B IRLF EXCHANGE KCHANGJS The Genetic View of Berkeley's Religious Motivation BY G. STANLEY HALL, Ph. D., LL. D. President, Clark University, and Professor of Psychology and Education Reprinted from JOUBNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY April, 1912, Vol. V, pp. 137-162 THE GENETIC VIEW OF BERKELEY'S RELIGIOUS MOTIVATION. BY G. STANLEY HALL, Ph. D., LL. D., President, Clark University, and Professor of Psychology and Education. Geneticism, which I believe to be at once the philosophy and the psychology of the future, regards the world not sub specie eternitatis, but sub specie generationis. It recognizes both prag- matism and absolutism, and justifies each as factors in its I higher synthesis. It holds that all things in life and mind will find their ultimate explanation only when all the stages of their origin are simply but correctly described, and their evolution set forth with maximal fulness. It believes that nothing that mind is or does, has been or has done in the past, or will be and will do in the future, is without its sufficient reason; that this is true of all mental products, whether they be the apparent incoherence of mania and verbigeration, or philosophical problems such as whether unperceived objects exist, whether we think of things differently from what they are, why Plato postulated good, and Spinoza substance, as their absolutes, and so on. It would subject all these themes to its own psychoanalysis, and also the study of practicalities from Kant to Schiller, James and Dewey, in order to find out the deeper meanings and their latent content. It assumes that Thorndike's meliorism, Strong's substitutionism, Pitken's world-picture, Tawney's purposive consistency, and all the newest and oldest problems of epistemology, and the present struggle back towards the terra firma of realism, even in re- ligion, do not one of them say all that they mean, and some only a small part; that most of the expressions of psychic life are more or less symbolic, and that their half-concealed, 239320 RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY half-revealed meaning will be brought out only when we can get through and back of their form in consciousness and tell what deeper tendencies they express and how historically they came to take on their present forms. With Perry, geneticism holds that the theory of knowledge arose from postulating matter without qualities and mind without extension, and that consciousness must be reduced to a form of energy, but that this objective is only another aspect of subjective psychology. W. F. Marvin (Syllabus of an Introduction to Philosophy, p. 129) says, ''Consciousness is nowhere, that is, it does not exist in space," "nor is it a non-extended point in space," "it is, in fact, non-spatial." And McCosh says practically the same. What relation then can it possibly have with the brain or nerves? Can it move, or can anything in it move? Is it in time? It is frankly admitted that, so far, geneticism is 'little more than an ideal with even its program but partially developed, / but it affords a new and lofty viewpoint from which to survey \ with equanimity and with a wide horizon all the conflicts of .present opinion, and to give them fairly a true perspective. It can already rather completely solve some problems, although, at present, it asks a score of questions for every one it can answer. For this reason, it will not appeal to those who seek completeness, or believe that we have already arrived, or that it is noon-day rather than a very early morning hour in phil- osophy. Thus, it is not a view that will commend itself to those who seek finality, still less to those who have already accepted or wrought out a closed system. All these should be warned betimes that their place is not in the camp of the /geneticists. Geneticism began but recently and obscurely with a few empirical data, its view being for the most part neglected by those who wrought in the field of mind, and we were very modest. But its growth has, of late, been amazing, and far beyond the early dreams of its originators, or the knowledge of those who have neglected it. It is already beginning to read its title clear to become the chief stone of the corner, entirely ignored though it still is by most of the guild of system-build- ers. From the observation of simpler and higher animal forms, and of the minds and conduct of children, normal and defec- tive, it has already come to realize that the great speculative GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 139 minds of history are but children of a larger growth, that each system is only a set of more or less carefully wrought-out returns to nature's great unwritten questionnaire, which, from long before the days of the Sphinx down, has always been ask- ing what is man and his place in the world, what can he know, what should he do, how feel, how did he and all his problems arise from great Mother Nature, and what will be his end? To the geneticists, all philosophemes, whether of children or adults, wise or otherwise, are only more or less precious data for study- ing human types of soul, temperament, diathesis and disposi- tion. 1 Hence the geneticist can never be a materialist or an idealist, a dogmatist or a positivist, or any of the rest, because to him each is legitimate and has its own justification, and expresses a type of character and mental tastes and opinions, which it is his task thoroughly to know and sympathetically appreciate and, in the end, harmoniously synthetize into a new and greater harmony, nothing less than the symphony of man- soul itself. Those who need to do so may still make the per- sonally-conducted and well-traveled tour through Locke, Berke- ley, Hume and Kant, viewing the absolute idealism of the theory of knowledge, the best lesson of which is the realization that every psychic bane produces its own antidote or antiseptic, in this case, the new realism of the immediate intuitionists like Stumpf and, in a different way, Mach and Bergson ; while others may prefer Schurman and the old short circuit of the Scotch philosophy (Reid and Stewart) of common sense, which bars this detour. The epistemological microbe is most infectious at the very dawn of the teens, as so many studies have shown. At no age is the mind so prone to sudden and spontaneous obsessions of the question-mania regarding ultimate things. The collections of childish queries and speculations upon these themes should be very suggestive to philosophers. Like childish distempers, however, all these insistent questionings as to what knowledge and reality really are are innocuous and leave a very whole- some immunizing agency behind them, unless they come too *As an early illustration of this tendency, see " Visualization as a Chief Source of the Psychology of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume," by Alexander Eraser. Am. Jour, of Psy. Dec., 1891. Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 230-247. Also his " The Psychological Foundation of Natural Real- ism." Jtid. April, 1892. Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 429-450. 