ADH 6649 





Armchair Philosophy 

by 

DANIEL A. LORD. S.J. 

Copyright 1918 

THE QUEEN'S WORK. INC. 



. d 

Imprimi potest: 

J oseph H. Rockwell, S. J. 

Praep. Provo Maryl.-Neo Ebor. 

Nihil obstat: 

Arthur J . Scanlan, S. T. D. 

Censor Librorum 

Imprimatur: 

Joseph F. Mooney (Adm.) 

New York 

November 15, 1918 

ANY FINANCIAL PROFIT 1nade by 

the Central Office of the Sodality 

will be used for the advancement 

of the Sodality Movement and the 

cause of Catholic Action. 

Copyright 1918 

The Queen's Work, Inc . 



TO 

MY FATHER AND MOTHER 





ARMC.HAIR PHILOSOPHY 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 

I Armchair Philosophy........ . 1 

II Intellectual Hara-Kiri...................................... 8 

III The World of Sight and Other Senses ... _.n .•.... 14 

. IV Our Futuristic Senses......................................... .. ........... 21 

V Beyond the Realm of Sense......... ........ ... ..... ........... 29 

VI Necessary Egotism........................... . 36 

VII The Pilot of the SouL... ................ .. .. ...... ... ..... 44 

VIII Dynamiting the Moral World.. 51 

IX The Eternal "Whence?' '........... .... ........... ............... ...... 57 

X A God of Contradictions............ ............. ........... 66 

XI World Builders....... .. ............. . ...... .... .... 73 

XII The Dream of Immortality......... ..n. .. .n. 80 

XIII Moral Immorality ........ . 

XIV Our Friend the Utilitarian. 

XV A Cure for Caprice .. ....... . 

XVI The Reign of Law....... .......... . 

XVII The Philosophical Rules ..... . 

XVIII The Final Goal........... ......... . .n'" 

. . 88 

95 

.102 

... 109 

..116 

....... 123 





I 

Annchair Philosophy 

W HEN a philosopher of the impossible or the hnprobable wants to be really disdainful 
toward the philosophy of an opponent, he labels it 

" armchair philosophy. " The epithet is more or less 

common. Every once in a while you hear of some 

philosopher- pulling up his window shades, glanc-

ing out at the bright world that flits gaily/past his 

door, and then uttering some caustic thoughts on 

the subject of common sense. 

That is the inevitable prelude to remarks on the 

subject of armchair philosophy. Or it may be that 

he picks up in a dark bookshop, where as a rule 

there is not to be found any tome weighing less 

than two pounds, some little volume filled with 

hopeful, optimistic reflections on. the life and des-

tiny of man. Whereupon he is sure to turn up his 

nose, roll his shortsighted eyes toward where 

heaven used to . be located, and mutter under his 

breath the pet condemnation. 

The condemnatioIi contains the quintessence of 

contempt. To refer to a philosophy as something 

that originated in an armchair is, in the eyes of 

men of this type, to brand it as hopelessly puerile, 

out of harmony with science and its laws, and 

bearing to genuine philosophy the relation of 

homemade fudge to, bread and beefsteak. For gen-

1 



2 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

uine philosophy must reek either of the laboratory 

where specimens and the experimenters alone are 

welcome, or of some library from which have been 

excluded all the comforts of life. Genuine philoso-

phy must subtly suggest test tubes and micro-

scopes even while it may be in opposition to any 

information ever g,ained through , scientific ,appa-

ratus; it must be . ,very mysterious, technically 

obstruse, an,d by preference , startlingly at vari~ 
ance with commo~ experience. Philosophy has its 
natural shrine in auster'e studies in which the light 

of heaven is. tolerated but not encouraged, or in 

laborat~ries where t~e perfume of chlorine,is pre-
ferred to that of the rose. 

To suggest mildly that philosophy might be 

suited for consumption in an armchair to the 

pleasant accompanilnent of light gray smoke and 

fur-lined slippers is ' to debase the queen of sci-

ences to the level of best sellers and magazines 
that sport pretty-girl covers. . 

When you come to the rub, I r'ather doubt 

whether most men would enjoy their firesides or 

their good cigars or their slippers very long in 

company with some of our most fashionable p4i-

losophers. Fancy any man's really enjoying the 

discovery that he does not actually see the things 

that he thinks he sees, that he manufactures an 

unreal wife and children out of his own evolving 

spirit. Fancy a man's drawing long satisfying 

puffs out of his cigar as he reads that the only posi-

tive feeling is that of pain, that "we ought to be 

miserable, and we are so," and that the highest 

point of happiness is aimihilation. Does it not 



ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 3 

make the gas logs look brighter and more cheerful 

when one learns that one has no free will, that 

one's great-g-reat-grandfather was a chattering 

ape, and that one really ought to be up and fight-

ing might and main toward the superhuman ~ 

The one consolation about these current philos-

ophies- of gloom and contradiction is that few -

people are stupid enough really to believe them. 

They are ingenious, clever bits of sophistry; but 

the man who attempts them from the vantage 

point of an armchair is more likely than not to end 

by knocking the ashes off his cigar, pitching the -

volume where the dust will be sure to find it, and 

going out to live his life on lines that, judged by 

the aforesaid standards, are most unphilosophical. 

Unquestionably a large percentage of the phi-

losophers whose writings are current today are 

making the egregious mistake of supposing that 

no truth ever came out of any other room in the 

architectural world save out of a laboratory, and 

that any statement which can be grasped withouJ; 

the aid of logarithms or a series of mental acro-

batics is on the face of it too childish to employ the 

cultured mind even-long enough to condemn it. So 

the philosopher in the armchair and the reader in 

the armchair fall alike under the contemptuous 

glance. Armchairs and philosophers have no com-
mon denominator. ' 

Let me begin with a confession. I am seated at 

this moment in an armchair. It is a very hand-
some one, plain wood of an unclassified variety, 

with a leather seat that is marked by an incurable 



4 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

sag, and an iron brace that is a concession to age 

and long service. In just such a chair, to complete 
the humiliating confession, I have studied what-

ever of systematic philosophy I may have acquired. 

But you must not imagine that the philosophy 

learned in my armchair came done up in a gift 

package with a red ribbon and sprig of holly. It is 
the philosophy that made Aristotle's pupils gather 

from the ends of the earth to fill the Lyceum. 

Thomas 'of Acquin wedded it to Christian thought 

and raised it fo something almost sacramental. It 
is the philosophy that for centuries was taught 

wherever philosophy was worshiped; and not too 

long ago, after a period of exile, it crossed once 

more to England with Cardinal Mercier. It is a 
philosophy which has eagerly taken up the best in 

scientific thought and discovery. It has gone far-
ther into the essence of things than has any other 

philosophy ever synthesized by man. But above 

all it is philosophy which lays its roots in an 

almost divine common sense and which is proudly 

and fearlessly the champion of human nature. 

Often as I sat in my own armcha.ir, I have, 

thought of the many men and women the world 

over who likewise sit in armchairs. T~ere is 
milady, who, when the children have been. dis-

patched to school and the house has been set face 

about, sinks into her wicker basket chair in the 

warm sun parlor and reaches for a book. There is 

the lord and master, who after a long day at his 

desk fits his body into his favorite leather lounging 

chair and, after a long puff to assure himself that 

his cigar is burning properly, runs his eye over the 



ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 5 

library table for the volume he. began last night. 

Why after all should there not be armchair philos-

ophy, since so much of our life is spent in just 

such bless-the-man-who-invented-them comfort-

able pieces of furniture 1 Why act as if philosophy 

were the mind food of an intellectual elite wearing 

glasses of extra thickness and afflicted with a 

mania for playing the various kinds of jujitsu that 

have various kinds of technical names 1 Why treat 

philosophy as false simply because it is simrl,E;l ~ . 

Mr. G. K. Chesterton, a delightful philosopher 

of the armchair, did much to reinstate in his 

propel' dignity the man who writes all his letters 

before his name. To Mr. Chesterton's farseeing . 

mind, I'm sure; Mr. P. H. D. Brown had an intel-

lect quite as capable of attaining truth as had Mr~ 
Brown, Ph.D. And the fact that there are so 

many more P. H. D. Browns than there are 

Browns, Ph.D. would have made the former more 

worthy of the· late G. K. 's attention. 

So these chapters on armchair ppilosophy are 

addressed to the antelettered-it is unfair to say 

unlettered-men and women who like myself sit 

in armchairs. Philosophy is after all an analysis 

of life in its ultimate causes and destiny, and these 

men and women are living lives of tremendous 

import, and living them in the very midst of a riot 
of life. 

The philosophies of so many writers of the past 

century and a half have just this to condemn them: 

They are out of touch with life. Many a philos-

opher who holds that there ,is no such thing as 

matter in the world does not know what it means 



6 ARMCHAIR ~HII;OSOPHY 

to ,worry about tomorrow's supply of buns and 

beefsteak, not to mention Charlotte's new party 

gown and the leg Algernon dislocated during a 

football game. It is cne thing to sit in a study-

the electric lights switched off-and concoct vast 

arguments to prove the theory that we have no 

free will; it is quite another thing to set one's 

jaws and fight off for the sake of a wife and baby 

at home the allurements of vice or an, inherited 

tendency to drink. 

These philosophers have looked toO' long through 

the microscopes to see anything larger than an 

amoeba. They have gazed so long at the stars that 

our little earth has slipped from ' their range of 

vision. It is hard to convince some of them that 

anything obvious-like love and babies, bricks and 

beefsteaks, the facts that two and two make tqur 

and that a thing cannot be and not be at the ~a:me 
time-is true. ,A , little touch of nature, applied 

preferably in a way to rough one up, is often a 

splendid antidote for philosophical speculations 

which are spun out O'f star dust and the tenuous 
vapors of Mars. 

Men and women often sit in armchairs because 

they are weary with the battle we call life. They 

are flesh and blood and soul, not theories; their 

long experience has made them keen appraisers of 

the true and the false. Philosophical jargon they 

have never learned; but they can understand the 

language of smiles and quickly raised eyebrows, 

of silent lips and set jaws. They know that a phi-

losophy which does not fit with life's necessities 



ABMCHAIB PHILOSOPHY 7 

and which contradicts the cold, brutal facts of 

their experience may be as fascinating as phan-

toms of a heat-oppressed brain and yet offer no 

explanation of the riddles that underlie all life. 

If then my armchair philosophy, which is not of 

course mine but the heritage of the great Catholic 

world, can do anything, it can explain the riddles. 

at which modern philosophers vainly strain. As 

such an explanation do I offer it to all who are my 

compamons III arms . 

. ' 



II 

Intellectual Hara-kiri 

SKEPTIOISM, the theory that we can be certain of nothing, has-like flowing whiskers or.Gre-
cian fillets - its periods of vogue. The phrase 

"Really I believe in nothing, don't you know" 

carries with it a dashing hardihood that has fas-

cinated more or less intensely certain types of 

minds from the ages lost in Egyptian darkness to 

our own days of colleges and jive. Pyrrh0 and 

Arcesilaus made universal doubt the smart philos-

ophy among the elite of Greece. Montaigne, whom 

our own O. Henry referred to as his bully old pal, 

spun this theory through the pages of his fascinat-

ing essays, In England, David Hume held posi-

tively that one can be positivB about nothing. And 

a skeptical attitude toward all truth is not at all 

uncommon even in this present day .. 

Yet modern science, with its positive assurance 

that immutable laws underlie all things, has done 

much to make ridiculous the man who doubts about 

pverything, who doubts thllt he doubts, and who is 

not quite sure that he doubts that he doubts. Ibsen 

could hold that not even on the moon two and two 
make four; but if he had gone the inevitable step 

further and doubted if anything was true, he 

would have been considered to have violated what 

is at present philosophical good form. The uni-

versal skeptic is not uncommon, it is true, but he 

8 



INTELLECTUAL HARAKIRI 

is rather a curious relic of a past age when men 

spun long arguments to prov~ that an arrow shot 
from a bow could not by any possible chance move 

toward its target. Many modern instruments of 

war somehow do not fit in with theories like that. 

It is absolutely necessary to begin our essays in 

armchair philosophy by assuring ourselves that 

we are certain about a great many things. With 

this once established, we have a fine bedrock 

foundation for our structure. 

The most cursory glance is enough to convince 

us that all our lives we act on the supposition that 

we are certain about any number of things. The 

man who acted otherwise wOlild be worse off than 

the man who stood still. When we arise in the 

morning, we are certain that the sun will give 

forth light, and we put our feet out of bed in the 

calm assurance that they will find a floor under the 

bed. We splash around in our bath, assuming with 

certainty that the water will not suddenly burst 

into flames. We eat our breakfast in the certainty 

that the eggs and bacon and cereal and rolls are 

necessary conditions of our bodily strength. We 

make a five-cent purchase, tender the salesman a 

quarter, and are certain that the twenty-cents 

change plus five cents make the fourth part of a 

dollar. 

Downtown we dodge a swiftly moving car be-

cause we are sure that a heavy object hurts the 

object that it hits. We enter our office building 

with the certainty that our office has not moved 

itself to a higher floor or dropped down the eleva-

tor shaft. All day we labor at our des~ in the cer-



10 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

tainty that the earth will revolve without our 

worrying about it, that the letters we read have a 

real significance, that the letters we write will be 

intelligible to the recipients, that we are serving 

our loved ones with each tick of the clock. When 

we come home in the evening, we are certain that 

food is not poison, that armchairs are not to be. 

used as tennis rackets, and that books are intended 

to be read and not smoked in a pipe. Life, even 

the most commonplace aspects of it, is grounded 

on a certainty that the average man would never 

be stupid enough to question. 

Not so to my grave philosophical skeptic. He 

doubts everything. He is certain-or he says 80-

about nothing. Perhaps when he puts hIS feet out 

of bed, they will hang over the brink of the uni-

verse j the water may turn his Lath into a minia-

ture inferno j life may be sustained without food; 

twenty cents plus five cents may by some trick of 

elastic currency total a dollar j the oncoming trol-

ley may pass over his form with the lightness of a 

zephyr. How is he to be sure1 Poor chap! he lives 

in a continuous mental tremble for fear that the 

world will suddenly crumble beneath his feet. For 

who knows but that, like the children's moon, the 

world is made bf green cheese and is honeycombed 

with mice¥ 

Certainly if any theory ever ueserved the title 

of intellectual hara-kiri, it is this theory of uni-

versal doubt. Like some Japanese suicide this 

theory rips . itself open with its own knife. One 

prefers for the good name of .mankind to believe 



INTELLECTUAL HARAKIRI 11 

that it is after all a mere mental pose. Our philo-

sophical skeptic fights against all the patent facts 

of life furiously and with all his subtle acumen. 

"I am certain of nothing," he summarizes. 

Argument with such a man is like fox-trotting 

with an eel. But you attempt it. "Are you quite 

sure of that?" you inquire, ingratiatingly. " Abso-

lutely," he answers. "There!" you retort, in tri-

umph. "At least you are certain that your theory 

is correct, so you really do not doubt everything." 

He stammers. "That was a slip," he says. "I 

should rather say that I am not certain even of my 

theory. " . , , Yet you are certain that you have a 

theory, and you are certain that you doubt it; you 

are sure that such a person as yourself exists to 

doubt the theory, and you are quite sure that other 

people do not hold that sort .of nonsense. Anyway 

how dare you fight for a theory which you are sure 

is only doubtful 1 " To quote one of Wather Ben-

son's young Londoners, "Isn't it all dreadful 
tush 1." 

As a working hypothesis or a theory of life uni-

versal doubt would make the Mock Turtle smile. 

"Be sure you are right, and then go ahead" would 

be revamped by the skeptic to read, "Be sure you 

are right; and since you never can be sure of any-

thing, do not dare move. " In the quiet of his room 

the universal skeptic is quite sure that he is cer-

tain of nothing. But just dare him to leap from an 

airplane on the supposition that he might fall up 

and not down. Hand him a red parasol and invite 

him to walk in a pasture, .where grazes a bull 



12 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

'blessed with sharp horns and vicious disposition. 

Suggest that he try doing without food on the sup-

position that food may not be necessary for life. 

Pay him for fifty-dollars' worth of goods with two 

ten-dollar bills, explaining that you are not sure 

but what two ten-dollar bills add up to fifty dollars. 

In an instant his fine theorizing evaporates like 

alcohol left in the sun. Life and his theory lie in 

different planetary systems. 

Philosopher of the armchair, I am not waging 

warfare on tin soldiers. Men have existed and do 

, exist who persuade themselves that they are cer-

tain of nothing. And their theory undermines the 

whole edifice of philsosphical certainty~ 

The chief difficulty in the way of the universal 

skeptic's sanity is his unwillingness to accept the 

obvious. To his mind philosophers are the only 

ones with any claims to knowledge. In the past 

man has made some rather large mistakes, believ-

ing for example that the world is flat. In conse-

quence the skeptic doubts the vallie of all the 

truths grounded in human experience. 

The sane philosopher on the contrary does not 

reject and deride the, obvious; he examines it 

further, discovers the foundations on which it 

rests, and drives it to its ultimate conclusions. He 

does not claim to be an intellectual Balboa stand-

ing on the shores of a hitherto unknown sea. He 

knows that we are certain about many things, and 

he goes further in his effort to prove the sanity of 

this conviction. The philosopher who in the pur-

suit of truth spurns the natural certainty of all 



INTELLECTUAL HARAKIRI 

men is simply diving into a cave open only at one 

end. 

Universal doubt is then contradictory as a 

theory, and as a practical basis for action it is 

about as useful as are handcuffs on a juggler. We 

are so certain of some facts that we build our lives 

upon them. The amusing part of it is that the 

most blatant of skeptics is ultimately forced to do 

precisely the same things that the rest of man-

kind do. 

Another point to be insisted on is that any phil-

osophical theory that would .lead us back to the 

point where we could be certain of nothing is on 

the face of it ·false and destructive. Men make 

mistakes, it is true, when without sufficient reflec-

tion they form snap judgments; they are often 

inclined to give a ready assent without investigat-

ing the reasons which . should . lie back of every 

affirmation. But for all tllat our minds are blessed 

with a certainty that no intellectual sleight of hand 

can ever cause to disappear. Any theory then that 

endangers the certainty without which we cannot 

so much as raise a finger, pet a baby, or converse 

with a friend must end in the philosophical scrap 

heap. By its side an ox team or a high-wheel 

bicycle is a tremendous vehicle of progress. 



· '. 

III 

The World of Sight and Other Senses 

W E do not need the poets to tell us that the world is beautifuL Rather the spirit which 
moves poets to symbolize human emotions in 

flowers and waterfalls and the impulse which 

causes artists to reproduce in marble and on can-

vas the loveliness of nature are merely the highest 

forms of an appreciation latent in the dullest 

hearts. Burns and Shelley, Claude and Turner 

were only the high priests who paid to nature the 

tributes which all men feel are its due. 

And when tellers of fairy tales try to conjure up 

an enchanted paradise in which sleeps the be-

witched and bewitching princess, they can do so 

only in words whose meanings are first known 

from sights and sounds and tastes and perfumes 

that reach our senses. The very wonders of the' 

Apocalypse are the glorified splendors which the 

tangible world offers to our unceasing delight. 

Noone is silly enough to contest that we all have 

sensatj.ons of beautiful objects and enchanting 

sounds and delicate scents. If we didn't have 

these sensations, then why would we patronize art 

galleries and symphony concerts and flower shows ? 

No more does anyone deny that we see toads and 

hear factory whistles and scent tanneries. But 

since the dawn of philosophy men have fought 

14 



THE WORLD OF SIGHT AND OTHER SENSES 15 

about the causes of these sensations, and they are 

fighting about them today. 

In broadest outliile the contestants fall into two 

classes: those who in accordance with common 

sense 'claim that there are real, solid objects out-

side of us that correspond to our sensations j and 

the idealists, who in the face of experience main-

tain that sensation is the product of the soul alone, 

because nothing exists outside . of the soul which 

is thinking. There are no mountains and streams, 

no fair faces and muscular arms, no houses or 

horses or motors. One thing alone exists-spirit j 

and spirit creates for itself without any real exist-

ence on their part all the objects that we call 

material. From our own bodies, which are mere 

illusions, to the sun in the heavens, which has no 

real entity, every gram of · matter is the product 

of the thinking mind. If all thought were suddenly 

to cease, ' the material world with all its beauty 

would vanish like the dream of the sleeper sud-

denly aroused from his slumber~ According to the 
idealists my spirit is so ordered by nature that it 

produces for itself the sensations of color, sound, 

taste, hardness and softness, and the like. I am 

the world's creator. 

