into extensive 'laws'
+is the last step, in their philosophic unification.  A completed
+theoretic philosophy can thus never be anything more than a completed
+classification of the world's ingredients; and its results must always
+be abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstract
+essence embedded in the living fact,--the rest of the living fact being
+for the time ignored by the classifier.  This means that none of our
+explanations are complete.  They subsume things under heads wider or
+more familiar; but the last heads, whether of things or of their
+connections, are mere abstract genera, data which we just find in
+things and write down.
+
+When, for example, we think that we have rationally explained the
+connection of the facts _A_ and _B_ by classing both under their common
+attribute _x_, it is obvious that we have really explained only so much
+of these items as _is x_.  To explain the connection of choke-damp and
+suffocation by the lack of oxygen is {68} to leave untouched all the
+other peculiarities both of choke-damp and of suffocation,--such as
+convulsions and agony on the one hand, density and explosibility on the
+other.  In a word, so far as _A_ and _B_ contain _l_, _m_, _n_, and
+_o_, _p_, _q,_ respectively, in addition to _x_, they are not explained
+by _x_.  Each additional particularity makes its distinct appeal.  A
+single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of
+view.  The entire fact is not accounted for until each and all of its
+characters have been classed with their likes elsewhere.  To apply this
+now to the case of the universe, we see that the explanation of the
+world by molecular movements explains it only so far as it actually
+_is_ such movements.  To invoke the 'Unknowable' explains only so much
+as is unknowable, 'Thought' only so much as is thought, 'God' only so
+much as is God.  _Which_ thought?  _Which_ God?--are questions that
+have to be answered by bringing in again the residual data from which
+the general term was abstracted.  All those data that cannot be
+analytically identified with the attribute invoked as universal
+principle, remain as independent kinds or natures, associated
+empirically with the said attribute but devoid of rational kinship with
+it.
+
+Hence the unsatisfactoriness of all our speculations.  On the one hand,
+so far as they retain any multiplicity in their terms, they fail to get
+us out of the empirical sand-heap world; on the other, so far as they
+eliminate multiplicity the practical man despises their empty
+barrenness.  The most they can say is that the elements of the world
+are such and such, and that each is identical with itself wherever
+found; but the question Where is it found? the practical man is left to
+answer by his own wit.  Which, of all the {69} essences, shall here and
+now be held the essence of this concrete thing, the fundamental
+philosophy never attempts to decide.  We are thus led to the conclusion
+that the simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the best
+possible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable
+and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the truth.  It is a
+monstrous abridgment of life, which, like all abridgments is got by the
+absolute loss and casting out of real matter.  This is why so few human
+beings truly care for philosophy.  The particular determinations which
+she ignores are the real matter exciting needs, quite as potent and
+authoritative as hers.  What does the moral enthusiast care for
+philosophical ethics?  Why does the _AEsthetik_ of every German
+philosopher appear to the artist an abomination of desolation?
+
+  Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie
+  Und gruen des Lebens goldner Baum.
+
+The entire man, who feels all needs by turns, will take nothing as an
+equivalent for life but the fulness of living itself.  Since the
+essences of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through the
+whole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness and
+alternation that he will enjoy them.  When weary of the concrete clash
+and dust and pettiness, he will refresh himself by a bath in the
+eternal springs, or fortify himself by a look at the immutable natures.
+But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; he will
+never carry the philosophic yoke upon his shoulders, and when tired of
+the gray monotony of her problems and insipid spaciousness of her
+results, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic
+richness of the concrete world.
+
+{70}
+
+So our study turns back here to its beginning.  Every way of
+classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular
+purpose.  Conceptions, 'kinds,' are teleological instruments.  No
+abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality
+except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver.  The
+interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but
+one of a thousand human purposes.  When others rear their heads, it
+must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs.  The
+exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their
+solutions is thus greatly reduced.  The only virtue their theoretic
+conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an
+equivalent for the world only so far as the world is simple,--the world
+meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily
+complex affair.  Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency
+in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the
+most invincible of human impulses.  The quest of the fewest elements of
+things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are men to
+think at all.
+
+
+But suppose the goal attained.  Suppose that at last we have a system
+unified in the sense that has been explained.  Our world can now be
+conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief.  Our universal
+concept has made the concrete chaos rational.  But now I ask, Can that
+which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly
+called rational?  It would seem at first sight that it might.  One is
+tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is
+appeased by the identification of one {71} thing with another, a datum
+which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving
+definitively, or be rational _in se_.  No otherness being left to annoy
+us, we should sit down at peace.  In other words, as the theoretic
+tranquillity of the boor results from his spinning no further
+considerations about his chaotic universe, so any datum whatever
+(provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle
+from the universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as
+there would then be for him absolutely no further considerations to
+spin.
+
+This in fact is what some persons think.  Professor Bain says,--
+
+
+"A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown to
+resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known.
+Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be apparent contradiction:
+the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity,
+fraternity.  When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation
+can go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; there
+is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire....  The
+path of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward generality, wider
+and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every
+department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends,
+perfect vision is gained."
+
+
+But, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold.  Our mind is so
+wedded to the process of seeing an _other_ beside every item of its
+experience, that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented to
+it, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at the
+void beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation.  In
+short, it spins for itself the further positive consideration of a
+nonentity {72} enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leads
+nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again.  But there is
+no natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and the
+thought stands oscillating to and fro, wondering "Why was there
+anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?"
+and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost.  Indeed, Bain's words are so
+untrue that in reflecting men it is just when the attempt to fuse the
+manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the
+conception of the universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection,
+that the craving for further explanation, the ontological
+wonder-sickness, arises in its extremest form.  As Schopenhauer says,
+"The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in
+motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is
+just as possible as its existence."
+
+The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent of the
+philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense.  Absolute
+existence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothing
+remain unmediated to our understanding.  One philosopher only has
+pretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm.  Hegel, by trying
+to show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by a
+series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivable
+into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotary
+circulation of the mind within its bounds.  Since such unchecked
+movement gives the feeling of rationality, he must be held, if he has
+succeeded, to have eternally and absolutely quenched all rational
+demands.
+
+But for those who deem Hegel's heroic effort to {73} have failed,
+nought remains but to confess that when all things have been unified to
+the supreme degree, the notion of a possible other than the actual may
+still haunt our imagination and prey upon our system.  The bottom of
+being is left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come
+upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and
+wonder as little as possible.  The philosopher's logical tranquillity
+is thus in essence no other than the boor's.  They differ only as to
+the point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset the
+absoluteness of the data he assumes.  The boor does so immediately, and
+is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt.  The
+philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is
+warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only
+practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the
+ultimate Why?  If he cannot exorcise this question, he must ignore or
+blink it, and, assuming the data of his system as something given, and
+the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or of
+action based on it.  There is no doubt that this acting on an opaque
+necessity is accompanied by a certain pleasure.  See the reverence of
+Carlyle for brute fact: "There is an infinite significance in fact."
+"Necessity," says Duehring, and he means not rational but given
+necessity, "is the last and highest point that we can reach....  It is
+not only the interest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but also
+that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an ideal equilibrium in
+an uttermost datum which can simply not be other than it is."
+
+Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism, God's fiat being
+in physics and morals such an {74} uttermost datum.  Such also is the
+attitude of all hard-minded analysts and _Verstandesmenschen_.  Lotze,
+Renouvier, and Hodgson promptly say that of experience as a whole no
+account can be given, but neither seek to soften the abruptness of the
+confession nor to reconcile us with our impotence.
+
+
+But mediating attempts may be made by more mystical minds.  The peace
+of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails.  To
+religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the
+world, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by
+the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish;
+nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep,--as Wordsworth says,
+"thought is not; in enjoyment it expires."  Ontological emotion so
+fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap it
+and put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence.  Even the
+least religious of men must have felt with Walt Whitman, when loafing
+on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that "swiftly arose
+and spread round him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument
+of the earth."  At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there
+were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic
+grubbing and brooding.  In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is
+at best a learned fool.
+
+Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which the
+head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematized
+method would be a philosophic achievement of first-rate importance.
+But as used by mystics hitherto it has lacked universality, being
+available for few persons and at few times, and {75} even in these
+being apt to be followed by fits of reaction and dryness; and if men
+should agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge without logical
+pertinency, a plaster but no cure, and that the idea of non-entity can
+never be exorcised, empiricism will be the ultimate philosophy.
+Existence then will be a brute fact to which as a whole the emotion of
+ontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain eternally
+unsatisfied.  Then wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential
+attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizing
+of it will continue to be an ingredient in the philosophic industry of
+the race.  Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its
+Faust, or its Sartor Resartus.
+
+
+With this we seem to have considered the possibilities of purely
+theoretic rationality.  But we saw at the outset that rationality meant
+only unimpeded mental function.  Impediments that arise in the
+theoretic sphere might perhaps be avoided if the stream of mental
+action should leave that sphere betimes and pass into the practical.
+Let us therefore inquire what constitutes the feeling of rationality in
+its _practical_ aspect.  If thought is not to stand forever pointing at
+the universe in wonder, if its movement is to be diverted from the
+issueless channel of purely theoretic contemplation, let us ask what
+conception of the universe will awaken active impulses capable of
+effecting this diversion.  A definition of the world which will give
+back to the mind the free motion which has been blocked in the purely
+contemplative path may so far make the world seem rational again.
+
+Well, of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand,
+that one which awakens the active {76} impulses, or satisfies other
+aesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more
+rational conception, and will deservedly prevail.
+
+There is nothing improbable in the supposition that an analysis of the
+world may yield a number of formulae, all consistent with the facts.
+In physical science different formulae may explain the phenomena
+equally well,--the one-fluid and the two-fluid theories of electricity,
+for example.  Why may it not be so with the world?  Why may there not
+be different points of view for surveying it, within each of which all
+data harmonize, and which the observer may therefore either choose
+between, or simply cumulate one upon another?  A Beethoven
+string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses'
+tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms;
+but the application of this description in no way precludes the
+simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.  Just
+so a thorough-going interpretation of the world in terms of mechanical
+sequence is compatible with its being interpreted teleologically, for
+the mechanism itself may be designed.
+
+If, then, there were several systems excogitated, equally satisfying to
+our purely logical needs, they would still have to be passed in review,
+and approved or rejected by our aesthetic and practical nature.  Can we
+define the tests of rationality which these parts of our nature would
+use?
+
+
+Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere
+familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of their
+rationality.  The empiricist school has been so much struck by this
+circumstance {77} as to have laid it down that the feeling of
+rationality and the feeling of familiarity are one and the same thing,
+and that no other kind of rationality than this exists.  The daily
+contemplation of phenomena juxtaposed in a certain order begets an
+acceptance of their connection, as absolute as the repose engendered by
+theoretic insight into their coherence.  To explain a thing is to pass
+easily back to its antecedents; to know it is easily to foresee its
+consequents.  Custom, which lets us do both, is thus the source of
+whatever rationality the thing may gain in our thought.
+
+In the broad sense in which rationality was defined at the outset of
+this essay, it is perfectly apparent that custom must be one of its
+factors.  We said that any perfectly fluent and easy thought was devoid
+of the sentiment of irrationality.  Inasmuch then as custom acquaints
+us with all the relations of a thing, it teaches us to pass fluently
+from that thing to others, and _pro tanto_ tinges it with the rational
+character.
+
+Now, there is one particular relation of greater practical importance
+than all the rest,--I mean the relation of a thing to its future
+consequences.  So long as an object is unusual, our expectations are
+baffled; they are fully determined as soon as it becomes familiar.  I
+therefore propose this as the first practical requisite which a
+philosophic conception must satisfy: _It must, in a general way at
+least, banish uncertainty from the future_.  The permanent presence of
+the sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely ignored by most
+writers, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment is
+never free from the ingredient of expectancy.  Every one knows how when
+a painful thing has to be undergone in the {78} near future, the vague
+feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness
+and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our
+attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given
+present.  The same is true when a great happiness awaits us.  But when
+the future is neutral and perfectly certain, 'we do not mind it,' as we
+say, but give an undisturbed attention to the actual.  Let now this
+haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without
+an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind.
+But in every novel or unclassified experience this is just what occurs;
+we do not know what will come next; and novelty _per se_ becomes a
+mental irritant, while custom _per se_ is a mental sedative, merely
+because the one baffles while the other settles our expectations.
+
+Every reader must feel the truth of this.  What is meant by coming 'to
+feel at home' in a new place, or with new people?  It is simply that,
+at first, when we take up our quarters in a new room, we do not know
+what draughts may blow in upon our back, what doors may open, what
+forms may enter, what interesting objects may be found in cupboards and
+corners.  When after a few days we have learned the range of all these
+possibilities, the feeling of strangeness disappears.  And so it does
+with people, when we have got past the point of expecting any
+essentially new manifestations from their character.
+
+The utility of this emotional effect of expectation is perfectly
+obvious; 'natural selection,' in fact, was bound to bring it about
+sooner or later.  It is of the utmost practical importance to an animal
+that he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects {79} that
+surround him, and especially that he should not come to rest in
+presence of circumstances that might be fraught either with peril or
+advantage,--go to sleep, for example, on the brink of precipices, in
+the dens of enemies, or view with indifference some new-appearing
+object that might, if chased, prove an important addition to the
+larder.  Novelty _ought_ to irritate him.  All curiosity has thus a
+practical genesis.  We need only look at the physiognomy of a dog or a
+horse when a new object comes into his view, his mingled fascination
+and fear, to see that the element of conscious insecurity or perplexed
+expectation lies at the root of his emotion.  A dog's curiosity about
+the movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far as
+the point of deciding what is going to happen next.  That settled,
+curiosity is quenched.  The dog quoted by Darwin, whose behavior in
+presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to a sense
+'of the supernatural,' was merely exhibiting the irritation of an
+uncertain future.  A newspaper which could move spontaneously was in
+itself so unexpected that the poor brute could not tell what new
+wonders the next moment might bring forth.
+
+To turn back now to philosophy.  An ultimate datum, even though it be
+logically unrationalized, will, if its quality is such as to define
+expectancy, be peacefully accepted by the mind; while if it leave the
+least opportunity for ambiguity in the future, it will to that extent
+cause mental uneasiness if not distress.  Now, in the ultimate
+explanations of the universe which the craving for rationality has
+elicited from the human mind, the demands of expectancy to be satisfied
+have always played a fundamental part.  {80} The term set up by
+philosophers as primordial has been one which banishes the
+incalculable.  'Substance,' for example, means, as Kant says, _das
+Beharrliche_, which will be as it has been, because its being is
+essential and eternal.  And although we may not be able to prophesy in
+detail the future phenomena to which the substance shall give rise, we
+may set our minds at rest in a general way, when we have called the
+substance God, Perfection, Love, or Reason, by the reflection that
+whatever is in store for us can never at bottom be inconsistent with
+the character of this term; so that our attitude even toward the
+unexpected is in a general sense defined.  Take again the notion of
+immortality, which for common people seems to be the touchstone of
+every philosophic or religious creed: what is this but a way of saying
+that the determination of expectancy is the essential factor of
+rationality?  The wrath of science against miracles, of certain
+philosophers against the doctrine of free-will, has precisely the same
+root,--dislike to admit any ultimate factor in things which may rout
+our prevision or upset the stability of our outlook.
+
+Anti-substantialist writers strangely overlook this function in the
+doctrine of substance; "If there be such a _substratum_," says Mill,
+"suppose it at this instant miraculously annihilated, and let the
+sensations continue to occur in the same order, and how would the
+_substratum_ be missed?  By what signs should we be able to discover
+that its existence had terminated?  Should we not have as much reason
+to believe that it still existed as we now have?  And if we should not
+then be warranted in believing it, how can we be so now?"  Truly
+enough, if we have {81} already securely bagged our facts in a certain
+order, we can dispense with any further warrant for that order.  But
+with regard to the facts yet to come the case is far different.  It
+does not follow that if substance may be dropped from our conception of
+the irrecoverably past, it need be an equally empty complication to our
+notions of the future.  Even if it were true that, for aught we know to
+the contrary, the substance might develop at any moment a wholly new
+set of attributes, the mere logical form of referring things to a
+substance would still (whether rightly or wrongly) remain accompanied
+by a feeling of rest and future confidence.  In spite of the acutest
+nihilistic criticism, men will therefore always have a liking for any
+philosophy which explains things _per substantiam_.
+
+A very natural reaction against the theosophizing conceit and
+hide-bound confidence in the upshot of things, which vulgarly
+optimistic minds display, has formed one factor of the scepticism of
+empiricists, who never cease to remind us of the reservoir of
+possibilities alien to our habitual experience which the cosmos may
+contain, and which, for any warrant we have to the contrary, may turn
+it inside out to-morrow.  Agnostic substantialism like that of Mr.
+Spencer, whose Unknowable is not merely the unfathomable but the
+absolute-irrational, on which, if consistently represented in thought,
+it is of course impossible to count, performs the same function of
+rebuking a certain stagnancy and smugness in the manner in which the
+ordinary philistine feels his security.  But considered as anything
+else than as reactions against an opposite excess, these philosophies
+of uncertainty cannot be acceptable; the general mind will fail to {82}
+come to rest in their presence, and will seek for solutions of a more
+reassuring kind.
+
+We may then, I think, with perfect confidence lay down as a first point
+gained in our inquiry, that a prime factor in the philosophic craving
+is the desire to have expectancy defined; and that no philosophy will
+definitively triumph which in an emphatic manner denies the possibility
+of gratifying this need.
+
+
+We pass with this to the next great division of our topic.  It is not
+sufficient for our satisfaction merely to know the future as
+determined, for it may be determined in either of many ways, agreeable
+or disagreeable.  For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it
+must define the future _congruously with our spontaneous powers_.  A
+philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either of two
+defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance.  First, its ultimate
+principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our
+dearest desires and most cherished powers.  A pessimistic principle
+like Schopenhauer's incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann's
+wicked jack-of-all-trades the Unconscious, will perpetually call forth
+essays at other philosophies.  Incompatibility of the future with their
+desires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of more
+fixed disquietude than uncertainty itself.  Witness the attempts to
+overcome the 'problem of evil,' the 'mystery of pain.'  There is no
+'problem of good.'
+
+But a second and worse defect in a philosophy than that of
+contradicting our active propensities is to give them no object
+whatever to press against.  A philosophy whose principle is so
+incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all {83}
+relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at one
+blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism.  Better face the
+enemy than the eternal Void!  This is why materialism will always fail
+of universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into an
+atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity.
+For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the
+impulses which we most cherish.  The real _meaning_ of the impulses, it
+says, is something which has no emotional interest for us whatever.
+Now, what is called 'extradition' is quite as characteristic of our
+emotions as of our senses: both point to an object as the cause of the
+present feeling.  What an intensely objective reference lies in fear!
+In like manner an enraptured man and a dreary-feeling man are not
+simply aware of their subjective states; if they were, the force of
+their feelings would all evaporate.  Both believe there is outward
+cause why they should feel as they do: either, "It is a glad world! how
+good life is!" or, "What a loathsome tedium is existence!"  Any
+philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by
+explaining away its objects or translating them into terms of no
+emotional pertinency, leaves the mind with little to care or act for.
+This is the opposite condition from that of nightmare, but when acutely
+brought home to consciousness it produces a kindred horror.  In
+nightmare we have motives to act, but no power; here we have powers,
+but no motives.  A nameless _unheimlichkeit_ comes over us at the
+thought of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the
+objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies.
+The monstrously lopsided equation of the universe and its {84} knower,
+which we postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled
+by the no less lopsided equation of the universe and the _doer_.  We
+demand in it a character for which our emotions and active propensities
+shall be a match.  Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the
+cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that his
+reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast
+whole,--that he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do
+what it expects of him.  But as his abilities to do lie wholly in the
+line of his natural propensities; as he enjoys reacting with such
+emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the
+like; and as he very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or
+doubt,--a philosophy which should only legitimate emotions of the
+latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and
+craving.
+
+It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up
+of practical interests.  The theory of evolution is beginning to do
+very good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of
+reflex action.  Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, a
+cross-section at a certain point, of what in its totality is a motor
+phenomenon.  In the lower forms of life no one will pretend that
+cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action.  The
+germinal question concerning things brought for the first time before
+consciousness is not the theoretic 'What is that?' but the practical
+'Who goes there?' or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, 'What is
+to be done?'--'Was fang' ich an?'  In all our discussions about the
+intelligence of lower animals, the only test we use is that of their
+_acting_ as if for a purpose.  {85} Cognition, in short, is incomplete
+until discharged in act; and although it is true that the later mental
+development, which attains its maximum through the hypertrophied
+cerebrum of man, gives birth to a vast amount of theoretic activity
+over and above that which is immediately ministerial to practice, yet
+the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the active nature
+asserts its rights to the end.
+
+When the cosmos in its totality is the object offered to consciousness,
+the relation is in no whit altered.  React on it we must in some
+congenial way.  It was a deep instinct in Schopenhauer which led him to
+reinforce his pessimistic argumentation by a running volley of
+invective against the practical man and his requirements.  No hope for
+pessimism unless he is slain!
+
+Helmholtz's immortal works on the eye and ear are to a great extent
+little more than a commentary on the law that practical utility wholly
+determines which parts of our sensations we shall be aware of, and
+which parts we shall ignore.  We notice or discriminate an ingredient
+of sense only so far as we depend upon it to modify our actions.  We
+_comprehend_ a thing when we synthetize it by identity with another
+thing.  But the other great department of our understanding,
+_acquaintance_ (the two departments being recognized in all languages
+by the antithesis of such words as _wissen_ and _kennen_; _scire_ and
+_noscere_, etc.), what is that also but a synthesis,--a synthesis of a
+passive perception with a certain tendency to reaction?  We are
+acquainted with a thing as soon as we have learned how to behave
+towards it, or how to meet the behavior which we expect from it.  Up to
+that point it is still 'strange' to us.
+
+{86}
+
+If there be anything at all in this view, it follows that however
+vaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate universal datum, he
+cannot be said to leave it unknown to us so long as he in the slightest
+degree pretends that our emotional or active attitude toward it should
+be of one sort rather than another.  He who says "life is real, life is
+earnest," however much he may speak of the fundamental mysteriousness
+of things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness by
+ascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood called
+seriousness,--which means the willingness to live with energy, though
+energy bring pain.  The same is true of him who says that all is
+vanity.  For indefinable as the predicate 'vanity' may be _in se_, it
+is clearly something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape from
+suffering, to be our rule of life.  There can be no greater incongruity
+than for a disciple of Spencer to proclaim with one breath that the
+substance of things is unknowable, and with the next that the thought
+of it should inspire us with awe, reverence, and a willingness to add
+our co-operative push in the direction toward which its manifestations
+seem to be drifting.  The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it make
+such distinct demands upon our activity we surely are not ignorant of
+its essential quality.
+
+If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great
+periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common,
+we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have
+said to the human being, "The inmost nature of the reality is congenial
+to _powers_ which you possess."  In what did the emancipating message
+of primitive Christianity consist but in the announcement that {87} God
+recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely
+overlooked?  Take repentance: the man who can do nothing rightly can at
+least repent of his failures.  But for paganism this faculty of
+repentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair.
+Christianity took it, and made it the one power within us which
+appealed straight to the heart of God.  And after the night of the
+middle ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses
+of the flesh, and defined the reality to be such that only slavish
+natures could commune with it, in what did the _sursum corda_ of the
+platonizing renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype
+of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole
+aesthetic being?  What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals
+to powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them,--faith
+and self-despair,--but which were personal, requiring no priestly
+intermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God?
+What caused the wildfire influence of Rousseau but the assurance he
+gave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, if
+only the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between?
+How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time with
+cheer, except by saying, "Use all your powers; that is the only
+obedience the universe exacts"?  And Carlyle with his gospel of work,
+of fact, of veracity, how does he move us except by saying that the
+universe imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can
+perform?  Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be is
+here in the enveloping now; that man has but to obey himself,--"He who
+will rest in what he _is_, {88} is a part of destiny,"--is in like
+manner nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency
+of one's natural faculties.
+
+In a word, "Son of Man, _stand upon thy feet_ and I will speak unto
+thee!" is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs have
+helped the disciple.  But that has been enough to satisfy the greater
+part of his rational need.  _In se_ and _per se_ the universal essence
+has hardly been more defined by any of these formulas than by the
+agnostic _x_; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are,
+are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent; that it speaks to them and
+will in some way recognize their reply; that I can be a match for it if
+I will, and not a footless waif,--suffices to make it rational to my
+feeling in the sense given above.  Nothing could be more absurd than to
+hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse
+to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more
+powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies.  Fatalism, whose
+solving word in all crises of behavior is "all striving is vain," will
+never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is
+indestructible in the race.  Moral creeds which speak to that impulse
+will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and
+shadowy determination of expectancy.  Man needs a rule for his will,
+and will invent one if one be not given him.
+
+
+But now observe a most important consequence.  Men's active impulses
+are so differently mixed that a philosophy fit in this respect for
+Bismarck will almost certainly be unfit for a valetudinarian poet.  In
+other words, although one can lay down in advance the {89} rule that a
+philosophy which utterly denies all fundamental ground for seriousness,
+for effort, for hope, which says the nature of things is radically
+alien to human nature, can never succeed,--one cannot in advance say
+what particular dose of hope, or of gnosticism of the nature of things,
+the definitely successful philosophy shall contain.  In short, it is
+almost certain that personal temperament will here make itself felt,
+and that although all men will insist on being spoken to by the
+universe in some way, few will insist on being spoken to in just the
+same way.  We have here, in short, the sphere of what Matthew Arnold
+likes to call _Aberglaube_, legitimate, inexpugnable, yet doomed to
+eternal variations and disputes.
+
+Take idealism and materialism as examples of what I mean, and suppose
+for a moment that both give a conception of equal theoretic clearness
+and consistency, and that both determine our expectations equally well.
+Idealism will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution,
+materialism by another.  At this very day all sentimental natures, fond
+of conciliation and intimacy, tend to an idealistic faith.  Why?
+Because idealism gives to the nature of things such kinship with our
+personal selves.  Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with,
+what we are least afraid of.  To say then that the universe essentially
+is thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all.
+There is no radically alien corner, but an all-pervading _intimacy_.
+Now, in certain sensitively egotistic minds this conception of reality
+is sure to put on a narrow, close, sick-room air.  Everything
+sentimental and priggish will be consecrated by it.  That element in
+reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there
+because it calls forth {90} powers that he owns--the rough, harsh,
+sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the
+democratizer--is banished because it jars too much on the desire for
+communion.  Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws
+many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic
+reaction against the contrary extreme.  They sicken at a life wholly
+constituted of intimacy.  There is an overpowering desire at moments to
+escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no
+respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over
+us.  The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think,
+always be seen in philosophy.  Some men will keep insisting on the
+reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that we
+can act _with_; others, on the opacity of brute fact that we must react
+_against_.
+
+
+Now, there is one element of our active nature which the Christian
+religion has emphatically recognized, but which philosophers as a rule
+have with great insincerity tried to huddle out of sight in their
+pretension to found systems of absolute certainty.  I mean the element
+of faith.  Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is
+still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness
+to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the
+prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.  It is in
+fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs;
+and there will be a very widespread tendency in men of vigorous nature
+to enjoy a certain amount of uncertainty in their philosophic creed,
+just as risk lends a zest to worldly activity.  Absolutely certified
+philosophies {91} seeking the _inconcussum_ are fruits of mental
+natures in which the passion for identity (which we saw to be but one
+factor of the rational appetite) plays an abnormally exclusive part.
+In the average man, on the contrary, the power to trust, to risk a
+little beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function.  Any mode
+of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous
+power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to
+create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is
+willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers.
+
+The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is
+strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day;
+but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only
+legitimate when used in the interests of one particular
+proposition,--the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is
+uniform.  That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she
+follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can _know_; but
+in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or
+assume it.  As Helmholtz says: "Hier gilt nur der eine Rath: vertraue
+und handle!"  And Professor Bain urges: "Our only error is in proposing
+to give any reason or justification of the postulate, or to treat it as
+otherwise than begged at the very outset."
+
+With regard to all other possible truths, however, a number of our most
+influential contemporaries think that an attitude of faith is not only
+illogical but shameful.  Faith in a religious dogma for which there is
+no outward proof, but which we are tempted to postulate for our
+emotional interests, just as we {92} postulate the uniformity of nature
+for our intellectual interests, is branded by Professor Huxley as "the
+lowest depth of immorality."  Citations of this kind from leaders of
+the modern _Aufklaerung_ might be multiplied almost indefinitely.  Take
+Professor Clifford's article on the 'Ethics of Belief.'  He calls it
+'guilt' and 'sin' to believe even the truth without 'scientific
+evidence.'  But what is the use of being a genius, unless _with the
+same scientific evidence_ as other men, one can reach more truth than
+they?  Why does Clifford fearlessly proclaim his belief in the
+conscious-automaton theory, although the 'proofs' before him are the
+same which make Mr. Lewes reject it?  Why does he believe in primordial
+units of 'mind-stuff' on evidence which would seem quite worthless to
+Professor Bain?  Simply because, like every human being of the
+slightest mental originality, he is peculiarly sensitive to evidence
+that bears in some one direction.  It is utterly hopeless to try to
+exorcise such sensitiveness by calling it the disturbing subjective
+factor, and branding it as the root of all evil.  'Subjective' be it
+called! and 'disturbing' to those whom it foils!  But if it helps those
+who, as Cicero says, "vim naturae magis sentiunt," it is good and not
+evil.  Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we
+form our philosophical opinions.  Intellect, will, taste, and passion
+co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the
+passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over
+the philosopher across the way.  The absurd abstraction of an intellect
+verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the
+probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose
+denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ideally as inept
+as it is actually impossible.  It is almost incredible that men who are
+themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can
+be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal
+preference, belief, or divination.  How have they succeeded in so
+stultifying their sense for the living facts of human nature as not to
+perceive that every philosopher, or man of science either, whose
+initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought, has taken
+his stand on a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in one
+direction rather than another, and a sort of preliminary assurance that
+his notion can be made to work; and has borne his best fruit in trying
+to make it work?  These mental instincts in different men are the
+spontaneous variations upon which the intellectual struggle for
+existence is based.  The fittest conceptions survive, and with them the
+names of their champions shining to all futurity.
+
+The coil is about us, struggle as we may.  The only escape from faith
+is mental nullity.  What we enjoy most in a Huxley or a Clifford is not
+the professor with his learning, but the human personality ready to go
+in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances.  The
+concrete man has but one interest,--to be right.  That for him is the
+art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.  Naked he
+is flung into the world, and between him and nature there are no rules
+of civilized warfare.  The rules of the scientific game, burdens of
+proof, presumptions, _experimenta crucis_, complete inductions, and the
+like, are only binding on those who enter that game.  As a matter of
+fact we all more or less do enter it, because it helps us to our end.
+But if the means presume to frustrate the end and call us cheats for
+being right in {94} advance of their slow aid, by guesswork or by hook
+or crook, what shall we say of them?  Were all of Clifford's works,
+except the Ethics of Belief, forgotten, he might well figure in future
+treatises on psychology in place of the somewhat threadbare instance of
+the miser who has been led by the association of ideas to prefer his
+gold to all the goods he might buy therewith.
+
+In short, if I am born with such a superior general reaction to
+evidence that I can guess right and act accordingly, and gain all that
+comes of right action, while my less gifted neighbor (paralyzed by his
+scruples and waiting for more evidence which he dares not anticipate,
+much as he longs to) still stands shivering on the brink, by what law
+shall I be forbidden to reap the advantages of my superior native
+sensitiveness?  Of course I yield to my belief in such a case as this
+or distrust it, alike at my peril, just as I do in any of the great
+practical decisions of life.  If my inborn faculties are good, I am a
+prophet; if poor, I am a failure: nature spews me out of her mouth, and
+there is an end of me.  In the total game of life we stake our persons
+all the while; and if in its theoretic part our persons will help us to
+a conclusion, surely we should also stake them there, however
+inarticulate they may be.[2]
+
+{95}
+
+But in being myself so very articulate in proving what to all readers
+with a sense for reality will seem a platitude, am I not wasting words?
+We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith.  Faith is
+synonymous with working hypothesis.  The only difference is that while
+some hypotheses can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy ages.
+A chemist who conjectures that a certain wall-paper contains arsenic,
+and has faith enough to lead him to take the trouble to put some of it
+into a hydrogen bottle, finds out by the results of his action whether
+he was right or wrong.  But theories like that of Darwin, or that of
+the kinetic constitution of matter, may exhaust the labors of
+generations in their corroboration, each tester of their truth
+proceeding in this simple way,--that he acts as if it were true, and
+expects the result to disappoint him if his assumption is false.  The
+longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows his faith in his
+theory.
+
+Now, in such questions as God, immortality, absolute morality, and
+free-will, no non-papal believer at the present day pretends his faith
+to be of an essentially different complexion; he can always doubt his
+creed.  But his intimate persuasion is that the odds in its favor are
+strong enough to warrant him in acting all along on the assumption of
+its truth.  His corroboration or repudiation by the nature of things
+may be deferred until the day of judgment.  The {96} uttermost he now
+means is something like this: "I _expect_ then to triumph with tenfold
+glory; but if it should turn out, as indeed it may, that I have spent
+my days in a fool's paradise, why, better have been the dupe of _such_
+a dreamland than the cunning reader of a world like that which then
+beyond all doubt unmasks itself to view."  In short, we _go in_ against
+materialism very much as we should _go in_, had we a chance, against
+the second French empire or the Church of Rome, or any other system of
+things toward which our repugnance is vast enough to determine
+energetic action, but too vague to issue in distinct argumentation.
+Our reasons are ludicrously incommensurate with the volume of our
+feeling, yet on the latter we unhesitatingly act.
+
+
+Now, I wish to show what to my knowledge has never been clearly pointed
+out, that belief (as measured by action) not only does and must
+continually outstrip scientific evidence, but that there is a certain
+class of truths of whose reality belief is a factor as well as a
+confessor; and that as regards this class of truths faith is not only
+licit and pertinent, but essential and indispensable.  The truths
+cannot become true till our faith has made them so.
+
+Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps, and have had the
+ill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is
+by a terrible leap.  Being without similar experience, I have no
+evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and
+confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my
+feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps
+have been impossible.  But suppose that, on the contrary, {97} the
+emotions of fear and mistrust preponderate; or suppose that, having
+just read the Ethics of Belief, I feel it would be sinful to act upon
+an assumption unverified by previous experience,--why, then I shall
+hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launching
+myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the
+abyss.  In this case (and it is one of an immense class) the part of
+wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of
+the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its
+object.  _There are then cases where faith creates its own
+verification_.  Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save
+yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish.
+The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage.
+
+The future movements of the stars or the facts of past history are
+determined now once for all, whether I like them or not.  They are
+given irrespective of my wishes, and in all that concerns truths like
+these subjective preference should have no part; it can only obscure
+the judgment.  But in every fact into which there enters an element of
+personal contribution on my part, as soon as this personal contribution
+demands a certain degree of subjective energy which, in its turn, calls
+for a certain amount of faith in the result,--so that, after all, the
+future fact is conditioned by my present faith in it,--how trebly
+asinine would it be for me to deny myself the use of the subjective
+method, the method of belief based on desire!
+
+In every proposition whose bearing is universal (and such are all the
+propositions of philosophy), the acts of the subject and their
+consequences throughout eternity should be included in the formula.  If
+_M_ {98} represent the entire world _minus_ the reaction of the thinker
+upon it, and if _M_ + _x_ represent the absolutely total matter of
+philosophic propositions (_x_ standing for the thinker's reaction and
+its results),--what would be a universal truth if the term x were of
+one complexion, might become egregious error if _x_ altered its
+character.  Let it not be said that _x_ is too infinitesimal a
+component to change the character of the immense whole in which it lies
+imbedded.  Everything depends on the point of view of the philosophic
+proposition in question.  If we have to define the universe from the
+point of view of sensibility, the critical material for our judgment
+lies in the animal kingdom, insignificant as that is, quantitatively
+considered.  The moral definition of the world may depend on phenomena
+more restricted still in range.  In short, many a long phrase may have
+its sense reversed by the addition of three letters, _n-o-t_; many a
+monstrous mass have its unstable equilibrium discharged one way or the
+other by a feather weight that falls.
+
+Let us make this clear by a few examples.  The philosophy of evolution
+offers us to-day a new criterion to serve as an ethical test between
+right and wrong.  Previous criteria, it says, being subjective, have
+left us still floundering in variations of opinion and the _status
+belli_.  Here is a criterion which is objective and fixed: _That is to
+be called good which is destined to prevail or survive_.  But we
+immediately see that this standard can only remain objective by leaving
+myself and my conduct out.  If what prevails and survives does so by my
+help, and cannot do so without that help; if something else will
+prevail in case I alter my conduct,--how can I possibly now, conscious
+of alternative courses of action open before me, either of which {99} I
+may suppose capable of altering the path of events, decide which course
+to take by asking what path events will follow?  If they follow my
+direction, evidently my direction cannot wait on them.  The only
+possible manner in which an evolutionist can use his standard is the
+obsequious method of forecasting the course society would take _but for
+him_, and then putting an extinguisher on all personal idiosyncrasies
+of desire and interest, and with bated breath and tiptoe tread
+following as straight as may be at the tail, and bringing up the rear
+of everything.  Some pious creatures may find a pleasure in this; but
+not only does it violate our general wish to lead and not to follow (a
+wish which is surely not immoral if we but lead aright), but if it be
+treated as every ethical principle must be treated,--namely, as a rule
+good for all men alike,--its general observance would lead to its
+practical refutation by bringing about a general deadlock.  Each good
+man hanging back and waiting for orders from the rest, absolute
+stagnation would ensue.  Happy, then, if a few unrighteous ones
+contribute an initiative which sets things moving again!
+
+All this is no caricature.  That the course of destiny may be altered
+by individuals no wise evolutionist ought to doubt.  Everything for him
+has small beginnings, has a bud which may be 'nipped,' and nipped by a
+feeble force.  Human races and tendencies follow the law, and have also
+small beginnings.  The best, according to evolution, is that which has
+the biggest endings.  Now, if a present race of men, enlightened in the
+evolutionary philosophy, and able to forecast the future, were able to
+discern in a tribe arising near them the potentiality of future
+supremacy; were able to see that their own {100} race would eventually
+be wiped out of existence by the new-comers if the expansion of these
+were left unmolested,--these present sages would have two courses open
+to them, either perfectly in harmony with the evolutionary test:
+Strangle the new race now, and ours survives; help the new race, and it
+survives.  In both cases the action is right as measured by the
+evolutionary standard,--it is action for the winning side.
+
+Thus the evolutionist foundation of ethics is purely objective only to
+the herd of nullities whose votes count for zero in the march of
+events.  But for others, leaders of opinion or potentates, and in
+general those to whose actions position or genius gives a far-reaching
+import, and to the rest of us, each in his measure,--whenever we
+espouse a cause we contribute to the determination of the evolutionary
+standard of right.  The truly wise disciple of this school will then
+admit faith as an ultimate ethical factor.  Any philosophy which makes
+such questions as, What is the ideal type of humanity?  What shall be
+reckoned virtues?  What conduct is good? depend on the question, What
+is going to succeed?--must needs fall back on personal belief as one of
+the ultimate conditions of the truth.  For again and again success
+depends on energy of act; energy again depends on faith that we shall
+not fail; and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right,--which
+faith thus verifies itself.
+
+Take as an example the question of optimism or pessimism, which makes
+so much noise just now in Germany.  Every human being must sometime
+decide for himself whether life is worth living.  Suppose that in
+looking at the world and seeing how full it is of misery, of old age,
+of wickedness and {101} pain, and how unsafe is his own future, he
+yields to the pessimistic conclusion, cultivates disgust and dread,
+ceases striving, and finally commits suicide.  He thus adds to the mass
+_M_ of mundane phenomena, independent of his subjectivity, the
+subjective complement _x_, which makes of the whole an utterly black
+picture illumined by no gleam of good.  Pessimism completed, verified
+by his moral reaction and the deed in which this ends, is true beyond a
+doubt.  _M_ + _x_ expresses a state of things totally bad.  The man's
+belief supplied all that was lacking to make it so, and now that it is
+made so the belief was right.
+
+But now suppose that with the same evil facts _M_, the man's reaction
+_x_ is exactly reversed; suppose that instead of giving way to the evil
+he braves it, and finds a sterner, more wonderful joy than any passive
+pleasure can yield in triumphing over pain and defying fear; suppose he
+does this successfully, and however thickly evils crowd upon him proves
+his dauntless subjectivity to be more than their match,--will not every
+one confess that the bad character of the _M_ is here the _conditio
+sine qua non_ of the good character of the _x_?  Will not every one
+instantly declare a world fitted only for fair-weather human beings
+susceptible of every passive enjoyment, but without independence,
+courage, or fortitude, to be from a moral point of view incommensurably
+inferior to a world framed to elicit from the man every form of
+triumphant endurance and conquering moral energy?  As James Hinton
+says,--
+
+
+"Little inconveniences, exertions, pains.--these are the only things in
+which we rightly feel our life at all.  If these be not there,
+existence becomes worthless, or worse; {102} success in putting them
+all away is fatal.  So it is men engage in athletic sports, spend their
+holidays in climbing up mountains, find nothing so enjoyable as that
+which taxes their endurance and their energy.  This is the way we are
+made, I say.  It may or may not be a mystery or a paradox; it is a
+fact.  Now, this enjoyment in endurance is just according to the
+intensity of life: the more physical vigor and balance, the more
+endurance can be made an element of satisfaction.  A sick man cannot
+stand it.  The line of enjoyable suffering is not a fixed one; it
+fluctuates with the perfectness of the life.  That our pains are, as
+they are, unendurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne
+save in misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion alone makes
+patient,--that our pains are thus unendurable, means not that they are
+too great, but that _we are sick_.  We have not got our proper life.