140 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY late in life, when they are much more severe and the effects more lasting and harder to recover from. Thus, while the geneticist yields not even to the metaphysi- cian and epistemologist in his appreciation of .the great phil- osophic systems, he regards them in a very different light. He sees in none of them ultimate or eternal truth, but considers / \ them as expressions of two things: First, of a certain age, race and nation. Not one of these systems could possibly have been developed in any other time or environment. Thus, like the ancient prophets each has always a primarily historical and never a scientific value. Their authors do not address us or our time, but others of a very different one. This is the new, historic, versus the old dogmatic and partisan view, which since Zeller and Fischer has been progressively recognized. Discipleship takes us out of our own age into that of one that has passed and gone. Many of the problems and issues that inspired both methods and conclusions of the great classical writers are simply dead from atrophy, or they are settled ; and it is robbing the grave to resurrect them, save as an academic exercise in the history of thought and culture. The second determining element in the old systems is the personality of the philosopher himself, for his biography is always the other key to his scheme of things. Idealists, episte- mologists, dogmatists, empiricists, and all other schools, are some more, some less, temperamental as well as creedal. Phil- osophers have been always partisan, criticizing and rejecting those of other sects. Each interprets the universe according to his own individuality and is not content, like scientific men, to contribute a tiny brick to the same vast temple others are building. To the geneticists, these schools and creeds must always be studied judiciously, comparatively, sympathetically, but none of them can ever, possibly be regarded as a finality. Each represents a species of the genus, "man of culture." A philosophy is the very acme of self-expression, as science often is of self-abnegation and subordination. There is no other field, not even literature or art, in which a man of education can vent himself with more self -abandon over so wide an area, and can choose his own periscope almost anywhere in it. He cannot be a specialist, but must be a generalist. He alone can follow his own thought freely, fearlessly, wherever it may lead him, weaving into it any color or patterns that seem to him good, GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 141 provided only he weave a careful or well-wrought picture. More than any other writer's, a philosopher's opinions are matters of his own taste, which no amount of disputation can change. If expression be the supreme luxury, the speculative philosopher attains this felicity of complete self-indulgence in his own opin- ions most completely. To be carefully explained by posterity, has been called the highest criterion of success in authorship, and we may add that, to explain the philosopher psychologically, is one of the chief new duties which our science now owes to the great speculative minds of the past. For geneticism, they all represent what Hegel characterizes as an animal kingdom of mind. They challenge us to study their types. No other intellects have ever blossomed so fully, none written so con- fessionally or revelatorily of what is in man's soul. In vino veritas, that is, men are all drunk with the spirit of truth and the passion to utter it, to show forth their inmost soul, only we must have the wit to do much interpretation. Psychological criticism thus must go back of what these systems say, in order to find all or most that they mean. They thought that they expressed certain things in certain ways. We shall find that they expressed very different things in very different ways. We must first take the trouble of understanding their own con- sciousness and, to do this, must often lay bare what they would fain conceal. We must seek for a deeper motive for all they said. Their documents tell us how the world looked from be- neath their own skull-pans, and we must not only vividly revive their images and sentiments, as a starting point from which to proceed to a further analysis, comparison, interpreta- tion, diagnosis of Anlagen, but trace out genetic stages to their causes and motivations till we understand them far better than they could possibly understand themselves. This genetic psy- chology is far vaster than all systems or creeds, for these are but two of the many fields it cultivates, Appallingly great as is this task, even it is but part, for the geneticist must also consider not only the latest twigs on the old tree of psychic life, as represented by the most cultivated adult men and women of to-day, but he must consider all phases and stages of development of mind in every animal form, with each extinct species of which a specific type of soul-life went out and was lost to the world. He must peer wherever possible into the past, list and scrutinize every vestige of . 142 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY psychic adaptation from the very beginning, and everything else that may serve as a key to what is gone, so as to restore the missing links of mind wherever possible. Hence, while he must introspect to the uttermost, he must realize that what he finds in himself is only a small and fragmentary part of the entire world of mind and that objective methods and data must be his chief reliance ; that he must, in a new sense, become a citizen of all times, lands and climes and the spectator of all events. He must especially be on his guard against be- coming a banausic provincial solipsist in his own field or a stand-patter of any school. To be a humanist, large as the term is, is not enough. What, for the geneticist, is the most perfect type of knowl- edge, and what wins man's most complete belief? It is sen- \sation, which is also the first and oldest of all psychic processes. Seeing is believing. What sane man, with normal senses, ever really did or could doubt the great body of their deliverances? Countless generations of beings have relied implicitly on their evidence. Had they not for eons been the most trustworthy of all witnesses, no psyche would ever have been evolved and ani- mal life without them is inconceivable. Subjectively considered, sensation is not only the primordial but the most direct and immediate of all intuitions, and has, from the first, shaped not only all vital functions but structures into conformity with and adaptation to the external world. Now, what is the essen- tial feature in all sensation? What is its purpose and end? Not the act of perception itself, as Berkeleyans aver, but a real outer object independent of the perceiver, not his eject, pro- ject, or any extradition of his consciousness. If we perceive, we perceive something not ourselves. Whether it be perceived truly as it is, or in a symbolic way, every candid analysis of the act of sensation or perception finds an object over against a subject, a counterposed non-ego over against an ego. Thus, there is an ineluctable realistic basis, no matter how trans- formed it be, to every true perception. This bottom fact, the exceptional cases of illusions and hallucinations should no more discredit than the fact of the existence of idiots and deviates of many kinds should shock our confidence in sanity, or sick- ness and weakness make us doubt health and strength. For the most part, then, the senses are the most truthful of all our faculties, the creators of automatisms and habits, the sovereign GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 143 lords of behavior and conduct, the mother of mind throughout both the animal and human world. They may err, but they do so rarely or under peculiar conditions, and all errors tend to be corrected. Most of the defects philosophers are so fond of charging up against them are really faults of interpretation, showing no lack of faithful deliverances on their part. Indeed, so invincible is their testimony, that, where subjective stimuli cause false sensations, they do not need to be very often repeated to compel belief in the objective reality they falsely assert, so that, as Helmholtz says, the soundest mind can not long re- main proof against