Class _i Roolc ...... - CofPghtN . COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. LIFE AS EEALITY A PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAY BY ARTHUR S. DEWING , Ph.D. Harvard University Philosophy. Introduction to the History of Modern Philosophy .... Philadelphia Life as Reality . New York Pedagogy. Chemistry Notebook . Boston Botany Notebook Boston Zoology Notebook Boston Physiology Notebook . Boston [Designed to teach by vigorous inductive method of la- boratory work.] LIFE AS REALITY A PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAY BY ARTHUK STONE DEWING LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1910 Copyright, 1910 BY ARTHUR S. DEWING THE SCIENTIFIC PRESS ROBERT DRUMMOND AND COMPANY NEW YORK GLA265218 TO WHO FIRST TAUGHT MB TO LOOK FOR REALITY CONTENTS PAGE I. Life and Nature 1 II. Experience and the Realist .... 18 III. Science and her Laws 37 IV. The Law of Life 60 V. The Call of the Whole . . . . . 84 VI. Religion 106 VII. Truth 124 VIII. Life as Reality 148 IX. The One in Many 170 X. The Many in One 191 vii FOREWORD Some years ago I was asked by a friend, while we were climbing old Kearsarge, to defend a system of idealism which gave full value to the will-strivings of our life-interests without degen- erating into crude individualism. That reality could be denned in some such terms had been my thesis, — and it is the thesis of the present essay. This little incident occurred several years ago, but in the intervening time, while struggling to make myself clear, I have become the more convinced than ever that reality, for us human beings, is revealed directly through the impulses, the strivings, the purposes of our life and only indirectly through the vast world of objects and facts that pass in ceaseless stream before the eye of consciousness. It is in the effort and not at the goal that we must search for the real. I have followed the method of trial and error in this search. After stating the problem of the final reality in the opening chapter, I have inquired what the material world and science ix x FOREWORD have to offer by way of solution. Later the problem shifts to the realm of the moral law, to society, to the religious experience, and to the various conceptions of philosophic truth. In all these spheres of relative value, we find that the underlying reality is revealed in the self-expres- sion of life. In the eighth chapter, "Life as Reality," — the crux of the book, — I have striven to state my main contention. The last two chapters show the application of this main thesis of the "one" of philosophy, and to the "many" of our practical, everyday life. To the whole idealistic trend of our modern world, my debt is obvious, most especially, I presume, to the imperial genius of Kant. Cambridge, February 13, 1910. LIFE AS REALITY LIFE AND NATURE The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. — Byron It is natural for the human mind to seek for ultimate reasons. Our ordinary, everyday activities require that we reach some working understanding of what our life means to us. We believe in the existence of the objects of sense experience; we believe in the existence of our own consciousness, and we have an almost involuntary belief in the existence of great moral forces in our world. We hold to these simple faiths without ordinarily admitting them to any more critical analysis than is given in everyday experience. Yet with all this simple assurance in the elementary beliefs, there comes a time when either of our own wish or by force of circumstance we must subject them to criti- 2 LIFE AS REALITY cism. At this point the problem of reality presses forward. We want to know whether our sense-world is ultimately real, or only a modification of consciousness; we want to know in what sense our own moral life has a place in the order of the world, and to what extent it squares with the final value of the universe. Religion, too, pushes forward its own questions. We are outgrowing the time-honored dogmas of our fathers and blazing out new paths of our own through a wilderness of doubt and criticism. Here we must have a firm understanding of the true values of the religious consciousness in order to distinguish what is permanent in religion from what is only temporary. All these and a thousand other questions of daily moment require that we straightway face the problem of reality and determine what is ultimate in the varied wealth of our experience. In the truest sense we are all philosophers. We can never close our eyes to the world in which we are living. We are all like Kasselas: whether we would or not, we must go forth into a living world and meet the issues of a living reality face to face. Hume preferred to play back- gammon beside his huge kitchen fireplace than LIFE AND NATURE 3 to amuse himself with his own speculation, and the record of some human achievement appealed to him far more than the subtleties of cause and effect. Life cannot be interpreted as a fixed mould into which our experiences fall with a kind of predetermined certainty. Reality comes only through actual living. Experiences are nothing, moral efforts count for nothing, religious aspira- tions signify nothing except as they have a depth of reality to the conscious being who knows and feels them. This search for a final truth in our world is a vital question notwithstanding the sophistry of logic into which it often degenerates. All that we attend to, all that interests us, all that we hope and pray for, is built upon the assumption that we believe something in the universe is real. We feel that this reality is intimately associated with our actual lives, either as the values of our moral, social, or religious con- sciousness, or as the material world of external experience. We believe in our inner life and we believe in outer nature. These two truths stand out clearly. One is the simple unquestioned reality of our own consciousness, the inextinguish- 4 LIFE AS REALITY able belief that we as conscious beings think and feel and stand for some value in the universe. The other truth is nature, — the belief in the reality of the vast world of material objects lying outside our own consciousness but some- how akin to it. Life is personal, in the truest sense individual. Nature is impersonal, in the truest sense universal. Life is grasped immedi- ately through activity, through feeling; life is life only so far as it is lived. Nature is known only by means of the senses; it has a far-away character, a sort of impersonal fixity never to be confused with the inner feeling of life. These two realms of reality, life and nature, appear mutually exclusive, — we cannot live nature nor observe life through the senses. We cannot even know of the universe that surges about us except through the indirect testimony of external experience. Nor, on the other hand, can we sense life itself as a living reality. We cannot measure it by objective standards and compress it into the sense-forms of our own objective experience. Life leads us within to our own personal feelings, to the very font of our beings; nature leads us without to the clearly defined world of sense experience. There can be no LIFE AND NATURE 5 confusion between the two, because the contrast is as deep and fundamental as anything within the grasp of our minds. This contrast between life and nature is directly revealed in consciousness. Life is a matter of value; nature is a matter of fact. Life means to the living personality a continual testing of things done and things undone, of successes and of failures, of efforts, struggles and ideals. Life stands as a symbol for all this wealth of subjective imagery, for the inner meaning of what we only vaguely feel. The problem of nature is not one of values, it is one of fact. Sense experience carries with it a blind certainty and the facts of nature come to us with the stubborn resistance of a reality alien to our own consciousness. They must be accepted as true in our understanding of the world that surrounds us. This certainty is the first pre- supposition of the natural sciences. Different periods of the world's history have emphasized either one or the other of these two problems. Human speculation resembles the swing of a huge pendulum, — one age worships subjective life, another objective nature. The old bards of the Vedic hymns far away in an 6 LIFE AS REALITY unknown land saw, with a prophetic vision, the problem of the world as a problem of life. They were the first idealists. Their voice resounds through the centuries, — the world of reality is within, it is life. In the ancient city of Miletus, rich and opulent, where the wealth of Persia and the industry of the Ionian Greeks met, Thales first taught a philosophy of material reality. The beginning and the end of all things is water; this, of all the world, is real. Great wealth fos- ters a belief in the final reality of nature because then men look for human values in the material stimulus rather than in the subjective satisfaction. But this passes away. A century or so later the philosophy of nature of the early Greeks was replaced by the philosophy of mind of Anax- agoras and Plato. The Greek genius had tested the reality of the material world and found it dependent on the flux, of human consciousness. It craved the reality that is centered in man. The rhythmic pulse of human thought vacillates between a philosophy of nature and a philosophy of life. But now our own age is naturalistic. We have learned through practical tests to gauge our knowledge by our conquest over natural LIFE AND NATURE 7 forces. We have little interest in understanding the springs and currents of human values. These are too subtle, too little capable of practical reckoning to interest a materialistic age. Science has taught us to seek for truth beyond con- sciousness. It has taught us to objectify truths It would even throw life on a screen and lead us to mistake the image for the reality, the centro- somes and the lines of amphiaster for the living protoplasm. Our immediate interests make science the revelation of God to man. Judging from its practical results, science is worthy of this confidence. It has harnessed natural forces, predicted the complex phenomena of wind and storm; it has read the composition of distant stars and measured the energy of the electron. Upward of a hundred years ago one of the most eminent scientists of modern times prophesied that chemistry would never be a true science because its facts could not be corre- lated with mathematics. To-day chemistry is in the forefront of the physical sciences and it has long since learned to predict its phenomena with mathematical accuracy. A few years ago the principles of inheritance were as mysterious as ever; to-day they are unfolding their secrets to 8 LIFE AS REALITY the pupils of Mendel and Darwin. All this is true, but it is not all. We call our age practical because it idealizes the material or else materializes life. We interpret the conquest of science over our physical environ- ment as if in the problem of nature lay the problem of reality. We have drawn the vitality out of life in order to measure its world. But it is not so simple as we would make it, because the whole of reality is not exhausted by our knowledge of nature. The things for which men and society have sought and struggled for are not the things of scientific moment. On the contrary, they are the intangible principles of life and liberty, of moral vigor and religious fervor, which cannot be materialized into facts and formulas. They are real, notwithstanding, and the world is dead without them. Even our practical age must give to the values of life their place in reality, for the problem of reality is a problem of poise. It is psychologically a balance between the impulse to interpret life in terms of nature and the impulse to interpret nature in terms of life. Logically it is a balance of ulti- mate principles of reason. In either case it is first a problem of value, the value of life in the LIFE AND NATURE 9 mechanism of nature and of nature in the reality of life. The materialism of our modern world may have accomplished much. It has not, however, under- stood the significance of its own achievements because it has not seen that the reality of nature is borrowed from life, which alone is real. Centuries ago Socrates plead with the youth of Athens to forsake the vain search for a material universal and find first the universal of conscious- ness and life. Nature is forever external to us, life and the moral world are close at hand. The old Greek saw a chaos of conflicting opinions struggling for vantage ground. He saw men looking for wisdom outside of themselves, when the true wisdom lies in life. Socrates did not appreciate, perhaps, the wonderful future that lay in store for the physical sciences, but he saw clearly that men must understand themselves before they understand their world. And to-day, notwithstanding the achievements of the sciences, the reality of the inner world of life is as certain as when the grand old man taught it to his faithful pupils in the prison opposite the Areop- 10 LIFE AS REALITY agus. Science has changed since Socrates lived, but his philosophy of life has not. Science can give us no insight into that life which to understand we must feel. The object- world of fact and certainty, of law and order, has a borrowed kind of reality; it is this that furnishes the inspiration and the limitations of science. The inner world of life activity has its truer values. It can never come within the range of scientific observation for the simple reason that it can never be objectified. It cannot even be described, for description can deal only with what can be portrayed to another, and life as a living reality can be known only as it is lived. Science can never instill into her clear-cut formulas the intimacy and the vitality which makes the experience real to the human being that experiences. Her ghostly forms of a dead reality can neither think nor speak; they can only express the outer shell of what was, never the living germ of what is. At best they are the protoplasm congealed, the ashes of the fire quenched. Here lies the difficulty of all our human specu- lation. The reality which we want to express because it is the reality within our own conscious- LIFE AND NATURE 11 ness is not the reality which we actually do express by any means within our power. The world of external sense-experience and formal law is not the deeply felt reality of our own life. The value worth knowing is this reality of life, but no sooner does it become articulate than it loses its vital character and shrinks into the dead images of objective experience. We try to hold to the reality of our life. But in trying to express this it fades away and something else looms up in its stead. We know what reality is, but we cannot make another feel what we mean by it. We cannot throw it into the forms with which we are accustomed to deal with our sense images. Nor, on the other hand, can we bring science up to the level of life, in spite of the rude efforts of the psychical and the social sciences. It is here that such subjects as psy- chology and sociology fail in their endeavor to explain vital processes. They may construct laws, they may theorize regarding the psycho- physical parallelism or the structure of conscious- ness or a thousand other things, but these have at most merely an academic interest. They remain forever objective to our consciousness; they never make us feel that they are concerned 12 LIFE AS REALITY with, something real and vital to us. They do not bridge the chasm; they do not explain one syllable of life as a living reality. Science fails to express more than an objective copy. Literature and art believe they can strike nearer home. Literature seeks to portray some phase of the multiform variety of human feeling, its strivings, its passions, its ideals, but at best these are always interpretations of what can- not be made articulate and recorded on paper. Lady Macbeth, Othello and Lear may speak in the words of Shakespeare's genius, but they are dead unless their emotions are understood in terms of what life means to every one of us. Literature does not give us a living reality, it merely supplies the rough clay into which we breathe the vital spark. And other arts, like painting and sculpture, do no better. They see the emotional striving for a finished perfection and seek to embody this in a form appreciable to sense experience, but find that the living spirit has vanished as soon as the object of art is created. They can give us, it is true, the vague shadows of a living reality, but these shadows reach no nearer the fountainhead of art's inspira- tion than the dead formulas of science. As a LIFE AND NATURE 13 whole, art fails even worse than science, because its error is more subtly veiled. Science advances no claim of omniscience; it would include only nature. What cannot be expressed as object it passes over knowing full well that there is a kind of truth it may not touch without blighting. But art, vain, fervid, impulsive, rushes into the innermost recesses of life. It would grasp the secret and transfigure it into some permanent form of reality. But the congealed life which it brings forth to the light of day is as dead and essentially meaningless as the crude and imperfect descriptions of science. In no way have either art or science succeeded in bridging the chasm between life and nature. Yet the bridge must be crossed, else life and nature are nothing to one another. If the mere statement of a problem is all that is demanded for its understanding, then the contrast between life and nature has brought into the foreground as deep and permanent a problem as our human powers may hope to grasp. But the statement of the contrast is not enough. Our mind revolts at any chasm between the two 14 LIFE AS REALITY fields of reality. We demand with a childish feverishness that our universe be a true universe. We want to know and to understand the relations which seem to subsist between life and nature. Moreover, we revolt at any inordinately com- plex and subtle theory of metaphysics. Life and the experiences of nature lie close at hand. There is nothing more directly certain than these two great realities, — why, then, refer them back to some unknown cause veiled in the obscurity of metaphysical dialectic? The philosophy of our modern world is simple, almost childish; it is akin to the animism of the old savage who saw himself in the great soul of nature. We have outgrown, perhaps unfortunately, the figurative play of his imagination, but we have not out- grown the utter simplicity of his philosophy. We want the most direct means for understand- ing life and nature, because life and nature are themselves so simple and so immediate. No end is achieved by inventing some supreme universal, neither life nor nature, where all con- trasts are obliterated in a vague, gray indifference. The fashion of philosophy and theology to ex- plain the known facts of consciousness by some unknown principle of universal reality leads LIFE AND NATURE 15 only to confusion. The Infinite Being of Par- menides, the Mystic One of Plotinus, the God of Erigina, the Substance of Spinoza, the Absolute Indifference of Schelling, and the Unknowable of Spenfer are all alike in their unintelligibihty. Under different names, among different peoples the old fascination for explaining the known by the unknown has occurred and reoccurred. But yet these Absolutes, one and all, either have meaning to our consciousness, in which case they are part of the interests of our life, or else they mean nothing and are no more than words, mere words signifying nothing. The Absolute, or whatever else we call reality, must be intimately related to life and to the human experience of external nature, because such a conception exists solely to make life and nature clearer. The Supreme Mystic One has no significance as a background of reality simply because it occupies so exalted a place that the everyday facts of our mind cannot reach it. We are compelled to interpret reality by the simple evidence of our own human consciousness. What is either so individual or so subtle as to claim for itself a place beyond life and nature can have no place in reality. Bather is it true that unless God or 16 LIFE AS REALITY any other conception of ultimate reality can meet the values of human appreciation, unless it can be interpreted to our mind, it is in no sense real. "Man is the measure of all things" has rung through the ages, an echo of what was taught along the banks of the Ilissus. But man's meas- ure of things is relative and not absolute; the very purposes by which he would measure his "all things" are themselves measured. They are relative. He looks out upon the world of material objects, that he believes himself able to pattern after his own mind; he would shape dead nature into a living image of himself. True, he does it; but is he himself not a part of what is shaped? Must we not go deeper than the external form of our ordinary purposes and efforts to discover reality? All the experiences which press upon consciousness, and all the struggles and moral purposes of life make us believe that there is a reality somewhere. This is the lesson of modern idealism, but it is only half the truth. The rest consists in finding what this reality is. Life and the experience of external nature are known to us in terms of our human consciousness. Whatever is real, whatever has significance, is LIFE AND NATURE 17 reflected there, for out of human consciousness in some form must come that which is real to us human beings. The untold richness through which the life which is lived and the nature which is known are borne into human consciousness, is not without depth and purpose. We demand a reason for ourselves and for our world. Many are the possibilities which rise into the foreground, many are the efforts to establish the reality of life and nature on a permanent foundation. We shall examine each in its turn. Sense- experience, science, happiness, the moral law, society, and religion each has its claim, each has its contribution to offer to the totality of human values, each believes itself the final reality in a universe of law and purposes. Beneath and beyond all stands the reality of life. II EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST To Truth's house there is a single door Which is experience. — Bayard Taylor The reality of nature is revealed to us through sense experience. If, therefore, we are to find ultimate truth and reality within the range of external nature, it must in some way be based on the evidence of our senses. As distinguished from our own consciousness we can in a measure regard the sense world as an independent region of causal sequences having a dignity and an ultimate truth peculiar to itself. There is an insistent certainty about experience which pleads its own cause. We must believe in it. There is, therefore, every reason for beginning a search for the reality of life and nature in nature itself. Such a theory of reality is in truth a realism, for it asserts, with no small degree of modesty, that reality is found crouching beneath our ordinary sense impressions. Reality is outside conscious- 18 EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 19 ness in the world of physical objects, a world that is true because it is forever pressing inward on the mind with an insistency that involves belief. The stern facts of sense do not lie. Their truth is the truth of an everlasting reality beyond and above our own varying consciousness. Kealism as a theory of real existence is directly built on the assumption that sense-experiences lead to a true reality. We know nothing of material reals except as they are manifest through sense impressions. There is the test, there is the fulcrum by which alone the reason may enter into possession of the world of external nature. Experience can give us only a theory of knowl- edge; realism is a theory of reality. Yet the one is bound up in the other, — the ultimate reality of external nature stands or falls with our analysis of experience. The first step in any understand- ing of reality is in the direction of an under- standing of the character and sources of our knowledge. Experience must plead its own cause. Often are we told that in the given experience there is an immediacy and a finality beneath which our ordinary human consciousness cannot penetrate. We are told that experience is simple; 20 LIFE AS REALITY it must point to something ultimate. We all feel an innate confidence in experience; we attach to its decisions a strength and a vigor which no other authority, whatever may be its character, can quite repudiate. Since the days of Bacon and Locke the scientific mind of all the world has turned to experience as the supreme court of appeal, for by her evidence all things human reach a final decision. She has no wily ways to lead astray men's minds. "A fact is a fact, an experience is an experience," — so runs the golden rule of the empiricist. Here truth begins, here it ends. This, in a word, is the creed of the empiricist. He is a self-satisfied, eminently practical individ- ual, always right, not by virtue of any wisdom of his own, but because of his unbounded con- fidence in his mistress. He never doubts in his own name, but always in the name of his oracle. His doubts are never true doubts, they are only echoes of what experience might say. His mental poise is never ruffled, he never feels the sting of uncertainty that sometimes falls to the lot of his less confident brethren. Every one of us has been an empiricist at some period of life. It is a larval stage through which we all pass, EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 21 so simple and naively fascinating is the world of sense certainty. The stage, however, is not permanent. A child breaks open its toy in order to see for himself its mechanism. So it is with all of us; there comes a time when our simple confidence in the unvarying certainty of the sense world is no longer self-satisfying and we find ourselves, too, inquiring what is this experience to which our confidence is so firmly shackled. The belief in the reality of nature rests on sensations. The experience of the bit of paper is to each one of us a composite group of sensations, — whiteness, evenness, shape, contour, stiffness, pliability, toughness, etc. In all this description, it will be observed that we never have before us directly, in an immediate manner, the experience of this one bit of paper. The experience stands as a complex of sensations associated together because they all occur at one point in our con- sciousness. Even the single sensation is not immediately itself and nothing else. The paper is white, but is not whiteness associated with snow, clouds, cloth, mosques, and a thousand other objects? And in a similar way every other quality by which the paper is sensed as an object of experience belongs to many other objects 22 LIFE AS REALITY quite different in character from the paper. The sensations, immediate though they seem, are, therefore, only the common elements among experiences. Qualities do not inhere within a single experi- ence; they are part and parcel of many. No sense experience can ever come to consciousness which is not both itself and also the common quality of a thousand other experiences. It is by means of these common qualities, whiteness, roundness, smoothness, and the like, that experi- ence becomes intelligible to our consciousness. These and similar qualities knit our world of sense impressions into a closely woven whole. We see nature not as a series of disconnected objects. We see it rather as an interrelated whole, with the web-lines running in all directions. All this is not new. It was pointed out centuries ago by the Platonic Socrates, and its truth is as certain now as then. The interrelatedness of all experiences through the common qualities of the sensations points to the importance of the conscious mind, where alone relations have their place of abode. Nor