+So you perceive pain is no more necessarily an evil, but an essential
+element of the highest good."[3]
+
+
+But the highest good can be achieved only by our getting our proper
+life; and that can come about only by help of a moral energy born of
+the faith that in some way or other we shall succeed in getting it if
+we try pertinaciously enough.  This world _is_ good, we must say, since
+it is what we make it,--and we shall make it good.  How can we exclude
+from the cognition of a truth a faith which is involved in the creation
+of the truth?  _M_ has its character indeterminate, susceptible of
+forming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of a
+meliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on the
+other.  All depends on the character of the {103} personal contribution
+_x_.  Wherever the facts to be formulated contain such a contribution,
+we may logically, legitimately, and inexpugnably believe what we
+desire.  The belief creates its verification.  The thought becomes
+literally father to the fact, as the wish was father to the thought.[4]
+
+
+Let us now turn to the radical question of life,--the question whether
+this be at bottom a moral or an unmoral universe,--and see whether the
+method of faith may legitimately have a place there.  It is really the
+question of materialism.  Is the world a simple brute actuality, an
+existence _de facto_ about which the deepest thing that can be said is
+that it happens so to be; or is the judgment of _better_ or worse, of
+_ought_, as intimately pertinent to phenomena as the simple judgment
+_is_ or _is not_?  The materialistic theorists say that judgments of
+worth are themselves mere matters of fact; that the words 'good' and
+'bad' have no sense apart from subjective passions and interests which
+we may, if we please, play fast and loose with at will, so far as any
+duty of ours to the non-human universe is concerned.  Thus, when a
+materialist says it is better for him to suffer great inconvenience
+than to break a promise, he only means that his social interests have
+become so knit up with {104} keeping faith that, those interests once
+being granted, it is better for him to keep the promise in spite of
+everything.  But the interests themselves are neither right nor wrong,
+except possibly with reference to some ulterior order of interests
+which themselves again are mere subjective data without character,
+either good or bad.
+
+For the absolute moralists, on the contrary, the interests are not
+there merely to be felt,--they are to be believed in and obeyed.  Not
+only is it best for my social interests to keep my promise, but best
+for me to have those interests, and best for the cosmos to have this
+me.  Like the old woman in the story who described the world as resting
+on a rock, and then explained that rock to be supported by another
+rock, and finally when pushed with questions said it was rocks all the
+way down,--he who believes this to be a radically moral universe must
+hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate
+_should_, or on a series of _shoulds_ all the way down.[5]
+
+The practical difference between this objective sort of moralist and
+the other one is enormous.  The subjectivist in morals, when his moral
+feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek
+harmony by toning down the sensitiveness of the feelings.  Being mere
+data, neither good nor evil in themselves, he may pervert them or lull
+them to sleep by any means at his command.  Truckling, compromise,
+time-serving, capitulations of conscience, are conventionally
+opprobrious names for what, if successfully carried out, {105} would be
+on his principles by far the easiest and most praiseworthy mode of
+bringing about that harmony between inner and outer relations which is
+all that he means by good.  The absolute moralist, on the other hand,
+when his interests clash with the world, is not free to gain harmony by
+sacrificing the ideal interests.  According to him, these latter should
+be as they are and not otherwise.  Resistance then, poverty, martyrdom
+if need be, tragedy in a word,--such are the solemn feasts of his
+inward faith.  Not that the contradiction between the two men occurs
+every day; in commonplace matters all moral schools agree.  It is only
+in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then
+routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.  It cannot then be
+said that the question, Is this a moral world? is a meaningless and
+unverifiable question because it deals with something non-phenomenal.
+Any question is full of meaning to which, as here, contrary answers
+lead to contrary behavior.  And it seems as if in answering such a
+question as this we might proceed exactly as does the physical
+philosopher in testing an hypothesis.  He deduces from the hypothesis
+an experimental action, _x_; this he adds to the facts _M_ already
+existing.  It fits them if the hypothesis be true; if not, there is
+discord.  The results of the action corroborate or refute the idea from
+which it flowed.  So here: the verification of the theory which you may
+hold as to the objectively moral character of the world can consist
+only in this,--that if you proceed to act upon your theory it will be
+reversed by nothing that later turns up as your action's fruit; it will
+harmonize so well with the entire drift of experience that the latter
+will, as it were, adopt it, or at most give it an ampler {106}
+interpretation, without obliging you in any way to change the essence
+of its formulation.  If this be an objectively moral universe, all acts
+that I make on that assumption, all expectations that I ground on it,
+will tend more and more completely to interdigitate with the phenomena
+already existing.  _M_ + _x_ will be in accord; and the more I live,
+and the more the fruits of my activity come to light, the more
+satisfactory the consensus will grow.  While if it be not such a moral
+universe, and I mistakenly assume that it is, the course of experience
+will throw ever new impediments in the way of my belief, and become
+more and more difficult to express in its language.  Epicycle upon
+epicycle of subsidiary hypothesis will have to be invoked to give to
+the discrepant terms a temporary appearance of squaring with each
+other; but at last even this resource will fail.
+
+If, on the other hand, I rightly assume the universe to be not moral,
+in what does my verification consist?  It is that by letting moral
+interests sit lightly, by disbelieving that there is any duty about
+_them_ (since duty obtains only as _between_ them and other phenomena),
+and so throwing them over if I find it hard to get them satisfied,--it
+is that by refusing to take up a tragic attitude, I deal in the
+long-run most satisfactorily with the facts of life.  "All is vanity"
+is here the last word of wisdom.  Even though in certain limited series
+there may be a great appearance of seriousness, he who in the main
+treats things with a degree of good-natured scepticism and radical
+levity will find that the practical fruits of his epicurean hypothesis
+verify it more and more, and not only save him from pain but do honor
+to his sagacity.  While, on the other hand, he who contrary {107} to
+reality stiffens himself in the notion that certain things absolutely
+should be, and rejects the truth that at bottom it makes no difference
+what is, will find himself evermore thwarted and perplexed and
+bemuddled by the facts of the world, and his tragic disappointment
+will, as experience accumulates, seem to drift farther and farther away
+from that final atonement or reconciliation which certain partial
+tragedies often get.
+
+_Anaesthesia_ is the watchword of the moral sceptic brought to bay and
+put to his trumps.  _Energy_ is that of the moralist.  Act on my creed,
+cries the latter, and the results of your action will prove the creed
+true, and that the nature of things is earnest infinitely.  Act on
+mine, says the epicurean, and the results will prove that seriousness
+is but a superficial glaze upon a world of fundamentally trivial
+import.  You and your acts and the nature of things will be alike
+enveloped in a single formula, a universal _vanitas vanitatum_.
+
+
+For the sake of simplicity I have written as if the verification might
+occur in the life of a single philosopher,--which is manifestly untrue,
+since the theories still face each other, and the facts of the world
+give countenance to both.  Rather should we expect, that, in a question
+of this scope, the experience of the entire human race must make the
+verification, and that all the evidence will not be 'in' till the final
+integration of things, when the last man has had his say and
+contributed his share to the still unfinished _x_.  Then the proof will
+be complete; then it will appear without doubt whether the moralistic x
+has filled up the gap which alone kept the _M_ of the world from
+forming an even and harmonious unity, or whether the {108}
+non-moralistic _x_ has given the finishing touches which were alone
+needed to make the _M_ appear outwardly as vain as it inwardly was.
+
+But if this be so, is it not clear that the facts _M_, taken _per se_,
+are inadequate to justify a conclusion either way in advance of my
+action?  My action is the complement which, by proving congruous or
+not, reveals the latent nature of the mass to which it is applied.  The
+world may in fact be likened unto a lock, whose inward nature, moral or
+unmoral, will never reveal itself to our simply expectant gaze.  The
+positivists, forbidding us to make any assumptions regarding it,
+condemn us to eternal ignorance, for the 'evidence' which they wait for
+can never come so long as we are passive.  But nature has put into our
+hands two keys, by which we may test the lock.  If we try the moral key
+_and it fits_, it is a moral lock.  If we try the unmoral key and _it_
+fits, it is an unmoral lock.  I cannot possibly conceive of any other
+sort of 'evidence' or 'proof' than this.  It is quite true that the
+co-operation of generations is needed to educe it.  But in these
+matters the solidarity (so called) of the human race is a patent fact.
+The essential thing to notice is that our active preference is a
+legitimate part of the game,--that it is our plain business as men to
+try one of the keys, and the one in which we most confide.  If then the
+proof exist not till I have acted, and I must needs in acting run the
+risk of being wrong, how can the popular science professors be right in
+objurgating in me as infamous a 'credulity' which the strict logic of
+the situation requires?  If this really be a moral universe; if by my
+acts I be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may doubt be
+itself a moral act {109} analogous to voting for a side not yet sure to
+win,--by what right shall they close in upon me and steadily negate the
+deepest conceivable function of my being by their preposterous command
+that I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in
+eternal and insoluble doubt?  Why, doubt itself is a decision of the
+widest practical reach, if only because we may miss by doubting what
+goods we might be gaining by espousing the winning side.  But more than
+that! it is often practically impossible to distinguish doubt from
+dogmatic negation.  If I refuse to stop a murder because I am in doubt
+whether it be not justifiable homicide, I am virtually abetting the
+crime.  If I refuse to bale out a boat because I am in doubt whether my
+efforts will keep her afloat, I am really helping to sink her.  If in
+the mountain precipice I doubt my right to risk a leap, I actively
+connive at my destruction.  He who commands himself not to be credulous
+of God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may again and again be
+indistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them.  Scepticism in
+moral matters is an active ally of immorality.  Who is not for is
+against.  The universe will have no neutrals in these questions.  In
+theory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wise
+scepticism, we are really doing volunteer military service for one side
+or the other.
+
+Yet obvious as this necessity practically is, thousands of innocent
+magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow
+negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls.
+All they need to be free and hearty again in the exercise of their
+birthright is that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away.  All
+that the human {110} heart wants is its chance.  It will willingly
+forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel
+that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no
+one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs.  And if
+I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few
+of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down its
+lion-strength, I shall be more than rewarded for my pains.
+
+
+To sum up: No philosophy will permanently be deemed rational by all men
+which (in addition to meeting logical demands) does not to some degree
+pretend to determine expectancy, and in a still greater degree make a
+direct appeal to all those powers of our nature which we hold in
+highest esteem.  Faith, being one of these powers, will always remain a
+factor not to be banished from philosophic constructions, the more so
+since in many ways it brings forth its own verification.  In these
+points, then, it is hopeless to look for literal agreement among
+mankind.
+
+The ultimate philosophy, we may therefore conclude, must not be too
+strait-laced in form, must not in all its parts divide heresy from
+orthodoxy by too sharp a line.  There must be left over and above the
+propositions to be subscribed, _ubique, semper, et ab omnibus_, another
+realm into which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples and
+indulge its own faith at its own risks; and all that can here be done
+will be to mark out distinctly the questions which fall within faith's
+sphere.
+
+
+
+[1] This essay as far as page 75 consists of extracts from an article
+printed in Mind for July, 1879.  Thereafter it is a reprint of an
+address to the Harvard Philosophical Club, delivered in 1880, and
+published in the Princeton Review, July, 1882.
+
+[2] At most, the command laid upon us by science to believe nothing not
+yet verified by the senses is a prudential rule intended to maximize
+our right thinking and minimize our errors _in the long run_.  In the
+particular instance we must frequently lose truth by obeying it; but on
+the whole we are safer if we follow it consistently, for we are sure to
+cover our losses with our gains.  It is like those gambling and
+insurance rules based on probability, in which we secure ourselves
+against losses in detail by hedging on the total run.  But this hedging
+philosophy requires that long run should be there; and this makes it
+inapplicable to the question of religious faith as the latter comes
+home to the individual man.  He plays the game of life not to escape
+losses, for he brings nothing with him to lose; he plays it for gains;
+and it is now or never with him, for the long run which exists indeed
+for humanity, is not there for him.  Let him doubt, believe, or deny,
+he runs his risk, and has the natural right to choose which one it
+shall be.
+
+[3] Life of James Hinton, pp. 172, 173.  See also the excellent chapter
+on Faith and Sight in the Mystery of Matter, by J. Allanson Picton.
+Hinton's Mystery of Pain will undoubtedly always remain the classical
+utterance on this subject.
+
+[4] Observe that in all this not a word has been said of free-will.  It
+all applies as well to a predetermined as to an indeterminate universe.
+If _M_ + _x_ is fixed in advance, the belief which leads to _x_ and the
+desire which prompts the belief are also fixed.  But fixed or not,
+these subjective states form a phenomenal condition necessarily
+preceding the facts; necessarily constitutive, therefore, of the truth
+_M_ + _x_ which we seek.  If, however, free acts be possible, a faith
+in their possibility, by augmenting the moral energy which gives them
+birth, will increase their frequency in a given individual.
+
+[5] In either case, as a later essay explains (see p. 193), the
+_should_ which the moralist regards as binding upon him must be rooted
+in the feeling of some other thinker, or collection of thinkers, to
+whose demands he individually bows.
+
+
+
+
+{111}
+
+REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM.[1]
+
+MEMBERS OF THE MINISTERS' INSTITUTE:
+
+Let me confess to the diffidence with which I find myself standing here
+to-day.  When the invitation of your committee reached me last fall,
+the simple truth is that I accepted it as most men accept a
+challenge,--not because they wish to fight, but because they are
+ashamed to say no.  Pretending in my small sphere to be a teacher, I
+felt it would be cowardly to shrink from the keenest ordeal to which a
+teacher can be exposed,--the ordeal of teaching other teachers.
+Fortunately, the trial will last but one short hour; and I have the
+consolation of remembering Goethe's verses,--
+
+  "Vor den Wissenden sich stellen,
+  Sicher ist 's in allen Faellen,"--
+
+for if experts are the hardest people to satisfy, they have at any rate
+the liveliest sense of the difficulties of one's task, and they know
+quickest when one hits the mark.
+
+Since it was as a teacher of physiology that I was most unworthily
+officiating when your committee's {112} invitation reached me, I must
+suppose it to be for the sake of bringing a puff of the latest winds of
+doctrine which blow over that somewhat restless sea that my presence is
+desired.  Among all the healthy symptoms that characterize this age, I
+know no sounder one than the eagerness which theologians show to
+assimilate results of science, and to hearken to the conclusions of men
+of science about universal matters.  One runs a better chance of being
+listened to to-day if one can quote Darwin and Helmholtz than if one
+can only quote Schleiermacher or Coleridge.  I almost feel myself this
+moment that were I to produce a frog and put him through his
+physiological performances in a masterly manner before your eyes, I
+should gain more reverential ears for what I have to say during the
+remainder of the hour.  I will not ask whether there be not something
+of mere fashion in this prestige which the words of the physiologists
+enjoy just now.  If it be a fashion, it is certainly a beneficial one
+upon the whole; and to challenge it would come with a poor grace from
+one who at the moment he speaks is so conspicuously profiting by its
+favors.
+
+I will therefore only say this: that the latest breeze from the
+physiological horizon need not necessarily be the most important one.
+Of the immense amount of work which the laboratories of Europe and
+America, and one may add of Asia and Australia, are producing every
+year, much is destined to speedy refutation; and of more it may be said
+that its interest is purely technical, and not in any degree
+philosophical or universal.
+
+This being the case, I know you will justify me if I fall back on a
+doctrine which is fundamental and well established rather than novel,
+and ask you whether {113} by taking counsel together we may not trace
+some new consequences from it which shall interest us all alike as men.
+I refer to the doctrine of reflex action, especially as extended to the
+brain.  This is, of course, so familiar to you that I hardly need
+define it.  In a general way, all educated people know what reflex
+action means.
+
+It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outward
+discharges from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges
+are themselves the result of impressions from the external world,
+carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves.  Applied at
+first to only a portion of our acts, this conception has ended by being
+generalized more and more, so that now most physiologists tell us that
+every action whatever, even the most deliberately weighed and
+calculated, does, so far as its organic conditions go, follow the
+reflex type.  There is not one which cannot be remotely, if not
+immediately, traced to an origin in some incoming impression of sense.
+There is no impression of sense which, unless inhibited by some other
+stronger one, does not immediately or remotely express itself in action
+of some kind.  There is no one of those complicated performances in the
+convolutions of the brain to which our trains of thought correspond,
+which is not a mere middle term interposed between an incoming
+sensation that arouses it and an outgoing discharge of some sort,
+inhibitory if not exciting, to which itself gives rise.  The structural
+unit of the nervous system is in fact a triad, neither of whose
+elements has any independent existence.  The sensory impression exists
+only for the sake of awaking the central process of reflection, and the
+central process of reflection exists {114} only for the sake of calling
+forth the final act.  All action is thus _re_-action upon the outer
+world; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation or
+thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose
+ends have their point of application in the outer world.  If it should
+ever have no roots in the outer world, if it should ever happen that it
+led to no active measures, it would fail of its essential function, and
+would have to be considered either pathological or abortive.  The
+current of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant to run out
+at our hands, feet, or lips.  The only use of the thoughts it occasions
+while inside is to determine its direction to whichever of these organs
+shall, on the whole, under the circumstances actually present, act in
+the way most propitious to our welfare.
+
+The willing department of our nature, in short, dominates both the
+conceiving department and the feeling department; or, in plainer
+English, perception and thinking are only there for behavior's sake.
+
+I am sure I am not wrong in stating this result as one of the
+fundamental conclusions to which the entire drift of modern
+physiological investigation sweeps us.  If asked what great
+contribution physiology has made to psychology of late years, I am sure
+every competent authority will reply that her influence has in no way
+been so weighty as in the copious illustration, verification, and
+consolidation of this broad, general point of view.
+
+I invite you, then, to consider what may be the possible speculative
+consequences involved in this great achievement of our generation.
+Already, it dominates all the new work done in psychology; but {115}
+what I wish to ask is whether its influence may not extend far beyond
+the limits of psychology, even into those of theology herself.  The
+relations of the doctrine of reflex action with no less a matter than
+the doctrine of theism is, in fact, the topic to which I now invite
+your attention.
+
+
+We are not the first in the field.  There have not been wanting writers
+enough to say that reflex action and all that follows from it give the
+_coup de grace_ to the superstition of a God.
+
+If you open, for instance, such a book on comparative psychology, as
+der Thierische Wille of G. H. Schneider, you will find, sandwiched in
+among the admirable dealings of the author with his proper subject, and
+popping out upon us in unexpected places, the most delightfully _naif_
+German onslaughts on the degradation of theologians, and the utter
+incompatibility of so many reflex adaptations to the environment with
+the existence of a creative intelligence.  There was a time, remembered
+by many of us here, when the existence of reflex action and all the
+other harmonies between the organism and the world were held to prove a
+God.  Now, they are held to disprove him.  The next turn of the
+whirligig may bring back proof of him again.
+
+Into this debate about his existence, I will not pretend to enter.  I
+must take up humbler ground, and limit my ambition to showing that a
+God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which,
+if he did exist, would form _the most adequate possible object_ for
+minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the
+universe.  My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward
+reality of {116} a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is
+the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible
+for the human mind's contemplation.  _Anything short of God is not
+rational, anything more than God is not possible_, if the human mind be
+in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reaction
+which we at the outset allowed.
+
+Theism, whatever its objective warrant, would thus be seen to have a
+subjective anchorage in its congruity with our nature as thinkers; and,
+however it may fare with its truth, to derive from this subjective
+adequacy the strongest possible guaranty of its permanence.  It is and
+will be the classic mean of rational opinion, the centre of gravity of
+all attempts to solve the riddle of life,--some falling below it by
+defect, some flying above it by excess, itself alone satisfying every
+mental need in strictly normal measure.  Our gain will thus in the
+first instance be psychological.  We shall merely have investigated a
+chapter in the natural history of the mind, and found that, as a matter
+of such natural history, God may be called the normal object of the
+mind's belief.  Whether over and above this he be really the living
+truth is another question.  If he is, it will show the structure of our
+mind to be in accordance with the nature of reality.  Whether it be or
+not in such accordance is, it seems to me, one of those questions that
+belong to the province of personal faith to decide.  I will not touch
+upon the question here, for I prefer to keep to the strictly
+natural-history point of view.  I will only remind you that each one of
+us is entitled either to doubt or to believe in the harmony between his
+faculties and the truth; and that, whether he doubt or {117} believe,
+he does it alike on his personal responsibility and risk.
+
+  "Du musst glauben, du musst wagen,
+    Denn die Goetter leihn kein Pfand,
+  Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen
+    In das schoene Wunderland."
+
+
+I will presently define exactly what I mean by God and by Theism, and
+explain what theories I referred to when I spoke just now of attempts
+to fly beyond the one and to outbid the other.
+
+
+But, first of all, let me ask you to linger a moment longer over what I
+have called the reflex theory of mind, so as to be sure that we
+understand it absolutely before going on to consider those of its
+consequences of which I am more particularly to speak.  I am not quite
+sure that its full scope is grasped even by those who have most
+zealously promulgated it.  I am not sure, for example, that all
+physiologists see that it commits them to regarding the mind as an
+essentially teleological mechanism.  I mean by this that the conceiving
+or theorizing faculty--the mind's middle department--functions
+_exclusively for the sake of ends_ that do not exist at all in the
+world of impressions we receive by way of our senses, but are set by
+our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether.[2]  It is a
+transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different
+world,--the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected
+in the interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose
+whatsoever.  Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective
+purposes, preferences, {118} fondnesses for certain effects, forms,
+orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order
+of our experience to be remodelled at all.  But, as we have the
+elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be
+effected; there is no escape.  The world's contents are _given_ to each
+of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can
+hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is
+like.  We have to break that order altogether,--and by picking out from
+it the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far
+away, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definite
+threads of sequence and tendency; to foresee particular liabilities and
+get ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place of
+what was chaos.  Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this
+moment and impartially added together an utter chaos?  The strains of
+my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of
+the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you
+may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all?  Is
+it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them
+that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few
+others--the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke from
+places in your memory that have nothing to do with this scene
+associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train
+of thought,--rational, because it leads to a conclusion which we have
+some organ to appreciate?  We have no organ or faculty to appreciate
+the simply given order.  The real world as it is given objectively at
+this moment is the sum total of all its beings and {119} events now.
+But can we think of such a sum?  Can we realize for an instant what a
+cross-section of all existence at a definite point of time would be?
+While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea-gull catches a fish at the mouth
+of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes
+in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.
+What does that mean?  Does the contemporaneity of these events with one
+another and with a million others as disjointed, form a rational bond
+between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world?
+Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the
+real order of the world.  It is an order with which we have nothing to
+do but to get away from it as fast as possible.  As I said, we break
+it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break
+it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home.  We make ten
+thousand separate serial orders of it, and on any one of these we react
+as though the others did not exist.  We discover among its various
+parts relations that were never given to sense at all (mathematical
+relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions), and
+out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and
+lawgiving, and ignore the rest.  Essential these relations are, but
+only _for our purpose_, the other relations being just as real and
+present as they; and our purpose is to _conceive simply_ and to
+_foresee_.  Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends
+pure and simple?  They are the ends of what we call science; and the
+miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any
+philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling.
+It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to {120} many of our
+aesthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends.
+
+When the man of affairs, the artist, or the man of science fails, he is
+not rebutted.  He tries again.  He says the impressions of sense _must_
+give way, _must_ be reduced to the desiderated form.[3]  They all
+postulate in the interests of their volitional nature a harmony between
+the latter and the nature of things.  The theologian does no more.  And
+the reflex doctrine of the mind's structure, though all theology should
+as yet have failed of its endeavor, could but confess that the endeavor
+itself at least obeyed in form the mind's most necessary law.[4]
+
+
+Now for the question I asked above: What kind of a being would God be
+if he did exist?  The word 'God' has come to mean many things in the
+history {121} of human thought, from Venus and Jupiter to the 'Idee'
+which figures in the pages of Hegel.  Even the laws of physical nature
+have, in these positivistic times, been held worthy of divine honor and
+presented as the only fitting object of our reverence.[5]  Of course,
+if our discussion is to bear any fruit, we must mean something more
+definite than this.  We must not call any object of our loyalty a 'God'
+without more ado, simply because to awaken our loyalty happens to be
+one of God's functions.  He must have some intrinsic characteristics of
+his own besides; and theism must mean the faith of that man who
+believes that the object of _his_ loyalty has those other attributes,
+negative or positive, as the case may be.
+
+Now, as regards a great many of the attributes of God, and their
+amounts and mutual relations, the world has been delivered over to
+disputes.  All such may for our present purpose be considered as quite
+inessential.  Not only such matters as his mode of revealing himself,
+the precise extent of his providence and power and their connection
+with our free-will, the proportion of his mercy to his justice, and the
+amount of his responsibility for evil; but also his metaphysical
+relation to the phenomenal world, whether causal, substantial, ideal,
+or what not,--are affairs of purely sectarian opinion that need not
+concern us at all.  Whoso debates them presupposes the essential
+features of theism to be granted already; and it is with these
+essential features, the bare poles of the subject, that our business
+exclusively lies.
+
+{122}
+
+Now, what are these essential features?  First, it is essential that
+God be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he
+must be conceived under the form of a mental personality.  The
+personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is
+involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition
+of our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves being
+all good and righteous things.  But, extrinsically considered, so to
+speak, God's personality is to be regarded, like any other personality,
+as something lying outside of my own and other than me, and whose
+existence I simply come upon and find.  A power not ourselves, then,
+which not only makes for righteousness, but means it, and which
+recognizes us,--such is the definition which I think nobody will be
+inclined to dispute.  Various are the attempts to shadow forth the
+other lineaments of so supreme a personality to our human imagination;
+various the ways of conceiving in what mode the recognition, the
+hearkening to our cry, can come.  Some are gross and idolatrous; some
+are the most sustained efforts man's intellect has ever made to keep
+still living on that subtile edge of things where speech and thought
+expire.  But, with all these differences, the essence remains
+unchanged.  In whatever other respects the divine personality may
+differ from ours or may resemble it, the two are consanguineous at
+least in this,--that both have purposes for which they care, and each
+can hear the other's call.
+
+
+Meanwhile, we can already see one consequence and one point of
+connection with the reflex-action theory of mind.  Any mind,
+constructed on the {123} triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its
+impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that
+object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and
+finally react.  The stage of reaction depends on the stage of
+definition, and these, of course, on the nature of the impressing
+object.  When the objects are concrete, particular, and familiar, our
+reactions are firm and certain enough,--often instinctive.  I see the
+desk, and lean on it; I see your quiet faces, and I continue to talk.
+But the objects will not stay concrete and particular: they fuse
+themselves into general essences, and they sum themselves into a
+whole,--the universe.  And then the object that confronts us, that
+knocks on our mental door and asks to be let in, and fixed and decided
+upon and actively met, is just this whole universe itself and its
+essence.
+
+What are _they_, and how shall I meet _them_?
+
+The whole flood of faiths and systems here rush in.  Philosophies and
+denials of philosophy, religions and atheisms, scepticisms and
+mysticisms, confirmed emotional moods and habitual practical biases,
+jostle one another; for all are alike trials, hasty, prolix, or of
+seemly length, to answer this momentous question.  And the function of
+them all, long or short, that which the moods and the systems alike
+subserve and pass into, is the third stage,--the stage of action.  For
+no one of them itself is final.  They form but the middle segment of
+the mental curve, and not its termination.  As the last theoretic pulse
+dies away, it does not leave the mental process complete: it is but the
+forerunner of the practical moment, in which alone the cycle of
+mentality finds its rhythmic pause.
+
+{124}
+
+We easily delude ourselves about this middle stage.  Sometimes we think
+it final, and sometimes we fail to see, amid the monstrous diversity in
+the length and complication of the cogitations which may fill it, that
+it can have but one essential function, and that the one we have
+pointed out,--the function of defining the direction which our
+activity, immediate or remote, shall take.
+
+If I simply say, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas!" I am defining the
+total nature of things in a way that carries practical consequences
+with it as decidedly as if I write a treatise De Natura Rerum in twenty
+volumes.  The treatise may trace its consequences more minutely than
+the saying; but the only worth of either treatise or saying is that the
+consequences are there.  The long definition can do no more than draw
+them; the short definition does no less.  Indeed, it may be said that
+if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should
+have identical consequences, those two definitions would really be
+identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by
+the different verbiage in which they are expressed.[6]
+
+
+My time is unfortunately too short to stay and give to this truth the
+development it deserves; but I will assume that you grant it without
+further parley, and pass to the next step in my argument.  And here,
+too, I shall have to bespeak your close attention for a moment, while I
+pass over the subject far more {125} rapidly than it deserves.  Whether
+true or false, any view of the universe which shall completely satisfy
+the mind must obey conditions of the mind's own imposing, must at least
+let the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called a
+rational universe or not.  Not any nature of things which may seem to
+be will also seem to be _ipso facto_ rational; and if it do not seem
+rational, it will afflict the mind with a ceaseless uneasiness, till it
+be formulated or interpreted in some other and more congenial way.  The
+study of what the mind's criteria of rationality are, the definition of
+its exactions in this respect, form an intensely interesting subject
+into which I cannot enter now with any detail.[7]  But so much I think
+you will grant me without argument,--that all three departments of the
+mind alike have a vote in the matter, and that no conception will pass
+muster which violates any of their essential modes of activity, or
+which leaves them without a chance to work.  By what title is it that
+every would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy which
+rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one half
+of mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creed
+of some partial sect?  Either it has dropped out of its net some of our
+impressions of sense,--what we call the facts of nature,--or it has
+left the theoretic and defining department with a lot of
+inconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands; or else,
+finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active and
+emotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-on or to
+live for.  Any one of these defects is fatal to its complete success.
+Some one {126} will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system,
+and to seek another in its stead.
+
+I need not go far to collect examples to illustrate to an audience of
+theologians what I mean.  Nor will you in particular, as champions of
+the Unitarianism of New England, be slow to furnish, from the motives
+which led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism,
+instances enough under the third or practical head.  A God who gives so
+little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all
+its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they
+say to our most cherished powers, There is no object for you.
+
+Well, just as within the limits of theism some kinds are surviving
+others by reason of their greater practical rationality, so theism
+itself, by reason of its practical rationality, is certain to survive
+all lower creeds.  Materialism and agnosticism, even were they true,
+could never gain universal and popular acceptance; for they both,
+alike, give a solution of things which is irrational to the practical
+third of our nature, and in which we can never volitionally feel at
+home.  Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental
+functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its
+formula of formulas prepared.  The whole array of active forces of our
+nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how
+to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life.  "Well!"
+cry they, "what shall we do?"  "Ignoramus, ignorabimus!" says
+agnosticism.  "React upon atoms and their concussions!" says
+materialism.  What a collapse!  The mental train misses fire, the
+middle fails to ignite the end, the cycle breaks down half-way to its
+conclusion; and the active {127} powers left alone, with no proper
+object on which to vent their energy, must either atrophy, sicken, and
+die, or else by their pent-up convulsions and excitement keep the whole
+machinery in a fever until some less incommensurable solution, some
+more practically rational formula, shall provide a normal issue for the
+currents of the soul.
+
+Now, theism always stands ready with the most practically rational
+solution it is possible to conceive.  Not an energy of our active
+nature to which it does not authoritatively appeal, not an emotion of
+which it does not normally and naturally release the springs.  At a
+single stroke, it changes the dead blank _it_ of the world into a
+living _thou_, with whom the whole man may have dealings.  To you, at
+any rate, I need waste no words in trying to prove its supreme
+commensurateness with all the demands that department Number Three of
+the mind has the power to impose on department Number Two.
+
+Our volitional nature must then, until the end of time, exert a
+constant pressure upon the other departments of the mind to induce them
+to function to theistic conclusions.  No contrary formulas can be more
+than provisionally held.  Infra-theistic theories must be always in
+unstable equilibrium; for department Number Three ever lurks in ambush,
+ready to assert its rights, and on the slightest show of justification
+it makes its fatal spring, and converts them into the other form in
+which alone mental peace and order can permanently reign.
+
+The question is, then, _Can_ departments One and Two, _can_ the facts
+of nature and the theoretic elaboration of them, always lead to
+theistic conclusions?
+
+The future history of philosophy is the only {128} authority capable of
+answering that question.  I, at all events, must not enter into it
+to-day, as that would be to abandon the purely natural-history point of
+view I mean to keep.
+
+This only is certain, that the theoretic faculty lives between two
+fires which never give her rest, and make her incessantly revise her
+formulations.  If she sink into a premature, short-sighted, and
+idolatrous theism, in comes department Number One with its battery of
+facts of sense, and dislodges her from her dogmatic repose.  If she
+lazily subside into equilibrium with the same facts of sense viewed in
+their simple mechanical outwardness, up starts the practical reason
+with its demands, and makes _that_ couch a bed of thorns.  From
+generation to generation thus it goes,--now a movement of reception
+from without, now one of expansion from within; department Number Two
+always worked to death, yet never excused from taking the most
+responsible part in the arrangements.  To-day, a crop of new facts;
+to-morrow, a flowering of new motives,--the theoretic faculty always
+having to effect the transition, and life growing withal so complex and
+subtle and immense that her powers of conceiving are almost ruptured
+with the strain.  See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic
+and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution,
+and how the young thinkers are at work!  See, in Great Britain, how the
+dryness of the strict associationist school, which under the
+ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday,
+gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional
+needs and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectual
+harmonies!  These are but tackings to the common {129} port, to that
+ultimate _Weltanschauung_ of maximum subjective as well as objective
+richness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any rate
+wear the theistic form.
+
+
+Here let me say one word about a remark we often hear coming from the
+anti-theistic wing: It is base, it is vile, it is the lowest depth of
+immorality, to allow department Number Three to interpose its demands,
+and have any vote in the question of what is true and what is false;
+the mind must be a passive, reactionless sheet of white paper, on which
+reality will simply come and register its own philosophic definition,
+as the pen registers the curve on the sheet of a chronograph.  "Of all
+the cants that are canted in this canting age" this has always seemed
+to me the most wretched, especially when it comes from professed
+psychologists.  As if the mind could, consistently with its definition,
+be a reactionless sheet at all!  As if conception could possibly occur
+except for a teleological purpose, except to show us the way from a
+state of things our senses cognize to another state of things our will
+desires!  As if 'science' itself were anything else than such an end of
+desire, and a most peculiar one at that!  And as if the 'truths' of
+bare physics in particular, which these sticklers for intellectual
+purity contend to be the only uncontaminated form, were not as great an
+alteration and falsification of the simply 'given' order of the world,
+into an order conceived solely for the mind's convenience and delight,
+as any theistic doctrine possibly can be!
+
+Physics is but one chapter in the great jugglery which our conceiving
+faculty is forever playing with {130} the order of being as it presents
+itself to our reception.  It transforms the unutterable dead level and
+continuum of the 'given' world into an utterly unlike world of sharp
+differences and hierarchic subordinations for no other reason than to
+satisfy certain subjective passions we possess.[8]
+
+And, so far as we can see, the given world is there only for the sake
+of the operation.  At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance
+of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the
+unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate.  To bid the man's
+subjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out the
+environment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statue
+express itself from out the stone.  Operate we must! and the only
+choice left us is that between operating to poor or to rich results.
+The only possible duty there can be in the matter is the duty of
+getting the richest results that the material given will allow.  The
+richness lies, of course, in the energy of all three departments of the
+mental cycle.  Not a sensible 'fact' of department One must be left in
+the cold, not a faculty of department Three be paralyzed; and
+department Two must form an indestructible bridge.  It is natural that
+the habitual neglect of department One by theologians should arouse
+indignation; but it is most _un_natural that the indignation should
+take the form of a wholesale denunciation of department Three.  It is
+the story of Kant's dove over again, denouncing the {131} pressure of
+the air.  Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us, that, amid the
+wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands
+upright,--that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but one
+commandment, but that one supreme, saying, _Thou shalt not be a
+theist_, for that would be to satisfy thy subjective propensities, and
+the satisfaction of those is intellectual damnation.  These most
+conscientious gentlemen think they have jumped off their own
+feet,--emancipated their mental operations from the control of their
+subjective propensities at large and _in toto_.  But they are deluded.
+They have simply chosen from among the entire set of propensities at
+their command those that were certain to construct, out of the
+materials given, the leanest, lowest, aridest result,--namely, the bare
+molecular world,--and they have sacrificed all the rest.[9]
+
+Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of
+his subjective propensities,--his pre-eminence over them simply and
+solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of
+his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual.  Had his whole
+life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have
+established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
+And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his
+wants are to be trusted; that even {132} when their gratification seems
+farthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of
+his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present
+powers of reckoning.  Prune down his extravagance, sober him, and you
+undo him.  The appetite for immediate consistency at any cost, or what
+the logicians call the 'law of parsimony,'--which is nothing but the
+passion for conceiving the universe in the most labor-saving
+way,--will, if made the exclusive law of the mind, end by blighting the
+development of the intellect itself quite as much as that of the
+feelings or the will.  The scientific conception of the world as an
+army of molecules gratifies this appetite after its fashion most
+exquisitely.  But if the religion of exclusive scientificism should
+ever succeed in suffocating all other appetites out of a nation's mind,
+and imbuing a whole race with the persuasion that simplicity and
+consistency demand a _tabula rasa_ to be made of every notion that does
+not form part of the _soi-disant_ scientific synthesis, that nation,
+that race, will just as surely go to ruin, and fall a prey to their
+more richly constituted neighbors, as the beasts of the field, as a
+whole, have fallen a prey to man.
+
+I have myself little fear for our Anglo-Saxon race.  Its moral,
+aesthetic, and practical wants form too dense a stubble to be mown by
+any scientific Occam's razor that has yet been forged.  The knights of
+the razor will never form among us more than a sect; but when I see
+their fraternity increasing in numbers, and, what is worse, when I see
+their negations acquiring almost as much prestige and authority as
+their affirmations legitimately claim over the minds of the docile
+public, I feel as if the influences working in the direction of our
+mental barbarization were {133} beginning to be rather strong, and
+needed some positive counteraction.  And when I ask myself from what
+quarter the invasion may best be checked, I can find no answer as good
+as the one suggested by casting my eyes around this room.  For this
+needful task, no fitter body of men than the Unitarian clergy exists.
+Who can uphold the rights of department Three of the mind with better
+grace than those who long since showed how they could fight and suffer
+for department One?  As, then, you burst the bonds of a narrow
+ecclesiastical tradition, by insisting that no fact of sense or result
+of science must be left out of account in the religious synthesis, so
+may you still be the champions of mental completeness and
+all-sidedness.  May you, with equal success, avert the formation of a
+narrow scientific tradition, and burst the bonds of any synthesis which
+would pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, those
+relations of reality, to which at present our active and emotional
+tendencies are our only avenues of approach.  I hear it said that
+Unitarianism is not growing in these days.  I know nothing of the truth
+of the statement; but if it be true, it is surely because the great
+ship of Orthodoxy is nearing the port and the pilot is being taken on
+board.  If you will only lead in a theistic science, as successfully as
+you have led in a scientific theology, your separate name as Unitarians
+may perish from the mouths of men; for your task will have been done,
+and your function at an end.  Until that distant day, you have work
+enough in both directions awaiting you.
+
+
+Meanwhile, let me pass to the next division of our subject.  I said
+that we are forced to regard God as {134} the normal object of the
+mind's belief, inasmuch as any conception that falls short of God is
+irrational, if the word 'rational' be taken in its fullest sense; while
+any conception that goes beyond God is impossible, if the human mind be
+constructed after the triadic-reflex pattern we have discussed at such
+length.  The first half of the thesis has been disposed of.
+Infra-theistic conceptions, materialisms and agnosticisms, are
+irrational because they are inadequate stimuli to man's practical
+nature.  I have now to justify the latter half of the thesis.
+
+I dare say it may for an instant have perplexed some of you that I
+should speak of conceptions that aimed at going beyond God, and of
+attempts to fly above him or outbid him; so I will now explain exactly
+what I mean.  In defining the essential attributes of God, I said he
+was a personality lying outside our own and other than us,--a power not
+ourselves.  Now, the attempts to fly beyond theism, of which I speak,
+are attempts to get over this ultimate duality of God and his believer,
+and to transform it into some sort or other of identity.  If
+infratheistic ways of looking on the world leave it in the third
+person, a mere _it_; and if theism turns the _it_ into a _thou_,--so we
+may say that these other theories try to cover it with the mantle of
+the first person, and to make it a part of _me_.
+
+I am well aware that I begin here to tread on ground in which trenchant
+distinctions may easily seem to mutilate the facts.
+
+That sense of emotional reconciliation with God which characterizes the
+highest moments of the theistic consciousness may be described as
+'oneness' with him, and so from the very bosom of theism a {135}
+monistic doctrine seem to arise.  But this consciousness of
+self-surrender, of absolute practical union between one's self and the
+divine object of one's contemplation, is a totally different thing from
+any sort of substantial identity.  Still the object God and the subject
+I are two.  Still I simply come upon him, and find his existence given
+to me; and the climax of my practical union with what is given, forms
+at the same time the climax of my perception that as a numerical fact
+of existence I am something radically other than the Divinity with
+whose effulgence I am filled.
+
+Now, it seems to me that the only sort of union of creature with
+creator with which theism, properly so called, comports, is of this
+emotional and practical kind; and it is based unchangeably on the
+empirical fact that the thinking subject and the object thought are
+numerically two.  How my mind and will, which are not God, can yet
+cognize and leap to meet him, how I ever came to be so separate from
+him, and how God himself came to be at all, are problems that for the
+theist can remain unsolved and insoluble forever.  It is sufficient for
+him to know that he himself simply is, and needs God; and that behind
+this universe God simply is and will be forever, and will in some way
+hear his call.  In the practical assurance of these empirical facts,
+without 'Erkentnisstheorie' or philosophical ontology, without
+metaphysics of emanation or creation to justify or make them more
+intelligible, in the blessedness of their mere acknowledgment as given,
+lie all the peace and power he craves.  The floodgates of the religious
+life are opened, and the full currents can pour through.
+
+It is this empirical and practical side of the theistic position, its
+theoretic chastity and modesty, which I {136} wish to accentuate here.