habitual illusions of perception. To suspect the habitual veracity of sense thus brings panic and confusion and is due, on the part of those who stress them, either to an exceptional number of illusions in their own experience, or else to some often hidden motivation or unconscious wish which causes them to over-emphasize the exceptional fallacies of pen*- ception and to interpret sound in the light of unsound experi- ences, rather than conversely, as they should. Implicit_bejief in the senses, therefore, is the most common form of sound common sense, for there is no reality or certainty in the unl- verse that can begin for a moment to compare with that of a thing seen, felt, or otherwise sensed. That gives us a paradigm of every other kind of reality, knowledge, and certainty, the degree of which is directly in proportion as it approximates this, which can never be suppressed. The very etymologies of every one of the terms designating the so-called higher or more complex psychic processes show how sense forms and images of the various types pervade all mental processes. Even science, according to Avenarius, grows perfect just in propor- tion as it formulates the universe in terms of possible sense- experience, for this makes us able to think the world with the greatest economy or conservation of mental energy. Conversely, whatever we try ta take out of the sense-world loses reality just as far as we succeed in the attempt. To deny space relations of extension and position to anything, even God, soul, thought, is to rob it of its most essential reality, and con- demn it to lead a hovering limbo-life in the pallid realms of nominalism: it is to cut the tap-root of genuine belief in its existence, because everything that truly is, even mind, thought, soul, God, is somewhere, although we may know nothing as to its position, size or shape. For the geneticist, thus, sense is 144 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY the foundation of everything in the psyche; and one of his great problems is to trace, step by step, how the world of mind evolved from this basis. To impeach its witness, is, therefore, to make psychology and philosophy air-plants striking no roots into mother-earth, and to rob them of the most essential criteria of truth. It condemns philosophizing to do its business with a paper of currency of promises to pay, when there is no specie basis. This being so, the geneticist who must explain, evaluate and find partial truth in all things, deviative as well as norma- tive, must tell us why, for instance, Berkeley and the subjective idealists came to proclaim sense-perception bankrupt, and must weigh their evidences, must ask what was the underlying motive of their elaborated solipsism, their rejection of what is so car- dinal and inexpugnable. What was the deeper faith that underlay their honest doubts, for that these always exist, the geneticist, for whom there is no error, must always assume. For this new psychoanalysis, despite the little known of his early family life, the case of Berkeley offers us, on the whole, a most favorable example. His biographer, Eraser, speaks of his ' ' singularly emotional disposition. ' ' Irish, his fervid genius may in many points well be compared with that of his great Irish precursor, Scotus Erigena, the morning-star of medieval, as Berkeley became of modern, scholasticism. The dreamery and imaginings of this "romantic boy," "distrustful at the age of eight years," and "so by nature disposed for new doc- trine," as he says of himself, were matured by a country -home near an old castle, such as fired the genius of Walter Scott, till at the age of eleven he was sent to the nearest town-school at Kilkenny, the Eton of Ireland, where he spent the four most susceptible years of pubescence. "Precocious," well-prepared and finding the curriculum easy, there is a tradition, says Fraser, that "he fed his imagination with the airy vision of romance and thus weakened the natural sense of the difference between illusion and reality." He was also very susceptible to the charms that nature had lavishly spread about this region, which he loved to explore and to feel all its thanatopsis and other mystic moods, and the inevitable provocation to specu- late as to its meaning and man's origin, and place in all the mighty scheme. How deeply he could appreciate this is seen GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 145 in one of the very earliest of his writings, an account of a visit to the cave of Dunmore near by. At the age of fifteen, in 1700, he went to Trinity College, Dublin, where, some three years later, he began his lately dis- covered (printed in 1871) Common-place Book, kept for years, which gives us exceptional insight into the seethings of his mind. In it he communes with himself, apparently with no thought that any other eye would see these jottings. In this precious, almost confessional document, we see that the reveried gropings and obstinate questioning so germane to childhood, as it begins to merge into manhood and realize things in a new way, had not in his case been left to fade into the light of common day, but that he had mused and pondered over them with rare fascina- tion. His enthusiasm and perfervid fancy teemed with queries concerning the true meaning of reality in the world of sense. We find here a consuming desire to promulgate a new doctrine which should "make short work of all the supposed powers of dead unconscious matter;" should banish perplexity and con- tradiction, sap the roots of religious scepticism, and bring - a new harmony of science and theology. All these centered in his new-old scepticism concerning things we see and touch, or the visibilia and the tangibilia. He would make a great coup, which should bring consternation to the critics of religion, by his tu quoque argument that students of nature also work by faith, knowing the material world only by a system of symbols slowly evolved and associated in ways that could be subjected to a most destructive criticism. During his thirteen years at Dub- lin, which he left at twenty-eight, this Guy Fawkes of naive natural realism had pretty well matured and had scrappily laid his plot against common sense, but had done it in the sweetest unconsciousness of all the negative implications that ever since have flowed from it. He would impeach and discredit the most ancient trusted oracles of mankind by a flank movement against the critics of transcendentalities, by showing that matter too was really immaterial, was only a practical postulate on the plane of sense, which must be, in fact, everywhere accepted by an act of faith. He would subjectify even the objects of per- ception, and make each individual the creator of his own phys- ical world, and bring to Modern Europe the old Indie psychosis of maya, which looks out upon nature as only a phantasmagoria of magic-lantern effects projected upon the tabula rasa of time 146 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY and space, the objective reality of which latter it never occurred to him to doubt. Things are only phenomenal; noumena are spiritual, higher, surer, truer, in fact, the only actual realities. Though not deeply concerned for things ecclesiastical, caring little for the conventional orthodoxy of his day, he was heart and soul a religionist, and most of all concerned to vindicate the ways of God in nature and mind, and to subject science to faith. Long he pondered the ways and means of the most effective propaganda of these doctrines, so that they should bring most startling consternation into the camp of the scientists, whose claims constituted the chief atmosphere of academic Dublin, which he found saturated and fermenting with them, for no- where in