can this be disproved by a certain type of modern empiricist who claims that relations, like sense- EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 23 objects, can be immediately sensed. " White- ness " and "complexity" cannot be directly experienced in the same way as "white paper" and "machine," for relations develop as the mind develops. They are genetic like conscious- ness. Whiteness, as a relation among objects, is different for you at one age from what it is at another, and much more are such relations as complexity the direct result of mental activity. They depend on training and insight, which are characters in no sense empirical, unless the empiricist stretches the meaning of his term out of all proportion to the significance in which he ordinarily uses it. Mechanical complexity is quite a different relation to the trained mechanic than what it is to one untrained, notwithstanding it may be excited by looking at the same machine. The relations are not static; they are constituted through our life's interest and the grasp of our mind. The sheet of paper and the mosque of Djedid have no connection in themselves, yet through the common quality of whiteness the mind is able to bring them into a single class. This association does not He in the paper nor in the mosque, nor does it spring full- armed from the forehead of a creator. It is due rather to an 24 LIFE AS REALITY attitude of our will activity. The whiteness is not crude passiveness. Nothing in the world is quite that. It stands for something which re- sponds to my life purpose in a particular way. It is a bit of raw material which my will reacts to and translates into something intelligible. The understanding of experience, with the assort- ment and arrangement which my consciousness involves, is nothing but a retroactive process by which those values of my life which I define for myself from moment to moment become crystal- lized in an objective world. We hesitate to pass over this matter. The whole thread of materialism, pluralism and positivism hangs upon the predicates of experi- ence. Yet it seems hard to conceive how empiri- cism and materialism can see in experience an absolutely sundered and external reality if they are unable to account for the setting of experience in consciousness and life. To follow their reason- ing to its logical outcome leads us to a world of ultimate matter devoid of mind and conscious- ness and life. But it is a fact, unquestionable on account of its directness, that experiences are without meaning unless they bear relations to an experiencing mind, and this simple unassail- EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 25 able fact carries us beyond the pure externality of experience into the very citadel of consciousness. The empiricist is, therefore, in a peculiarly disagreeable predicament. He cannot accept the absolute uncritical ultimateness of his experi- ence, because he must admit the relation of sensation to a sensing consciousness. If this simple fact is admitted he must take refuge in some form of critical empiricism in which experi- ences play hide and seek with themselves in their endeavor to ignore consciousness, at the same time that they recognize it. The empiricist must interpret experience for what it stands. The issue, therefore, narrows itself to whether experience stands for an external reality, of which we know and can know nothing, or else for something that is intelligible to our con- sciousness. What is intelligible to consciousness is so only because it bears a relation to it, and this relation transforms the something into values which are not merely for themselves, but also for consciousness. Experience stands for something, because it is experience for consciousness. This cannot be repeated too often, because the empiricist forgets its import as soon as he has heard it. Experience 26 LIFE AS REALITY stands for something that is not in isolation and self completeness. It stands for something that is fully intelligible to consciousness, to life, in whose roots consciousness is itself grounded. Experience is a reflection of a life process, — the projection of life into a world conceived as differ- ent from ourselves. Thus it stands for one of the ways the final reality of life is objectified, one of the ways reality is revealed to human consciousness. This is the result that must remain for us permanent. The meaning of experience, the truth of experience, the reality of experience lies in the expression of life. This is empiricism in its lowest terms. The empiricist, with his sense certainty, is only on the threshold of a theory of reality. In the background lies realism. Empiricism is merely a theory of the source of our knowledge; realism is a theory of reality. All realists, so far as there is any uniformity in their teachings, believe in a truth independent of consciousness and life. They stand for the permanent reality of a sub-sensuous world, the pictures of which EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 27 are presented to us through experience. The ancient strait between realism and idealism is a contest over the reality underlying our simple sense experience. The realists believe sensation mirrors a final reality different from conscious- ness; the idealist believes it is the mirroring of some form of consciousness itself. Both, we echo, must meet at the reality of life. Eealism is as ancient as human speculation. In the old days it was practically synonymous with materialism, but of late years it has under- gone many refining processes. The basis of modern realism is critical common sense. It recognizes the relativity of all sense images, but fails to see why this single characteristic accounts for the richness of our world. The whole of reality cannot, seemingly, be reduced to a system of relations, for mere relations must have some substantial cores upon which to adhere. Rela- tions involve terms related, which are decidedly different from the mere relations, — there can be no whiteness without white objects. Some- where in the great world of nature there must be primal elements of reality which are not mere relation. There must be the centers of reality which bear the relations. 28 LIFE AS REALITY The realist contends, moreover, that only from such a world of independently real elements can we understand the " stubbornness," the " external- ness" of daily experience. Mere relation, a world of nothing but the gray, dull uniformity of relation, cannot explain the variety of our world, teeming with incident and purpose. The realist builds up reality. He starts with cer- tain ultimate units as its elements; they are to him the bricks and the mortar out of which the world of our own sense imagery is evolved. The realist is thus a profound believer in the constructive power of our minds. He hopes that by taking these crude elements of which we know next to nothing we may succeed in building a world of consciousness of which we know next to everything. But has he made reality clearer to us? In order for us to believe in a system of reals beyond consciousness he must predicate to this reality some determinable character by which we shall know something regarding it. To say "'tis there " is pure dogmatism no longer tolerated in any search for reality. The realist must describe his system of reals ere he can convince us of their reality. Many EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 29 have been his attempts and as many have been his failures. The only character with which he can consistently endow his elements is the character of " unrelatedness." Like the isolated monads of an old German philosopher, conceived to have "no windows to look out of," these modern monadistic " reals " are so independent, so entirely free from relativity, that all relationship has vanished. Each is supreme and unqualified within a narrow sphere of its own. Yet the realist would build our world out of just such elements. He would ordain a kind of universal reality to spring from these isolated "reals" and breathe into the system he has thus created a life and a vigor and a relativity which is entirely foreign to its nature. Such a course is conceiv- able, it is at least within the limits of possibility, but is it an adequate theory of our real world? Does it fit the very facts that the realist is working so valiantly to understand and to explain? If our world is full of relations and nothing is known to us except in terms of these relations, does it seem plausible that the ultimate units of such a universe are totally without rela- tions? Still if the realist admits a degree of relativity among the "reals" he has forsaken 30 LIFE AS REALITY his original position and called a truce with the idealists. Kealism claims to have reached the elements of experience. It believes that beneath every sense impression there is a something which cannot be resolved further. Yet this something in order to enter into the building of our world must be like the world. It must have relations. No relative ultimate, no matter how precisely or how carefully denned, but what must have relations to other hypothetical units similar to itself. However valiantly the realist may strive to define his "real" without involving relations, still that real must be a part, a significant part, of his own life. Here he is silent. The promised land of the realist, flowing with milk and honey, dwindles down into a collection of elements most like mere points in their supreme individuality and least like our world of concrete sensations, thoughts and feelings. The universe that the realist would build out of his irreducible units is not our world of sense experience, nor does it breathe the free air of our world of thought and action. It is not living. Finally after resorting to every artifice of description, every subterfuge of dialectic, the EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 31 modern realist takes refuge in the sophistry of the mathematical limit. He is willing to admit with us that the single experience is known to human consciousness as a cluster of relations, but he insists likewise that the true reality, the real, may be conceived through a process of abstraction. This stand of the modern realist may be illustrated by the old example of the sheet of white paper. Among its many qualities that of its whiteness is conspicuous. If we imagine this quality of whiteness removed all the rest of the qualities of the paper remain, — the smoothness, the fibrous texture, the form and all else that makes the experience of the paper just what it is. Then again we may believe, perhaps, that the quality of smoothness is taken away. This leaves the paper with all its qualities except those of whiteness and smoothness. By some such process of abstraction the modern realist of this particular type conceives one quality of an experience after another removed until nothing remains but the mere limit, the mere "end quality ' ' which is gradually approached in our conception as quality after quality of the sense experience is abstracted away. The real is that "substratum of permanence" which is 32 LIFE AS REALITY approached but never reached. The real is the hmit, — that and nothing more. 1 Assuming this position, the realist claims to have inherited the mantle of Kant and Herbart. He would infuse into the " thing-in-itself " a kind of artificial life drawn largely from the analogy between the sense process of experience and the form of a mathematical series. As a limit the realist believes that his real is beyond the scope of perception, yet real in the truest, deepest sense. All this may be true, but it is above all else vague and artificial. In the extreme position into which the realist has been driven reality is made differ- ent from anything known to consciousness. Yet this strange, unnatural kind of reality is connected with actual experience by the relation of the terms of a series and their limit. But this 1 In a previous publication this theory was advocated, — that reality of an objective kind could be reached by a process of abstracting qualities from sense experiences. This theory of the realist seems to me no longer tenable, because (a) Reality would be individual and hence have no relation to the qualities; (b) Knowledge of the terms of a mathematical series does not justify a knowledge of the limit; (c) What reality shall be ascribed to the qualities themselves if the reals are the limits left over after the qualities are removed? (d) What relation do the reals bear to one another if they are mere limits? EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 33 makes the kind of sense-reality which we meet with through experience absolutely unreal, since reality is that which by definition is unattainable through the senses. We have the world of reality reduced to an unrelated mass of psycho-mathe- matical limits, conceivable only through the artificial staging which this particular type of realist has erected about our simple ordinary experience. But again we ask of the realist, as we asked of his brother of less mathematical pretensions, — What kind of a world have you built out of these figments of your mind? It is certainly not the world of our actual experience, since the world of our daily knowledge is full of those sense qualities which are arbitrarily denied to the reals. Mathematics is at best an abstraction from experience. Its conceptions are derived at the last analysis from experience, and like all other theoretical constructions have their validity and their value tested at the court of experience. At this point the modern realist of contemporary philosophical journals makes answer. He would drive realism to the opposite extreme. The real is not a limit produced by abstraction, it is, on the contrary, a limit of fullness. All our descrip- 34 LIFE AS REALITY tions of an experience are inadequate to the "real reality" of what is somehow involved in the experience. Therefore, let us call the " real " the limit which all our descriptions of an experi- ence approach as we add to it quality after quality, truth after truth. The real is therefore the complete saturation of reality, the limit approached by our finite and meager descriptions as we approach nearer and nearer its full and ultimate description. This young realist is, unfortunately, in no better position than his elder brother. He is still wallowing in the theory of Hmits and its vague subtleties. For if the "real" is no more than the " limit of descriptions " it can hardly be more than the goal in consciousness for our ordinary descriptive powers. Under this spell the real becomes in the truest sense unreal. It is non- existent. It is what the world might be were consciousness and our finite powers of description capable of doing what they cannot do, namely, of reaching some ultimate limit. The modern realist, with all his constructive devices, has therefore made no progress toward the actual solution of the problem of reality. He has been driven through long years of controversy, EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 35 like a retreating army from ditch to ditch, until finally in the last trench he has fortified his position by an appeal to the analogy between experience and the theory of hmits. He has sought to explain the comparatively lucid world of actual life by artificial constructions which remove reality forever from all that we can know in our simple daily experience. In his efforts to clarify and make real the core of reality which we all believe to exist somewhere in experience he has had recourse to an artificial staging which carries reality forever beyond the fight of sense and consciousness. There, in his last trench, we leave the realist. The failure of the empiricist and the realist to reach an ultimate theory of reality proves not the least that experience in itself is unreal. It proves only that the reality of experience is not borrowed from some vague external world intel- ligible only in being unintelligible. It shows conclusively that simple experiences derive their import from those very life processes which we employ in interpreting their meaning. Experi- ence stands for intelligibihty, for consciousness, 36 LIFE AS REALITY for life. We understand experience, not because it points to an external, unknowable world, foreign to our own life, but because it is the pro- jection of that life. It is in the truest and deepest sense a revelation of our own life activity. This is the final meaning of experience, but there is another phase of its value which con- tinually demands attention. It is the place of experience in science. The order and the system of our world of sense perception is not without its bearing on the problem of reality. One fact of experience does not give us all of the life that is revealed through the senses. It occupies merely a niche in an ideal whole. This whole is science. Ill SCIENCE AND HER LAWS Watch narrowly The demonstration of a truth, its birth, And you trace back the effluence to its spring And source within us. —Browning. It is the frequent boast of the practical scientist that progress in our understanding of nature has run parallel with the forward movement of civilization. The human race has accumulated from age to age a fund of experiences which it has woven into a compact whole. This accumu- lated fund of knowledge from experience has met every new demand thrust upon it and has, therefore, incited a confidence in the natural sciences. Ever since the old days of the English empiricist science has brought to bear these conspicuous practical achievements as evidence of its grasp on the true reality. It has asserted with pride that any branch of human knowledge so eminently successful along its own lines must 37 38 LIFE AS REALITY be built on some permanent foundation. It has furthermore asserted that this permanent founda- tion must be akin to the true reality. The practical success of science has tended to hinder the proper estimate of its ability to see the underlying problems with which it is grappling. The purely practical results of any inquiry are quite different in character from the presupposi- tions upon which the inquiry rests. The practical bearing of sanitation on sociological questions is quite different from an examination into the pathology of the pneumococcus. Navigation is different from astrophysics, engineering from pure mathematics, and even pure mathematics is quite different from the investigations into the nature of space and time manifolds. So in all sciences the practical undertakings present a type of problem in no wise identical with that dealing with the kind of reality underlying scientific labors. Science is successful in its elaboration of nature, — so much is vouchsafed on every hand, — yet we demand to know the kind of reality upon which scientific truth is built. Science is conspicuously obj ective. Its material must be thrown on a screen. There must be some device for making a fact an object for examination, SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 39 else it has no place in science. Even in psychology and sociology where the facts arise through human consciousness these facts must be capable of empirical description and measurement ere they can be stamped with the hall mark of the scien- tific fact. In a word, science deals throughout all its branches with objects. The reality with which it is concerned is the reality of objects. In reaching this kind of reality science has the same instrument as philosophical realism, — namely, experience. The estimations of the values of experience have brought to light, in the preceding chapter, nothing ultimate except the life values into which they lead. These life values are no more akin to the type of reality for which scientific realism is seeking than they are like the type of reality for which philosophical realism stood. Behind the experience lies the perception of sense quali- ties and behind this the life values which give experience its content. Through the relativity of all sensation-qualities we make experience what it is by reference to the activity of our own life process. AH that we know through the senses is nothing except as it is made vital through the inner process of living. So much for the 40 LIFE AS REALITY content of experience, which, under the scrutiny of analysis, turns out to be a content of life. But science is not merely experience. It is something more. It is constructive, and that vast structural fabric which it weaves out of the separate elements of experience has a breadth and a comprehension that places it on another plane. Science necessarily deals with sense im- pressions and for this reason the form of its knowledge must bear the characteristics of its origin. Yet notwithstanding this, one is led to recognize a marked difference between the truth of science as it is reached from an elaborate process of observation, experiment and induction, and the crude experiences which jostle against one another in the normal human consciousness. In themselves all these simple elementary sense impressions are identical in value. But out of this plebeian mass a certain chosen few rise con- spicuously into the foreground. All smooth- coated peas are to all intents and purposes alike, but in the course of certain experiments on inheritance it is quite possible that the experience of a single pea might make or mar some broad phylogenetic theory. The astronomer often has groups of experiences which are essentially alike SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 41 in character, but on account of some depth of meaning which he himself alone observes, one member of this group stands out clearly from the rest, — as, for example, when Young observed the reversal layer in the sun's spectrum during the total eclipse of 1870. The germinal cells of a certain insect contain normally twenty-seven little bodies, but some of these cells contain a twenty-eighth, and upon this seemingly insig- nificant difference hangs a wonderfully ingenious theory of sex determination. So it is throughout all ranges of science, — it is not so much the experience itself that counts as it is the signifi- cance of that experience in the intellectual back- ground of the investigator. Science is constructive. But the elements of her pattern are not experiences themselves in their rude simplicity, but rather the meanings for which these simple sense impressions stand. The pattern bears very little resemblance to the single threads. A multitude of animals is a very different matter from the meanings attached to them in systematic zoology. Fossil and living armadillos stand for nothing unless their meanings can be compared. But when these meanings are compared it is possible to build from them vast 42 LIFE AS REALITY generalizations like that of evolution. Science may be said, therefore, to build her structures out of the mind- values of experiences and not out of the raw sense impressions. She represents the organization of the meanings of experience, and one must observe that the meanings are themselves not empirical but teleological. They arise as one human effort through the medium of which men may express themselves. They find a place in science because in them men may find a field for their own life interests, the self- expressions of fife as it is revealed to them. Again we repeat, science is constructive. The sense impressions which furnish the raw material for all scientific inductions lack the objective permanence and stability which scientific truth demands. Sensations when reduced to their lowest terms are mental images. While, perhaps, we can breathe into them an objective back- ground by referring them back in every case to their external objective source, still they are transient and variable. They are vitiated by the relativity of all mental facts, whereas science demands an invariant basis upon which to erect the permanence of its constructions. On account of this instability of our ordinary sense world SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 43 science must reconstruct its experiences in such a manner that they assume some character of permanence. They must become universal. It will not do for a star to appear bright at one instant, dull at another, red to one observer, yellow to another, unless these differences can be easily attributed to atmospheric or other causes. A chemical reaction must be the same if observed under the same conditions no matter by whom or at what place or time. Moreover, personal standards will not answer. In recent cata- logues of the stars a certain sixth-magnitude star is taken as the basis for all photometric measurements and the brightness of all stars is determined by reference to this standard. In this sense, therefore, the standard becomes the test for the experience. The very nature of experience demands clear standards of permanence. In its real nature all experience arises through the actual living of life. It is active in the truest sense and not the passive imagery of a world of reals beyond life. Yet it is only a passive world of permanence, which does not change with the observer or with time, that can serve as the invariant referendum for scientific truth. The first task for science. 