+The highest flights of theistic mysticism, far from pretending to
+penetrate the secrets of the _me_ and the _thou_ in worship, and to
+transcend the dualism by an act of intelligence, simply turn their
+backs on such attempts.  The problem for them has simply
+vanished,--vanished from the sight of an attitude which refuses to
+notice such futile theoretic difficulties.  Get but that "peace of God
+which passeth understanding," and the questions of the understanding
+will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest.  In other
+words, theistic mysticism, that form of theism which at first sight
+seems most to have transcended the fundamental otherness of God from
+man, has done it least of all in the theoretic way.  The pattern of its
+procedure is precisely that of the simplest man dealing with the
+simplest fact of his environment.  Both he and the theist tarry in
+department Two of their minds only so long as is necessary to define
+what is the presence that confronts them.  The theist decides that its
+character is such as to be fitly responded to on his part by a
+religious reaction; and into that reaction he forthwith pours his soul.
+His insight into the _what_ of life leads to results so immediately and
+intimately rational that the _why_, the _how_, and the _whence_ of it
+are questions that lose all urgency.  'Gefuehl ist Alles,' Faust says.
+The channels of department Three have drained those of department Two
+of their contents; and happiness over the fact that being has made
+itself what it is, evacuates all speculation as to how it could make
+itself at all.
+
+But now, although to most human minds such a position as this will be
+the position of rational equilibrium, it is not difficult to bring
+forward certain {137} considerations, in the light of which so simple
+and practical a mental movement begins to seem rather short-winded and
+second-rate and devoid of intellectual style.  This easy acceptance of
+an opaque limit to our speculative insight; this satisfaction with a
+Being whose character we simply apprehend without comprehending
+anything more about him, and with whom after a certain point our
+dealings can be only of a volitional and emotional sort; above all,
+this sitting down contented with a blank unmediated dualism,--are they
+not the very picture of unfaithfulness to the rights and duties of our
+theoretic reason?
+
+Surely, if the universe is reasonable (and we must believe that it is
+so), it must be susceptible, potentially at least, of being reasoned
+_out_ to the last drop without residuum.  Is it not rather an insult to
+the very word 'rational' to say that the rational character of the
+universe and its creator means no more than that we practically feel at
+home in their presence, and that our powers are a match for their
+demands?  Do they not in fact demand to be _understood_ by us still
+more than to be reacted on?  Is not the unparalleled development of
+department Two of the mind in man his crowning glory and his very
+essence; and may not the _knowing of the truth_ be his absolute
+vocation?  And if it is, ought he flatly to acquiesce in a spiritual
+life of 'reflex type,' whose form is no higher than that of the life
+that animates his spinal cord,--nay, indeed, that animates the writhing
+segments of any mutilated worm?
+
+It is easy to see how such arguments and queries may result in the
+erection of an ideal of our mental destiny, far different from the
+simple and practical religious one we have described.  We may well
+begin {138} to ask whether such things as practical reactions can be
+the final upshot and purpose of all our cognitive energy.  Mere outward
+acts, changes in the position of parts of matter (for they are nothing
+else), can they possibly be the culmination and consummation of our
+relations with the nature of things?  Can they possibly form a result
+to which our godlike powers of insight shall be judged merely
+subservient?  Such an idea, if we scan it closely, soon begins to seem
+rather absurd.  Whence this piece of matter comes and whither that one
+goes, what difference ought that to make to the nature of things,
+except so far as with the comings and the goings our wonderful inward
+conscious harvest may be reaped?
+
+And so, very naturally and gradually, one may be led from the theistic
+and practical point of view to what I shall call the _gnostical_ one.
+We may think that department Three of the mind, with its doings of
+right and its doings of wrong, must be there only to serve department
+Two; and we may suspect that the sphere of our activity exists for no
+other purpose than to illumine our cognitive consciousness by the
+experience of its results.  Are not all sense and all emotion at bottom
+but turbid and perplexed modes of what in its clarified shape is
+intelligent cognition?  Is not all experience just the eating of the
+fruit of the tree of _knowledge_ of good and evil, and nothing more?
+
+These questions fan the fire of an unassuageable gnostic thirst, which
+is as far removed from theism in one direction as agnosticism was
+removed from it in the other; and which aspires to nothing less than an
+absolute unity of knowledge with its object, and refuses to be
+satisfied short of a fusion and solution and saturation of both
+impression and action with reason, and {139} an absorption of all three
+departments of the mind into one.  Time would fail us to-day (even had
+I the learning, which I have not) to speak of gnostic systems in
+detail.  The aim of all of them is to shadow forth a sort of process by
+which spirit, emerging from its beginnings and exhausting the whole
+circle of finite experience in its sweep, shall at last return and
+possess itself as its own object at the climax of its career.  This
+climax is the religious consciousness.  At the giddy height of this
+conception, whose latest and best known form is the Hegelian
+philosophy, definite words fail to serve their purpose; and the
+ultimate goal,--where object and subject, worshipped and worshipper,
+facts and the knowledge of them, fall into one, and where no other is
+left outstanding beyond this one that alone is, and that we may call
+indifferently act or fact, reality or idea, God or creation,--this
+goal, I say, has to be adumbrated to our halting and gasping
+intelligence by coarse physical metaphors, 'positings' and
+'self-returnings' and 'removals' and 'settings free,' which hardly help
+to make the matter clear.
+
+But from the midst of the curdling and the circling of it all we seem
+dimly to catch a glimpse of a state in which the reality to be known
+and the power of knowing shall have become so mutually adequate that
+each exhaustively is absorbed by the other and the twain become one
+flesh, and in which the light shall somehow have soaked up all the
+outer darkness into its own ubiquitous beams.  Like all headlong
+ideals, this apotheosis of the bare conceiving faculty has its depth
+and wildness, its pang and its charm.  To many it sings a truly siren
+strain; and so long as it is held only as a postulate, as a mere
+vanishing {140} point to give perspective to our intellectual aim, it
+is hard to see any empirical title by which we may deny the legitimacy
+of gnosticism's claims.  That we are not as yet near the goal it
+prefigures can never be a reason why we might not continue indefinitely
+to approach it; and to all sceptical arguments, drawn from our reason's
+actual finiteness, gnosticism can still oppose its indomitable faith in
+the infinite character of its potential destiny.
+
+Now, here it is that the physiologist's generalization, as it seems to
+me, may fairly come in, and by ruling any such extravagant faith out of
+court help to legitimate our personal mistrust of its pretensions.  I
+confess that I myself have always had a great mistrust of the
+pretensions of the gnostic faith.  Not only do I utterly fail to
+understand what a cognitive faculty erected into the absolute of being,
+with itself as its object, can mean; but even if we grant it a being
+other than itself for object, I cannot reason myself out of the belief
+that however familiar and at home we might become with the character of
+that being, the bare being of it, the fact that it is there at all,
+must always be something blankly given and presupposed in order that
+conception may begin its work; must in short lie beyond speculation,
+and not be enveloped in its sphere.
+
+Accordingly, it is with no small pleasure that as a student of
+physiology and psychology I find the only lesson I can learn from these
+sciences to be one that corroborates these convictions.  From its first
+dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find that the cognitive
+faculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one element
+in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mental
+powers,--the powers {141} of will.  Such a thing as its emancipation
+and absolution from these organic relations receives no faintest color
+of plausibility from any fact we can discern.  Arising as a part, in a
+mental and objective world which are both larger than itself, it must,
+whatever its powers of growth may be (and I am far from wishing to
+disparage them), remain a part to the end.  This is the character of
+the cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have no
+reason to suppose that that character will ever change.  On the
+contrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power of
+moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the
+deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess.  In
+every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred
+from, the grasp of every other.  God's being is sacred from ours.  To
+co-operate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems
+all he wants of us.  In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any
+chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking
+of him up, must lie the real meaning of our destiny.
+
+This is nothing new.  All men know it at those rare moments when the
+soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and
+insisting about this formula or that.  In the silence of our theories
+we then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Being
+beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the
+character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe,
+is more than all theories about it put together.  The most any theory
+about it can do is to bring us to that.  Certain it is that the acutest
+theories, the greatest intellectual power, the most elaborate
+education, are a {142} sheer mockery when, as too often happens, they
+feed mean motives and a nerveless will.  And it is equally certain that
+a resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped with
+learning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should never
+pay were we not satisfied that the essential root of human personality
+lay there.
+
+
+I have sketched my subject in the briefest outlines; but still I hope
+you will agree that I have established my point, and that the
+physiological view of mentality, so far from invalidating, can but give
+aid and comfort to the theistic attitude of mind.  Between agnosticism
+and gnosticism, theism stands midway, and holds to what is true in
+each.  With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannot
+know how Being made itself or us.  With gnosticism, it goes so far as
+to insist that we can know Being's character when made, and how it asks
+us to behave.
+
+If any one fear that in insisting so strongly that behavior is the aim
+and end of every sound philosophy I have curtailed the dignity and
+scope of the speculative function in us, I can only reply that in this
+ascertainment of the _character_ of Being lies an almost infinite
+speculative task.  Let the voluminous considerations by which all
+modern thought converges toward idealistic or pan-psychic conclusions
+speak for me.  Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of a Renouvier,
+reply whether within the limits drawn by purely empirical theism the
+speculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do.
+But do it little or much, its _place_ in a philosophy is always the
+same, and is set by the structural form of the mind.  Philosophies,
+whether expressed in sonnets or {143} systems, all must wear this form.
+The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and
+asks its meaning.  He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and
+makes a voyage long or short.  He ascends into the empyrean, and
+communes with the eternal essences.  But whatever his achievements and
+discoveries be while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some
+new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with
+which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the _terra
+firma_ of concrete life again.
+
+Whatever thought takes this voyage is a philosophy.  We have seen how
+theism takes it.  And in the philosophy of a thinker who, though long
+neglected, is doing much to renovate the spiritual life of his native
+France to-day (I mean Charles Renouvier, whose writings ought to be
+better known among us than they are), we have an instructive example of
+the way in which this very empirical element in theism, its confession
+of an ultimate opacity in things, of a dimension of being which escapes
+our theoretic control, may suggest a most definite practical
+conclusion,--this one, namely, that 'our wills are free.'  I will say
+nothing of Renouvier's line of reasoning; it is contained in many
+volumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention.[10]  But to
+enforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes the
+philosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem of
+Tennyson, published last year, in which the speculative voyage is made,
+and the same conclusion reached in a few lines:--
+
+{144}
+
+  "Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
+  From that great deep before our world begins,
+  Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will,--
+  Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
+  From that true world within the world we see,
+  Whereof our world is but the bounding shore,--
+  Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,
+  With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun
+  Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.
+  For in the world which is not ours, they said,
+  'Let us make man,' and that which should be man,
+  From that one light no man can look upon,
+  Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons
+  And all the shadows.  O dear Spirit, half-lost
+  In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign
+  That thou art thou,--who wailest being born
+  And banish'd into mystery,...
+            ...our mortal veil
+  And shattered phantom of that Infinite One,
+  Who made thee unconceivably thyself
+  Out of his whole world-self and all in all,--
+  Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape
+  And ivyberry, choose; and still depart
+  From death to death through life and life, and find
+  Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought
+  Not matter, nor the finite-infinite,
+  _But this main miracle, that thou art thou,
+  With power on thine own act and on the world_."
+
+
+
+[1] Address delivered to the Unitarian Ministers' Institute at
+Princeton, Mass., 1881, and printed in the Unitarian Review for October
+of that year.
+
+[2] See some Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind, in the Journal of
+Speculative Philosophy for January, 1878.
+
+[3] "No amount of failure in the attempt to subject the world of
+sensible experience to a thorough-going system of conceptions, and to
+bring all happenings back to cases of immutably valid law, is able to
+shake our faith in the rightness of our principles.  We hold fast to
+our demand that even the greatest apparent confusion must sooner or
+later solve itself in transparent formulas.  We begin the work ever
+afresh; and, refusing to believe that nature will permanently withhold
+the reward of our exertions, think rather that we have hitherto only
+failed to push them in the right direction.  And all this pertinacity
+flows from a conviction that we have no right to renounce the
+fulfilment of our task.  What, in short sustains the courage of
+investigators is the force of obligation of an ethical idea."
+(Sigwart: Logik, bd. ii., p. 23.)
+
+This is a true account of the spirit of science.  Does it essentially
+differ from the spirit of religion?  And is any one entitled to say in
+advance, that, while the one form of faith shall be crowned with
+success, the other is certainly doomed to fail?
+
+[4] Concerning the transformation of the given order into the order of
+conception, see S. H. Hodgson, The Philosophy of Reflection, chap. v.;
+H. Lotze, Logik, sects. 342-351; C. Sigwart, Logik, sects. 60-63, 105.
+
+[5] Haeckel has recently (Der Monismus, 1893, p. 37) proposed the
+Cosmic Ether as a divinity fitted to reconcile science with theistic
+faith.
+
+[6] See the admirably original "Illustrations of the Logic of Science,"
+by C. S. Peirce, especially the second paper, "How to make our Thoughts
+clear," in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878.
+
+[7] On this subject, see the preceding Essay.
+
+[8] "As soon as it is recognized that our thought, as logic deals with
+it, reposes on our _will to think_, the primacy of the will, even in
+the theoretical sphere, must be conceded; and the last of
+presuppositions is not merely [Kant's] that 'I think' must accompany
+all my representations, but also that 'I will' must dominate all my
+thinking."  (Sigwart; Logik, ll. 25.)
+
+[9] As our ancestors said, _Fiat justitia, pereat mundus_, so we, who
+do not believe in justice or any absolute good, must, according to
+these prophets, be willing to see the world perish, in order that
+_scientia fiat_.  Was there ever a more exquisite idol of the den, or
+rather of the _shop_?  In the clean sweep to be made of superstitions,
+let the idol of stern obligation to be scientific go with the rest, and
+people will have a fair chance to understand one another.  But this
+blowing of hot and of cold makes nothing but confusion.
+
+[10] Especially the Essais de Critique Generale, 2me Edition, 6 vols.,
+12mo, Paris, 1875; and the Esquisse d'une Classification Systematique
+des Doctrines Philosophiques, 2 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1885.
+
+
+
+
+{145}
+
+THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM.[1]
+
+A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out
+of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than
+warm up stale arguments which every one has heard.  This is a radical
+mistake.  I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive
+genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground,--not, perhaps,
+of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our
+sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the
+ideas of fate and of free-will imply.  At our very side almost, in the
+past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press
+works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights.  Not to
+speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not
+to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here,--we see in the
+writings of Renouvier, Fouillee, and Delboeuf[2] how completely changed
+and refreshed is the form of all the old disputes.  I cannot pretend to
+vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my
+ambition limits itself to just one little point.  If I can make two of
+the necessarily implied corollaries {146} of determinism clearer to you
+than they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for you
+to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of
+what you are about.  And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to
+remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of
+your hesitation is.  I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all
+pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true.  The
+most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in
+assuming it true, and acting as if it were true.  If it be true, it
+seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case.  Its
+truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats.
+It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their
+backs upon it.  In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are
+free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free.
+This should exclude, it seems to me, from the free-will side of the
+question all hope of a coercive demonstration,--a demonstration which
+I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.
+
+
+With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance.  But not
+without one more point understood as well.  The arguments I am about to
+urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories
+about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to
+attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective
+satisfaction; and, second, if there be two conceptions, and the one
+seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we are
+entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two.
+I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me;
+{147} for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not,
+they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say.  I
+cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the
+magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science--our
+doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest--proceed
+from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational
+shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the
+crude order of our experience.  The world has shown itself, to a great
+extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality.  How much
+farther it will show itself plastic no one can say.  Our only means of
+finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions
+of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality.  If a certain
+formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral
+demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to
+doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence,
+for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as
+subjective and emotional as the other is.  The principle of causality,
+for example,--what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply
+a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper
+kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary
+juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears?  It is as much an altar
+to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens.  All our
+scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
+Uniformity is as much so as is free-will.  If this be admitted, we can
+debate on even terms.  But if any one pretends that while freedom and
+variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and
+uniformity are something {148} altogether different, I do not see how
+we can debate at all.[3]
+
+To begin, then, I must suppose you acquainted with all the usual
+arguments on the subject.  I cannot stop to take up the old proofs from
+causation, from statistics, from the certainty with which we can
+foretell one another's conduct, from the fixity of character, and all
+the rest.  But there are two words which usually encumber these
+classical arguments, {149} and which we must immediately dispose of if
+we are to make any progress.  One is the eulogistic word _freedom_, and
+the other is the opprobrious word _chance_.  The word 'chance' I wish
+to keep, but I wish to get rid of the word 'freedom.'  Its eulogistic
+associations have so far overshadowed all the rest of its meaning that
+both parties claim the sole right to use it, and determinists to-day
+insist that they alone are freedom's champions.  Old-fashioned
+determinism was what we may call _hard_ determinism.  It did not shrink
+from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and
+the like.  Nowadays, we have a _soft_ determinism which abhors harsh
+words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination,
+says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity
+understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
+Even a writer as little used to making capital out of soft words as Mr.
+Hodgson hesitates not to call himself a 'free-will determinist.'
+
+Now, all this is a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of
+fact has been entirely smothered.  Freedom in all these senses presents
+simply no problem at all.  No matter what the soft determinist mean by
+it,--whether he mean the acting without external constraint; whether he
+mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law
+of the whole,--who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and
+sometimes we are not?  But there _is_ a problem, an issue of fact and
+not of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is often
+decided without discussion in one sentence,--nay, in one clause of a
+sentence,--by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their
+efforts to show {150} what 'true' freedom is; and that is the question
+of determinism, about which we are to talk to-night.
+
+Fortunately, no ambiguities hang about this word or about its opposite,
+indeterminism.  Both designate an outward way in which things may
+happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental
+associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance.  Now,
+evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism and
+indeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible to
+find.  Let us look at the difference between them and see for
+ourselves.  What does determinism profess?
+
+It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down
+absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be.  The
+future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we
+call the present is compatible with only one totality.  Any other
+future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible.  The
+whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an
+absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or
+shadow of turning.
+
+  "With earth's first clay they did the last man knead,
+  And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.
+  And the first morning of creation wrote
+  What the last dawn of reckoning shall read."
+
+
+Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain
+amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of
+them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be.  It
+admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that
+things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be
+ambiguous.  Of two {151} alternative futures which we conceive, both
+may now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at the
+very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself.
+Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact.
+It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it
+corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things.  To that
+view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from
+out of which they are chosen; and, _somewhere_, indeterminism says,
+such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.
+
+Determinism, on the contrary, says they exist _nowhere_, and that
+necessity on the one hand and impossibility on the other are the sole
+categories of the real.  Possibilities that fail to get realized are,
+for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all.
+There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all
+that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity
+virtually there.  The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass
+of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which
+'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.
+
+The issue, it will be seen, is a perfectly sharp one, which no
+eulogistic terminology can smear over or wipe out.  The truth _must_
+lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side makes the
+other false.
+
+The question relates solely to the existence of possibilities, in the
+strict sense of the term, as things that may, but need not, be.  Both
+sides admit that a volition, for instance, has occurred.  The
+indeterminists say another volition might have occurred in its place;
+the determinists swear that nothing could possibly {152} have occurred
+in its place.  Now, can science be called in to tell us which of these
+two point-blank contradicters of each other is right?  Science
+professes to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters of
+fact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount of
+assurance that something actually happened give us the least grain of
+information as to whether another thing might or might not have
+happened in its place?  Only facts can be proved by other facts.  With
+things that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern.  If
+we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the
+possibility-question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up.
+
+And the truth is that facts practically have hardly anything to do with
+making us either determinists or indeterminists.  Sure enough, we make
+a flourish of quoting facts this way or that; and if we are
+determinists, we talk about the infallibility with which we can predict
+one another's conduct; while if we are indeterminists, we lay great
+stress on the fact that it is just because we cannot foretell one
+another's conduct, either in war or statecraft or in any of the great
+and small intrigues and businesses of men, that life is so intensely
+anxious and hazardous a game.  But who does not see the wretched
+insufficiency of this so-called objective testimony on both sides?
+What fills up the gaps in our minds is something not objective, not
+external.  What divides us into possibility men and anti-possibility
+men is different faiths or postulates,--postulates of rationality.  To
+this man the world seems more rational with possibilities in it,--to
+that man more rational with possibilities excluded; and talk as we will
+about having to yield to {153} evidence, what makes us monists or
+pluralists, determinists or indeterminists, is at bottom always some
+sentiment like this.
+
+The stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to the
+idea of chance.  As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our
+friends, we find a number of them shaking their heads.  This notion of
+alternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one of
+several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name
+for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind
+can for an instant tolerate in the world.  What is it, they ask, but
+barefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law?  And
+if the slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the
+whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos
+from recommencing her topsy-turvy reign?
+
+Remarks of this sort about chance will put an end to discussion as
+quickly as anything one can find.  I have already told you that
+'chance' was a word I wished to keep and use.  Let us then examine
+exactly what it means, and see whether it ought to be such a terrible
+bugbear to us.  I fancy that squeezing the thistle boldly will rob it
+of its sting.
+
+The sting of the word 'chance' seems to lie in the assumption that it
+means something positive, and that if anything happens by chance, it
+must needs be something of an intrinsically irrational and preposterous
+sort.  Now, chance means nothing of the kind.  It is a purely negative
+and relative term,[4] giving us {154} no information about that of
+which it is predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with
+something else,--not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other
+things in advance of its own actual presence.  As this point is the
+most subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the point
+on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to
+it.  What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be
+in itself to call it 'chance.'  It may be a bad thing, it may be a good
+thing.  It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching
+the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an
+unimaginably perfect way.  All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that
+this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise.  For the
+system of other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing.  Its
+origin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands
+off! coming, when it comes, as a free gift, or not at all.
+
+This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when
+thus considered _ab. extra_, or from the point of view of previous
+things or distant things, do not preclude its having any amount of
+positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and
+moment.  All that its chance-character asserts about it is that there
+is something in it really of its own, something that is not the
+unconditional property of the whole.  If the whole wants this property,
+the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance.
+That the universe may actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this
+sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited
+powers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion.
+
+Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest {155} dose of
+disconnectedness of one part with another, the smallest modicum of
+independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, for
+example, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into a
+sort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all.  Since
+future human volitions are as a matter of fact the only ambiguous
+things we are tempted to believe in, let us stop for a moment to make
+ourselves sure whether their independent and accidental character need
+be fraught with such direful consequences to the universe as these.
+
+What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after
+the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance as far as the present
+moment is concerned?  It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford
+Street are called; but that only one, and that one _either_ one, shall
+be chosen.  Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of
+my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the
+choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street.
+In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and
+then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate ten
+minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door
+of this hall just as I was before the choice was made.  Imagine then
+that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and
+traverse Oxford Street.  You, as passive spectators, look on and see
+the two alternative universes,--one of them with me walking through
+Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking through
+Oxford Street.  Now, if you are determinists you believe one of these
+universes to have been from eternity impossible: you believe it to have
+{156} been impossible because of the intrinsic irrationality or
+accidentality somewhere involved in it.  But looking outwardly at these
+universes, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one, and
+which the rational and necessary one?  I doubt if the most iron-clad
+determinist among you could have the slightest glimmer of light on this
+point.  In other words, either universe _after the fact_ and once there
+would, to our means of observation and understanding, appear just as
+rational as the other.  There would be absolutely no criterion by which
+we might judge one necessary and the other matter of chance.  Suppose
+now we relieve the gods of their hypothetical task and assume my
+choice, once made, to be made forever.  I go through Divinity Avenue
+for good and all.  If, as good determinists, you now begin to affirm,
+what all good determinists punctually do affirm, that in the nature of
+things I _couldn't_ have gone through Oxford Street,--had I done so it
+would have been chance, irrationality, insanity, a horrid gap in
+nature,--I simply call your attention to this, that your affirmation is
+what the Germans call a _Machtspruch_, a mere conception fulminated as
+a dogma and based on no insight into details.  Before my choice, either
+street seemed as natural to you as to me.  Had I happened to take
+Oxford Street, Divinity Avenue would have figured in your philosophy as
+the gap in nature; and you would have so proclaimed it with the best
+deterministic conscience in the world.
+
+But what a hollow outcry, then, is this against a chance which, if it
+were present to us, we could by no character whatever distinguish from
+a rational necessity!  I have taken the most trivial of examples, but
+no possible example could lead to any different {157} result.  For what
+are the alternatives which, in point of fact, offer themselves to human
+volition?  What are those futures that now seem matters of chance?  Are
+they not one and all like the Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street of our
+example?  Are they not all of them _kinds_ of things already here and
+based in the existing frame of nature?  Is any one ever tempted to
+produce an _absolute_ accident, something utterly irrelevant to the
+rest of the world?  Do not all the motives that assail us, all the
+futures that offer themselves to our choice, spring equally from the
+soil of the past; and would not either one of them, whether realized
+through chance or through necessity, the moment it was realized, seem
+to us to fit that past, and in the completest and most continuous
+manner to interdigitate with the phenomena already there?[5]
+
+The more one thinks of the matter, the more one wonders that so empty
+and gratuitous a hubbub as this outcry against chance should have found
+so great an echo in the hearts of men.  It is a word which tells us
+absolutely nothing about what chances, or about the _modus operandi_ of
+the chancing; and the use of it as a war-cry shows only a temper of
+{158} intellectual absolutism, a demand that the world shall be a solid
+block, subject to one control,--which temper, which demand, the world
+may not be bound to gratify at all.  In every outwardly verifiable and
+practical respect, a world in which the alternatives that now actually
+distract _your_ choice were decided by pure chance would be by _me_
+absolutely undistinguished from the world in which I now live.  I am,
+therefore, entirely willing to call it, so far as your choices go, a
+world of chance for me.  To _yourselves_, it is true, those very acts
+of choice, which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are the
+opposites of this, for you are within them and effect them.  To you
+they appear as decisions; and decisions, for him who makes them, are
+altogether peculiar psychic facts.  Self-luminous and self-justifying
+at the living moment at which they occur, they appeal to no outside
+moment to put its stamp upon them or make them continuous with the rest
+of nature.  Themselves it is rather who seem to make nature continuous;
+and in their strange and intense function of granting consent to one
+possibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocal
+and double future into an inalterable and simple past.
+
+But with the psychology of the matter we have no concern this evening.
+The quarrel which determinism has with chance fortunately has nothing
+to do with this or that psychological detail.  It is a quarrel
+altogether metaphysical.  Determinism denies the ambiguity of future
+volitions, because it affirms that nothing future can be ambiguous.
+But we have said enough to meet the issue.  Indeterminate future
+volitions do mean chance.  Let us not fear to shout it from the
+house-tops if need be; for we now know that {159} the idea of chance
+is, at bottom, exactly the same thing as the idea of gift,--the one
+simply being a disparaging, and the other a eulogistic, name for
+anything on which we have no effective _claim_.  And whether the world
+be the better or the worse for having either chances or gifts in it
+will depend altogether on _what_ these uncertain and unclaimable things
+turn out to be.
+
+
+And this at last brings us within sight of our subject.  We have seen
+what determinism means: we have seen that indeterminism is rightly
+described as meaning chance; and we have seen that chance, the very
+name of which we are urged to shrink from as from a metaphysical
+pestilence, means only the negative fact that no part of the world,
+however big, can claim to control absolutely the destinies of the
+whole.  But although, in discussing the word 'chance,' I may at moments
+have seemed to be arguing for its real existence, I have not meant to
+do so yet.  We have not yet ascertained whether this be a world of
+chance or no; at most, we have agreed that it seems so.  And I now
+repeat what I said at the outset, that, from any strict theoretical
+point of view, the question is insoluble.  To deepen our theoretic
+sense of the _difference_ between a world with chances in it and a
+deterministic world is the most I can hope to do; and this I may now at
+last begin upon, after all our tedious clearing of the way.
+
+I wish first of all to show you just what the notion that this is a
+deterministic world implies.  The implications I call your attention to
+are all bound up with the fact that it is a world in which we
+constantly have to make what I shall, with your permission, call
+judgments of regret.  Hardly an hour passes in {160} which we do not
+wish that something might be otherwise; and happy indeed are those of
+us whose hearts have never echoed the wish of Omar Khayam--
+
+  "That we might clasp, ere closed, the book of fate,
+    And make the writer on a fairer leaf
+  Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate.
+
+  "Ah!  Love, could you and I with fate conspire
+  To mend this sorry scheme of things entire,
+    Would we not shatter it to bits, and then
+  Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"
+
+
+Now, it is undeniable that most of these regrets are foolish, and quite
+on a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on the
+universe of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable The
+Atheist and the Acorn,--
+
+  "Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore,
+  Thy whimsies would have worked no more," etc.
+
+Even from the point of view of our own ends, we should probably make a
+botch of remodelling the universe.  How much more then from the point
+of view of ends we cannot see!  Wise men therefore regret as little as
+they can.  But still some regrets are pretty obstinate and hard to
+stifle,--regrets for acts of wanton cruelty or treachery, for example,
+whether performed by others or by ourselves.  Hardly any one can remain
+_entirely_ optimistic after reading the confession of the murderer at
+Brockton the other day: how, to get rid of the wife whose continued
+existence bored him, he inveigled her into a desert spot, shot her four
+times, and then, as she lay on the ground and said to him, "You didn't
+do it on purpose, did you, dear?" replied, "No, I {161} didn't do it on
+purpose," as he raised a rock and smashed her skull.  Such an
+occurrence, with the mild sentence and self-satisfaction of the
+prisoner, is a field for a crop of regrets, which one need not take up
+in detail.  We feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the rest
+of the universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else would
+really have been better in its place.
+
+But for the deterministic philosophy the murder, the sentence, and the
+prisoner's optimism were all necessary from eternity; and nothing else
+for a moment had a ghost of a chance of being put into their place.  To
+admit such a chance, the determinists tell us, would be to make a
+suicide of reason; so we must steel our hearts against the thought.
+And here our plot thickens, for we see the first of those difficult
+implications of determinism and monism which it is my purpose to make
+you feel.  If this Brockton murder was called for by the rest of the
+universe, if it had to come at its preappointed hour, and if nothing
+else would have been consistent with the sense of the whole, what are
+we to think of the universe?  Are we stubbornly to stick to our
+judgment of regret, and say, though it _couldn't_ be, yet it _would_
+have been a better universe with something different from this Brockton
+murder in it?  That, of course, seems the natural and spontaneous thing
+for us to do; and yet it is nothing short of deliberately espousing a
+kind of pessimism.  The judgment of regret calls the murder bad.
+Calling a thing bad means, if it mean anything at all, that the thing
+ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its stead.
+Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead,
+virtually defines the universe {162} as a place in which what ought to
+be is impossible,--in other words, as an organism whose constitution is
+afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw.  The pessimism
+of a Schopenhauer says no more than this,--that the murder is a
+symptom; and that it is a vicious symptom because it belongs to a
+vicious whole, which can express its nature no otherwise than by
+bringing forth just such a symptom as that at this particular spot.
+Regret for the murder must transform itself, if we are determinists and
+wise, into a larger regret.  It is absurd to regret the murder alone.
+Other things being what they are, _it_ could not be different.  What we
+should regret is that whole frame of things of which the murder is one
+member.  I see no escape whatever from this pessimistic conclusion, if,
+being determinists, our judgment of regret is to be allowed to stand at
+all.
+
+The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to abandon
+the judgment of regret.  That this can be done, history shows to be not
+impossible.  The devil, _quoad existentiam_, may be good.  That is,
+although he be a _principle_ of evil, yet the universe, with such a
+principle in it, may practically be a better universe than it could
+have been without.  On every hand, in a small way, we find that a
+certain amount of evil is a condition by which a higher form of good is
+bought.  There is nothing to prevent anybody from generalizing this
+view, and trusting that if we could but see things in the largest of
+all ways, even such matters as this Brockton murder would appear to be
+paid for by the uses that follow in their train.  An optimism _quand
+meme_, a systematic and infatuated optimism like that ridiculed by
+Voltaire in his Candide, is one of the possible {163} ideal ways in
+which a man may train himself to look on life.  Bereft of dogmatic
+hardness and lit up with the expression of a tender and pathetic hope,
+such an optimism has been the grace of some of the most religious
+characters that ever lived.
+
+  "Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
+  And all is clear from east to west."
+
+
+Even cruelty and treachery may be among the absolutely blessed fruits
+of time, and to quarrel with any of their details may be blasphemy.
+The only real blasphemy, in short, may be that pessimistic temper of
+the soul which lets it give way to such things as regrets, remorse, and
+grief.
+
+Thus, our deterministic pessimism may become a deterministic optimism
+at the price of extinguishing our judgments of regret.
+
+But does not this immediately bring us into a curious logical
+predicament?  Our determinism leads us to call our judgments of regret
+wrong, because they are pessimistic in implying that what is impossible
+yet ought to be.  But how then about the judgments of regret
+themselves?  If they are wrong, other judgments, judgments of approval
+presumably, ought to be in their place.  But as they are necessitated,
+nothing else _can_ be in their place; and the universe is just what it
+was before,--namely, a place in which what ought to be appears
+impossible.  We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog, but the
+other one sinks all the deeper.  We have rescued our actions from the
+bonds of evil, but our judgments are now held fast.  When murders and
+treacheries cease to be sins, regrets are theoretic absurdities and
+errors.  The theoretic and the active life thus play a kind of {164}
+see-saw with each other on the ground of evil.  The rise of either
+sends the other down.  Murder and treachery cannot be good without
+regret being bad: regret cannot be good without treachery and murder
+being bad.  Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; so
+something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world.
+It must be a place of which either sin or error forms a necessary part.
+From this dilemma there seems at first sight no escape.  Are we then so
+soon to fall back into the pessimism from which we thought we had
+emerged?  And is there no possible way by which we may, with good
+intellectual consciences, call the cruelties and the treacheries, the
+reluctances and the regrets, _all_ good together?
+
+Certainly there is such a way, and you are probably most of you ready
+to formulate it yourselves.  But, before doing so, remark how
+inevitably the question of determinism and indeterminism slides us into
+the question of optimism and pessimism, or, as our fathers called it,
+'the question of evil.'  The theological form of all these disputes is
+the simplest and the deepest, the form from which there is the least
+escape,--not because, as some have sarcastically said, remorse and
+regret are clung to with a morbid fondness by the theologians as
+spiritual luxuries, but because they are existing facts of the world,
+and as such must be taken into account in the deterministic
+interpretation of all that is fated to be.  If they are fated to be
+error, does not the bat's wing of irrationality still cast its shadow
+over the world?
+
+
+The refuge from the quandary lies, as I said, not far off.  The
+necessary acts we erroneously regret {165} may be good, and yet our
+error in so regretting them may be also good, on one simple condition;
+and that condition is this: The world must not be regarded as a machine
+whose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but rather
+as a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of what
+goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are.  Not the doing either
+of good or of evil is what nature cares for, but the knowing of them.
+Life is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of _knowledge_.  I am
+in the habit, in thinking to myself, of calling this point of view the
+_gnostical_ point of view.  According to it, the world is neither an
+optimism nor a pessimism, but a _gnosticism_.  But as this term may
+perhaps lead to some misunderstandings, I will use it as little as
+possible here, and speak rather of _subjectivism_, and the
+_subjectivistic_ point of view.
+
+Subjectivism has three great branches,--we may call them scientificism,
+sentimentalism, and sensualism, respectively.  They all agree
+essentially about the universe, in deeming that what happens there is
+subsidiary to what we think or feel about it.  Crime justifies its
+criminality by awakening our intelligence of that criminality, and
+eventually our remorses and regrets; and the error included in remorses
+and regrets, the error of supposing that the past could have been
+different, justifies itself by its use.  Its use is to quicken our
+sense of _what_ the irretrievably lost is.  When we think of it as that
+which might have been ('the saddest words of tongue or pen'), the
+quality of its worth speaks to us with a wilder sweetness; and,
+conversely, the dissatisfaction wherewith we think of what seems to
+have driven it from its natural place gives us the severer pang.
+Admirable artifice of {166} nature! we might be tempted to
+exclaim,--deceiving us in order the better to enlighten us, and leaving
+nothing undone to accentuate to our consciousness the yawning distance
+of those opposite poles of good and evil between which creation swings.
+
+We have thus clearly revealed to our view what may be called the
+dilemma of determinism, so far as determinism pretends to think things
+out at all.  A merely mechanical determinism, it is true, rather
+rejoices in not thinking them out.  It is very sure that the universe
+must satisfy its postulate of a physical continuity and coherence, but
+it smiles at any one who comes forward with a postulate of moral
+coherence as well.  I may suppose, however, that the number of purely
+mechanical or hard determinists among you this evening is small.  The
+determinism to whose seductions you are most exposed is what I have
+called soft determinism,--the determinism which allows considerations
+of good and bad to mingle with those of cause and effect in deciding
+what sort of a universe this may rationally be held to be.  The dilemma
+of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right
+horn is subjectivism.  In other words, if determinism is to escape
+pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a
+simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in
+themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and
+ethical, in us.
+
+To escape pessimism is, as we all know, no easy task.  Your own studies
+have sufficiently shown you the almost desperate difficulty of making
+the notion that there is a single principle of things, and that
+principle absolute perfection, rhyme together with {167} our daily
+vision of the facts of life.  If perfection be the principle, how comes
+there any imperfection here?  If God be good, how came he to
+create--or, if he did not create, how comes he to permit--the devil?
+The evil facts must be explained as seeming: the devil must be
+whitewashed, the universe must be disinfected, if neither God's
+goodness nor his unity and power are to remain impugned.  And of all
+the various ways of operating the disinfection, and making bad seem
+less bad, the way of subjectivism appears by far the best.[6]
+
+For, after all, is there not something rather absurd in our ordinary
+notion of external things being good or bad in themselves?  Can murders
+and treacheries, considered as mere outward happenings, or motions of
+matter, be bad without any one to feel their badness?  And could
+paradise properly be good in the absence of a sentient principle by
+which the goodness was perceived?  Outward goods and evils seem
+practically indistinguishable except in so far as they result in
+getting moral judgments made about them.  But then the moral judgments
+seem the main thing, and the outward facts mere perishing instruments
+for their production.  This is subjectivism.  Every one must at some
+time have wondered at that strange paradox of our moral nature, that,
+though the {168} pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils,
+the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation and
+death.  Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or
+on earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape?  The white-robed
+harp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table
+elysium represented in Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, as the final
+consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this
+respect,--lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all.[7]  We look upon
+them from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivings
+and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations, which forms
+our present state, and _tedium vitae_ is the only sentiment they awaken
+in our breasts.  To our crepuscular natures, born for the conflict, the
+Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro, the shifting struggle of the sunbeam
+in the gloom, such pictures of light upon light are vacuous and
+expressionless, and neither to be enjoyed nor understood.  If _this_ be
+the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations of mankind
+suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets confessed and martyrs
+sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end
+than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should
+succeed, and protract _in saecula saeculorum_ their contented and
+inoffensive lives,--why, at such a rate, better lose than win the
+battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last
+act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be
+saved from so singularly flat a winding-up.
+
+{169}
+
+All this is what I should instantly say, were I called on to plead for
+gnosticism; and its real friends, of whom you will presently perceive I
+am not one, would say without difficulty a great deal more.  Regarded
+as a stable finality, every outward good becomes a mere weariness to
+the flesh.  It must be menaced, be occasionally lost, for its goodness
+to be fully felt as such.  Nay, more than occasionally lost.  No one
+knows the worth of innocence till he knows it is gone forever, and that
+money cannot buy it back.  Not the saint, but the sinner that
+repenteth, is he to whom the full length and breadth, and height and
+depth, of life's meaning is revealed.  Not the absence of vice, but
+vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human
+state.  And there seems no reason to suppose it not a permanent human
+state.  There is a deep truth in what the school of Schopenhauer
+insists on,--the illusoriness of the notion of moral progress.  The
+more brutal forms of evil that go are replaced by others more subtle
+and more poisonous.  Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, and
+never do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves and
+the azure meet.  The final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly
+to be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness,
+through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of
+characters.  This of course obliges some of us to be vessels of wrath,
+while it calls others to be vessels of honor.  But the subjectivist
+point of view reduces all these outward distinctions to a common
+denominator.  The wretch languishing in the felon's cell may be
+drinking draughts of the wine of truth that will never pass the lips of
+the so-called favorite of fortune.  And the peculiar consciousness of
+{170} each of them is an indispensable note in the great ethical
+concert which the centuries as they roll are grinding out of the living
+heart of man.
+
+So much for subjectivism!  If the dilemma of determinism be to choose
+between it and pessimism, I see little room for hesitation from the
+strictly theoretical point of view.  Subjectivism seems the more
+rational scheme.  And the world may, possibly, for aught I know, be
+nothing else.  When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its
+forms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutal
+and the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is an
+integral part of the total richness,--why, then it seems a grudging and
+sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink from any of its
+facts and wish them not to be.  Rather take the strictly dramatic point
+of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which
+the spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, is
+eternally thinking out and representing to itself.[8]
+
+
+No one, I hope, will accuse me, after I have said all this, of
+underrating the reasons in favor of subjectivism.  And now that I
+proceed to say why those reasons, strong as they are, fail to convince
+my own mind, I trust the presumption may be that my objections are
+stronger still.
+
+I frankly confess that they are of a practical order.  If we
+practically take up subjectivism in a sincere and radical manner and
+follow its consequences, we meet with some that make us pause.  Let a
+subjectivism {171} begin in never so severe and intellectual a way, it
+is forced by the law of its nature to develop another side of itself
+and end with the corruptest curiosity.  Once dismiss the notion that
+certain duties are good in themselves, and that we are here to do them,
+no matter how we feel about them; once consecrate the opposite notion
+that our performances and our violations of duty are for a common
+purpose, the attainment of subjective knowledge and feeling, and that
+the deepening of these is the chief end of our lives,--and at what
+point on the downward slope are we to stop?  In theology, subjectivism
+develops as its 'left wing' antinomianism.  In literature, its left
+wing is romanticism.  And in practical life it is either a nerveless
+sentimentality or a sensualism without bounds.