By way of experiment in this spiritual view of 

matter I thrust my finger into the shaving water 

which has been unexpectedly heated beyond boil-

ing point. There is really no shaving water at all j 

my spirit by its peculiar and. uncontrollable ten-

dency produces in some way the sensation caused 

by a hot fluid. Looking at my finger, I really do 

not see ' it blistered j my spirit subjectively pro-



16 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

duces the impression of a very red and very throb-

bing digit. Like a hurt boy I thrust my finger into 

my mouth, and the peculiar hot, boiled taste I 

experience is not the result of my finger's acting 

on my palate; my spirit alone is responsible for 

the fiat, disappointing sensation. Neither water, 

nor finger, nor burn, nor palate exists. 

Put briefiy, in the view of the idealist, souls or 

spirits alone exist; matter, such as shaving water 

and burnt fingers, though it appears to be the 

object of sense, is just a degree less real than fairy 

godmothers and Februaries with thirty-one days. 

Our souls are mighty workshops which by their 

nature produce constantly and uniformly the 

experiences we call sensations. Like spiders we 

spin out of our own substance the world in which 

we live. Recognizing the tremendous difficulties 

of this system, certain idealists, since they deny 

the existence of any material, extended 'Objects, 

hold that God acts directly on the soul to produce 

the modifications that we call sensations. 

If ever there was a darkroom, anti-common-

sense philosophy, it is the denial of the whole 

sensible world. On the basis of such a theory it is 

simply futile to explain as simple a faat as a fall-

ing brick or a scrambled egg, much less Urban's 

scenery or the Grand Canyon. 

Our idealist decides to visit the Chicago Art 

Institute to see Breton's" The Song of the Lark." 

If the soul is the cause 'Of all sensation, he might 

save himself the trouble of shaving his wholly 

spiritual face and getting dressed to make the 

trip. Reclining in his Morris chair, he might make 



THE WORLD OF SIGHT AND OTHER SENSES 17 

his spirit produce the masterpiece. As a matter of 

fact he is aware that a picture as it is really pro-

duced by his imagination in the quiet of his room 

differs from the original more completely than a 

twelfth carbon copy differs from the upper type-

written sheet - differs at least as much as the 

original picture differs from a living peasant girl 

and a singing lark. 

So he shaves-though shaving is an operation 

difficult to explain in spirits-and then takes a 

south side "L" train-most annoyingly and un-

spiritually noisy-to the art institute. 

N ow how does his soul as it was in his own room 

differ from his soul in the presence of the picture? 

If the picture itself is spiritual, it can help not one 

whit toward the production of the sensations which 

would be caused by the actual picture. If his own 

soul is the cause of that delightful experience which 

he calls viewing a picture, why could not his soul 

produce the sensations in any other place except 

where the picture seems to be? Why did the 

enthusiastic student who is working near him in 

the gallery have to journey from San Francisco 

to see a picture which in all essentials his own soul 

produces 7 Why will "generations still unborn" 

experience this particular picture only when they 

are before the picture and in no place else? If 

there is no striking mass of color and lines called 

"The Song of the Lark," if M. Breton simply 

fancied he dabbled in paint, if the Chicago Art 

Institute bought something which really has no 

existence outside of the thinking mind, then cer-



18 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

tainly men have been playing a gigantic and 

decidedly exasperating game of makebelieve. 

We say that the beauty of children's faces is 

often in the eyes of the parents; the idealists go it 

a bit stronger and assert that children have no 

faces at all. 

A wedding couple travel long miles of rail to 

spend a few weeks in the Adirondacks, where they 

fish for spiritual fish which they weigh in spirituai 

scales, climb diaphanous mountains in very tough 

(I could pun on the "sole' ') boots, and return 

home still dropping: intangible rice from nonexist-

ing suitcases. Before the tremendous act of crea-

tion achieved in the minds of . this love-oblivious 

pair, God's act of creation becomes relatively the 

act of a careless child. According to the idealists, 

not one tremendous' being, but two very imperfect 

beings, and with them all who were present in the 

Adirondacks, produced the wonders of sight and 

sound that made their honeymoon a dream of joy. 

More than that: This same creation has been 

going on since the beginning of . time. My mind 

produces the Rockies, fills the heavens with stars, 

stands with Shakespeare as the author of "Ham-

let, " and is as much the composer of" Lohengrin' , 

as was Wagner. 

If this be true, my whole internal consciousness 
is a continuous Ii€). For I never for a moment 

believe anything of the sort, nor can all the argu-

ments from those of th€) Neo-platonist down 

through Fichte and Hegel to Mrs. Eddy ever con-
vince me that it is true . . 



THE WORLD OF SIGHT AND OTHER SENSES 19 

Columbus stands on the .sh.ores of America. And 

since according to the idealist there is no reality 

but the thinking ego or "I," he not only discovers 

America but manufactures it. One would like to 

know whether according to this theory there ex-

isted before the microscope discovered them the 

cells of the human body, or the circulation of the 

blood, or the wonderful process of human genera-

tion, or the minute disease germs. If the reader 

of this book is convinced that the book really exists 

outside of his mind and that Lwrote it and not he, 

then idealism would hardly be a working system 

. of philosophy for him .. 

The theory which attributes directly to God the 

production of sensations without any reality to 

correspond to them does not in the least save the 

system. On the contrary the theory makes God 

the greatest deceiver, . the most ridiculous scoffer 

concei:vable. According to this theory God impels 

us always to believe that we live in a material 

world that does not exist, and He forces us to act 

according to that belief. We can imagine the 

Greek Zeus in a fit of Olympic mirth causing some 

poor mortal to pursue gold which has no reality, 

to fly . terror-stricken from a bull which his own 

spirit produces, to water nonexisting flower gar-

dens, and to sink peac~fully into the imaginary 

shade of unreal trees. But to hold such a theory 

regarding the Christian God, as these idealists do, 

is simply to make Him a senseless, brutal humor-

ist who uses His creatures for His mirth. 



20 AR.MCHAIR PHILOSOPHY • 

The theory that there is no reality outside of the 

thinker is so impracticable that a celebrated Ger-

man philosopher said of it that any man who tried 

to live according to it would shortly feel something 

in his brain snap. No amount of argument will 

convince the most confirmed idealist that an erupt-

ing volcano can be mentally transfigured into a 

shower bath. No man would be fool enough to 

boast to his friends that his mind produced' 'Ham-

let" or composed "La Traviata. " The best that 

an idealist can do is use an intangible pen to write 

books which others will produce as they read them, 

or from professors' chairs teach bodiless classes 

in words which are the products of the hearers' 

spirits. On the same principle, possibly bewil-

dered reader, the bursting shell does not bring 

about i1 crumbling fortress; the crumbling fort-

ress produces the bursting shell. 

I recall that as a youth I stumbled over a trick 

problem in algebra that proved conclusively that 

four equals five. Now four never could equal five, 

I reasoned; yet there was the proof clear against 

me. After fruitless effort I carried the problem 

to a professor of mathematics. He glanced at it 

casually and then laid his finger on a certain equa-

tion. "There's the flaw," he said . . " At that point 

you begin to multiply zeros. " A person can prove 

anything if he multiplies zeros. And all the argu-

ments of the idealists are simply multiplications 

of zeros. 



IV 

Our Futuristic Senses 

In the heat of the futurist craze a certain French 

sculptor, whose death was one of the minor trage-

dies of World War I, offered to an astonished 

world some mussy-looking groups in marble. He 

called them statues, so he unquestionably intended 

them to be such; but they would have cost Phidias 

or Michelangelo sleepless nights. Masses of stone, 

misshapen, unsymmetrical yet labeled conveniently 

"Stage" or "Oaritas," they appear a cross be-

tween a half-carved Eskimo totem and a snowman 

after a sudden thaw. 

Then a kindly interpreter, who wrote futuristic 

poetry, explained it all. They were not really 

statues; they were musical compositions in stone. 

They made their appeal, not to the eye, but to the 

ear. Yon heavy mass of marble was a symphony; 

that dainty triangular bit of porphyry was a waltz; 

this nervous bunch of ungainly angles and sharp 

corners was a fox trot orchestrated for banjo, 

saxophone, and traps. 

N ow since marble when it is not crashing down 

a mountain or off a pedestal is obviously incapable 

of sound, these musical statues presuppose only 

one thing: that a properly trained eye can be made 

to hear. After that futurism has nothing further 

to 'offer. 

21 



22 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

.A.bou t the same time a volume of the "Book of 

Knowledge" found its way to my armchair. Under 

the heading" Senses" was a diagram in which a 

number of parallel lines had been placed so as to 

seem slanting toward one another, and under the 

diagram was the brilliant query: "Do our senses 

deceive us 1" There was more than a passing simi-

larity between the diagram and the musical statues. 

If in our last chapter in armchair philosophy we 

arrived · at anything, it was the confirmation of 

our common-sense view that there is a real world 

of tangible, extended objects outside of ourselves. 

It is of course obvious that we cannot perform the 

Marsyan feat of getting outside of our own skins 

to reach this world; we must rely on our senses-

our eyes, ears, tongue and palate, nose, and the 

sensory surface of our skins-to bring us and that 

world in contact. If to the question proposed by 

the editor of the" Book of Knowledge" we must 

with certain philosophers answer that our senses 

do deceive us, it would really be better if no such 

things as the world existed. It is better to know 

nothing about a thing than to know something that 

is not true. .And if our senses really deceive us, 

and we think that we know something about this 

beautiful world of color and scent and taste, then 

that something is absolutely wrong. 

I have seen about a dozen ways to prove that 
the squares of the two sides of a triangle are equal 

to the square of its hypotenuse; but I have never 

seen any proof that two and two equal four. I 

know that the two pencils added to my fountain 



OUR FUTURISTIC SENSES 23 

pen and pape~' cutter make a total of four objects 

on my desk; .yet if someone declined to believe it, 

I am sure I should not know how to prove it to 

him . . I am quite ready to admit the difficulty of 

proving the perfectly obvious proposition that our 

senses do not deceive us. The best that one can 

hope to do is simply to explain how our senses 

cannot possibly deceive us. 

No one who admits the tangible world about us 

denies that the eyes are by nature intended to see, 

the ears ' to hear, the sensory tissues to feel, the 

tongue and palate to taste, and the nose to smell. 

That is philosophy as obvious as the philosophy of 

" As You Like It. " "Hast any philosophy in thee, 
shepherd ~ " asked Touchstone, of Corin. ' , No more 

but that I know the more one sickens the worse at 

ease is he ... that the property of rain is to wet 

and fire to burn ... that a great cause of the night 

is the lack of the sun." Corin was a right hearty 

philosopher even in the eyes of Touchstone, and 

he might have voiced in the same context the 

truisms about the senses which every one perforce 
admits. . 

The question is: Do our eyes, · which were 

fashioned to r eproduce colors of the world, repro-

duce colors correctly~ Are the mistakes which, 

everyone admits, occur the results of a natural 

bent or of some accidental modification which here 

and now impedes the proper operation of sight ~ 
Is it the nature of the senses to reproduce objects 

correctly or incorrectly 1 There lies the crux of 

the whole matter. 



24 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

If the eyes are made to see and yet because of 

their very nature do not see what they are looking 

at or see it incorrectly, then the eyes can be par-

alleled to a gun that of its nature was never 

intended to shoot or to an automobile that was 

built to stand still. It simply gives the lie to its 
own nature. The nature of the senses, as all admit, 

is to sense objects .. If then by their nature they 
were so fonned that they always sensed objects 

incorrectly, they would simply not be senses. They 

would be senses because they were ordained to 

perceive the material world; they would not per-

ceive the material world because they would al-

ways perceive it incorrectly. Incorrect knowledge 

is no knowledge at all. 

Imagine that some genius fashions a machine 

which he calls a camera. He offers me his machine; 

I take it, believing that it conforms to the nature 

of all cameras, which is to reproduce the object to 

which the sensitive plate is exposed. The :first pic-

ture I attempt is a bit of marine landscape. I 

develop the plate and discover that just nothing 

has been reproduced. Having had the same expe-

rience before with other cameras, I try again, this 

time photographing a friend's new and ultra-

modern roadster. When the plate comes from the 

developing bath, I find that I have the reproduc-

tion of a very old and spavined horse. 

In wrath I rush to the inventor. "I thought 

you said that this is a camera," I bluster. "It is," 
he replies. "But it is a camera which by its nature 

either does not reproduce the object at which it is 

directed or reproduces it differently from what ·it 



OUR FUTURISTIC SENSES 25 

is. " "Then," I retort, tossing the machine deftly 

at his head, "call it what else you please, but do 

not call it a camera. A camera which is made not 

to reproduce objects or not to reproduce them as 

they are is simply no camera at all. " 

On the same principle a sense that is by nature 

destined to reproduce objects incorrectly or not to 

reproduce them at all may be a subject for an 

anatomist or a poet, but it is not in any particular 

~ sense. Senses must by nature be ordained to 
give u's correct information about material objects; 

otherwise they are by no means senses . . 

The causes which impel philosophers to doubt 

this obvious fact may be ..,!:educed to two groups: 

There has not been taken into consideration the 

normal sense working under normal conditions, or 

the sense has been used for a purpose for which 

it was not destined or for which it was destined 

only secondarily. That probably needs explanation. 

Noone says that a motorboat that will not travel 

in the air is imperfect; a man does not give up 

faith in watches as timekeepers when he finds that 

his watch needs regulating. Yet with marvelous 

inconsistency men jump to the conclusion that 

their eyes are deceptive when they look at a stick 

that is thrust into a glass of water and seem to 

see the stick bent quite out of shape; from the 

color blindness of one individual they leap to the 

conclusion that all eyes are essentially deceptive; 

they pronounce their eyes imperfect because their 

eyes fail to do the work of a microscope or a high-

powered telescope. 



26 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

In order to have any correct judgment about 

our eyes, we must be sure that we are looking 

through a natural medium. Our eyes are not the 

eyes of mermen. The stick in the water has passed 

out of our normal medium, which is of course 

ether and air. The color blindness of a particular 

person is an accident and as such cannot affect 

the judgment on the essential character of vision. 

When we maintain that our eyes are not deceptive, 

our only contention is that the things they report 

under normal conditions they report correctly. To 

expect the senses to report everything, no matter 

how minute or how remote, is almost like expect-

ing a single mirror to reflect the universe. 

Each sense, if we except possibly the sense of 

touch, has one particular quality in bodies for 

which it is primarily suited. The eye perceives 

color, the ear sound, the nose odor, the tongue 

and the palate taste. Put a perfectly colorless body 

before the eyes, and they perceive nothing-unless 

of course the colorless body is made to contrast 

sharply with a colored body, in which case the eyes 

perceive a sudden cessation of color where the 

colorless body had been placed. But like the cow-

boys in one of O. Henry's yarns who used their 

gold watches as quoits, we want our single senses 

to do much more than report the quality for which 

they were destined. Like the futuristic sculptor 

we want our eyes to hear; like the editor of the 

"Book of Knowledge" we insist that our eyes tell 

us all about the direction of line. We condemn our 

eyes outright if they fail us in the task we have 

s~~t them. 



OUR FUTURISTIC :::lENSES 27 

Taking the eye for our example, we find that 

when the eye looks at a color it perceives that that 

color terminates at a certain point, where a new 

color begins. My eye thus perceives that the white 

of the paper on which I write ends abruptly, and 

the green of my desk blotter begins at that point. 

This color beoomes for me a way to determine 

shape. But if from the data given by my eyes 

alone I judge the shape of an object, I am cer-

tainly very likely to make an incorrect judgment. 

Color is the quality for which the eye is primarily 

destined; shape or size falls under the range not 

merely of sight but of touch as well. For a safe 

judgment on the subject of shape or size the testi-

mony of two senses, not one, is usually required. 

When two senses have been thus applied, all that 

has been proved for the correctness of one sense 

holds for the other sense. Had the editor of the 

, 'Book of Knowledge" used in addition to his eyes 

his sense of touch on the puzzling parallel lines, 

he would not have deserved a place with the sculp-

tor of musical statues. 

It did not take much acute reasoning to show in 

an earlier chapter in this book on armchair phi-

losophy the ridiculoUs and self-contradictory pose 

of a man who professes to doubt everything. Such 

a skeptic if he acts up to his creed is bound in an 

intellectual strait jacket. Yet one who believes 

that of their nature his senses deceive him is 

headed along a straight and level road toward this 

absolute skepticism. If my senses, on which I am 

ultimately dependent for all my knowledge of the 



28 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

world outside of myself, are essentially unreliable, 

then every tangible fact I have ever experience-d-

from the conviction that I am grasping a fountain 

pen to the tremendous scientific edifice which men 

have built up through years of patient study with 

microscope and test tube-is whisked like Alad-

din's palace into the realm of unreality. Without 

infallible senses we have no right to put faith in 

the patent facts of life. 



v 

Beyond the Realm of Sense 

SOME time ago, just after the ilcientific hysteria of the" Silly Seventies," it seems to have been 
philosophical bad form for a person to call his 

soul his own. Souls were carefully card-indexed 

for the information of antiquarians. In the place 

of souls the world was given the omnipotent and 

all-explaining cell, the complex association of 

nerve fibers, or the brain that secreted thought as 

the glands secrete saliva. It was all so very simple 

that there was no further need for a soul. Did not 

the cell explain life1 And did not the complexity 

of the brain fibers explain thought ~ A number of 

persons retorted very abruptly: "No they do 

not. " But the human voice makes itself heard 

with difficulty amidst a riot of applause, and 

applause was showered pretty freely on the scien-

tists in the limelight. 

So those who believed that a fact is not dis-
proved by violent screaming or name calling, those 

in fine who liked to fancy that they had a spiritual 

soul to distinguish them from their pet pal'l'ot or 

fox terrier, decided to possess themselves in 

patience for a time. Now it is becoming recognized 

that anyone who tucked his soul away in intellec-

tual moth balls was very fortunate. Souls are 

29 



30 ARMOHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

becoming fashionable once more. In fact they are 

quite the vogue. 

By a soul men have understood a vital principle 

distinct from matter yet so united to it that soul 

and body make up but one person. The soul they 

have regarded as the thinking principle and the 

principle from which flow those actions that we 

call free. Those who deny souls maintain that 

besides matter there is just nothing. The brain 

alone thinks. As for free will ... well if these men 

are honest in their materialism, they pass over 

free will with a flippant reference to popular delu-

siol1s; their only alternative is to ignore what they 

cannot begin to explain. 

, All men stand in wonder before the tremendous 

capacity of the human intellect. There is some-

thing almost overwhelming, in the intellectual 

attainments of melllike the giants of the Renais-

sance. When Da Vinci wrote to the Duke of Milan 

the list of his abilities, he was not merely eulogiz-

ing his own mental powers; he was uttering a 

panegyric of the human mind. Socrates by his own 

unaided intellect leaping to the idea of a supreme 

Deity, Aristotle and St. Thomas stripping off the 

individuating qualities in things to reach deep into 

their essences, Newton arriving at the universal 

principle of gravitation, the astronomer attaining 

from abstract mathematics to a knowledge of stars 

he never saw-these men gave instances of the 

magnificent power of the human intellect. 

-Kre such intellects merely the complex associa-

tion of nerve fibers T Do they differ only in degree 



BEYOND THE REALM OF SENSE 31 

of intensity from the faculty of cognition in horses 

and oxen ? This is precisely the point in these 

chapters in armchair philosophy. It has always 

been the claim of the best philosophy that the 

brain alone does not think, that our intellectual 

life is such .that it cannot proceed from mere mat-

ter. For an explanation of thought one needs a 

spiritual soul, that is, a soul distinct from the 

material body. 

It is quite obvious that all o.ur knowledge begins 

with what we learn through the senses. But the 

human intellect does not stop with the bare facts 

as they are reported by the senses. On the con-

trary the intellect is never satisfied with the infor-

mation thus gained; it goes far beyond. The intel-

lect knows for example not -merely that two 

Pekingese dogs plus their two expensive pups 

make a kennel of four fine dogs; it knows that if 

such things as Pekingese pups did not exist, or for 

that matter if the person thinking were the only 

material object in the world, two and two would 

still make four. The intellect has jumped from 

the concrete dogs to the essential nature of two 

plus two..,-and the distance is a vast one. 