44 LIFE AS REALITY therefore, is to discover a system of checks for transferring the ordinary life values of our every- day experience into the constants of universal ex- perience. In this problem of giving a permanent basis to the values of experience science presents her own solution to the problem of reality. It is not the solution of the empiricist, because science knows that experience is fragmentary and the reality she seeks is the universalism of nature; it is not the solution of the realist, because science stealthily avoids metaphysics, and at those junctures when she approaches its subtle- ties nearest she shrinks from the pluralism of realism. No. Science has her own belief regard- ing the nature of the universe, her own conception of the place of experience in reality. The type of reality to which science cleaves is of a constructive character. Starting with the given sense image, with all its fringe of sub- jective meaning, the scientist may either reason backward to certain elementary constants, the structural elements of his subject, or else he may reason forward to certain generalizations repre- SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 45 senting the theoretical superstructure of his subject. In one case he pursues a deductive method, using experience as the general type and discovering within it certain invariant elements, like atoms or species. In the other case he follows an inductive method, using experience as the concrete illustration of some universal law, — the falling apple and the rotation of the moon illustrating gravity. In the first instance experi- ence is the premise from which it is possible to deduce concrete expectations, — just as the char- acteristics of the unit species, Alca impennis, are determined from the one or two known specimens of the great auk. In the second instance experi- ence supplies the specific facts from which it is possible to construct broad generalizations, as, for example, the dissociation hypothesis from certain anomalies in the behavior of acids and salts. In any case, however, experience with its setting in the living consciousness of the scientist is the starting point. The reality sought for by science, in its invariant elements and its universal laws, is a reality firmly anchored to the sense experience of conscious living be- ings. To understand the characteristics of these types of reality, the >. elements and the laws, 46 LIFE AS REALITY they must be traced back to their own native wilds. Instances of elementary realities in the sciences are of frequent occurrence. There is no science quite devoid of them, although they take different forms in accordance with the particular demands of each special province of inquiry. In physics the atom and the molecule have long occupied fundamental positions, but at the present time other elementary constants such as the corpus- cle, — or unit of negative electricity, — with the corresponding unit of positive electricity, seem to have assumed more significant positions. The atom still remains, however, of the deepest importance to chemistry, notwithstanding the efforts of the physical chemists to substitute a more variable unit. The other sciences have elementary constants as well as physics and chemistry. Among modern works on inheritance, especially after Mendel's law had been studied, it was found necessary to presuppose certain inheritable unit characters, like blackness of pigment or length of hair; it seemed necessary to assume that these could be inherited from SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 47 generation to generation. They are, therefore, of the nature of hereditary constants. Another very useful constant in biology is the species. The psychologist, on account of the profound complexity of mental life, has always assumed that there must be certain elementary con- stituents of which all the higher states of con- sciousness are composed. He has called these units sensations. Such are types of elementary constants, — the corpuscle, the atom, the unit inheritable character, the sensation. Each, it will be observed, is the result of an elaborate process of deduction from experience, brought about by the demand for estabhshing certain permanent grounds which may be conceived as underlying the variability of our ordinary sense impressions. The reality which we ascribe to these scientific abstractions can be better under- stood from an examination into two typical instances, as, for example, the chemical atom and the biological unit of heredity. The conception of the atom has become fairly clear in recent years because of certain wonderful discoveries in physics. As originally denned by the English chemist, Dalton, the atom was simply the smallest bit of matter that could 48 LIFE AS REALITY enter into a chemical union. Dalton did not assert that the atom was the smallest possible particle of matter. This was an interpretation which arose later, based simply on the dogmatic assumption that the smallest chemical unit must be the smallest physical unit. The recent dis- coveries in connection with the Eontgen ray and the radio-active elements have entirely upset this assumption and shown that there exist physical units, the corpuscles, almost incom- parably smaller than the mass of a hydrogen atom, — ' ' the volume of a corpuscle bears to that of the atom about the same relation as a speck of dust to the volume of a room" (Thompson). But yet in spite of the discovery of what we might call the dust of atoms the old conception of the atom remains essentially the same. These new experiments, instead of destroying our belief in atoms as the units of matter, have tended in remarkable and unforeseen ways to bear additional evidence to their support. In a marvelous manner the electrically charged atoms of helium (a gas occurring sparingly in the atmosphere) have been actually counted. These charged atoms are given off from radium in a continual stream. Crookes found that every SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 49 time such a charged atom of helium struck a peculiarly prepared screen a visible flash was produced. Modifying the screen and using a microscope he was able to actually count the number of flashes per second. 1 Later Dewar computed the volume of helium that was given off from radium in a second from the amount given off in a longer time. Combining these two results the number of atoms in a cubic centi- meter of helium turns out to be 25,600,000,000,- 000,000,000. This example will perhaps suffice to show that atoms can be no longer regarded as figments of the scientist's imagination. They have been numbered by several independent methods, they have been weighed and the laws of their structure studied, — and all this with an abundance of experimental background. The unit characters of inheritance have not as yet received the abundant empirical justification that is associated with the physical atom. It is an old observation that certain characteristics persist unaltered through many generations, *The emanations were also counted by Rutherford, using an electrical device. This independent method gave results agreeing essentially with the optical method of Crookes. 50 LIFE AS REALITY notwithstanding the introduction of opposite tendencies. We often notice how a certain color of eye or form of feature is handed down from parent to child. Breeders of animals have long recognized the relative permanence of many desirable or undesirable features and they have striven to regulate their practical experiments with this in mind. In the early sixties a brilliant Austrian priest cultivated certain varieties of the ordinary pea and kept a careful record of the re- sults. He found that if smooth-coated peas were bred to a wrinkled- coated variety the resulting hybrids would all be smooth-coated. But if some of these hybrids were then bred among themselves a fourth of this second generation of hybrids would be wrinkled like one of the grandparents. Obviously the wrinkledness lay dormant in the middle generation, ready to show itself again. Obviously hidden away in the germ cells of this middle generation lay both smoothness and wrinkledness, the one smothering the other to our eyes but incapable of killing it. Each of these characters could be regarded as a unit character capable of passing from generation to generation essentially unaltered and unalterable. Our microscopic technique is at present too crude SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 51 to detect the presence of such unit characters in the germinal cells but their presence is a necessary assumption, 1 for by no other means, the biologist contends, can he explain the facts of inheritance in many plants and animals. These two instances, the atom and the unit inheritable character, indicate the kind of reality that we must ascribe to the elementary con- stants of science. It will be observed that no one ever actually saw an atom, although modern ingenuity has opened up many avenues of intricate observation by which these inconceivably minute bits can be actually measured and weighed. We believe also that the germ plasm has associated with it many inheritable characters, attested to by several lines of experiment and observation, but yet the microscopist has never seen any of these characters. Evidently the indirect methods of approach, available in each case, are at best methods of interpretation. This interpretation is a process of evaluating according to definite mentally conceived standards. 1 The work of McClung, Wilson and others on the chromo- some structure of the male gametes seems to indicate that the cytological basis of sex determination is almost within the grasp of science. 52 * LIFE AS REALITY We are compelled to recognize, whatever our form of description, that the reality of the atom and the inheritable unit arises through a process of transferring certain objective facts into some- thing intelligible to our own consciousness. It is because the atom moves, has comparable size, can give off energy units, in short because it "does something" in the broadest acceptation of the phrase that we believe in its existence. The capacity to do something, this standing for a predictable set of activities, is simply the translation of our own life activity into terms of objective experience. Our own life world is a world of movement; it is what it expresses. We are what we do, — we stand for what we have the capacity of doing. And when the vast variety of experiences crowd in upon our con- sciousness and demand some kind of organization our first effort is to infuse order into this mass by reducing the whole to elementary units and then to picture these units in terms of our own life activity. Hence the structural constants of science are real because they bear the impress of our own will impulse. The atom is real, it is no vague image of scientific delirium. It existed in essentially the SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 53 same form centuries before electricity and radium were thought of, when the old Greeks, Democritus and Leucippus, taught that matter was composed of particles eternally moving. The atoms do something, they stand for something in a system of real activities, and that made them real for the Greek as it does for us. The unit character of inheritance means a reality to us because we see in it that something which underlies trans- formations from generation to generation, a kind of living force behind organic evolution. We cannot conceive of a purely passive, inactive, "do nothing" unit, for this means nothing to our intelligence. Some chemists have wished to do away with the atomic theory, preferring to explain chemical reactions in more abstract terms, but without avail. The human mind demands a concrete, and at the same time dynamic basis for its thoughts. Beneath all our science and our experience there is the innate belief that nature can be understood only on general dynamical principles, a belief which finds its source in the struggle of life to express itself. In a sense the elementary constants of science are more real than the shifting scenes of our sense world. Yet this is a reality which is 54 LIFE AS REALITY knowable only through the projection of our own life, teeming with will activity, into that very world of experiences we seek to interpret and make permanent. Here is the reality of the corpuscles, the "eanalstrahlen," the atoms, the molecules, the species and all the other constants of our empirical world. They are real because they reflect human life activity. They are real to life, as a living reality, because they stand for a particular transformation of a life meaning. In this they do their work and fulfill their purposes. The elementary constants of the types just considered represent the permanent individuals of science according to which sense impressions are standardized. The universals in science are its laws. They group together larger ranges of experience in accordance with some simple but usually abstract characteristic. The so- called law of gravity expresses the attractive character of all objects. Falling bodies on this planet as well as the changes in position of the components of double stars exhibit concrete instances of the law. It is thus a shorthand SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 55 formula of what might be expected from experi- ence under certain conditions. The principle of recapitulation in embryology affords a fair illustration of the scientific law. It has not the mathematical rigidity of a physical law, but yet the experiences upon which it depends are sufficiently distinct to afford well- defined tests. The early embryologists observed that many embryos developed according to a succession of stages that duplicated forms lower down in the animal series. The sheep embryo, for example, is first a single one-celled body, corresponding to the primitive protozoa. Later on it assumes a form analogous to the group to which the jellyfish belongs. Still later it is worm-like, with its various rudimentary organs in analogous positions. Again it has the gills of the fish, although these soon disappear as the sheep approaches the form of all mammalian embryos. This law, moreover, vague as it may seem, has been made the ground of predictions concerning unknown experiences. Indeed, so well defined is it in the minds of some embry- ologists that they have been able to trace the whole evolutionary development of a group of animals by a careful study of their embryos. 56 LIFE AS REALITY Later these suppositions have been verified by the rinding of the earlier forms among the fossils of old rocks. A certain Eussian zoologist used this law of recapitulation as the basis for his study of the development of a low vertebrate, hoping by its use to add evidence to the Dar- winian hypothesis by detecting stepping stones in the chasm between the lower and the higher animals. In its general expression the law indicates, therefore, a group character persisting throughout a certain well- defined range of experi- ence. It is a shorthand expression for the common feature or features of an extended class of experiences. This is the kernel of law. From this single instance it is obvious that the test of a law is found in its agreement with experience. The greater the range of experience the greater the confidence we have in the law. The present hypothesis of electrolytic dissocia- tion, upon which so much of modern chemistry depends, is supported by many independent lines of evidence, any one of which would destroy the theory if distinctly different x from what it 1 At the present time the dissociation hypothesis is being assailed because of the anomalous behavior of strong elec- trolytes in solutions of medium concentration. Yet as a SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 57 is. Many years ago the astronomer Bode observed that the distances of the planets from the snn could be expressed by a simple arithmetical progression. This was believed by practically all astronomers until an exception was found in the case of the planet Neptune. The new fact was regarded as the all-important value and "Bode's Law" was thrown aside like an outworn shell. For the time being the law served its purpose as a convenient index of known facts, but it was dethroned in a moment when a new experience was found to be at variance with it. The reality to be ascribed to the scientific law is somewhat different from that of the elementary constants. Science has evolved its elements in order to obtain permanence in experience; it has evolved its laws in order to make universal this permanence. But this universalism of a law is itself not capable of experience; it is in all cases extracted out of experience by a process of interpretation. A law has no locus, no place of abode, except in the intellectual imagination of scientific theory it has met the test of " agreement with fact " so well that most chemists demand a wider range of de- structive evidence before they consent to discard it. 58 LIFE AS REALITY man. The scientist sees in experience a kind of life process and universalizes this into a law. He is successful because the kind of reality with which he is dealing is familiar to him as the reflection of his own life interest. The reality of the law becomes for him one phase of his own self-expression. It is a reality because it expresses activities in nature — a formula in consciousness for how nature duplicates life. We all look upon scientific law with a reverential respect because it presumes for itself a generality which carries us quite beyond the finite scope of our own meager sense-impressions. Yet it is our own mind that formulates these very laws for which it has such respect. And they must be verified ever and anon by those very sense- impressions which we so disdainfully call meager and finite. To simple experience scientific law is alike relative and subservient. There is nothing derogatory to science in this. It simply shows how futile are all attempts of the scientist to construct for himself a realm of truth which shall be more absolute than the world of his own life. He may seem to do this in the order and system into which he weaves experience. But the order and the system of science come from SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 59 the projection of his own life-expression into the world he calls alien to his own consciousness. Thus much is the reality of science life. Whether we consider its elements or its laws we are driven back to the human interpretations of experience, at most the projections of life activities. We pattern our world after ourselves, not in consciousness, but in action. Our life is a continuous effort, it is action, and the reality of nature we reflect is dynamic. This is the truth of science, but it is a truth that arises through life. IV THE LAW OF LIFE Two things fill my soul with ever new and increasing wonder and respect, the oftener and the more attentively I reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. — Kant. Empiricism and science are concerned with values outside of our human consciousness. The empiricist, the realist and the scientist would all describe reality in terms of some external foundation, and make the values of human life dependent on this outer reality. They fail in this undertaking, not because sense experience is without significance or importance in the sum total of the world, but because the relativity of our world of sense impressions indicates merely a relative, never a final reality. Experience is not unreal, it simply can't be explained in the manner the scientist would have us believe. A philosophy of reality, at all thorough or self- satisfying, cannot stop with the unfinished 60 THE LAW OF LIFE 61 philosophy of the external world. Above the values of experience, loom up those of life, — feeling, activity, morality, social welfare and religious faith. We turn from the external forms of the material world to the life-values revealed in human action, because we believe them more vital and significant to our everyday consciousness. First, however, we are led to inquire whether or not there is a formal law of life. It is human activity, ceaselessly throbbing and pulsating, that shapes the material world after its own forms. Experience is not passive and formless; it is rather vibrating with the reality which we ourselves give to it. Even Aristotle, the greatest of the philosophers of the material world, vouchsafed this much to his master Plato, — mere matter can never be known in its material purity, what we know through experience is always matter endowed with a rationality like our own. The world of consciousness, of pur- poses, above all else of activity and moral effort, this is the world that gives its values to experi- ence. But it is a world of order after its own kind. Therefore we seek its law, its expression of objective reality. 62 LIFE AS REALITY Men must act, — life is above all else dynamic. To be conscious is to be conscious of impulse and exertion, to be self-conscious is to be conscious of the feeling of action. This feeling cannot be separated from life. Mysticism, which tries to give moral dignity to a mere existence of pure passiveness, has failed as a philosophy. It has failed as a religion. The Christian mystics of the late middle ages were out of sympathy with our European civilization. They did not under- stand that religion to have meaning to us must have its truth reflected in action. We crave no absorption into the Being of God for we cannot comprehend what reality means apart from striving and effort. Remove from life the belief in action and nothing remains but the outer wrappings. Make the ideal and the purpose of life the suppression of effort, of impulse to do in its broadest sense, then the whole import of life disappears. The Nirvana of the Orient is little else than a word concept to our consciousness, because any form of existence without some relation to action and individuality is incon- ceivable. Even Schopenhauer fails to mould Buddhism into forms acceptable to our western thought. He gives us an Absolute in which all THE LAW OF LIFE 63 differentiation and strife are suppressed. He paints our conscious, human life in the somber colors of pessimism simply because life and consciousness involve action and effort. But Schopenhauer, subtle as he was in the analysis of experience, failed to perceive that his Oriental ideal of peace and quietness was merely the emotional reaction of his own volcanic tempera- ment. His peace was not the peace of life, for it had no relation to life. It is impossible to describe life without action. It is, however, necessary for us to understand something of what action means. We cannot lay aside the problems involved in our life of activity as the chemist might his test-tubes and his beakers. Our struggles, with their hopes and ambitions, have a practical vividness that carries with them our immediate attention. A jurist is often confronted with the difficult problem of deciding between two equally conclusive lines of evidence. He cannot postpone judgment as a scientist might. He must act, and great con- sequences may arise from his decision. In this sense we are all in his position. We must all act even though we may not understand fully the true import of our effort. This brings us 64 LIFE AS REALITY face to face with the principles underlying the motives of our actions. The science of conduct is the science of life. It involves more than the distinctions of right and wrong, for in the end right and wrong, good and bad, are relative terms, valueless unless justified by some ultimate standard. Determine first this standard and all human actions and purposes can be understood without difficulty; but if life is without organiza- tion and purpose, then the simplest act lacks meaning and the drama of life becomes the tragedy of fatalism or the purposeless play of chance. It is a part of our nature to believe in life and seek for its purpose. It is impossible to live without the quest. The simplest thought or act transcends itself; it means more, it is more, than appears on its face. The moment we try to ask of it what this more is, then we are driven backward, step by step, to the final issues of life. Broad moral questions and the conflict of duties often hang on simple everyday acts. We would avoid all the perplexities of the deeper problems of speculation, but we find ourselves there almost from the outset. We would confine ourselves to the concrete, practical everyday facts of life, THE LAW OF LIFE 65 we would avoid assiduously all the bypaths of metaphysics which have perplexed our impractical brothers, but we find ourselves thrown into these mazes by the very practical concerns to which we would anchor our trust. Our every thought and act leads into the august realm of law and order, leads us to inquire what is the ultimate significance of the whole, what is the final law of this life of ours to which all other concerns are relative. Ever since the days of the ancients we have been concerned with the principles underlying our actions. We have found the subject highly interesting, even fascinating, for it is at once the easiest and most difficult field of human inquiry. It is the easiest because its material lies close at hand since the problems of conduct have an intimacy and vividness which the problems of no other subject possess. Yet they are the most difficult because in the end human conduct is as multifarious as the infinite variety of human nature and as complex as the subtle springs of human action. The moralist tries to delve into the innermost nature of life and 66 LIFE AS REALITY unmask its secret. He would crystallize the living germ of reality. Since men have begun to discuss the principles of their conduct there have existed side by side two distinguishable currents of thought. Each represents a different answer to the problem of conduct. Each finds the solution of the problem in some external basis of authority but differs in regard to the nature of this authority. On the one side stands the empirical school, fostered largely by the Ango- Saxon confidence in the world of experience; on the other side stand those who find the basis of human action in some source deeply spiritual in its nature and perhaps almost religious. Sometimes this spiritual source, external to our consciousness, may take the form of a belief in the ultimate goodness of God, sometimes it may find its authority in the con- science or duty. The point of importance is the objective character of each of these standards. The Anglo-Saxon thinkers have stood out boldly for the empirical view of fife. They have carried their deductions into the field of ethics and have seen in the experience of the individual and of the race the ultimate basis of human action. The empirical theory of ethical values points THE LAW OP LIFE 67 out that it is experience that teaches the differ- ence between black and white. From this simple observation it reasons that all judgments, colored by right and wrong, good or evil, are distinctions which may be traced finally to the broad field of sense impressions. Moral principles are merely the successful modes of conduct. From many experiences the race has discovered that " honesty is the best policy," and hence crystallizes the results of its experience in the moral precept, — "thou shalt be honest." The validity of this principle derives its strength from the width of experience upon which it is based. Were social relations to become very different from what they are now, it is conceivable that this moral principle might no longer hold true. Experience is general expediency. Here is the ultimate criterion of conduct. Here whatever there is of a moral law reaches its justification. Our practical mind is impressed with the vigor and simplicity of the empirical theory. We have learned in the course of years to rely upon our experience. We have learned to trust implicitly to sense perceptions and all that joins us most closely to the external world of fact certainty. But this very certainty and scope is the greatest 68 LIFE AS REALITY defect of the empirical ethics. Our ideas of black and white, of large and small, may arise from experience, but that is far from proving that the ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, and our delicate appreciation of social advance- ment and retrogression, have a similar origin. Experience is at best a generalized form of sense impressions. Its facts obtain whatever cer- tainty they possess from the shifting sense images of a world arbitrarily described as beyond consciousness, — a world which is admittedly non- ethical in temper and value. To declare that human activity, throbbing and filling our whole being with its deep reality, finds its origin here is to declare that a world which is by nature passive and determined, which is neither moral nor immoral, nor has any semblance of vitality, can yet impose a universal law on our human life. Expediency, upon which experience would base the law of action, is purely relative. It is, more- over, narrow and uncertain. It may seem expedient to murder at one time, to be kind at another, but the final basis of this expediency is never more than a momentary emotion, based at best on a narrow induction from limited experience. Experience is different for different THE LAW OF LIFE 69 persons, and a moral law derived from general convenience or suitableness would be as various and uncertain as the fruits of human experience are various and uncertain. Experience offers nothing final and ultimate of its own; we can hardly believe, therefore, that it can serve as the ultimate court of appeal for a law of life. One of the most graphic answers to the problem of " What is expedient?" is found in the utilitarian commandment, — act so to achieve the greatest happiness to the greatest number. This appeals to our sense of proportion and the general appro- priateness of things. It is big with human sympathy. Yet it cannot bear the acute scrutiny of experience by whose strict laws the empiricist believes it justified. Happiness as such cannot be universalized. It cannot even be objectified. There are no means known to man by which some moral legislature can add the various types and degrees of happiness which are likely to follow from any given line of action. In the practical working of this test our knowledge of society and its structure proves so vague that we find it quite impossible to prophesy with any degree of accuracy the happiness or unhappiness that may arise from any single moral decision. 