+
+Everywhere it fosters the fatalistic mood of mind.  It makes those who
+are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless
+those whose energy is already in excess.  All through history we find
+how subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts itself in
+every sort of spiritual, moral, and practical license.  Its optimism
+turns to an ethical indifference, which infallibly brings dissolution
+in its train.  It is perfectly safe to say now that if the Hegelian
+gnosticism, which has begun to show itself here and in Great Britain,
+were to become a popular philosophy, as it once was in Germany, it
+would certainly develop its left wing here as there, and produce a
+reaction of disgust.  Already I have heard a graduate of this very
+school express in the pulpit his willingness to sin like David, if only
+he might repent like David.  You may tell me he was only sowing his
+wild, or rather his tame, oats; and perhaps he was.  But the point is
+{172} that in the subjectivistic or gnostical philosophy oat-sowing,
+wild or tame, becomes a systematic necessity and the chief function of
+life.  After the pure and classic truths, the exciting and rancid ones
+must be experienced; and if the stupid virtues of the philistine herd
+do not then come in and save society from the influence of the children
+of light, a sort of inward putrefaction becomes its inevitable doom.
+
+Look at the last runnings of the romantic school, as we see them in
+that strange contemporary Parisian literature, with which we of the
+less clever countries are so often driven to rinse out our minds after
+they have become clogged with the dulness and heaviness of our native
+pursuits.  The romantic school began with the worship of subjective
+sensibility and the revolt against legality of which Rousseau was the
+first great prophet: and through various fluxes and refluxes, right
+wings and left wings, it stands to-day with two men of genius, M. Renan
+and M. Zola, as its principal exponents,--one speaking with its
+masculine, and the other with what might be called its feminine, voice.
+I prefer not to think now of less noble members of the school, and the
+Renan I have in mind is of course the Renan of latest dates.  As I have
+used the term gnostic, both he and Zola are gnostics of the most
+pronounced sort.  Both are athirst for the facts of life, and both
+think the facts of human sensibility to be of all facts the most worthy
+of attention.  Both agree, moreover, that sensibility seems to be there
+for no higher purpose,--certainly not, as the Philistines say, for the
+sake of bringing mere outward rights to pass and frustrating outward
+wrongs.  One dwells on the sensibilities for their energy, the other
+for their sweetness; one speaks with a voice of {173} bronze, the other
+with that of an AEolian harp; one ruggedly ignores the distinction of
+good and evil, the other plays the coquette between the craven
+unmanliness of his Philosophic Dialogues and the butterfly optimism of
+his Souvenirs de Jeunesse.  But under the pages of both there sounds
+incessantly the hoarse bass of _vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas_,
+which the reader may hear, whenever he will, between the lines.  No
+writer of this French romantic school has a word of rescue from the
+hour of satiety with the things of life,--the hour in which we say, "I
+take no pleasure in them,"--or from the hour of terror at the world's
+vast meaningless grinding, if perchance such hours should come.  For
+terror and satiety are facts of sensibility like any others; and at
+their own hour they reign in their own right.  The heart of the
+romantic utterances, whether poetical, critical, or historical, is this
+inward remedilessness, what Carlyle calls this far-off whimpering of
+wail and woe.  And from this romantic state of mind there is absolutely
+no possible _theoretic_ escape.  Whether, like Renan, we look upon life
+in a more refined way, as a romance of the spirit; or whether, like the
+friends of M. Zola, we pique ourselves on our 'scientific' and
+'analytic' character, and prefer to be cynical, and call the world a
+'roman experimental' on an infinite scale,--in either case the world
+appears to us potentially as what the same Carlyle once called it, a
+vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death.
+
+The only escape is by the practical way.  And since I have mentioned
+the nowadays much-reviled name of Carlyle, let me mention it once more,
+and say it is the way of his teaching.  No matter for Carlyle's life,
+no matter for a great deal of his {174} writing.  What was the most
+important thing he said to us?  He said: "Hang your sensibilities!
+Stop your snivelling complaints, and your equally snivelling raptures!
+Leave off your general emotional tomfoolery, and get to WORK like men!"
+But this means a complete rupture with the subjectivist philosophy of
+things.  It says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact for
+our recognition.  With the vision of certain works to be done, of
+certain outward changes to be wrought or resisted, it says our
+intellectual horizon terminates.  No matter how we succeed in doing
+these outward duties, whether gladly and spontaneously, or heavily and
+unwillingly, do them we somehow must; for the leaving of them undone is
+perdition.  No matter how we feel; if we are only faithful in the
+outward act and refuse to do wrong, the world will in so far be safe,
+and we quit of our debt toward it.  Take, then, the yoke upon our
+shoulders; bend our neck beneath the heavy legality of its weight;
+regard something else than our feeling as our limit, our master, and
+our law; be willing to live and die in its service,--and, at a stroke,
+we have passed from the subjective into the objective philosophy of
+things, much as one awakens from some feverish dream, full of bad
+lights and noises, to find one's self bathed in the sacred coolness and
+quiet of the air of the night.
+
+But what is the essence of this philosophy of objective conduct, so
+old-fashioned and finite, but so chaste and sane and strong, when
+compared with its romantic rival?  It is the recognition of limits,
+foreign and opaque to our understanding.  It is the willingness, after
+bringing about some external good, to feel at peace; for our
+responsibility ends with the {175} performance of that duty, and the
+burden of the rest we may lay on higher powers.[9]
+
+  "Look to thyself, O Universe,
+  Thou art better and not worse,"
+
+we may say in that philosophy, the moment we have done our stroke of
+conduct, however small.  For in the view of that philosophy the
+universe belongs to a plurality of semi-independent forces, each one of
+which may help or hinder, and be helped or hindered by, the operations
+of the rest.
+
+
+But this brings us right back, after such a long detour, to the
+question of indeterminism and to the conclusion of all I came here to
+say to-night.  For the only consistent way of representing a pluralism
+and a world whose parts may affect one another through their conduct
+being either good or bad is the indeterministic way.  What interest,
+zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we
+are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural
+way,--nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way?  And what sense can
+there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we
+need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us
+as well?  I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we
+feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.  I cannot
+understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its
+happening.  I cannot understand regret without the admission of real,
+genuine possibilities in the world.  Only _then_ is it {176} other than
+a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an
+irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it
+must forever after mourn.
+
+
+If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the
+eye of science and reason impossibility, and that if I act badly 'tis
+that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right
+back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism,
+from out of whose toils we have just wound our way.
+
+Now, we are of course free to fall back, if we please.  For my own
+part, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of
+objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply,
+determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains
+difficulties that are greater still.  But you will remember that I
+expressly repudiated awhile ago the pretension to offer any arguments
+which could be coercive in a so-called scientific fashion in this
+matter.  And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk,
+obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way.  This
+personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the
+problem; and the most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he
+can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to
+work on others as it may.
+
+Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this.  The world is
+enigmatical enough in all conscience, whatever theory we may take up
+toward it.  The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular
+sense based on the judgment of regret, represents {177} that world as
+vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they
+act wrong.  And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of
+possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly
+warded off.  In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency
+or of stability.  It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in
+which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to
+a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt,
+remain forever inacceptable.  A friend with such a mind once told me
+that the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the
+horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.
+
+But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are
+repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every
+alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way.  The indeterminism
+with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the
+native absolutism of my intellect,--an absolutism which, after all,
+perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check.  But the determinism
+with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with
+no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral
+reality through and through.  When, for example, I imagine such carrion
+as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the
+universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature
+without shrinking from complicity with such a whole.  And I
+deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by
+saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of
+the whole, is not carrion.  There are some instinctive reactions which
+{178} I, for one, will not tamper with.  The only remaining
+alternative, the attitude of gnostical romanticism, wrenches my
+personal instincts in quite as violent a way.  It falsifies the simple
+objectivity of their deliverance.  It makes the goose-flesh the murder
+excites in me a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime.
+It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic
+exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one's diseased curiosity
+pleases to carry it out.  And with its consecration of the 'roman
+naturaliste' state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of
+Parisian _litterateurs_ among the eternally indispensable organs by
+which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective
+illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of
+a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the
+objective carrion I called it in to take away.
+
+No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our
+moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward;
+but better far than that the world of chance.  Make as great an uproar
+about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and
+nothing more.  If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the
+philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits
+me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of
+affection and an unsophisticated moral sense.  And if I still wish to
+think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a
+chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to
+pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all.  That 'chance'
+whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish {179} from my
+view of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that
+'chance' is--what?  Just this,--the chance that in moral respects the
+future may be other and better than the past has been.  This is the
+only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist.  Shame, rather,
+on its repudiation and its denial!  For its presence is the vital air
+which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.
+
+
+And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see
+admitted by others to-night.  But I know that if I do stop here,
+misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you, and keep all
+I have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a few
+more words.
+
+In the first place, in spite of all my explanations, the word 'chance'
+will still be giving trouble.  Though you may yourselves be adverse to
+the deterministic doctrine, you wish a pleasanter word than 'chance' to
+name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider my
+preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part.
+It certainly _is_ a bad word to make converts with; and you wish I had
+not thrust it so butt-foremost at you,--you wish to use a milder term.
+
+Well, I admit there may be just a dash of perversity in its choice.
+The spectacle of the mere word-grabbing game played by the soft
+determinists has perhaps driven me too violently the other way; and,
+rather than be found wrangling with them for the good words, I am
+willing to take the first bad one which comes along, provided it be
+unequivocal.  The question is of things, not of eulogistic names for
+them; and the best word is the one that enables men to {180} know the
+quickest whether they disagree or not about the things.  But the word
+'chance,' with its singular negativity, is just the word for this
+purpose.  Whoever uses it instead of 'freedom,' squarely and resolutely
+gives up all pretence to control the things he says are free.  For
+_him_, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be.
+It is a word of _impotence_, and is therefore the only sincere word we
+can use, if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant it
+honestly, and really risk the game.  "Who chooses me must give and
+forfeit all he hath."  Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets
+us, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretence of
+restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other
+we anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does not get
+beyond our sight.
+
+
+But now you will bring up your final doubt.  Does not the admission of
+such an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a
+Providence governing the world?  Does it not leave the fate of the
+universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure?
+Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate
+peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?
+
+To this my answer must be very brief.  The belief in free-will is not
+in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you
+do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but _fatal_
+decrees.  If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as
+actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those
+two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled
+even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; {181}
+and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be
+from all eternity.
+
+An analogy will make the meaning of this clear.  Suppose two men before
+a chessboard,--the one a novice, the other an expert player of the
+game.  The expert intends to beat.  But he cannot foresee exactly what
+any one actual move of his adversary may be.  He knows, however, all
+the _possible_ moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet
+each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of
+victory.  And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how
+devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the
+novice's king.
+
+Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for
+the infinite mind in which the universe lies.  Suppose the latter to be
+thinking out his universe before he actually creates it.  Suppose him
+to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not _now_[10]
+decide on all the steps thereto.  At various points, ambiguous
+possibilities shall be left {182} open, _either_ of which, at a given
+instant, may become actual.  But whichever branch of these bifurcations
+become real, I know what I shall do at the _next_ bifurcation to keep
+things from drifting away from the final result I intend.[11]
+
+The creator's plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to many
+of its actual details, but all possibilities would be marked down.  The
+realization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; that
+is, would only be determined when the moment of realization came.
+Other possibilities would be _contingently_ determined; that is, their
+decision would have to wait till it was seen how the matters of
+absolute chance fell out.  But the rest of the plan, including its
+final upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all.  So the
+creator himself would not need to know _all_ the details of actuality
+until they came; and at any time his own view of the world would be a
+view partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours is
+now.  Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that his
+world was safe, and that no matter how much it might zig-zag he could
+surely bring it home at last.
+
+{183}
+
+Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creator
+leave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by himself, each
+when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he
+alienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out to
+finite creatures such as we men are.  The great point is that the
+possibilities are really _here_.  Whether it be we who solve them, or
+he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate's scales
+seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks
+nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that
+the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now.  _That_ is what
+gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as
+Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement.  This
+reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft
+alike, suppress by their denial that _anything_ is decided here and
+now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long
+ago.  If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the error
+of continuing to believe in liberty.[12]  It is fortunate for the
+winding up of controversy that in every discussion with determinism
+this _argumentum ad hominem_ can be its adversary's last word.
+
+
+
+[1] An Address to the Harvard Divinity Students, published in the
+Unitarian Review for September, 1884.
+
+[2] And I may now say Charles S. Peirce,--see the Monist, for 1892-93.
+
+[3] "The whole history of popular beliefs about Nature refutes the
+notion that the thought of a universal physical order can possibly have
+arisen from the purely passive reception and association of particular
+perceptions.  Indubitable as it is that men infer from known cases to
+unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to
+the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would
+never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the
+belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation.
+From the point of view of strict experience, nothing exists but the sum
+of particular perceptions, with their coincidences on the one hand,
+their contradictions on the other.
+
+"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is
+not discovered; _till the order is looked for_.  The first impulse to
+look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained,
+or produce a result.  But the practical need is only the first occasion
+for our reflection on the conditions of true knowledge; and even were
+there no such need, motives would still be present for carrying us
+beyond the stage of mere association.  For not with an equal interest,
+or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those
+natural processes in which a thing is linked with its former mate, and
+those in which it is linked to something else.  _The former processes
+harmonize with the conditions of his own thinking_: the latter do not.
+In the former, his _concepts_, _general judgments_, and _inferences_
+apply to reality: in the latter, they have no such application.  And
+thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without
+reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized
+throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities,
+uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and
+guiding principle of his own thought."  (Sigwart, Logik, bd. 3, s. 382.)
+
+[4] Speaking technically, it is a word with a positive denotation, but
+a connotation that is negative.  Other things must be silent about
+_what_ it is: it alone can decide that point at the moment in which it
+reveals itself.
+
+[5] A favorite argument against free-will is that if it be true, a
+man's murderer may as probably be his best friend as his worst enemy, a
+mother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first-born, and all of
+us be as ready to jump from fourth-story windows as to go out of front
+doors, etc.  Users of this argument should properly be excluded from
+debate till they learn what the real question is.  'Free-will' does not
+say that everything that is physically conceivable is also morally
+possible.  It merely says that of alternatives that really _tempt_ our
+will more than one is really possible.  Of course, the alternatives
+that do thus tempt our will are vastly fewer than the physical
+possibilities we can coldly fancy.  Persons really tempted often do
+murder their best friends, mothers do strangle their first-born, people
+do jump out of fourth-story windows, etc.
+
+[6] To a reader who says he is satisfied with a pessimism, and has no
+objection to thinking the whole bad, I have no more to say: he makes
+fewer demands on the world than I, who, making them, wish to look a
+little further before I give up all hope of having them satisfied.  If,
+however, all he means is that the badness of some parts does not
+prevent his acceptance of a universe whose _other_ parts give him
+satisfaction, I welcome him as an ally.  He has abandoned the notion of
+the _Whole_, which is the essence of deterministic monism, and views
+things as a pluralism, just as I do in this paper.
+
+[7] Compare Sir James Stephen's Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862,
+pp. 138, 318.
+
+[8] Cet univers est un spectacle que Dieu se donne a lui-meme.  Servons
+les intentions du grand chorege en contribuant a rendre le spectacle
+aussi brillant, aussi varie que possible.--RENAN.
+
+[9] The burden, for example, of seeing to it that the _end_ of all our
+righteousness be some positive universal gain.
+
+[10] This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of
+time.  And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I
+have no reply to make.  A mind to whom all time is simultaneously
+present must see all things under the form of actuality, or under some
+form to us unknown.  If he thinks certain moments as ambiguous in their
+content while future, he must simultaneously know how the ambiguity
+will have been decided when they are past.  So that none of his mental
+judgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his world is one
+from which chance is excluded.  Is not, however, the timeless mind
+rather a gratuitous fiction?  And is not the notion of eternity being
+given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon
+us the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?--just
+the point to be proved.  To say that time is an illusory appearance is
+only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that
+the frame of things is an absolute unit.  Admit plurality, and time may
+be its form.
+
+[11] And this of course means 'miraculous' interposition, but not
+necessarily of the gross sort our fathers took such delight in
+representing, and which has so lost its magic for us.  Emerson quotes
+some Eastern sage as saying that if evil were really done under the
+sun, the sky would incontinently shrivel to a snakeskin and cast it out
+in spasms.  But, says Emerson, the spasms of Nature are years and
+centuries; and it will tax man's patience to wait so long.  We may
+think of the reserved possibilities God keeps in his own hand, under as
+invisible and molecular and slowly self-summating a form as we please.
+We may think of them as counteracting human agencies which he inspires
+_ad hoc_.  In short, signs and wonders and convulsions of the earth and
+sky are not the only neutralizers of obstruction to a god's plans of
+which it is possible to think.
+
+[12] As long as languages contain a future perfect tense, determinists,
+following the bent of laziness or passion, the lines of least
+resistance, can reply in that tense, saying, "It will have been fated,"
+to the still small voice which urges an opposite course; and thus
+excuse themselves from effort in a quite unanswerable way.
+
+
+
+
+{184}
+
+THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE.[1]
+
+The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing
+possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance.  We
+all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we
+contribute to the race's moral life.  In other words, there can be no
+final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has
+had his experience and said his say.  In the one case as in the other,
+however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts
+to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which
+determine what that 'say' shall be.
+
+
+First of all, what is the position of him who seeks an ethical
+philosophy?  To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who
+are satisfied to be ethical sceptics.  He _will_ not be a sceptic;
+therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of
+ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual
+alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every
+would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and
+renounce his original aim.  That aim is to find an account of the moral
+relations that obtain among things, which {185} will weave them into
+the unity of a stable system, and make of the world what one may call a
+genuine universe from the ethical point of view.  So far as the world
+resists reduction to the form of unity, so far as ethical propositions
+seem unstable, so far does the philosopher fail of his ideal.  The
+subject-matter of his study is the ideals he finds existing in the
+world; the purpose which guides him is this ideal of his own, of
+getting them into a certain form.  This ideal is thus a factor in
+ethical philosophy whose legitimate presence must never be overlooked;
+it is a positive contribution which the philosopher himself necessarily
+makes to the problem.  But it is his only positive contribution.  At
+the outset of his inquiry he ought to have no other ideals.  Were he
+interested peculiarly in the triumph of any one kind of good, he would
+_pro tanto_ cease to be a judicial investigator, and become an advocate
+for some limited element of the case.
+
+
+There are three questions in ethics which must be kept apart.  Let them
+be called respectively the _psychological_ question, the _metaphysical_
+question, and the _casuistic_ question.  The psychological question
+asks after the historical _origin_ of our moral ideas and judgments;
+the metaphysical question asks what the very _meaning_ of the words
+'good,' 'ill,' and 'obligation' are; the casuistic question asks what
+is the _measure_ of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so
+that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.
+
+
+I.
+
+The psychological question is for most disputants the only question.
+When your ordinary doctor of {186} divinity has proved to his own
+satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called 'conscience' must
+be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your
+popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that 'apriorism' is an
+exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually
+resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons
+thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said.  The
+familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used
+now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really
+refer to the psychological question alone.  The discussion of this
+question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible
+to enter upon it at all within the limits of this paper.  I will
+therefore only express dogmatically my own belief, which is this,--that
+the Benthams, the Mills, and the Barns have done a lasting service in
+taking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must have
+arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and
+reliefs from pain.  Association with many remote pleasures will
+unquestionably make a thing significant of goodness in our minds; and
+the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will
+its source appear to be.  But it is surely impossible to explain all
+our sentiments and preferences in this simple way.  The more minutely
+psychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces
+of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment
+with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from
+those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are
+practically all that pure empiricism can admit.  Take the love of
+drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror {187} of high places, the
+tendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, the
+susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the
+passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics,--no one of
+these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility.
+They _go with_ other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and
+some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing
+in us for which some use may not be found.  But their origin is in
+incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose
+original features arose with no reference to the perception of such
+discords and harmonies as these.
+
+Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this
+secondary and brain-born kind.  They deal with directly felt fitnesses
+between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of
+habit and presumptions of utility.  The moment you get beyond the
+coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor
+Richard's Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the
+eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained.  The sense for
+abstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation,
+from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or
+for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of
+others.  The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual
+attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the
+essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic
+fussiness, etc.,--are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference
+of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake.  The nobler thing
+_tastes_ better, and that is all that we can say.  {188} 'Experience'
+of consequences may truly teach us what things are _wicked_, but what
+have consequences to do with what is _mean_ and _vulgar_?  If a man has
+shot his wife's paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in
+things is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and
+the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again?
+Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs.
+Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and
+millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a
+certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
+lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of
+emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an
+impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how
+hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as
+the fruit of such a bargain?  To what, once more, but subtile
+brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests
+against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice?--I refer to
+Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his
+substitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr.
+Heidenhain's Process), to M. Guyau with his radical condemnation of the
+punitive ideal.  All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as
+much beyond what can be ciphered out from the 'laws of association' as
+the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go
+beyond such precepts of the 'etiquette to be observed during
+engagement' as are printed in manuals of social form.
+
+No!  Purely inward forces are certainly at work here.  All the higher,
+more penetrating ideals are {189} revolutionary.  They present
+themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in
+that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the
+environment and the lessons it has so far taught as must learn to bend.
+
+This is all I can say of the psychological question now.  In the last
+chapter of a recent work[2] I have sought to prove in a general way the
+existence, in our thought, of relations which do not merely repeat the
+couplings of experience.  Our ideals have certainly many sources.  They
+are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained,
+and pains to be escaped.  And for having so constantly perceived this
+psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school.  Whether
+or not such applause must be extended to that school's other
+characteristics will appear as we take up the following questions.
+
+The next one in order is the metaphysical question, of what we mean by
+the words 'obligation,' 'good,' and 'ill.'
+
+
+II.
+
+First of all, it appears that such words can have no application or
+relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists.  Imagine an
+absolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts,
+and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested
+spectator: would there be any sense in saying of that world that one of
+its states is better than another?  Or if there were two such worlds
+possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and
+the other bad,--good or {190} bad positively, I mean, and apart from
+the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the
+philosopher's private interests?  But we must leave these private
+interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and
+we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical
+facts _per se_.  Surely there is no _status_ for good and evil to exist
+in, in a purely insentient world.  How can one physical fact,
+considered simply as a physical fact, be 'better' than another?
+Betterness is not a physical relation.  In its mere material capacity,
+a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant or painful.
+Good for what?  Good for the production of another physical fact, do
+you say?  But what in a purely physical universe demands the production
+of that other fact?  Physical facts simply _are_ or are _not_; and
+neither when present or absent, can they be supposed to make demands.
+If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have
+ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious
+sensibility.  Goodness, badness, and obligation must be _realised_
+somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical
+philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic 'nature of things' can
+realize them.  Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing _in
+vacuo_.  Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no
+world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to
+which ethical propositions apply.
+
+The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the universe,
+there is a chance for goods and evils really to exist.  Moral relations
+now have their _status_, in that being's consciousness.  So far as he
+feels anything to be good, he _makes_ it good.  It {191} _is_ good, for
+him; and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the sole
+creator of values in that universe, and outside of his opinion things
+have no moral character at all.
+
+In such a universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the
+question of whether the solitary thinker's judgments of good and ill
+are true or not.  Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to
+which he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity,
+subject to no higher judge.  Let us call the supposed universe which he
+inhabits a _moral solitude_.  In such a moral solitude it is clear that
+there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the
+god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his
+own several ideals with one another.  Some of these will no doubt be
+more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a
+profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him with
+more obstinate regrets if violated.  So the thinker will have to order
+his life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly
+discordant and unhappy.  Into whatever equilibrium he may settle,
+though, and however he may straighten out his system, it will be a
+right system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there is
+nothing moral in the world.
+
+If now we introduce a second thinker with his likes and dislikes into
+the universe, the ethical situation becomes much more complex, and
+several possibilities are immediately seen to obtain.
+
+One of these is that the thinkers may ignore each other's attitude
+about good and evil altogether, and each continue to indulge his own
+preferences, indifferent to what the other may feel or do.  In such a
+{192} case we have a world with twice as much of the ethical quality in
+it as our moral solitude, only it is without ethical unity.  The same
+object is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view
+which this one or that one of the thinkers takes.  Nor can you find any
+possible ground in such a world for saying that one thinker's opinion
+is more correct than the other's, or that either has the truer moral
+sense.  Such a world, in short, is not a moral universe but a moral
+dualism.  Not only is there no single point of view within it from
+which the values of things can be unequivocally judged, but there is
+not even a demand for such a point of view, since the two thinkers are
+supposed to be indifferent to each other's thoughts and acts.  Multiply
+the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us in the
+ethical sphere something like that world which the antique sceptics
+conceived of,--in which individual minds are the measures of all
+things, and in which no one 'objective' truth, but only a multitude of
+'subjective' opinions, can be found.
+
+But this is the kind of world with which the philosopher, so long as he
+holds to the hope of a philosophy, will not put up.  Among the various
+ideals represented, there must be, he thinks, some which have the more
+truth or authority; and to these the others _ought_ to yield, so that
+system and subordination may reign.  Here in the word 'ought' the
+notion of _obligation_ comes emphatically into view, and the next thing
+in order must be to make its meaning clear.
+
+
+Since the outcome of the discussion so far has been to show us that
+nothing can be good or right except {193} so far as some consciousness
+feels it to be good or thinks it to be right, we perceive on the very
+threshold that the real superiority and authority which are postulated
+by the philosopher to reside in some of the opinions, and the really
+inferior character which he supposes must belong to others, cannot be
+explained by any abstract moral 'nature of things' existing
+antecedently to the concrete thinkers themselves with their ideals.
+Like the positive attributes good and bad, the comparative ones better
+and worse must be _realised_ in order to be real.  If one ideal
+judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be
+made flesh by being lodged concretely in some one's actual perception.
+It cannot float in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of
+meteorological phenomenon, like the aurora borealis or the zodiacal
+light.  Its _esse_ is _percipi_, like the _esse_ of the ideals
+themselves between which it obtains.  The philosopher, therefore, who
+seeks to know which ideal ought to have supreme weight and which one
+ought to be subordinated, must trace the _ought_ itself to the _de
+facto_ constitution of some existing consciousness, behind which, as
+one of the data of the universe, he as a purely ethical philosopher is
+unable to go.  This consciousness must make the one ideal right by
+feeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong.  But
+now what particular consciousness in the universe _can_ enjoy this
+prerogative of obliging others to conform to a rule which it lays down?
+
+If one of the thinkers were obviously divine, while all the rest were
+human, there would probably be no practical dispute about the matter.
+The divine thought would be the model, to which the others should
+conform.  But still the theoretic question {194} would remain, What is
+the ground of the obligation, even here?
+
+In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitable
+tendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when they
+are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad.  They
+imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides;
+and each tries to prove that this pre-existing order is more accurately
+reflected in his own ideas than in those of his adversary.  It is
+because one disputant is backed by this overarching abstract order that
+we think the other should submit.  Even so, when it is a question no
+longer of two finite thinkers, but of God and ourselves,--we follow our
+usual habit, and imagine a sort of _de jure_ relation, which antedates
+and overarches the mere facts, and would make it right that we should
+conform our thoughts to God's thoughts, even though he made no claim to
+that effect, and though we preferred _de facto_ to go on thinking for
+ourselves.
+
+But the moment we take a steady look at the question, _we see not only
+that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be
+no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a
+claim_.  Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they
+cover each other exactly.  Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves
+as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true 'in
+themselves,' is therefore either an out-and-out superstition, or else
+it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real
+Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our
+obligation must be ultimately based.  In a theistic-ethical philosophy
+that thinker in question is, of {195} course, the Deity to whom the
+existence of the universe is due.
+
+I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I have
+called the superstitious view, to realize that every _de facto_ claim
+creates in so far forth an obligation.  We inveterately think that
+something which we call the 'validity' of the claim is what gives to it
+its obligatory character, and that this validity is something outside
+of the claim's mere existence as a matter of fact.  It rains down upon
+the claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the
+moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the
+influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens.  But
+again, how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness,
+additional to the imperativeness which is in the concrete claim itself,
+_exist_?  Take any demand, however slight, which any creature, however
+weak, may make.  Ought it not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied?
+If not, prove why not.  The only possible kind of proof you could
+adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a
+demand that ran the other way.  The only possible reason there can be
+why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is
+desired.  Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it
+_makes_ itself valid by the fact that it exists at all.  Some desires,
+truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant
+persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they
+bring.  But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small
+obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal
+demands.
+
+If we must talk impersonally, to be sure we can say {196} that 'the
+universe' requires, exacts, or makes obligatory such or such an action,
+whenever it expresses itself through the desires of such or such a
+creature.  But it is better not to talk about the universe in this
+personified way, unless we believe in a universal or divine
+consciousness which actually exists.  If there be such a consciousness,
+then its demands carry the most of obligation simply because they are
+the greatest in amount.  But it is even then not _abstractly right_
+that we should respect them.  It is only concretely right,--or right
+after the fact, and by virtue of the fact, that they are actually made.
+Suppose we do not respect them, as seems largely to be the case in this
+queer world.  That ought not to be, we say; that is wrong.  But in what
+way is this fact of wrongness made more acceptable or intelligible when
+we imagine it to consist rather in the laceration of an _a priori_
+ideal order than in the disappointment of a living personal God?  Do
+we, perhaps, think that we cover God and protect him and make his
+impotence over us less ultimate, when we back him up with this _a
+priori_ blanket from which he may draw some warmth of further appeal?
+But the only force of appeal to _us_, which either a living God or an
+abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the 'everlasting ruby
+vaults' of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and
+not irresponsive to the claim.  So far as they do feel it when made by
+a living consciousness, it is life answering to life.  A claim thus
+livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which
+no thought of an 'ideal' backing can render more complete; while if, on
+the other hand, the heart's response is withheld, the stubborn
+phenomenon is there of an impotence in the claims {197} which the
+universe embodies, which no talk about an eternal nature of things can
+gloze over or dispel.  An ineffective _a priori_ order is as impotent a
+thing as an ineffective God; and in the eye of philosophy, it is as
+hard a thing to explain.
+
+
+We may now consider that what we distinguished as the metaphysical
+question in ethical philosophy is sufficiently answered, and that we
+have learned what the words 'good,' 'bad,' and 'obligation' severally
+mean.  They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support.
+They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or
+anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds.
+
+Wherever such minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demands
+upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features.
+Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out
+from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving
+souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution
+as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could
+harbor.  It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock's
+inhabitants would die.  But while they lived, there would be real good
+things and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations,
+claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments;
+compunctions and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace
+of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral
+life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of
+interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.
+
+{198}
+
+We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just
+like the inhabitants of such a rock.  Whether a God exist, or whether
+no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an
+ethical republic here below.  And the first reflection which this leads
+to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe
+where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there
+is a God as well.  'The religion of humanity' affords a basis for
+ethics as well as theism does.  Whether the purely human system can
+gratify the philosopher's demand as well as the other is a different
+question, which we ourselves must answer ere we close.
+
+
+III.
+
+The last fundamental question in Ethics was, it will be remembered, the
+_casuistic_ question.  Here we are, in a world where the existence of a
+divine thinker has been and perhaps always will be doubted by some of
+the lookers-on, and where, in spite of the presence of a large number
+of ideals in which human beings agree, there are a mass of others about
+which no general consensus obtains.  It is hardly necessary to present
+a literary picture of this, for the facts are too well known.  The wars
+of the flesh and the spirit in each man, the concupiscences of
+different individuals pursuing the same unshareable material or social
+prizes, the ideals which contrast so according to races, circumstances,
+temperaments, philosophical beliefs, etc.,--all form a maze of
+apparently inextricable confusion with no obvious Ariadne's thread to
+lead one out.  Yet the philosopher, just because he is a philosopher,
+adds his own peculiar ideal to the confusion {199} (with which if he
+were willing to be a sceptic he would be passably content), and insists
+that over all these individual opinions there is a _system of truth_
+which he can discover if he only takes sufficient pains.
+
+We stand ourselves at present in the place of that philosopher, and
+must not fail to realize all the features that the situation comports.
+In the first place we will not be sceptics; we hold to it that there is
+a truth to be ascertained.  But in the second place we have just gained
+the insight that that truth cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws,
+or an abstract 'moral reason,' but can only exist in act, or in the
+shape of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found.  There is,
+however, no visible thinker invested with authority.  Shall we then
+simply proclaim our own ideals as the lawgiving ones?  No; for if we
+are true philosophers we must throw our own spontaneous ideals, even
+the dearest, impartially in with that total mass of ideals which are
+fairly to be judged.  But how then can we as philosophers ever find a
+test; how avoid complete moral scepticism on the one hand, and on the
+other escape bringing a wayward personal standard of our own along with
+us, on which we simply pin our faith?
+
+The dilemma is a hard one, nor does it grow a bit more easy as we
+revolve it in our minds.  The entire undertaking of the philosopher
+obliges him to seek an impartial test.  That test, however, must be
+incarnated in the demand of some actually existent person; and how can
+he pick out the person save by an act in which his own sympathies and
+prepossessions are implied?
+
+One method indeed presents itself, and has as a matter of history been
+taken by the more serious {200} ethical schools.  If the heap of things
+demanded proved on inspection less chaotic than at first they seemed,
+if they furnished their own relative test and measure, then the
+casuistic problem would be solved.  If it were found that all goods
+_qua_ goods contained a common essence, then the amount of this essence
+involved in any one good would show its rank in the scale of goodness,
+and order could be quickly made; for this essence would be _the_ good
+upon which all thinkers were agreed, the relatively objective and
+universal good that the philosopher seeks.  Even his own private ideals
+would be measured by their share of it, and find their rightful place
+among the rest.
+
+Various essences of good have thus been found and proposed as bases of
+the ethical system.  Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to be
+recognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy for
+the moment; to make others as well as him happy in the long run; to add
+to his perfection or dignity; to harm no one; to follow from reason or
+flow from universal law; to be in accordance with the will of God; to
+promote the survival of the human species on this planet,--are so many
+tests, each of which has been maintained by somebody to constitute the
+essence of all good things or actions so far as they are good.
+
+No one of the measures that have been actually proposed has, however,
+given general satisfaction.  Some are obviously not universally present
+in all cases,--_e. g._, the character of harming no one, or that of
+following a universal law; for the best course is often cruel; and many
+acts are reckoned good on the sole condition that they be exceptions,
+and serve not as examples of a universal law.  Other {201} characters,
+such as following the will of God, are unascertainable and vague.
+Others again, like survival, are quite indeterminate in their
+consequences, and leave us in the lurch where we most need their help:
+a philosopher of the Sioux Nation, for example, will be certain to use
+the survival-criterion in a very different way from ourselves.  The
+best, on the whole, of these marks and measures of goodness seems to be
+the capacity to bring happiness.  But in order not to break down
+fatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and impulses
+that never _aim_ at happiness; so that, after all, in seeking for a
+universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most
+universal principle,--that _the essence of good is simply to satisfy
+demand_.  The demand may be for anything under the sun.  There is
+really no more ground for supposing that all our demands can be
+accounted for by one universal underlying kind of motive than there is
+ground for supposing that all physical phenomena are cases of a single
+law.  The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those
+of physics are.  The various ideals have no common character apart from
+the fact that they are ideals.  No single abstract principle can be so
+used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientifically
+accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale.
+
+
+A look at another peculiarity of the ethical universe, as we find it,
+will still further show us the philosopher's perplexities.  As a purely
+theoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly ever
+come up at all.  If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the
+best _imaginable_ system of goods he would indeed have an easy task;
+for all demands as {202} such are _prima facie_ respectable, and the
+best simply imaginary world would be one in which _every_ demand was
+gratified as soon as made.  Such a world would, however, have to have a
+physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we
+inhabit.  It would need not only a space, but a time, 'of
+_n_-dimensions,' to include all the acts and experiences incompatible
+with one another here below, which would then go on in
+conjunction,--such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking our
+holiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yet
+doing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keeping
+our youthful freshness of heart; and the like.  There can be no
+question that such a system of things, however brought about, would be
+the absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could create
+universes _a priori_, and provide all the mechanical conditions, that
+is the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create.
+
+But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and
+the casuistic question here is most tragically practical.  The actually
+possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded;
+and there is always a _pinch_ between the ideal and the actual which
+can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind.  There is
+hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the
+possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined
+good.  Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of
+some other end of desire.  Shall a man drink and smoke, _or_ keep his
+nerves in condition?--he cannot do both.  Shall he follow his fancy for
+Amelia, _or_ for Henrietta?--both cannot be the choice of his heart.
+Shall he have the {203} dear old Republican party, _or_ a spirit of
+unsophistication in public affairs?--he cannot have both, etc.  So that
+the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination
+in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need.  Some part of
+the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part.  It is a
+tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has
+to deal.
+
+Now we are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopher's task by
+the fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largely
+ordered already.  If we follow the ideal which is conventionally
+highest, the others which we butcher either die and do not return to
+haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, every one
+applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear.  In other words, our
+environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.  The
+philosopher, however, cannot, so long as he clings to his own ideal of
+objectivity, rule out any ideal from being heard.  He is confident, and
+rightly confident, that the simple taking counsel of his own intuitive
+preferences would be certain to end in a mutilation of the fulness of
+the truth.  The poet Heine is said to have written 'Bunsen' in the
+place of 'Gott' in his copy of that author's work entitled "God in
+History," so as to make it read 'Bunsen in der Geschichte.'  Now, with
+no disrespect to the good and learned Baron, is it not safe to say that
+any single philosopher, however wide his sympathies, must be just such
+a Bunsen in der Geschichte of the moral world, so soon as he attempts
+to put his own ideas of order into that howling mob of desires, each
+struggling to get breathing-room for the ideal to which it clings?  The
+very best of men must not only be insensible, but {204} be ludicrously
+and peculiarly insensible, to many goods.  As a militant, fighting
+free-handed that the goods to which he is sensible may not be submerged
+and lost from out of life, the philosopher, like every other human
+being, is in a natural position.  But think of Zeno and of Epicurus,
+think of Calvin and of Paley, think of Kant and Schopenhauer, of
+Herbert Spencer and John Henry Newman, no longer as one-sided champions
+of special ideals, but as schoolmasters deciding what all must
+think,--and what more grotesque topic could a satirist wish for on
+which to exercise his pen?  The fabled attempt of Mrs. Partington to
+arrest the rising tide of the North Atlantic with her broom was a
+reasonable spectacle compared with their effort to substitute the
+content of their clean-shaven systems for that exuberant mass of goods
+with which all human nature is in travail, and groaning to bring to the
+light of day.  Think, furthermore, of such individual moralists, no
+longer as mere schoolmasters, but as pontiffs armed with the temporal
+power, and having authority in every concrete case of conflict to order
+which good shall be butchered and which shall be suffered to
+survive,--and the notion really turns one pale.  All one's slumbering
+revolutionary instincts waken at the thought of any single moralist
+wielding such powers of life and death.  Better chaos forever than an
+order based on any closet-philosopher's rule, even though he were the
+most enlightened possible member of his tribe.  No! if the philosopher
+is to keep his judicial position, he must never become one of the
+parties to the fray.
+
+
+What can he do, then, it will now be asked, except to fall back on
+scepticism and give up the notion of being a philosopher at all?
+
+{205}
+
+But do we not already see a perfectly definite path of escape which is
+open to him just because he is a philosopher, and not the champion of
+one particular ideal?  Since everything which is demanded is by that
+fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy
+(since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world)
+be simply to satisfy at all times _as many demands as we can_?  That
+act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole,
+in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions.  In the
+casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which
+_prevail at the least cost_, or by whose realization the least possible
+number of other ideals are destroyed.  Since victory and defeat there
+must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the
+more inclusive side,--of the side which even in the hour of triumph
+will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished
+party's interests lay.  The course of history is nothing but the story
+of men's struggles from generation to generation to find the more and
+more inclusive order.  _Invent some manner_ of realizing your own
+ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands,--that and that only
+is the path of peace!  Following this path, society has shaken itself
+into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of
+social discoveries quite analogous to those of science.  Polyandry and
+polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial
+torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually
+aroused complaints; and though some one's ideals are unquestionably the
+worse off for each improvement, yet a vastly greater total number of
+them find shelter in our civilized society than in the older {206}
+savage ways.  So far then, and up to date, the casuistic scale is made
+for the philosopher already far better than he can ever make it for
+himself.  An experiment of the most searching kind has proved that the
+laws and usages of the land are what yield the maximum of satisfaction
+to the thinkers taken all together.  The presumption in cases of
+conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good.
+The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of his
+casuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customs
+of the community on top.
+
+And yet if he be a true philosopher he must see that there is nothing
+final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, as
+our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones,
+so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order
+which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without
+producing others louder still.  "Rules are made for man, not man for
+rules,"--that one sentence is enough to immortalize Green's Prolegomena
+to Ethics.  And although a man always risks much when he breaks away
+from established rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole than
+they permit, yet the philosopher must allow that it is at all times
+open to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake
+his life and character upon the throw.  The pinch is always here.  Pent
+in under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom it
+weighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are always
+rumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue by
+which they may get free.  See the abuses which the {207} institution of
+private property covers, so that even to-day it is shamelessly asserted
+among us that one of the prime functions of the national government is
+to help the adroiter citizens to grow rich.  See the unnamed and
+unnamable sorrows which the tyranny, on the whole so beneficent, of the
+marriage-institution brings to so many, both of the married and the
+unwed.  See the wholesale loss of opportunity under our _regime_ of
+so-called equality and industrialism, with the drummer and the
+counter-jumper in the saddle, for so many faculties and graces which
+could flourish in the feudal world.  See our kindliness for the humble
+and the outcast, how it wars with that stern weeding-out which until
+now has been the condition of every perfection in the breed.  See
+everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem
+how to make them less.  The anarchists, nihilists, and free-lovers; the
+free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and
+civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists;
+the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the
+weak,--these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed
+against them, are simply deciding through actual experiment by what
+sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in
+this world.  These experiments are to be judged, not _a priori_, but by
+actually finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcry
+or how much appeasement comes about.  What closet-solutions can
+possibly anticipate the result of trials made on such a scale?  Or what
+can any superficial theorist's judgment be worth, in a world where
+every one of hundreds of ideals has its special champion already
+provided {208} in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it,
+and to fight to death in its behalf?  The pure philosopher can only
+follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least
+resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive
+arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the
+kingdom of heaven is incessantly made.