As I walk down the avenue, a chauffeur in a fine 

touring car stops a few feet ahead of me and picks 

up two very ragged and very frail children. This 

individual act of a kindly man impresses me so 

much that I murmur to myself, "Courtesy is 

surely oil on the wheels of progress." My mind, 

not content with the individual case reported by 

my senses, leaped to a generalization: I saw a 

single act of a kindly man; I thought about that 



32 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

highly abstract, that intangible quality of courtesy 

which fits not merely the individual case but all 

cases where tender hearts prompt men to deeds 

of unselfish gentleness. I have not been content 

alone with the facts that my senses reported. 

Two litigants fight over a title ' deed to a piece 

of uptown property. There is . an exchange of 

words, then of lawjers' visits. There is a session 

presided over by a modern "Solomon" in check 

'suit and tortoise-shell glasses. After learned argu-

ments hy the lawyers and interrogation of the wit-

nesses, the aforesaid" Solomon" pronounces that 
Litigant A has · the right to the property. The 

judge uses the word. " right" casually, believing 

that everyone in the. courtroom understands him; 
and though not a-man present, from his honor to 

the tramps who dropped in to get warm, ever saw 

or heard or tasted anybody's right to anything, 

Litigant B bows in submission and goes forth to 

drown his sorrow in the flowing bowl and in his 

attorney's flow of explanation. 

Abbot Mendel gathers together the last batch of 

his hybrid peas from his . monastery garden and 

sits down to put into ,writing his revolutionary 

theory of heredity. After all the number· of pea 

plants he has investigated is relatively small, yet 

he dares to lay down a law applicable not only to 
pea plants in his garden but to the pea plants in 

Asia and Africa that furnished the tables of Con-

fucius or Rameses II, or to plants that will bloom 

in . the year of grace 2000. And other scientists 

seizIng on this new law apply it to cocks, dogs, 

and blooded sheep. 



BEYOND THE REALM OF SENSE 33 

The instances used ate by no means extraordi-

nary; the mind is constaIitlyemployed in acts of 

just such a character. The ,fact is that the human 

mind is practically never satisfied with just what 

the senses bring it. One sees a mother fondling 

her first-born arid sits down to write a poem on 

maternal love. Right, justice, morality, things 

which the senses are simply incapable of seeing, 

are the subjects of our incessant thoughts and of 

tremendous import in our ordinary lives. Science 

would be out of the question were the human mind 

not capable of passing from the individual speci-

men · under the microscope to the universal law 

that lies behind the fact. • 

Thorn bushes will be producing in the normal 

course of nature a large harvest of grapes long 

before the senses will be . able to produce such 

intellectual thought. The mere matter that com-

poses the brain and the senses cannot in the phi-

losophy of the materialists explain the simple~t 
abstract concept. Does the eye ever see the ab-

stract quality of courtesy ,or of maternal love? 

The answer to that is simptv 'th~t no such thing as 
ab~tract courtesy or. matern'allove exists in mat-
~er. ' Oourteous chauffeurs eixst, but not courtesy. 

Mothers who love their children are, thank heaven, 

still brightening the earth; maternal love is . an 

abstract quality and· as such is not £oUIid in mate-

rial creation. The senses, as we know from con-

s.tant experience, report only the concrete, indi-

vidual type, the courteous man, the loving mother. 

Thus there must be another faculty in us whjch 



34 ARM;CHj\.IR PHILOSOPHY. 

reaches to the quality that is found not merely in 

one particular case but in all cases of like nature. 

It is simply ridiculous to maintain that our 

senses can grasp a universal law of nature. Did 

anyone ever see the law of gravitation ~ or touch 
it ~ or taste it ~ or hear it ~ Men have seen apples 

falling to earth and the scuttled ship sinking in the 

waves, but the law that lies back of these facts 

they have never subjected to touch or sight or 

hearing. 

As for those tremendous moral facts of . truth 

and honor and duty and civil right, which are 

absolutely essential to the life of man, these have 

no material essence w:b.atsoever. Fancy asking a 

policeman to show you his right to regulate traf-

fic! Imagine asking the ruler of a warring nation 

to let you see the wound in its national honorl 

Yet f'0r its honor that nation has plunged itself 

into a devastating war. For truth a martyr will 

lay down his life. The right of the traffic police-

man will stop the most reckless driver. Here cer-

tainly are facts that move the world; and yet not 

one of them has ever been touched by our senses. 

If only matter existed in man, no amount of nerve 

action would ever make man know anything abbut 

these facts. Matter can attain to a knowledg'e of 

only the material; sense can kn<)w only the sensible. 

History' is a long record of that something 

within man that peremptorily refuses to be satis-

fied with mere matter or with bodies. The very 

fact that a man is constantly arguing over the 

question of souls is enough to show that his intel-



BEYOND THE REALM OF SENSE 35 

lect will not rest with the material. If merely our 

brains think, then the idea of a soul, which is a 

substance without extension or any of the attri-

butes of matter, would never occur to our brains. 

The brain could only imagine the things it has per-

ceived or things like them, and it has never peI'-

c.eived anything save extended, tangible matter . 

. That . something within man which will not rest 

content with matter has thi'oughout the history of 

all races been rising to a being that far transcends 

the realms of sensitive experience: God. Men have 

never seen or ' heard God with their senses, yet 

men's intellects have been either admitting Him 

or disputing about Hiin from the least known days 

of old. The very infidel who denies God's existence 

knows what is contained in the idea of Deity. To 

rise to such. an ultrasensitive idea, something more 

than mere matter is required . . Without a soul the 

thought of God is simply inexplicable. 



VI 

Necessary Egotism . 

W HEN dear old Rip roused himself from his rather protracted nap and stroked his 
unaccustomed white beard,he thought at once of 

his home and of the probable reception that 

awaited him there. Then he wondered mildly if 

he had better wait until it grew dark before he 

returned to his muscular dame with 'her sharp 

tongue and ready broomstick. In reality years 

had passed since he left that home; but for him the 

days of his vagabond youth with all' the associa~ 

tions of cavernous pockets and tempestuous wife, 

of elfish bowling dubs and vast draughts of 

exhilarating liquor lay within easy reach of mem-

ory. He was, so far as he knew, the same old Rip 

that had taken his gun and his dog up into the 

Catskills, though his garments were tattered 

beyond recognition and the gun at his side had 

evidently been substituted by puckish gamins for 

his own fowling piece. About it all there was a 

certain overwhelming strangeness. But the one 

thing of which he was quite sure was that he was 

the same Rip VanWinkle who had lain down to 

rest in the mountains. 

That is a strange link which binds the feeble old 

man on his last bed with the same man when he 

was a child at his mother's knee. Rip was unique 

36 



:. NEOESSARY EGOTISM 37 

merely in that he skipped the entire period of his 

middle age. He went to sleep a fresJl, blooming 

hunter and awoke a doddering relic. But for most 

men the various epochs of life dissolve gradually 

into one another. Childhood slips into youth; 

youth. glides impercepti"Qly into manhood; man-

hood ripe:q.s and reaches a full maturity; and then 

begins the gradual descent toward that bed on 

which the inevitable last scene is played. Shake-

speare's seven ages are not. r.eally acts bounded 

at each end by a rising and a falling curtain; they 

a,re rather one long act in which in various cos-

tumes a single actor plays his several roles. The 

realization .of one personal identity throughout 

links the life· of today with the life of yesterday; 

or of last year, or of twenty Qrfifty years ago. 

The old man· oan no more shake off the con-

sciousness that he': and the child of five that bore 

his name are identically . the same person than he 

can shake off his head by diligent nodding. A man 

of business takes a w.eek off to run down to" the 

old home." He looks fondly at the orchard where 

he-then a lad in overalls and a torn shirtwaist; 

his feet innocent of .shoes-stole the forbidden 

green apples. He boasts that .he could in those 

happy days of unconscious digestion eat more 

than any boy in his" neck o~ the woods. " He tells 
how he licked singlehanded a bully ten years older. 

And though when the old folks bring out a fad€'d 

tintype . of a very stiff and frightened youth in 

short-long trousers and a blouse starched like a 

strait jacket . he screams with enjoyment at the 

thought that that puny youngster was once .him-



38 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

self, he has not the slightest doubt that he and the 

frightened youth are the very same person. 

The surviving members of the class .of '97 are 

entertained by the alumni association. Smith, 

aged eighty-one, egged on by his fellow antiquar-

ians, brags that in his day he was the swiftest run-

ner in the college ... "beat Harvard, by Jove! in 

the 100 at 11 flat. " And though the dear old chap 

could not beat a snail even if the snail gave him a 

handicap, no one doubts that this is the onetime 

champion. 

That tremendous sense of personal identity 

linking the man of the present with the man of the 

past has its grim features too. What has this 

prim, passionless professional man who is diffus-

ing wisdom and majestic decorum from his very 

presence to do with the hot-blo.oded impetuous 

youth who in a moment of wild, blinding passion 

flung a trusting s.oul headlong to ruin ~ Yet in the 

quiet of his room, where no eye sees, wisdom and 

decorum fall from him like a loose glove, and con-

science flings into his quivering face the crime qf 

his distant youth. 

This identity of personality is absolutely neces-

sar¥ for whole classes of intellectual operations. 

The composition of "The Canterbury Tales" took 

Chaucer some twenty years, but through that 

entire period he never lost sight of the single plan 

that he had formulated in the very beginning. 

Today it would be simply impossible for any man 

to take up the work as Chaucer left it and carry 

it to the conclusion that Chaucer clearly had in 

mind: 



NECESSARY EGOTISM 39 

Or take the physicist who is employed on some 

delicate experiment that covers reams of paper 

and consumoo years of time. Suppose that there 

were Il;0 identity of person there, that from day to 

day the experimenter could not recognize that he 

was the one who performed those experiments 

yesterday and the day bef'Ore. It is obvious that in 

that case any completion of the experiments would 

be impossible. He must recognize the steps which 

he took to reach the present point in his problem; 

he must be able without any break inthe sequence 

to bring his results from the first equation to the 

final answer; he must be in a position at the con-
clusion of his experiments to grasp the problem as 

a single, logical whole. And becau-se the physicist 

is coI).scious of his identity with the man who 

beg'an and continued the experiments, the ultimate 

solution is more than merely possible. 

Everyone knows from his own experience that 

he is the same person throughout the longest ana 

most varied life. In succession baby, boy, lover, 

soldier, justice, grandfather, ancient, he is abso-

lutely the same individual. To brand such a Ulll-

versal and necessary conviction as a delusion is to 

incur the righteous laughter of those who have 

common sense. Yet unless the soul is distinct from 

the body; it is simply impossible fo explain this 

perception of identity. If there is no soul, the 

problem is relatively simple. 

Suppose we take first the materialistic attitude 

that there is nothing else in a man but his body. 

At some time in our lives we have alI been amused 

to learn of the enormous quantities of food that 



40 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

we c'Onsume in the c'Ourse 'Of a n'Ormal year. We 

realize the significance 'Of this apparent v'Oracity 

th'Ough when we learn that the simplest acti'On 'Of 

muscle 'Or nerve literally burns up our b'Odies as a 

locomotive burns c'Oal. We live-like the 'Old-time 

racing steamb'Oats 'On the Mississippi-by consum-

ing 'Ourselves as fuel, SQ' much S'O that, conserva-

tive scientists mainta~n, in the course 'Of every 
seven years every nerve and muscle and b'One in 

'Our b'Odies are c'Ompletely changed. In 'the case 'Of 

the brain the .destruction and rebuilding are much 

m'Ore rapid •. Americans, who liv:e ' at very high 

pressure; probably renew their brain cells faster 

than d'O pe'Ople in other c'Ountries . . 

If then n'Othing exists but 'Our b'Odies, 'Our c'On-

viction, ineradicable though it :may be, that we are 

the same persons today that we were seven years 

ag'O is simply false. We have n'Othing but 'Our 

bodies, and 'Our b'Odies have changed-as have 'Our 

coats and hats. The child with its fresh, pink skin, 

its sensitive nerves, and its resilient b'Ones is n'O 

m'Ore the sage with his wrinkled, parchment skin, 

his dulled senses, and his brittle b'Ones than the 

baby's beribboned sh'Oes are the sage's carpet slip-

pers. If there is no soul, which would be unchanged 

substantially during all the changes of the body, 

to link together this ever decaying, ever renewing 

"mansion 'Of flesh," then there is n'O greater fo'Ol 

than the man of seventy who believes that he is 

the same person that he was when he was a child 

of seven, a youth of seventeen, a bridegroom of 

twenty-seven. As a matter of fact if .he has ' no 



· NECESSARY EGOTISM 41 

soul, he has been a new personality every seven 
years. 

Absurd as materialism is, the modern theory of 

a world soul is a very dark shade more ridiculous. 

Briefly put, the theory is this: There are no indi-

vidual souls; there is one huge soul, which, like 

Lake Michigan flowing through the hydrants of 

Chicago, trickles through the individu.al ltrain in 

a stream of thought. To use the favorite figure, 

the world of men is a great stained-glass window 

through which the cosmic mind flings its rays, Th-e 

thoughts of course receive their individual charac~ 

tel' from the brain, through which they seep, just 

as the rays of the sun are colored by the indi-

vidual bits of glass through which they filter. But 

the person does not think; the world soul does the 

thinking; and a mail can be said to · have a soul 

only in so far as the thoughts of the world soul 

filter through his brain. There is no thinker; there 

are only thoughts. 

Som~ philosophers would be saved if only they 

had a sense of humor. For here is confusion con-

founded and compounded. My body is constantly 

changing, but so are my t:p.oughts. The only per-

manent thing is a world soul, which is not mine. 

My body is not permanent; my soul is as common 

as a public drinking fountain; my thoughts are 

considerably less durable than the fountain 's flow~ 

ing water. I have a constant conviction of my per~ 

sonal identity, though the thinking principle in 

me is in no way personal to me and is as much the 

property of everyman in town as is the air or 



42 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

the sidewalk. As for my thoughts, they just" roll 

along. " 

In other words the idea of a world soul gives the 

lie to my conviction of my individuality, because 

I share that soul in common with Tom, Dick, and 

Harry. The succession of thoughts rende'rs impos-

sible any explanation of a continuous personality. 

For even supposing that Thought Two knows all 

about Thought One, and Thought Three knows all 

about Thought One and Thought Two, yet when I 

go to sleep, I make it a point to stop thinking, and 

the chain of thoughts is nicely riven in twain. 

Under this theory it would be very easy for a per-

son to break with the past: He would just have to 

take an anesthetic. 

As a matter of fact we could not run our world 

unless there were besides this mere belief in per-

sonal identity actually in every man something 

that kept him identically the same. Unless the 

thief or the murderer or the wife-deserter arrested 

years after the crime were absolutely identical 

with the man who committed the crime, all the 

judges, from the supreme bench to the courtroom 

of Alice's Wonder land, could not punish the 

offender. From the viewpoint of the materialistic 

theory a lapse of seven years, or under the suc-

cessive-thoughts theory a single change of ~ind 
would annul all the marriages in the land, turn 

fathers into persons quite unrelated to their chil-

dren, and set our little earth on its head. 

Fortunately we do not manage affairs on such 

theories as these. Even while we dispute about it, 



NECESSARY EGOTISM: 43 

we presuppose something- in a man that makes him 

responsible for all the acts of his lifetime, that 

binds him to his contracts through years of time, 

that keeps him in precisely the same relationship 

to father or children or wife. That something is 

nothing else than his unchang-ing- soul, which is 

distinct from his chang-ing- body and is the cause 

of fleeting thought. 



VII 

The Pilot of the Soul 

C
' ONSISTENCY my be a jewel, but unfortu-

nately in certain philosophical circles jewelry 

is regarded as frivolous ornamentation. ' It is of 

course as ridiculous for philosophers who deny a 

personal soul to talk of free will as it is for a turtle 

to brag of its wings. Yet some philosophers do just 

that. When in the cloakrooms of the philosophical 

halls they checked their souls, they renounced all 

right to any real freedom of choice; for chemical 

and physical forces - heyond which according to 

their theory there is nothing else-are governed by 

laws as fixed as the courses of the stars. The loose 

boulder on the mountaintop is not free to whip 

itself suddenly toward the sun. The early crocus 

is not free to withhold its bloom as a woman might 

withhold her spring hat until Easter morning. If 

he has no soul, man is like the boulder or the 

crocus, made up simply of chemical and physical 

forces which know no freedom of choice. 

There are however many materialists who recog-

nize that their philosophy has left no breathing 

space for free will. Matter is not free; man is but 

soulless matter. So when materialists are brought 

face to face with the fact of free will, like Tito 

Melema and his unwelcome father they simply 

deny the fact. Man is not free, they say; the glo-

44 



THE PILOT OF THE SOUL 45 

rious power to choose a course is simple illusion, 

a vain flattery with which man has salved his own 

self-conceit. Like the lightning and the wind, the 

plow horse and the gasoline . engine, man has not 

the slightest power over his actions. 

Consequently if we prove that man has a free 

will, we prove that there is in him .something 

besides mere chemical and physical forces, a some-

thing which is not governed by the laws of matter, 

a something that we call the soul. 

Dogberry to the contrary notwithstanding, com-

parisons have their use, and we can get an idea of 

our free will if we compare it with the action of 
our intellect. A class in. geometry sits fidgeting 

before an unsolved prol)lem that has been placed 

on the blackboard. Step by step the instructor 

leads the students through a labyrinth of parallel 

lines and acute angles and hypotenuses and at 

length sets before them a completely satisfactory 

answer. A sigh from the class, and they settle 

back in satisfied acquiescence. Brought face to 

face with any truth clearly proposed, the intellect 

is simply forced to accept it. 

But suppose we consider a businessman at his 

desk in the late morning of a summery Saturday. 

An afternoon in the office will mean clinching the 

good will of a rather desirable buyer. But through 

the window comes a delicious breeze elusively sug-

gestive of greens and bunkers and long stretches 

of undulating sward. Here are two things, both 

of which the businessman knows to be desirable, 

and he vacillates to the rhythm of his swaying 

desk chair. Then with a sudden gesture he piles 



46 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

his correspondence in a heap, bangs down his 

desk cover, gets his golf bag from its place in the 

corner and swings it over his shoulder, and heads 

",hither the breezes call. Brought face to face with 

two attractive possibilities, he deliberately chooses 

the one and merely rejects the other simply be-

cause he desires golf more than he does the good 

will of this particular buyer. 

That faculty which freely determines to select 

out of a number of possible attractions one par-

ticular thing we call the free will. Calmly and 

quietly a man considers a certain plan; he weighs 

motives for the accomplishment of the plan and 

dwells on those motives which militate against the 

plan. He recognizes that the plan .would be a good 

thing for him, but he is aware that the plan has 

disadvantages. In . the end with all the pros .and 

cons before him he is free to choose or reject the 

plan, to act or remain inert, just as he wishes and 

because he wishes. 

Our commonest conscious actions are proof 

positi-ve of this freedom of choice. The alarm 

clock rings in the morning, and the awakened 

sleeper knows that he ought to rise promptly. 

Instead he flings a shoe at the clock and rolls over 

for another quarter-of-an-hour's sleep. At last 

he rises and rubs his chin regretfully. Really he 

ought to shave ... still ... "Oh let's get it done 

during lunch hour ." ... "Journal or Herald7" 

queries the newsboy. The purchaser hesitates. 

The J ourn-al has a bully sports page, but the fea-
ture page in the Herald is always ... "Give me a 

Journal," and he bolts for the" L" train. Free-



THE PILOT OF THE SOUL 47 

dom 1 vVhy in the simplest conscious actions, from 

the selection of a cigaret or a necktie to the choice 

of a candidate for President of the United States, 

man is aware of this sovereignty of choice, this 

power to cast a thing aside or take it to his inner-

most heart. 

By way of contrast there are plenty of facts 

over which we know that \ve have no control. A 

man blessed with a normal appetite does not worry 

whether or not he can digest his dinner; he has 

nothing to say about it. He does not fuss because 

his beard grows in spite of his dislike to shave; 

all the worry in the world will not stop the growth 

of a tough beard. We know quite clearly the facts 

of life that are matters of our choice and the facts 

that do not enter the sphere of our choice; we 

recognize the difference between actions domi-

nated by free will and actions that we cann ot 

influence. 

If man is not free, how explain the elaborate 

machinery that he has built up for his guidance 

when he has to make a choice in affairs of real 

import 1 Does the man who is about to embark on 

. a new business enterprise feel himself physically 

forced into that enterprise, as a root is forced 

willy-nilly through the hard soil? If he does, then 

the careful counting of possible expenses and 

receipts, the consultation with Dun-Bradstreet, 

the anxious hours with lawyers and banking 

agents are all parts of an elaborate self-deception. 