Britain was there any center of scientific interest and activity to be compared at that time with Trinity, which had so lately been awakened to the new light. To a youth of Berkeley's genius, whose mind was still full of the dreams of boyhood, all this was stimulating to the point of exhilaration and yet baffling to all his deeply-rooted and hitherto fondly-cherished tendencies. He was charmed, yet recusant; "drawn, but repelled. Where was the place, and what was the justification, in an atmosphere so charged and saturated with science, for a purely idealistic diathesis, closing in about which the world of law and necessity brought almost claustrophobic symptoms? He could not, like the more prosaic Lotze, whose soul was long perturbed by the same antithesis, admit that the mechanical view of the world was everywhere present, but every- where subordinate, for this would imply compromise, and of this the Berkeleyan type of mind never knows even the meaning. Ordained at the age of twenty-four, preaching occasionally, he had given hostages to the Christian religion, and his impetuous temperament, chafed as it was, stormed at by free-thinkers like Tolland, John Browne, Molyneux (in his new dioptrics), Locke, Newton, Hobbes, Descartes, Boyle and the great Greeks (for he became Greek professor at the age of twenty-two), his realiza- tion that "things are thinks," to use Bronson Alcott's expres- sion, brought thus a great revolution, and also a profound peace to his perturbed soul. This was all new and most stimulating to him. He felt that his own view would clear up "all those contradictions and inexplicable, perplexing absurdities that have in all ages been a reproach to human reason." He knew too that there was "a mighty set of men" who would oppose GENETICISM AND BERKELEY and vilipend him, but he vows to cling to his transrrming thought. With it, he says, he has "a heart of ease," knowing that things of sense are ideas, a thesis, as Fraser says, "not in- telligible to his contemporaries and immediate successors, and he had only an imperfect consciousness of it himself." He sought with the greatest enthusiasm to restore spiritual beliefs and higher ideals of life in a materialistic age. He was really ' " against his own intention, opening the door for the most thor- oughgoing scepticism and agnosticism ever offered to the world." This made Berkeley the enfant terrible of modern philoso- phers, the arch-sceptic of all sceptics, casting doubt upon the most fundamental belief of the world. Never has there been a philosophy so purely one of temperament and so infectious to those of like diathesis. To the sedentary aloofness from prac- tical affairs of academic life and isolation greater for specu- lators than for those in any other chairs, he added his own visionary temperament, his theological bias, and the special incitement of finding himself in the midst of the hottest battle so far waged between science and faith, where, with lines closely drawn and combatants in serried array on either side, he would be a new David coming forth with his sling against the great Philistine, science. But here the simile ends, for his sling did chief execution in his own ranks, which have ever since been more discomfited than have either the scientists or the every-day naive realists. > His great secret of visual and tactual immaterialism consisted in applying what Locke had said of the secondary to the primary qualities of matter, and it was both inspired and used as a method of causing physical things to vanish and to reveal in their places the eternal spirit and uni- versal reason. 1 The early stages of his writings were negative, while later the dominating motive was more in evidence. We live and move and have our being in God. We realize this ' ' in- tellectually, philosophically and practically by assimilation to God who is reason and spirit and reality, so supreme" that, in His presence, the sensible world fades away and only things unseen are really eternal. , Thus we find the underlying motive deeper than his own con- sciousness, a bias probably never realized by himself. His all-dominant wish was to exalt the cause of faith and reason above, and at the expense of, that of sense, not content like Paul to postulate a new special organ of transcendentalities, to r 148 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY parallel the domain of the sensory, thus giving us a dual world order; not quite a visionary, he yet believed the pipe-dreams of his own imagination until this faculty had become so vivid as to claim the same credence as sense. Like Swedenborg, he was satisfied with the mystic and absorbed contemplation of things divine till the physical world seemed empty and for- gotten, as to the ecstatic newer Platonists. To these views he turned with special fondness in his old age. Incapable of the unique ontological method of Parmenides or Spinoza in resting everything on the deductive or mathematical elabora- tion of an absolutist's creed, his pugnacious Irish disposition impelled him as Philonous to carry aggressive warfare into the Hylic Court with the new weapon that turned the burden of proof on his adversaries and opened a new mine of psycho- logical veins of doubt beneath their very feet, by convincing all who put their trust in sense of a credulity if not a super- stition even grosser than that which scepticism had charged up against religionists. Thus, by breaking the bonds of sense, C human might be sublimated into divine thought as in his later writings, especially in Alciphron and Siris he seeks to doi posi- tively. Even Micromegas on the dog star, with his thousand senses, got no satisfaction, but only growing perplexity from them. Thus, this author of the philosophy of a recrudescent Hindu maya gave the world a shock, which for subsequent stu- dents in the field brought actual disenchantment with nature by tarnishing its pristine charm and immediateness, and those who felt its full force and then succeeded in facing it down, returned to the world somewhat as convalescents, after grave disease, look out through the sickroom windows upon the pal- pitating life of man, while they muster strength again to face the world with courage and resolution as recuperative agencies bring them back to it again. They have trod the way of death far enough toward the end to have lost their way back for a time, but this experience was necessary, and was prescribed, in fact, not only as giving immunity against all less mortal microbes of doubt, but because those sick nigh unto death may return to life with a more vivid sense of the reality of things unseen beyond the veil. His Bermuda scheme occupied a prominent, if not the chief, place in his mind from the age of thirty-six to forty-six. Realiz- ing, from his travels on the continent and his life in London, GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 149 the corruption of Europe, which, to his pure soul, seemed to predict ruin, his ardent social idealism led him to plan a college on the Bermuda Islands, 600 miles from land, where both the sons of British colonists and native Indians from the continent of America could be educated. Long he schemed to raise money for his Utopian institution on these beautiful summer islands, to which his fancy gave a halo of romance. When Swift privately married Stella, and the unhappy Vanessa, whom he had never seen, bequeathed to Berkeley her fortune of some 3,000 pounds, this asset and the charter and grant from Parliament, together with private subscriptions, seemed to him to warrant the realization of his hopes, and so, in 1829, he landed, not at the Bermudas, but at Newport, where he began his bucolic life, wrote and waited for the special grant of 30,000 pounds which had