+
+
+IV.
+
+All this amounts to saying that, so far as the casuistic question goes,
+ethical science is just like physical science, and instead of being
+deducible all at once from abstract principles, must simply bide its
+time, and be ready to revise its conclusions from day to day.  The
+presumption of course, in both sciences, always is that the vulgarly
+accepted opinions are true, and the right casuistic order that which
+public opinion believes in; and surely it would be folly quite as
+great, in most of us, to strike out independently and to aim at
+originality in ethics as in physics.  Every now and then, however, some
+one is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary
+thought or action may bear prosperous fruit.  He may replace old 'laws
+of nature' by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in a
+certain place, bring in a total condition of things more ideal than
+would have followed had the rules been kept.
+
+On the whole, then, we must conclude that no philosophy of ethics is
+possible in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term.  Everywhere
+the ethical philosopher must wait on facts.  The thinkers who create
+the ideals come he knows not whence, their sensibilities are evolved he
+knows not how; and the {209} question as to which of two conflicting
+ideals will give the best universe then and there, can be answered by
+him only through the aid of the experience of other men.  I said some
+time ago, in treating of the 'first' question, that the intuitional
+moralists deserve credit for keeping most clearly to the psychological
+facts.  They do much to spoil this merit on the whole, however, by
+mixing with it that dogmatic temper which, by absolute distinctions and
+unconditional 'thou shalt nots,' changes a growing, elastic, and
+continuous life into a superstitious system of relics and dead bones.
+In point of fact, there are no absolute evils, and there are no
+non-moral goods; and the _highest_ ethical life--however few may be
+called to bear its burdens--consists at all times in the breaking of
+rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case.  There is but
+one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek
+incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring
+about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
+Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as
+our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for
+the moral life.  For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a
+unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and
+ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe
+without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists.
+The philosopher, then, _qua_ philosopher, is no better able to
+determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than other men.
+He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most men, what the question
+always is,--not a question of this good or that good simply taken, but
+of the two total {210} universes with which these goods respectively
+belong.  He knows that he must vote always for the richer universe, for
+the good which seems most organizable, most fit to enter into complex
+combinations, most apt to be a member of a more inclusive whole.  But
+which particular universe this is he cannot know for certain in
+advance; he only knows that if he makes a bad mistake the cries of the
+wounded will soon inform him of the fact.  In all this the philosopher
+is just like the rest of us non-philosophers, so far as we are just and
+sympathetic instinctively, and so far as we are open to the voice of
+complaint.  His function is in fact indistinguishable from that of the
+best kind of statesman at the present day.  His books upon ethics,
+therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and
+more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative
+and suggestive rather than dogmatic,--I mean with novels and dramas of
+the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and
+philanthropy and social and economical reform.  Treated in this way
+ethical treatises may be voluminous and luminous as well; but they
+never can be _final_, except in their abstractest and vaguest features;
+and they must more and more abandon the old-fashioned, clear-cut, and
+would-be 'scientific' form.
+
+
+V.
+
+The chief of all the reasons why concrete ethics cannot be final is
+that they have to wait on metaphysical and theological beliefs.  I said
+some time back that real ethical relations existed in a purely human
+world.  They would exist even in what we called a moral solitude if the
+thinker had various {211} ideals which took hold of him in turn.  His
+self of one day would make demands on his self of another; and some of
+the demands might be urgent and tyrannical, while others were gentle
+and easily put aside.  We call the tyrannical demands _imperatives_.
+If we ignore these we do not hear the last of it.  The good which we
+have wounded returns to plague us with interminable crops of
+consequential damages, compunctions, and regrets.  Obligation can thus
+exist inside a single thinker's consciousness; and perfect peace can
+abide with him only so far as he lives according to some sort of a
+casuistic scale which keeps his more imperative goods on top.  It is
+the nature of these goods to be cruel to their rivals.  Nothing shall
+avail when weighed in the balance against them.  They call out all the
+mercilessness in our disposition, and do not easily forgive us if we
+are so soft-hearted as to shrink from sacrifice in their behalf.
+
+The deepest difference, practically, in the moral life of man is the
+difference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood.  When in the
+easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling
+consideration.  The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite
+indifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained.  The
+capacity for the strenuous mood probably lies slumbering in every man,
+but it has more difficulty in some than in others in waking up.  It
+needs the wilder passions to arouse it, the big fears, loves, and
+indignations; or else the deeply penetrating appeal of some one of the
+higher fidelities, like justice, truth, or freedom.  Strong relief is a
+necessity of its vision; and a world where all the mountains are
+brought down and all the valleys are {212} exalted is no congenial
+place for its habitation.  This is why in a solitary thinker this mood
+might slumber on forever without waking.  His various ideals, known to
+him to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the same
+denominational value: he can play fast or loose with them at will.
+This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to
+our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power.  Life,
+to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but
+it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the
+infinite scale of values fails to open up.  Many of us, indeed,--like
+Sir James Stephen in those eloquent 'Essays by a Barrister,'--would
+openly laugh at the very idea of the strenuous mood being awakened in
+us by those claims of remote posterity which constitute the last appeal
+of the religion of humanity.  We do not love these men of the future
+keenly enough; and we love them perhaps the less the more we hear of
+their evolutionized perfection, their high average longevity and
+education, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunity
+from pain and zymotic disease, and all their other negative
+superiorities.  This is all too finite, we say; we see too well the
+vacuum beyond.  It lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and may
+all be dealt with in the don't-care mood.  No need of agonizing
+ourselves or making others agonize for these good creatures just at
+present.
+
+When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of
+the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out.  The scale of the
+symphony is incalculably prolonged.  The more imperative ideals now
+begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and
+to utter the penetrating, shattering, {213} tragically challenging note
+of appeal.  They ring out like the call of Victor Hugo's alpine eagle,
+"qui parle au precipice et que le gouffre entend," and the strenuous
+mood awakens at the sound.  It saith among the trumpets, ha, ha! it
+smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the
+shouting.  Its blood is up; and cruelty to the lesser claims, so far
+from being a deterrent element, does but add to the stern joy with
+which it leaps to answer to the greater.  All through history, in the
+periodical conflicts of puritanism with the don't-care temper, we see
+the antagonism of the strenuous and genial moods, and the contrast
+between the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation from on high,
+and those of prudence and the satisfaction of merely finite need.
+
+The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural
+human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or
+traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one
+simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of
+existence its keenest possibilities of zest.  Our attitude towards
+concrete evils is entirely different in a world where we believe there
+are none but finite demanders, from what it is in one where we joyously
+face tragedy for an infinite demander's sake.  Every sort of energy and
+endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set
+free in those who have religious faith.  For this reason the strenuous
+type of character will on the battle-field of human history always
+outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the
+wall.
+
+
+It would seem, too,--and this is my final conclusion,--that the stable
+and systematic moral universe {214} for which the ethical philosopher
+asks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine thinker
+with all-enveloping demands.  If such a thinker existed, his way of
+subordinating the demands to one another would be the finally valid
+casuistic scale; his claims would be the most appealing; his ideal
+universe would be the most inclusive realizable whole.  If he now
+exist, then actualized in his thought already must be that ethical
+philosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermore
+approach.[3]  In the interests of our own ideal of systematically
+unified moral truth, therefore, we, as would-be philosophers, must
+postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religious
+cause.  Meanwhile, exactly what the thought of the infinite thinker may
+be is hidden from us even were we sure of his existence; so that our
+postulation of him after all serves only to let loose in us the
+strenuous mood.  But this is what it does in all men, even those who
+have no interest in philosophy.  The ethical philosopher, therefore,
+whenever he ventures to say which course of action is the best, is on
+no essentially different level from the common man.  "See, I have set
+before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; therefore,
+choose life that thou and thy seed may live,"--when this challenge
+comes to us, it is simply our total character and personal genius that
+are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and
+use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or
+incapacity for moral life.  From this unsparing practical ordeal no
+professor's lectures and no array of books {215} can save us.  The
+solving word, for the learned and the unlearned man alike, lies in the
+last resort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of their
+interior characters, and nowhere else.  It is not in heaven, neither is
+it beyond the sea; but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth
+and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.
+
+
+
+[1] An Address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the
+International Journal of Ethics, April, 1891.
+
+[2] The Principles of Psychology, New York, H. Holt & Co, 1890.
+
+[3] All this is set forth with great freshness and force in the work of
+my colleague, Professor Josiah Royce: "The Religious Aspect of
+Philosophy."  Boston, 1885.
+
+
+
+
+{216}
+
+GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT.[1]
+
+A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains
+between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of
+zoological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
+
+It will be best to prepare the ground for my thesis by a few very
+general remarks on the method of getting at scientific truth.  It is a
+common platitude that a complete acquaintance with any one thing,
+however small, would require a knowledge of the entire universe.  Not a
+sparrow falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of his
+fall are to be found in the milky way, in our federal constitution, or
+in the early history of Europe.  That is to say, alter the milky way,
+alter the federal constitution, alter the facts of our barbarian
+ancestry, and the universe would so far be a different universe from
+what it now is.  One fact involved in the difference might be that the
+particular little street-boy who threw the stone which brought down the
+sparrow might not find himself opposite the sparrow at that particular
+moment; or, finding himself there, he might not be in that particular
+serene and disengaged mood of mind which expressed itself in throwing
+the stone.  But, true as all this is, it would be very foolish for any
+one who {217} was inquiring the cause of the sparrow's fall to overlook
+the boy as too personal, proximate, and so to speak anthropomorphic an
+agent, and to say that the true cause is the federal constitution, the
+westward migration of the Celtic race, or the structure of the milky
+way.  If we proceeded on that method, we might say with perfect
+legitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon his
+door-step and cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteen
+at the table, died because of that ominous feast.  I know, in fact, one
+such instance; and I might, if I chose, contend with perfect logical
+propriety that the slip on the ice was no real accident.  "There are no
+accidents," I might say, "for science.  The whole history of the world
+converged to produce that slip.  If anything had been left out, the
+slip would not have occurred just there and then.  To say it would is
+to deny the relations of cause and effect throughout the universe.  The
+real cause of the death was not the slip, _but the conditions which
+engendered the slip_,--and among them his having sat at a table, six
+months previous, one among thirteen.  _That_ is truly the reason why he
+died within the year."
+
+It will soon be seen whose arguments I am, in form, reproducing here.
+I would fain lay down the truth without polemics or recrimination.  But
+unfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statement
+until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement
+would be.  The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark
+background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.  And
+the error which I am going to use as a foil to set off what seems to me
+the truth of my own statements is contained in the philosophy of Mr.
+Herbert Spencer and {218} his disciples.  Our problem is, What are the
+causes that make communities change from generation to
+generation,--that make the England of Queen Anne so different from the
+England of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so different from
+that of thirty years ago?
+
+I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the accumulated
+influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and
+their decisions.  The Spencerian school replies, The changes are
+irrespective of persons, and independent of individual control.  They
+are due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physical
+geography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer
+relations; to everything, in fact, except the Grants and the Bismarcks,
+the Joneses and the Smiths.
+
+
+Now, I say that these theorizers are guilty of precisely the same
+fallacy as he who should ascribe the death of his friend to the dinner
+with thirteen, or the fall of the sparrow to the milky way.  Like the
+dog in the fable, who drops his real bone to snatch at its image, they
+drop the real causes to snatch at others, which from no possible human
+point of view are available or attainable.  Their fallacy is a
+practical one.  Let us see where it lies.  Although I believe in
+free-will myself, I will waive that belief in this discussion, and
+assume with the Spencerians the predestination of all human actions.
+On that assumption I gladly allow that were the intelligence
+investigating the man's or the sparrow's death omniscient and
+omnipresent, able to take in the whole of time and space at a single
+glance, there would not be the slightest objection to the milky way or
+the fatal feast being {219} invoked among the sought-for causes.  Such
+a divine intelligence would see instantaneously all the infinite lines
+of convergence towards a given result, and it would, moreover, see
+impartially: it would see the fatal feast to be as much a condition of
+the sparrow's death as of the man's; it would see the boy with the
+stone to be as much a condition of the man's fall as of the sparrow's.
+
+The human mind, however, is constituted on an entirely different plan.
+It has no such power of universal intuition.  Its finiteness obliges it
+to see but two or three things at a time.  If it wishes to take wider
+sweeps it has to use 'general ideas,' as they are called, and in so
+doing to drop all concrete truths.  Thus, in the present case, if we as
+men wish to feel the connection between the milky way and the boy and
+the dinner and the sparrow and the man's death, we can do so only by
+falling back on the enormous emptiness of what is called an abstract
+proposition.  We must say, All things in the world are fatally
+predetermined, and hang together in the adamantine fixity of a system
+of natural law.  But in the vagueness of this vast proposition we have
+lost all the concrete facts and links; and in all practical matters the
+concrete links are the only things of importance.  The human mind is
+essentially partial.  It can be efficient at all only by _picking out_
+what to attend to, and ignoring everything else,--by narrowing its
+point of view.  Otherwise, what little strength it has is dispersed,
+and it loses its way altogether.  Man always wants his curiosity
+gratified for a particular purpose.  If, in the case of the sparrow,
+the purpose is punishment, it would be idiotic to wander off from the
+cats, boys, and other possible agencies close by in the street, to
+{220} survey the early Celts and the milky way: the boy would meanwhile
+escape.  And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves
+in contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice
+the ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor fellow,
+who never dined out in his life, may slip on it in coming to the door,
+and fall and break his head too.
+
+It is, then, a necessity laid upon us as human beings to limit our
+view.  In mathematics we know how this method of ignoring and
+neglecting quantities lying outside of a certain range has been adopted
+in the differential calculus.  The calculator throws out all the
+'infinitesimals' of the quantities he is considering.  He treats them
+(under certain rules) as if they did not exist.  In themselves they
+exist perfectly all the while; but they are as if they did not exist
+for the purposes of his calculation.  Just so an astronomer, in dealing
+with the tidal movements of the ocean, takes no account of the waves
+made by the wind, or by the pressure of all the steamers which day and
+night are moving their thousands of tons upon its surface.  Just so the
+marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, but
+not for the equally real motion of the earth and solar system.  Just so
+a business man's punctuality may overlook an error of five minutes,
+while a physicist, measuring the velocity of light, must count each
+thousandth of a second.
+
+There are, in short, _different cycles of operation_ in nature;
+different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one
+another, so that what goes on at any moment in one may be compatible
+with almost any condition of things at the same time in the next.  The
+mould on the biscuit in the store-room of a {221} man-of-war vegetates
+in absolute indifference to the nationality of the flag, the direction
+of the voyage, the weather, and the human dramas that may go on on
+board; and a mycologist may study it in complete abstraction from all
+these larger details.  Only by so studying it, in fact, is there any
+chance of the mental concentration by which alone he may hope to learn
+something of its nature.  On the other hand, the captain who in
+manoeuvring the vessel through a naval fight should think it necessary
+to bring the mouldy biscuit into his calculations would very likely
+lose the battle by reason of the excessive 'thoroughness' of his mind.
+
+The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected
+with one another only _if we take the whole universe into account_.
+For all lesser points of view it is lawful--nay, more, it is for human
+wisdom necessary--to regard them as disconnected and irrelevant to one
+another.
+
+
+And this brings us nearer to our special topic.  If we look at an
+animal or a human being, distinguished from the rest of his kind by the
+possession of some extraordinary peculiarity, good or bad, we shall be
+able to discriminate between the causes which originally _produced_ the
+peculiarity in him and the causes that _maintain_ it after it is
+produced; and we shall see, if the peculiarity be one that he was born
+with, that these two sets of causes belong to two such irrelevant
+cycles.  It was the triumphant originality of Darwin to see this, and
+to act accordingly.  Separating the causes of production under the
+title of 'tendencies to spontaneous variation,' and relegating them to
+a physiological cycle which he forthwith {222} agreed to ignore
+altogether,[2] he confined his attention to the causes of preservation,
+and under the names of natural selection and sexual selection studied
+them exclusively as functions of the cycle of the environment.
+
+Pre-Darwinian philosophers had also tried to establish the doctrine of
+descent with modification; but they all committed the blunder of
+clumping the two cycles of causation into one.  What preserves an
+animal with his peculiarity, if it be a useful one, they saw to be the
+nature of the environment to which the peculiarity was adjusted.  The
+giraffe with his peculiar neck is preserved by the fact that there are
+in his environment tall trees whose leaves he can digest.  But these
+philosophers went further, and said that the presence of the trees not
+only maintained an animal with a long neck to browse upon their
+branches, but also produced him.  They _made_ his neck long by the
+constant striving they aroused in him to reach up to them.  The
+environment, in short, was supposed by these writers to mould the
+animal by a kind of direct pressure, very much as a seal presses the
+wax into harmony with itself.  Numerous instances were given of the way
+in which this goes on under our eyes.  The exercise of the forge makes
+the right arm strong, the palm grows callous to the oar, the mountain
+air distends the chest, the chased fox grows cunning and the chased
+bird shy, the arctic cold stimulates the animal combustion, and so
+forth.  Now these changes, of which many more examples might be
+adduced, are {223} at present distinguished by the special name of
+_adaptive_ changes.  Their peculiarity is that that very feature in the
+environment to which the animal's nature grows adjusted, itself
+produces the adjustment.  The 'inner relation,' to use Mr. Spencer's
+phrase, 'corresponds' with its own efficient cause.
+
+Darwin's first achievement was to show the utter insignificance in
+amount of these changes produced by direct adaptation, the immensely
+greater mass of changes being produced by internal molecular accidents,
+of which we know nothing.  His next achievement was to define the true
+problem with which we have to deal when we study the effects of the
+visible environment on the animal.  That problem is simply this; Is the
+environment more likely to _preserve or to destroy him_, on account of
+this or that peculiarity with which he may be born?  In giving the name
+of 'accidental variations' to those peculiarities with which an animal
+is born, Darwin does not for a moment mean to suggest that they are not
+the fixed outcome of natural law.  If the total system of the universe
+be taken into account, the causes of these variations and the visible
+environment which preserves or destroys them, undoubtedly do, in some
+remote and roundabout way, hang together.  What Darwin means is, that,
+since that environment is a perfectly known thing, and its relations to
+the organism in the way of destruction or preservation are tangible and
+distinct, it would utterly confuse our finite understandings and
+frustrate our hopes of science to mix in with it facts from such a
+disparate and incommensurable cycle as that in which the variations are
+produced.  This last cycle is that of occurrences before the animal is
+born.  It is the cycle of influences upon ova and embryos; {224} in
+which lie the causes that tip them and tilt them towards masculinity or
+femininity, towards strength or weakness, towards health or disease,
+and towards divergence from the parent type.  What are the causes there?
+
+In the first place, they are molecular and invisible,--inaccessible,
+therefore, to direct observation of any kind.  Secondly, their
+operations are compatible with any social, political, and physical
+conditions of environment.  The same parents, living in the same
+environing conditions, may at one birth produce a genius, at the next
+an idiot or a monster.  The visible external conditions are therefore
+not direct determinants of this cycle; and the more we consider the
+matter, the more we are forced to believe that two children of the same
+parents are made to differ from each other by causes as
+disproportionate to their ultimate effects as is the famous pebble on
+the Rocky Mountain crest, which separates two rain-drops, to the Gulf
+of St. Lawrence and the Pacific Ocean toward which it makes them
+severally flow.
+
+
+The great mechanical distinction between transitive forces and
+discharging forces is nowhere illustrated on such a scale as in
+physiology.  Almost all causes there are forces of _detent_, which
+operate by simply unlocking energy already stored up.  They are
+upsetters of unstable equilibria, and the resultant effect depends
+infinitely more on the nature of the materials upset than on that of
+the particular stimulus which joggles them down.  Galvanic work, equal
+to unity, done on a frog's nerve will discharge from the muscle to
+which the nerve belongs mechanical work equal to seventy thousand; and
+exactly the same muscular {225} effect will emerge if other irritants
+than galvanism are employed.  The irritant has merely started or
+provoked something which then went on of itself,--as a match may start
+a fire which consumes a whole town.  And qualitatively as well as
+quantitatively the effect may be absolutely incommensurable with the
+cause.  We find this condition of things in ail organic matter.
+Chemists are distracted by the difficulties which the instability of
+albuminoid compounds opposes to their study.  Two specimens, treated in
+what outwardly seem scrupulously identical conditions, behave in quite
+different ways.  You know about the invisible factors of fermentation,
+and how the fate of a jar of milk--whether it turn into a sour clot or
+a mass of koumiss--depends on whether the lactic acid ferment or the
+alcoholic is introduced first, and gets ahead of the other in starting
+the process.  Now, when the result is the tendency of an ovum, itself
+invisible to the naked eye, to tip towards this direction or that in
+its further evolution,--to bring forth a genius or a dunce, even as the
+rain-drop passes east or west of the pebble,--is it not obvious that
+the deflecting cause must lie in a region so recondite and minute, must
+be such a ferment of a ferment, an infinitesimal of so high an order,
+that surmise itself may never succeed even in attempting to frame an
+image of it?
+
+Such being the case, was not Darwin right to turn his back upon that
+region altogether, and to keep his own problem carefully free from all
+entanglement with matters such as these?  The success of his work is a
+sufficiently affirmative reply.
+
+
+And this brings us at last to the heart of our subject.  The causes of
+production of great men lie in a {226} sphere wholly inaccessible to
+the social philosopher.  He must simply accept geniuses as data, just
+as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations.  For him, as for Darwin,
+the only problem is, these data being given, How does the environment
+affect them, and how do they affect the environment?  Now, I affirm
+that the relation of the visible environment to the great man is in the
+main exactly what it is to the 'variation' in the Darwinian philosophy.
+It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short _selects_
+him.[3]  And whenever it adopts and preserves the great man, it becomes
+modified by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way.  He
+acts as a ferment, and changes its constitution, just as the advent of
+a new zoological species changes the faunal and floral equilibrium of
+the region in which it appears.  We all recollect Mr. Darwin's famous
+statement of the influence of cats on the growth of clover in their
+neighborhood.  We all have read of the effects of the European rabbit
+in New Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in the controversy
+about the English sparrow here,--whether he kills most canker-worms, or
+drives away most native birds.  Just so the great man, whether he be an
+importation from without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, or
+whether he spring from the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about
+a rearrangement, on a large or a small scale, of the pre-existing
+social relations.
+
+{227}
+
+The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are in
+the main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the example of
+individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the
+moment, or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that
+they became ferments, initiators of movement, setters of precedent or
+fashion, centres of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose
+gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another
+direction.
+
+We see this power of individual initiative exemplified on a small scale
+all about us, and on a large scale in the case of the leaders of
+history.  It is only following the common-sense method of a Lyell, a
+Darwin, and a Whitney to interpret the unknown by the known, and reckon
+up cumulatively the only causes of social change we can directly
+observe.  Societies of men are just like individuals, in that both at
+any given moment offer ambiguous potentialities of development.
+Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on a
+decision which has to be made before a certain day.  He takes the place
+offered in the counting-house, and is _committed_.  Little by little,
+the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so
+near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities.  At first, he
+may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered in that decisive hour
+might not have been the better of the two; but with the years such
+questions themselves expire, and the old alternative _ego_, once so
+vivid, fades into something less substantial than a dream.  It is no
+otherwise with nations.  They may be committed by kings and ministers
+to peace or war, by generals to victory or defeat, by prophets to this
+{228} religion or to that, by various geniuses to fame in art, science,
+or industry.  A war is a true point of bifurcation of future
+possibilities.  Whether it fail or succeed, its declaration must be the
+starting-point of new policies.  Just so does a revolution, or any
+great civic precedent, become a deflecting influence, whose operations
+widen with the course of time.  Communities obey their ideals; and an
+accidental success fixes an ideal, as an accidental failure blights it.
+
+Would England have to-day the 'imperial' ideal which she now has, if a
+certain boy named Bob Clive had shot himself, as he tried to do, at
+Madras?  Would she be the drifting raft she is now in European
+affairs[4] if a Frederic the Great had inherited her throne instead of
+a Victoria, and if Messrs. Bentham, Mill, Cobden, and Bright had all
+been born in Prussia?  England has, no doubt, to-day precisely the same
+intrinsic value relatively to the other nations that she ever had.
+There is no such fine accumulation of human material upon the globe.
+But in England the material has lost effective form, while in Germany
+it has found it.  Leaders give the form.  Would England be crying
+forward and backward at once, as she does now, 'letting I will not wait
+upon I would,' wishing to conquer but not to fight, if her ideal had in
+all these years been fixed by a succession of statesmen of supremely
+commanding personality, working in one direction?  Certainly not.  She
+would have espoused, for better or worse, either one course or another.
+Had Bismarck died in his cradle, the Germans would still be satisfied
+with appearing to themselves as a race of spectacled _Gelehrten_ and
+political herbivora, and to the French as _ces bons_, or _ces naifs_,
+{229} _Allemands_.  Bismarck's will showed them, to their own great
+astonishment, that they could play a far livelier game.  The lesson
+will not be forgotten.  Germany may have many vicissitudes, but they--
+
+        "will never do away, I ween,
+  The marks of that which once hath been"--
+
+of Bismarck's initiative, namely, from 1860 to 1873.
+
+The fermentative influence of geniuses must be admitted as, at any
+rate, one factor in the changes that constitute social evolution.  The
+community _may_ evolve in many ways.  The accidental presence of this
+or that ferment decides in which way it _shall_ evolve.  Why, the very
+birds of the forest, the parrot, the mino, have the power of human
+speech, but never develop it of themselves; some one must be there to
+teach them.  So with us individuals.  Rembrandt must teach us to enjoy
+the struggle of light with darkness, Wagner to enjoy peculiar musical
+effects; Dickens gives a twist to our sentimentality, Artemus Ward to
+our humor; Emerson kindles a new moral light within us.  But it is like
+Columbus's egg.  "All can raise the flowers now, for all have got the
+seed."  But if this be true of the individuals in the community, how
+can it be false of the community as a whole?  If shown a certain way, a
+community may take it; if not, it will never find it.  And the ways are
+to a large extent indeterminate in advance.  A nation may obey either
+of many alternative impulses given by different men of genius, and
+still live and be prosperous, just as a man may enter either of many
+businesses.  Only, the prosperities may differ in their type.
+
+But the indeterminism is not absolute.  Not every {230} 'man' fits
+every 'hour.'  Some incompatibilities there are.  A given genius may
+come either too early or too late.  Peter the Hermit would now be sent
+to a lunatic asylum.  John Mill in the tenth century would have lived
+and died unknown.  Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant
+his civil war.  An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted
+rifles; and, to express differently an instance which Spencer uses,
+what could a Watt have effected in a tribe which no precursive genius
+had taught to smelt iron or to turn a lathe?
+
+Now, the important thing to notice is that what makes a certain genius
+now incompatible with his surroundings is usually the fact that some
+previous genius of a different strain has warped the community away
+from the sphere of his possible effectiveness.  After Voltaire, no
+Peter the Hermit; after Charles IX. and Louis XIV., no general
+protestantization of France; after a Manchester school, a
+Beaconsfield's success is transient; after a Philip II., a Castelar
+makes little headway; and so on.  Each bifurcation cuts off certain
+sides of the field altogether, and limits the future possible angles of
+deflection.  A community is a living thing, and in words which I can do
+no better than quote from Professor Clifford,[5] "it is the peculiarity
+of living things not merely that they change under the influence of
+surrounding circumstances, but that any change which takes place in
+them is not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organism
+to serve as the foundation for future actions.  If you cause any
+distortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever you
+may do afterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your {231}
+distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part of
+the tree's nature....  Suppose, however, that you take a lump of gold,
+melt it, and let it cool....  No one can tell by examining a piece of
+gold how often it has been melted and cooled in geologic ages, or even
+in the last year by the hand of man.  Any one who cuts down an oak can
+tell by the rings in its trunk how many times winter has frozen it into
+widowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it into life.  A living
+being must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its
+own existence, but of all its ancestors."
+
+Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects his picture in a
+certain sense.  Whatever lines follow must be built on those first laid
+down.  Every author who starts to rewrite a piece of work knows how
+impossible it becomes to use any of the first-written pages again.  The
+new beginning has already excluded the possibility of those earlier
+phrases and transitions, while it has at the same time created the
+possibility of an indefinite set of new ones, no one of which, however,
+is completely determined in advance.  Just so the social surroundings
+of the past and present hour exclude the possibility of accepting
+certain contributions from individuals; but they do not positively
+define what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they are
+powerless to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shall
+be.[6]
+
+{232}
+
+Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly
+distinct factors,--the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the
+play of physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the
+power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the
+social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him
+and his gifts.  Both factors are essential to change.  The community
+stagnates without the impulse of the individual.  The impulse dies away
+without the sympathy of the community.
+
+All this seems nothing more than common-sense.  All who wish to see it
+developed by a man of genius should read that golden little work,
+Bagehot's Physics and Politics, in which (it seems to me) the complete
+sense of the way in which concrete things grow and change is as
+livingly present as the straining after a pseudo-philosophy of
+evolution is livingly absent.  But there are never wanting minds to
+whom such views seem personal and contracted, and allied to an
+anthropomorphism long exploded in other fields of knowledge.  "The
+individual withers, and the world is more and more," to these writers;
+and in a Buckle, a Draper, and a Taine we all know how much the 'world'
+has come to be almost synonymous with the _climate_.  We all know, too,
+how the controversy has been kept up between the partisans of a
+'science of history' and those who deny the existence of anything like
+necessary 'laws' where human societies are concerned.  Mr. Spencer, at
+the opening of his Study of Sociology, makes an onslaught on the
+'great-man theory' of history, from which a few passages may be
+quoted:--
+
+"The genesis of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably
+believed so long as, resting in general {233} notions, you do not ask
+for particulars.  But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand
+that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we
+discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent.  If, not stopping at
+the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back
+a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory
+breaks down completely.  The question has two conceivable answers: his
+origin is supernatural, or it is natural.  Is his origin supernatural?
+Then he is a deputy god, and we have theocracy once removed,--or,
+rather, not removed at all....  Is this an unacceptable solution?  Then
+the origin of the great man is natural; and immediately this is
+recognized, he must be classed with all other phenomena in the society
+that gave him birth as a product of its antecedents.  Along with the
+whole generation of which he forms a minute part, along with its
+institutions, language, knowledge, manners, and its multitudinous arts
+and appliances, he is a _resultant_....  You must admit that the
+genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex
+influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the
+social state into which that race has slowly grown....  Before he can
+remake his society, his society must make him.  All those changes of
+which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the
+generations he descended from.  If there is to be anything like a real
+explanation of those changes, it must be sought in that aggregate of
+conditions out of which both he and they have arisen."[7]
+
+
+Now, it seems to me that there is something which one might almost call
+impudent in the attempt which Mr. Spencer makes, in the first sentence
+of this extract, to pin the reproach of vagueness upon those who
+believe in the power of initiative of the great man.
+
+{234}
+
+Suppose I say that the singular moderation which now distinguishes
+social, political, and religious discussion in England, and contrasts
+so strongly with the bigotry and dogmatism of sixty years ago, is
+largely due to J. S. Mill's example.  I may possibly be wrong about the
+facts; but I am, at any rate, 'asking for particulars,' and not
+'resting in general notions.'  And if Mr. Spencer should tell me it
+started from no personal influence whatever, but from the 'aggregate of
+conditions,' the 'generations,' Mill and all his contemporaries
+'descended from,' the whole past order of nature in short, surely he,
+not I, would be the person 'satisfied with vagueness.'
+
+The fact is that Mr. Spencer's sociological method is identical with
+that of one who would invoke the zodiac to account for the fall of the
+sparrow, and the thirteen at table to explain the gentleman's death.
+It is of little more scientific value than the Oriental method of
+replying to whatever question arises by the unimpeachable truism, "God
+is great."  _Not_ to fall back on the gods, where a proximate principle
+may be found, has with us Westerners long since become the sign of an
+efficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect.
+
+To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its
+antecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal
+and consummation, of science.  If she is simply to lead us out of the
+labyrinth by the same hole we went in by three or four thousand years
+ago, it seems hardly worth while to have followed her through the
+darkness at all.  If anything is humanly certain it is that the great
+man's society, properly so called, does not make him before he can
+remake it.  Physiological forces, with which {235} the social,
+political, geographical, and to a great extent anthropological
+conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the condition
+of the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by
+which I write, are what make him.  Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the
+convergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged on
+Stratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W.
+Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born
+there,--as the pressure of water outside a certain boat will cause a
+stream of a certain form to ooze into a particular leak?  And does he
+mean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera
+infantum, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon would needs have
+engendered a duplicate copy of him, to restore the sociologic
+equilibrium,--just as the same stream of water will reappear, no matter
+how often you pass a sponge over the leak, so long as the outside level
+remains unchanged?  Or might the substitute arise at
+'Stratford-atte-Bowe'?  Here, as elsewhere, it is very hard, in the
+midst of Mr. Spencer's vagueness, to tell what he does mean at all.
+
+We have, however, in his disciple, Mr. Grant Allen, one who leaves us
+in no doubt whatever of his precise meaning.  This widely informed,
+suggestive, and brilliant writer published last year a couple of
+articles in the Gentleman's Magazine, in which he maintained that
+individuals have no initiative in determining social change.
+
+"The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect,
+commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend, not
+upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other
+unknown and unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the
+{236} physical circumstances to which they are exposed.  If it be a
+fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizably
+from the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably from
+the people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspicuous differences
+between them are wholly due to the geographical position of the various
+races.  If the people who went to Hamburg had gone to Timbuctoo, they
+would now be indistinguishable from the semi-barbarian negroes who
+inhabit that central African metropolis;[8] and if the people who went
+to Timbuctoo had gone to Hamburg, they would now have been
+white-skinned merchants driving a roaring trade in imitation sherry and
+indigestible port....  The differentiating agency must be sought in the
+great permanent geographical features of land and sea; ... these have
+necessarily and inevitably moulded the characters and histories of
+every nation upon the earth....  We cannot regard any nation as an
+active agent in differentiating itself.  Only the surrounding
+circumstances can have any effect in such a direction.  [These two
+sentences dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively independent
+physiological cycle of causation.]  To suppose otherwise is to suppose
+that the mind of man is exempt from the universal law of causation.
+There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors.  Even
+tastes and inclinations _must_ themselves be the result of surrounding
+causes."[9]
+
+{237}
+
+Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says:--
+
+
+"It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical
+Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan
+brain,...  To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing
+whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the
+physical conditions in which they are set,--including, of course, under
+the term _physical conditions_ the relations of place and time in which
+they stand with regard to other bodies of men.  To suppose otherwise is
+to deny the primordial law of causation.  To imagine that the mind can
+differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated
+without a cause."[10]
+
+
+This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the
+moment we refuse to invest in the kind of causation which is peddled
+round by a particular school, makes one impatient.  These writers have
+no imagination of alternatives.  With them there is no _tertium quid_
+between outward environment and miracle.  _Aut Caesar, aut nullus_!
+_Aut_ Spencerism, _aut_ catechism!
+
+If by 'physical conditions' Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the
+outward cycle of visible nature and man, his assertion is simply
+physiologically false.  For a national mind differentiates 'itself'
+whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the
+invisible and molecular cycle.  But if Mr. Allen means by 'physical
+conditions' the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but
+the vague Asiatic {238} profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate,
+which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or
+scientific character.
+
+
+And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have distinguished
+in these matters between _necessary_ conditions and _sufficient_
+conditions of a given result?  The French say that to have an omelet we
+must break our eggs; that is, the breaking of eggs is a necessary
+condition of the omelet.  But is it a sufficient condition?  Does an
+omelet appear whenever three eggs are broken?  So of the Greek mind.
+To get such versatile intelligence it may be that such commercial
+dealings with the world as the geographical Hellas afforded are a
+necessary condition.  But if they are a sufficient condition, why did
+not the Phoenicians outstrip the Greeks in intelligence?  No
+geographical environment can produce a given type of mind.  It can only
+foster and further certain types fortuitously produced, and thwart and
+frustrate others.  Once again, its function is simply selective, and
+determines what shall actually be only by destroying what is positively
+incompatible.  An Arctic environment is incompatible with improvident
+habits in its denizens; but whether the inhabitants of such a region
+shall unite with their thrift the peacefulness of the Eskimo or the
+pugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, an
+accident.  Evolutionists should not forget that we all have five
+fingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merely
+because the first vertebrate above the fishes _happened_ to have that
+number.  He owed his prodigious success in founding a line of descent
+to some entirely other quality,--we know {239} not which,--but the
+inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the present
+day.  So of most social peculiarities.  Which of them shall be taken in
+tow by the few qualities which the environment necessarily exacts is a
+matter of what physiological accidents shall happen among individuals.
+Mr. Allen promises to prove his thesis in detail by the examples of
+China, India, England, Rome, etc.  I have not the smallest hesitation
+in predicting that he will do no more with these examples than he has
+done with Hellas.  He will appear upon the scene after the fact, and
+show that the quality developed by each race was, naturally enough, not
+incompatible with its habitat.  But he will utterly fail to show that
+the particular form of compatibility fallen into in each case was the
+one necessary and only possible form.
+
+Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a
+fauna and its environment are.  An animal may better his chances of
+existence in either of many ways,--growing aquatic, arboreal, or
+subterranean; small and swift, or massive and bulky; spiny, horny,
+slimy, or venomous; more timid or more pugnacious; more cunning or more
+fertile of offspring; more gregarious or more solitary; or in other
+ways besides,--and any one of these ways may suit him to many widely
+different environments.
+
+Readers of Mr. A. R. Wallace will well remember the striking
+illustrations of this in his Malay Archipelago:--
+
+"Borneo closely resembles New Guinea not only in its vast size and its
+freedom from volcanoes, but in its variety of geological structure, its
+uniformity of climate, and the general aspect of the forest vegetation
+that clothes its surface; the Moluccas are the counterpart of the
+Philippines {240} in their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility,
+their luxuriant forests, and their frequent earthquakes; and Bali, with
+the east end of Java, has a climate almost as dry and a soil almost as
+arid as that of Timor.  Yet between these corresponding groups of
+islands, constructed, as it were, after the same pattern, subjected to
+the same climate, and bathed by the same oceans, there exists the
+greatest possible contrast when we compare their animal productions.
+Nowhere does the ancient doctrine that differences or similarities in
+the various forms of life that inhabit different countries are due to
+corresponding physical differences or similarities in the countries
+themselves, meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction.  Borneo
+and New Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be,
+are zoologically wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its
+dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts, and its temperate
+climate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related to
+those inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which everywhere
+clothe the plains and mountains of New Guinea."
+
+
+Here we have similar physical-geography environments harmonizing with
+widely differing animal lives, and similar animal lives harmonizing
+with widely differing geographical environments.  A singularly
+accomplished writer, E. Gryzanowski, in the North American Review,[11]
+uses the instances of Sardinia and Corsica in support of this thesis
+with great effect He says:--
+
+
+"These sister islands, lying in the very centre of the Mediterranean,
+at almost equal distances from the centres of Latin and Neo-Latin
+civilization, within easy reach of the Phoenician, the Greek, and the
+Saracen, with a {241} coast-line of more than a thousand miles, endowed
+with obvious and tempting advantages, and hiding untold sources of
+agricultural and mineral wealth, have nevertheless remained unknown,
+unheeded, and certainly uncared for during the thirty centuries of
+European history....  These islands have dialects, but no language;
+records of battles, but no history.  They have customs, but no laws;
+the _vendetta_, but no justice.  They have wants and wealth, but no
+commerce, timber and ports, but no shipping.  They have legends, but no
+poetry, beauty, but no art; and twenty years ago it could still be said
+that they had universities, but no students....  That Sardinia, with
+all her emotional and picturesque barbarism, has never produced a
+single artist is almost as strange as her barbarism itself....  Near
+the focus of European civilization, in the very spot which an _a
+priori_ geographer would point out as the most favorable place for
+material and intellectual, commercial, and political development, these
+strange sister islands have slept their secular sleep, like _nodes_ on
+the sounding-board of history."
+
+
+This writer then goes on to compare Sardinia and Sicily with some
+detail.  All the material advantages are in favor of Sardinia, "and the
+Sardinian population, being of an ancestry more mixed than that of the
+English race, would justify far higher expectations than that of
+Sicily."  Yet Sicily's past history has been brilliant in the extreme,
+and her commerce to-day is great.  Dr. Gryzanowski has his own theory
+of the historic torpor of these favored isles.  He thinks they
+stagnated because they never gained political autonomy, being always
+owned by some Continental power.  I will not dispute the theory; but I
+will ask, Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately: Simply
+because no individuals were {242} born there with patriotism and
+ability enough to inflame their countrymen with national pride,
+ambition, and thirst for independent life.  Corsicans and Sardinians
+are probably as good stuff as any of their neighbors.  But the best
+wood-pile will not blaze till a torch is applied, and the appropriate
+torches seem to have been wanting.[12]
+
+Sporadic great men come everywhere.  But for a community to get
+vibrating through and through {243} with intensely active life, many
+geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required.  This is
+why great epochs are so rare,--why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an
+early Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery.  Blow must follow blow so
+fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals.  Then the mass of the
+nation grows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertia
+long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away.
+We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human
+affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but
+that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant.  This
+mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why
+great rivers flow by great towns.  It is true that great public
+fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses, who in more torpid times
+would have had no chance to work.  But over and above this there must
+be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the
+fermentation begin at all.  The unlikeliness of the concourse is far
+greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the
+rarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they always
+wear.