The same necessity which drags the thrown rock 

downward toward the earth forces the man who 

has no free will into a particular business. 



48 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY . 

. One striking difference between nian and his 

animal servants is the 'fact of remorse. A chicken 

through some hennis)1 freak pecks to death all the 

yellow chick::; in her brood. Not even the most 

sGntimental humanizer of animals fancies that 

Mistress Hen is haunted through long nights by 

terror-inspiring phantoms of the chicks she has 

slain. But the world is never without its Gretchens. 

Indeed looking back over his life, a man becomes 

conscious of the thousand things he c0uld have 

done and did not do and of the thousand other 

things he did do in the face of outraged conscience. 

The denial of free will makes the fact of remorse 

another of those unsolved mysteries. vVhy should 

Trynan in Eliot's treu).endous sketch feel the sword 

turn in his soul when he looks at the painted face 

of the dying girl he had ruined 7 In that very 

agony of remorse he is admitting the fact that he 

might have saved the girl's soul but that he delib-

erately flung it down to destruction. 

,TV e recognize in our past lives two distinct 
classes of actions: those for which ,ve were re-

sponsible and those over which we had no control. 

Two friends on a hunting excursion leap from a 

canoe, guns in hand; one of the men slips, his 

gun spits lead, and the other man falls face down-

ward. There is ag~ny of soul in the survivor, a 
dread of facing the relatives of the slain man, but 

withal a saving sense of innocence. He has not 

lost the right to face even the mother of the dead 

man. But suppose as he stepped from that canoe 

he coolly and deliberately shot down his com-

pamon. In this case precisely the same effect. 



TH1~ PILOT ClF THE SOUL 49 

woulclhave followed-his companion would have 

dropped lifeless to the earth. Between this death 

find the death we call accidental there would -have 

been only one difference: In the second case the 

shot would have been intended and freely, delib-

erately fired. Free will 'would have entered into 

the action. 

As for tile elaborate system of medals and 

awards with which the civilized recompense their 

heroes, this is simply another contribution to the 

gaiety of nations unless the actions that are re-

warded were fr~ely done. Medals are not hung on 
a tree that served as a shelter for a daring 

sharpshooter; a drunkard is not tre~ted as a hero 

even if his fall from an upper window kills the 

enemy's general as he was ' passing through the 

streets below. A hero is rewarded for a brave act 

simply because he was not obliged to do that act. 

He shares in some slight degree in the, praise that 

St. Paul tendered Christ, '.' wlio, ,having joy set 

before Him, endured the cross; ,despising the 

shame ... . " 

~rhe defQnders of free will by no means maintain 

that the' ,vill acts without 'adequate motive. But 

most emphatically we maintain that the object 

which furnishes a motive for a choice is not neces-
sEl.'rily the best that is p-rese'nted for consideration, 

that it has not, considered in: itself, qualities pre-

eminent over those of other objects. , Put a bit of 

iron between two magnets, and it flies inevitably 

toward the magnet which has the greater attrac-

tive force. Put a man between two objects, and 

the object which he chooses 'will not be necessarily 



50 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

the better; it will be the one that he wants. A 

man will refuse a fortune to spite a relative that 

he hates; like Cyrano he will fling his whole 

month's income onto the stage for the sake of a 

fine gesture. The ultimate reason for his action 

will be that his free will chose so to act. 

Readers of Joseph Conrad will recall how Cap-

tain Mac Whirr guided the Nan-Shan through the 

terrors of the typhoon on the China Sea. In one 

of those gripping descriptions Conrad sums up 

the taciturn skipper's battle with the elements. 

, , Jukes could no longer see his captain dis-

tinctly. The darkness was absolutely piling itself 

upon the ship. At most he made out movements, 

a hint of elbows spread out, of a head thrown up. 

Captain MacWhirr was trying to do up the top 

button of his oilskin coat with unwonted haste. 

The hurricane, with its power to madden the seas, 

to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong 

walls and dash the very birds of the air to the 

ground, had found this taciturn man in its path, 

and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a 

few words. Before the renewed wrath of winds 

swooped on his ship, Captain MacWhirr was 

moved to declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were: 

'I wouldn't like to lose her'." 

The hurricane had hurled its force against the 

strongest power in the created world, a man's free 

will. Material force fell helpless before the power 

of that spiritual faculty. 



VIn 

Dynamiting the Moral World 

THE question of Shakespeare's religion will always delight the sophomoric debater. But 
Catholic or not, Shakepeare was heir of a Catho-

lic principle which is the motif of his greatest trag-

edies, the principle of personal responsibility. It is 

a free step deliberately taken which starts his 

Macbeth and his Leal' down the sharp incline 

toward destruction. In this Shakepeare differs 

from the old Greek tragedians, whose heroes were 

overshadowed by a compelling fate, a fearful and 

inexplicable Ate which plunged them struggling 

and protesting into final ruin. 

Our modern dramatists do not believe in the 

Greek fate, but many of them write as if they did 

not believe in the power of free will either. In the 

place of the traditional conflicts of wills, we have 

among the moderns contests of the individual with 

environment, with heredity, with his own fierce 

passions, with economic conditions. The will is 

ultimately displayed as powerless in the face of 

the foes arrayed against it. When the hero, or 

more usually the heroine, falls, we do not blame 

or pity; we merely accept the inevitable. 

The denial of free will is not an unimportant 

bit of dramatic machinery or a piece of fine philo-

sophical cobweb spinning. It is one of those denials 

which would, if it were logically followed out, 

shake the foundations of the universe. For cen-

51 



52 ARMCHAIR PHILOWPHY 

turies men have been trained-when they have 

been trained at all-to fight against the allure-

ments of what under accepted morality has been 

called sin. Youths have been taught to stand firmly 

against their personal wishes and inclinations 

when a higher duty to God or to country or to fel-

low men was in question. The wishy-washy prin-

ciple of our sentimental novelists that a man or a 

woman must follow every whim and fancy, espe-

cially in matters of sex, has never made any man 

lay down his life for his country or . caused any 

woman to pluck from her heart a gllilty passion. 

The line of least resistance has not been the road 

leading to heroic glory. Precisely by their accept-

ing the things that bring physical and mental 

. anguish, precisely by their resisting the attrac-

tions that almost tear the heart from the breast 

,have heroes and saints attained their eminence . 

. All this is swept away by a denial of free will. 

For if a man has no free will, he must of his 

'very nature follow the line of least resistance ; 

chemical arid physical forces cannot act otherwise. 

When Jack and Jill fell down the hill, they prob-

ably-in an unwritten sequel-picked ' themselves 

'up and, broken crowns notwithstanding; went up 

for a second pail of water. But the spilled water 

taking the line of least resistance flowed-with iron 

necessity to the foot of the hill and stayed there. 

The water was not free to mount after the clumsy 

pair., 

Send an electrical current through an iron wire 

and through a copper wire, and you Can measure 

with ,mathematical accuracy the percentage of the 



DYNAMITING THE MORAL WORLD 53 

charge th~t will flow through each wire; the 
greater amount of charge will always flow through 

the copper wire. Without free will man can no 

more avoid the line of least resistance than can 

water or electricity. 

The logical consequence of this denial of free 

will would startle any but the most willful dog-

matist. There are moments in each man's life 

when everything inside of him and outside of him 

seems to fight for an object that he knows he must 

not touch. Every ·fiber of his nature cries aloud 

for it. A malignant chance has thrown it in his 

way; he can take it and still avoid the conse-

quences that attend most wrongdoing. Yet one 

faint, blurred, sometimes almost inconsequential 

factor-like Kitchener's picture in the "Unfin-

ished Story "-holds him back, that one factor and 

a sense that the power of choice is in his own 

hands. Suddenly some philosopher whispers that 

he is not free, that he must follow the line of least 

resistance. Who can doubt in such a case whither 

the line of least resistance leads? Who can blame 

him if his conviction that he is not free sends him 

whirling toward the longed-for object Y 

After all why shouldn't he accept that object ~ 
If there is no freedom of will, it is ludicrous non-
sense to talk of one's responsibility for one's acts. 

The parrot is not responsible for its hair-raising 

profanities; the lightning is not blamed when it 

blasts a mother and her week-old baby, nor is it 

praised when it brings the ursurper 's palace crash-

ing about his throne. Unless a man who does evil 

is free to do good, unless the saint who lays down 



54 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

his life in a leper colony is free to stay at home 

with his feet in carpet slippers, then the wife-

beater and the savior of his country, the betrayer 

of innocence and the Sister of Charity, the mur-

derer and the martyr, Nero and Si. Paul, Lucrezia 

Borgia and Joan of Arc, Benedict Arnold and 

Washington differ in no moral essential. On the 

contrary since the dawn of history men have been 

sending to prison, to the lash, and to the gallows 

fellow men who have committed theft, arson, and 

murder for which they were in no way responsible. 

If there is no freedom of will, then our whole 

criminal code, from preamble to final clause, is a 

vast and hideous hoax at the expense of human 

nature. 

Just what would happen to the world were all 

men suddenly to throw over their sense of respon-

sibility is a picture that no imagination cares to 

construct. Even were it true a thousand times that 

free will is a vain delusion, men would be forced 

in self-defense to use this delusion in order to 

build up in themselves and in others a sense of 

personal responsibility. Without this sense of per-

sonal resopnsibility the sins of Sodom and the 

crimes of Caligula would write themselves with 

terrifying iteration in the ordinary history of ,the 

world. 

It is pitiable beyond words to see philosophers . . 
teaching young people a doctrine that is appli-

cable in life only in so far as from it one learns 

how not to live. It is hard enough for youth to 
fight back the hot surgings of passion, io close 
eager eyes to the fascinating sin which beckons so 



DYNAMITING THE MORAL WORLD 55 

alluringly even when he feels that should he con-

sent he is personally responsible for the evil that 

will follow. If on the contrary he is told that wild 

oats are the necessary fruitage of life's spring-

time, that broken hearts and blighted hopes are 

the inevitable wreckage of passion's restless 

flood, it is madness to blame him when he flings to 

the winds tlris hampering delusion of personal 

responsibility. 

If the professors of such a philosophy really 

practiced their creed, the jail, not the classroom, 

would be their proper habitat. Happily they really 

prove throughol).t their lives, if they are moral 

men, the truth that man is distinguished from 

soulless matter and from the brute creation in 

this: that he deliberately chooses the things which 

are hard and rejects calmly and coolly the line of 

least resistEtnce. A very large portion of the lives 

of these professors, like the lives of all other mor-

tals, is spent in learning by sheer force of will to 

control the natural impulses that are banned by 

morality or by the necessary conventions of civil-

ized society. Certainly the hard patient life of a 

student is incomparably less attractive to young 

blood than is a free, self-indulgent existence. Yet 

youth chooses the student life largely because, 

being so hard, it leads to the fame that he has set 

as. the goal of his ambitions. Young people feel a 

thousand times in their lives the desire for rest 

and comfort and luxury; yet they set all aside 

because it impedes them on their way to their goal. 

And though man clings with an almost insuper-

able longing to his own life, few men would hesi-



56 AI~MCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

tate freely to lay down that precious life for the 

sake of a national peace and prosperity-which 

p'robably they will never enjoy. Free will lies so 

deeply at the root of our moral life that the 

destruction of it would send our universe reeling. 

Good and eyil, innocence and guilt-the burden of 

so much of our literature, the scales in which we 

weigh our associates-are terms which become as 

meaningless as the gibbering of apes if free will 

is denied. Deny it as he may, the philosopher of 

slave will could not avoid the penitentiary, retain 

the friendship of a single individual, merit a line 

of praise from an educational journal or the warm 

handclasp of a grateful pupil unless he was con-

stantly giving the lie to his own doctrine by his 

incessant use of personal freedom. He never 

argues more strongly for free will than when he 

employs it to dynamite the moral world. 

In the matter of free will, as elsewhere, Shake-
speare was writing out of the great heari of 

humankind. The modern dramatist bases his dra-

matic thesis on the morbid, the pathological, the 

neurotic individual; Shakespeare drew his men 

and women from all time. And Shakespeare was 

right. ,Vhen the warning bell for the final curtain 

on each man's life is so.unded, the protagonist, 

looking backward through his little play, will see 

that he it was who determined whether life should 

end as a comedy or as a traged~·. Environment, 

heredity, passions were with him, acting on the 

stage. But it was his free will that wove these 

factors into fitting roles in the drama of his life 

and wrote t.he final lines. 



IX 

The Eternal "\Vhence?" 

I NTELLECTUAL life is a history profusely punctuated with question marks. Wbet). a child 
lifts a puzzled bce to his father and propounds 

his first "Whyf" intellectual life for him has 

really begun. And as long as a man continues to 

use the rising vocal inflection and besprinkles his 

conversation and his thoughts liberally with inter-

rogation points, no matter what his years or his 

infirmities, he is still very much intellectually alive. 

For thought would almost cease were it not for 

the question mark. N ow like an automatic the 

question mark is leveled at nature, forcing her to 

yield up her most jealously guarded secrets. Now 

like a steam shovel it digs deep into the founda-

tions of things, giving us philosophy. Now like a 

lever it dares pry up a little corn.er of the curtain 

which shuts off mortal vision from what may lie 

beyond. The question mark is the spark plug in 

our intellectual motor, the condiment in our 

mental cuisine. 

It is a historical fact that just this ubiquitous 

question mark following on the monosyllable 

, 'Whence f " has driven every race of men to 

acknowledge a being they call supreme. The least 

civilized races have had an intellectual life suffi-

57 



58 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

cient to formulate that inevitable "Whence'" 

with its inevitable answer; the more civilized peo-

ples have answered this "Whence~" with the 

temples of Karnac and Olympus and the Capi-

toline and Jerusalem, with the cathedrals of 

Rheims and Canterbury and Cologne. All men, as 

they lo<;>ked out over this tremendous world, have 

asked, "Whence'" And the only satisfactory 

answer has been: from a supreme being beyond 

and above this world who made the world and 

rules it. The name that men gave that being is 

aside from the question. It is His existence that 

alone solves the riddle hidden in that" Whence ~ , , 

The fact that a vast majority of all men in all 

times have been forced to bend their intellects 

before a supreme Deity is in itself a most power-

ful argument for the existence of such a being. 

Only the intellectual waster flings to the winds the 

cherished convictions which have satisfied the 

minds and consoled the hearts of the world's 

greatest geniuses. But my argument is taken from 

the nature of the world as it exists about us. For 

the rational mind, even when it is untouched by 

the light of faith, cannot fail to see in the world 

a clear reflection of some power above and beyond 

the world. The world is the hand glass of the 
Deity. 

There seems to have been a time in history when 

men believed that they had exhausted the possi-

bilities of science. Every savant possessed ency-

clopedic knowledge. He had memorized the infor-

mation or misinformation which previous ages 



THE ETERNAL WHEN OE? 59 

had committed to writing, and there was simply 

nothing more to be said. A man might be at the 

same time an accomplished physicist and a meta-

physicist, a mathematician and an astronomer, an 

alchemist and a botanist, confident the while that 

he knew all that the world had to teach him in each 

branch of knowledge. 

In that respect at least the world h&s grown 

very modest. Men used to study the universe; now 

they concentrate on a ray of light. A tiny frag-

ment of one of the great branches of science is 

now enough to absorb the exhausting and exhaus-

tive study of a lifetime; for through his micro-

scope mid telescope man has begun to realize the 

tremendous and undreamed-of complexity and 

magnitude of the universe. 

To the ancient Assyrian watching the stars 

from the temple roof, the universe seemed gigan-

tic; to the modern astronomer the universe is just 

this side of infinite. Yet quietly and undisturbed 

these gigantic masses-sun, planets, whole solar 

systems-swing through their measureless cycles, 

clicking off the days and the centuries and the 

eons with a precision that the most accurate 

chronometer pitifully imitates. And on our own 

little planet season follows season, each with its 

myriad mysteries, lawbound, definite in its purpose. 

Only the professional pessimist denies the order 

of the universe. Of course no sane philosopher or 

scientist claims fot the world an absolute pel'fec-

tion; in fact he emphatically denies it. It was con-

sequently possible for fanatics like Haeckel, by 



60 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

their focusing their microscopes on the imperfec-

tions of some deformed· sea urchin and deliberately 

shuttIng their eyes to the unfathomed perfections 

of the solar system or the human organism, to 

fling sarcastic jibes ~t the world's order. As well 
say there is no beauty in Michelangelo's "Last 

Judgment" because there are phices in the wall 

that are cracked. 

Admitting even the many defects, and admitting 

too that science has yet to learn the purpose of 

many seemingly useless things, one can go through 

life sublimely . convinced that no stray planet will 

crash into our world,. that crop. will follow crop, 

that living things will be born in pursuance of 

some definite scheme . . As a matter of fact order 

is so universal that from crystals and cocci to 

mountains and mastodons we have the bases of 

systematic sciences, each ~ith fixed laws, each 
bound up with two unquestionable facts-matter 

and force. Whence then the universal world order ? 

Three solutions suggest themselves: The or del' 

comes from chance, or from the essential nature 

of matter and force, or from some directive 
intelligence. . 

Listen, I prithee, to a fairy tale. Once upon a 

time a certain humorous giant decided to build 

something, he did not much care what. So up to 

the top of the mountain he lugged vast quantities 

of mortar and stone and iron and wood and nuts 

and bolts and wheels. and springs and water and 

gasoline and fire. Then he sat him down, and upon 

the plain below he playfully tossed great handfuls 



THE ETERNAL WHENCE ~ 61 

of his materials. A truly humorous giant, this. 

At last he exhausted his supply. So into the valley 

he strode; where, wonderful to ' relate, he found 

that his mortar and stone and iron and wood had 

formed themselv~s into a wonderful city with fair 

streets and stately buildings, with bridges and car 

lines. The gasoline was rmming the engines, which 

had been formed of the nuts and bolts and wheels 

and springs. And over the fire, water was boiling 

in preparation for his tea . . This is a real fairy 

tale-and, curious reader, you must not ask where 

he got the mortar and stone and iron and wood 

and nuts and bolts and wheels and springs and 

water and gasoline and fire. 

The ancient rhetoricians demanded that an alle-

gory be clear as crystal. I am trusting that this 

allegory would not have made any of them shud-

der. In any case chance as an explanation of the 

universe makes the cosmology of a head hunter 

seem scientifically adequate. Originally everything 

was chaos; then just by accident stars began to 

form, and planets to revolve, and grass to grow, 

and birds to fly - until by a final and crowning 

accident man was formed, and he began to think. 

That is nonsense unworthy of a serious man. 

Chance does not explain how order once entered 

the universe; chance is simply incapable of 

accounting for the still more remarkable fact that 

for ages and ages order has continued to reign. 

Matter and force have during the last century 

been used as twin levers in an attempt to lift the 

creator out of the universe. According to the 

theophobic scientists matter and force are eternal. 



62 ARMCHAIH PHILOSOPHY 

By their essential, necessary nature they have 

been working together until they have given us 

the universe as it is today. Together they made 

the universe with its wonderful order, which regu-

lates our watches and inspires our poetry. And 

they have been everlastingly at it. Simple, is it 

not '? 

The theory rather puts to blush our old adage 

that practice makes perfect.. Matter and force in 

this staggering postulate have been eternally-

that is, without any beginning-working toward 

perfection. And yet after an eternity of practice 

they have not reached anything like absolute per-

fection. In an unlimited amount of duration they 

have achieved a limited amount of perfection, 

though they shou~d have reached absolute perfec-
tion ages ago. On the contrary the present imper-

fectio:n of the universe indicates with absolute 

certainty that matter and force began to evolve 

the universe at some definite time. Put it as far 

back as you like; nonetheless the theory of the 

eternal duration of matter and force falls with an 

appalling· thud. 

Yet for all that they have been working only for 

a limited time, they really have put a marvelously 

intricate order into the universe. The question 

then which naturally arises is: Did matter and 

force, when they set out to evolve the universe, 

know what they were doing ~ Or did they act with-

out knowledge ~ 

To suppose that this order was introduced with-

out any knowledge of what was being done is as 



THE ETERNAL WHEK CE f 63 

ridiculous as an appeal to chance. Let us suppose 

that when the last exquisite building had been 

added to the Acropolis of Athens someone rushed 

up, clasped the architect's hand, and cried, "It is 
almost divine." The architect then stood back 

and looked at the buildings which have been the 

despair of all subsequent builders. "It is marve-

lous," he remarked. "And do you know~ all the 
time we were working on them, no one in this 

world knew what they were eventually going to 

be." Matter and force according to this second 

alternative have been working diligently until they 

have accomplished the present order of the uni-

verse, though all the while no one in this world 

had any idea what their labor was all about. An 

intelligent child would turn up a contemptuous 

nose at such nonsense. 