been voted for his project, but which Walpole never sent. Here too he wrote his Alciphron, which marked a distinct advance from his phenomenological standpoint to an actual hypostatization of Plato's ideas, and here he inspired Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Edwards. But, after nearly three years, he sailed for home, a disappointed man, never having seen the Bermudas nor his college, but con- soled by his transcendental speculations. In America, he charmed everyone, as he always did, and gave a great impulse to metaphysical speculation to the few scholars here inclined that way. He had found consolation for the disenchantments of immaterialism in a greatly augmented sense of the reality of the supernal world, where alone noumena were found. All phenomena were only media through which we discern the in- telligent and divine spirit. Eeligion alone is the perfection of man. Indeed, we can see God even more truly than we can see nature or the soul of our friends. Reason is begotten of faith. All nature is but a revelation of God. Thus Berkeley \ sought to regenerate the New World by his new idealism. In the crude practical civilization of this country, as it was in his day, where the chief energies of men were directed to the con- quest of nature, the enthusiastic espousal of his crude idealism by the chosen few was a contrast effect of reaction from a materialistic civilization, and suggests the strange success of Dr. William Harris' propaganda of Hegelism in the raw cul- ture of St. Louis, thirty years ago. Pioneer-life complemented itself by crass religious creeds, while the few more thoughtful 150 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY minds turned to a crass philosophy which was the diametrical opposite of their practical lives. Thus extremes met, and this effect was heightened by the fact that Berkeley's socialistic ideas were favored by the callow Utopian democratic dream- eries of our pre-Revolutionary days. This was the most romantic of all romantic missionary enter- prises, and might almost be compared with the South Sea Bubble and the tulip-mania. In remote rural Cloyne, where, after a period of controversy, the last eighteen years of his life, from forty-nine on, were spent, when famine and fever had ravaged the region, and his own health was impaired, he sought a panacea for all bodily, as hitherto he had for all mental and social ills, and found it in tar-water, and his Siris or chain of aphorisms on this subject was written and became at once by far the most popular of all his works. The culminating thought of his life was of a universal agent, the one true remedy of remedies, the great reality revealed though concealed by sense. This nauseous drug, now shrunken to a very humble place in the medical pharma- copoeia, became the only drug in his household, and about it he spun a system of philosophical halos. It became the fashion, and factories were established to make it. It was to open a new era to the world. Though itself a phenomenal drug, it had behind it the infinite source of life, and those charged with it would make unprecedented advances, physically, mentally and morally. It thus became, as his biographer says, the ruling passion of his closing years, and yet he slowly sank into melan- choly, a baffled ontologist. p In all this, his type of reason was somewhat paralleled twenty 'years ago by Brown-Sequard and his disciples' advocacy of testicular extracts, which many savants here and in Europe used with great confidence in their amazing rejuvenating effects. Jj Unlike modern American idealistic professors, who left others to draw the ineluctable practical consequences of their creed in the theory and practice of faith-cure, he did not hesitate to enter the therapeutic field himself. If there be a universal sin-cure, as Christianity teaches, which all must experience to be saved, there must also be a universal bodily panacea. If there be one supreme creative energy, why not a sustaining and curative one? No doubt tar-water ten grams of tar- water to ten grams of faith did work cures, but so can almost anything GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 151 else, provided the faith be not wanting, and provided the remedy be not particularly harmful. But how sedulously explain that it was not the tar-water itself, for that was only phenomenal, but the great principle of life back of it which brought the cures? Here we psychoanalysts find a remarkable recrud- escence in Berkeley's mind of the transubstantiation psychosis ] which the Medieval Church experienced in the doctrine that the bread and wine of the Sacrament were made into the veritable body and blood of Our Lord. As the one regenerated the soul, so the other did the body, not by its phenomenal material, the pitch and resin, but by its inner principle, the vital life, which expressed the life-giving energy of God, who had singled it out and imparted to it a unique and special power. Berkeley sought no patent for his new medicine, although perhaps no patent medicine was ever so effectively advertised on so high a plane. Siris won the author, then but little known outside of Eng- land and her colonies, immediate and world-wide fame, and was translated into many languages. That and his further writings on tar-water were the largest of his works, save Al- ciphron, and by far the most scholarly, with allusions to a wide range of philosophical literature, which was generally lacking in his other writings. Very many, if not most, of his con- temporaries knew him by this treatise only, which is now almost entirely ignored by both the history of philosophy and epistemologists. Those who treat his Theory of Vision, Human Knowledge, Alciphron, Philonous and Hylas seriously, usually wish his Siris forgotten, but to the geneticists, it is precious ( and indispensable, and it absorbed the chief energies of nearly a decade and a half of his maturest years. In it he not only hypostatized ideas, as he had begun to do in the Alciphron, but passed from the standpoint of Plato almost to that of the Neo- Platonists. Tar-water is charged with pure empyrean fire. It is not only the soul of all vegetable life, but the theoretical fire of the thermal principle. It is the soul of the world, which will go out when the world cools off. It is the principle of life, which the plant bequeaths to the animal world. Thus, the chain passes from the physical to the spiritual. Deity is spiritu- alized tar-water, a universe of ideas realized in living persons, they and it derived from absolute being. It is the link between physics and metaphysics, medicine and theosophy. It is some- 152 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY times compared with Plato's Timaeus for unintelligibility. The type of emanationism it represents is rather more Heraclitic than Alexandrian. The tar-water psychosis in Berkeley was an expression of the unconscious wish of his soul to fill the great void which existed in almost every great and thoughtful mind till evolu- tion, now supplemented by geneticism, came. Tar-water was more than his ''flower in the crannied wall" to start with, and it became in the end the embodiment of his one and all. It was to him all that ether means to the physicist, and proto- plasm to the biologist, noumenalized. In the beginning was tar-water. It was the primal source and therefore also the regenerator of life: the supreme quintessence of the alchemist, sifted out of nature by pine and fir trees, the most precious bequest of the plant-soul. It was the supreme type and symbol too of salvation and of deity. As the great and good before Christ, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the rest were said to have anticipated the great salvation of