+
+{244}
+
+It is folly, then, to speak of the 'laws of history' as of something
+inevitable, which science has only to discover, and whose consequences
+any one can then foretell but do nothing to alter or avert.  Why, the
+very laws of physics are conditional, and deal with _ifs_.  The
+physicist does not say, "The water will boil anyhow;" he only says it
+will boil if a fire be kindled beneath it.  And so the utmost the
+student of sociology can ever predict is that _if_ a genius of a
+certain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow.  It might
+long ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy and
+Germany would reach a stable unity if some one could but succeed in
+starting the process.  It could not have been predicted, however, that
+the _modus operandi_ in each case would be subordination to a paramount
+state rather than federation, because no historian could have
+calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same
+moment such positions of authority to three such peculiar individuals
+as Napoleon III., Bismarck, and Cavour.  So of our own politics.  It is
+certain now that the movement of the independents, reformers, or
+whatever one please to call them, will triumph.  But whether it do so
+by converting the Republican party to its ends, or by rearing a new
+party on the ruins of both our present factions, the historian cannot
+say.  There can be no doubt that the reform movement would make more
+progress in one year with an adequate personal leader than as now in
+ten without one.  Were there a great citizen, splendid with every civic
+gift, to be its candidate, who can doubt that he would lead us to
+victory?  But, at present, we, his environment, who sigh for him and
+would so gladly preserve and adopt him if he came, can neither {245}
+move without him, nor yet do anything to bring him forth.[13]
+
+To conclude: The evolutionary view of history, when it denies the vital
+importance of individual initiative, is, then, an utterly vague and
+unscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinism
+into the most ancient oriental fatalism.  The lesson of the analysis
+that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with
+which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the
+energy of the individual.  Even the dogged resistance of the
+reactionary conservative to changes which he cannot hope entirely to
+defeat is justified and shown to be effective.  He retards the
+movement; deflects it a little by the concessions he extracts; gives it
+a resultant momentum, compounded of his inertia and his adversaries'
+speed; and keeps up, in short, a constant lateral pressure, which, to
+be sure, never heads it round about, but brings it up at last at a goal
+far to the right or left of that to which it would have drifted had he
+allowed it to drift alone.
+
+
+I now pass to the last division of my subject, the function of the
+environment in _mental_ evolution.  After what I have already said, I
+may be quite concise.  Here, if anywhere, it would seem at first sight
+as if that school must be right which makes the mind passively plastic,
+and the environment actively productive of the form and order of its
+conceptions; which, in a word, thinks that all mental progress must
+result from {246} a series of adaptive changes, in the sense already
+defined of that word.  We know what a vast part of our mental furniture
+consists of purely remembered, not reasoned, experience.  The entire
+field of our habits and associations by contiguity belongs here.  The
+entire field of those abstract conceptions which were taught us with
+the language into which we were born belongs here also.  And, more than
+this, there is reason to think that the order of 'outer relations'
+experienced by the individual may itself determine the order in which
+the general characters imbedded therein shall be noticed and extracted
+by his mind.[14]  The pleasures and benefits, moreover, which certain
+parts of the environment yield, and the pains and hurts which other
+parts inflict, determine the direction of our interest and our
+attention, and so decide at which points the accumulation of mental
+experiences shall begin.  It might, accordingly, seem as if there were
+no room for any other agency than this; as if the distinction we have
+found so useful between 'spontaneous variation,' as the producer of
+changed forms, and the environment, as their preserver and destroyer,
+did not hold in the case of mental progress; as if, in a word, the
+parallel with darwinism might no longer obtain, and Spencer might be
+quite right with his fundamental law of intelligence, which says, "The
+cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency
+with which the relation between the answering external phenomena has
+been repeated in experience."[15]
+
+{247}
+
+But, in spite of all these facts, I have no hesitation whatever in
+holding firm to the darwinian distinction even here.  I maintain that
+the facts in question are all drawn from the lower strata of the mind,
+so to speak,--from the sphere of its least evolved functions, from the
+region of intelligence which man possesses in common with the brutes.
+And I can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those mental
+departments which are highest, which are most characteristically human,
+Spencer's law is violated at every step; and that as a matter of fact
+the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are
+originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental
+out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the
+excessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simply
+confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or
+destroys,--selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and
+social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort.
+
+It is one of the tritest of truisms that human intelligences of a
+simple order are very literal.  They are slaves of habit, doing what
+they have been taught without variation; dry, prosaic, and
+matter-of-fact in their remarks; devoid of humor, except of the coarse
+physical kind which rejoices in a practical joke; taking the world for
+granted; and possessing in their faithfulness and honesty the single
+gift by which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration.  But
+{248} even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic ring,
+and to remind us more of the immutable properties of a piece of
+inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable of
+alternative choice.  When we descend to the brutes, all these
+peculiarities are intensified.  No reader of Schopenhauer can forget
+his frequent allusions to the _trockener ernst_ of dogs and horses, nor
+to their _ehrlichkeit_.  And every noticer of their ways must receive a
+deep impression of the fatally literal character of the few, simple,
+and treadmill-like operations of their minds.
+
+But turn to the highest order of minds, and what a change!  Instead of
+thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten
+track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and
+transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions
+and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the
+subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly
+introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is
+fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where
+partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine
+is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law.  According to the
+idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have one
+character or another.  They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will
+be flashes of poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions of
+dramatic fiction or of mechanical device, logical or philosophic
+abstractions, business projects, or scientific hypotheses, with trains
+of experimental consequences based thereon; they will be musical
+sounds, or images of plastic beauty or picturesqueness, or visions of
+moral harmony.  But, whatever their {249} differences may be, they will
+all agree in this,--that their genesis is sudden and, as it were,
+spontaneous.  That is to say, the same premises would not, in the mind
+of another individual, have engendered just that conclusion; although,
+when the conclusion is offered to the other individual, he may
+thoroughly accept and enjoy it, and envy the brilliancy of him to whom
+it first occurred.
+
+To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically
+pointed out[16] how the genius of discovery depends altogether on the
+number of these random notions and guesses which visit the
+investigator's mind.  To be fertile in hypotheses is the first
+requisite, and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience
+contradicts them is the next.  The Baconian method of collating tables
+of instances may be a useful aid at certain times.  But one might as
+well expect a chemist's note-book to write down the name of the body
+analyzed, or a weather table to sum itself up into a prediction of
+probabilities of its own accord, as to hope that the mere fact of
+mental confrontation with a certain series of facts will be sufficient
+to make _any_ brain conceive their law.  The conceiving of the law is a
+spontaneous variation in the strictest sense of the term.  It flashes
+out of one brain, and no other, because the instability of that brain
+is such as to tip and upset itself in just that particular direction.
+But the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad
+flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an
+exact equality in respect of their origin.  Aristotle's absurd Physics
+and his immortal Logic flow from one source: the forces that produce
+the one produce the other.  {250} When walking along the street,
+thinking of the blue sky or the fine spring weather, I may either smile
+at some grotesque whim which occurs to me, or I may suddenly catch an
+intuition of the solution of a long-unsolved problem, which at that
+moment was far from my thoughts.  Both notions are shaken out of the
+same reservoir,--the reservoir of a brain in which the reproduction of
+images in the relations of their outward persistence or frequency has
+long ceased to be the dominant law.  But to the thought, when it is
+once engendered, the consecration of agreement with outward relations
+may come.  The conceit perishes in a moment, and is forgotten.  The
+scientific hypothesis arouses in me a fever of desire for verification.
+I read, write, experiment, consult experts.  Everything corroborates my
+notion, which being then published in a book spreads from review to
+review and from mouth to mouth, till at last there is no doubt I am
+enshrined in the Pantheon of the great diviners of nature's ways.  The
+environment _preserves_ the conception which it was unable to _produce_
+in any brain less idiosyncratic than my own.
+
+Now, the spontaneous upsettings of brains this way and that at
+particular moments into particular ideas and combinations are matched
+by their equally spontaneous permanent tiltings or saggings towards
+determinate directions.  The humorous bent is quite characteristic; the
+sentimental one equally so.  And the personal tone of each mind, which
+makes it more alive to certain classes of experience than others, more
+attentive to certain impressions, more open to certain reasons, is
+equally the result of that invisible and unimaginable play of the
+forces of growth within the nervous system which, irresponsibly to the
+{251} environment, makes the brain peculiarly apt to function in a
+certain way.  Here again the selection goes on.  The products of the
+mind with the determined aesthetic bent please or displease the
+community.  We adopt Wordsworth, and grow unsentimental and serene.  We
+are fascinated by Schopenhauer, and learn from him the true luxury of
+woe.  The adopted bent becomes a ferment in the community, and alters
+its tone.  The alteration may be a benefit or a misfortune, for it is
+(_pace_ Mr. Allen) a differentiation from within, which has to run the
+gauntlet of the larger environment's selective power.  Civilized
+Languedoc, taking the tone of its scholars, poets, princes, and
+theologians, fell a prey to its rude Catholic environment in the
+Albigensian crusade.  France in 1792, taking the tone of its St. Justs
+and Marats, plunged into its long career of unstable outward relations.
+Prussia in 1806, taking the tone of its Humboldts and its Steins,
+proved itself in the most signal way 'adjusted' to its environment in
+1872.
+
+Mr. Spencer, in one of the strangest chapters of his Psychology,[17]
+tries to show the necessary order in which the development of
+conceptions in the human race occurs.  No abstract conception can be
+developed, according to him, until the outward experiences have reached
+a certain degree of heterogeneity, definiteness, coherence, and so
+forth.
+
+
+"Thus the belief in an unchanging order, the belief in _law_, is a
+belief of which the primitive man is absolutely incapable....
+Experiences such as he receives furnish but few data for the conception
+of uniformity, whether as displayed in things or in relations....  The
+daily {252} impressions which the savage gets yield the notion very
+imperfectly, and in but few cases.  Of all the objects around,--trees,
+stones, hills, pieces of water, clouds, and so forth,--most differ
+widely, ... and few approach complete likeness so nearly as to make
+discrimination difficult.  Even between animals of the same species it
+rarely happens that, whether alive or dead, they are presented in just
+the same attitudes....  It is only along with a gradual development of
+the arts ... that there come frequent experiences of perfectly straight
+lines admitting of complete apposition, bringing the perceptions of
+equality and inequality.  Still more devoid is savage life of the
+experiences which generate the conception of the uniformity of
+succession.  The sequences observed from hour to hour and day to day
+seem anything but uniform, difference is a far more conspicuous trait
+among them....  So that if we contemplate primitive human life as a
+whole, we see that multiformity of sequence, rather than uniformity, is
+the notion which it tends to generate....  Only as fast as the practice
+of the arts develops the idea of measure can the consciousness of
+uniformity become clear....  Those conditions furnished by advancing
+civilization which make possible the notion of uniformity
+simultaneously make possible the notion of _exactness_....  Hence the
+primitive man has little experience which cultivates the consciousness
+of what we call _truth_.  How closely allied this is to the
+consciousness which the practice of the arts cultivates is implied even
+in language.  We speak of a true surface as well as a true statement.
+Exactness describes perfection in a mechanical fit, as well as perfect
+agreement between the results of calculations."
+
+
+The whole burden of Mr. Spencer's book is to show the fatal way in
+which the mind, supposed passive, is moulded by its experiences of
+'outer {253} relations.'  In this chapter the yard-stick, the balance,
+the chronometer, and other machines and instruments come to figure
+among the 'relations' external to the mind.  Surely they are so, after
+they have been manufactured; but only because of the preservative power
+of the social environment.  Originally all these things and all other
+institutions were flashes of genius in an individual head, of which the
+outer environment showed no sign.  Adopted by the race and become its
+heritage, they then supply instigations to new geniuses whom they
+environ to make new inventions and discoveries; and so the ball of
+progress rolls.  But take out the geniuses, or alter their
+idiosyncrasies, and what increasing uniformities will the environment
+show?  We defy Mr. Spencer or any one else to reply.
+
+The plain truth is that the 'philosophy' of evolution (as distinguished
+from our special information about particular cases of change) is a
+metaphysical creed, and nothing else.  It is a mood of contemplation,
+an emotional attitude, rather than a system of thought,--a mood which
+is old as the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation of
+it (such as the spencerian philosophy) will dispel; the mood of
+fatalistic pantheism, with its intuition of the One and All, which was,
+and is, and ever shall be, and from whose womb each single thing
+proceeds.  Far be it from us to speak slightingly here of so hoary and
+mighty a style of looking on the world as this.  What we at present
+call scientific discoveries had nothing to do with bringing it to
+birth, nor can one easily conceive that they should ever give it its
+_quietus_, no matter how logically incompatible with its spirit the
+ultimate phenomenal distinctions which {254} science accumulates should
+turn out to be.  It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions on which
+science is based, for it draws its vital breath from a region
+which--whether above or below--is at least altogether different from
+that in which science dwells.  A critic, however, who cannot disprove
+the truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in
+protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes.  I think
+that all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agree
+that the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and intellectual progress is
+an obsolete anachronism, reverting to a pre-darwinian type of thought,
+just as the spencerian philosophy of 'Force,' effacing all the previous
+distinctions between actual and potential energy, momentum, work,
+force, mass, etc., which physicists have with so much agony achieved,
+carries us back to a pre-galilean age.
+
+
+
+[1] A lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society; published in
+the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1880.
+
+[2] Darwin's theory of pangenesis is, it is true, an attempt to account
+(among other things) for variation.  But it occupies its own separate
+place, and its author no more invokes the environment when he talks of
+the adhesions of gemmules than he invokes these adhesions when he talks
+of the relations of the whole animal to the environment.  _Divide et
+impera!_
+
+[3] It is true that it remodels him, also, to some degree, by its
+educative influence, and that this constitutes a considerable
+difference between the social case and the zoological case, I neglect
+this aspect of the relation here, for the other is the more important.
+At the end of the article I will return to it incidentally.
+
+[4] The reader will remember when this was written.
+
+[5] Lectures and Essays, i. 82.
+
+[6] Mr. Grant Allen himself, in an article from which I shall presently
+quote, admits that a set of people who, if they had been exposed ages
+ago to the geographical agencies of Timbuctoo, would have developed
+into negroes might now, after a protracted exposure to the conditions
+of Hamburg, never become negroes if transplanted to Timbuctoo.
+
+[7] Study of Sociology, pages 33-35.
+
+[8] No! not even though they were bodily brothers!  The geographical
+factor utterly vanishes before the ancestral factor.  The difference
+between Hamburg and Timbuctoo as a cause of ultimate divergence of two
+races is as nothing to the difference of constitution of the ancestors
+of the two races, even though as in twin brothers, this difference
+might be invisible to the naked eye.  No two couples of the most
+homogeneous race could possibly be found so identical as, if set in
+identical environments, to give rise to two identical lineages.  The
+minute divergence at the start grows broader with each generation, and
+ends with entirely dissimilar breeds.
+
+[9] Article 'Nation Making,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878.  I quote
+from the reprint in the Popular Science Monthly Supplement December,
+1878, pages 121, 123, 126.
+
+[10] Article 'Hellas,' in Gentleman's Magazine, 1878.  Reprint in
+Popular Science Monthly Supplement, September, 1878.
+
+[11] Vol. cxiii. p. 318 (October, 1871).
+
+[12] I am well aware that in much that follows (though in nothing that
+precedes) I seem to be crossing the heavily shotted bows of Mr. Galton,
+for whose laborious investigations into the heredity of genius I have
+the greatest respect.  Mr. Galton inclines to think that genius of
+intellect and passion is bound to express itself, whatever the outward
+opportunity, and that within any given race an equal number of geniuses
+of each grade must needs be born in every equal period of time; a
+subordinate race cannot possibly engender a large number of high-class
+geniuses, etc.  He would, I suspect, infer the suppositions I go on to
+make--of great men fortuitously assembling around a given epoch and
+making it great, and of their being fortuitously absent from certain
+places and times (from Sardinia, from Boston now, etc.)--to be
+radically vicious.  I hardly think, however, that he does justice to
+the great complexity of the conditions of _effective_ greatness, and to
+the way in which the physiological averages of production may be masked
+entirely during long periods, either by the accidental mortality of
+geniuses in infancy, or by the fact that the particular geniuses born
+happened not to find tasks.  I doubt the truth of his assertion that
+_intellectual_ genius, like murder, 'will out.' It is true that certain
+types are irrepressible.  Voltaire, Shelley, Carlyle, can hardly be
+conceived leading a dumb and vegetative life in any epoch.  But take
+Mr. Galton himself, take his cousin Mr. Darwin, and take Mr. Spencer:
+nothing is to me more have died 'with all their music in them,' known
+only to their friends as persons of strong and original character and
+judgment.  What has started them on their career of effective greatness
+is simply the accident of each stumbling upon a task vast, brilliant,
+and congenial enough to call out the convergence of all his passions
+and powers.  I see no more reason why, in case they had not fallen in
+with their several hobbies at propitious periods in their life, they
+need necessarily have hit upon other hobbies, and made themselves
+equally great.  Their case seems similar to that of the Washingtons,
+Cromwells, and Grants, who simply rose to their occasions.  But apart
+from these causes of fallacy, I am strongly disposed to think that
+where transcendent geniuses are concerned the numbers anyhow are so
+small that their appearance will not fit into any scheme of averages.
+That is, two or three might appear together, just as the two or three
+balls nearest the target centre might be fired consecutively.  Take
+longer epochs and more firing, and the great geniuses and near balls
+would on the whole be more spread out.
+
+[13] Since this paper was written, President Cleveland has to a certain
+extent met the need.  But who can doubt that if he had certain other
+qualities which he has not yet shown, his influence would have been
+still more decisive?  (1896.)
+
+[14] That is, if a certain general character be rapidly repeated in our
+outer experience with a number of strongly contrasted concomitants, it
+will be sooner abstracted than if its associates are invariable or
+monotonous.
+
+[14] Principles of Psychology, i. 460.  See also pp. 463, 464, 500.  On
+page 408 the law is formulated thus: The _persistence_ of the
+connection in consciousness is proportionate to the _persistence_ of
+the outer connection.  Mr. Spencer works most with the law of
+frequency.  Either law, from my point of view, is false; but Mr.
+Spencer ought not to think them synonymous.
+
+[16] In his Principles of Science, chapters xi., xii., xxvi.
+
+[17] Part viii. chap. iii.
+
+
+
+
+{255}
+
+THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS.
+
+The previous Essay, on Great Men, etc., called forth two replies,--one
+by Mr. Grant Allen, entitled the 'Genesis of Genius,' in the Atlantic
+Monthly, vol. xlvii. p. 351; the other entitled 'Sociology and Hero
+Worship,' by Mr. John Fiske, _ibidem_, p. 75.  The article which
+follows is a rejoinder to Mr. Allen's article.  It was refused at the
+time by the Atlantic, but saw the day later in the Open Court for
+August, 1890.  It appears here as a natural supplement to the foregoing
+article, on which it casts some explanatory light.
+
+
+Mr. Allen's contempt for hero-worship is based on very simple
+considerations.  A nation's great men, he says, are but slight
+deviations from the general level.  The hero is merely a special
+complex of the ordinary qualities of his race.  The petty differences
+impressed upon ordinary Greek minds by Plato or Aristotle or Zeno, are
+nothing at all compared with the vast differences between every Greek
+mind and every Egyptian or Chinese mind.  We may neglect them in a
+philosophy of history, just as in calculating the impetus of a
+locomotive we neglect the extra impetus given by a single piece of
+better coal.  What each man adds is but an infinitesimal fraction
+compared with what he derives from his parents, or {256} indirectly
+from his earlier ancestry.  And if what the past gives to the hero is
+so much bulkier than what the future receives from him, it is what
+really calls for philosophical treatment.  The problem for the
+sociologist is as to what produces the average man; the extraordinary
+men and what they produce may by the philosophers be taken for granted,
+as too trivial variations to merit deep inquiry.
+
+Now, as I wish to vie with Mr. Allen's unrivalled polemic amiability
+and be as conciliatory as possible, I will not cavil at his facts or
+try to magnify the chasm between an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Napoleon
+and the average level of their respective tribes.  Let it be as small
+as Mr. Allen thinks.  All that I object to is that he should think the
+mere _size_ of a difference is capable of deciding whether that
+difference be or be not a fit subject for philosophic study.  Truly
+enough, the details vanish in the bird's-eye view; but so does the
+bird's-eye view vanish in the details.  Which is the right point of
+view for philosophic vision?  Nature gives no reply, for both points of
+view, being equally real, are equally natural; and no one natural
+reality _per se_ is any more emphatic than any other.  Accentuation,
+foreground, and background are created solely by the interested
+attention of the looker-on; and if the small difference between the
+genius and his tribe interests me most, while the large one between
+that tribe and another tribe interests Mr. Allen, our controversy
+cannot be ended until a complete philosophy, accounting for all
+differences impartially, shall justify us both.
+
+An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing:
+"There is very little difference between one man and another; but what
+little there {257} is, _is very important_."  This distinction seems to
+me to go to the root of the matter.  It is not only the size of the
+difference which concerns the philosopher, but also its place and its
+kind.  An inch is a small thing, but we know the proverb about an inch
+on a man's nose.  Messrs. Allen and Spencer, in inveighing against
+hero-worship, are thinking exclusively of the size of the inch; I, as a
+hero-worshipper, attend to its seat and function.
+
+Now, there is a striking law over which few people seem to have
+pondered.  It is this: That among all the differences which exist, the
+only ones that interest us strongly are those _we do not take for
+granted_.  We are not a bit elated that our friend should have two
+hands and the power of speech, and should practise the matter-of-course
+human virtues; and quite as little are we vexed that our dog goes on
+all fours and fails to understand our conversation.  Expecting no more
+from the latter companion, and no less from the former, we get what we
+expect and are satisfied.  We never think of communing with the dog by
+discourse of philosophy, or with the friend by head-scratching or the
+throwing of crusts to be snapped at.  But if either dog or friend fall
+above or below the expected standard, they arouse the most lively
+emotion.  On our brother's vices or genius we never weary of
+descanting; to his bipedism or his hairless skin we do not consecrate a
+thought.  _What_ he says may transport us; that he is able to speak at
+all leaves us stone cold.  The reason of all this is that his virtues
+and vices and utterances might, compatibly with the current range of
+variation in our tribe, be just the opposites of what they are, while
+his zoologically human attributes cannot possibly go astray.  There
+{258} is thus a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the
+dramatic interest lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the
+stage.  This is the formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the
+race's average, not yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of
+the social community in which it occurs.  It is like the soft layer
+beneath the bark of the tree in which all the year's growth is going
+on.  Life has abandoned the mighty trunk inside, which stands inert and
+belongs almost to the inorganic world.  Layer after layer of human
+perfection separates me from the central Africans who pursued Stanley
+with cries of "meat, meat!"  This vast difference ought, on Mr. Allen's
+principles, to rivet my attention far more than the petty one which
+obtains between two such birds of a feather as Mr. Allen and myself.
+Yet while I never feel proud that the sight of a passer-by awakens in
+me no cannibalistic waterings of the mouth, I am free to confess that I
+shall feel very proud if I do not publicly appear inferior to Mr. Allen
+in the conduct of this momentous debate.  To me as a teacher the
+intellectual gap between my ablest and my dullest student counts for
+infinitely more than that between the latter and the amphioxus: indeed,
+I never thought of the latter chasm till this moment.  Will Mr. Allen
+seriously say that this is all human folly, and tweedledum and
+tweedledee?
+
+To a Veddah's eyes the differences between two white literary men seem
+slight indeed,--same clothes, same spectacles, same harmless
+disposition, same habit of scribbling on paper and poring over books,
+etc.  "Just two white fellows," the Veddah will say, "with no
+perceptible difference."  But what a difference to the literary men
+themselves!  Think, Mr. Allen, of {259} confounding our philosophies
+together merely because both are printed in the same magazines and are
+indistinguishable to the eye of a Veddah!  Our flesh creeps at the
+thought.
+
+But in judging of history Mr. Allen deliberately prefers to place
+himself at the Veddah's point of view, and to see things _en gros_ and
+out of focus, rather than minutely.  It is quite true that there are
+things and differences enough to be seen either way.  But which are the
+humanly important ones, those most worthy to arouse our interest,--the
+large distinctions or the small?  In the answer to this question lies
+the whole divergence of the hero-worshippers from the sociologists.  As
+I said at the outset, it is merely a quarrel of emphasis; and the only
+thing I can do is to state my personal reasons for the emphasis I
+prefer.
+
+The zone of the individual differences, and of the social 'twists'
+which by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formative
+processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where
+past and future meet.  It is the theatre of all we do not take for
+granted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow its
+scope, it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions.
+The sphere of the race's average, on the contrary, no matter how large
+it may be, is a dead and stagnant thing, an achieved possession, from
+which all insecurity has vanished.  Like the trunk of a tree, it has
+been built up by successive concretions of successive active zones.
+The moving present in which we live with its problems and passions, its
+individual rivalries, victories, and defeats, will soon pass over to
+the majority and leave its small deposit on this static mass, to make
+room for fresh actors and a newer play.  {260} And though it may be
+true, as Mr. Spencer predicts, that each later zone shall fatally be
+narrower than its forerunners; and that when the ultimate lady-like
+tea-table elysium of the Data of Ethics shall prevail, such questions
+as the breaking of eggs at the large or the small end will span the
+whole scope of possible human warfare,--still even in this shrunken and
+enfeebled generation, _spatio aetatis defessa vetusto_, what eagerness
+there will be!  Battles and defeats will occur, the victors will be
+glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of
+yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in
+safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those
+evanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver in fate's scale.
+
+And is not its instinct right?  Do not we here grasp the
+race-differences _in the making_, and catch the only glimpse it is
+allotted to us to attain of the working units themselves, of whose
+differentiating action the race-gaps form but the stagnant sum?  What
+strange inversion of scientific procedure does Mr. Allen practise when
+he teaches us to neglect elements and attend only to aggregate
+resultants?  On the contrary, simply because the active ring, whatever
+its bulk, _is elementary_, I hold that the study of its conditions (be
+these never so 'proximate') is the highest of topics for the social
+philosopher.  If individual variations determine its ups and downs and
+hair-breadth escapes and twists and turns, as Mr. Allen and Mr. Fiske
+both admit, Heaven forbid us from tabooing the study of these in favor
+of the average!  On the contrary, let us emphasize these, and the
+importance of these; and in picking out from history our heroes, and
+communing with their {261} kindred spirits,--in imagining as strongly
+as possible what differences their individualities brought about in
+this world, while its surface was still plastic in their hands, and
+what whilom feasibilities they made impossible,--each one of us may
+best fortify and inspire what creative energy may lie in his own
+soul.[1]
+
+This is the lasting justification of hero-worship, and the pooh-poohing
+of it by 'sociologists' is the ever-lasting excuse for popular
+indifference to their general laws and averages.  The difference
+between an America rescued by a Washington or by a 'Jenkins' may, as
+Mr. Allen says, be 'little,' but it is, in the words of my carpenter
+friend, 'important.'  Some organizing genius must in the nature of
+things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will
+affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should
+have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte?  What animal,
+domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a word
+of sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings of
+Jesus of Nazareth?
+
+The preferences of sentient creatures are what _create_ the importance
+of topics.  They are the absolute and ultimate law-giver here.  And I
+for my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary
+sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined
+tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of
+individual {262} differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of
+fatalisms.  Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is
+it to be,--that of your preference, or mine?  There lies the question
+of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide.
+
+
+
+[1] M. G. Tarde's book (itself a work of genius), Les Lois de
+l'Imitation, Etude Sociologique (2me Edition, Paris, Alcan, 1895), is
+the best possible commentary on this text,--'invention' on the one
+hand, and 'imitation' on the other, being for this author the two sole
+factors of social change.
+
+
+
+
+{263}
+
+ON SOME HEGELISMS.[1]
+
+We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British and
+American philosophy.  Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that I
+believe but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be counted
+among the privat-docenten and younger professors of Germany, and whose
+older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so
+zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be
+reckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higher
+walks of thought.  And there is no doubt that, as a movement of
+reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian
+influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a
+certain kind.  Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly
+indulgent.  Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption
+with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become
+quasi-official, make ready to defend itself as well as to attack
+others.  It is with no hope of converting independent thinkers, but
+rather with the sole aspiration of showing some chance youthful
+disciple that there _is_ another point of view in philosophy that I
+fire this skirmisher's shot, which may, I hope, soon be followed by
+somebody else's heavier musketry.
+
+{264}
+
+The point of view I have in mind will become clearer if I begin with a
+few preparatory remarks on the motives and difficulties of
+philosophizing in general.
+
+
+To show that the real is identical with the ideal may roughly be set
+down as the mainspring of philosophic activity.  The atomic and
+mechanical conception of the world is as ideal from the point of view
+of some of our faculties as the teleological one is from the point of
+view of others.  In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere and
+roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member
+calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity.
+Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong together by inward
+kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers
+of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.
+
+Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law.
+The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us.
+Each asserts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest,
+which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without
+it.  Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous--are the adjectives by
+which we are tempted to describe it.  And yet from out the bosom of it
+a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration
+that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form.  Not only do
+the materials lend themselves under certain circumstances to aesthetic
+manipulation, but underlying their worst disjointedness are three great
+continua in which for each of us reason's ideal is actually reached.  I
+mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of
+space.  In {265} these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely
+at home.  The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself,
+and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is
+not lost.
+
+Consider, for example, space.  It is a unit.  No force can in any way
+break, wound, or tear it.  It has no joints between which you can pass
+your amputating knife, for it penetrates the knife and is not split,
+Try to make a hole in space by annihilating an inch of it.  To make a
+hole you must drive something else through.  But what can you drive
+through space except what is itself spatial?
+
+But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, space in its
+parts contains an infinite variety, and the unity and the variety do
+not contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects.  The
+one is the whole, the many are the parts.  Each part is one again, but
+only one fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, the
+very picture of peace and non-contradiction.  It is true that the space
+between two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of a
+dumb-bell both unites and divides the two balls.  But the union and the
+division are not _secundum idem_: it divides them by keeping them out
+of the space between, it unites them by keeping them out of the space
+beyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency.
+Self-contradiction in space could only ensue if one part tried to oust
+another from its position; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishes
+in the framing, and cannot stay to vex the mind.[2]  Beyond the parts
+we see or think at any {266} given time extend further parts; but the
+beyond is homogeneous with what is embraced, and follows the same law;
+so that no surprises, no foreignness, can ever emerge from space's womb.
+
+Thus with space our intelligence is absolutely intimate; it is
+rationality and transparency incarnate.  The same may be said of the
+ego and of time.  But if for simplicity's sake we ignore them, we may
+truly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world the
+standard set by our knowledge of space is what governs our desire.[3]
+Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the margin of foreignness, be exorcised
+from other things and leave them unitary like the space they fill?
+Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.
+
+But the moment we turn to the material qualities {267} of being, we
+find the continuity ruptured on every side.  A fearful jolting begins.
+Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its mechanical bare
+poles,--atoms and their motions,--the discontinuity is bad enough.  The
+laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion,
+all seem arbitrary collocations of data.  The atoms themselves are so
+many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise
+seems to involve the existence of the rest.  We have not banished
+discontinuity, we have only made it finer-grained.  And to get even
+that degree of rationality into the universe we have had to butcher a
+great part of its contents.  The secondary qualities we stripped off
+from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled 'subjective
+illusion,' still _as such_ are facts, and must themselves be
+rationalized in some way.
+
+But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are
+farther than ever from the goal.  We have not now the refuge of
+distinguishing between the 'reality' and its appearances.  Facts of
+thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only
+differences, and identities of thought the only identities there are.
+Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity.  We can
+no longer speak of heat and light being reconciled in any _tertium
+quid_ like wave-motion.  For motion is motion, and light is light, and
+heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their
+existence.  Together with the other attributes and things we conceive,
+they make up Plato's realm of immutable ideas.  Neither _per se_ calls
+for the other, hatches it out, is its 'truth,' creates it, or has any
+sort of inward community with it except that of being comparable {268}
+in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling,
+as the case may be.  The world of qualities is a world of things almost
+wholly discontinuous _inter se_.  Each only says, "I am that I am," and
+each says it on its own account and with absolute monotony.  The
+continuities of which they _partake_, in Plato's phrase, the ego,
+space, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they
+possess.
+
+It might seem as if in the mere 'partaking' there lay a contradiction
+of the discontinuity.  If the white must partake of space, the heat of
+time, and so forth,--do not whiteness and space, heat and time,
+mutually call for or help to create each other?
+
+Yes; a few such _a priori_ couplings must be admitted.  They are the
+axioms: no feeling except as occupying some space and time, or as a
+moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of
+an object; no time without a previous time,--and the like.  But they
+are limited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad
+genera of concepts, and leave quite undetermined what the
+specifications of those genera shall be.  What feeling shall fill
+_this_ time, what substance execute _this_ motion, what qualities
+combine in _this_ being, are as much unanswered questions as if the
+metaphysical axioms never existed at all.
+
+The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly
+mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pass over the facts of the
+world.  Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few
+vague enveloping laws, independent in all besides.--such seems the
+truth.
+
+In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far {269} apart that
+their conjunction seems quite hopeless.  To eat our cake and have it,
+to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of
+selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be
+the ideal.  But the real offers us these terms in the shape of mutually
+exclusive alternatives of which only one can be true at once; so that
+we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility.  The wrench is
+absolute: "Either--or!"  Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on an
+event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or
+poorer without any intermediate degrees passed over; just as my
+wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me
+from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are
+compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the
+conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and
+impossibility in all its fulness for the other,--so the bachelor joys
+are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must
+henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good
+enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible
+living in the sunshine, the 'unbuttoning after supper and sleeping upon
+benches in the afternoon,' are stars that have set upon the path of him
+who in good earnest makes himself a moralist.  The transitions are
+abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many
+possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all
+their sudden completeness.
+
+Must we then think that the world that fills space and time can yield
+us no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty space
+and time themselves?  Is what unity there is in the world {270} mainly
+derived from the fact that the world is _in_ space and time and
+'partakes' of them?  Can no vision of it forestall the facts of it, or
+know from some fractions the others before the others have arrived?
+Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid there
+being any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happening
+itself?  Can we gain no anticipatory assurance that what is to come
+will have no strangeness?  Is there no substitute, in short, for life
+but the living itself in all its long-drawn weary length and breadth
+and thickness?
+
+In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sense
+finds no difficulty in acquiescing.  To such a way of thinking the
+notion of 'partaking' has a deep and real significance.  Whoso partakes
+of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and
+its other partakers.  But he claims no more.  His share in no wise
+negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession
+of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and
+which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing.  Why may
+not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all
+the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet
+sit at the common table of space and time?
+
+To me this view seems deeply probable.  Things cohere, but the act of
+cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of
+their qualifications indeterminate.  As the first three notes of a tune
+comport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till a
+particular ending has actually come,--so the parts actually known of
+the universe may comport many ideally possible complements.  But as
+{271} the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one is
+not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary
+elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all.
+Why, if one act of knowledge could from one point take in the total
+perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever
+have been anything more than that act?  Why duplicate it by the tedious
+unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality?  No answer seems
+possible.  On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community
+of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part
+controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually
+given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at
+all.  This is the moral view, the view that gives to other powers the
+same freedom it would have itself,--not the ridiculous 'freedom to do
+right,' which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as _I_ think
+right, but the freedom to do as _they_ think right, or wrong either.
+After all, what accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe
+to me?  By what insatiate conceit and lust of intellectual despotism do
+I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic
+throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the
+Lord's anointed?  Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right?
+And shall it be given before they are given?  _Data! gifts!_ something
+to be thankful for!  It is a gift that we can approach things at all,
+and, by means of the time and space of which our minds and they
+partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.
+
+There are 'bounds of ord'nance' set for all things, where they must
+pause or rue it.  'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for
+it, not by it.
+
+{272}
+
+Now, to a mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply
+loathsome.  Bounds that we can't overpass!  Data! facts that say,
+"Hands off, till we are given"! possibilities we can't control! a
+banquet of which we merely share!  Heavens, this is intolerable; such a
+world is no world for a philosopher to have to do with.  He must have
+all or nothing.  If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the
+sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational
+at all.  It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose
+haphazard sway I will not truckle.  But, no! this is not the world.
+The world is philosophy's own,--a single block, of which, if she once
+get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey
+and feed her all-devouring theoretic maw.  Naught shall be but the
+necessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom
+to obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her
+champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.
+
+The insolence of sway, the _hubris_ on which gods take vengeance, is in
+temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice.  A
+Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters.  But when an
+_intellect_ is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence
+must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a
+monster, but a philosophic prophet.  May not this be all wrong?  Is
+there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of
+liability to excess?  And where everything else must be contented with
+its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod
+over the whole?
+
+I confess I can see no _a priori_ reason for the exception.  He who
+claims it must be judged by the {273} consequences of his acts, and by
+them alone.  Let Hegel then confront the universe with his claim, and
+see how he can make the two match.
+
+
+The universe absolutely refuses to let him travel without jolt.  Time,
+space, and his ego are continuous; so are degrees of heat, shades of
+light and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes call
+for salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows what
+salt and sugar are.  But on the whole there is nought to soften the
+shock of surprise to his intelligence, as it passes from one quality of
+being to another.  Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him who
+holds the one the other is not given till it give itself.  Real being
+comes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with no
+permission asked of the conceiver.  In despair must Hegel lift vain
+hands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, he
+must throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature of
+things an _absolute_ muddle and incoherence.
+
+But, hark!  What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear?
+Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require?
+Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency?  Is not
+jolt passage?  Is friction other than a kind of lubrication?  Is not a
+chasm a filling?--a queer kind of filling, but a filling still.  Why
+seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart
+is the only glue you need?  Let all that negation which seemed to
+disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the
+problem stands solved.  The paradoxical character of the notion could
+not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native {274} Germany,
+where mental excess is endemic.  Richard, for a moment brought to bay,
+is himself again.  He vaults into the saddle, and from that time his
+career is that of a philosophic desperado,--one series of outrages upon
+the chastity of thought.
+
+And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree?  The
+old receipts of squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns
+have many applications.  An evil frankly accepted loses half its sting
+and all its terror.  The Stoics had their cheap and easy way of dealing
+with evil.  _Call_ your woes goods, they said; refuse to _call_ your
+lost blessings by that name,--and you are happy.  So of the
+unintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and what
+further do you require?  There is even a more legitimate excuse than
+that.  In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas lies
+a standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to say
+anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling
+words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability.  Thus
+Baron Bunsen writes to his wife: "Nothing is near but the far; nothing
+true but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothing
+so real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing so
+visible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death."  Of
+these ecstatic moments the _credo quia impossibile_ is the classical
+expression.  Hegel's originality lies in his making their mood
+permanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others,--not
+as a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens of
+her intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is always
+ready), but as the very form of intellectual responsibility itself.
+
+{275}
+
+And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel's ways
+of applying his discovery.  His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which
+if you once pass the door you may be lost forever.  Safety lies in not
+entering.  Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance with
+various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so
+plausible as to slide us unresistingly and almost unwittingly through
+the fatal arch.  It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it
+is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that
+its premises are rotten.  I shall accordingly confine myself to a few
+of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they
+break down, so must the system which they prop.
+
+First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing and
+partaking business he so much loathes.  He will not call contradiction
+the glue in one place and identity in another; that is too
+half-hearted.  Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must derive
+its credit from being shown to be latently involved in cases that we
+hitherto supposed to embody pure continuity.  Thus, the relations of an
+ego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place with
+another place, of a cause with its effect, of a thing with its
+properties, and especially of parts with wholes, must be shown to
+involve contradiction.  Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heart
+of coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them,
+and must be taken as the universal solvent,--or, rather, there is no
+longer any need of a solvent.  To 'dissolve' things in identity was the
+dream of earlier cruder schools.  Hegel will show that their very
+difference is their identity, and that {276} in the act of detachment
+the detachment is undone, and they fall into each other's arms.
+
+Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher who
+pretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words that
+it can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (the
+identity of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, and
+obliges him in fact to use the word 'understanding,' whenever it occurs
+in his pages, as a term of contempt.  Take the case of space we used
+above.  The common man who looks at space believes there is nothing in
+it to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, no
+secrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make the
+static whole.  His intellect is satisfied with accepting space as an
+ultimate genus of the given.  But Hegel cries to him: "Dupe! dost thou
+not see it to be one nest of incompatibilities?  Do not the unity of
+its wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patent
+contradiction?  Does it not both unite and divide things; and but for
+this strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all?  The
+hidden dynamism of self-contradiction is what incessantly produces the
+static appearance by which your sense is fooled."
+
+But if the man ask how self-contradiction _can_ do all this, and how
+its dynamism may be seen to work, Hegel can only reply by showing him
+the space itself and saying: "Lo, _thus_."  In other words, instead of
+the principle of explanation being more intelligible than the thing to
+be explained, it is absolutely unintelligible if taken by itself, and
+must appeal to its pretended product to prove its existence.  Surely,
+such a system of explaining _notum per ignotum_, of {277} making the
+_explicans_ borrow credentials from the _explicand_, and of creating
+paradoxes and impossibilities where none were suspected, is a strange
+candidate for the honor of being a complete rationalizer of the world.
+
+The principle of the contradictoriness of identity and the identity of
+contradictories is the essence of the hegelian system.  But what
+probably washes this principle down most with beginners is the
+combination in which its author works it with another principle which
+is by no means characteristic of his system, and which, for want of a
+better name, might be called the 'principle of totality.'  This
+principle says that you cannot adequately know even a part until you
+know of what whole it forms a part.  As Aristotle writes and Hegel
+loves to quote, an amputated hand is not even a hand.  And as Tennyson
+says,--
+
+  "Little flower--but if I could understand
+  What you are, root and all, and all in all,
+  I should know what God and man is."
+
+Obviously, until we have taken in all the relations, immediate or
+remote, into which the thing actually enters or potentially may enter,
+we do not know all _about_ the thing.