70 LIFE AS REALITY The influence of each action is so diffuse, like the waves excited on the surface of a pond, that we can have no appreciation of its value or extent. Happiness is not the same for us all, nor has the empiricist his own self-satisfaction to guide him in the determination of his particular interpretation of universal happiness, since no single action can produce the same quantity or intensity of happiness when repeated. All this is true because happiness cannot be objectified; it is personal. So here when the principle of expediency, the test of action according to experience, has been extended to embrace society, it is found to be merely relative. No vague formula of the world's happiness strikes to the heart of the immediate vividness of every human action. History shows us how futile are all the efforts of social expediency, throughout countless ages, to bring us nearer the Elysian fields of an earthly paradise. So the world since time immemorial has extended its principle of expediency from this life to the next. The eternal city is not Eome. The religious moralist, fearful lest the overburdening sin of the world should turn men's faces from the time-honored customs THE LAW OF LIFE 71 of their fathers, has promised an ultimate justi- fication of human good and evil in the world to come. The Buddhists have invented a series of sensuous heavens and torturing hells in which the ceaseless law of Karma metes out to each his reward and his punishment. The Christians have contrasted a heaven paved with gold and precious stones in which the august majesty of God judges the quick and the dead with a hell stifling with the sulphurous fumes of eternal fires, where agonies interminable justify the ways of God to man. Such is the moral law based on eternal justice. Yet even such a justice does not render the principle of expediency ultimate. For if human action is to have value only on the grounds of reward and punishment in some "after reckoning taken on trust " then our human life degenerates into a system of bargaining in which the good is sold at one price and the evil at another. Nor is this principle of expediency universally authoritative, for there are many men who do not accept the dogma of a personal immortality. Life here on earth is more than a play of doubts, serious only to those who look forward to a retribution in another world. The basis of authority for action must come from practical 72 LIFE AS REALITY life itself. Morality must be self-sufficient. It must stand justified in its own world of practical values. And this justification cannot be obtained from the relative, never absolute, motives of expediency. With this clearly before us, we turn to the second type of ethical theory, where the sanction of conduct is derived from some spiritual source. The conscience, the ten commandments, "the way of purity," and the Sermon on the Mount, represent the obligation to a spiritual moral law. This moral law is imposed from without, it acquires its strength because it is forced upon our life by a supreme power beyond the scope of our own finite experience. It commands with a kingly authority, it seems to rise up from the deep recesses of man's spiritual nature, from some source far removed from the petty things of our daily life. We follow it with childish timidity. We may even ascribe to it the final authority in this life of ours. The conscience, although speaking as an inner voice, is authoritative because it seems to come from beyond our own will. We respect an THE LAW OF LIFE 73 authority which, it is not given us to question, we revere the "still small voice within," not because we have found this reverence rational, but because the conscience commands like a law vibrating through our nature from some unknown depth. Were we to consider the conscience as a part of our own personality it would lose this force and become merely one part of our being counseling another part. It would become more immediate and vital, — and in that sense more real to life, — but it would lose its objective authority. The conscience, in the sense of a moral sanction, is therefore objective in its nature. Yet if the conscience presumes to guide the motives of our life we cannot rest on this dogmatic avowal of authority. We must dis- cover the objective basis upon which the authority of the conscience rests. What is true of the conscience is likewise true of duty. We all feel its sovereign dignity, — "thou who art victory and law." The moral strength of the old Puritans lay in their venera- tion for duty. To them it was the final referen- dum of things human, the law unto itself supreme in the moral world. Yet the authority of duty, like that of conscience, cannot be pleaded with- 74 LIFE AS REALITY out some ulterior basis. It must have a sanction beyond itself, for we inquire immediately, why is it right, why morally necessary, to follow with- out question the command of duty or the impera- tive of conscience. It is this " why " that gives duty and conscience their strength. It is also this "why" that makes us seek for a further justification. The old Indian Yoga where men did disagreeable things simply for self-abasement has ceased to be pertinent to our workaday world. Duty for duty's sake is unethical. Even the hermit in his hut and the monk in his cell require some ulterior motive to give vitality, even sanctity, to their daily routine of duties. To us, who may feel the stir of a world of action, however austere the authority of the "stern voice of God " may seem, still we must trace back this authority to a source which gives vitality to the external obligation of a law of life derived from the conscience or duty. The ultimate authority for these spiritual sanctions may be either external expediency or some religious value. In the former case the same relativity and insecurity which vitiated the ultimate value of all moral laws founded on expediency here destroys our confidence in the THE LAW OF LIFE 75 conscience and duty as well. This has been obvious to those who believe in the final value of these spiritual sanctions, so their authority is sought for elsewhere than in the implications of mere experience. The connection of such laws of conduct as the conscience and duty with religion is as old as the history of our human institutions. There is undoubtedly a stage in the history of human society when it is expedient that justice and morality should have all the artificial support that custom, tradition and religious creed can afford. Savage tribes strengthened social expediency by the "taboo"; the early customs of the Jews, as the laws of Jehovah engraved on tablets of stone, assumed an authority unknown to human law. This is historical fact. But it proves not the least that the principles of moral actions and religion are inseparable. Social expediency in itself is not ultimate. With our present insight into life we have come to see that the alliance between principles of morality and the religious feeling has little permanent significance. "Oh! religion, what crimes have been committed in thy name! " is the oft-repeated cry of the victims of religious persecution. Under its white mantle cluster for 76 LIFE AS REALITY protection the highest principles of moral con- duct and the depraved cruelties of brutalized sensuality. Eeligion and morality are essentially different. Eeligion is a feeling; it concerns itself with the relation of man to his world, humanity to its God. The law that gives unity to life concerns matters of daily action. In no sense is it a feeling; in no sense is it concerned with the problem of the universe. It is the practical living of life. Christ's morality is no stronger, as morality, because of its religious superstructure; the moral law is not justified, as a moral law, by basing its authority on the religious feeling. Matthew Arnold is right when he points out that the essence of Christianity is the simple morality of Christ; but this argues only for a hopeless confusion of the moral and the religious motives. We cannot remain satisfied with Mr. Casaubon's " Key to all the mythologies " even though that worthy pedant was actuated by the most laudable motives. We have at best a confused notion of conscience or duty, yet neither one is more clearly understood or given a firmer ethical basis, though it is supported by the still more illusive ranges of religious feeling. Even the great THE LAW OF LIFE 77 thinker of Konigsberg is silent on this point. Kant found morality bound up in religion and religion in morality. Yet he fails to indicate the underlying conditions which make this mutuality possible. A basis there must be to the principles of human conduct, as well as to the conscience and to duty, if any confidence is to be placed in their authority. Yet this basis is not made clearer by transporting bodily the whole field of ethical values into the realm of religious obscurity. The moral law is omnipotent only within its own sphere. That sphere is life. That sphere is human personality. Conscience, duty, even religion itself must find, like expediency, their ultimate justification in life itself. They cannot give values to life, because it is fife that deter- mines their own values. As ideals they may perhaps embrace more and strike deeper than the older ethics of expediency, still, with them the unity of action lies external to life. What is external to life is not ultimate. In the deepest sense it is not real. Both of these theories of conduct, the empirical and the spiritual, are alike in the objective interpretation which they give to the underlying motives of our action. Both find the ultimate 78 LIFE AS REALITY standard of human activity in some region of value capable of determining the conduct of men by an irreducible certainty of external authority. This certainty comes to life from without. It is objective. It is, therefore, valid only on the assumption that conduct can be understood from the outside. Both types of ethical theory assume that we can apply a kind of ethical microscope to our daily life and reach some universal basis for all human action. It is scientifically formal in its inductive reasoning. It assumes that actions, like cells and double stars, may be objectified before consciousness and the laws of their being laid bare. The law of life must be in life. This is the lesson of all efforts to find an external principle of action. These efforts fail because human activities cannot be reduced to general principles, like the movements of stars and germ cells. They cannot be thrown on a screen and minutely examined. Life, pulsating with its activity, is not the dead form of reality which we dismember in the vague formalism of our ethical analysis. THE LAW OF LIFE 79 It is life, as a living reality, that makes for itself its own law. We must look for the principle of action nearer at hand. We must look for it in the very activity that brings it into being. This is our own individual life. We know absolutely nothing of the inner life of our fellow-beings. Their actions are, at the last analysis, as mysterious as the responses of the earthworm to light. That is why it is so difficult to legislate for another's moral actions; that is why experience and the conscience have each a limited significance. As principles of life they are artificial, they are not vital. If we could understand fife in its totality then we could interpret the moral color of another's experience and another's hopes and struggles. But we can't know life in its totality, simply because it can't be objectified. We are therefore driven backward into the recesses of our own inner activity. There is reality, there is finality. But human fife must have a balance. The springs of its activity cannot run rampant through nature. Man is lord of creation, but he is also his own master. The moral law shrinks and wizens to a mere shell in the presence of man's own life, but this very life, with all its reality aad its eternal 80 LIFE AS REALITY mastery of the world, must be master of itself. It must carve out its own fate, for there is no external law to sit in judgment over it. Life knows but one law, and that is of its own making. It is the law of self-expression. It is an imperative dominating every sphere of human action — " Express thyself! Express the life that is in you! " Under the guidance of this inner law each life becomes organized after its own pattern, adhering only to the universal law of self-expression. It is supremely moral because it is life, it is reality. The ethical value of life is gauged by the full- ness of self-expression. It is an active, insistent world in which the human soul finds itself lodged, and the only response it can make to its whole environment is in terms of its single function, life, activity. We are what we have the capacity of doing. The completed deed is not ethical, only the act. The duty of our moral nature, deeper than all other duties, lies in expressing to the fullest that germ of life which lies within us. On a more concrete plane our duty is simply to do, in a workaday world, all that we have the capacity of doing. Goodness lies not in the good of the cause, for that is never attained, nor in the THE LAW OF LIFE 81 accomplishment of a deed, for that becomes dead as soon as done, but simply and only in the self- expression which all acting and striving and struggling involves. The purpose of life is to live to the fullest in action and not in result. Degree in morality is merely the intensity of saturation of life-impulse infused into any moment. The only real evil in the world is the evil of failure to do. The only real good in the world is the good of action, of expression of the eternal "what next?" The law of life is felt, not known, but this is the ideal of that law so far as it can be crystallized in words. The ideal of self-expression gives unity to life. It stands for the inner meaning of those forms of the external moral law which proved inadequate to life because they were external. Expediency based on experience is valuable as a practical rule of living only as it contributes to the attain- ment of some end-purpose, which the individual deems worth striving for. Experience is the raw material of ethical values which is welded into our moral nature only so far as it con- tributes to the purposes of our wills. This is true also of universal happiness, — it is significant to life only as it forms a part of the struggles and 82 LIFE AS REALITY ambitions of those who seek to realize it. In itself it is evil since it is finished. Conscience and duty have whatever truth they possess illumined by the inner fife effort which they help to express. They are evil, absolutely evil, if they lead to a mediaeval asceticism, good if they add stimulus and fullness to our ambitions. In this alone lies the importance of all those formal principles of conduct which the race has constructed for itself. They subserve some pur- pose beyond themselves, the purpose of self- expression, the purpose of thrusting forward into the world so much of reality as stands revealed within. Yet in all this individual self-expression there rises above the threshold of our single purposes the composite will of society. The individual finds his own self-expression is encompassed about by the co-ordinates of social forms. He finds that his own self-expression is not a matter of crude caprice, but is intimately bound up with the self-expression of others of his kind. To the institutions and values of society we, therefore, turn for a further expression of the reality of life. THE CALL OF THE WHOLE No man can live or die so much for himself as he that lives and dies for others. — Colton. All those principles of conduct which arise external to life itself fail to express the inner impulse which forces each into being. They fail moreover as formal principles of an ethical world, for they are inadequate to the richness of life as an immediate reality. But even individ- uality demands its setting. Life is revealed to us set in a social background, where law and order are not determined by the impulses and the purposes of a single person. Society looms above the horizon of our single aims. We strive to express that which is so intimately personal that we come to regard it as a part of our own self-expression, but, strangely enough, we find that our own self-expression is linked inseparably with that of others. A man cannot stand as a mere individual, an isolated unit in the maelstrom 83 84 LIFE AS REALITY of human society. His real self-expression, as a human being, lies in his capacity to reflect in his own particular way the larger social life which ebbs and flows about him. Individual morality is social morality. A formal law for life proves objective; so also is the law of the social whole. Social ethics are individual ethics magnified. Man reflects his own purposes and values into the world about him and calls them the conventions, the institutions and the moral principles of society. These are universal, not because they involve in themselves any inherent necessity, but because a majority of our fellow men call them so. Still they stand out in the vast organization which society has constructed for itself as the things for which it stands. Society in the strictest sense is nothing more than the massing of these external institu- tions which we impose upon it; it is they which seem to have the final reality and value toward which we as single persons blindly strive. We pass beyond the relativity of Hmited values. In the larger individuality which pulsates with the life of humanity we find a breadth and a scope which breaks down the partitions which separate men and substitutes social insti- THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 85 tutions and ideals for individual interests and purposes. Society exists for individuals. All our social ideals go back to primitive springs of character. The fundamental institutions of society, such as the family, the clan and the nation, control men because they are based on simple traits of human nature. Civilization has not changed the rudi- ments of man's character; it has only smoothed the edges. Our progress upward has been social, but in that progress we have enveloped about us a covering of external forms, such as the institu- tions of the family and the state, much as the crustacean might its shell. These institutions exist primarily for the mutual advantage of the individuals concerned. The progress of mankind from the cave has constantly verified the belief that men will achieve greater individual self- expression when acting in conjunction with one another than when acting independently and alone. Yet beneath this social mutuality it must never be forgotten that society exists for the individual and not the individual for society. This is a fundamental truth notwithstanding the fact that all ethical values are reflected upward and outward into social values. 86 LIFE AS REALITY The firmest and closest of all social institutions is the family. It involves the most precise social bond. To secure this definiteness it demands the subjugation of the single will to the will of a narrow intensive group whose welfare succeeds that of the single persons composing it. This strength of the bond, this coherence and homo- geneity, is essential for the continued existence of the family as an institution. The internal structure of the group must be limited and definite; its bond must be indisputable. When this bond becomes in the least indefinite the strength of the family as an element of society gradually disappears. This is shown historically, for as the family expanded to the clan and the clan to the nation the homogeneity of the original unit was lost in the general diffusion of responsi- bility. The higher levels of emotional and intellectual sympathy by which marriage and the family attain their full flower are based on the differ- entiation of sex together with the differ ence of emotional and intellectual attitudes which depend on this difference. This condition cannot be idealized away nor can any sanctity shed upon marriage by religion modify its nature. Originally THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 87 it had significance merely as a mutual agreement or contract in the light of which society sanctions the gratification of a primitive passion. Such was marriage among the Greeks and the early Teutons. Efforts on the part of many idealists to raise marriage to levels of absolute truth and value too often savor of an inclination to lend their philosophy to the justification and ennoble- ment of what they emotionally feel to be true. It is social expediency which has justified marriage in the form that we find it, but a social expediency which has proved its value through the moral influences which it has shed upon the persons composing the family group. On its highest levels, unfortunately not always realized, the family is a great moral force enabling individuals to attain through its medium a higher state of self-expression. The primitive purpose of the family is the continuance of the race under conditions most favorable to individual and social progress. This is purely a practical matter. The higher the species in the scale of animal life and the higher the stage of society in its social life the longer the young require protection. The experi- ence of the past has shown that this is best 88 LIFE AS REALITY obtained under conditions of strong parental feeling and where struggle or competition in childhood is minimized. On the lower planes of ignorance and incompetency mere increase of the human species is fraught with hopeless misery, want and degeneracy. Charity and philanthropy in the city slums are as nothing compared with the importance of checking the birth rate where conditions are unfavorable to the proper devel- opment of children. Evolution would teach its glaring lessons to the philanthropist and the practical sociologist, but they are blind. The struggle of incompetents with incompetents will adjust itself to human progress, but it will work out its iron law through the relentless slaughter of those unwilling or unable to conform to moral and social ideals. Comparatively few now living will have descendants a thousand years from now, but these few are the chosen seed, not by a scriptural commandment, but by the law of nature which perpetuates the moral and the strong but stamps out the immoral and the weak. This is the fundamental duty of the family — to make possible better individuals, not merely more. The deeper significance of the family is not THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 89 biological, but teleological. It Helps to the self- expression of individual human beings. One generation devotes itself to the raising of the next, and this in its turn to the raising of another. Is all this human effort not an endless and self-contradictory process, without significance or permanent value, unless the individuals at each stage express in themselves a separate and distinct reality? Social values do not lose them- selves in some vague Utopia — they stand out in the eternal now. And the family, like any other social form, must justify itself in the immediate reality of the present. This present is real only for human beings, never for institutions. The family exists for individuals, not the individuals for the family. The latter is at present expedient, and therefore of relative value. But this social expediency gives to it, as an institution, as a social form, no ring of absoluteness. Historically it arose, and pre- sumably it will pass. It was of slight importance in the Spartan state and Plato's ideal republic relegates it to an insignificant value. It is at most a middle term between the singleness of the individual and the multiplicity of society. Like the rhythmic movements of vast cosmic forces 90 LIFE AS REALITY the present social tendencies bring the antithesis of the individual and society not only into more marked juxtaposition, but also into greater harmony. If the family in any particular instance leads to a greater individuality among its members, to greater opportunities of self-expression, then it serves its purpose in that particular instance. Its influence for good is centered in its individuals, but penetrates outward to society. It helps to the self-expression of the human beings who are always massed within the social group. There is the criterion of its value, for alone the family is merely a conventional step between the one and the social many. Broader than the blood-clan stands the political unit. The historian of society tells us that in the early times when the customs of the race were forming, the family gradually enlarged its limits and assumed duties which slowly transformed it into a primitive state. Once the definite limits of the family were broken down the step from the clan to the vast empire was merely a matter of time and natural selection in the struggle for political prominence. THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 91 The state, as an abstract universal, is made up of single persons. What distinct reality the state in itself possesses arises through the relations which these persons bear to each other and to the traditions and ideals of their country. The membership in a state must mean something to the life of the citizens. This something is of the nature of a bond which they both feel and rever- ence. It may be reduced to the f eeling of patriot- ism and the acknowledgment of law. Patriotism is the subjective attitude of individuals toward the somewhat figurative expression "my country," with all the institutions and ideals for which it stands. Legal authority represents the con- trol of the social will over the members of the group. Patriotism is a kind of clan sympathy. It is a feeling of loyalty, veneration and respect. It wells up from a man's soul, — the pride of race, kinship and institutional ideals. Law, on the contrary, is external; it is not subjective and personal. It stands for what authority the political group is capable of extending over the individuals within its borders. It is essentially restraint and depends on magistrates and correct- ive means for its enforcement. The personal feeling of patriotism and the 92 LIFE AS REALITY external authority of the law are opposite to one another. Both are, however, equally essen- tial to the stability of the state. By the sub j e cti ve feeling of the one the individuals consent to revere the state; by the objective force of the other the state retains its authority over the individuals. The integrity of the state lasts only so long as there is a normal equilibrium between these two. If, through the amalgamation of states, the political unit grows to such an extent that patriotism must needs be dissipated through a heterogeneous mass without apparent internal principles of unity, then the authority of the state becomes so diffuse that it is no longer able to hold the separate parts together. When patriot- ism loses its focus, then law loses its authority. This may be illustrated historically. The strength of the early Greek state lay in the excess of subjective feeling over objective control, in the excess of patriotism over the binding authority of the law. The Athenians flocked to the standards of Miltiades and Alcibiades not because of the authority of their mother city, but because of the intensity of the feeling for the Hellenic race. During the last centuries of imperial Kome the conditions were opposite to those of THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 93 Greece. Owing to the constant union of nation after nation the empire had grown so cumber- some, its authority so diffuse and the feeling of its citizens toward it so weak and abstract that the nice adjustment of subjective patriotism to external law was disturbed. Each separate dis- trict established a new and more concrete center of patriotism and law. The estimate of the kind of reality and the depth of value attributable to the state rests upon an estimate of the fundamental significance of patriotism and law together with all that these imply. Patriotism expresses the feeling of the individual toward the state. It is essentially self-centered, yet as a feeling productive of actions it must be measured by the larger values of right and wrong. These are not merely individualistic, but of universal character. They transcend the limited scope of one's own personal feelings and the somewhat accidental conditions upon which these depend. They carry us backward into the background of social good. Such expres- sions as "my country, right or wrong" mean little else than a vague and childish intensity of feeling. The policy of a country is determined by the crude massing of individual wills. It is, 94 LIFE AS REALITY therefore, no more certain to be right than the actions of a single person. There may be a blind loyalty to the abstraction "my country," but this can have little reference to the immediate or remote purpose for which this loyalty stands. If patriotism is to refer to an entire political unit, why limit it to a single nationality? " My country " and its flag are abstract symbols. If these stand for nothing more than traditions then the state has no deeper reality than the storied pages of outworn history. If they stand for the future only, then we must remember that each state follows the same road of mortality to which individuals and nations are joint heirs. If they stand for ideals, why sever them from the ideals of humanity? Is not the feeling toward humanity stronger than that toward a single group? Ideals cannot be restricted to states. They arise from loyalty to society. The relativity of the state to society as a whole is further illustrated by the nature of the law. Social relations demand the subjection of the individual will to that of the group. To insure this end the state has long since established, on the ground of general expediency, certain well- defined paths of conduct. Its ability to enforce THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 95 these lines of conduct on the individuals depends on the strength of the state itself and the general rationality of its laws. At all events the limits which determine the duty of the governed to observe the law are the limits of social expediency. The purpose of the law is declared to be the establishment of justice. It is therefore relative to the end which it subserves. Justice, even among single persons, is a conception of rich and varied ethical coloring, but social justice is even more delicate and intangible. In every case the ulterior purpose of justice goes beyond the narrow conception of law as confined to the single state and embraces the whole of humanity. Law is relative to the ends of society. In itself it involves no innate necessity. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself, notwith- standing the halo of sanctity with which jurists habitually surround the law. If at any time laws cease to meet the requirements which the social group demands of them, if they fail to appreciate the delicate adjustment of individual and social values, lopping off here too much and there too little, then it becomes the right and the duty of society to readjust the law to its new demands. If the law fails utterly in its function 96 LIFE AS REALITY society may grasp the scepter from its enervated hand and rule in its own name. This is the spirit of social progress so far as it comes within the influence of legal sanction. It shows the relativity of the law to social expediency. It shows that the law of a single state is relative to the larger law of humanity. Yet the state, with its patriotism and its law, possesses in itself a value, like that of the institution of the family, even though this may be relative to a larger social value. This intrinsic value lies in the opportunity for the expression of life-purposes which the state affords; the ideals of patriotism and national loyalty do count for something in themselves, because they mean something to the human being who struggles for them and sacrifices for them. They represent to the patriot the stimulus to self-expression, and in that stimulus he finds a true reality because he finds a value that is real to life. The means here justifies the end. Yet it is not the meaning of patriotism as a logical concept nor the ends to which patriotism leads that count. These are relative like all else. But it is the fact that in working for these ends some human individual feels an insistent struggle and passion THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 97 for self-expression, and through this very feeling makes the ends real. The martyr to his country gets his reality by making the cause a part of himself, by throwing himself into the vortex of the struggle. He makes what appears external and formal to become subjective and vital. The concept " my country " counts for something in the life activity of those who believe in it, and that makes it real. As an objective form, aside from its meaning to human life, the state is relative to the larger social background, and derives its value from its social setting. The family and the state mediate between the individual and society. Whatever significance they possess finds its justification in individual values on the one hand and in social values on the other. The individual and society are extremes of one another, but extremes which, like points on the surface of a sphere, He close together. Society is brought into the foreground as one focuses the attention either toward or away from the individual. The con- ditions of life under which we all live are. of so 98 LIFE AS REALITY complex a character that no single person alone and unaided is able to raise himself above the level of a ceaseless struggle for mere existence. We progress through mutual effort. The self- expression of the single individual can be ade- quately realized only with the aid of strong social forces. Every movement, therefore, which seems to look toward individualism emphasizes much more the paramount importance of the social organization. The social whole takes the place of the individual unit, social values become superimposed on individual values. Social values arise through the organization of members of a group. The starting point of all values lies in the individual and in the end it is he who justifies social values. This is the back- ground upon which all sociology must rest. In the cry of the socialist and the communist we must listen for the echo of individualism. Society with its intricate organization means much, but it can never mean more than what is revealed to the living personalities within. There is perhaps a mob psychology which is different from the mental life of the single person; there is perhaps a code of ethics which rises into the fore- ground only as a result of extreme intricacies of THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 99 complex social intercourse. Still notwithstanding all this no group psychology or sociology can ever get back of the simple lesson that society is made up of single persons and it is they alone who inherit whatever of worth our social machinery may lead to. The lesson of all this is that social values must embrace the intimate personal values of those within society, else they have no value in themselves. Any account of the laws and organization of society must begin with an account of the indi- vidual. The chief task of any scientific sociology, — a task too often hardly mentioned, — lies in the understanding of the principles beneath the transition from the single individual to society as the over-individual. The transition must be made. It cannot be passed ov sc with a belief that a catalogue of the duties of society contains all that there is in a philosophy of social values. This transition may be expressed in the light of one of two opposite motives. Either society may be explained as an organization of individuals in which the stress of emphasis is laid from the beginning to the end upon the individuals, or else society may claim for itself the supreme value and crush the individuals, like the car of Jugger- 100 LIFE AS REALITY naut, beneath its ponderous wheels. It is all a matter of emphasis, but a matter of emphasis which spells progress or degeneration. In the one case there is social organization, in the other case there is socialism. In the one case there is social progress because the individuals of which society is composed retain their full significance, in the other case there is de- generation because socialism suppresses the value of personality and can substitute nothing in its place. Socialism, in the sense in which the term is ordinarily used, involves the extinction of the individual in society. It does not involve the strengthening of the individual through society. Socialism would blot out personality as a distinct force in this world of ours. It would reduce us all to cogs in a great social mechanism and stultify ambition and personal reward. The question involved is not whether socialism is practical or desirable from a low economic point of view. The vital question is whether or not the values of individual personality retire into the background as those of the social mechanism press forward into the foreground. Personality is as sacred as anything else connected with human life. The THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 101 socialist would sacrifice this in the hopes that the social unit, when magnified beyond all limits, would supply some higher expression of value. In this the socialist forgets that the only heirs to inherit social values are the individuals com- posing society. Society itself is nothing but an organized group of personalities. There is no huge Leviathan with muscles and sinews and brain. The socialist loses all perspective in the blind adoration of his abstraction, for he tries to state the problem of social welfare without hav- ing first determined the conditions of individual welfare. Such an undertaking is as crude and narrow as it is unscientific and contradictory. Society, as the organization of individuals, exists for the positive purpose of permitting the largest expression of personality, not for the negative purpose of stifling it. This expression of personality is impossible without individual struggle and effort involving, as perhaps it must, the apparent defeat of our limited purposes. Social organization is the oppo- site of socialism, because it emphasizes the para- mount importance of the individual. Its problem is how individuality may be broadened and deepened. Theoretically it may be stated as 102 LIFE AS REALITY the search for that social structure which permits the largest opportunity for self-expression and self-development, — in a word, the greatest indi- viduality. Practically it is the adjustment of individual initiative so that there shall be the maximum achievement for each. Stifle the in- dividual initiative and we stifle the precious germplasm which alone makes possible the evolution of society. The individual and society are reciprocals of each other. No one can labor for the achievement of social good without at the same time attaining a fuller expression of his own individual good. This is the lesson of social cooperation, but it is not the lesson of a crude socialism. It is in mutual cooperation, in organization, that the true value of the social unit becomes apparent. The individual reaches out for a larger expression of personality. He would find it in the family, but the family is at best an intermediate form, the value of which is soon obscured in the social whole; he would find it in the state, but the value of the state is relative to society. Social organization is both means and end. It gives value to the fragmentary intentions and purposes of individual lives. Its THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 103 end is the largest and fullest expression of life. Social organization is the last of a long chain of values. It cannot, however, be without a motive of its own. It cannot be final in itself unless it expresses in itself a realization of value sufficiently broad for all relative values. In this would lie its reality. This it seeks to express in its motive, its ideal. The ideal of society is social progress. Yet this progress is never conceived as a conscious motive, a clearly formed and well-articulated purpose, by that very social organization which seeks to express it. Society moves forward by the independent effort of separate lives, organized in harmony with each other. But society itself is powerless to understand the fundamental purposes which determine its so-called progress. Just as the individual looks upward to society for his final value, society in its turn looks within its own fife-plan for some fundamental reality. But its search is in vain. Society has no mind of its own, no consciously realized ideal before whose final court of adjustment all social ends are brought into the sweep of one great social purpose. 104 LIFE AS REALITY Whatever intrinsic value society may grasp is lost in a single moment. It is engulfed in a current that knows not whither it is flowing. Social progress is essentially a process of trial and error. In this process neither society nor the individuals within have a clear idea of the motive; they cannot understand the final ideal which each successive stage apparently seeks to approximate. Social progress moves forward like a man on a mountain enveloped in a cloud. He feels the rising ground beneath his feet but never sees the distant peak toward which he is groping. We may speak of a social better or a social worse, but these terms have little significance because the standard of judgment is never seen. Society has no conception of its own independent reality; it cannot therefore determine a final value for either itself or for the various institutions within its organization. Some deeper principle of ideal unity is demanded. This must come to society from a sphere of ultimate reality, since it cannot arise within the social unit itself. Society turns to the realm of religious feeling for the source of its supreme ideal, because religion would bind all relative values into the harmony of one Infinite Purpose. For us there remains, THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 105 however, the deeply significant lesson that all social values, whatever their nature, are relative to the supreme value of the individual, the human personality for whose self-expression and indi- viduality all the forms of social organization find their existence and their meaning* VI RELIGION If man sleeps on, untaught by what he sees, Can he prove infidel to what he feels? Young We are dimly conscious of relative values in our world of ethical and social activities. These relative expressions are not sufficient in them- selves. They require a realm of values based on a consciousness beyond our own. We speak of a better and a worse, an advanced and a decadent civilization, according as the values we reflect into social conditions agree or disagree with some dimly conceived standard. All this emphasizes the vague longing of the human soul for some permanent reality beyond the limitations of sense and feeling. This longing has been mirrored by the race in its religion. It is in the divine will interpreted by Buddha, Christ or Mohammed that the race has ever looked for the permanent value of its social order and its ethical purposes. 106 RELIGION 107 All lesser motives and lower ideals become sanctified by the religious spirit and their own relative value becomes absolute when illumined by the divine reality. Social values, like other human values, demand a place in the religious consciousness. The things which mean most for society are measured by conceptions which seem to lead beyond the social order. Social progress to those within its current is distinctly a question of practical conditions. Any final value which may emerge above the threshold of the social consciousness is not to be expressed in terms of social values alone, but rather in terms of a still more inclusive conscious- ness. The reformer never clearly understands the ultimate ends toward which he is working, but is aware only of a general desire to better the condition of his fellow men. He achieves practical results only so far as this general desire becomes crystallized in a definite and finite task. Yet he vaguely hopes that his work may not be without permanent significance in the Divine Consciousness. No one doubts the universality of religion. It appears at every stage of society, in every form of ethnic culture and in every age of the 108 LIFE AS REALITY world's history. Broadly speaking, differences among religions are more superficial than vital. Throughout all ranges of mental and social life we have felt the need of something permanent and invariant beneath the shifting scenes of life. Unconsciously we look behind the vanishing present, beyond the vista of a single life and read the meaning of the world in terms of a Divine Permanence. From time immemorial men have called this eternal value Spirit and have clothed it with the majesty of the human mind. They have called It Creator, Father, Lord. Our whole outlook on life is determined very largely by the environment in which we happen to be born. Human nature is much the same in the Indian, the Greek and the Celt, but the customs, traditions and superstitions which sur- round men from earliest youth react on a plastic and unformed material. The man is, within broad limits, what the environment has made him. This is especially pertinent in matters of religious belief. The Anglo-Saxon is a Christian because in the distant past Saint Augustine RELIGION 109 landed on the stormy shores of Britain and preached the gospel of Christ to our forefathers. The Asiatic of to-day is a Buddhist because some two thousand years ago a prince of the house of Gautama was born beneath Indian skies who taught to the ancient Hindoos the gospel of charity and peace. We take our creed much as we find it. We make it a collective or social function with the result that all religions depend, to a large extent, upon a certain uniformity of belief among their adherents. This cannot be obtained by the mere personal feeling itself as there would be as many forms as there were worshipers. Some common ground of dogmatic faith and ritual is necessary in order to insure the uniformity and therefore the permanent stability of the religion. Nor can personal reflection be relied upon to achieve this result. An intellectual religion in which each thought out the basis of his belief is conceivable, but has never been even remotely realized. It would lose the force of " social feeling "; it would lack organization and above all else vividness of appeal. Eeligions, therefore, have never emphasized the individual character of belief, whether founded on emotion or reflective experience. They have sought 110 LIFE AS REALITY instead to organize the separate beliefs of their adherents into a well-defined uniformity of ritual and creed. This uniformity is obtained through the common ground of faith. The antithesis, faith and knowledge, may mean much or little according to the meaning and the stress of emphasis given to faith. It is almost needless to remark that every mental process contains both an element of irrational belief and an element of knowledge. The proposition, "one and one make two," may be considered a fact of unquestioned knowledge, but even there the faith element is present. Even this simplest act of reasoning must assume, but cannot prove, the power of the mind. This assumption is not a matter of knowledge. We believe that the processes of reason will not play us false, but of this there is no positive assurance other than that vouchsafed by simple faith. In the sense of the belief in something beneath direct empirical proof, faith is therefore as elementary and necessary as any other phase of mental life. The faith in our ordinary reasoning is a faith that tends to reinforce and supplement the rational powers of the mind. It does not try to establish an authority superior to them. RELIGION 111 We must have faith in the reason which enables us to say "one plus one are two," because rational thought on all levels would be impossible were it not for this simple assurance in the native powers of the human mind. But this is a different faith from that of religion. The belief in the miraculous birth of Buddha or in the divinity of Christ are offered by religion as immediate objects of. be- lief, not requiring the correlative sanction of the reason. Keligion is the only great field of human values that takes this position, the only sphere where men are asked to believe what they are not permitted at the same time to subject to the ordinary tests of experience and reason. The question is not in regard to the truth of any of the great religious dogmas, but merely of the manner in which they are presented. Faith would reach truth by a direct means. It would establish an immediate ground for the religious consciousness which is neither in experi- ence nor in the reason, but more certain than either. It would establish a court of appeal of its own. " Salvation by faith" prescribes an ideal to be attained through mere belief, irrespect- ive of the relation of this belief to other forms of knowledge. But this mere act of belief is an act 112 LIFE AS REALITY of reason, since it is possible to either accept or reject the statement presented. Faith, there- fore, involves a contradiction, — " Eeason to accept faith, which transcends the reason." Dogmatic faith would give to religion a basis of permanent reality. Yet how are the values and the truths of faith to be correlated with other values, human and social, which depend on reflection and not on mere belief? Faith deter- mines one region of truth. From this region all other values are distinct unless there is some intimate bond of connection. This religion denies because by admitting such a bond there would be involved a connection and, therefore, a mutual dependence between rational values and faith values. We cannot acknowledge, therefore, that dogmatic faith is able to define a permanent reality beneath those lesser relative values which rise out of our human experience and human reflection. Religion, made social by the mould of a common faith, is thus in no unassailable position. The most that a common ground of faith can do is to extend the individual religious experience so that it may be reinforced by a common assent. But this adds not the least to its grasp on reality, RELIGION 113 nor to its ability to determine ideals for moral and social values. Historically it has proved inadequate to the task, as the blackened pages of the Spanish Inquisition and the horrors of religious persecutions too plainly show. Perhaps it was these silent witnesses of the past which once led a great thinker to liken the religious consciousness to the damp soil of the forest from which all kinds of rank weeds spring. The religious cult, founded on the community of faith, is the result of social conditions, and not a cause in determining them. It is the wax and not the die. It is not in the superstitions of the religious cult that the true religious feeling is found. If religion is to express the final reality it should express the deepest values of the human spirit. Its plea for recognition lies in the intimacy with which it may reflect the depths of an immediate personal consciousness. But if this reflection represents only the social reflex, religion loses its prerogative. True religious feeling must be subjective and personal. The moment it becomes objective and impersonal it ceases to have 114 LIFE AS REALITY significance as an independent human value and becomes merely a phase of our social institu- tions. The religion established by the sword, the word of a monarch or the still stronger commands of social convention is merely an external form. Yet, if it is to afford the groundwork of reality for the social order, it must legislate to society and not mirror a still more universal social consciousness. It must speak authoritatively from the inner recesses of personality. This was the advance of Buddhism over the earlier cults of India, of Christianity over Judaism, of Protestantism over Catholicism, of Puritanism over the English Church. True religion ebbs up as the personal response to a great reflective or emotional experience. There and there alone stands the religious con- sciousness stripped of the artificialities of custom and superstition, — religion in its purest and simplest form. There and there alone religion appears as the cry of some soul in the throes of doubt and pessimism, the cry of a soul longing for peace beyond mind and sense. Such was the religion of Saint Augustine, of Boehme and of Bunyan. To each seer religion came as a great truth, a light in a world of darkness, a refuge of RELIGION 115 strength, among wrongs and weaknesses. In their extreme feeling each called the religious consciousness immediate and its truth a direct revelation of God to one human being. In this form, as a personal revelation, religion stands purest and best able to justify itself as the final reality underlying all our human relative values. It is the attitude of mind and the mental setting that separates religion from all else. The religious experience is essentially a personal reaction born under extreme stress. The setting in which it appears in the mind gives to it a vivid emotional coloring. This emotional luster always forms the broad background of the religious experience, even though reflective ideas are pushed forward as if they were of vital consequence. It is a feeling of communion between man's soul and the soul of the universe which reflects, like a mirror, God's purposes in men's thoughts. Indeed of such importance is it that one of the most liberal theologians of the last hundred years characterized religion as little else than feeling. Whether or not the psychology of the religious consciousness can consistently assume this posi- tion is largely a matter of empirical evidence, 116 LIFE AS REALITY but no description of religion can disregard this large emotional element. It is an immediate fact of consciousness that what goes under the name of feeling has an important place in life. This cannot be denied. In the end it is the only means by which we know of life as an immediate personal reality. The satisfaction of self-expression which is in the end the dearest thing in life is known to each one of us only as it is felt. No intellectual process alone can ever make us feel life as a reality. All this is true and it shows how important is the psychological activity which we call feeling in the values of life. But it does not show that the form in which this activity appears in the relig- ious consciousness has an independent reality, a reality which may serve as a basis for all our human values. Feeling can and must express what is individually real as this is revealed in life, but religion would objectify this purely personal feeling and make it universal. It would, in its own way, do exactly what science tried to do, — namely, make objective and general what must always remain subjective and individual. Religion cannot make its element of feeling objective and universal. The religious feeling RELIGION 117 has no greater prerogative than what feeling in itself represents. The sphere of things obj ective is the sphere of the intellect where truth is reached through rational processes. But religion would cut the Gordian knot. It would extend the confines of feeling so as to embrace a concept of universal objective reality. Eeligion fails in this effort to reach final reality simply because the form in which feeling occurs in our human consciousness is individual, and the form which religion demands of it in order to reach its reality is over-individual and objective. The significance that the religious feeling possesses is not original in the religious conscious- ness, but is borrowed directly from life. One cannot reiterate too often that feeling has a place in life. The religious consciousness, as one expression of that feeling, cannot be set aside. It has a value, but a value which arises only through its setting in the whole of consciousness, in the whole of life. This is very far from ascribing to it an ultimate reality quite its own. Religious feeling is a part of life; it stands for a certain effort of the human spirit to objectify its own inner feeling in