Even to the scientist who does not want God the 

idea is so absurd that we are gravely informed 

that matter and force are really acting intelli-

gently all the while. So electricity and rocks and 

fire and the falling seed' and hydrogen and the 

star nebula really think. The tiny atoms of oxygen 

and iron and cobalt, the forces of gravity and 

affinity and .centrifugal motion set out with a 

definite plan in their nonexistent heads; and while 

men, hitherto supposed to have the intellects par 

excellence, were vainly trying to discover how it 

was all coming about, these factors actually 

mapped out the universe and made it according to 

the plan. 

The" Arabian Nights," with its thinking horses 

and talking birds, has nothing comparable to this. 



64 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

Matter thinks; force plans. How proud a bit of 

gold must be when it finds itself made into a 

magnificent watch! And how delighted the explo-

sive po,rer of gasoline must be when it is driving 

an imported limousine! 

Perhaps my chapter on idealism sounded absurd, 

but as a matter of fact what really lies back of 

this "thinking matter" is a denial of all matter. 

Many of the scientists who talk of "thinking mat-

ter" mean that matter really does not exist. Only 

thought exists; thought evolves itself into appear-

ances which we call matter. Fortunately we don't 

have to waste more mental labor on that precious 

philosophical legerdemain. 

The order of the universe is a fact a:s unques~ 
tionable as mother love, or the multiplication 

tables, or an aching tooth. Chance could not have 

produced it, nor could matter and force if they 

were left to themselves. ,Ve have only one remain-

ing alternative: a directive intelligence. Here at 

length is common sense. If the order displayed in 

a clock or a mousetrap or a torpedo or a linotype 

could not come into existence without someone to 

plan it down to the most minute details, it is per-

fectly ludicrous to talk of the order of the universe 

-so complex, so constant in its manifestations-

unless there is implicitly admitted an intelligence 

which conceived it and directed it in accordance 

with a definite plan. 

And if the human mind is still struggling to 

understand the order of the universe, what must 



THE ETERNAL WHENCE ~ 65 

we think of the tremendous intellect which intro-

duced this order where otherwise chaos would 

reign ~ Men may differ in the names they apply 

to this intellect, but they cannot but stand in awe 

before its gigantic proportions. And though as 

yet I have not proved "its personal character, I 

shall feel justified - when in these chapters on 

armchair philosophy the words again occur-in 

spelling Directive Intelligence with capital letters. 



x 

A God of Contradictions 

I
F ever a philosophy seemed to pour gratifying 

unction on man's vain soul, that philosophy is 

pantheism. For while golden calves and gods of 

green jade may do for occasional idolatry, as a 

consistent and wholly adorable idol none can com-

pare with oneself. Pantheism assures its votaries, 

with a flattery that would have gained a smile 

from Caligula, that we are gods. 

Under various names pantheism has floated up 

in the mystical poetry and unintelligible theology 

of the East. It is a scientific hypothesis under the 
name of monism. Mrs. Eddy taught it-though all 

the while disclaiming it - as Christian Science. 

And even Bernard Shaw, who likes to believe that 

he thinks the thought that no man ever thought 

before, is a whimsical if diluted pantheist. The 

theory is essentially the same in all cases: All is 

god. There is only one substance in the universe, a 

divine essence, and we are all of that essence, and 

as such we ourselves are divine. 

As soon as a person makes up his mind that 

there is only one kind of substance in the world, he 

finds that he has to give up either matter or spirit. 

It is a hard renunciation, but the pantheist makes 

it bravely. According to the materialistic panthe-

ist God is identified with hydrogen and gold and 

66 



A GOD OF CONTRADICTIONS 67 

the sunflower and the elephant and the college 

professor and the street sweeper; and if you put 

them all together and run them all through a 

strainer, you would not find a single bit of spirit 

in the lot. Wrong, says the idealist pantheist; 

nothing exists save one great world spirit, which 

manifests itself in different forms, like men and 

mountains and puppies and pineapples. Matter is 

a delusion; it is the all-spirit manifesting itself. 

That is small consolation for the troop that has 

to charge a machine-gun company. Bullets are 

such a painful sort of delusion. 

Now if, charitable reader in an armchair, you 

wish to give up your soul and with it your free 

will, you have my leave to fraternize with the 

materialistic pantheist. But souls are precious 

things-if one looks for the slightest essential dif-

ference between the pebble which the genius in a 

moment of abstraction flings into a lake and the 

genius himself whose intellectual gifts blossom 

forth in a supreme poem or a masterpiece in mar-

ble. With the materialistic pantheist pebble and 

poem and poet are just the same kind of substance 

in various stages of complexity-nothing more. 

Besides, this form of pantheism destroys with a 

quiet and effective conclusiveness all idea of a 

designer or an architect of the universe. You do 

not expect the undeveloped intellect of a baby to 

be able to design a new cathedral; and it is folly 

to think that the intellect which put order and 

plan into the ungues sed reaches of our heavens 



68 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

could have elaborated this vast scheme until it had 

reached a marvelous state of development. 

On the contrary, says the materialistic panthe-

ist, the intellect which designed my world is 

identical with the world that that intellect de-

signed; hence it can reach perfection only after 

the various parts of the universe have been evolved 

into an exact order and harmony. 

So even were such matter as sticks and stones 

able to think, the intellect would be in no condi-

tion' to plan out its intricate perfection until after 

it had reached a point where its plan had already 

been executed. It is much as if the San Francisco 

Exposition had not only evolved its own order and 

beauty but, while doing so, had actually evolved 

the intellect of the architect who designed it. And 

does it not seem a little strange that man, who has 

the highest intellect in the world, not only cannot 

plan and order the universe but actually cannot 

understand it with anything like comprehen-

siveness 1 

Personally I prefer to be soundly asleep before 

I start to dream. I should be loath to think that 

I am dreaming during all my waking hours, wan-

dering through a vast world of delusions and 

unrealities, flying from poison and from wild 

beasts, which are merely the divine spirit in one 

of its manifestations, and craving food and the 

comradeship of faithful friends, which are merely 

the divine spirit in another of its deluding mani-

festations. If after all the only substance in the 

world is the all-spirit, as the idealistic pantheist 

maintains, then we are pOOl' fools who wander in 



A ' GOD OF COifTRADICTIOKS 69 

a world of ghosts and hug to our heart of hearts 

shadows less real than the images one weaves 

from smoke; For such a contention wipes out 

everything that we in accord with our common 

sense call material and brands all matter as utter 

delusion. 

Pantheism, no n\.atter of what brand, certainly 

does not leave much room for real individuality. 

In fact it makes indi,+iduality simply impossihle. 
For if weare all identified in one great undivided 
essence, we are really not individuals at all but 

inseparable ' and unseparated parts of the one 

divine being. And since we are identical with 

God, we are also identical with one another. For 

is there not an axiom that two things equal to a 

third thing are equal to each other ~ If that is the 

case, I am, not myself, but Fainting Bertha and 

Percy MacKaye and Jack Dempsey and King 

George. At this statement one feels inclined to 

shriek with laughter. Indeed one could find grim 

humor in a 'war in which the annies of the enemy, 

which are really essentially identical with the 

armies of the Allies, couLd fight so strenuously 

against others who are really themselves. 

This difficulty however reaches a climax of 

absurdity .when we realize that not only our fellow 

men but the pig and the carp and the water rat are 

as much identified with the divine essence as are 

we ourselves. They, like us, are not distinct beings, 

but are united by an essential unity in one divine 

essence and hence · are essentially united to us. 

Though I have never felt any consuming desire to 

claim descent {rom a Darwinian monkey, I much 



70 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

prefer such remote ancestry to this pantheistic 

identity with a hog. 

As an American I feel an unconquerable impulse 

to fight whenever I see my liberty endangered, and 

I fail to see where the pantheist leaves me any 

more freedom than has my image in the glass. 

What freedom can you expect in a "manifesta-

tion" 1 Just the freedom that the manifester grants 

it-simply none at all. My image in the glass does 

not have to be there, but it cannot be there unless 

I make it possible by my placing myself before the 

mirror; and once my image is there, it does as I 

make it do. 

If we are merely parts of the great divine 

essence, then like any other mere part we move 

and think and act just as that essence directs. My 

arm is not free to scribble these sentences unless 

I direct its action, for my arm is a part of me and 

as such is subject to my direct dominion. And if 

men are parts of God, it is as absurd to speak of 

the individual human liberty as it is to speak of 

brains in a clothesbrush. This the consistent pan-

theist admits without much reluctance. Weare 

the toys of divinity, flung either by its free will or 

in obedience to fixed laws into a seemingly sepa-

rate existence. Once more philosophy b,as thrown 

away free will and with it all law and duty and 

obligation and morality. 

For without individual freedom of will there is 

no place in the dictionary of pantheism for our 

meaning of a wrong act. Matricide, rape, the 

defrauding of widows and orphans, and that cata-

logue of crimes which make desolate the land can-



A GOD OF CONTRADICTIONS 71 

not in any sense be called moral wrongs. The 

murderer, the seducer, the firebrand, the traitor 

are merely parts of the Deity, and hence they act 

under direction and cannot do otherwise than 

they do. 

In what possible sense can we say that this uni-

versal Deity acts wrongly~ It has no duty to any 

one, for no one but itself exists. There is no one 

to place a binding law upon it or oblige it to carry 

out such a law if such a law did exist. If this be 

true, then the criminals in the world, who are 

after all only the manifestations of the Deity, do 

not the slightest wrong when they betray inno-

cence, snatch the very food from the mouths of 

the poor, and spit screaming babies on the points 

of their swords. All of which implies that our 

moral codes can stand a thorough overhauling and 

that some extremely primitive concepts of life 

must go by the board in a trice. 

Supposing however that the Deity is really the I 

author of the world's crime-and I am using the 

word crime in its properly understood sense. Then 

we have the disgusting picture of a Deity, a being 

of essence divine, who freely burdens itself with 

the atrocities of Cain and Messalina and Sir 

Henry Morgan and the Paris apaches. We find 

ourselves confronted with a being which by its 

infinite intelligence put into the world a wonder-

ful order and plan and yet by senseless crimes 

deliberately frustrates that order in a thousand 

and a million cases. Though incomprehensibly 

vast in the breadth of its understanding, that 

Deity either does not recognize, even as men 



72 A.RMCHAIR .PHILOSOPRY 

recognize, the inherent destructiveness of sin, or 

else, recognizing its true nature, it freely and 

deliberately embraces the things which set at 

naught the plan that that same Deity has fixed 

in the universe. In either case we have re.duced 

our Deity to the level of the lowest degenerate that 

walks the streets of our cities. Thus pantheism, 

which started out to make all men gods, ends by 

reducing God to the condition of the most dis-

gusting c~iminal. 

There is no denying that at first sight, especially 

when it is draped in the opalescent robes of the 

East, pantheism seems a fair priestess for our 

souls. But if, logically followed out, it first makes 

us equal to God and then makes God equal 

beneath our feet and the feet of the criminal whose 

presence we feel to be a profanation, if it deprives 

us of our individuality, if it strips us of free will 

and makes us the toy of some irresponsible Deity, 

if it inevitably makes the. philanthropist and the 

murder alike unworthy of praise or blame, it is a 

doctrine, not to fiatter the vanity, but to pervert 

the human intelligence. Man must by force of his 

nature bow before some Deity. Yet who dare say 

that the savage who enshrines in his hut a fiat-

nosed idol of clay is more to be ridiculed for his 

cult than is the scientist who admits to the 

sanctuary of his mind this pantheistic god of 

contradictions ~ 



XI 

World Builders 

A F AYOUB scientist once remarked in a brag-ging mood that, given matter and force, he 
could construct the universe. The boast sounds like 

an echo of old Archimedes' vaunting offer that, 

given a lever and a fulcrum, he could move the 

earth. Each had little fear that his boast would be 

taken up. Possibly both the scientist and his Gre-

cian predecessor thought that they could make good 

. their brag; certainly the Greek set himself the far 

simpler t,ask. But in either case the instr"hlments 

needed for the contemplated operations were 

admittedly beyond the power of the boasters to 

obtain; each felt his incapacity to furnish himself 

with,the needed material'and tools. The difference 

between them lies in the fact that Archimedes 

never expected anyone to furnish him with his 

gigantic toys, ' while the scientist would take his 

matter and force as actually existing and patent 
facts. . 

Matter and force and the Directive Intelligence 

separate from them were the three factors which 

together brought the visible universe to its present 

state of development. The question arising imme-

'diately is whether that intelligence, according to 

the prescription of the boastful scientist, was 
" given" matter and force to work with, jU'st as 

73 



74 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

the architect is given bricks and steel and concrete 

and the power of the donkey engine. Are matter 

and force beings which exist by the strength of 

their own nature and quite independently of any 

outside agency1 Or do they owe not merely their 

direction but their actual existence to the gigantic 

intelligence which ordered them 1 

To answer this question, we must apply to mat-

ter and force the two principles without which any 

scientific investigation would . be as futile as the 

questioning of a parrot: N ~thing begins to be 
without some cause that is capable of producing 

it; and nothing exists without a sufficient reason 

to account for its existence. These are the princi-

ples which have enabled scientists to ascertain 

pretty exactly from a handful of flint arrows and 

a bit of broken pottery the intellectual develop-

ment and culture of races that perished before the 

plans of the pryamids were drawn and to plot out 

from a knowledge of the Pennsylvania coalbeds 

the vast, marshy forests' that bloomed at a period 

when fish spawned on the peaks of the Rockies. A 

slight variation in the orbit of some planet is suf-

ficient to show that some unknown and as yet 

unseen body is drawing that planet from its course. 

The presence of a characteristic that was unex-

plained by known elements led Madame Curie to 

the discovery of radium. Indeed these two prin-

ciples that we have enunciated here are the com-

monplaces of every scientific experiment. So if 

matter and force began at some time to exist, they 

must have had a cause sufficient to produce them; 

if they have been eternal, still they must have 



WORLD BUILDERS 75 

some reason sufficient to explain their existence. 

Our everyday experience in the world has made 

us acquainted with the constant appearance of 

beings that have their origin in other beings that 

in many cases are doomed to disappear. We meet 

everywhere the constantly recurring phenomena 

of plant life developing and propagating itself 

through seeds; we see on every side the mystery 

of birth and death and the passing on of life 

through gener·ation~ that arise and fall like suc-
cessive waves on a beach. Even the waters of the 

seas and the rocks of the mountains were formed 

in a prehistoric past from the union of elements 

which bore. but slight superficial resemblance to 

the forms they assumed in composition. We are 

in fact surrounded by links in a chain of causes 

and effects which traces its beginning to a period 

·that no mathematician has as yet computed. 

The mind is staggered at the idea that this 

chain of causes and effects has been in existence 

from eternity, that there really was no first cause. 

In fact, as was previously noted, such a hypothesis 
simply destroys the theory of evolution; for in an 

infinite duration matter and force should certainly 

have attained an infinite · perfection, something 

which no sane man claims for matter and force. 

Suppose then that matter and force did exist 

eternally but began to evolve themselves only at a 

definite time in the past. Then we have a hypoth-

esis which plays hob with the established law of 

inertia. For a body at rest continues by the force 

of its nature to stay in that state unless it is 

moved by some outside agency. A stone lying in 



76 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

the Grand Canyon will lie there until it is weath-

ered into dust unless some tourist pitches it into 

the rushing stream, or an earthquake jars it from 

its resting place, or some other external force 

rudely moves it from its position. That is kinder-

garten science. The idea of matter and force hav-

ing been from eternity quiescent and suddenly 

springing into motion indicates clearly that some 

other force must have caused that first motion. In 

this case we have another indicati~n of the influ-
ence of the Directive Intelligence on the matter 

and force of the universe. 

The extreme unlikelihood and even impossibility 

of an eternal series of causes and effects force us 

ultimately to a first cause which gave the rest 

existence or at least set in motion that long course 

of evolution. This first cause was itself either 

caused by some other cause, or it was the cause of 

itself, or it always existed-and this by the force 

of its own nature. Since it was the first cause, 

obviously it was not brought into existence by 

some other cause. The problem of a thing not 

yet in existence being the cause of itself makes 

the trick of lifting one's self by the bootstraps 

seem the simplest athletic exercise. So if there 

was a first cause, which itself had no cause, it must 

have had an external existence due to its own 

inherent nature. 

Such a being differs essentially from any other 

being in the range of experience. For every being 

we kno'\v from actual experience has the reason for 

its existence, not in itself, but in some other beilig. 

Conceive then a chain of causes and effects stretch-



WORLD BUILDERS 77 

ing back as far as you wish, even into eternity: 

corn producing grains and the grains fresh stalks; 

birds laying eg'gs which are nurtured into small, 

gaping-mouthed fiedgings, In each individual case 

the reason for the new being lay in the fact that 

a previous bei:r;lg had pr:oduced 'it; and since any 

one of a thousand or a million possible misfor-

tunes-the dropping of the seed on a rock or the 

addling of the egg in the sun-could have pre-

vented its coming into existence, each cause might 

easily have failed to act, and each effect was no 

more inevitable than are the pansies which the 

amateur gardener hopes to see sprouting from the 

seeds that he trustfully planted, In fact whole 

races of plants and animals, like the famous 

extinct race of trilobites, completely dropped out 

of existence, leaving behind only bits of fossil 

embedded in the forming rock. And man himself 

for all his superlative gifts of mind and will finds 

traces of wl101e nations of beings like himself 

which some unknown disaster swept completely 

from the records of the past. 

Not one single link in the chain but owes its 

forging to some outside agency; not one link but 

depends on a hundred doubtful circumstances; not 

one link which by the very force of its nature had 

to come into existence. We have in consequence a 

chain made up of links each one of which does not 

have the reason for its existence in itself but which 

depends on some other being; and it must be 

remembered that no chain is stronger than its 

weakest link. So if no single link is self-existing, 

the whole chain has the reason for its existence, 



78 ARMCHAlR PHILOSOPHY 

not in itself, but in something outside of itself. 

And unless that being is self-existing and contains 

within its own nature the reason for its existence, 

we have to continue our search until we come to a 

being that does exist by the force of its nature and 

owes th.e reason for its existence to itself alone. 

Make then the chain eternal if you wish; still each 

single link and hence the whole chain by their very 

nature demand some being which does not owe its 

existence to someone else but which exists because 

it is its nature to exist. Once more we are driven 

back to a first cause which differs essentially from 

all other things in this universe and on which all 

other beings necessarily depend. 

So matter and force not only owe their direction 

to something outside of themselves; but they depend 

on this outside agency for their very existence. 

Now comes the question of how that outside 

agency, that Directive Intelligence, brought them 

into existence. Obviously it did not find them 

ready to hand. If it did, then they are actually 

independent beings and they in no way rely on the 

outside agency-the theory which we have been 

disproving. The Directive Intelligence then must 

have produced them since they owe it their exist-

ence. This could have happened in either of two 

ways; -Either matter and force are parts of this 

self-existent being; or they were called into exist-

ence, which they did not before possess. Certainly 

matter and force are not parts of the Directive 

Intelligence, for that would drive us back once 

more to pantheism with all its absurdities. So we 

are forced to admit that the intelligence which 



WORLD BUILDERS 79 

directs the universe called matter and force into 

being, nothing but itself having existed previously. 

That is what we call the act of creation. 

The unbelieving philosopher and essayist, whose 

sense of humor is often strikingly r edundant, has 

had titillating fun laughing at the Christian God 

whom he loves to describe as a doddering old man 

seated on a glittering throne, surrounded by bored 

angels and saints, and occasionally breaking the 

monotony by wielding the lightning. Unfortunately 

that is humor without any point, for the essayist 

made not only the joke but the god as welL The 

Christian God is not a sort of superminister in a 

black coat, starched tie, and possibly a wobbly 

tiara. He is the infinite intelligence which put 

order and plan into a world that without Him 

would be chaos. He is a being distinct from the 

world and hence enjoying a personal existence, an 

existence which H e owes to none but Himself. We 

find Him exercising in the creative act a power 

which surpasses all power that we know anything 

about. It is not the man who adores such a God 

that is the fool. The fool is he who prefers- no God 

-or a god of his own making, even if that god 

has clay feet or wears the image of imperfect man. 