+
+And obviously for such an exhaustive acquaintance with the thing, an
+acquaintance with every other thing, actual and potential, near and
+remote, is needed; so that it is quite fair to say that omniscience
+alone can completely know any one thing as it stands.  Standing in a
+world of relations, that world must be known before the thing is fully
+known.  This doctrine is of course an integral part of empiricism, an
+integral part of common-sense.  Since when could good men not apprehend
+the passing hour {278} in the light of life's larger sweep,--not grow
+dispassionate the more they stretched their view?  Did the 'law of
+sharing' so little legitimate their procedure that a law of identity of
+contradictories, forsooth, must be trumped up to give it scope?  Out
+upon the idea!
+
+Hume's account of causation is a good illustration of the way in which
+empiricism may use the principle of totality.  We call something a
+cause; but we at the same time deny its effect to be in any latent way
+contained in or substantially identical with it.  We thus cannot tell
+what its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened.
+The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thing
+to be so far as it is a cause.  Humism thus says that its causality is
+something adventitious and not necessarily given when its other
+attributes are there.  Generalizing this, empiricism contends that we
+must everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing and
+its relations, and, among these, between those that are essential to
+our knowing it at all and those that may be called adventitious.  The
+thing as actually present in a given world is there with _all_ its
+relations; for it to be known as it _there_ exists, they must be known
+too, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness large
+enough to embrace that world as a unity.  But what constitutes this
+singleness of fact, this unity?  Empiricism says, Nothing but the
+relation-yielding matrix in which the several items of the world find
+themselves embedded,--time, namely, and space, and the mind of the
+knower.  And it says that were some of the items quite different from
+what they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, an
+equally unitary world might be, provided each {279} item were an object
+for consciousness and occupied a determinate point in space and time.
+All the adventitious relations would in such a world be changed, along
+with the intrinsic natures and places of the beings between which they
+obtained; but the 'principle of totality' in knowledge would in no wise
+be affected.
+
+But Hegelism dogmatically denies all this to be possible.  In the first
+place it says there are no intrinsic natures that may change; in the
+second it says there are no adventitious relations.  When the relations
+of what we call a thing are told, no _caput mortuum_ of intrinsicality,
+no 'nature,' is left.  The relations soak up all there is of the thing;
+the 'items' of the world are but _foci_ of relation with other _foci_
+of relation; and all the relations are necessary.  The unity of the
+world has nothing to do with any 'matrix.'  The matrix and the items,
+each with all, make a unity, simply because each in truth is all the
+rest.  The proof lies in the _hegelian_ principle of totality, which
+demands that if any one part be posited alone all the others shall
+forthwith _emanate_ from it and infallibly reproduce the whole.  In the
+_modus operandi_ of the emanation comes in, as I said, that partnership
+of the principle of totality with that of the identity of
+contradictories which so recommends the latter to beginners in Hegel's
+philosophy.  To posit one item alone is to deny the rest; to deny them
+is to refer to them; to refer to them is to begin, at least, to bring
+them on the scene; and to begin is in the fulness of time to end.
+
+
+If we call this a monism, Hegel is quick to cry, Not so!  To say simply
+that the one item is the rest {280} of the universe is as false and
+one-sided as to say that it is simply itself.  It is both and neither;
+and the only condition on which we gain the right to affirm that it is,
+is that we fail not to keep affirming all the while that it is not, as
+well.  Thus the truth refuses to be expressed in any single act of
+judgment or sentence.  The world appears as a monism _and_ a pluralism,
+just as it appeared in our own introductory exposition.
+
+But the trouble that keeps us and Hegel from ever joining hands over
+this apparent formula of brotherhood is that we distinguish, or try to
+distinguish, the respects in which the world is one from those in which
+it is many, while all such stable distinctions are what he most
+abominates.  The reader may decide which procedure helps his reason
+most.  For my own part, the time-honored formula of empiricist
+pluralism, that the world cannot be set down in any single proposition,
+grows less instead of more intelligible when I add, "And yet the
+different propositions that express it are one!"  The unity of the
+propositions is that of the mind that harbors them.  Any one who
+insists that their diversity is in any way itself their unity, can only
+do so because he loves obscurity and mystification for their own pure
+sakes.
+
+
+Where you meet with a contradiction among realities, Herbart used to
+say, it shows you have failed to make a real distinction.  Hegel's
+sovereign method of going to work and saving all possible
+contradictions, lies in pertinaciously refusing to distinguish.  He
+takes what is true of a term _secundum quid_, treats it as true of the
+same term _simpliciter_, and then, of course, applies it to the term
+_secundum aliud_.  A {281} good example of this is found in the first
+triad.  This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due
+to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever _is_ by
+the same act _is not_, and gets undone and swept away; and that thus
+the irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has been
+written has its roots in an ineluctable necessity which lies revealed
+to our logical reason.  This notion of a being which forever stumbles
+over its own feet, and has to change in order to exist at all, is a
+very picturesque symbol of the reality, and is probably one of the
+points that make young readers feel as if a deep core of truth lay in
+the system.
+
+But how is the reasoning done?  Pure being is assumed, without
+determinations, being _secundum quid_.  In this respect it agrees with
+nothing.  Therefore _simpliciter_ it is nothing; wherever we find it,
+it is nothing; crowned with complete determinations then, or _secundum
+aliud_, it is nothing still, and _hebt sich auf_.
+
+It is as if we said, Man without his clothes may be named 'the naked.'
+Therefore man _simpliciter_ is the naked; and finally man with his hat,
+shoes, and overcoat on is the naked still.
+
+Of course we may in this instance or any other repeat that the
+conclusion is strictly true, however comical it seems.  Man within the
+clothes is naked, just as he is without them.  Man would never have
+invented the clothes had he not been naked.  The fact of his being clad
+at all does prove his essential nudity.  And so in general,--the form
+of any judgment, being the addition of a predicate to a subject, shows
+that the subject has been conceived without the predicate, and thus by
+a strained metaphor may {282} be called the predicate's negation.  Well
+and good! let the expression pass.  But we must notice this.  The
+judgment has now created a new subject, the naked-clad, and all
+propositions regarding this must be judged on their own merits; for
+those true of the old subject, 'the naked,' are no longer true of this
+one.  For instance, we cannot say because the naked pure and simple
+must not enter the drawing-room or is in danger of taking cold, that
+the naked with his clothes on will also take cold or must stay in his
+bedroom.  Hold to it eternally that the clad man _is_ still naked if it
+amuse you,--'tis designated in the bond; but the so-called
+contradiction is a sterile boon.  Like Shylock's pound of flesh, it
+leads to no consequences.  It does not entitle you to one drop of his
+Christian blood either in the way of catarrh, social exclusion, or what
+further results pure nakedness may involve.
+
+In a version of the first step given by our foremost American
+Hegelian,[4] we find this playing with the necessary form of judgment.
+Pure being, he says, has no determinations.  But the having none is
+itself a determination.  Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self,
+and so on.  Why not take heed to the _meaning_ of what is said?  When
+we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely
+the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make.
+The showman who advertised his elephant as 'larger than any elephant in
+the world except himself' must have been in an hegelian country where
+he was afraid that if he were less explicit the audience would
+dialectically proceed to say: {283} "This elephant, larger than any in
+the world, involves a contradiction; for he himself is in the world,
+and so stands endowed with the virtue of being both larger and smaller
+than himself,--a perfect hegelian elephant, whose immanent
+self-contradictoriness can only be removed in a higher synthesis.  Show
+us the higher synthesis!  We don't care to see such a mere abstract
+creature as your elephant."  It may be (and it was indeed suggested in
+antiquity) that all things are of their own size by being both larger
+and smaller than themselves.  But in the case of this elephant the
+scrupulous showman nipped such philosophizing and all its inconvenient
+consequences in the bud, by explicitly intimating that larger than any
+_other_ elephant was all he meant.
+
+
+Hegel's quibble with this word _other_ exemplifies the same fallacy.
+All 'others,' as such, are according to him identical.  That is,
+'otherness,' which can only be predicated of a given thing _A_,
+_secundum quid_ (as other than _B_, etc.), is predicated _simpliciter_,
+and made to identify the _A_ in question with _B_, which is other only
+_secundum aliud_,--namely other than _A_.
+
+Another maxim that Hegelism is never tired of repeating is that "to
+know a limit is already to be beyond it."  "Stone walls do not a prison
+make, nor iron bars a cage."  The inmate of the penitentiary shows by
+his grumbling that he is still in the stage of abstraction and of
+separative thought.  The more keenly he thinks of the fun he might be
+having outside, the more deeply he ought to feel that the walls
+identify him with it.  They set him beyond them _secundum quid_, in
+imagination, in longing, in despair; _argal_ they take him there
+_simpliciter_ and {284} in every way,--in flesh, in power, in deed.
+Foolish convict, to ignore his blessings!
+
+
+Another mode of stating his principle is this: "To know the finite as
+such, is also to know the infinite."  Expressed in this abstract shape,
+the formula is as insignificant as it is unobjectionable.  We can cap
+every word with a negative particle, and the word _finished_
+immediately suggests the word _unfinished_, and we know the two words
+together.
+
+But it is an entirely different thing to take the knowledge of a
+concrete case of ending, and to say that it virtually makes us
+acquainted with other concrete facts _in infinitum_.  For, in the first
+place, the end may be an absolute one.  The _matter_ of the universe,
+for instance, is according to all appearances in finite amount; and if
+we knew that we had counted the last bit of it, infinite knowledge in
+that respect, so far from being given, would be impossible.  With
+regard to _space_, it is true that in drawing a bound we are aware of
+more.  But to treat this little fringe as the equal of infinite space
+is ridiculous.  It resembles infinite space _secundum quid_, or in but
+one respect,--its spatial quality.  We believe it homogeneous with
+whatever spaces may remain; but it would be fatuous to say, because one
+dollar in my pocket is homogeneous with all the dollars in the country,
+that to have it is to have them.  The further points of space are as
+numerically distinct from the fringe as the dollars from the dollar,
+and not until we have actually intuited them can we be said to 'know'
+them _simpliciter_.  The hegelian reply is that the _quality_ of space
+constitutes its only _worth_; and that there is nothing true, good, or
+beautiful to be known {285} in the spaces beyond which is not already
+known in the fringe.  This introduction of a eulogistic term into a
+mathematical question is original.  The 'true' and the 'false' infinite
+are about as appropriate distinctions in a discussion of cognition as
+the good and the naughty rain would be in a treatise on meteorology.
+But when we grant that all the worth of the knowledge of distant spaces
+is due to the knowledge of what they may carry in them, it then appears
+more than ever absurd to say that the knowledge of the fringe is an
+equivalent for the infinitude of the distant knowledge.  The distant
+spaces even _simpliciter_ are not yet yielded to our thinking; and if
+they were yielded _simpliciter_, would not be yielded _secundum aliud_,
+or in respect to their material filling out.
+
+Shylock's bond was an omnipotent instrument compared with this
+knowledge of the finite, which remains the ignorance it always was,
+till the infinite by its own act has piece by piece placed itself in
+our hands.
+
+Here Hegelism cries out: "By the identity of the knowledges of infinite
+and finite I never meant that one could be a _substitute_ for the
+other; nor does true philosophy ever mean by identity capacity for
+substitution."  This sounds suspiciously like the good and the naughty
+infinite, or rather like the mysteries of the Trinity and the
+Eucharist.  To the unsentimental mind there are but two sorts of
+identity,--total identity and partial identity.  Where the identity is
+total, the things can be substituted wholly for one another.  Where
+substitution is impossible, it must be that the identity is incomplete.
+It is the duty of the student then to ascertain the exact _quid,
+secundum_ which it obtains, as we have tried to do above.  Even the
+Catholic will tell you that when he believes in the {286} identity of
+the wafer with Christ's body, he does not mean in all respects,--so
+that he might use it to exhibit muscular fibre, or a cook make it smell
+like baked meat in the oven.  He means that in the one sole respect of
+nourishing his being in a certain way, it is identical with and can be
+substituted for the very body of his Redeemer.
+
+
+'The knowledge of opposites is one,' is one of the hegelian first
+principles, of which the preceding are perhaps only derivatives.  Here
+again Hegelism takes 'knowledge' _simpliciter_, and substituting it for
+knowledge in a particular respect, avails itself of the confusion to
+cover other respects never originally implied.  When the knowledge of a
+thing is given us, we no doubt think that the thing may or must have an
+opposite.  This postulate of something opposite we may call a
+'knowledge of the opposite' if we like; but it is a knowledge of it in
+only that one single respect, that it is something opposite.  No number
+of opposites to a quality we have never directly experienced could ever
+lead us positively to infer what that quality is.  There is a jolt
+between the negation of them and the actual positing of it in its
+proper shape, that twenty logics of Hegel harnessed abreast cannot
+drive us smoothly over.
+
+The use of the maxim 'All determination is negation' is the fattest and
+most full-blown application of the method of refusing to distinguish.
+Taken in its vague confusion, it probably does more than anything else
+to produce the sort of flicker and dazzle which are the first mental
+conditions for the reception of Hegel's system.  The word 'negation'
+taken _simpliciter_ is treated as if it covered an indefinite number of
+{287} _secundums_, culminating in the very peculiar one of
+self-negation.  Whence finally the conclusion is drawn that assertions
+are universally self-contradictory.  As this is an important matter, it
+seems worth while to treat it a little minutely.
+
+When I measure out a pint, say of milk, and so determine it, what do I
+do?  I virtually make two assertions regarding it,--it is this pint; it
+is not those other gallons.  One of these is an affirmation, the other
+a negation.  Both have a common subject; but the predicates being
+mutually exclusive, the two assertions lie beside each other in endless
+peace.
+
+I may with propriety be said to make assertions more remote
+still,--assertions of which those other gallons are the subject.  As it
+is not they, so are they not the pint which it is.  The determination
+"this is the pint" carries with it the negation,--"those are not the
+pints."  Here we have the same predicate; but the subjects are
+exclusive of each other, so there is again endless peace.  In both
+couples of propositions negation and affirmation are _secundum aliud_:
+this is _a_; this is n't not-_a_.  This kind of negation involved in
+determination cannot possibly be what Hegel wants for his purposes.
+The table is not the chair, the fireplace is not the cupboard,--these
+are literal expressions of the law of identity and contradiction, those
+principles of the abstracting and separating understanding for which
+Hegel has so sovereign a contempt, and which his logic is meant to
+supersede.
+
+And accordingly Hegelians pursue the subject further, saying there is
+in every determination an element of real conflict.  Do you not in
+determining the milk to be this pint exclude it forever from the chance
+of being those gallons, frustrate it from {288} expansion?  And so do
+you not equally exclude them from the being which it now maintains as
+its own?
+
+Assuredly if you had been hearing of a land flowing with milk and
+honey, and had gone there with unlimited expectations of the rivers the
+milk would fill; and if you found there was but this single pint in the
+whole country,--the determination of the pint would exclude another
+determination which your mind had previously made of the milk.  There
+would be a real conflict resulting in the victory of one side.  The
+rivers would be negated by the single pint being affirmed; and as
+rivers and pint are affirmed of the same milk (first as supposed and
+then as found), the contradiction would be complete.
+
+But it is a contradiction that can never by any chance occur in real
+nature or being.  It can only occur between a false representation of a
+being and the true idea of the being when actually cognized.  The first
+got into a place where it had no rights and had to be ousted.  But in
+_rerum natura_ things do not get into one another's logical places.
+The gallons first spoken of never say, "We are the pint;" the pint
+never says, "I am the gallons."  It never tries to expand; and so there
+is no chance for anything to exclude or negate it.  It thus remains
+affirmed absolutely.
+
+Can it be believed in the teeth of these elementary truths that the
+principle _determinatio negatio_ is held throughout Hegel to imply an
+active contradiction, conflict, and exclusion?  Do the horse-cars
+jingling outside negate me writing in this room?  Do I, reader, negate
+you?  Of course, if I say, "Reader, we are two, and therefore I am
+two," I negate you, for I am actually thrusting a part into the seat of
+the whole.  {289} The orthodox logic expresses the fallacy by saying
+the we is taken by me distributively instead of collectively; but as
+long as I do not make this blunder, and am content with my part, we all
+are safe.  In _rerum natura_, parts remain parts.  Can you imagine one
+position in space trying to get into the place of another position and
+having to be 'contradicted' by that other?  Can you imagine your
+thought of an object trying to dispossess the real object from its
+being, and so being negated by it?  The great, the sacred law of
+partaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegel
+cannot possibly understand.  All or nothing is his one idea.  For him
+each point of space, of time, each feeling in the ego, each quality of
+being, is clamoring, "I am the all,--there is nought else but me."
+This clamor is its essence, which has to be negated in another act
+which gives it its true determination.  What there is of affirmative in
+this determination is thus the mere residuum left from the negation by
+others of the negation it originally applied to them.
+
+But why talk of residuum?  The Kilkenny cats of fable could leave a
+residuum in the shape of their undevoured tails.  But the Kilkenny cats
+of existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel are all-devouring, and
+leave no residuum.  Such is the unexampled fury of their onslaught that
+they get clean out of themselves and into each other, nay more, pass
+right through each other, and then "return into themselves" ready for
+another round, as insatiate, but as inconclusive, as the one that went
+before.
+
+If I characterized Hegel's own mood as _hubris_, the insolence of
+excess, what shall I say of the mood he ascribes to being?  Man makes
+the gods in his {290} image; and Hegel, in daring to insult the
+spotless _sophrosune_ of space and time, the bound-respecters, in
+branding as strife that law of sharing under whose sacred keeping, like
+a strain of music, like an odor of incense (as Emerson says), the dance
+of the atoms goes forward still, seems to me but to manifest his own
+deformity.
+
+
+This leads me to animadvert on an erroneous inference which hegelian
+idealism makes from the form of the negative judgment.  Every negation,
+it says, must be an intellectual act.  Even the most _naif_ realism
+will hardly pretend that the non-table as such exists _in se_ after the
+same fashion as the table does.  But table and non-table, since they
+are given to our thought together, must be consubstantial.  Try to make
+the position or affirmation of the table as simple as you can, it is
+also the negation of the non-table; and thus positive being itself
+seems after all but a function of intelligence, like negation.
+Idealism is proved, realism is unthinkable.  Now I have not myself the
+least objection to idealism,--an hypothesis which voluminous
+considerations make plausible, and whose difficulties may be cleared
+away any day by new discriminations or discoveries.  But I object to
+proving by these patent ready-made _a priori_ methods that which can
+only be the fruit of a wide and patient induction.  For the truth is
+that our affirmations and negations do not stand on the same footing at
+all, and are anything but consubstantial.  An affirmation says
+something about an objective existence.  A negation says something
+_about an affirmation_,--namely, that it is false.  There are no
+negative predicates or falsities in nature.  Being makes no false
+hypotheses that have {291} to be contradicted.  The only denials she
+can be in any way construed to perform are denials of our errors.  This
+shows plainly enough that denial must be of something mental, since the
+thing denied is always a fiction.  "The table is not the chair"
+supposes the speaker to have been playing with the false notion that it
+may have been the chair.  But affirmation may perfectly well be of
+something having no such necessary and constitutive relation to
+thought.  Whether it really is of such a thing is for harder
+considerations to decide.
+
+
+If idealism be true, the great question that presents itself is whether
+its truth involve the necessity of an infinite, unitary, and omniscient
+consciousness, or whether a republic of semi-detached consciousnesses
+will do,--consciousnesses united by a certain common fund of
+representations, but each possessing a private store which the others
+do not share.  Either hypothesis is to me conceivable.  But whether the
+egos be one or many, the _nextness_ of representations to one another
+within them is the principle of unification of the universe.  To be
+thus consciously next to some other representation is the condition to
+which each representation must submit, under penalty of being excluded
+from this universe, and like Lord Dundreary's bird 'flocking all
+alone,' and forming a separate universe by itself.  But this is only a
+condition of which the representations _partake_; it leaves all their
+other determinations undecided.  To say, because representation _b_
+cannot be in the same universe with _a_ without being _a's neighbor_;
+that therefore _a_ possesses, involves, or necessitates _b_, hide and
+hair, flesh and fell, all appurtenances and belongings,--is {292} only
+the silly hegelian all-or-nothing insatiateness once more.
+
+Hegel's own logic, with all the senseless hocus-pocus of its triads,
+utterly fails to prove his position.  The only evident compulsion which
+representations exert upon one another is compulsion to submit to the
+conditions of entrance into the same universe with them--the conditions
+of continuity, of selfhood, space, and time--under penalty of being
+excluded.  But what this universe shall be is a matter of fact which we
+cannot decide till we know what representations _have_ submitted to
+these its sole conditions.  The conditions themselves impose no further
+requirements.  In short, the notion that real contingency and ambiguity
+may be features of the real world is a perfectly unimpeachable
+hypothesis.  Only in such a world can moral judgments have a claim to
+be.  For the bad is that which takes the place of something else which
+possibly might have been where it now is, and the better is that which
+absolutely might be where it absolutely is not.  In the universe of
+Hegel--the absolute block whose parts have no loose play, the pure
+plethora of necessary being with the oxygen of possibility all
+suffocated out of its lungs--there can be neither good nor bad, but one
+dead level of mere fate.
+
+But I have tired the reader out.  The worst of criticising Hegel is
+that the very arguments we use against him give forth strange and
+hollow sounds that make them seem almost as fantastic as the errors to
+which they are addressed.  The sense of a universal mirage, of a
+ghostly unreality, steals over us, which is the very moonlit atmosphere
+of Hegelism itself.  What wonder then if, instead of {293} converting,
+our words do but rejoice and delight, those already baptized in the
+faith of confusion?  To their charmed senses we all seem children of
+Hegel together, only some of us have not the wit to know our own
+father.  Just as Romanists are sure to inform us that our reasons
+against Papal Christianity unconsciously breathe the purest spirit of
+Catholicism, so Hegelism benignantly smiles at our exertions, and
+murmurs, "If the red slayer think he slays;" "When me they fly, I am
+the wings," etc.
+
+To forefend this unwelcome adoption, let me recapitulate in a few
+propositions the reasons why I am not an hegelian.
+
+1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real
+contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the
+other false.  When this happens, one must go forever; nor is there any
+'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive.
+
+2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere
+negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought.
+
+3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges, because they
+are without chasm.
+
+4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only
+partially.
+
+5. This partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a
+common world.
+
+6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts.
+
+7. But the same quality appears in many times and spaces.  Generic
+sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by
+which the jolts are reduced.
+
+8. What between different qualities jolts remain.  {294} Each, as far
+as the other is concerned, is an absolutely separate and contingent
+being.
+
+9. The moral judgment may lead us to postulate as irreducible the
+contingencies of the world.
+
+10. Elements mutually contingent are not in conflict so long as they
+partake of the continua of time, space, etc.,--partaking being the
+exact opposite of strife.  They conflict only when, as mutually
+exclusive possibilities, they strive to possess themselves of the same
+parts of time, space, and ego.
+
+11. That there are such real conflicts, irreducible to any
+intelligence, and giving rise to an excess of possibility over
+actuality, is an hypothesis, but a credible one.  No philosophy should
+pretend to be anything more.
+
+
+NOTE.--Since the preceding article was written, some observations on
+the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted to
+make by reading the pamphlet called The Anaesthetic Revelation and the
+Gist of Philosophy, by Benjamin Paul Blood, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874,
+have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and
+the weakness of Hegel's philosophy.  I strongly urge others to repeat
+the experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough.  The
+effects will of course vary with the individual.  Just as they vary in
+the same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in the
+former case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain.  With
+me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the
+experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense
+metaphysical illumination.  Truth lies open to the view in depth
+beneath depth of almost blinding evidence.  The mind sees all the
+logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity
+to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety
+returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly
+at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a
+cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled,
+or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand.
+
+{295}
+
+The immense emotional sense of _reconciliation_ which characterizes the
+'maudlin' stage of alcoholic drunkenness,--a stage which seems silly to
+lookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes a
+chief part of the temptation to the vice,--is well known.  The centre
+and periphery of things seem to come together.  The ego and its
+objects, the _meum_ and the _tuum_, are one.  Now this, only a
+thousandfold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first
+result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the
+conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepest
+convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong.  Whatever idea or
+representation occurred to the mind was seized by the same logical
+forceps, and served to illustrate the same truth; and that truth was
+that every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a higher
+unity in which it is based; that all contradictions, so-called, are but
+differences; that all differences are of degree; that all degrees are
+of a common kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being;
+and that we are literally in the midst of _an infinite_, to perceive
+the existence of which is the utmost we can attain.  Without the _same_
+as a basis, how could strife occur?  Strife presupposes something to be
+striven about; and in this common topic, the same for both parties, the
+differences merge.  From the hardest contradiction to the tenderest
+diversity of verbiage differences evaporate; _yes_ and _no_ agree at
+least in being assertions; a denial of a statement is but another mode
+of stating the same, contradiction can only occur of the same
+thing,--all opinions are thus synonyms, are synonymous, are the same.
+But the same phrase by difference of emphasis is two; and here again
+difference and no-difference merge in one.
+
+It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the
+identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this
+experience.  I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written
+during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless
+drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire
+of infinite rationality.  God and devil, good and evil, life and death,
+I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity
+and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and
+swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and
+small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty
+other {296} contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way.
+The mind saw how each term _belonged_ to its contrast through a
+knife-edge moment of transition which _it_ effected, and which,
+perennial and eternal, was the _nunc stans_ of life.  The thought of
+mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgment of
+opposition, as 'nothing--but,' 'no more--than,' 'only--if,' etc.,
+produced a perfect delirium of theoretic rapture.  And at last, when
+definite ideas to work on came slowly, the mind went through the mere
+_form_ of recognizing sameness in identity by contrasting the same word
+with itself, differently emphasized, or shorn of its initial letter.
+Let me transcribe a few sentences:
+
+  What's mistake but a kind of take?
+  What's nausea but a kind of -ausea?
+  Sober, drunk, -_unk_, astonishment.
+  Everything can become the subject of criticism--how
+      criticise without something _to_ criticise?
+  Agreement--disagreement!!
+  Emotion--motion!!!
+  Die away from, _from_, die away (without the _from_).
+  Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!
+  Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!
+  It escapes, it escapes!
+  But----
+  What escapes, WHAT escapes?
+  Emphasis, EMphasis; there must be some emphasis in order
+      for there to be a phasis.
+  No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is _other_.
+  _In_coherent, coherent--same.
+  And it fades!  And it's infinite!  AND it's infinite!
+  If it was n't _going_, why should you hold on to it?
+  Don't you see the difference, don't you see the identity?
+  Constantly opposites united!
+  The same me telling you to write and not to write!
+  Extreme--extreme, extreme!  Within the _ex_tensity that
+      'extreme' contains is contained the '_extreme_' of intensity.
+  Something, and _other_ than that thing!
+  Intoxication, and _otherness_ than intoxication.
+  Every attempt at betterment,--every attempt at otherment,--is a----.
+  It fades forever and forever as we move.
+
+{297}
+
+  There _is_ a reconciliation!
+  Reconciliation--_e_conciliation!
+  By God, how that hurts!  By God, how it _does n't_ hurt!
+      Reconciliation of two extremes.
+  By George, nothing but _o_thing!
+  That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure _on_sense!
+  Thought deeper than speech----!
+  Medical school; divinity school, _school_!  SCHOOL!  Oh my
+      God, oh God, oh God!
+
+The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this:--
+
+There are no differences but differences of degree between different
+degrees of difference and no difference.
+
+This phrase has the true Hegelian ring, being in fact a regular _sich
+als sich auf sich selbst beziehende Negativitaet_.  And true Hegelians
+will _ueberhaupt_ be able to read between the lines and feel, at any
+rate, what _possible_ ecstasies of cognitive emotion might have bathed
+these tattered fragments of thought when they were alive.  But for the
+assurance of a certain amount of respect from them, I should hardly
+have ventured to print what must be such caviare to the general.
+
+
+But now comes the reverse of the medal.  What is the principle of unity
+in all this monotonous rain of instances?  Although I did not see it at
+first, I soon found that it was in each case nothing but the abstract
+_genus_ of which the conflicting terms were opposite species.  In other
+words, although the flood of ontologic _emotion_ was Hegelian through
+and through, the _ground_ for it was nothing but the world-old
+principle that things are the same only so far and no farther than they
+_are_ the same, or partake of a common nature,--the principle that
+Hegel most tramples under foot.  At the same time the rapture of
+beholding a process that was infinite, changed (as the nature of the
+infinitude was realized by the mind) into the sense of a dreadful and
+ineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort is
+incommensurable and in the light of which whatever happens is
+indifferent.  This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture to
+horror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced.  I
+got it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough to
+produce incipient nausea; and I cannot but regard it as the normal and
+inevitable outcome of the {298} intoxication, if sufficiently
+prolonged.  A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and
+indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis,
+but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one,--this is the
+upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright.
+
+Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader will
+have noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing the
+clue.  Something 'fades,' 'escapes;' and the feeling of insight is
+changed into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion,
+astonishment.  I know no more singular sensation than this intense
+bewilderment, with nothing particular left to be bewildered at save the
+bewilderment itself.  It seems, indeed, _a causa sui_, or 'spirit
+become its own object.'
+
+My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the
+law of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived,
+engender a very powerful emotion, that Hegel was so unusually
+susceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratification
+became his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to the
+means he employed; that _indifferentism_ is the true outcome of every
+view of the world which makes infinity and continuity to be its
+essence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the
+mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the
+identification of contradictories, so far from being the
+self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a
+self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and
+terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood
+of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.
+
+
+
+[1] Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882.
+
+[2] The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and the
+fact that it is all finished and given and there, can be got over in
+more than one way.  The simplest way is by idealism, which
+distinguishes between space as actual and space as potential.  For
+idealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but all
+actually represented spaces are finite; it is only possibly
+representable spaces that are infinite.
+
+[3] Not only for simplicity's sake do we select space as the paragon of
+a rationalizing continuum.  Space determines the relations of the items
+that enter it in a far more intricate way than does time; in a far more
+fixed way than does the ego.  By this last clause I mean that if things
+are in space at all, they must conform to geometry; while the being in
+an ego at all need not make them conform to logic or any other manner
+of rationality.  Under the sheltering wings of a self the matter of
+unreason can lodge itself as safely as any other kind of content.  One
+cannot but respect the devoutness of the ego-worship of some of our
+English-writing Hegelians.  But at the same time one cannot help
+fearing lest the monotonous contemplation of so barren a principle as
+that of the pure formal self (which, be it never so essential a
+condition of the existence of a world of organized experience at all,
+must notwithstanding take its own _character_ from, not give the
+character to, the separate empirical data over which its mantle is
+cast), one cannot but fear, I say, lest the religion of the
+transcendental ego should, like all religions of the 'one thing
+needful,' end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.
+
+[4] Journal of Speculative Philosophy, viii. 37.
+
+
+
+
+{299}
+
+WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED.[1]
+
+"The great field for new discoveries," said a scientific friend to me
+the other day, "is always the unclassified residuum."  Round about the
+accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort
+of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and
+irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to
+ignore than to attend to.  The ideal of every science is that of a
+closed and completed system of truth.  The charm of most sciences to
+their more passive disciples consists in their appearing, in fact, to
+wear just this ideal form.  Each one of our various _ologies_ seems to
+offer a definite head of classification for every possible phenomenon
+of the sort which it professes to cover; and so far from free is most
+men's fancy, that, when a consistent and organized scheme of this sort
+has once been comprehended and assimilated, a different scheme is
+unimaginable.  No alternative, whether to whole or parts, can any
+longer be conceived as possible.  Phenomena unclassifiable within the
+system are therefore paradoxical {300} absurdities, and must be held
+untrue.  When, moreover, as so often happens, the reports of them are
+vague and indirect; when they come as mere marvels and oddities rather
+than as things of serious moment,--one neglects or denies them with the
+best of scientific consciences.  Only the born geniuses let themselves
+be worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get no
+peace till they are brought within the fold.  Your Galileos, Galvanis,
+Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins are always getting confounded and
+troubled by insignificant things.  Any one will renovate his science
+who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena.  And when the
+science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of
+the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
+
+No part of the unclassified residuum has usually been treated with a
+more contemptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomena
+generally called _mystical_.  Physiology will have nothing to do with
+them.  Orthodox psychology turns its back upon them.  Medicine sweeps
+them out; or, at most, when in an anecdotal vein, records a few of them
+as 'effects of the imagination,'--a phrase of mere dismissal, whose
+meaning, in this connection, it is impossible to make precise.  All the
+while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the
+surface of history.  No matter where you open its pages, you find
+things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal
+possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and
+productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiar
+individuals over persons and things in their neighborhood.  We suppose
+that 'mediumship' {301} originated in Rochester, N. Y., and animal
+magnetism with Mesmer; but once look behind the pages of official
+history, in personal memoirs, legal documents, and popular narratives
+and books of anecdote, and you will find that there never was a time
+when these things were not reported just as abundantly as now.  We
+college-bred gentry, who follow the stream of cosmopolitan culture
+exclusively, not infrequently stumble upon some old-established
+journal, or some voluminous native author, whose names are never heard
+of in _our_ circle, but who number their readers by the
+quarter-million.  It always gives us a little shock to find this mass
+of human beings not only living and ignoring us and all our gods, but
+actually reading and writing and cogitating without ever a thought of
+our canons and authorities.  Well, a public no less large keeps and
+transmits from generation to generation the traditions and practices of
+the occult; but academic science cares as little for its beliefs and
+opinions as you, gentle reader, care for those of the readers of the
+Waverley and the Fireside Companion.  To no one type of mind is it
+given to discern the totality of truth.  Something escapes the best of
+us,--not accidentally, but systematically, and because we have a twist.
+The scientific-academic mind and the feminine-mystical mind shy from
+each other's facts, just as they fly from each other's temper and
+spirit.  Facts are there only for those who have a mental affinity with
+them.  When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the
+academic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to
+interpret and discuss them,--for surely to pass from mystical to
+scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity; but on
+the other hand if there is {302} anything which human history
+demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary
+academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present
+themselves as wild facts, with no stall or pigeon-hole, or as facts
+which threaten to break up the accepted system.  In psychology,
+physiology, and medicine, wherever a debate between the mystics and the
+scientifics has been once for all decided, it is the mystics who have
+usually proved to be right about the _facts_, while the scientifics had
+the better of it in respect to the theories.  The most recent and
+flagrant example of this is 'animal magnetism,' whose facts were
+stoutly dismissed as a pack of lies by academic medical science the
+world over, until the non-mystical theory of 'hypnotic suggestion' was
+found for them,--when they were admitted to be so excessively and
+dangerously common that special penal laws, forsooth, must be passed to
+keep all persons unequipped with medical diplomas from taking part in
+their production.  Just so stigmatizations, invulnerabilities,
+instantaneous cures, inspired discourses, and demoniacal possessions,
+the records of which were shelved in our libraries but yesterday in the
+alcove headed 'superstitions,' now, under the brand-new title of 'cases
+of hystero-epilepsy,' are republished, reobserved, and reported with an
+even too credulous avidity.
+
+Repugnant as the mystical style of philosophizing maybe (especially
+when self-complacent), there is no sort of doubt that it goes with a
+gift for meeting with certain kinds of phenomenal experience.  The
+writer of these pages has been forced in the past few years to this
+admission; and he now believes that he who will pay attention to facts
+of the sort dear to mystics, {303} while reflecting upon them in
+academic-scientific ways, will be in the best possible position to help
+philosophy.  It is a circumstance of good augury that certain
+scientifically trained minds in all countries seem drifting to the same
+conclusion.  The Society for Psychical Research has been one means of
+bringing science and the occult together in England and America; and
+believing that this Society fulfils a function which, though limited,
+is destined to be not unimportant in the organization of human
+knowledge, I am glad to give a brief account of it to the uninstructed
+reader.
+
+According to the newspaper and drawing-room myth, soft-headedness and
+idiotic credulity are the bond of sympathy in this Society, and general
+wonder-sickness its dynamic principle.  A glance at the membership
+fails, however, to corroborate this view.  The president is Prof. Henry
+Sidgwick,[2] known by his other deeds as the most incorrigibly and
+exasperatingly critical and sceptical mind in England.  The hard-headed
+Arthur Balfour is one vice-president, and the hard-headed Prof. J. P.
+Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is another.  Such
+men as Professor Lodge, the eminent English physicist, and Professor
+Richet, the eminent French physiologist, are among the most active
+contributors to the Society's Proceedings; and through the catalogue of
+membership are sprinkled names honored throughout the world for their
+scientific capacity.  In fact, were I asked to point to a scientific
+journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources
+of error might be seen in their full bloom, {304} I think I should have
+to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
+The common run of papers, say on physiological subjects, which one
+finds in other professional organs, are apt to show a far lower level
+of critical consciousness.  Indeed, the rigorous canons of evidence
+applied a few years ago to testimony in the case of certain 'mediums'
+led to the secession from the Society of a number of spiritualists.
+Messrs. Stainton Moses and A. R. Wallace, among others, thought that no
+experiences based on mere eyesight could ever have a chance to be
+admitted as true, if such an impossibly exacting standard of proof were
+insisted on in every case.
+
+The S. P. R., as I shall call it for convenience, was founded in 1882
+by a number of gentlemen, foremost among whom seem to have been
+Professors Sidgwick, W. F. Barrett, and Balfour Stewart, and Messrs. R.
+H. Hutton, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Edmund Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers.
+Their purpose was twofold,--first, to carry on systematic
+experimentation with hypnotic subjects, mediums, clairvoyants, and
+others; and, secondly, to collect evidence concerning apparitions,
+haunted houses, and similar phenomena which are incidentally reported,
+but which, from their fugitive character, admit of no deliberate
+control.  Professor Sidgwick, in his introductory address, insisted
+that the divided state of public opinion on all these matters was a
+scandal to science,--absolute disdain on _a priori_ grounds
+characterizing what may be called professional opinion, while
+indiscriminate credulity was too often found among those who pretended
+to have a first-hand acquaintance with the facts.
+
+As a sort of weather bureau for accumulating {305} reports of such
+meteoric phenomena as apparitions, the S. P. R. has done an immense
+amount of work.  As an experimenting body, it cannot be said to have
+completely fulfilled the hopes of its founders.  The reasons for this
+lie in two circumstances: first, the clairvoyant and other subjects who
+will allow themselves to be experimented upon are few and far between;
+and, secondly, work with them takes an immense amount of time, and has
+had to be carried on at odd intervals by members engaged in other
+pursuits.  The Society has not yet been rich enough to control the
+undivided services of skilled experimenters in this difficult field.
+The loss of the lamented Edmund Gurney, who more than any one else had
+leisure to devote, has been so far irreparable.  But were there no
+experimental work at all, and were the S. P. R. nothing but a
+weather-bureau for catching sporadic apparitions, etc., in their
+freshness, I am disposed to think its function indispensable in the
+scientific organism.  If any one of my readers, spurred by the thought
+that so much smoke must needs betoken fire, has ever looked into the
+existing literature of the supernatural for proof, he will know what I
+mean.  This literature is enormous, but it is practically worthless for
+evidential purposes.  Facts enough are cited, indeed; but the records
+of them are so fallible and imperfect that at most they lead to the
+opinion that it may be well to keep a window open upon that quarter in
+one's mind.
+
+In the S. P. R.'s Proceedings, on the contrary, a different law
+prevails.  Quality, and not mere quantity, is what has been mainly kept
+in mind.  The witnesses, where possible, have in every reported case
+been cross-examined personally, the collateral facts {306} have been
+looked up, and the story appears with its precise coefficient of
+evidential worth stamped on it, so that all may know just what its
+weight as proof may be.  Outside of these Proceedings, I know of no
+systematic attempt to _weigh_ the evidence for the supernatural.  This
+makes the value of the volumes already published unique; and I firmly
+believe that as the years go on and the ground covered grows still
+wider, the Proceedings will more and more tend to supersede all other
+sources of information concerning phenomena traditionally deemed
+occult.  Collections of this sort are usually best appreciated by the
+rising generation.  The young anthropologists and psychologists who
+will soon have full occupancy of the stage will feel how great a
+scientific scandal it has been to leave a great mass of human
+experience to take its chances between vague tradition and credulity on
+the one hand and dogmatic denial at long range on the other, with no
+body of persons extant who are willing and competent to study the
+matter with both patience and rigor.  If the Society lives long enough
+for the public to become familiar with its presence, so that any
+apparition, or house or person infested with unaccountable noises or
+disturbances of material objects, will as a matter of course be
+reported to its officers, we shall doubtless end by having a mass of
+facts concrete enough to theorize upon.  Its sustainers, therefore,
+should accustom themselves to the idea that its first duty is simply to
+exist from year to year and perform this recording function well,
+though no conclusive results of any sort emerge at first.  All our
+learned societies have begun in some such modest way.
+
+But one cannot by mere outward organization make much progress in
+matters scientific.  Societies can {307} back men of genius, but can
+never take their place.  The contrast between the parent Society and
+the American Branch illustrates this.  In England, a little group of
+men with enthusiasm and genius for the work supplied the nucleus; in
+this country, Mr. Hodgson had to be imported from Europe before any
+tangible progress was made.  What perhaps more than anything else has
+held the Society together in England is Professor Sidgwick's
+extraordinary gift of inspiring confidence in diverse sorts of people.
+Such tenacity of interest in the result and such absolute impartiality
+in discussing the evidence are not once in a century found in an
+individual.  His obstinate belief that there is something yet to be
+brought to light communicates patience to the discouraged; his
+constitutional inability to draw any precipitate conclusion reassures
+those who are afraid of being dupes.  Mrs. Sidgwick--a sister, by the
+way, of the great Arthur Balfour--is a worthy ally of her husband in
+this matter, showing a similarly rare power of holding her judgment in
+suspense, and a keenness of observation and capacity for experimenting
+with human subjects which are rare in either sex.
+
+The _worker_ of the Society, as originally constituted, was Edmund
+Gurney.  Gurney was a man of the rarest sympathies and gifts.