the cross, so Berkeley by this chain of aphorisms filled the void that yawned and ached, con- sciously or unconsciously, in nearly every soul, before evolution came to fill it and he gained by his tar- water dreameries all that he could of the wished fulfilment or the lasting satisfaction which the genetic view of the world always has and always will give those who know what is to be known, and put their faith in and cast their burdens upon it, for the sake of its great uplift. This was the latent content of his patent emanationistic dream. This is the mother-lye of nature, and, at the same time, the web of thought spun from nature to nature's God. "Ohne Phosphor (=tar- water), kein Gedanke." It was more than Pfliiger assigns to cyanogen. Indeed, it was more than the essential ingredient in the sacramental blood and wine of the soul-communion, for it regenerates the body as well as the soul. Thus idealists always take amazing liberties with the world of things as they are, but Berkeley outdoes them all, for his brooding had bred a profound sense of the unreality of facts. Otherwise, he never could have gone against them so naively with such a flimsy tissue of speculations. Xo philosopher is so like the Baconian spider who ejects a mesh of web from its spinnerette on the top of a picket and then floats from the air suspended by it. For subjective idealists there can be no criterion of truth, save the fitting coherence of ideas, one with AXD BEEKEi 153 another. Here there is no logical consistency, but only the crassest syncretism of quod libet eclecticism. The same in- genuity might have made any object, element, or drug what- ever, as credible a eatholieon. Not a living soul ever did or could accept his system, not even the Hermetics, and Eraser himself is only painfully apologetic. Many delusions of the madhouse have been more systematized. Thus the time has surely come when we must ask whether these sickly vagaries of Berkeley, which haunted all his maturer years, may not be used as a wholesome admonition to youth to cleave close to reality, to wreak the fullest intensity of belief upon the world as it is to sense, lest they too cripple their own souls, and be left to believe any lie that speculative fancy, which has filled the world with metaphysical ghosts, may suggest. This is the Nemesis of immaterialism. That Berkeley's soul still goes march- ing on in the academic world to-day and is not relegated to the sibilant limbo of mere historicity is not creditable to our phil- osophic sanity, for, measured by higher modern standards of normality, his soul and career are simply pathological, although a ease for psychoanalysis, he will long be of unique interest It is not therefore ghoulish to dig up and mutilate even a decent corpse like his, if it lies right athwart what has become a most traveled highway, where it trips and hips most and maims a few who traverse it. He wished posterity to judge him chiefly by his tar-water philosophy. We certainly cannot ignore it. When any professor to-day draws about himself the awful and inviolable circle of academic freedom, I would pause long before invading it. I would reflect how, in Germany, Fechner was allowed to teach that plants and planets were besouled, that the psyche of the sun and moon were regnant deities; how Bauer thought that the Gospels were myths, when myth had a very low connotation as mere fancy; how Zollner, the great Leipzig astronomer, lectured on slate-writing tricks lemonstrate spiritism; how Kirschmann was allowed to teach red socialism right across the street from the most absolute monarch west of Russia, but I would not forget that Hygeia is a goddess on whose shrine authority is compelling us more and more to make oblations of even liberty personal, social corporate, academic and Berkeleyism with its languishing mental involutions brings such a unique blight and murrain, and raise the question of mental and moral hygiene; and there are 154 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY others in the history of philosophy that need this new, higher criticism and censorship on the grounds of academic sanitation. Eddyism is the inevitable logical consequence of New England transcendentalism, and Emmanuelism is the conclusion of aca- demic epistemology. The authors of these systems of thought did not have the courage or the practical efficiency to draw con- clusions, but left that to Mrs. Eddy and Worcester. Berkeley had the courage to apply his system. Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher, contains seven dia- logues, written in America, which are chiefly devoted to an attack upon British free-thinkers, deists, theists and atheists. Lysicles stands for a light-hearted worldling Mandeville, who taught that private vices were public benefits. Against Shaftes- bury 's reduction of conscience to good taste and virtue to beauty, Euphrator shows that aesthetics is not sufficient to inspire vir- tue or morality, but that we must have faith in God, whose existence we know by the same evidences that we know that the souls of our friends exist. The Analyst, which followed, attacked infidel mathematicians and astronomers and the minute philosophers who dealt in infinitesimals rather than men of the world. It sought to show that force was as inconceivable as grace. The doctrine of con- tinuity and fluctuations, the basis of calculus, he thought very minute and philosophy resting on presuppositions that were quite as much credulity as faith. His antagonism was specially directed against the astronomer Halley who could not accept the hypothesis of God because he could find no place for him in the universe. Thus, to go back early in his life, when man is normally in the closest touch with his environment in nature, Berkeley com- mitted himself to the hyperidealistic creed that degraded nature to a mere set of symbols, making a great negation before he had wrought out the great affirmation which always and only can justify denial. Berkeley's mature and later life furnishes us with the spectacle of a pure, ardent, ingenuous soul that had early mutilated itself, and ever after was seeking consola- tion in the spiritual for losses in the physical world, and this is the motive with which his philosophy is still taught. To wean from nature, impels man to take refuge in something higher. Full consolation, however, Berkeley never found, as may have GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 155 happened with a more abstract thinker like Spinoza and one with less ties to and sympathy with mundane things. His later v sadness was that of an ontologist who, despite all his subse- quent findings in the transcendent world, felt himself baffled and defeated. He, too, felt the malign spell of the spirit and method he had conjured up, which has paled life in so many since. How can one agnostic to the real world of sense be truly gnostic to spiritual verities? He did not pass through nature to nature's God, but found Him by turning away from nature as effectively as anchorites renounced the world. f* Also, genetically, affirmations precede rather than follow '' denials. His scepticism was the most radical in all the history of philosophy. To be sure it was the jeu d' esprit of the lush, life-loving, gifted adolescent, sentimentally a perfervid lover of nature, and always preferring to live where her great heart beat strongest, in the country. A temperament that peculiarly needs to feel the authoritativeness of objective reality when it subjectifies it all, does experience a great and dizzying tempor- ary exaltation, a mild inebriation, which is the great charm of epistemology, in the thought that the majestic spectacle of sky, landscape, sea, and even the works of man and the being of one's