the vast totality of universal values. This effort, relative though it is, proves 118 LIFE AS REALITY perhaps above all else, how deeply significant is feeling itself to life. The religious experience, as the response of the human soul under the spell of a deep emotion, possesses, then,. a relative but not absolute value. But in this relativity to life, religion derives its strength and its permanence. This is the lesson of the religious consciousness stripped of all the external forms of creed and dogma, the lesson that in the end the value of religion as a force in life lies in its emphasis on the power of the human personality to make real before consciousness what the deep feeling for its own reality involves. The objectification may be wrong, but not so the immediate feeling for life and personality. That is reality. But the religious feeling is not content with merely obj ectif ying itself as feeling. It must have a center, an ideal embodiment. There is a force within our minds which impels us to revere and worship some power greater than ourselves enduring above destruction and change. The highest, noblest idea our own mind can symbolize is the deep and eternal mystery of personality. RELIGION 119 It is natural, therefore, that in the supreme ecstasy of religious feeling we should depict the God of our world as a person. Religious feeling must have an object. We cannot have a feeling toward a mere ideal, unless this is made vivid by being made real to us as living human beings. We see divinity as a person, we see ourselves as reflecting the divine. This Divine Personality, at first the creation of a crude animism, develops as the race develops into the Supreme Deity of the higher forms of the religious consciousness. The savage beheld the awful powers of nature. He revered them. He reflected his own conscious- ness into the world about him and called that consciousness eternal spirit. The human heart yearns for affection in the great heart of nature, — Zeus-pater and the fatherhood of God. It cries out for a divine sympathy that shall touch its own afflictions and in answer to this yearning religious feeling creates its belief in the Divine Personality. This yearning does not arise from what is con- ceived to be necessary in order to give a final reality to relative values; it is based rather on what best serves the purposes of the religious experience. Belief in the Divine Personality involves the knowledge of just those conditions 120 LIFE AS REALITY which belong to divinity. Only by such knowl- edge can our human consciousness span the chasm between humanity and God with any confidence in the truth and the value of this supreme effort of the mind. This knowledge cannot be supported by such artificial stagings as miracles, because such events, even if absolutely authentic, prove only at best an extraordinary power. They do not prove to us the manifesta- tion of Divinity, because we have no deeper knowledge to tell us that miracles are a necessary attribute of the portrayal of Divinity. The belief in Divinity, in the religious sense, is thus identical with a knowledge of all the con- ditions and attributes which are conceived as necessary in order to raise the mere concept of the Divine Personality from the possible of thought to the actual of reality. This breadth of understanding is something which the human mind cannot attain, since by the very presupposi- tions of the Divine Personality, as the ideal of the religious feeling, such a supreme knowledge lies beyond the scope of our finitely determined rational powers. Christ's Divinity, for example, cannot be actually grasped by the religious consciousness since we cannot understand the RELIGION 121 grounds which might make it possible to apply the attributes of divinity to a human person. To recognize God in man involves a knowledge of God Himself. We know personality only on its human level, and the step upward to the Divine Personality can be made only by some tran- scendent intuition into whose shadowy confines it is not given us to penetrate. Like religious feeling the belief in the Divine Personality has its value in life. It indicates how significant to our daily needs and to the abstract concepts of our mind is the import of Personality. It indicates, too, that the reality which we crave, through the extension of person- ality to the abstract universal of God, is a reality which has its origin in ourselves. Through the Divine Personality the human consciousness finds a medium for expressing the deep reality of its own life. This is religion in its purity. The grasp of religion on the reality of lif e is not ultimate; it does not give us anything final. Yet religion has a deep significance in the sum total of our world. This significance lies in its 122 LIFE AS REALITY portrayal of an inner impulse for self-expression. Keligion vainly tries to extend this feeling beyond the human personality to the Divine Personality, but fails because feeling cannot be objectified into the universal form of an over-personality similar to our own selves. Yet when its full scope is understood, and a normal limit placed on its ambitions, feeling is seen to be merely a feeling for the deep reality of life. The realities which religion seeks to grasp cast us back onto the realities of life. If religion has any meaning to human beings, as it certainly has, that meaning must be express- ible in terms of life, for under no other conditions is it real to men. In the religious feeling our human soul seeks to give clearness of form to this passion for life, — and religion on its formal side is this articulate expression. Every impulse of religion on its lowest and its highest levels is a groping for a larger life. Unfortunately, savage religions are ordinarily appealed to in order to prove almost anything regarding religion, yet one cannot have the least familiarity with a single primitive cult without being impressed with the savage's thirst for more life, for a larger life. He loves activity and in that sense, perhaps, RELIGION 123 comes nearer to reality than ourselves. But above all, his religion expresses this love of life; his gods are human beings endowed with life greater than his own. His gods become more powerful and more definite as they become more human. His immortality is a longing for more life; it is a demand on nature much more than a clearly formed belief. It is merely the inner feeling, — the eternal reality of life. With this feeling religion closes its volume, rich with the hope and anguish of unnumbered generations. It stands for a form of reality, because it stands for a form of life, — that form which seeks to reflect our own life outward into nature and make ourselves one with its God. In a sense it is right, in a sense it has mastered reality, because it would make all things living after man's own image. But the God which it creates is not the Divine Personality, universal in the sense of being objective. Its God is life, because its reality is life. VII TKUTH And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. — St. John. Human experience in all its ranges seeks for truth. It is an ideal to which all other ideals must conform. Eelative values on all levels, human, social and divine, feel the influence of this ideal. Society, trying to lift itself and its members upward to some plane of greater relative value, is incapable of grasping its own ideal. It moves forward, not by some preconceived pur- pose, illuminating all the dark recesses of that something we call social progress, but rather, like some shuttle of fate, making no question of yeas or nays. In its own blindness, society looks back upon individuals, thinking that per- haps they have already determined social progress. But individuals have their own value as indi- viduals reflected down upon them from social values. In this dilemma society takes ready 124 TRUTH 125 formed its ideal from a sphere beyond its own. Religion and philosophy stand ready to give social values a final value. The one sees value in terms of f eeling revealing itself in some supreme personality, the other sees value in some all- inclusive conception of truth. " Seek thou the true," has reverberated through the ages as the noblest quest of thought and action on this our human plane. Our minds have reflected this ideal in the supreme effort to grasp reality. They have sought for a richness of content quite beyond other concepts, and have found truth rich beyond all comparison. Its very richness is the cause of its illusiveness. We require truth to have some specific meaning, some content, before it can seem to us real and significant. Its wealth appalls our fancy. We demand of philosophy, in whose broad fields truth takes refuge, that she define for us her ideal in more specific terms. The mere word truth has no mystic spell that will unlock the unf athomed secrets of the universe. Mere truth might be called mere Wahrheit, mere verum. As a name it means little. Its signifi- cance lies in the wealth of meaning which our human consciousness breathes into it, the value 126 LIFE AS REALITY for which truth stands. A mermaid represents truth of a certain kind, — the truth of mythological fable, — and so with every idea that the human mind may express, provided its significance is sufficiently qualified. Many and various have been the efforts to describe just what is meant by truth. Fre- quently a search is made among the dusty tomes of science and mathematics, history and law, for the purpose of determining, if possible, some characteristic common to all forms of knowledge that are called true. Such a description is a scientific attempt to reach a common understand- ing of what men normally mean by truth, a kind of average usage on all levels of knowledge. Yet such an attempt is at best unsatisfactory. To know truth there must be a standard to which appeal may be made in every case. There must be some ideal of truth relatively static and permanent, which may serve as a test for all judgments. This standard is not a matter of averages, nor is it to be determined by a series of cross references throughout all fields of knowledge. It must express the inner nature of truth and not merely the circumstances under which truth is ordinarily found. There TRUTH 127 must be a basis of truth which is itself true beyond all question. The simplest standard of truth is correspond- ence. Our thoughts and actions are all more or less dependent upon making true judgments. One would walk across the room but he must first estimate its breadth, and must know of the presence or absence of any obstacles in the way. At the start, he must have before him a fairly accurate idea of all that may, in any way, be concerned in the practical outcome of his desire. The success or failure of this simple act hangs merely upon whether or not his preconceived idea was true, — whether it corresponded with facts. The difference between truth and error in this instance is the bare conformity of the idea with the "objects" of the room. The truth of the idea is open to the simplest test. Abstract truths of mathematics are open to this same naive test. The only reason why we believe in the rough statement "one plus one make two" is simply because daily observation has shown that it corresponds with the facts of our world. We believe in the attraction of all bodies and state this 128 LIFE AS REALITY belief in the form of a general scientific truth, because the movements of all bodies, so far as our empirical knowledge extends, correspond to this general statement. Truth is the mere corre- spondence of idea with object, law with experience. This is the simplest philosophy of truth. All that is necessary to test any statement or supposi- tion is to note whether or not it corresponds with facts, — this and nothing more. But simplicity does not create a theory of truth. It may seem as if, in the ordinary relations to our world, we test truth by its correspondence to fact, — but do we ever find correspondence in the strict- est sense? It is a statement within my own personal observation that one plus one make two; its test is its agreement with facts. But what are facts? Ordinarily we speak of the world of fact as that region beyond consciousness which somehow fixes and tests the truth of what we see, — but the contrast between consciousness and this outer world of facts is profound. My idea of two is a very different matter from two apples or two mountains. It may even be said that in this world beyond consciousness there is nothing that is just two, it is always two something. We may even go so far as to assert TRUTH 129 that the difference between the mental idea of the statement, ''one plus one make two," is as different from the one or the two objects out in the fact world as the subjective life of con- sciousness is different from the objective world of experience. All this shows that the belief in the correspondence between idea and object is based merely on the assertion within my own consciousness that an idea somehow agrees with something entirely different from itself. Correspondence is essentially a judgment of agreement. Such a judgment demands a judging mind. The correspondence involves, therefore, a mental activity which shall perceive this agree- ment between idea and its object. The mind is, thus, the arbitrator between correspondence and non-correspondence, between truth and error. But if the mind is the judge it must transform object into something mental in order that the two things judged, idea and object, shall be of the same denomination as itself. Otherwise judg- ment of correspondence would be impossible, as the mind could hardly deal with a mere "object," so utterly different from itself as to bear no relations to it. In the end, therefore, the correspondence is not between idea and 130 LIFE AS REALITY object, but between two facts of consciousness. One of these facts we call arbitrarily " idea," while the other we designate as a "fact" and thus ascribe to it an objective existence and certainty of its own. Truth as correspondence between idea and its fact is thus in reality merely the equation or the balance between two elements of consciousness. The mind is responsible for the correspondence between ideas and objects. It determines the truth of that correspondence, not because truth is in the mind itself, but because idea and object meet only within consciousness. The mind, however, cannot estimate the correspondence of its own ideas with the object unless it has some practical " working test " at its disposal. Sense- ideas and sense-objects belong to utterly different ranges of value, hence the mind must acknowledge some practical test, some working formula, by which its ideas can be " measured up " to their corresponding objects. The modern pragmatist would supply such a "ready reckoner" of truth correspondence. He goes one step further in his desire to discover the kernel of meaning in TRUTH 131 correspondence, by showing how this corre- pondence test of truth actually works out in our world of daily experience. Pragmatism interprets whatever truth there is in the agreement of an idea with its object as the agreement of some belief with a wide range of practical attitudes which depend upon it. Every fact involves a certain way of looking at the world, a certain position with regard to the concerns of daily life. If the fact is true, then this outlook on the world will present a clear, closely-knit and well-organized system. If it is false, then the whole view will be contorted. One plus one make two, because in all our actions and attitudes toward the world we act as if it were true, — nothing leads us to assume the con- trary, everything leads us to believe in its validity. The pragmatic formula is simplicity itself. My individual actions in the presence of any situa- tion determine the truth of what is involved there. Truth is a correlate of my way of acting, —it is a kind of by-product of my practical life. This, the pragmatist believes, is as near as our finite minds can come to truth. There is nothing new under the sun, except, one might add, a new name for an old idea. The 132 LIFE AS REALITY great master of Konigsburg taught, over a hundred years ago, that in those ranges of human life where the speculative reason cannot penetrate, there is a power of the mind that judges of truth according to its significance in action, its place in practical life. Kant's pupils enlarged upon the teachings of their master until there arose a whole school of philosophy making an indelible impression on the history of thought. The movement had significance, not because it saw a narrow meaning in practical life, but because it interpreted our practical activity, with its moral impetus, in the broadest possible setting. So that when, finally, the greatest of Kant's disciples took up the pen of his teacher, practical truth had lost even the last trace of narrowness, and had become synonymous with the absolute truth of the universe. Modern pragmatism would have us forget the whole history of German idealism. Like the lesser Socratic schools which followed in the wake of Socrates and grasped but a single flicker from the expiring lamp of their master, so the modern pragmatists have fanned to flame a single spark from the beacon lighted by Kant. Pragmatism is, to be sure, a new name; still V TRUTH 133 need the philosopher remodel the history of his subject in order that it may be made to embrace every outworn idea, even though it be dressed in the garb of the new? It was shown years ago by Kant and his followers that practical truth, the truth of the modern pragmatist, is in the end significant only so far as it reflects truth as a part of a whole system of values. It is not merely our own practical attitudes that make the system of truth, but it is the system of truth that makes our attitudes. Pragmatism has had its literary apostles. Novalis and Schlegel, Shelley and Byron were pragmatists in their philosophy of life. And historically, too, they owed their inspiration to the same vast spring of Kantian Idealism from which sprang modern pragmatism. But pragmatism in literature failed. Komanticism stands for a brilliant awakening of poetic genius, a noble reaction from the formalism of the eighteenth century. It touches a responsive chord in every heart because it demands the free expression of individuality, without which life is nothing. Yet it proved inadequate to the breadth and the depth of life. The freedom of the romanticist is the freedom of caprice. It sees universal truth 134 LIFE AS REALITY in terms of a single consciousness and interprets this through the impulses of a single will. It destroys the organization of life because it gives us no foundation upon which to rest our apprecia- tion of fche world. It substitutes accident for law, caprice for freedom. It is the same with pragmatism in its theoretical discussion of truth. It claims to answer the perplexing logical quibble — "What is a true statement? " — by calling truth that which seems to be implied by one's action. I act toward the legend as if it were true, — therefore it is. No further test of its validity is possible; there is no standard of truth, no law of values. In the simplicity of his description the pragmatist has reached a theory of reality. He has cut the Gordian knot. He has put behind him, with one supreme stroke of the pen, the whole history of human speculation from Parmenides to the present time. Truth and reality become for him childishly simple. Yet this extreme simplicity is purchased at the price of a dilemma. If truth is determined merely by our practical attitudes, then it is different for each person. There is nothing permanent. All is ceaseless change like the flux TRUTH 135 of a single consciousness. In a word, there is no truth, but only opinion. The pragmatist has murthered truth and the weird sisters have played him false. Yet if, on the other hand, he is repelled by this world of anarchy and retracts from his original position, admitting that there is a criterion of logical values beyond the indi- vidual consciousness, then he tacitly admits that truth is not confined to its practical attitudes but is determined by some absolute standard. Truth becomes world- centered and not man- centered; it has a value universal and not merely individual. On the one horn of the dilemma pragmatism leads us into a world without unity or order, plan or meaning, a mere chaos of opinions in which the pragmatic test is but one of many; on the other horn, pragmatism foregoes its intent and bases the practical test of truth on some ultimate foundation by which all lesser truths are tested. In either case, therefore, pragmatism is inadequate to the problem of truth. It either gives no solution at all or else hands truth over to some other test. Yet if pragmatism remained satisfied with its assertion of the fundamental value of will- activity in its account of reality we could very 136 LIFE AS REALITY well let the matter rest. So far as modern pragmatism follows the path of Fichtean volun- tarism, it is on safe ground. It loses itself in the morass only when it would transform the simple immediate reality of our will-activity into a theory of logical truth. Its failure is a failure to distinguish between the vital impulses which we feel and those formal categories of logic by which the mind tries to find truth as a thought process. The life values given in the strivings of our will are sufficient without this confusion. They give us the self-expression which makes us feel the reality of life. Truth grows more perplexing. Already we saw how impossible it was to describe truth according to the correspondence of idea with object, because both require a further mediating test which may be applied at any time by the mind. The pragmatic test, as the second pos- sibility, proves a failure because it, too, requires a further test in order that truth shall be more than a mere chaos of opinions. Both theories, however, seem to have this in common — they demand that the world in which truth is found shall be in some respects a system, an order. The pragmatic formula is of much value as long TRUTH 137 as we are allowed to assume that the truth-world is an organized whole in which our practical attitudes somehow "fit in." Admitting this, the pragmatist becomes an ardent supporter of the theory of consistency. A fact is true, not only because we act toward all its various rela- tions as if it were true, but because it occupies within the organized system of truth's world a consistent position. Truth "works" because it is consistent. Its "cash value" is its con- sistency. The statement "One and one make two" is true because it falls in with all our com- mon-sense knowledge of our fact world and is, further, verified in the most abstract realms of mathematical research. The statement is per- fectly consistent with everything else in the universe, therefore it is true — no further quibbling is needed. This consistency theory presents, therefore, a third step in the baffling hunt for truth order. This test of consistency has been a harbor of refuge that has saved from shipwreck many a voyage of discovery into the unknown sea of truth values. They who formerly looked upon truth as mere correspondence grew tired of the simplicity of their formula. Assailed from every 138 LIFE AS REALITY side, they have fortified themselves behind the organic interrelatedness of all truth and called its practical test consistency. But we ask here, as we asked in the two preceding tests: What is the meaning of your truth-formula? Obviously what is consistent is merely not contradictory, and not-contradictory can be used as a mere synonym of truth. Obviously the consistency test must become more specific, else we dismiss it as a mere subterfuge of words. In order that we shall say, "this statement is consistent with all else," we must have a knowl- edge of this "all else." Yet no such omniscience is given to our poor human powers. The most that we can say is that it is consistent with "all else that has a meaning for my consciousness." This introduces a mental valuation into our description of truth, which we would wish — should it be possible — to shut out altogether. But we can't. It is always and forever the human mind which is judging and it is the human mind which applies its pet category of truth to its world. Consistency must be consistency for my world. But this "my world" is mine only as it has the fullness of meaning for me. What I don't understand, what I can't know of, isn't TRUTH 139 mine in any sense whatever — hence it can't come into my truth formula. The world that is con- sistent for me is consistent because it has meaning for me — this and nothing more. Meaning within my own world-order is truth for me. In this, apparently, truth stands confessed. Truth must have meaning. It must stand for the expression of some specific idea in order that it may be consistent with other facts of the world. This is the teleological value of truth — the expression or fulfillment of some purpose. It gives to truth a real and significant content, because it makes truth stand for something to the human mind where alone its value is tested, by whatever formula we use. It makes con- sistency the consistency of purposes. What has a meaning for my consciousness has truth for me to just that degree, the more meaning the more truth, the deeper the purpose the deeper the truth. A friend is "true" if he fulfills the pur- pose, the meaning, which is involved in friend- ship. That one plus one make two, is a math- ematical truth, not because it corresponds to 140 LIFE AS REALITY particular facts whatever they may be, nor be- cause we act as if it were true, nor even because it is consistent with everything else we know of in the universe, but because that mere statement is the expression of a meaning, a purpose, that finds its objective fulfillment wheresoever we turn. Consistency requires that its "fact" shall mean something to a conscious examiner, be that something little or much; so does the practical assurance of the pragmatist; so likewise does the mere correspondence of idea with object. This content is the last test in a world which we must assume to be organized, in order that truth may have a place of habitation. It is the meaning that a particular truth bears to my own con- sciousness and to that organized whole of which it is a part. Truth is consistent because it fulfills a purpose in the whole, it stands for a meaning in the totality of meanings. What is inconsistent simply has no meaning nor significance, and there- fore no truth. All is idea and the expression of purpose, because there alone is truth. The advance of this teleological conception of truth, as it might be called, over the previous views is profound. Truth is not defined as if it were a result of some empirical, haphazard proc- TRUTH 141 ess of trial and error, in which ideas and facts are shuffled about until some balance is found and the result called truth. Nor is it denned in terms of some practical attitude narrowly in- dividualistic and unqualified by the world of organized facts and ideals, which it naively as- sumes. Nor does it call truth mere consistency without denning the term, a consistency which involves some real test to which it is deaf. Truth, as the fulfillment of a purpose, is universal and makes the whole world its own. Everything that is, has some measure of truth because it meets a purpose somehow, somewhere. That alone has truth in its entirety which fulfills all purposes — the universe as idea in its highest sense. Still with all the insight into the meaning of truth, yet this content of purpose requires an ulterior authority. If truth is defined by its purpose or its meaning then some criterion supe- rior even to this is required in order to determine whether or not a certain purpose finds its fulfill- ment in the concrete ideas and facts of our simple knowledge and daily fife. Purpose is purpose not merely for the mind that judges it as such but also for the specific value that gives it meaning. Purpose has significance only so far as there 142 LIFE AS REALITY exists