+Although, like Carlyle, he used to groan under the burden of his
+labors, he yet exhibited a colossal power of dispatching business and
+getting through drudgery of the most repulsive kind.  His two thick
+volumes on 'Phantasms of the Living,' collected and published in three
+years, are a proof of this.  Besides this, he had exquisite artistic
+instincts, and his massive volume on 'The Power of Sound' was, when it
+appeared, the most important {308} work on aesthetics in the English
+language.  He had also the tenderest heart and a mind of rare
+metaphysical power, as his volumes of essays, 'Tertium Quid,' will
+prove to any reader.  Mr. Frederic Myers, already well known as one of
+the most brilliant of English essayists, is the _ingenium praefervidum_
+of the S. P. R.  Of the value of Mr. Myers's theoretic writings I will
+say a word later.  Dr. Hodgson, the American secretary, is
+distinguished by a balance of mind almost as rare in its way as
+Sidgwick's.  He is persuaded of the reality of many of the phenomena
+called spiritualistic, but he also has uncommon keenness in detecting
+error; and it is impossible to say in advance whether it will give him
+more satisfaction to confirm or to smash a given case offered to his
+examination.
+
+
+It is now time to cast a brief look upon the actual contents of these
+Proceedings.  The first two years were largely taken up with
+experiments in thought-transference.  The earliest lot of these were
+made with the daughters of a clergyman named Creery, and convinced
+Messrs. Balfour Stewart, Barrett, Myers, and Gurney that the girls had
+an inexplicable power of guessing names and objects thought of by other
+persons.  Two years later, Mrs. Sidgwick and Mr. Gurney, recommencing
+experiments with the same girls, detected them signalling to each
+other.  It is true that for the most part the conditions of the earlier
+series had excluded signalling, and it is also possible that the
+cheating may have grafted itself on what was originally a genuine
+phenomenon.  Yet Gurney was wise in abandoning the entire series to the
+scepticism of the reader.  Many critics of the S. P. R. seem out of all
+{309} its labors to have heard only of this case.  But there are
+experiments recorded with upwards of thirty other subjects.  Three were
+experimented upon at great length during the first two years: one was
+Mr. G. A. Smith; the other two were young ladies in Liverpool in the
+employment of Mr. Malcolm Guthrie.
+
+It is the opinion of all who took part in these latter experiments that
+sources of conscious and unconscious deception were sufficiently
+excluded, and that the large percentage of correct reproductions by the
+subjects of words, diagrams, and sensations occupying other persons'
+consciousness were entirely inexplicable as results of chance.  The
+witnesses of these performances were in fact all so satisfied of the
+genuineness of the phenomena, that 'telepathy' has figured freely in
+the papers of the Proceedings and in Gurney's book on Phantasms as a
+_vera causa_ on which additional hypotheses might be built.  No mere
+reader can be blamed, however, if he demand, for so revolutionary a
+belief, a more overwhelming bulk of testimony than has yet been
+supplied.  Any day, of course, may bring in fresh experiments in
+successful picture-guessing.  But meanwhile, and lacking that, we can
+only point out that the present data are strengthened in the flank, so
+to speak, by all observations that tend to corroborate the possibility
+of other kindred phenomena, such as telepathic impression,
+clairvoyance, or what is called 'test-mediumship.'  The wider genus
+will naturally cover the narrower species with its credit.
+
+Gurney's papers on hypnotism must be mentioned next.  Some of them are
+less concerned with establishing new facts than with analyzing old
+ones.  But omitting these, we find that in the line of pure {310}
+observation Gurney claims to have ascertained in more than one subject
+the following phenomenon: The subject's hands are thrust through a
+blanket, which screens the operator from his eyes, and his mind is
+absorbed in conversation with a third person.  The operator meanwhile
+points with his finger to one of the fingers of the subject, which
+finger alone responds to this silent selection by becoming stiff or
+anaesthetic, as the case may be.  The interpretation is difficult, but
+the phenomenon, which I have myself witnessed, seems authentic.
+
+Another observation made by Gurney seems to prove the possibility of
+the subject's mind being directly influenced by the operator's.  The
+hypnotized subject responds, or fails to respond, to questions asked by
+a third party according to the operator's silent permission or refusal.
+Of course, in these experiments all obvious sources of deception were
+excluded.  But Gurney's most important contribution to our knowledge of
+hypnotism was his series of experiments on the automatic writing of
+subjects who had received post-hypnotic suggestions.  For example, a
+subject during trance is told that he will poke the fire in six minutes
+after waking.  On being waked he has no memory of the order, but while
+he is engaged in conversation his hand is placed on a _planchette_,
+which immediately writes the sentence, "P., you will poke the fire in
+six minutes."  Experiments like this, which were repeated in great
+variety, seem to prove that below the upper consciousness the hypnotic
+consciousness persists, engrossed with the suggestion and able to
+express itself through the involuntarily moving hand.
+
+Gurney shares, therefore, with Janet and Binet, the {311} credit of
+demonstrating the simultaneous existence of two different strata of
+consciousness, ignorant of each other, in the same person.  The
+'extra-consciousness,' as one may call it, can be kept on tap, as it
+were, by the method of automatic writing.  This discovery marks a new
+era in experimental psychology, and it is impossible to overrate its
+importance.  But Gurney's greatest piece of work is his laborious
+'Phantasms of the Living.'  As an example of the drudgery stowed away
+in the volumes, it may suffice to say that in looking up the proofs for
+the alleged physical phenomena of witchcraft, Gurney reports a careful
+search through two hundred and sixty books on the subject, with the
+result of finding no first-hand evidence recorded in the trials except
+the confessions of the victims themselves; and these, of course, are
+presumptively due to either torture or hallucination.  This statement,
+made in an unobtrusive note, is only one instance of the care displayed
+throughout the volumes.  In the course of these, Gurney discusses about
+seven hundred cases of apparitions which he collected.  A large number
+of these were 'veridical,' in the sense of coinciding with some
+calamity happening to the person who appeared.  Gurney's explanation is
+that the mind of the person undergoing the calamity was at that moment
+able to impress the mind of the percipient with an hallucination.
+
+Apparitions, on this 'telepathic' theory, may be called 'objective'
+facts, although they are not 'material' facts.  In order to test the
+likelihood of such veridical hallucinations being due to mere chance,
+Gurney instituted the 'census of hallucinations,' which has been
+continued with the result of obtaining answers from over twenty-five
+thousand persons, asked {312} at random in different countries whether,
+when in good health and awake, they had ever heard a voice, seen a
+form, or felt a touch which no material presence could account for.
+The result seems to be, roughly speaking, that in England about one
+adult in ten has had such an experience at least once in his life, and
+that of the experiences themselves a large number coincide with some
+distant event.  The question is, Is the frequency of these latter cases
+too great to be deemed fortuitous, and must we suppose an occult
+connection between the two events?  Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick have worked
+out this problem on the basis of the English returns, seventeen
+thousand in number, with a care and thoroughness that leave nothing to
+be desired.  Their conclusion is that the cases where the apparition of
+a person is seen on the day of his death are four hundred and forty
+times too numerous to be ascribed to chance.  The reasoning employed to
+calculate this number is simple enough.  If there be only a fortuitous
+connection between the death of an individual and the occurrence of his
+apparition to some one at a distance, the death is no more likely to
+fall on the same day as the apparition than it is to occur on the same
+day with any other event in nature.  But the chance-probability that
+any individual's death will fall on any given day marked in advance by
+some other event is just equal to the chance-probability that the
+individual will die at all on any specified day; and the national
+death-rate gives that probability as one in nineteen thousand.  If,
+then, when the death of a person coincides with an apparition of the
+same person, the coincidence be merely fortuitous, it ought not to
+occur oftener than once in nineteen thousand cases.  As a matter of
+fact, {313} however, it does occur (according to the census) once in
+forty-three cases, a number (as aforesaid) four hundred and forty times
+too great.  The American census, of some seven thousand answers, gives
+a remarkably similar result.  Against this conclusion the only rational
+answer that I can see is that the data are still too few; that the net
+was not cast wide enough; and that we need, to get fair averages, far
+more than twenty-four thousand answers to the census question.  This
+may, of course, be true, though it seems exceedingly unlikely; and in
+our own twenty-four thousand answers veridical cases may possibly have
+heaped themselves unduly.
+
+The next topic worth mentioning in the Proceedings is the discussion of
+the physical phenomena of mediumship (slate-writing, furniture-moving,
+and so forth) by Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr. Hodgson, and 'Mr. Davey.'  This, so
+far as it goes, is destructive of the claims of all the mediums
+examined.  'Mr. Davey' himself produced fraudulent slate-writing of the
+highest order, while Mr. Hodgson, a 'sitter' in his confidence,
+reviewed the written reports of the series of his other sitters,--all
+of them intelligent persons,--and showed that in every case they failed
+to see the essential features of what was done before their eyes.  This
+Davey-Hodgson contribution is probably the most damaging document
+concerning eye-witnesses' evidence that has ever been produced.
+Another substantial bit of work based on personal observation is Mr.
+Hodgson's report on Madame Blavatsky's claims to physical mediumship.
+This is adverse to the lady's pretensions; and although some of Madame
+Blavatsky's friends make light of it, it is a stroke from which her
+reputation will not recover.
+
+{314}
+
+Physical mediumship in all its phases has fared hard in the
+Proceedings.  The latest case reported on is that of the famous Eusapia
+Paladino, who being detected in fraud at Cambridge, after a brilliant
+career of success on the continent, has, according to the draconian
+rules of method which govern the Society, been ruled out from a further
+hearing.  The case of Stainton Moses, on the other hand, concerning
+which Mr. Myers has brought out a mass of unpublished testimony, seems
+to escape from the universal condemnation, and appears to force upon us
+what Mr. Andrew Lang calls the choice between a moral and a physical
+miracle.
+
+In the case of Mrs. Piper, not a physical but a trance medium, we seem
+to have no choice offered at all.  Mr. Hodgson and others have made
+prolonged study of this lady's trances, and are all convinced that
+super-normal powers of cognition are displayed therein.  These are
+_prima facie_ due to 'spirit-control.'  But the conditions are so
+complex that a dogmatic decision either for or against the
+spirit-hypothesis must as yet be postponed.
+
+One of the most important experimental contributions to the Proceedings
+is the article of Miss X. on 'Crystal Vision.'  Many persons who look
+fixedly into a crystal or other vaguely luminous surface fall into a
+kind of daze, and see visions.  Miss X. has this susceptibility in a
+remarkable degree, and is, moreover, an unusually intelligent critic.
+She reports many visions which can only be described as apparently
+clairvoyant, and others which beautifully fill a vacant niche incur
+knowledge of subconscious mental operations.  For example, looking into
+the crystal before breakfast one morning she reads in printed
+characters of the {315} death of a lady of her acquaintance, the date
+and other circumstances all duly appearing in type.  Startled by this,
+she looks at the 'Times' of the previous day for verification, and
+there among the deaths are the identical words which she has seen.  On
+the same page of the Times are other items which she remembers reading
+the day before; and the only explanation seems to be that her eyes then
+inattentively observed, so to speak, the death-item, which forthwith
+fell into a special corner of her memory, and came out as a visual
+hallucination when the peculiar modification of consciousness induced
+by the crystal-gazing set in.
+
+Passing from papers based on observation to papers based on narrative,
+we have a number of ghost stories, etc., sifted by Mrs. Sidgwick and
+discussed by Messrs. Myers and Podmore.  They form the best ghost
+literature I know of from the point of view of emotional interest.  As
+to the conclusions drawn, Mrs. Sidgwick is rigorously non-committal,
+while Mr. Myers and Mr. Podmore show themselves respectively hospitable
+and inhospitable to the notion that such stories have a basis of
+objectivity dependent on the continued existence of the dead.
+
+I must close my gossip about the Proceedings by naming what, after all,
+seems to me the most important part of its contents.  This is the long
+series of articles by Mr. Myers on what he now calls the 'subliminal
+self,' or what one might designate as ultra-marginal consciousness.
+The result of Myers's learned and ingenious studies in hypnotism,
+hallucinations, automatic writing, mediumship, and the whole series of
+allied phenomena is a conviction which he expresses in the following
+terms:--
+
+{316}
+
+"Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more
+extensive than he knows,--an individuality which can never express
+itself completely through any corporeal manifestation.  The self
+manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of
+the self unmanifested, and always, as it seems, some power of organic
+expression in abeyance or reserve."
+
+
+The ordinary consciousness Mr. Myers likens to the visible part of the
+solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged
+by the inclusion of the ultra-red and ultra-violet rays.  In the
+psychic spectrum the 'ultra' parts may embrace a far wider range, both
+of physiological and of psychical activity, than is open to our
+ordinary consciousness and memory.  At the lower end we have the
+_physiological_ extension, mind-cures, 'stigmatization' of ecstatics,
+etc.; in the upper, the hyper-normal cognitions of the medium-trance.
+Whatever the judgment of the future may be on Mr. Myers's speculations,
+the credit will always remain to them of being the first attempt in any
+language to consider the phenomena of hallucination, hypnotism,
+automatism, double personality, and mediumship as connected parts of
+one whole subject.  All constructions in this field must be
+provisional, and it is as something provisional that Mr. Myers offers
+us his formulations.  But, thanks to him, we begin to see for the first
+time what a vast interlocked and graded system these phenomena, from
+the rudest motor-automatisms to the most startling sensory-apparition,
+form.  Quite apart from Mr. Myers's conclusions, his methodical
+treatment of them by classes and series is the first great step toward
+overcoming the distaste of orthodox science to look at them at all.
+
+{317}
+
+One's reaction on hearsay testimony is always determined by one's own
+experience.  Most men who have once convinced themselves, by what seems
+to them a careful examination, that any one species of the supernatural
+exists, begin to relax their vigilance as to evidence, and throw the
+doors of their minds more or less wide open to the supernatural along
+its whole extent.  To a mind that has thus made its _salto mortale_,
+the minute work over insignificant cases and quiddling discussion of
+'evidential values,' of which the Society's reports are full, seems
+insufferably tedious.  And it is so; few species of literature are more
+truly dull than reports of phantasms.  Taken simply by themselves, as
+separate facts to stare at, they appear so devoid of meaning and sweep,
+that, even were they certainly true, one would be tempted to leave them
+out of one's universe for being so idiotic.  Every other sort of fact
+has some context and continuity with the rest of nature.  These alone
+are contextless and discontinuous.
+
+Hence I think that the sort of loathing--no milder word will do--which
+the very words 'psychical research' and 'psychical researcher' awaken
+in so many honest scientific breasts is not only natural, but in a
+sense praiseworthy.  A man who is unable himself to conceive of any
+_orbit_ for these mental meteors can only suppose that Messrs. Gurney,
+Myers, & Co.'s mood in dealing with them must be that of silly
+marvelling at so many detached prodigies.  And such prodigies!  So
+science simply falls back on her general _non-possumus_; and most of
+the would-be critics of the Proceedings have been contented to oppose
+to the phenomena recorded the simple presumption that in some way or
+other the reports _must_ be {318} fallacious,--for so far as the order
+of nature has been subjected to really scientific scrutiny, it always
+has been proved to run the other way.  But the oftener one is forced to
+reject an alleged sort of fact by the use of this mere presumption, the
+weaker does the presumption itself get to be; and one might in course
+of time use up one's presumptive privileges in this way, even though
+one started (as our anti-telepathists do) with as good a case as the
+great induction of psychology that all our knowledge comes by the use
+of our eyes and ears and other senses.  And we must remember also that
+this undermining of the strength of a presumption by reiterated report
+of facts to the contrary does not logically require that the facts in
+question should all be well proved.  A lot of rumors in the air against
+a business man's credit, though they might all be vague, and no one of
+them amount to proof that he is unsound, would certainly weaken the
+_presumption_ of his soundness.  And all the more would they have this
+effect if they formed what Gurney called a fagot and not a chain,--that
+is, if they were independent of one another, and came from different
+quarters.  Now, the evidence for telepathy, weak and strong, taken just
+as it comes, forms a fagot and not a chain.  No one item cites the
+content of another item as part of its own proof.  But taken together
+the items have a certain general consistency; there is a method in
+their madness, so to speak.  So each of them adds presumptive value to
+the lot; and cumulatively, as no candid mind can fail to see, they
+subtract presumptive force from the orthodox belief that there can be
+nothing in any one's intellect that has not come in through ordinary
+experiences of sense.
+
+But it is a miserable thing for a question of truth {319} to be
+confined to mere presumption and counter-presumption, with no decisive
+thunderbolt of fact to clear the baffling darkness.  And, sooth to say,
+in talking so much of the merely presumption-weakening value of our
+records, I have myself been wilfully taking the point of view of the
+so-called 'rigorously scientific' disbeliever, and making an _ad
+hominem_ plea.  My own point of view is different.  For me the
+thunderbolt _has_ fallen, and the orthodox belief has not merely had
+its presumption weakened, but the truth itself of the belief is
+decisively overthrown.  If I may employ the language of the
+professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by
+a particular instance.  If you wish to upset the law that all crows are
+black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you
+prove one single crow to be white.  My own white crow is Mrs. Piper.
+In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that
+knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use
+of her eyes and ears and wits.  What the source of this knowledge may
+be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to
+make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no
+escape.  So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I
+cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the 'rigorously
+scientific' mind, with its presumption as to what the true order of
+nature ought to be.  I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in
+spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight.  The
+rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark.
+Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method.  To
+suppose that it means a certain set of {320} results that one should
+pin one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius,
+and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.
+
+We all, scientists and non-scientists, live on some inclined plane of
+credulity.  The plane tips one way in one man, another way in another;
+and may he whose plane tips in no way be the first to cast a stone!  As
+a matter of fact, the trances I speak of have broken down for my own
+mind the limits of the admitted order of nature.  Science, so far as
+science denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dust
+for me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present
+is that science be built up again in a form in which such things may
+have a positive place.  Science, like life, feeds on its own decay.
+New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and
+new together into a reconciling law.
+
+And here is the real instructiveness of Messrs. Myers and Gurney's
+work.  They are trying with the utmost conscientiousness to find a
+reconciling conception which shall subject the old laws of nature to
+the smallest possible strain.  Mr. Myers uses that method of gradual
+approach which has performed such wonders in Darwin's hands.  When
+Darwin met a fact which seemed a poser to his theory, his regular
+custom, as I have heard an able colleague say, was to fill in all round
+it with smaller facts, as a wagoner might heap dirt round a big rock in
+the road, and thus get his team over without upsetting.  So Mr. Myers,
+starting from the most ordinary facts of inattentive consciousness,
+follows this clue through a long series which terminates in ghosts, and
+seeks to show that these are but extreme manifestations of a {321}
+common truth,--the truth that the invisible segments of our minds are
+susceptible, under rarely realized conditions, of acting and being
+acted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives.  This
+may not be ultimately true (for the theosophists, with their astral
+bodies and the like, may, for aught I now know, prove to be on the
+correcter trail), but no one can deny that it is in good scientific
+form,--for science always takes a known kind of phenomenon, and tries
+to extend its range.
+
+I have myself, as American agent for the census, collected hundreds of
+cases of hallucination in healthy persons.  The result is to make me
+feel that we all have potentially a 'subliminal' self, which may make
+at any time irruption into our ordinary lives.  At its lowest, it is
+only the depository of our forgotten memories; at its highest, we do
+not know what it is at all.  Take, for instance, a series of cases.
+During sleep, many persons have something in them which measures the
+flight of time better than the waking self does.  It wakes them at a
+preappointed hour; it acquaints them with the moment when they first
+awake.  It may produce an hallucination,--as in a lady who informs me
+that at the instant of waking she has a vision of her watch-face with
+the hands pointing (as she has often verified) to the exact time.  It
+may be the feeling that some physiological period has elapsed; but,
+whatever it is, it is subconscious.
+
+A subconscious something may also preserve experiences to which we do
+not openly attend.  A lady taking her lunch in town finds herself
+without her purse.  Instantly a sense comes over her of rising from the
+breakfast-table and hearing her purse drop upon the floor.  On reaching
+home she finds {322} nothing under the table, but summons the servant
+to say where she has put the purse.  The servant produces it, saying;
+"How did you know where it was?  You rose and left the room as if you
+did n't know you 'd dropped it."  The same subconscious something may
+recollect what we have forgotten.  A lady accustomed to taking
+salicylate of soda for muscular rheumatism wakes one early winter
+morning with an aching neck.  In the twilight she takes what she
+supposes to be her customary powder from a drawer, dissolves it in a
+glass of water, and is about to drink it down, when she feels a sharp
+slap on her shoulder and hears a voice in her ear saying, "Taste it!"
+On examination, she finds she has got a morphine powder by mistake.
+The natural interpretation is that a sleeping memory of the morphine
+powders awoke in this quasi-explosive way.  A like explanation offers
+itself as most plausible for the following case: A lady, with little
+time to catch the train, and the expressman about to call, is excitedly
+looking for the lost key of a packed trunk.  Hurrying upstairs with a
+bunch of keys, proved useless, in her hand, she hears an 'objective'
+voice distinctly say, "Try the key of the cake-box."  Being tried, it
+fits.  This also may well have been the effect of forgotten experience.
+
+Now, the effect is doubtless due to the same hallucinatory mechanism;
+but the source is less easily assigned as we ascend the scale of cases.
+A lady, for instance, goes after breakfast to see about one of her
+servants who has become ill over night.  She is startled at distinctly
+reading over the bedroom door in gilt letters the word 'small-pox.'
+The doctor is sent for, and ere long pronounces small-pox to be the
+disease, although the lady says, "The thought of {323} the girl's
+having small-pox never entered my mind till I saw the apparent
+inscription."  Then come other cases of warning; for example, that of a
+youth sitting in a wagon under a shed, who suddenly hears his dead
+mother's voice say, "Stephen, get away from here quick!" and jumps out
+just in time to see the shed-roof fall.
+
+After this come the experiences of persons appearing to distant friends
+at or near the hour of death.  Then, too, we have the trance-visions
+and utterances, which may appear astonishingly profuse and continuous,
+and maintain a fairly high intellectual level.  For all these higher
+phenomena, it seems to me that while the proximate mechanism is that of
+'hallucination,' it is straining an hypothesis unduly to name any
+ordinary subconscious mental operation--such as expectation,
+recollection, or inference from inattentive perception--as the ultimate
+cause that starts it up.  It is far better tactics, if you wish to get
+rid of mystery, to brand the narratives themselves as unworthy of
+trust.  The trustworthiness of most of them is to my own mind far from
+proved.  And yet in the light of the medium-trance, which is proved, it
+seems as if they might well all be members of a natural kind of fact of
+which we do not yet know the full extent.
+
+Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States to-day live
+as steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferent
+to modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the twelfth century.
+They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously
+indifferent to their experiences.  Although in its essence science only
+stands for a method and for no fixed belief, yet as habitually taken,
+both by its votaries and outsiders, it is {324} identified with a
+certain fixed belief,--the belief that the hidden order of nature is
+mechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories are
+irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such things as human
+life.  Now, this mechanical rationalism, as one may call it, makes, if
+it becomes one's only way of thinking, a violent breach with the ways
+of thinking that have played the greatest part in human history.
+Religious thinking, ethical thinking, poetical thinking, teleological,
+emotional, sentimental thinking, what one might call the personal view
+of life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and the
+romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view,
+have been, and even still are, outside of well-drilled scientific
+circles, the dominant forms of thought.  But for mechanical
+rationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion.  The chronic
+belief of mankind, that events may happen for the sake of their
+personal significance, is an abomination; and the notions of our
+grandfathers about oracles and omens, divinations and apparitions,
+miraculous changes of heart and wonders worked by inspired persons,
+answers to prayer and providential leadings, are a fabric absolutely
+baseless, a mass of sheer _un_truth.
+
+Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which the
+romantic and personal view of nature may lead, if wholly unchecked by
+impersonal rationalism, are direful.  Central African Mumbo-jumboism is
+one of unchecked romanticism's fruits.  One ought accordingly to
+sympathize with that abhorrence of romanticism as a sufficient
+world-theory; one ought to understand that lively intolerance of the
+least grain of romanticism in the views of life of other people, which
+are such characteristic marks of those who {325} follow the scientific
+professions to-day.  Our debt to science is literally boundless, and
+our gratitude for what is positive in her teachings must be
+correspondingly immense.  But the S. P. R.'s Proceedings have, it seems
+to me, conclusively proved one thing to the candid reader; and that is
+that the verdict of pure insanity, of gratuitous preference for error,
+of superstition without an excuse, which the scientists of our day are
+led by their intellectual training to pronounce upon the entire thought
+of the past, is a most shallow verdict.  The personal and romantic view
+of life has other roots besides wanton exuberance of imagination and
+perversity of heart.  It is perennially fed by _facts of experience_,
+whatever the ulterior interpretation of those facts may prove to be;
+and at no time in human history would it have been less easy than
+now--at most times it would have been much more easy--for advocates
+with a little industry to collect in its favor an array of contemporary
+documents as good as those which our publications present.  These
+documents all relate to real experiences of persons.  These experiences
+have three characters in common: They are capricious, discontinuous,
+and not easily controlled; they require peculiar persons for their
+production; their significance seems to be wholly for personal life.
+Those who preferentially attend to them, and still more those who are
+individually subject to them, not only easily may find, but are
+logically bound to find, in them valid arguments for their romantic and
+personal conception of the world's course.  Through my slight
+participation in the investigations of the S. P. R. I have become
+acquainted with numbers of persons of this sort, for whom the very word
+'science' has become a name of reproach, for reasons that I now both
+understand {326} and respect.  It is the intolerance of science for
+such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of
+their existence or of their significance (except as proofs of man's
+absolute innate folly), that has set science so apart from the common
+sympathies of the race.  I confess that it is on this, its humanizing
+mission, that the Society's best claim to the gratitude of our
+generation seems to me to depend.  It has restored continuity to
+history.  It has shown some reasonable basis for the most superstitious
+aberrations of the foretime.  It has bridged the chasm, healed the
+hideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot into
+the human world.
+
+I will even go one step farther.  When from our present advanced
+standpoint we look back upon the past stages of human thought, whether
+it be scientific thought or theological thought, we are amazed that a
+universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication
+should ever have seemed to any one so little and plain a thing.
+Whether it be Descartes's world or Newton's, whether it be that of the
+materialists of the last century or that of the Bridgewater treatises
+of our own, it always looks the same to us,--incredibly perspectiveless
+and short.  Even Lyell's, Faraday's, Mill's, and Darwin's consciousness
+of their respective subjects are already beginning to put on an
+infantile and innocent look.  Is it then likely that the science of our
+own day will escape the common doom; that the minds of its votaries
+will never look old-fashioned to the grandchildren of the latter?  It
+would be folly to suppose so.  Yet if we are to judge by the analogy of
+the past, when our science once becomes old-fashioned, it will be more
+for its omissions of fact, for its {327} ignorance of whole ranges and
+orders of complexity in the phenomena to be explained, than for any
+fatal lack in its spirit and principles.  The spirit and principles of
+science are mere affairs of method; there is nothing in them that need
+hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal
+forces are the starting-point of new effects.  The only form of thing
+that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely
+have, is our own personal life.  The only complete category of our
+thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category of
+personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements of
+that.  And this systematic denial on science's part of personality as a
+condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and
+innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may,
+conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very
+defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own
+boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make
+it look perspectiveless and short.
+
+
+
+[1] This Essay is formed of portions of an article in Scribner's
+Magazine for March, 1890, of an article in the Forum for July, 1892,
+and of the President's Address before the Society for Psychical
+Research, published in the Proceedings for June, 1896, and in Science.
+
+[2] Written in 1891.  Since then, Mr. Balfour, the present writer, and
+Professor William Crookes have held the presidential office.
+
+
+
+
+{329}
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+  ABSOLUTISM, 12, 30.
+  Abstract conceptions, 219.
+  Action, as a measure of belief, 3, 29-30.
+  Actual world narrower than ideal, 202.
+  Agnosticism, 54, 81, 126.
+  Allen, G., 231, 235, 256.
+  Alps, leap in the, 59, 96.
+  Alternatives, 156, 161, 202, 269.
+  Ambiguity of choice, 156; of being, 292.
+  Anaesthetic revelation, 294.
+  A priori truths, 268.
+  Apparitions, 311.
+  Aristotle, 249.
+  Associationism, in Ethics, 186.
+  Atheist and acorn, 160.
+  Authorities in Ethics, 204; _versus_ champions, 207.
+  Axioms, 268.
+
+  BAGEHOT, 232.
+  Bain, 71, 91.
+  Balfour, 9.
+  Being, its character, 142; in Hegel, 281.
+  Belief, 59.  See 'Faith.'
+  Bellamy, 188.
+  Bismarck, 228.
+  Block-universe, 292.
+  Blood, B. P., vi, 294.
+  Brockton murderer, 160, 177.
+  Bunsen, 203, 274.
+
+  CALVINISM, 45.
+  Carlyle, 42, 44, 45, 73, 87, 173.
+  'Casuistic question' in Ethics, 198.
+  Causality, 147.
+  Causation, Hume's doctrine of, 278.
+  Census of hallucinations, 312.
+  Certitude, 13, 30.
+  Chance, 149, 153-9, 178-180.
+  Choice, 156.
+  Christianity, 5, 14.
+  Cicero, 92.
+  City of dreadful night, 35.
+  Clark, X., 50.
+  Classifications, 67.
+  Clifford, 6, 7, 10, 14, 19, 21, 92, 230.
+  Clive, 228.
+  Clough, 6.
+  Common-sense, 270.
+  Conceptual order of world, 118.
+  Conscience, 186-8.
+  Contradiction, as used by Hegel, 275-277.
+  Contradictions of philosophers, 16.
+  Crillon, 62
+  Criterion of truth, 15, 16; in Ethics, 205.
+  Crude order of experience, 118.
+  Crystal vision, 314.
+  Cycles in Nature, 220, 223-4.
+
+  DARWIN, 221, 223, 226, 320.
+  Data, 271.
+  Davey, 313.
+  Demands, as creators of value, 201.
+  'Determination is negation,' 286-290.
+  Determinism, 150; the Dilemma of;
+    145-183; 163, 166; hard and soft, 149.
+  Dogs, 57.
+  Dogmatism, 12.
+  Doubt, 54, 109.
+  Dupery, 27.
+
+  EASY-GOING mood, 211, 213.
+  Elephant, 282.
+  Emerson, 23, 175.
+  Empiricism, i., 12, 14, 17, 278.
+  England, 228.
+  Environment, its relation to great men,
+    223, 226; to great thoughts, 250.
+  Error, 163; duty of avoiding, 18.
+  Essence of good and bad, 200-1.
+  Ethical ideals, 200.
+  Ethical philosophy, 208, 210, 216.
+  Ethical standards, 205; diversity of, 200.
+  Ethics, its three questions, 185.
+  Evidence, objective, 13, 15, 16.
+  Evil, 46, 49, 161, 190.
+  Evolution, social, 232, 237; mental, 245.
+  Evolutionism, its test of right, 98-100.
+  Expectancy, 77-80.
+  Experience, crude, _versus_ rationalized,
+    118; tests our faiths, 105.
+
+  FACTS, 271.
+  Faith, that truth exists, 9, 23; in our
+    fellows, 24-5; school boys' definition of, 29;
+    a remedy for pessimism, 60, 101; religious, 56;
+    defined, 90; defended against 'scientific'
+    objections, viii-xi, 91-4; may
+    create its own verification, 59, 96-103.
+  Familiarity confers rationality, 76.
+  Fatalism, 88.
+  Fiske, 255, 260.
+  Fitzgerald, 160.
+  Freedom, 103, 271.
+  Free-will, 103, 145, 157.
+
+  GALTON, 242.
+  Geniuses, 226, 229.
+  Ghosts, 315,
+  Gnosticism, 138-140, 165, 169.
+  God, 61, 68; of Nature, 43; the most
+    adequate object for our mind, 116,
+    122; our relations to him, 134-6;
+    his providence, 182; his demands
+    create obligation, 193; his function
+    in Ethics, 212-215.
+  Goethe, 111.
+  Good, 168, 200, 201.
+  Goodness, 190.
+  Great-man theory of history, 232.
+  Great men and their environment, 216-254.
+  Green, 206,
+  Gryzanowski, 240.
+  Gurney, 306, 307, 311.
+  Guthrie, 309.
+  Guyau, 188.
+
+  HALLUCINATIONS, Census of, 312.
+  Happiness, 33.
+  Harris, 282.
+  Hegel, 72, 263; his excessive claims,
+    272; his use of negation, 273, 290;
+    of contradiction, 274, 276; on being,
+    281; on otherness, 283; on infinity,
+    284; on identity, 285; on determination,
+    289; his ontological emotion, 297.
+  Hegelisms, on some, 263-298.
+  Heine, 203.
+  Helmholtz, 85, 91.
+  Henry IV., 62.
+  Herbart, 280.
+  Hero-worship, 261.
+  Hinton, C. H., 15.
+  Hinton, J., 101.
+  Hodgson, R., 308.
+  Hodgson, S, H., 10.
+  Honor, 50.
+  Hugo, 213.
+  Human mind, its habit of abstracting, 219.
+  Hume on causation, 278.
+  Huxley, 6, 10, 92.
+  Hypnotism, 302, 309.
+  Hypotheses, live or dead, 2; their
+    verification, 105; of genius, 249.
+
+  IDEALS, 200; their conflict, 202.
+  Idealism, 89, 291.
+  Identity, 285.
+  Imperatives, 211.
+  Importance of individuals, the, 255-262;
+    of things, its ground, 257.
+  Indeterminism, 150.
+  Individual differences, 259.
+  Individuals, the importance of, 255-262
+  Infinite, 284.
+  Intuitionism, in Ethics, 186, 189.
+
+  JEVONS, 249.
+  Judgments of regret, 159.
+
+  KNOWING, 12.
+  Knowledge, 85.
+
+  LEAP on precipice, 59, 96.
+  Leibnitz, 43.
+  Life, is it worth living, 32-62.
+
+  MAGGOTS, 176-7.
+  Mahdi, the, 2, 6.
+  Mallock, 32, 183.
+  Marcus Aurelius, 41.
+  Materialism, 126.
+  'Maybes,' 59.
+  Measure of good, 205.
+  Mediumship, physical, 313, 314.
+  Melancholy, 34, 39, 42.
+  Mental evolution, 246; structure, 114, 117.
+  Mill, 234.
+  Mind, its triadic structure, 114, 117;
+    its evolution, 246; its three departments,
+    114, 122, 127-8.
+  Monism, 279.
+  Moods, the strenuous and the easy, 211, 213
+  Moralists, objective and subjective, 103-108.
+  Moral judgments, their origin, 186-8;
+    obligation, 192-7; order, 193;
+    philosophy, 184-5.
+  Moral philosopher and the moral life, the, 184-215.
+  Murder, 178.
+  Murderer, 160, 177.
+  Myers, 308, 315, 320.
+  Mystical phenomena, 300.
+  Mysticism, 74.
+
+  NAKED, the, 281.
+  Natural theology, 40-4.
+  Nature, 20, 41-4, 56.
+  Negation, as used by Hegel, 273.
+  Newman, 10.
+  Nitrous oxide, 294.
+  Nonentity, 72.
+
+  OBJECTIVE evidence, 13, 15, 16.
+  Obligation, 192-7.
+  Occult phenomena, 300; examples of, 323.
+  Omar Khayam, 160.
+  Optimism, 60, 102, 163.
+  Options offered to belief, 3, 11, 27.
+  Origin of moral judgments, 186-8.
+  'Other,' in Hegel, 283.
+
+  PARSIMONY, law of, 132.
+  Partaking, 268, 270, 275, 291.
+  Pascal's wager, 5, 11.
+  Personality, 324, 327.
+  Pessimism, 39, 40, 47, 60, 100, 101, 161, 167.
+  Philosophy, 65; depends on personal
+    demands, 93; makes world unreal,
+    39; seeks unification, 67-70; the
+    ultimate, 110; its contradictions, 16.
+  Physiology, its _prestige_, 112.
+  Piper, Mrs., 314, 319.
+  Plato, 268
+  Pluralism, vi, 151, 178, 192, 264, 267.
+  Positivism, 54, 108
+  Possibilities, 151, 181-2, 292, 294.
+  Postulates, 91-2.
+  Powers, our powers as congruous with the world, 86.
+  Providence, 180.
+  Psychical research, what it has accomplished, 299-327;
+    Society for, 303, 305, 325.
+  Pugnacity, 49, 51.
+
+  QUESTIONS, three, in Ethics, 185.
+
+  RATIONALISM, 12, 30.
+  Rationality, the sentiment of, 63-110;
+    limits of theoretic, 65-74; mystical,
+    74; practical, 82-4; postulates of, 152.
+
+  Rational order of world, 118, 125, 147.
+  Reflex action and theism, 111-144.
+  Reflex action defined, 113; it refutes gnosticism, 140-1.
+  Regret, judgments of, 159.
+  Religion, natural, 52; of humanity, 198.
+  Religious hypothesis, 25, 28, 51.
+  Religious minds, 40.
+  Renan, 170, 172.
+  Renouvier, 143.
+  Risks of belief or disbelief, ix, 26; rules for minimizing, 94.
+  Romantic view of world, 324.
+  Romanticism, 172-3.
+  Rousseau, 4, 33, 87.
+  Ruskin, 37.
+
+  SALTER, 62.
+  Scepticism, 12, 23, 109.
+  Scholasticism, 13.
+  Schopenhauer, 72, 169.
+  Science, 10, 21; its recency, 52-4;
+    due to peculiar desire, 129-132, 147;
+    its disbelief of the occult, 317-320;
+    its negation of personality, 324-6;
+    cannot decide question of determinism, 152.
+  Science of Ethics, 208-210.
+  Selection of great men, 226.
+  Sentiment of rationality, 63.
+  Seriousness, 86.
+  Shakespeare, 32, 235.
+  Sidgwick, 303, 307.
+  Sigwart, 120, 148.
+  Society for psychical research, 303; its 'Proceedings,' 305, 325.
+  Sociology, 259.
+  Solitude, moral, 191.
+  Space, 265.
+  Spencer, 168, 218, 232-235, 246, 251, 260.
+  Stephen, L., 1.
+  Stephen, Sir J., 1, 30, 212.
+  Stoics, 274.
+  Strenuous mood, 211, 213.
+  Subjectivism, 165, 170.
+  'Subliminal self,' 315, 321.
+  Substance, 80.
+  Suicide, 38, 50, 60.
+  System in philosophy, 13, 185, 199.
+
+  TELEPATHY, 10, 309.
+  Theism, and reflex action, 111-144.
+  Theism, 127, 134-6; see 'God.'
+  Theology, natural, 41; Calvinistic, 45.
+  Theoretic faculty, 128.
+  Thought-transference, 309.
+  Thomson, 35-7, 45, 46.
+  Toleration, 30.
+  Tolstoi, 188.
+  'Totality,' the principle of, 277.
+  Triadic structure of mind, 123.
+  Truth, criteria of, 15; and error, 18; moral, 190-1.
+
+  UNITARIANS, 126, 133.
+  Unknowable, the, 68, 81.
+  Universe = M + x, 101; its rationality, 125, 137.
+  Unseen world, 51, 54, 56, 61.
+  Utopias, 168.
+
+  VALUE, judgments of, 103.
+  Variations, in heredity, etc., 225, 249.
+  Vaudois, 48.
+  Veddah, 258.
+  Verification of theories, 95, 105-8.
+  Vivisection, 58.
+
+  WALDENSES, 47-9.
+  Wallace, 239, 304,
+  Whitman, 33, 64, 74.
+  Wordsworth, 60.
+  World, its ambiguity, 76; the invisible,
+    51, 54, 56; two orders of, 118.
+  Worth, judgments of, 103.
+  Wright, 52.
+
+  X., Miss, 314.
+
+  ZOLA, 172.
+  Zoellner, 15.
+
+
+
+
+By the Same Author
+
+
+THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.
+  2 vols.  8vo.  New York: Henry Holt & Co.  London;
+  Macmillan & Co.  1890
+
+PSYCHOLOGY: BRIEFER COURSE (TEXT BOOK).
+  12mo.  New York: Henry Holt & Co.  London:
+  Macmillan & Co.  1892.
+
+THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS
+  IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.
+  12mo.  New York, London.  Bombay and Calcutta:
+  Longmans, Green & Co.  1897.
+
+HUMAN IMMORTALITY: TWO SUPPOSED
+  OBJECTIONS TO THE DOCTRINE.
+  16mo.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.  1898.
+
+TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND
+  TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS.
+  12mo.  New York: Henry Holt & Co.  London,
+  Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co.  1899.
+
+THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE:
+  A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE.
+  Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902.
+  8vo.  New York, London, Bombay and Calcutta:
+  Longmans, Green & Co.  1902.
+
+PRAGMATISM: A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD
+  WAYS OF THINKING: POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY.
+  New York, London, Bombay and Calcutta:
+  Longmans, Green & Co.  1907.
+
+A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE: HIBBERT
+  LECTURES AT MANCHESTER COLLEGE ON THE
+  PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY.
+  New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta:
+  Longmans, Green & Co.  1909.
+
+THE MEANING OF TRUTH; A SEQUEL TO "PRAGMATISM."
+  New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta;
+  Longmans, Green & Co.  1909.
+
+THE LITERARY REMAINS OF HENRY JAMES
+  Edited, with an Introduction, by WILLIAM JAMES.
+  With Portrait.  Crown 8vo.  Boston: Houghton
+  Mifflin Co.  1885.
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+Transcriber's notes:
+
+Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly
+braces, e.g. {99}.  They have been located where page breaks occurred
+in the original book, in accordance with Project Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99.
+For its Index, a page number has been placed only at the start of that
+section.  In the HTML version of this book, page numbers are placed in
+the left margin.
+
+Footnotes are indicated by numbers enclosed in square brackets, e.g.
+[2].  They have been renumbered sequentially and moved to the end of
+their respective chapters.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Will to Believe, by William James
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILL TO BELIEVE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 26659.txt or 26659.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/2/6/6/5/26659/
+
+Produced by Al Haines. (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/26659.zip b/26659.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4dc4932
--- /dev/null
+++ b/26659.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..83dc40f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #26659 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26659)