friends, are phantasmagorical evolutions of our indi- vidual selves, that all we thought to be from without is really from within the individual. This is a delusion, to some measure of which the adolescent soul is normally prone, as it breaks : the chrysalis of childhood and first really looks out into the wide world of nature and man, but it is legitimate only as dreamy revery. It is a stage full of significance, but it should J be evanescent, for it is only a waking dream belonging to the realm of poetry and myth, and indeed abundantly expressed in both, but not fit for prose, still less for science, the very root of which it cuts. Berkeleyan immaterialism has its place f again in senescence, as a stage of its involution, for the weary soul withdrawing from earth. Its phenomena are those of renunciation? This, the long Mst of scientific men from Huxley to W. K. Brooks, who have been fascinated by it, after a life of devotion to nature and science, shows. The flitting intro- version of youth is only like so many other things, a very faint anticipatory fore-gleam of old age, and, if intensified in early life and taken seriously, brings senescence before its time. If J 156 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY we have found anything in a life's experience with philosophy better than the world of sense, then of course we turn from the latter to the former, but this withdrawal and valedictory must never be first or forced. Youthful nature need not be "sicklied o'er with this pale cast of thought," which belongs only to those who have achieved a wholesome culture, and a Ciceronian or perhaps even a Metschnikoffian old age. Sub- jective idealism is a kit of tools too sharp for college youth to more than handle with great circumspection. The imma- terialism argument is the most desperate of all vengeances that religion, the spiritual and ideal view of the world, has ever attempted to take upon all who in all ages have scoffed at its faith. If all its masked batteries are exploded in the youthful soul, progressive atrophy results, for it tends to wean both from aesthetic and scientific devotion to nature's form and phenomena. Thus, do the young men completely infected with it ever thereafter achieve anything worth while in either art, or science 1 Are they not all just at the time when they should be superlatively real and earnest, sad precocious wiseacres aloof, superior, always brandishing a few simple phrases with endless variations and chanting a theme of vanitas vanitatum as old as Ecclesiastes ? f* There is now quite a literature with many well-described cases of abnormal weakening or loss of the sense of reality and of the outer world (in Wernicke's allo-psychic field). These patients feel that all objects of sense are unsubstantial, fading, shadowy, and this brings depression, alarm and dis- tress. Is this really a house, a tree, my brother, or am I dream- ing? I can make nothing seem real. Am I awake? This is their plaint. It is especially the visibilia and tangibilia that are affected. This disorder usually begins with states of fatigue; is seen sometimes in involutions and in dementia praecox, and it also predisposes to these conditions. The only explanation so far suggested is that two things occur in such cases, first the muscular tension and response which sensation normally ex- cites, and which has been the chief factor in the so-called extra- dition of consciousness or of sensation, is weakened or lost; and secondly, that the usual associations evoked by the act of perception are not aroused, that is, the patient does not see with all he has seen, touch with all he has touched, but this single experience is isolated from its natural complexes. F. H. Pack- GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 157 ard 1 describes a remarkable patient of his who when fatigued saw all solids as flat surfaces, as Berkeley says we all really do. In looking over this literature 2 I cannot find evidence of any case on record who ever read Berkeley, and he certainly never read of such cases. It would be interesting to know what both they and he would have said of each other. To him, they would have illustrated the sense of phenomenality or im- materialism, but they are mentally crippled thereby. They in turn might have felt the fears which go with this distemper allayed by finding that they had only drifted toward the posi- tion advocated by a great philosopher. But, had the perusal of his writings led them to the feeling that their senses were deluders, he would have had only their imprecations. They certainly have felt precisely what he wishes us all at least to know if not to feel, viz., the unreality of the objective world. Can we have a logical conviction that the verdicts of sense are false, without sooner or later coming to feel more or less as these patients do? Should we strive to attain this realiza- tion of unreality? Are not these patients, in fact, practical Berkeleyans, who, had they taken him in dead earnest, would thus be realizing precisely what he argues for? There may be different answers to this question, but one thing remains cer- tain, viz., that the degree of intensity of the sense of reality of 1 things rises and falls with the degree of muscular tension or ,' reaction and also with the range, irradiation and vividness of association. With loss of the reality sense goes relaxation or atrophy of muscular tonus and narrowing of the breath and richness of association among the synapses, or a shrinking of the field of apperception. Thus a Berkeleyan creed must in- evitably bring some loss of vigor, of the energy and fidelity of response to facts and events in the outer world. If the doubt is held to in a Pickwickian way, in the sphere of purely reasoned events, the weakening of response would lie more in the domain, not of reflexes but of deliberately planned voluntary conduct as directed toward outer reality. Again, with this distemper 111 The Feeling of Unreality. " Journal of Abnormal Psychology. June, 1906. Pp. 141-147. * Very conveniently summarized by A. Hoch. { * A Review of Some Recent Papers upon the Loss of the Feeling of Reality and Kindred Symp- toms." Psy. Butt. 1905. Vol. 11, pp. 233-241. 158 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY of mind are generally associated disorders in the somato- and auto-psychic field. f These disassociative states, with their depressive syndromes, involve retarded and weakened movements, both of body and of mind. Most tests of sensation show no defect whatever, save in a few cases, and very slight analgesia. Even ideas and feel- ings are dim. There is also loss of interest owing to psyehas- thenic lowering of self-activity. Recognition fails; parts of the body are not felt unless touched or possibly moved. The eye does not reach out; the patient does not know how things before him look when his eyes are closed, and there is a growing sense of insufficiency and aboulia with progressive agnoscia. This is the precise opposite of Janet's conception of the most perfect normality, which consists in the most vital recognition of and response to present environment and the greatest absorp- tion in it. Just in proportion as this loses its power, the soul loses^its grasp on things. From growing indifference and nil admirari the psyche may gradually pass to the opposite state called the delire de negation. In this state, the hold of presentative words is weakened and those of symbolic words increased. Many from Aristotle down have recognized that the eye only perceives color and shade, that size, figure and motion are com- mon to sight and touch, that rays of light converge to a focus in the eye and diverge again, inverting the image on the retina, and not a few (quoted by