a deeper criterion of its value which, can be brought forward by the mind in the presence of any situation. Purpose goes to the heart of the problem of truth because it expresses meaning, and meaning is involved in all judgments, prac- tical and theoretical, individual and universal. But the meaning, the fulfillment of a purpose, which any single judgment represents, must arise out of the great font of reality in which truth and its meaning, purpose and the ultimate thing it signifies, meet as one. The logical quibble of truth becomes the metaphysical test of reality. It is the supreme test, not only of truth alone, but also of the truth of the world-order. Meaning must be meaning for something — and that some- thing must be reality. Truth, even as the fulfillment of a purpose, requires a basis of reality where the true is real, and the real is true. This basis is not smothered up in a confusion of formal dialectic. It is not given through another test of truth, deeper per- haps than purpose, but like it in character. Con- sistency and purpose are at most intellectual forms. They are the measures of truth, so long TRUTH 143 as truth is an objective and external ideal. Like scientific categories, such as necessity and causal- ity, they deal with forms of thought and with intellectual constructions. But the reality un- derlying truth, as expressed in intellectual process, is life with its impulse and will-activity. The whole intellectual world of logic, where truth is a category of thought, is merely the outer form of life. Thought deals with what is external and formal, reflecting reality rather than being itself real. The underlying reality is life. In- tellectual process and logical form stand for it externally. Nor is this all. Each single and finite purpose must be in harmony with all the other single and finite purposes. The demand that truths shall be consistent with one another is no vague requirement. Each truth may have its inde- pendent orbit, but there is required besides the universal harmony of the spheres to hold each wandering truth in its place. Each single and finite purpose must be in accordance with a broader universal purpose, the meaning of which each only partially expresses. In this balance of truths with one another mere purpose must be purpose in terms of the whole of truth. But the 144 LIFE AS REALITY only way we can know of the whole of this truth, the only way vouchsafed to us mortals by which we may test a truth, is in terms of life values. The unity of truths, by which alone truth can be consistent or fulfill a meaning to our human consciousness, becomes possible only when ex- pressed to *us as the unity of life. This is the only unity we know of. Every proposition in mathematics, every statement of science or art or law is true for us because it comes to our con- sciousness as a part of the effort to express life. Its purpose stands forth as the expression of a life value revealed in the course of our life activity. However stated, with whatever intricacies of logic or subterfuges of metaphysical deduction, still in the end the only meaning that can be given to a purpose or an idea is the meaning to life. There is the meeting place of all truths because there alone truth can come to its own. Life is its own supreme meaning, and purpose, and ful- fillment — because it is reality. Every description of truth leads finally to its description as a fife value. It is possible to speak of truth as correspondence because there must be a balance of life values. A fact corresponds to its idea simply because each represents a cer- TRUTH 145 tain expression, the one subjective and the other objective, of essentially the same value. My idea of the Apollo Belvedere is true if it cor- responds, in all essential particulars, to a certain piece of Greek marble which people have agreed to designate by this name. But the testing of this correspondence is simply the process of com- paring one value of consciousness with another, one mental image vaguely formed with another derived directly from the sense impression of the statue. Both images, however, are for me definite values, each having a place in my par- ticular stream of consciousness and each represent- ing to me some aspect of life activity. Without this aspect of life they are nothing; they convey to me no meaning, no truth. Truth has its pragmatic value because in the end life is individual for me. Thus far the pragmatist is in an unassailable position — there is something in truth which is individual, simply because truth is, at the last analysis, life, and life is for me an individual revelation. But the pragmatist seeks to make the individuality of truth the excuse for its lack of organization and unity. He forgets that the fragmentary, partial character of each single truth leads unswervingly 146 LIFE AS REALITY to the unity of all truth in the unity of life. Each truth is individual because it expresses an individual part in the whole, not because it is a law unto itself in a chaos of discord and caprice. All ranges of human value assume the ultimate unity of truth. No scientist can progress be- yond the merest rudiments of his subject without assuming the uniformity of nature as the nec- essary condition of his knowledge. This presup- position is impossible of proof on an empirical basis. Experience, as the great Scotchman long ago pointed out, can only give high probability, never the universality of law. This the scientist must assume, else the generality and permanent significance of his science crumble away. This presupposition of the uniformity of nature is, on the level of experience, the presupposition of the organization of knowledge in terms of an absolute truth. It is so with other values. The facts of ethics, of social relations, of art and of religion all assume the existence of an organization of knowledge and of truth which each fact alone only partially represents. This assumption of the unity of truths must remain a primal presupposition for TRUTH 147 every subject simply because each is inadequate to comprehend all that is given in life. Truth is one. This is the lesson borne home by every separate sphere of human endeavor which seeks truth. Truth is portrayed so far as we seek to express life values. This is the lesson reached finally in the quest of truth as corre- spondence, as practical attitude, as consistency and as the fulfillment of a purpose. The oneness of truth and its value as life are identical. Truth is an organized whole, not because it is consistent nor because it fulfills an infinite purpose, but because it expresses life with all its organization, its internal consistency, moral strivings and activ- ities, its purposes and all the other things which give life its infinite richness. Truth too, as reality, is life. VIII Life as Eeality The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment . — Hawthorne . Life is personal, life is immediate, life is for itself ultimate. This was the lesson made clear by the importance of feeling in religion and philosophy. It is the lesson ^lso of every other kind of human impulse which tries to grasp some fleeting shadow of reality and call it all. We throw the material world of sense on a screen and read its symbols as if it were a reality alien to ourselves. We find, however, that the value of experience and science lies in the fullness with which they reflect the values of our own life. It is so also with the universal principles of human action with all their scope and moral temper. They are not ultimate themselves, but only stand for so much of life as can be scruti- nized with the ethical microscope. Under the continual onslaught of criticism they become more and more objective and impersonal until the 148 LIFE AS REALITY 149 individual moral law becomes the universal social law. But society with all the complex machinery of cogs and gears has never, nor can it ever, reach deeper into the heart of reality than the single lives which move about in its social forms. Society is external and impersonal. Reality is internal and personal. We crave life. The old savages made universal life their god and worshiped its symbols. We in this age of mechanism turn to life with all the fullness of its unexplored meaning and worship it in our own fashion with a zeal no less intense than that of our savage ancestors. We welcome all that contributes to the expression of life; we throw aside all that dulls and dwarfs it. The expression of life, self-expression in its fullest sense, is for each one of us the thing above all else worth while. Sense experience, wealth, morality, and even religion each contributes its/ own value to the self-expression of life. Again we repeat — that is final. Self-expression is at first merely organic and physical. The stimulus of an athletic contest 150 LIFE AS REALITY or even the satisfaction in the portrayal of some mechanical dexterity each has its reflex effect on our bodily feeling and yields, each in its own way, its measure of physical joy. It is these simple impulses of our nature that first crave self-expres- sion. Man has certain likes and certain dislikes. He seeks pleasure and avoids pain. He feels drawn to beauty and repelled by ugliness. He loves and he hates; he has organic impulses and he has emotions; he would follow one path, but his impulse for self-expression leads him into another — and all this with the supreme simplicity of an untaught child. Long before man is master of himself he is the slave of that much of universal nature as expresses itself in him. He may raise bulwarks aginst the eddies of his own natural impulses, but they are powerless in the presence of great natural forces. Yet it is not given us to question the real significance of these life im- pulses even on this physical level, for all self- expression carries with it its own content of reality, its own excuse for being. Nor even here within the sphere of natural impulse can we re- flect our moral colors into the activities of life. We cannot characterize one impulse as good and another as evil, one as right and another as LIFE AS REALITY 151 wrong. The supreme fact remains, we act as we do because that much of universal life of which we individually partake leads us innocently by the hand. We cannot condemn life in part with- out condemning it in the whole. And were we able to separate the good in human life from the bad the magnitude of our task would soon lead us beyond the boundaries of our narrow per- ception. The natural impulses of our activity are the simplest forms of self-expression. They are, however, neither final in themselves nor do they afford more than the most meager expression of life. If human conduct is merely the sum of natural propensities and nothing more, then no Indian or Persian ever painted a more fatalistic picture of life than is given us by our own nature. But action as an organic activity is merely the groundwork. Man himself as a separate indi- vidual counts for something. He expresses life in these simple actions, but the value for which they stand is an immediate personal value for him. Exercise for the mere sake of exercise loses its zest the moment repetition has dulled the edge of novelty. The individual demands, in the self- expression of his life, even as pure physical 152 LIFE AS REALITY activity, something that is for him self-sufficient. Action must have something lasting in it, some of its colors must be dyed in more permanent pig- ments than those which disappear almost before we act. This seeming permanence is found in a kind of self-satisfaction which for want of a better term we call pleasure. Since the time of the Greek, Aristippus, we have sought to give to pleasure its proper place in life. This has proved one of the most perplexing of questions because no one denies the immediate certainty of pleasure, yet its transient, fleeting character is apparent to all. We must find a place for pleasure in life, yet we hesitate to ascribe to it its full worth fearing lest it may vitiate the permanent values of life. We cannot explain away pleasure nor can we cast it aside on the supposition that it involves a moral turpitude. On its lower levels it may result from a mere gratification of hunger or thirst; on its higher levels it may spring from a satisfaction akin to that which the mathematician feels in the solution of a new problem or that which Gibbon felt, in LIFE AS REALITY 153 his summer house in Lausanne, as he penned the last words of his immortal narrative. Pleasure may present itself as a final end in life. In this form it must be conceived as one among the many proffered answers to the problem of reality. Pleasure presents a theory of life. It would make itself final and self-sufficient. It points to all ranges of activity, from the simplest physiological response to the noblest flight of the constructive imagination. In all this breadth of human activity it asks of our own personal experience, Is not the thing worth while the pleasure, immediate or remote, which all forms of self-expression yield us? The logic of Hedonism is, from a certain point of view, unassailable. Experience proves that the self-expression of life involves pleasure. It is undeniable, there- fore, that it forms a part of the reality of life. The task of any philosophy of values is to ascribe to it its proper part. Pleasure bases its authority as a value in life on experience. But it is the experience of pleasure that proves its narrowness and insuffi- ciency. Pleasure in itself is single; it comes to consciousness as the separate tones or colors of the separate sense -impressions. These individual 154 LIFE AS REALITY ' pleasure units disappear almost as soon as they arise. In order, therefore, to obtain pleasure in any lasting form the sense -impressions having a pleasurable color must be grouped together so that they may form a kind of pleasure continuum. Here lies the evasiveness of pleasure. Those sense- impressions which produce pleasure at one moment often give only pain when repeated. And if from past experience we would intensify the pleasure of well-remembered experiences by intensifying the experiences themselves, we find to our dismay that pleasure soon passes over into pain. A color may give pleasure in its softer tints and actual pain when made too intense. Furthermore, if a long-continued pleasure is sought through shifting scenes so that new sense impres- sions pass ceaselessly above the threshold of consciousness, the purpose is no better achieved. "Anticipations always excel realities," according to the old proverb, so that he that weaves a golden web in his imagination never finds the same glitter in stern experience. Pleasure presents us with a dilemma — if we seek it through the old it vanishes with repetition, if through the new we cannot foretell its presence. The moment we direct our attention toward the pleasure we are LIFE AS REALITY 155 enjoying, just at that moment the pleasure disappears; the moment we analyze pleasure it dissolves away like mist before a summer's sun. Experience, then, which lures us on in the quest of pleasure plays us false. We are baffled in our search, we are defeated in our purpose. A life- plan cannot be woven out of this confusion of sensations and emotions. A school of the ancient Greeks, pleased with the simplicity of the pleasure motive in life, grasped at the fleeting chimera and called it all. But it ended in pessimism. Hegesias, the last of the Cyrenaics, despairing of ever finding a life of pleasure, called life bad, utterly bad. So it is with us, we seek pleasure as the expression of our life purpose, but it eludes our grasp. Mere pleasure passes away; if pur- sued for a long while the futility of the quest leads to a morbidness akin to the pessimism of the old Greek. Pessimism, like some showy saphrophyte, feeds on dead hopes and thwarted ambitions; it is the decay and not the fruition of life. As presented to us in literature and human experience it is an attitude of mind, not a philosophy of life. Men and nations embittered by failure are pessimists, 156 LIFE AS REALITY not because they have discovered any final solu- tion to life, but because they have failed to find its real self-expression. Men who have made the transient pleasures of experience their dominating pursuit to the extinction of all else come at last to realize the futility of their effort and call life evil. Pessimism always rests on a preconceived belief that the final value of life consists in some experi- ence of pleasure. It has burst forth as the last cry of despair when experience has failed to justify the belief in "those things men set their hearts upon." Pessimism springs from human failure, and human failure arises from the shat- tered confidence and the forlorn hope of the human spirit in the presence of impossible tasks. The man who has spent his life in the pursuit of wealth finds as the declining years dull his senses and narrow his vision that he has spent his life in the quest of an unattainable end. Like the Jew of Malta he sacrificed his life on the altar of a false god. The scholar struggling with his self- appointed tasks sees in the accumulation of knowledge a life purpose, but in its pursuit he finds the horizon ever widening, until at last he recognizes that the task he has essayed is endless. LIFE AS REALITY 157 Looking back, therefore, on the sacrifices he has made at an altar consecrated with his own hands, he too calls life a hopeless tragedy. Like Dr. Faustus, he has sold his soul for knowledge, and the devil has played him false. But pessimism is more than an attitude of mind regarding the outcome of life; it is, strictly speaking, a theory of the nature of reality. It is more than an interpretation of individual experience, for to refute it on this narrow ground is to assume a position more or less in sympathy with it. It is then simply an issue depending on the predominance between the good in life and the evil. But who shall judge this for even a single life? Self-satisfaction cannot be measured nor can the good and the evil in life be compared and balanced. Pessimism is essentially a theory of reality, not a mere attitude of life to be proved or disproved by the casual experience of each wandering soul. In its broadest sense it repre- sents an attempt to give moral color to the world of reality. It asserts that the part of existence which is apportioned to man in this life of ours, is evil and not good. Life is a tragedy, not so much in detail nor even in cast, but in setting and in plot. 158 LIFE AS REALITY As a theory of the real nature of life the arith- metical juggling of pleasure and pain adds not one straw to the strength of pessimism, nor tends in the least to refute it. Pessimism hangs on the belief that the human mind can reflect the moral colors of its own good and evil purposes into a world of reality. Whether we can call this life of ours good or bad depends in the end upon our ability to read into the reality of life the good and the evil which we ourselves create. Reality is not an attitude of mind. Life is too complex, too subtile, to permit of confidence in the moral dis- tinctions which we are wont to make. Out of our own human conceit we have created certain standards by which to judge the world, as if we had been ordained to sit in judgment over the purpose of life and the moral order of the universe. This applies to the optimist no less than to the pessimist. The optimist looks out on the world from his narrow cell and calls it good — ' ' the best of all possible worlds." The pessimist, because of temperament or limited experience, wails the evil of all things. To call the world bad the pessimist must know of a better one; to call it good the optimist must know of a worse one. Life, as an aspect of reality, as a living fact LIFE AS REALITY 159 apart from our objective judgment of it, has no moral coloring. It is neither good nor bad, moral nor immoral. Each life expresses in its own finite way, a certain aspect, a certain shade, in the expression of reality. The world- order would be incomplete, it would not be the all, were a single fact of life not what it is. Beyond this we cannot go. Our own human purposes may objectify life and pass judgment on its pictures as they are thrown on a screen — hence it becomes good or bad according to the lights with which the screen is illumined. But reality, immediately lived in the self-expression of life, is devoid of moral color simply because it lies deeper than our moral judgment. Eeality cannot be pictured nor can it be weighed in the balance of our finite purposes. Pleasure cannot be made the final end in life because pleasure alone defeats its end. It is at best an accompaniment of self-expression and as such adds its particular contribution to the reality of life. Pursued to the flood for its own sake it ebbs back as pessimism. Our own experi- ence teaches this, if the wisdom of ages is 160 LIFE AS REALITY not sufficient. Yet aside from pleasure we demand self-expression in some form as our personal mode of expressing reality. We demand at least a final purpose toward which we may strive, a "cause" or ambition which may enlist our efforts. We believe this will afford a field for our primitive self-expression and we doubt not that in this activity *we shall derive pleasure as a secondary result. We choose our motive as a fundamental interest in life. Objectively it may be the pursuit of wealth, or political power, or the honors of scholarship, but subjectively we value it according to the depth and intensity of self-expression it affords. We even beguile our- selves into believing that this "cause" or objective end is the thing sought for and not the immediate self-satisfaction that ensnares us. In all this the thing of value is the expression of life. We crave wealth for the opportunity it gives to portray our own purposes in men and things. It is to narrow minds the easiest and most direct road to power, because wealth values are measured by external standards. The modern "captain of industry" cares but little about the actual wealth he acquires, — six figures are quite as significant to him as seven. The real thing he LIFE AS REALITY 161 wants and craves and by which he measures his achievements is his power. Wealth is only means to an end; power is both means and end. On this altar he lays his all, pride, honor and ideals. He prostitutes his name and his family to this end and counts the cost as cheap. In all this struggle it is self-assertion which spurs him on. It is a game in which the counters are pure gold and the self-expression of life the stake. Another type of mind finds that political power affords the most immediate form of self- expression. Few men who clamor for political recognition care in the least about the welfare of those who raise them to position. All the glamour and the glitter of patriotism, of freedom, of national prosperity and the rights of all are flaunted in the face of a long-suffering people in the hopes that some of these vague ideals may excite tangible visions in their minds. It is the struggle of a few for the expression of power through the many. The few call this expression honor; they crave it because it is their inter- pretation of life. This is true also when political power is identi- fied with some patriotic "cause." The primitive pleasure of self-expression, though perhaps subtly 162 LIFE AS REALITY veiled to the patriot himself, is nevertheless the motive that brings about his real satisfaction. Some noble-minded man seeks to raise himself to power in order to create a lasting public utility or help to bring about some humanitarian end. He feels the moral force of his mission. He labors heart and soul for the ''cause," not thinking for a moment of his own advancement. His motives and the ends he seeks are of the noblest kind. He is unselfish in the largest sense. Still with all this the intensity of his utterances and the vigor of his actions arise not from the mere belief in the "cause," but rather from the reflection of himself within the "cause." He sees himself as a part of a great movement that surges about him. He cannot remain quiet, for it is he within the "cause" that clamors for self- expression. He finds his own life purpose in this movement, which he temporarily regards as something outside of himself. Its success or failure becomes his own success or failure. Here he finds a satisfaction that is purely personal because the "cause" to him is purely personal. Solon and Themistocles, Washington and Lincoln acted, if history tells us aright, from the highest motives of a noble patriotism. Yet beneath it all LIFE AS REALITY 163 the reward which came to each was a satisfaction immediate and personal. In the whole-souled devotion to a humanitarian end the patriot finds, like the seeker for pleasure or wealth or power, the sphere for his own primitive self-expression. This is for him the meaning of life. Learning and a life of scholarship are supposed to offer a type of satisfaction which carries the mind far above the fleeting pleasures of sense. The modern utilitarian, still fond of his "greatest happiness principle" but cringing under the implications of sensualism, takes refuge in the distinction between the higher and the lower pleasures, the mental and the physical. The moralist and the romancer, each seeking in a separate way to understand the values of life, have laid stress upon the balance between the sense and the intellect. They have required that we note the more permanent satisfaction that arises from intellectual enjoyment. Here then on what has seemed to men in all ages as the highest level of human activity the intellectual life ought to justify itself as an ideal not vitiated by purely self-determined motives. This, however, proves not the case. The pursuit of learning is of the same intent as the 164 LIFE AS REALITY pursuit of wealth or power. On the surface it seems to have lifted itself above the gross of a pleasure-seeking world. Yet in the end the impulse that leads the scholar to push forward the frontier points of knowledge in some single direction or the pedant to acquire his chips of learning is the same impulse for individual self- expression. At the last analysis it is purely personal, purely selfish. The writer of a mono- graph, be it on Gasteropods or Ahura Mazda, may say in his preface that this bit of research, meager though it is, may perhaps add something to that stock of facts which is briefly called human knowledge. Yet this motive is childishly super- ficial; the real impulse lies far deeper. He enjoys his microtomic sections and his dusty tomes. He feels a vital satisfaction in the pursuit of facts, in the construction of hypotheses and the testing of law. He enjoys the competition with other scholars and counts success by the measur- able achievements of publications and position. It is a game, like the pursuit of wealth, only here the counters are not chips of gold, but crumbs of knowledge. The story is told of an American student in a German University who had nearly finished a doctorial thesis when he was confronted LIFE AS REALITY 165 with, the published work of a fellow scholar on the identical subject. Crazed with disappointment he attempted to cut his throat. Fortunately for our knowledge of the classics he recovered, and may even now be dispensing Greek roots to admiring classes. The painter, the novelist, the critic and the poet all find in the practice of their arts a field for the self-expression of their individual lives. This is all — unless it be the ulterior motives of wealth and influence. We enjoy the satisfaction which the embodiment of our ideas involves. We delude ourselves into thinking that this enjoyment is objective in the thing itself, while in reality we gloat in the subjective activity which finds in the sphere of the intellect an- other medium for its primitive self-expression. The scholar or the artist tlirows his personality into the task before him. He makes it one with his own life. It therefore becomes real to him and to the world. This is the value of the intel- lect in terms of life. It is reality expressing itself. All forms