XII 

The Dream of Immortality 

THE mad anxiety of certain modern philoso-phers to run away from the idea of immortality 
is what Thomas Hardy would have called one of 

life's little ironies. Toward the beginning of World 

War i, Haeckel, goaded by the carnage of the 
battlefield, remarked bitingly that after all immor-

talityis a dream-a beautiful dream, but a dream 

nonetheless. Whereat many nodded solemnly 

assenting heads. 

It takes a man who has the calm assurance of 
Haeckel to stigmatize all mankind-save himself, 

a small coterie of materialists in our day, and an 

insignificant scattering of ancients-as deluded 

dreamers. A high-school pupil's acquaintance 

with the literature of Greece and Rome; the most 

casual dipping into Egyptian archeology, any 

slight knowledge of Hindu or Chinese beliefs, the 

burial rites of the Mound Builders, the traditional 

beliefs of the American Indians show that in their 

belief in immortality pagan nations were scarcely 

a pace behind the Hebrews and the peoples of 

Christian Europe. But of course they were all 

sound asleep. How fortunate for our generation 

that we possess a human alarm clock to wake us 

from our dream, beautiful though it is! Unbelief 

is astoundingly modest. 

80 



THE DREAM O:F IMMORTALITY 81 

To begin with, I freely admit that if there are 

no souls there is of course no immortality. We 

are only too grimly aware of the death of the body 

and its consequent decay. But the previous chap-

ters in this book on armchair philosophy have 

been love's labor lost if the reader has not been 

confirmed in his belief that he has a soul distinct 

from his body, a soul that performs intellectual 

acts and free acts of the will which no mere body . 

could perform. Naturally though as Haeckel did 

not own a soul of his own but believed himself to 

be a blood brother, or at least first cousin, of 'the 

bull and the chamois and that most fashionable 

relative the ape, it would have been simple non-

sense for him to have expected immortality. A 

plump turkey at Thanksgiving time would have 

had a far better chance for immortality. 

But you, faithful reader in your armchair, and 

I in mine know that we have a soul, a something 

more than our shifting, changing body. We know 

too that that soul can understand right and justice 

and abstract physical and moral laws, that it can 

form an idea of God and of other souls-all of 

which no sense of our body ever experienced 

because these are not material objects. One won-

ders by the way how Haeckel could have talked of 

immortality if he had no soul; for he never saw 

anything immortal, and he was a thousand miles 

from having heard or felt the abstract thing we 

call immortality. We know as well that we have a 

free will---':though our bodies are bound by the 

laws of physics and chemistry. So we have within 

us at least something which performs actions 



82 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

essentially higher than any action performed by 

our body. Such a soul might conceivably be 

immortal. 

Our own experience has shown us too that the 

destruction of the body does not necessarily mean 

the soul's destruction. For you will recall that 

every seven years the body is completely destroyed 

and rebuilt, while the soul remains essentially 

. unaltered, binding in a unity of personality the 

man who is tottering to his grave and the child 

who used to toddle to his mother's knee. At least 

during life our soul is not destroyed with the 

destruction of our body. 

One infallible recipe for the making of a suc-

cessful materialist is carefully to ignore or con-

descendingly to pity the higher beliefs and aspira-

tions of man. If, instead of pitying his roor dream-
ers, Haeckel had at least glanced at the dreams of 

these men, he might have felt some slight fear 

that his pity was misplaced. For oddly enongh it 

is as impossible for a man to be absolutely original 

in his dreams as it is for him to be in his poetry. 

Dreams, much like poetry, are the fragmentary 

and often inconsequent reproductions of real con-

victions and passionate aspirations. The stuff of 

dreams are the things we know and cnrve in our 

waking life. 

Supposing then that immortality is a dream, it 

is a dream based on an aspiration as firmly 

embedded in human nature as is hunger for food 

or a craving for love. It is a dream which has for 

its basis in man's waking life a continuous, uncon-

querable craving' for p~rfect happiness. May it 



THE DREAM OF IMMORTALITY 83 

not be that the designer of the universe when He 

gave man that craving intended at some future 

time to gratify it ~ 

If man is, as Haeckel would have maintained, 

just a step higher than the beast, it is remarkable 

that his horizon is not bounded by a soft bed of 

straw and a bit of juicy meat. But man has a crav-

ing for a happiness greater than any that life can 

give us. The most terrible pain does not come 

from the diseased or aching body; it comes from 

man's failure in his constant striving after happi-

ness. Like Nevill Fanning in "Initiation," men 

build their dreams of happiness on love of woman 

or love of nature; and dream after dream fades; 

and the insatiable, almost maddening craving for 

happiness remains. 

Since the days of Schopenhauer it has become 

part of a philosophical creed to sneer at the place 

()f happiness in the world's economy. Yet strike 

happiness from man's life, and you have a race of 

galley slaves ambitionlessly inert save under the 

lash of hunger or lust. Replace the desire for hap-

piness, and you energize the world. At the kiss of 

Prince Oharming the sleeping world awakes: 

Poets write, explorers plunge through the frozen 

entanglements of the poles, merchants pile up for-

tunes, scholars add knowledge to knowledge, and 

soldiers seek glory at the cannon's mouth. Even 

the poor fool whose glliding star is a flickering red 

light is being lured on by an insatiable craving for 

happiness. Every cocktail that is mixed, every 

hypodermic syringe that is filled, every tavern 



84 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY . 

that makes hideous the' night, is a sop thrown to 

man's hunger for happiness. 

If in all this broad world any mail at any time 

has found the secret of perfect happiness, he has 

hidden it more effectively than the inhabitants of 

that fabulous place hid the city of the Caesars. 

Surely experience, that safest and lllost expensive 

of teachers, should by this time have convinced 

men that the~r dream of perfect happiness is a 
dream indeed if they seek it in this wor.1d. His-

tory and the daily papers keep dinning into bur 

unwilling ears the fact that happiness cannot be 

measured in terms of stocks and bonds, languages 

learned, pictures painted, titles conferred, or even 

in souls saved. Like so much salt water all the 

possessions that one can heap up otily rendet niore 
insupportable our thirst for happiness; for as long 

as men shall live, at the moment of their greatest 

power they will weep-in tiresome ' imitation · of 

Alexander-for more worlds to conquer. 

Recall the fable of the fisherman and the en-

chanted fish. Like all fables it is truth crystallized. 

Men ask first fora cottage, then for a palace, then 

for a patent of nobility, and at last for the sun 

and moon to be their playthings. Vast knowledge 
whets the appetite for greater knowledge; the 

controller of a factory strives to control the whole 

industry; the emperor who had dominion over 

the earth would dream of an airship expedition 

aginst Mars. Even should we possess the earth 

for our throne and the heavens for our canopy, 

we know that our ultimate and fearfully antici-

pated earthly possession is a mound deep and dark 



THE DREAM OF IMMORTALITY 

and shunned by even our best beloved. That ter-

rible realization is enough to turn to wormwood 

any pleasure that time can offer us. 

Jove, said the old mythology, tortured Tantalus 

by creating in him a devouring thirst and keeping 

the water just out of reach of his parched lips. I n 

,that Jove was like the small boy who loves toimlJ 

a live beetle ~o pieces. Yet if the creator of the 
universe:, havingplaIited in the soul ' of man an 

unconquerable thirst 'for perfect happiness, made 

it impossible for 'man 'ever to quench that thirst, 

Jove wottld 'hav~ been by comparison a me'rciful, 
beneficent deity. Jove tortui'ed one guilty mortal; 

God would be torturing the whole hUnlai1 r a:ce. ' ' 
, " 

Ibsstrange that persons who pride themselve~ 

onth~ir superlative virtues and think most kindly 
of their friends will talk as If the world's creator, 

had neither common sense nor common justice. 

We must at least grant the person who put order 

into this universe the virtues that we would not 

deny a chance acquaintance. 

, Yet unless the soul with its intellect and will is 

immortal, there is no justice in God. In the heart 

of every man in every age has been ' that pase 

sionatecraving for perfect happiness; that crav~ 
inghas been' consistently and inevitably denied 

fulfillment in this life; We have but two alterna~ 
tives: Either God has been using men for lIis 

sport, driving them on blindly, irresistibly after a 

phantom that flies as men approached it; or He 

has put perfect happiness within the power of man 

in a world beyond this world. ' 



86 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

In the first alternative God would be, not God, 

but a brutal tyrant worse than those Oriental mon-

archs who chained their starving prisoners close 

to the banquet boards. Worst of all He would 

allow men to dream their beautiful dream of im-

mortality while all the while He laughed them to 

scorn. 

In the second alternative perfect liappiness must" 

inevitably mean immortality. No happiness can 

be perfect unless its possessor is sure that that 

happiness will never end; the mature happiness of 

a devoted husband and wife fails in this very 

regard, that it will end. If God in common justice 

meant to make possible the satisfaction of the 

thirst which He has created in man, He must have 

granted to human souls the gift of immortality. 

God has also given us an intellect, which man 

has not even begun to plumb to its depth. Has He 

allowed us only the few years on earth in which 

tp fill the limitless bounds of that intellect ~ Is 

that the sort of common sense we should expect of 

the designer of the universe 1 That would be like 

the act of the man who, to store the grain crop of 

a single summer, built an elevator which covered 

the western continent and when summer was over 

leveled the immense structure to the ground. At 

the end of the longest and most studious life man 

has stowed away in his vast intellect only a few 

tiny grains of knowledge, just enough to make him 

crave more. It is an insult to God's intelligence to 

suppose that these gigantic intellects that He 

created He destined to end when their work was 

just begun. 



ARMOHAIR PHILOSOPHY 87 

If we are not immortal, then the lot of the snake 

in the grass and of Burns's field mouse is happier 

than ours; they at least have neither intellect which 

craves knowledge nor will which thirsts after per-

fect happiness. But we cannot suppose that the 

God in whose universe such wonderful order reig11s 

would by His intellect and will raise man above the 

beast only that he might use that intellect and "will 
to make himself more miserable than the lowest 

reptile. On the contrary we are certain with a 

divine certainty that while there is a God in the 

universe and while in man's heart throbs that 

insuperable craving for happiness the dream of 

immortality shall not have been dreamed in vain. 



it 

XIII 

Moral Immorality 

THE world is at present so full of moralists that it is in imniinent danger of becoming 
immoral. For it is seldom healthy for any man or 

any generation to talk too much about anything. 

Often enough such excessive talking is a sign that 

a man is trying to talk himself into the belief that 

he actually possesses something that he would like 

very much to have, as a bank president boasts the 

unassailable solvency of his institution when the 

thought of a bank inspector gives him cold chills. 

Decadent ages are usually rife with seers who pro-

pound for the populace wise maxims and grave 

epigrams to serve in place of otherwise forgotten 

virtues. In the same way that an age which is 

sterile in pure literature turns critical and talks 

about books, an age which recognizes that its own 

morals show to best advantage only by gaslight 

talks learnedly and lustily on the beauty of virtue 

and the inner significance of morality, hoping by 

noise to distract a too inquisitive attention. 

But our moralists-and we are inundated with 

novelists and playrights and essayists and poets 

who play with morals as the Lake poets played 

with flowers-have coined for our age a new set 

of moral epigrams whose burden is a consistent 

and insistent negation. There is no such thing as 

absolute morality. No act is by its nature either 

88 



MORAL IMMORTALITY 89 

good or bad. Moral law is an antique that passed 

out with whatnots and haircloth furniture, very 

serviceable in a mid-Victorian parlor, but without 

either use or bBauty in a world of arts-and-crafts 

furniture arid geometric wallpaper. While each 

literary season brings its supply of lierary moral-

ists who chatter gaily of right and wrong and the 

futility of moral codes, they differ chiefly in the 

breadth and sweep of their denials. The best 

moralist seems to be the one who rejects the largest 

section of the moral law. 

In the midst of this blithe chorus of denials a 

person feels impelled to clap his hands to his ears 

and pause for a moment's silent thought. Did our 

devoted ancestors after all suffer from an age-

long delusion when they refused some actions the 

light ' of their countenance and bade others wel-

come to ,their homes ¥ Our lusty-lunged moralist s 

with their revolutionary creeds and their literary 

bad manners, are shouting that our ancestors were 

wrong. Poor ancestors! 

.All acts, comes the protest, weigh the same in 

either scale Of the 'moral balance. Custom, some 

cry, is whafmakes an action good or bad. Morals 

are as much a fashion as is the cut of a coat or the 

length of a skirt. 'Custom has banned murder 

along with the unpleasant habit of the gnawing of 

bones that are held between the fists. Yet since it 

is not such a far reach from the gnawing of bones 

to the e'ating of corn on the cob, murder may in 

time become a popular parlor sport. Nay! protest 

others . . Beforeeivil laws were enacted, men were 

as innocent of morals as they were of monocles. 



90 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

With the introduction of law some actions became 

bad and others good. Wrong, all of you! shouts 

the moral anarchist, who hides his red shirt under 
« immaculate linen"; the only moral man is the 

Nietzchean hero, who recognizes no law, no cus-

tom, no morality, who rides on an iron-shod 

charger over the shams and shadows that we can 

the moral law. "The golden rule is that there is 

no golden rule." 

Under the old moral code a moral act was one 

by the frequent repetition of which a man became 

good or bad, worthy of praise or blame. A person 

who frayed his pockets by his constant dipping 

into them for money for the needy was considered 

to be performing an essentially moral act; one 

who dipped into the pockets, frayed or otherwise, 

of others was considered guilty of an essentially 

evil action. On one side of our moral ledgers men 

wrote a list of acts for which praise should be 

bestowed: patriotism, continence, honor, devotion 

to parents. On the other side men inscribed a 

second list of acts for which men incurred the 

scorn and blame of mankind: treason, lust, lying, 

filial ingratitude. In their literatures men crystal-

lized these moral acts: in Leonidas and Ephialtes, 

Lucrece and Pasiphae, Regulus and Simon, Cor-

delia and Regan. Were those men wrong thus to 

catalogue acts as one catalogues diamonds as 

against paste imitations' 

Our ancestors were not stupid enough to think 

that the acts of a baby or an idiot could be moral 

acts. Our ancestors insisted that for an action to 

be moral there were required consciousness of the 



MORAL IMMORTALITY 91 

action and liberty of choice. They too, quite as 

much as our clever moderns, recognized that cus-

tom might influence a man's mental attitude to-

ward right and wrong; the simple matter of what 

constitutes sufficient raiment in an instance of 

that. But if custom or law is all that makes the 

difference between good and bad, our ancestors 

would have vehemently insisted that there is really 

no essential difference between good and bad. 

Custom determines for example our table man-

ners. It is not unlikely that the table manners of 

Simon Stylites would have shocked inexpressibly 

Don Juan - though no one debates about the 

respective morals of these two men. Law is the 

public expression of the will of the governing' por-

tion of the community. Yet a man wouldn't feel 

that he had to slink off and hide his head because 

he used his garden hose at a time of day when 

such use was prohibited by public enactment. 

Neither does he expect to have his neck weighed 

down with a medal just because he has decorated 

his terrier's neck with a license tag. If customs or 

laws that favor certain actions are all that make 

these actions morally good, and if other customs 

or laws that bann other acts alone make those acts 

morally evil, .then between truth and lying there is 

precisely the same difference that exists between 

eating peas with a fork or eating them with a knife. 

While peas that roll from a knife may not delight 

the esthetic soul, such an action leaves our moral 

sense intact. 

But is this really the case ? Is there no essential 

difference between actions that we call morally 



92 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

good and those that we call morally bad ~ The 

answer is simply to see what would happen were 

customs to be reserved and the laws altered by the 

insertion of negatives wherever they are not found 

and the deletion of them wherever they occur. Our 

attitude toward patriotism and treason for exam-

ple would promptly suffer a complete change, and 

we would be forced to shoot patriots at dawn and 

commemorate traitors in immemorial bronze. If 
laws alone make morality, then law might at some 

time in the little-known but often-felt past have 

enforced universal fratricide, established schools 

for the instruction of youth in vice, forbade chil-

dren to care for their aged parents, and banned as 

quite immoral purity . and temperance and the 

cardinal virtues. A whim of some mighty law-

giver, a fad successfully established by some 

ancient culture club might have made murder 

praiseworthy and placed piracy among the hon-

ored professions, along with medicine and law. 

For all actions, say our new moralists, are morally 

colorless until law or custom makes them either 

black or white or crimson. The · commonest of 

common sense revolts at the possibilities which 

this theory suggests if it were logically followed out. 

On the contrary even where custom has acted 

directly against what we : call morality, men have 

recognized the real difference between good and 

evil. In the degenerate days of the Roman Empire, 

when the customs of the imperial city sanctioned 

an almost universal unchasity among its women 

and set a premium upon craven sycophancy among 

its men, poets, with the same pens w.hich had writ-



MORAL IMMORTALITY 93 

ten glowingly of their mistresses' shame, paid 

reverent tribute to a Cornelia or a vestal virgin, 

and philosophel:s paused long enough in their 

flattery of the Caesars to praise the unbending 

knee of Cato the Younger. 

One important point cannot escape even a new 

moralist: Laws are, not the makers, but the re-

corders of men's attitudes toward the facts of life. 

Sanitary laws are enacted only after the public 

mind has been educated to a belief that dirt and 

unhygienic conditions are necessarily bad. So you 

may be sure that murder and arson are not bad 

because the laws forbid them; the laws forbid 

them because men saw that murder and arson 

were morally bad. 

It is unquestionable of course that there are 

actions which we might call moral cosmopolites, 

actions that dwell on the hazy borderland of moral-

ity and defy all attempt at strict classification. 

But there are a sufficient number of obviously 

good or bad actions to indicate quite clearly what 

in the .act itself marks it for what it is. An action 

is morally good if it conforms to the nature of a 

man as a free, rational being. Any action on the 

contrary which perverts his nature, humbling his 

will and intellect under the hoofs of his wild pas-

sions, is, essentially and prior to any law that may 

forbid it, morally evil. Charity is essentially good 

because it is an action which, befits a being whose 

will has been made capable of loving his fellow 

men. Lust is a orime because it allows the passions 

which we possess in 'common with the beasts to 

gain a dominion over the very faculties of will and 



94 ARMCHAlR PHILOSOPHY 

intellect which make us men; on the same prin-

ciple when thes,e passions are controlled and 

ordered by right reason, they beQome instruments 

of untold good. 

A man is worthiest of praise when through a 

long course of moral actions he has' attained to the 

full heights of his manhood. All that helps him to 

kue manliness is morally good; all that holds him 

back is morally evil. The woman to whom we lift 

our hats in a spirit of reverence is the woman who 

radiates from her whole person the purity and 

fragrance of soul without which woman is nothing 

more than Kipling's three disgusting elements; 

everything that has dragged her down is morally 

evil. 

The race of new moralists, who really should be 

called "no moralists," will continue, I suppose, 

their career of feverish negation. Yet even 'if all 

the laws and customs of men were suddenly to be 

dropped into oblivion, were chairs for the new 

moralists to be set up in every university and 

their plays produced on every stage, men would 

still recognize that between good and. evil actions 

lies a chasm which all the magic of poetic expres-

sion and all the witchery of beautiful prose can 

never close. As the good man pauses for a brief, 

horrified glance at the hill up which the new 

moralists are mockingly leading the way, he feels 

in his heart the rising of a prayer like the prayer 

which rose from the lips of Him who taught us 

the meaning of morality by His living and dying 

for it: "Father, forgive them, for they know not 

what they do. " 

, 



XIV 

Our Friend the Utilitarian 

NOT for the world would I suggest that modern philosophy might be plagiarized. Still less 
would I hint that it had taken to its heart a prin-

ciple which Jesuits have grown weary in the re-

pudiating. But sometimes it looks suspiciously as 
if the dear old despised principle that the end jus-

tifies the means had got a new dress and a new 

name and become utilitarianism. When the old-line 

moralists raise a voice of protest against birth 

control, its defenders do not contend that birth 

control is a moral action; but with frenzied accents 

and a tremolo stop they point to the mothers whose 

lives birth control will save, to the overpopulation 

it will prevent, to the resulting benefit in quality 

in the race as against mere quantity. You are 

given the same answer when you question the 

morality of euthanasia and divorce and half the 

other modern evils: They're useful and therefore 
moral. 

Normally we say that the willing surrender of 

one's chastity is distinctly a moral wrong. But 

when Monna Vanna goes to the general of the 

besieging army to deliver up, if need be, her chas-

tity in order to save her people, one would think 

from the pitying sobs and patter of approval that 

she were a Christian martyr walking into the jaws 

of a lil)n. The end she had in view was the saving 

95 



96 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

of her people; it really did not make much dif-

ference about the means that she employed to 

attain her end. Monna Vanna is only one heroic-

size example of the thousand heroines and heroes 

who do wrong that right may come of it. From 

this to utilitarianism is not even a short step. For, 

says the utilitarian, any action is moral which is 

useful for the happiness of the individual or the 

race. 

Most certainly, he continues, there is a differ-

ence between actions that are morally good and 

actions that are morally bad. Anyone whose brain 

has not been permeated with the fog of moral 

skepticism or addled by the heat of passions long 

indulged can see that. But the only difference 

between them is their ultimate effect on the tem-

poral happiness of the individual or of the race. 

If he stresses the effect of happiness on the indi-

vidual, he calls himself a hedonist. If the happi-

ness he has in mind is the greatest temporal hap-

piness of the greatest number, he calls himself a 

social utilitarian. 

Hedonism, as you can readily imagine, is a 

delightful moral system for any pagan age. Epi-

curus was the first to form it into a cle;:tr philo-

sophical system, and every young blade in Athens 

or Rome who sought to dignify with the name of 

philosophy his passion for wine and pretty slaves 

called himself an Epicurean. Today hedonism is 

chiefly a working hypothesis, and one does not 

brag too loudly if he works by it. 

But social utilitarianism, with its large-minded 

affectation of sympathy for the majority, is dis-



OUR FRIEND THE UTILITARIAN 97 

tinctly in favor. Your social utilitarian points to 

the factories whose smoke is the ubiquitous symbol 

of a nation's prosperity, to the universities and 

art museums and dramatic renascences which 

-stand for a nation's culture, to the polling booths 

and the free hospitals and the labor pensions and 

the public playgrounds which mark the century's 

social development. Any act, he contends, that 

promotes these things which result in the greatest 

good for the greatest number is morally good. 

Any action which impedes this good of society is 

morally bad. 

It is not surprising that in this day of King 

Motor one should forget the use of harness and 

hitch the cart in front of the horse. This is pre-

cisely what the utilitarian does. An act, says the 

utilitarian, is good if it is useful. The whole diffi-

culty with that sentence is that the clauses have 

been inverted. It should read: An act is useful if 

it is good. There is a vast difference between say-

ing, "I like this machine because it can make sixty 

miles an hour" and" This machine can make sixty 

miles an hour because I like it." 

I quite willingly concede that every good action 

is ultimately-and I stress the adverb-bound to 

serve the interests both of the individual and 

the community. But there are certain good actions 

-like dying for the truth or sacrificing a nation 

in the interests of justice-which certainly bring 

little temporal happiness compared to the tem-

poral ruin they involve. These actions would seem 

to be good in spite of their inutility to the indi-

vidual. So when I say that good actions are always 



98 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

ultimately useful, I have my eyes fixed not merely 

on the utility in this life but on the higher utility 

of an immortal soul in another life. Still even in 

this case an act must be good before it can be ulti-

mately useful. 

Once more we must resort to a comparison. A 

vacuum cleaner, if one may trust the hyperbolic 

pages of the advertising section, is eminently use-

ful. But before it can be useful, it has to be a 

good vacuum cleaner or - to be specific - the 

vacuum cleaner mentioned in the particular ad-

vertisement you happen to be reading. Noone 

nowadays-at least not in theory-questions the 

utility of dentists. But long before a dentist is 

trusted to preside at the obsequies of a pet nerve, 

men make very certain that he is a good dentist, 

. technically skillful, and acquainted with the'science 

of his profession. 

In very much the same way the utility of an 

action will depend on its inherent goodness. Just 

as a Naval expert can, by examining it, tell what 

benefit a turbine will bring our Navy, so a moralist 

can tell, by examining the nature of it, the bearing 

of an act on human happiness. But the reason 

which makes a certain turbine a good turhine anrl 

a certain act a moral act must be . sought else-

where than in utility. 

In justice to Epicurus it must be admitted that 

he never intended his followers to burn incense 

and nerves and manhood to Bacchus and Aphro-

dite, or to top off philosophic debate with philan-

dering debauches. But if the followers of his rule 

of morality did in fact make his name synonymous 



OUR FRIEND THE UTILITARIA~ 99 

with glutten and libertine, the fault was largely 

that .of Epicurus. For to say that the morality of 

an act depends on its effect on personal happiness 

is to leave room for . as many interpretations of 

morality as there are interpretations of the term 

happiness. History is witness to the innumerable 

meanings that have tucked themselves into those 

three f:?hort syllables. 

Happiness for a scientist and for an American 

Indian, happiness for a nun and for a dweller in 

hotels and taverns, happiness for a bibliophile and 

for a baseball fan can scarcely be said to have a 

common denominator. If all forms of personal 

happiness are in themselves morally right, then 

Raffles and that long line of gentlemen pirates 

ancient and modern whose supreme thrill lay in a 

bit of artistic buccaneering were moral men. And 

what of the duelist who, like D' Artagnan, loved 

the flash of rapiers better than the flash of dia-

monds ¥ Were the duels he fought with an enthu-

siastic zest moral actions ~ If not, then who is to 

determine what constitutes man's true happiness 

and what is but its -shadow~ And how is man to 

know exactly wherein lies the difference between 

happiness and its shadow~ 

The fact is that men have clearly distinguished 

between morality and mere utility. Socrates once 

said that a courtesan contributed perhaps more 

than anyone else to the happiness of the world. 

Yet he never intimated that such happiness was 
moral. The wealthy tenement-owner ' who distils 

his wealth from the blood of the poor is serving 

the purposes of his own personal gratification. 



100 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

Dare he flatter himself in the depths of his heart 

that he is a moral man ~ And what of those actions 

which, like the self-sacrifice of Sidney Carton, lead 

inevitably to death ~ Judged by the Epicurean 

standard, they are essentially immoral acts, for 

they result in the destruction of all possibility of 

further temporal happiness. 

The social utilitarian has little better success 

when he tries to determine just what is useful and 

what conducive to the greatest happiness of the 

greatest nRmber. On the meaning of that exasper-

ating little word happiness, nations have differed 

as widely as have individuals, and they have fre-

quently enough felt that their highest utility lay 

in actions which they never dared to dignify as 

morally good. 

Many a Roman statesman was convinced that 

the bloody gladiatorial fights because they kept 

alive the martial spirit and instilled a contempt 

for death served the best interests of the state. 

This by no means proves that they were equally 

convinced that the butchering of men was an 

essentially moral act. Our Pilgrim Fathers thought 

that the wholesale extermination of the Indians 

would be highly useful and conducive to the peace 

and happiness of the struggling towns. Possibly 

it was, though one would hesitate to pronounce 
the murder of Indian tribes through the deliberate 

introduCtion of smallpox a morally good action. 

The economists of Elizabeth's day felt that the 

introduction of the slave trade was a good thing 

for the mother country and the colonists, just as 

in former days Greek economists built their sys-



OUR FRIEND THE UTILITARIAN 101 

tems on the foundation of universal slavery: I 

doubt very much if either the English or the 

Greeks debated the morality of carrying off a 

free people into servile captivity. Utility and 

morality in this as in a thousand other cases-
for example in every war of conquest~were never 
for a moment confounded. 

In fact statesmen whose eyes have been open to 

the facts have plunged into courses of immoral 

action which they felt to be for the utility and 

happiness of their fellow citizens. By a diplomatic 

lie or a bit of trickery a statesman averts a war. 

He is convinced that he is serving the best tem-

poral interests of his fellow men, though he may 

be sure that the lie is wrong. The ' statesman who 

for the sake of right and justice chooses to see his 

people destroyed rather than stain their honor 

proves that mere utility and temporal happiness 

are by no means the ultimate tests of what is good 

and honorable. The nation that goes down to ruin 

fighting for justice has in annihilation found some-

thing far higher than mere temporal prosperity. 

Happiness and utility are such flexible, shifting 

terms that they are altogether unsafe guides for 

the determining of a morality which is inde-

pendent of all changing conditions. Murder is not 

good today and wrong tomorrow, even though a 

man sees that his best interests lie in the slaying 

of a foe. An action is not morally good unless the 

happiness which it produces and the utility it con-

serves are in themselves morally good. For this 

end we need a standard as unchangeable as the 

nature of right and wrong. 



xv 

A Cure for Caprice 

nOUGHLY considered, there are two general 

L\... classes of moralists: the moralists who invent 
theories, and the moralists who live theories. The 

second class follows the first as inevitably as a tail 

follows a comet, or a small boy a circus parade. 

There precisely is the danger of all moral theoriz-

ing. If every man were a hermit living ten miles 

from his nearest neighbor and absolutely barred 

from communication with anything more human 

than a woodchuck, he might sit quietly in the midst 

of the forest and spin moral theories from dewy 

morn to dusky eventide. 

But moralists love solitude in the same way that 

they hate print. As soon as a moralist has gath-

ered a dainty little handful of fantastic moral 

principles, he rushes furiously to a university or 

a publisher's office, blows a bugle, clangs a gong, 

and assembles the populace. Whereupon some 

pliant idiot takes the new teachings hot from the 

master's lips and runs to try them on the neigh-

bors. (Why have the neighbors never thought of 

organizing a moral home guard ~ ) 

Geographers may not mention the fact, but 

among the most important products of our coun-

try and among our staple importations are lawless 

heroes and wayward heroines. They romp through 

102 



A CURE FOR CAPRICE 103 

our current novels and over our subsidized stage, 

"living their own lives." (We can be grateful that 

they're not living our lives.) Through the medium 

of special newspaper writers they tell the credu-

louspublic that their particular murder or adultery 

or robbery was the expression of their eager, pant-

ing souls. They did no wrong. How could they do 

wrong when they were following their esthetic 

conscience 1 What we call crime, they call neces-

sary self-expression. 

Irritating and ridiculous as these criminals in 

evening clothes may be, they are after all only the 

camp followers of a very definite school of moral-

ity. Morality for them is so much a matter of pri" 

vate interpretation that any crime from man-

slaughter to the wholesale production of literature 

reeking of vice is justified by the smug criminals 

and hysterical feminists who hold office in the 

"Soulful Society of Sob Sisters." · We must not 

be too hard on th.em when they carry to its ridicu-

lous conclusion the theory of subjective morality. 

Since the days of Kant, the ablest exponent of 

this theory, the subjective school of morality has 

flourished mightily. Kant held that a morally 

good action is one which my reason decrees and 

which I feel could be made the universal nile of 

action for all men. "Shall I die for my coun try ~ " 

asks the soldier, as his officer calls for volunteer s 

in an enterprise that means certain destruction. 

, 'Yes, " he answers, "because my reason bids me 

die for my land, and because the best rule for all 

men under these circumstances is to die thus for 

their country." · 



104 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

"Shall I leave my husband 1" asks the modern 

heroine, in and out of the covers of our best sellers, 

when her butterfly affection has flitted to the hand-

some coast guard. ' , Yes, " she cries, placing her 

hand where her heart-if she had one-would be 

located, "because my reason bids me leave the 

place where love no longer dwells, and I should 

wish all women to do as I do under the same cir-

cumstances." An ethical society of self-respecting 

Eskimo squaws would sniff at such morality; a 

professor without a sense of humor would begin 

to explain the distinction between reason and 

caprice. But why should the moralist who accepts 

as his moral standard the individual conscience 

condemn her 1 In his theory each one is moral 

dictator for himself, not only judging what is 

right or wrong but actually making it right or 

wrong. Since dictators are notoriously irrespon-

sible, we need not be surprised at the sickening 

procession of men and women in fiction and in real 

life for whom the whim of the minute has become 

the law of life. Nor need we flatter ourselves that 

the end is yet. 

Why will people persist in talking as if our 

reason were the only unreasonable thing in the 

world 1 Unlike the German philosopher in the 

fanlous yarn, we do not pull down the blinds and 

fling all our natural histories into the fire when 

we want to know what a camel is like. We trot out 

to the zoo and look a camel straight in the eye. If 

we don't, ten to one we will believe that a came] 

is a hippo griff or a dodo. In the same way the 

reason does not go into a dark room to spin unreal 



A CURE FOR CAPRICE 105 

theories out of nebulous data. Reason, not non-

sense, bases its 0perations on the facts of life. 

Our moralist friends are looking through the 

large end of the opera glasses. An action like 

murder or kidnapping is not wrong because my 

reason forbids it; my reason, if it makes any pre-

tense to being reasonable, forbids it because it is 

wrong. My reason, as soon as it knows anything 

about the nature of the drug, mildly suggests the 

inadvisability of my consuming arsenic with my 

meals. Arsenic however is not slightly deleterious 

because my reason forbids it; my reason forbids 

it because arsenic is not conducive to long life or 

proper digestion. Some kind grammarian ought 

to write a guide to the uses of the word because. 

Glance swiftly at any of the thousand actions 

which from the dawn of history man's r eason has 

classified as good or bad. In every case you will 

find that there is something in the very act itself 

which forces man's reason to approve it or dis-

approve it. Every reasonable man recognizes the 

moral goodness of patriotism because through it 

alone our national life, so necessary to true peace 

and temporal prosperity, can be conserved. In a 

parallel way men recognize the evil of treason 

because like the ambushed assassin it aims with 

cowardly malice at the peace and happiness, not 

of a single individual, but of a whole people. There 

is something inherent in every good action which 

forces the human reason to approve it; there 

something inherent in every evil action that forces 

the reason to condemn it. That something we claim 



106 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

is its conformity or lack of confoTInity to man's 

rational nature in all its aspects . 

. Perhaps the foregoing looks a bit vague and 

cryptic; if so, blame a new combination of words; 

the fact itself is familiar to every .moral man .and 

woman. You, kindly reader in your armchair, act 

upon that principle a thousand times a day. 

Suppose for example that an honorable man 

feels within himself .the sudden wild impulse to 

grip the throat of the scoundrel who ruined him in 

business. .Almost immediately however his better 

nature (see how we slip into the phrase',) rises in 

protest, and he casts the impulse aside as unworthy 

of him. Why~ Because he sees clearly that mur-

der reduces man to the level of a beast of prey, 

makes him worthy fellow of the wolf and the 

panther; murder is against his whole rational 

nature. 

Why does a pure woman shrink so swiftly from 

the slightest stain upon her honor? Because she 

realizes that her nature as a woman entitles her to 

a niche just below the angels, and every impulse 

that tends to cloud her stainlessness causes her to 

be less the being whose purity ~akes men honor-
able and more the mere animal whose passion 

makes men beasts. 

Eating and drinking are in themselves actions 

that we share in common with .the brute. They are 

absolutely necessary for-life. But we are instantly 

aware that when a man eats, as the Romans did, 

for the sheer joy of eating, or when a man allows 

a craving for drink to ruin his poetic genius, he 



. A CURE FOR CAPRICE 107 

works against his human nature and commits a 

morally wrong act. 

For all their arguments to the contrary the 
. hedonist and the social utilitarian could not remain 

moral men for a single day unless they were con-

stantly recurring to their human nature as the 

moral metric stick by which to measure their con-

duct. That action, say they, is morally good which 

promotes happiness. But surely all happiness is 

not moral. VlT e have only to glance at the dens of 

our cities to realize that fact. Only that happiness 

is moral which conforms to man's rational nature, 

which elevates it and ennobles it. The libertine 

and the drunkard have no right to call their bestial 

pleasures man's true happiness; such pleasures 

drag the intellect and the will through the gutters 

and make the victims false to the duties which 

constitute man's highest dignity. 

In this day of men whose favorite study is their 

image in a glass and of women whose horizon is 

bounded by the hem of their skirts, one must 

pound with monotonous repetition on that tiny 

additional phrase "taken in all its aspects." Is 
it not maddening to hear our cant writers harping 

on "self-realization," as if men and women were 

isolated beings, with the breeze and the sea foam 

for their parents and the upper regions of the air 

for their habitat? There is no genuine self-realiza-

tion which does not take into consideration human 

nature in all its aspects and-very importantly-

in its essential relations to others. Weare bound, 

whether or not we like it, with woven steel to our 

parents, to our children, to civil society, to God. 



108 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

The mother who in her enthusiastic pursuit of 

culture has to inquire her baby's name each time 

she goes to see it may be wise 'as Aspasia; in 

one very important relation she is not a moral 

woman. A lie may here and now be to the eminent 

advantage of a lawyer; yet because of his essen-

tial duties as a member of the state he may not 

perform an act that weakens mutual trust and 

confidence, ~thout which society would be worse 
than a confederacy of picaroons. While other 

moral systems which regard man's epitaph as the 

end of all may see no good in a man who con-

tributes nothing to society's temporal prosperity, 

we find place in our moral world for the martyr, 

the missionary, the Poor Clare, and the man who 

lives to see his noble hopes and dreams crushed 

i:ato pitiful fragments. 

It is the proud boast of Catholic philosophy that 
here as elsewhere she is the valiant champion of 

human nature. She stands for all that is best and 

noblest in man's nature; she points a moral guide 

that cannot but lead man aright. Our moral stan-

dard is the sure cure for caprice. 



XVI 

The Reign of Law 

M
AN is at once the master and the anomaly of 

the world. Beneath him the creator has sub-

jected all things, so that by their very nature they 

minister to his needs or by the force of his God-

given intellect and will he bends them to his serv-

ice. On the soft pelt of the man-eating tiger, 

stretched now before the domestic hearth, man's 

children tumble and play. The wind that can up-

root whole forests becomes for man hewer of wood 

and drawer of water. Fire and flood, the swaying 

grain, the mettlesome horse, gold and the forces 

of steam and lightning serve him as no slave ever 

served a king in Babylon. All the or.der of the uni-

verse verges upward toward man, and on the pin-

acle of the universe he stands, the world's greatest 

anomaly. 

For in the midst of unchanging order he alone 

is free. All else must yield in blind obedience; he 

can lift his head against the world's designer and 

cry a proud defiance. He who is the appointed 

master of the world's order most often sets that 

very order at naught, most often puts chaos where 
order reigned. That is the mystery of man's free 

will. 

It is perfectly absurd to talk and act, as many 

modern philosophers talk and even act, as if in 

109 



110 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

the midst of this universal order man, the most 

perfect of visible beings, were himself without any 

order. It is ridiculous to suppose that the intellect 

which set a course to the stars and implanted an 

unchanging law in a scarcely visible seed allowed 

man to be lawless, the one lawless creature in a 

law-bound world. God would be, not a wise direc-

tor, but a fool of fools if He had left man free to 

scatter his talents, to squander his powers of intel-

lect and will, to ride heedlessly over his fellow 

men, to spread along his path the ruin of souls 

and the death of bodies. God could not make it 

right for man, his supreme visible creature, to 

thwart the order of the world. He has given man 

an intellect and a will, but He could not give him 

leave to .become inferior to the brutes by means of 

the very faculties which raise him above the brutes. 

A beast is bestial by force of his nature; a man 

becomes bestial in spite of his nature. 

Our own experience and the history of mankind 

prove that there is implanted in oui' natures a law 

which binds us to a definite course of action and 

forces us to avoid the contrary course. It is per-
fectly true that we have a free will and that con-

sequently the law does not coerce us as it coerces 

the horse and the ox and the rose and the comet-

by a blind physical force which cannot be resisted. 

It. is a law which is in 3:ccord with our free wills, 
a law which leaves us physically free to act for or 

against the law but obliges us to choose with the 

law and not against it if we would act as befits our 
human nature. 



THE REIGN OF :LAw 111 

There precisely is the anomaly: The law of our 

nature has been made to depend on our free will. 

We can live according to the law and thus attain 

the fullness of our manhood; we can set the law 

at defiance and deliberately ruin all that is best 

within us. This is at once the glory and the peril 

of our freedom. 

Natural law has an unpleasant connotation in 

certain philosophical quarteTs. Law implies 

restraint and obligation, words sadly in disfavor. 

The revolutions which swept away first much of 

canon law and then more of civil law have been 

aimed against natural law as well. But though we 

can destroy the laws of the land by pitching them 

-as was once done in Russia-into a bonfire, the 

only way that we can destroy the natural law is 

expressed so clearly and forcefully in every 

rational being that even though he may run each 

man must read. From the dawn of reason we are 

conscious of the mandates of the natural law, and 

we can read in the eyes of others-the frank, pure 

eyes of the nun not less than the brutal, shifting 

eyes of the roue-that they too feel its binding 

power. 