of self-expression, whether mere pleasure, mere wealth, mere power, or mere 166 LIFE AS REALITY learning, pursued for the gratification of their ends alone, lead to a hopeless series of thwarted efforts. This is life from the outside, but it is not the vital germ. Life viewed externally presents an infinite series of possibilities, and we learn from experience that the goal we select is never realized. All life-purposes viewed ex- ternally lead alike through failure to pessimism. Yet in the self-expression which each act, each hope, and each achievement gives, there is the immediate reward of portraying some particular phase of one's own individuality. In this there is something final. Self-expression is not of value for what it accomplishes, for this can never be more than a term in a series, a step in an infinite process. Its value lies in what it stands for itself, the individuality which is just itself and nothing else. It is, therefore, immediate and not relative; an end in itself and not a means. Self-expression, as life, gives us the germ of reality that the seekers for pleasure, for power and for learning blindly strive for. The things they struggle after have significance to them and to the whole universe merely as parts of a single life's individuality. The struggles, hopes and thwarted purposes are the outer casements. The LIFE AS REALITY 167 real life-value is the individuality which is realized through the immediate self-expression. It is the primitive satisfaction of expressing itself in its own way. This is art in its most universal embodiment, the art of life. Every act of life has the deepest significance, every life as a whole has the deepest value, not because of moral color, but because of its por- trayal of reality. We cannot judge of the mean- ing of another's life, because reality can never be thrown on a screen; it can never be objectified and made impersonal. We can never know the impulses to action of another's life — in a certain sense we cannot know our own, we can only feel them. Life expresses its own unique individuality. This is not the outward form, the success or the failure, but it is what life as a living reality yields to the single person. This is the subtle difference between appearance as object and reality as life. The one can be made universal, the other is its own individuality and nothing else. The facts of experience, the values of wealth, the universal moral law — these may be made general. They may be weighed in the balance of men's minds and tested at some final court of appeal. Not so with reality as life. That is irreducible. That is 168 LIFE AS REALITY single. Its value and its significance is just that something which it expresses as it passes. We realize this something in the degree with which we fill each momentary effort with the fullest self- expression that lies within our power. It is revealed as the life-impulse with which each instant is saturated with will- effort. Live to the fullest in every moment and we get reality. This self-expression is for life something final. It is ultimate within a world of its own. Life feels its own deep reality and beneath this feeling no philosophy nor metaphysics can ever pene- trate. It is the immediate reality of life so far as it is revealed with any distinctness. I feel that I am real; this feeling demands self-expres- sion. In these two assertions all the inner reality of consciousness stands naked and confessed. The multitude of facts and experiences which are forever passing above the threshold of conscious- ness have merely a reflected value. All the in- tellectual processes of logic and thought, all the ethical and metaphysical constructions which confine themselves to expressing reality as a closed system of relations, deal forever with externals. Their reality is borrowed. They are the pictures of the real showing us various phases LIFE AS REALITY 169 of its external form, much as the outworn integu- ments of insects give us the shape but not the substance of the living animal. But life is itself the germ of what experience, science, the moral principles and the religious beliefs are the sense forms. In the deep recesses of the human con- sciousness there is the impulse for self-expression which cannot be crystallized into an intellectual process nor thrown on the screen of sense expe- rience as an objective fact; it is an impulse which cannot be suppressed nor laid aside. It clamors for the assertion of its own reality. This is for us final. IX THE ONE IN MANY In dem gegenwartigen Idealismus hat die Thatigkeit uberhaupt ihr Gesetz unmittelbar in sich selbst. — Fichte. Within the sphere of life there is a final reality. It is the immediate fact of life felt, not known. Beneath this we cannot penetrate. Truth, whether the truth of correspondence or of practical values, whether the truth of consistency or the truth of purpose, must, in the end, be truth just because it has value for life. Truth is truth because in the final test of value which life alone determines it is found to have a place. Truth has value for life — this is the deepest significance it can have. But this is not enough. The immediacy of life is an individual fact underlying all values from sense experience to religion. But as a single fact of my individual belief it has significance for me alone. Life is broader than this individual feeling that seems to arise as a by-product of 170 THE ONE IN MANY 171 my own consciousness. Life is universal in the sense of being the ultimate reality, in the sense of being the final value for all our human, finite values. Yet in universalizing life we cannot make it synonymous with a Divine Personality, because the being of God is always objective to his world, whereas life is the world — "in whom we five and move and have our being." Life itself is its Absolute. The history of human speculation has dealt from time to time with various generalized abstractions, all of which have come in and out of fashion with a kind of mathematical regularity. But beneath these there lies the human passion for unity. The mystics and the idealists, the materialists and the scientists have ever been fascinated with the craze for uniformity. They have pursued every fragment of our human experience in the search for some consistent clue to unity; they have explored the facts of the human mind, the motives of our ethical world and the cravings of our religious con- sciousness in the hope that fields of the most diverse character will bear testimony to the unity of the world. Nor has all this been in vain. The human mind believes in its unity; the phraseology 172 LIFE AS REALITY of all its languages has grown up about this central conception. Yet we demand of the monist that he shall describe his Absolute with greater precision. We want our yearning for unity satisfied by a more definite, more intelligible, more natural description than is usually vouch- safed in metaphysical abstractions. We want to know our unity. For its own purposes science has always assumed a lifeless world beyond our sense perception. In order to show the contrast between the inner world of consciousness and the outer world of nature, between life and what seems to be with- out life, science has taken away from matter itself any semblance to fife. For the purposes of pure description it has seemed necessary to refer to material facts as if they were mere objects. Freedom of independent action, a con- sciousness or even an independent fife of their own would frustrate the chief object of science in reducing everything to law. Science insists, therefore, often with a dogmatic arrogance unbecoming to its dignity, that its phenomena shall have no independent value of their own. THE ONE IN MANY 173 Its facts must be concerned with mere objects and nothing else. This sharp line of distinction between the living and the dead is the theoretical standpoint of science, but it is not adhered to as rigidly now as it has been in years gone by. The unbridgable chasm between man and the lower animals, the invariant differences between the biological and the physical worlds, mean much less to-day than they did a century ago. Science grows less insistent on the fundamental differences among its objects. Vitalism is no longer an eternal truth to the chemist who has learned to duplicate many of the activities of living protoplasm. Indeed, so important have the physiological processes of organisms become from the point of view of their chemistry that a new science has risen to immense importance entirely within the lifetime of men now living. Chemistry sees its own universal laws reflected throughout the whole of nature, from the formation of a molecule of water to the metabolism of the neuron. The biological sciences, working downward from man to dead nature, see the universality of life on all levels. Science would construct a unity of life. The theory of organic evolution 174 LIFE AS REALITY begins to reason from the known of human life through the unknown of the geologic past to the first beginnings of life as we now understand it. But at last it comes to a chasm to which it is blind, the chasm between living and dead matter. If it opens its eyes to this it must see that its vast hypothesis with all the intricacies of con- struction and explanation is groundless sophistry unless that part of nature which it calls dead can be endowed with some form of life. Evolution can work backward to the Amoeba and the Pro- tococcus; to go further it must embrace the uni- verse. Psychology, from the point of view of con- sciousness, is moving in the same general direction. It finds, it is true, the psychic life of the lower animals different from that of man, but is it a difference of kind or of degree? We are able to attribute consciousness to other persons solely because their actions resemble what we believe ours would be in similar situations. Employing the same reasoning from analogy we may infer — and we have no reason to infer otherwise — that the various responses of the lower animals to the changes in the world about them arise from a consciousness similar to our own but differing in THE ONE IN MANY 175 form and intensity. If we refuse to admit this premise we must arbitrarily assume that there is somewhere in the animal kingdom a sharp line between the life that is conscious and the life that is not. But what shall determine this line? Consciousness is known only through the analogy between our own actions and those of another creature, yet even the primitive Amoeba responds to touch stimuli and different wave-lengths of light. It is far easier to infer the universality of con- sciousness in some form than be driven into the necessity of denning the conditions under which it is present and those under which it is absent. Driven to the terms of its definitions psychology must admit the universality of consciousness, otherwise it cannot be sure of its presence on the highest level of life. Life itself is indefinable to science because it cannot be thrown on a screen and described in exact terms. Those external phenomena of liv- ing matter which can come within the range of scientific description are always such facts as can be made the direct objects of our empirical knowledge. Science infers the existence of fife from these external phenomena. The minute Amoeba moves, it grows, it divides and subdivides. 176 LIFE AS REALITY These activities lead biology to declare that the Amoeba has life, since on higher ranges these characteristics are invariably associated with those beings it has learned to call alive. It is merely a question of analogy between the higher and the lower. The crystal is not considered alive, because it does not show all the character- istics found connected with life as science defines it. The crystal cannot move of itself nor re- produce its kind, therefore science calls it dead matter. But what right have we to set up a criterion to distinguish the living from the lifeless, since by the very nature of scientific knowledge we can never know, in terms of an abstract definition of science, what life really is? In de- claring that the crystal is without fife, that it is in no sense allied to the organisms we call alive, science presumes for itself an insight into the inner nature of living processes. This is a pre- sumption without foundation, since scientific knowledge concerns itself only with life in its external manifestations, and we have no basis for asserting that all fife manifests itself in the general ways we choose to recognize. There is, therefore, nothing in science that con- tradicts the universality of life. On the contrary THE ONE IN MANY 177 it is accumulating evidence, from year to year, that tends to tear down the barriers between the living and the dead. It sees, more and more, the lower reflected in the higher and the higher in the lower. Every field of science teaches the unity of nature, not only in rough outline, but in detail. Scientific knowledge cannot give life to one part of this unity without giving it to the whole. Beyond this we cannot go. Science can strike no deeper into the problem of reality be- cause it deals forever with externals. Science can only make the universality of fife probable, it can never make it certain because its objective descriptions cannot know life as reality. Science cannot reach reality because it remains forever objective. Art, however, would attain the goal in one supreme flash of intuition. It would grasp life in a single bound. Art approaches its ideal when it is able to breathe into its creations the breath of life; it fails when they seem dead. Look out on the marble fretwork and gilded mosaics of St. Mark's. The impression is not one of great beauty. With all its domes and columns, 178 LIFE AS REALITY its overwrought sculptures and ornate galleries, it bespeaks a monument of human ingenuity, but it is without life. Its statues do not speak of a greatness lost to Venice forever. Its four bronze horses are still prancing in action as in the days of Bellini, but their life is out of harmony with the huge basilica. The greatness of Greek art was its portrayal of life. Turn from the flamboyant pile of St. Mark's to the simple beauty of the statue of Hermes that Praxiteles is said to have cut. It looks down from its pedestal in the little museum of Olympia with a more than human conscious- ness. It seems to read the thoughts of those who sit opposite to it with the calm disdain of one who has run the whole gamut of human experience. The three female figures, taken by Lord Elgin from the pediment of the Parthenon, — called without good reason "the three fates," — suggest to us what was so supremely fine in Greek art. The three figures have come down to us without heads or arms, yet the art they portray is probably as near perfection as human genius is likely to create. They combine the Greek simplicity, the Attic poise of mind, with the perfection of technique which was alike com- THE ONE IN MANY 179 mon to the Attic and the Argive schools. Yet with all this, the greatness of their art lies not in the Greek poise of mind nor in the skill of their sculptural technique. It is in the vision of life these three mutilated figures portray. Phidias — or one of his pupils — has made articulate so much of the living as could be hardened into stone; he has made us feel a vital spark through the long intervening centuries and appreciate something of what life meant to the Greek genius. Even Greek architecture, where life is most difficult to express, has about it a living germ. Those who have seen the view from the Acropolis, especially at dusk, may have caught a glimmer of what the Greek art in its supreme effort to portray life must have meant to the Greek him- self. In the foreground, in its beautiful sim- plicity, stands the little temple of Nike; below are the purple waters of Salamis with iEgina in the distance, while a deep golden glow burns along the low hills that skirt Athens. Even the columns of the Parthenon that he prostrate on the ground speak with a life of their own. They call from another world: "Phidias has given us a reality which no Turk nor Venetian nor even time can wholly kill." It seems the abode of 180 LIFE AS REALITY some living spirit. It was alive to the Greek and that is why he has made immortal in Pen- tellic marble that something of life which he understood so well. But the aesthetic experience is not in itself absolute. It derives its value from its cross- references to life, from its ability to give us a copy of some phase of the multiform variety of life which shall be universal to the sense-experi- ence of all of us. In itself, from its psychological significance, beauty is deadening to life. It gives us at best an artificial copy which we mistake for the reality. Life is activity, it is not con- templation. The soul that loses itself in aesthetic enjoyment surrenders its own individual share of reality. For the time being it becomes one with its aesthetic object; it sees reality as an object of sense perception, forgetting that the only reality that- has permanent value surges up from the individual soul as activity. Action cares little for the beauty of external sense- experience. It makes its own reality; it does not find it revealed in something else. The fine arts lead to passivity, to inaction, to quiescence, to rest. No wonder Plato excluded them, especially music, from his ideal state, knowing full well THE ONE IN MANY 181 their deadening influence. Their share of reality lies in an artificial portrayal of life, but the deepest reality we ourselves can express lies not in seeing life without, but in feeling it in action. Religion, like science and art, seeks life as its ideal. The earliest and most primitive religions we know of are simple prayers to the spirit of nature. The savage must interpret all nature after the pattern of his own consciousness. And we, notwithstanding our claims of enlighten- ment, must do likewise. The religious conscious- ness seeks to represent the world as the embodi- ment of some active, vital principle, the presence of which the human spirit vaguely feels. This is why religions have always been idealistic and not materialistic, why they have always moved from a pluralism of forces to a monism of mind. Christianity was successful in its struggle with Roman paganism simply because in the ideal of Christ there was more vitality and human appeal than the Latin priests could infuse into the dead god s of Etruria, /^Philosophy, above all else, stands for life as \touth^-^With all the conflict of thought since the age of the Hindoos and the Greeks the current of progress has not swerved in its direction. 182 LIFE AS REALITY Anaxagoras and Plato planted the seeds of the vine from which Kant and Hegel picked the ripened fruit. Even the parallel influences of materialism and pluralism have softened under the mellowing influence of time. No longer do we hear that the brain secretes thought as the liver bile. The empirical psychologist, once so certain of his understanding of the mind, is willing now to admit that his scientific description of the states of consciousness cannot reach the meaning of consciousness itself. No longer can materialism fall back on psychology in its denial of the ultimate reality of fife. Neurons and sensations have ceased to explain the whole field of consciousness. In a sense philosophy is no better able to grasp the reality of life than empirical psychology or art or religion. Yet during all the years of its long history, for it is as ancient as the myths of the race, it has not won for men in vain the great lesson of the lordship of mind over matter and the reality of life. This cannot be lost, whatsoever the philosophical problems of the future. That science, art, religion and philosophy should all point in the same direction toward the final reality of life is no mere accident of circum- stance. Each of these great efforts of human THE ONE IN MANY 183 consciousness is concerned with essentially the same problem. Like a rich Oriental agate, whose colors vary with every change in the direc- tion of light, life appears different according to the angle from which it is viewed. As science it reveals itself as law and order in a material world. It portrays itself in a sense-world seemingly objective and dead; yet when science attempts to go deeper than what is immediately given it must stop at the portal or else see in experience the revelation of life. In the end life alone has for science a final reality. Art, too, would make life real to the senses. It would endow the mate- rial world with something of the secret which it feels in the pulse of all nature. Eeligion, taking the feeling of the immediate certainty of life, from which all knowledge and reality starts, would extend this upward and outward until at last it has embraced the ideal of a Divine Personality; and lastly philosophy, seeing in all things their value, sees too that the revelation of reality which each life bears, and by which all values in the universe are reflected, has itself a meaning only in life as the Absolute. 1S4 LIFE AS REALITY Among the violent struggles in the history of speculative thought none stand out clearer than that between the advocates of an intellectual view of the world and those who would interpret it in terms of some emotional intuition. Is the Abso- lute a concept of the intellect or a supreme state of feeling? Is it a sharply defined construction of the mind or is it attained in mystic comtemplation or poetic ectasy? In the presence of this question philosophy has always come back to immediate experience for the solution, as it must for an answer to all its permanently significant questions. On the one hand we find that every activity of con- sciousness is in a certain sense an intellectual activity, since mere conscious knowledge involves the perception of relations between states of mind. This is a simple matter of psychology. It is an equally simple matter of psychology to suggest as well, that the very immediacy, the direct certainty of all states of mind cannot be reached by any intellectual perception of rela- tions, but must arise as an immediate revelation of feeling. The presence of the experience comes through feeling, its significance through some subsequent intellectual process. These are the simple facts of our mental machinery that are THE ONE IN MANY 185 accessible to metaphysics. But they are enough. Philosophy cannot be blind to the daily lesson of experience. It must see that the intellectual and the emotional contents of our world of con- sciousness have both their importance in any understanding of the world- order. Life as reality unites these primary types of metaphysical synthesis. Intellectualism is limited in its scope. Theoretically it is limited to what can be externally pictured before consciousness; practically it is limited to the state of our human knowledge and the capacity of the intellect. It may move from cause to effect, from one relation to another, but the ground of its progress will always he in definite, finite sense qualities and mental images. For this reason its approach to the reality of life must follow necessarily the beaten track along which it pulls its ponderous chain of causal sequences. The result is an Absolute of pure relativity; a mind which is supreme in a sphere of pure logic. Such a description of reality is indefinitely — one hesitates to say infinitely — rich in the fullness of all that it contains. But it remains to the end a logical construction, wonderful in its portrayal of the powers of the intellect but formal and in the 186 LIFE AS REALITY deepest sense unreal. The intellect has played a game in logic's universe of discourse and the Absolute is the laurel wreath. Even more striking is the failure when the reins of Pegasus pass from the intellect to the feeling. Feeling is immediate; the Absolute is universal. No single flight of intuitive feeling can of itself carry us beyond the singleness of the present moment. Feeling has all the indi- viduality, the singleness of a mere point. Admit for a moment differences and plurality into feeling and it assumes the form of an intellectual process. It is no longer pure feeling, but a complex inter- play between feeling and our ordinary thought processes. So when the mystic tells us that he has reached the divine essence of the world, that he has thrown aside all the binding chains of thought and sense, spanning the gulf between the finite and the infinite by one supreme intuition, he tells us merely that he has objectified his own feeling of reality. He has reached unity, but he has lost all that the unity unites. His Absolute of pure intuition is as narrowly unreal as the conceptual construction of the intellectualist. The world is not as simple as the intellectual- ist or the emotionalist would make it. The THE ONE IN MANY 187 Absolute is neither inexhaustible relativity nor immediate intuition. Life is neither one uncolored immediacy, nor is it the play of the intellect among the shadows of its own creation. Life is both one and many, both immediate and relative. It includes feeling because it is through feeling that it grasps its own reality; it includes the intellect because it is through intellectual processes that it breaks away from the immediacy of a single moment in time. Feeling gives life its sphere; the intellect enables it to realize the inexhaustible richness of its world. Feeling gives us life as one reality; the intellect enables us to break down the hallowed circle of one single life's solitary existence and see the many in one. The Absolute of life is more than the practical activities with which the pragmatist wishes to construct his world. There must be a centralizing focus to hold each in its place ; there must be an Absolute attitude to give each finite attitude its meaning. Nor, going one step further, can the Absolute be merely the fulfillment of an idea, eternally reflecting its own meaning. The idea of the Absolute must express something for which idea as idea stands. The subject of the idea must be itself an idea, — the something for which idea stands must be yet another idea. This mystic circle of idea and its subject cannot be broken through by making idea an infinite self-repeating system because the system is either an arbitrary construction, — in which case it is of course unreal, — or else it must be brought into connection. 188 LIFE AS REALITY through some deeper value, with what we actually express in life. This deeper value is either another arbitrary con- struction, — in which no progress is gained, — or else it must be life itself, which is alone able to give value to all our constructive interpretations of reality. Life, then, as Absolute, is alone able to give unquestionable reality to all the purposes, finite and self-reflecting, of which the human mind can conceive. The inability of philosophy to grasp the full meaning of life is the inability of any human effort to reach its ideal. An understanding of life involves an understanding of the Absolute, with the fullness of absolute knowledge. Yet as ideal for our finite understanding of reality the Absolute of life is nearer to our consciousness than any other of the great ideals of thought. We understand the present dimly, but in that present we see the future and the past revealed. We understand life only so far as it is present reality for us, but in that present reality we have the only means within our power of understand- ing all reality. We cannot be skeptics because the present is not the all, nor can we deny to the whole of reality an actual existence because this wholeness is never revealed to us in one intuition. The present reality of life is immediate, it stands THE ONE IN MANY 189 naked and unmasked, but its very depth shows that it is only a part of a whole. Yet the only way we can know the merest trifle of the whole is through that part. It stands for its own individual reality, and it stands also for the reality of the whole. This philosophy seeks to grasp in the pursuit of its ideal. This ideal is the fullness of life. X The Many in One 8txX' spew* xoxh [ikv Y