Among the first judgments of which we are con-

scious is this: This action is right; this action is 

wrong. Blurred and hazy at first, such judgments 

grow for us clearer and more definite with advanc-

ing years and extend their scope to include a range 

of actions which hitherto had not touched our lives. 

Independently 0 f any 0 u t sid e suggestion, fre-

quently in the face of systematic training men 

recognize with more or less clarity the difference 



112 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

between actions which are good and actions which 

are bad. We need no instructors to tell us that 

murder and lying and the fleshl~' sins are wrong, 

and all the professors in the college of crime could 

never convince our reason that these actions are 

right. 

Almost simultaneously with these judgments 

comes a second group of judgments which imperi-

ously and with appeal bids us to do the good and 

avoid the evil.N 0 one rests satisfied with the 

purely impersonal, objective opinion that to strike 

one's mother is a grave wrong. Immediately man 

feels within himself a peremptory mandate: You 

shall not raise your hand against your mother. 

Who does not recall with shrinking the first time 

he resolutely shut his ears to some exasperating 

command and ran heedlessly into a course of action 

against which every fiber of his better nature was 

struggling in vain rebellion 1 Then came the rush 

of self-condemnation which follows on every 

wrong, the bitter, relentless, accusing judgment: 

You should not have acted thus. We have all felt 

in a greater or less degree the remorse that made 

Macbeth see murdered men where others saw but 

empty thrones, the remorse that caused his wife 

to wander in her sleep and to try in vain to wash 

away a stain with water. 

Here is law expressed more clearly than if it 

were written, like the Roman Law, on brazen tab-

lets or, like the law of the Hebrews, on tables of 

stone. ,Ve have only to glance at the literature of 

the nations or to read their written codes of law 

to discover that no matter- how much men and 



THE REIGN OF LAW 113 

nations may differ in their culture or in the reli-

gion which they follow, in the more general pre-

cepts of the natural law there is not only identity 

of thought but almost identity of expression. 

These commands of which we are all conscious 

are not in any sense mere directions suggesting 

the most profitable course of action. They are real 

laws whose binding force we feel even when we 

struggle against them. A businessman finds him-

self so placed that by a single dishonest act, which 

no one could possibly discover, he could make a 

fortune for himself and for those he loves best; • 

honesty in this case wouLd mean his inevitable 

ruin. But where the law is concerned, he has no 

choice; the law is absolute. Though disaster fling 

him and his family into irretrievable poverty, 

thou.gh he see his family starving before his eyes, 

he must take the course which his reason knows is 

honest. Should he choose the dishonest act, not 

the clinking of gold across his counters, nor the 

healthy laughter of his carefully tutored children, 

nor the adulation of an adoring wife could drown 

within him the voice which condemns his dishonest 

course. 

Put into one pan of the balance fortune, honor, 

life itself and into the other a mandate of the 

natural law, and the mandate must prevail. For 

her child the mother sacrifices health, her own 

pleasures, and the thousand luxuries which a 

woman's heart craves; she does this because the 

natural law makes her duty to her child a para-

mount obligation. A soldier captured in battle 

receives from the enemy a choice: honors and 



114 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

wealth with a grateful foe if he will turn traitor to 

his country, or at dawn a line of glistening rifles 

directed at him. If he follows the command of the 

natural law, he has no choice but the blinding 

handkerchief, the sharp order, and a grave in 

quicklime. 

All men acknowledge this. Our literature teems 

with the praise accorded men who chose death 

with torture rather than violate the natural law. 

Even the pagan could not but admire the Roman 

martyr. An almost casual gesture, the flinging of 

• a bit of incense into a brazier, would have meant 

life for him; he chose rather to become a living 

torch in the gardens of the Caesar. ,Ve stand in 

awe over the mangled body of the maiden who 

plunged down a cliff to certain death rather than 

yield her chastity. 

Here is a law which no mere man could have 

implanted in the human soul. By what right can 

any man oblige me to lay down my life rather than 

transgress his precept 1 And it is ridiculous to 

suppose that such a law is self-imposed; for after 

all my first instinct is to self-preservation, an 

instinct which in a thousand cases the law obliges 

me to conquer. What relative proportion is there 

between a short lie and my life 7 Yet something 

within me commands me to die rather than utter 

that lie. Indeed the simplest human law is incon-

ceivable unless there was first in my nature a law 

obliging me to obey rightfully constituted author-

ity. This is a law which is beyond all' possibility of 

human repeal. Man can tomorrow blot out the 

laws he made today; but when any written law 



THE REIGN OF LAW 115 

-
contradicts the natural law, the instinct of all men 

rises in rebellion, and we refuse to obey. We may 

ignore or rebel against the natural law ; we cannot 

repeal it or blot it from our hearts. 

Such a law, so weighty in its commands, so bind-

ing that to observe it I am obliged to sacrifice all 

that I naturally cling to, would be utterly impos-

sible were there not some being beyond and-above 

me who has a right to command obedience. The 

same Deity which set the wonderful order in the 

oak and the swallow and the whirling planet set 

an order in my souL But there is this difference: 

Neither oak nor swallow nor planet can do other 

than obey blindly and by a physical coercion the 

law of its nature; the Deity has left -me free to 

obey or resist the law, as I choose. But whether I 

obey or resist, one fact I cannot escape: The 

natural law is for me the imperial voice of God. 



- XVII 

The Philosophical Rules 

THE interest of unbelievers in St. Francis of Assisi is to my mind one of the most encour-
aging signs of the present day. If any man stood 

for a life different in every least detail from mod-

ern paganism, that man was Francis of Assisi. He 

loved the simple, the unaffected, the natural. The 

sun and the rain, the north wind, birds, flowers, 

little children he drew close to his heart in a pas-

sion of simple love. In all things he saw God, the 

maker of all he loved, so that his heart sang all 

the day long. To him our artificial, intricate, hec-

tic life with its preference for electric lights to the 

sun, for ventilation systems to the north wind, for 

swing bands to larks would have seemed unreal, 

hideous. The frank conspiracy today to keep little 

children out of God's world would have stricken 

the song from his lips. 

In spite of Francis's utter dissimilarity to the 

neopagans, men cannot but admire the troubadour 

who with an unconquerable optimism saw beauty 

everywhere, who loved creatures with a Christlike 

love, and whose soul throbbed with a long sweet 

canticle to his God. Unbelievers admire St. Fran-

cis of Assisi even though he is the embodiment of 

Christian optimism. 

116 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL BLUES 117 

But it is not a matter of ancient history that 

the opti,mism of St. Francis was preceded in popu-

lar favor by the pessimism of a very different 

stamp of man. Schopenhauer was read and dis-" 

cussed and admired; and Schopenhauer taught 

that" The only positive feeling is that of pain" 

... that" The world is a hell which surpasses that 

of Dante" ... that "Life is a path of red-hot coals 

with a few cool places here and there." Delightful 

philosophy for armchair consumption, is it not ~ 

Yet of the two classes of modern pagans, those 

naniely who affect to admire St. Francis and thoso 

who follow Schopenhauer, the followers of Scho-

penhauer are by all odds the more logical. A 

pagan has not the least right to be an optimist. 

Anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the 

ancient classics knows of the drab melancholy 

which formed the background of pagan life. A 

logical follower of almost any of the modern un-

christian schools of philosophy is by his own 

choice doomed to pessimism. The philosopher who 

adopts the optimism of St. Francis and does not 

accept St. Francis's beliefs in God and Our Lady 

and the brotherhood of all men in Christ is simply 

a parrot who has mimicked human laughter with-

out any understanding of why he laughs. 

There is no other conviction more chilling, more 

destructive of joy than the one by which a man is 

persuaded that he is being consistently deceived. 

Deception by those we trust, even though we only 

suspect it, is enough to ruin our lives. It throws 

about us a mordant distrust that affects our atti-
tude toward everything. ,It breeds suspicion, takes 



118 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

the firmness from the handclasp, deadens the love 

light in the eye. A generous man can forgive an 

honest blow struck him in the face far sooner than 

he can forgive a deception practiced upon him by 

someone he has trusted. If all the misanthropes 

of the world were mustered in one grisly army, 

it would be found that those who had not been 

soured by the deceit of some trusted friend would 

number scarcely a corporal's guard. 

Oertainly there is no friend on whom we are 

forced to rely half so much as we are upon our 

own senses. Weare obliged to depend upon them 

for at least the beginnings of all our knowledge. 

What then is the logical effect of a philosophy 

which teaches that our senses are constantly 

deceiving us, that we have no bodies, that what-

ever information we acquire through sight and 

hearing and touch is false and chimerical ~ Here 

we are confronte.d by a deception as constant as 

our waking lives, a deception which no effort on 

our part can ever hope to overcome. 

If such philosophy does not breed the blackest 

pessimism, a distrust of everything, it is because 

the philosopher or the follower lives a life quite 

independent of his beliefs. Though from a profes-

sor's chair the philosopher may preach that all 

matter is illusion and that only soul exists, he does 

not neglect to bandage a cut finger or to take his 

daily exercise in the university gymnasium. He 

may write learnedly about the untruthfulness of 

the senses, but for all that he gets out of the way 

when he sees a steel girder falling from a sky-

scraper. Living, as·he claims to do, in the midst 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL BLUES 119 

of constant deception, supplied with faculties that 

continually play him false, he should logically 

believe in nothing, trust no one, plunge himself 

into the utter depths of pessimism and despair. 

But .because he lives quite independently of his 

philosophical creed, he can smile trustingly into 

. the eyes of his friends and speak glowingly of St. 

Francis of Assisi. 

If our democratic world has one overpowering 

hatred, it is the hatred of slavery. We cannot bear 

the thought of it even when the yoke . presses on 

another. The rattle of chains that bind soul or 

body will drown the most entrancing music. Unless 

then a man's philosophy teaches that his will is 

free, it is impossible to see how he can logically 

escape the misery that is the birthright of every 

slave. Bound hand and foot, driven forward under 

the lash of blind chance or an irresponsible fate , 

he couLd no more lift his voice in song than could 

the galley slave, chained to his oar. Difficulties 

impend over his terrified head, and he knows he is 

powerless to wa:rd them off. Temptations sweep 

down upon him, threatening his dearest happiness 

and the hap'piness of his loved ones, yet his phi, 

losophy tells him that no effort of his can stem 

the overwhelming tide of disaster. 

For the philosopher of the slave will there can 

be happiness only in so far as he uses his God-

given freedom to ignore his own, creed, since hap-

piness is the companion of freedom alone. There 

at least the dour old Puritan disciples of Calvin in 

England and , in colonial America were brutally 

consistent. Their philosophy of life taught them 



120 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

that men are not free; so with relentless logic they 

put out the lights of the theaters, plucked the 

Maypole from the green turf, and banned from 

their vicinity the music of organ and of voice and 

of human laughter. 

Readers of cur:rent philosophy will have noted 

the recurrence of phrases like "passing the torch 

of life on to future generations" and "the immor-

tality of the life spark." When these expressions 

mean anything more than vague sentimentality, 

they are a poor sop thrown to a world hungry for 

immortality. These philosophers dole out, not a gen-

uine immortality, but a diluted substitute: the 

assurance that we live again in our children and 

that immortality is found in the memory of our 

friends. There is no doubting man's longing. for 

an immortality not only for himself but at times 

even more for the loved ones that he sees passing 

into the silence beyond. Even at the end of the 

longest life no man feels that h~ has lived long 

enough, that he has exhausted the possibilities of 

knowledge, that he has sounded th.edepths of love. 

No man can bear the thought that his wife or his 

mother has ceased to be, that death is a barrier 

which means irrevocable separation. Without im-

. mortality or the hope of it the longest life must 

end in pessimism, in the conviction that all is lost, 

and forever. 

But for the philosopher who denies a personal 

soul, immortality in any true sense is beyond the 

possibility of hope. If he believes that we have 
nothing but our bodies, he bounds human life by 

a pitiful span of harried years. If as a substitute 



THE PHILOSOPHIOAL BLUES 121 

for immortality he offers absorption in the great 

all-spirit, he is offering a solution that is positively 

repulsive to men, who cling passionately to their 

own individuality and who devotedly love the indi-

viduality of other persons. In such absorption 

into a pantheistic god all individuality is lost. 

Only a philosophy which like ours gives man 

the positive assurance that he has an immortal 

soul can take the horror from death. To most 

Dther philosophies death is a breaking with all 

that we cling to most ardently, or at least the sac-

Tifice of the individuality, which is dearer to us 

than is any other possession. That way lies pes-

simism drear and unrelieved. 

No man can be happy in mere denials; no mind 

can be satisfied with negations. For that reason 

modern philosophy is so largely a dreary waste, 

repulsive to the man whose life is in touch with 

the beautiful and the real. Modern philosophy has 

denied or questioned the certainty of our common-

est knowledge, doubted the very faculties on wh~ch 
all our activities depend, shackled our free will 

with bonds of steel, torn God from His heaven and 

substituted a blind chance or a machinelike evolu-

tion, stripped man of almost all his glorious pre-

rogatives, and offered the grave or oblivion as 

man's ultimate bourn. No wonder that a series of 

such pitiful denials was climaxed with Schopen-

hauer and his systematic pessimism. 

But the philosophy that woke the song on the 

lips of Francis of Assisi and has made Christian 

philosophy the only source of consistent systematic 

optimism is the philosophy which rests firmly on 



122 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

positive affirmations, which upholds man's facul-

ties in their quest for an attainable truth, which 

points out the glory and the responsibility of 

man's free will, which lifts the finger of hope to a 

directing Deity, who is the source of man's life 

and the guardian of his destinies, which marks 

man as the chosen son of the most High with a 

life unlimited by range or years or ages. 



XVIII 

The Final Goal 

PHILOSOPHY, which should above all else help a man to live, must be characterized by three 
things: consistency, common sense, and joyous-

ness. In just these three elements is Catholic phi-

losophy supreme. Every conclusion follows from 

proved premises with a consistency which its very 

adversaries must admire even while they withhold 

agreement. Its teachings are so eminently in 

accord with common sense that they read like a 

commentary on arid a guide to our universal human 

nature. Its proud boast of human freedom, its 

confidence in man's power from the higher plane 

of his spiritual-material nature to meet and cope 

with the material forces of the universe, its con-

stant looking forward toward life to meet a full 

satisfaction, its conviction that above all is a 

Directive Intelligence of undreamed-of power and 

beauty...:...-these impel the student to almost light-

ness of heart. 

I have not hoped or even desired to do more 

than introduce niy companions of these few half 

hours to the beauties of this philosophy. Subjects 

which have filled the minds of the world's greatest 

thinkers and crowded the libraries of the civilized 

world can hardly be treated with anything ap-

proaching adequacy in the space I have allowed 

123 



124 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

myself in this book. At most I have tried to bring 

the great truths of that philosophy with the proofs 

that underlie them within the range of readers 

who either from lack of time or lack of acquain-

tance would be repelled by the sight of large vol-

umes filled with terms that are like a strange 

langllage to them. I have tried to make these 

chapters the genial mutual acquaintance who 

brings together people who might otherwise not 

meet. It is almost time for me to withdraw myself 
and leave you and my chapters together. 

But before we go, I must call attention to a fact 

which has no doubt struck every thoughtful reader 

of these pages, the fact that every road of true 

philosophy leads upward toward a single goaL 

Though the student start his search for truth as 

the Greeks did, from pagan Athens,or as the 

Arabs did, from Cadiz, his road must ultimately 

lead him upward toward the supreme being. The 

bypaths and the downward trails are ever the 

roads of error. The same instinct which in 

moments of intense emotional crisis wrings even 

from the reluctant heart the cry to his maker has 

forced logical thinkers, willing and unwilling, to 

recognize, even if only to attack, the creator. 

For without Him philosophy is a murky blur. 

The unquestionable plan and order of this won-

derful universe, a fact so fundamental that no 

satisfactory philosophy can ignore it, is a mystery 

dark and impenetrable and filled with contradic-

tions unless He exists. The admission of a Direc-

tive Intelligence has been and is the only adequate 

explanation of the fact that the world, far from 



THE FINAL GOAL 125 

being a void filled with meaningless chaos: is filled 

with planets that roll on with mathematical pre-

cision, that in all the vast reaches of space there 

reigns order-harmonious, intelligent, unfailing. 

If without God the material facts of sticks and 

stones and motion are mysteries, the human soul 

with its free will and its tremendous intellect is 

simple contradiction unless there is a God. Here 

is a spiritual being, a thing, not of material ele-

ments, but transcending all. Whence could such a 

being have its origin ~ Certainly not from the 
chemical and physical forces o,f the world; for the 

power of this being to understanq. and freely to 

will is precisely the power which no physical fqrce 

possesses. These powers, which surpass anything 

else in nature, must have their origin in some 

being beyond and above nature, some being who 

first possessed them in himself before he gave 

them to the human soul. Once more the mind finds 

itself .fa.ce. to face with the being _that LCh:ristians 

call God. 

That insatiable craving for happiness which is 

the occasion of so much of the world's fairest 

romance and so much of its most sordid misery 

has no adequate satisfaction unless the philoso-

pher turns to an infinite being. Not the fairest 

creature in all the world has been able to satisfy 

the human desire to love and be loved. Every 

human affection-the love of Dante for his Bea-

trice, of Petrach for his Laura, the beautiful 

idealized love of the Brownings:-has fallen far 

short of the capacity of the human soul to give 

and to receive love. Our hearts, even those the 



126 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

ardor of whose love has burst forth in the world's 

finest lyrics and most exquisite melodies, have 

never been more than moistened with the love 

that they are capable of containing. Fully to 

answer our need for love we need a being t4at we 

can love' without fear of disillusionment or wear-

iness or loss. Such a being is God, the all-beautiful. 

The man who rejects no less than the man who 

follows the moral law does so with the conscious-

ness that a direct mandate binds his conscience. 

The moral law is a force that no one can escape 

by flight. The stern command is in the depths of 

wickedness, poisoning the sweetest pleasures of 

sin and sowing in the soul the seeds of bitterness 

and remorse. The stern command is in the heights 

of sanctity, rendering sweet and pleasurable the 

obedience freely given, blessing with a peace that 

defies pain and misunderstanding and the con-

tempt of man the martyr's physical agony or the 

confessor's trials and neglect. No sane man has 

escaped or can escape that binding, Ubiquitous 

law; and for it there is onlyone adequate explana-

tion: a powerful lawgiver above and beyond our 

nature who has bound it with His commands, which 

we can refuse to obey but which we spurn at our 

peril. Again does pure logic arguing on an incon-

testible fact .turn our faces up toward God. 

There is then only one goal toward which every 

road of · truth inevitably leads: God the supreme 

and per.fect truth. Whether we look into the 

reaches of heaven or into our own souls, whether 

we read the triumphs of man's intellectual achieve-

ment or· study in the face of a saint .or a criminal 



THE FINAL GOAL 127 

the individual record of man's subjection to the 

moral law, we are forced to recognize the presence 

of that powerful being to whom an inborn instinct 

impels men to bend the knee. 

The very act which with primitive people IS 

pure instinct or a custom consecrated by the his-

tory of their race may become for civilized man 

the highest tribute to the sanctity of truth and the 

compelling power of beauty. No physical compul-

sion bends our knee before the power above our 

nature. We may stand before Him and to His 

face defy Him; that is the privilege and the peril 

of our human liberty. But who that loves supremely 

truth and beauty, that feels within him a stirring 

at the thought of true greatness and power can 

stand unmoved before the being who flung the 

stars into their endless orbits and planted in the 

human soul its tremendous powers and capacities 1 

There is no slave service in our reverence of the 

world's creator. It is the proud homage that free 

beings pay to the one who represents in the highest 

degree all that the human heart supremely craves 

-beauty, truth, and boundless power. It is an 

acknowledgement on our part that the world-

whose color leaps up to charm our eyes, whose 

waterfalls and singing birds drown our souls in 

music, whose extent astounds and whose beauty is 

our constant . delight - and human souls, whose 

companionship robs pain of its torture and makes 

imperfect mortals loving and lovable - and our 

very persons with their powers of soul and body 



128 ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHY 

... these are gifts from a God who holds out to us 

a blessed immortality in return for our love and 

service. 

Philosophy has no higher destiny than to lead 
the miI,ld into the sanctuary of God. 










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