Fraser) before Berkeley have realized that we have to learn how to correlate and interpret the crude material of sensation and have seen the representative and symbolic character of impressions, that we never see but infer distance and that the bonds between sight and touch are knit up in early life; but all this pertains to the genetic or evolu- tionary history of the individual and the race. Hence, the fact that the adult immediacy of perception is acquired does not affect its validity. To consciousness itself the immediacy is indecomposable and the certainty is beyond all possibility of doubt. Philosophers have fallen into the inveterate fallacy that has been so characteristic of theologians that whatever is evolved cannot be perfect, that a unity made up of elements is not complete and that to demonstrate stages of development impairs the perfection of the product. But the legitimate inference from all Berkeley's facts on which he bases his new theory of vision GENETICISM AND BERKELEY 159 as well as all the very much we have learned since in this field is that God and nature have spent much time and made many a trial and error and effort in evolving senses that now act perfectly, instantaneously and truly and thus have been tri- umphantly successful and have not blundered or failed in their work. As atomism does not destroy spacial continuity, nor the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise disprove motion, so the fact that mental powers have been acquired by many tedious and intricate genetic stages does not invalidate their action. Thus in his vision-theory he is only a geneticist without knowing it and so was led to draw negative and destructive when he should have drawn positive and constructive conclusions. His and all analyses of perception only make the immediacy and certainty I with which it now acts all the more precious and all the more / trustworthy. Had Berkeley enjoyed the unimpaired healthful common-sense respect for reality that characterizes men who have attained real efficiency, he never could have blown the Bermuda bubble, which was only a dreamer's reaction to a world not real enough to be treated with proper respect. This plan has always been thought to be one of the wildest and weird- est of all schemes in the whole history of education. Had Berkeley not been sickened, like the medieval alchemists, by drinking his own elixir, he could never have evolved his almost lunatic creed concerning tar-water. He, doubtless, believed in this as profoundly as he believed in the external world, and ('probably far more so, but with the weakening of his sense of everything in the allo-psychic field, he had no criterion of truth, and so, because he believed in tar-water, that was the nostrum of all nostrums. It needs only a slight psychoanalysis of Berkeley's mind to show that his creed both expressed and had eaten into his life, most of which was spent in rural isolation, as if practical realities rather repelled him, making his mind his own kingdom, and like Descartes, occasionally coming into the great world to launch some scheme so fantastic that had it not been made plausible by a simple, attractive personality, great persuasive power and scholarly ingenuity, would have sent those who held it to the madhouse with delusions of great- ness. This distemper often goes with disorders in the somato- and 1 auto-psychic spheres, that is, the patient's notion of the reality of his own body and of his inmost ego is impaired, and so, the self in its psycho-physic aspect suffers. Whether this 160 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY tendency is logically or psychologically associated in the field of philosophy with loss of outer reality, we shall discuss affirma- tively in the case of Hume, and show how, while Berkeley's self had been unduly exalted, that of Hume had been unduly mortified, and that his denial of cause and self was^jdirectly favored by tendencies and experiences in his own life.l It was Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, 1739 and Inquiries, 1748) who read only Berkeley's early sceptical writings, and who would have abhorred his positive religious views, who, if he did not save the Berkeleyan negative way of thought from progressive oblivion, developed it with a vigor of thought far greater than that of Berkeley, and lent to it the influence of his name, which shone with a wider luster. It was Hume who made Berkeleyism an integral part of the history of philosophy. Hume's chief motive was to weaken the hold of theological thought, rather than to strengthen it, so that, even if Berkeley contributed anything that strengthened the religious faith of mankind, Hume used Berkeley's prime principle far more effectively to upset faith. Indeed, Hume almost saved Berkeley from being a joke. Moreover, was it not significant that Fraser, at the morturi salutamus age of eighty, edited Berkeley almost as his valedictory to life, as if saying "Farewell, vain world, I'm going home." Geneticists see all three dimensions of life, never forgetting the temporal perspective, as even experimenters are now prone to do. For psychoanalysis trivial and undeter- mined details are often graver than those of seemingly serious import. Geneticists believe that philosophy is the love and pursuit of wisdom, and may even prefer its pursuit to possession, and do not feel compelled to decide even between parallelism and interaction. Can man accept only so much that is given from without? Are there more or less fixed quanta of credibilia, whether per- cepts, facts or faith? Is the faculty of belief easily over-taxed, so that elimination at either end of the scale that connects sensuous and spiritual intensifies absorption in and docility to the other? Must we put out either the inner or the outer eye in order to see more clearly with the other? Does active doubt in the world of metaphysics or of physics depend on apperception of or quickened interest in the other? Is the carrying power of the soul for sense weakened, if we practice it for spiritual GENETICLSM AND BERKELEY 161 things, and vice versa, as we often conceive reason and faith to be rivals, one flourishing at the expense of the other? Must we specialize in cleaving to the one and rejecting the other? If this be so, can we not say that Berkeley inverted the natural order by turning from sense before he had felt the natural im- pulse which had, in every thinker of the past, who has grown negligent of sense, given him the only normal motivation to do so, viz., absorption in metaphysical or spiritual verities? They have never scuttled the ship of sense before they have been well established with all their belongings on the ship of faith. They have become denizens of the_higherjbefore they forswore their allegiance to the lower kingdom. They have built secure heavenly mansions before they vacated the earthly tenements of sense. They have not burned this world in order that their homelessness here might impel them to seek a higher one. Finally, no subjective analysis of the process oL seeing and touching can ever reveal anything but a simple, immediate, unitary act of direct intuition. Berkeley's analysis is essen- tially not subjective, but objective. It regards nerves, brain processes, conjectural developmental associations, observations on those restored to sight, babies, etc., and only by this method can the act of perception appear to be complex or in any way accessible to doubt. Introspection can never doubt that e.g. if we see a stick, we could put forth our hand and touch it. If we knew nothing of the anatomy and physiology of the eye and central nervous system, or of abnormalities, we normal adults could never possibly even distinguish between visibilia and tangibilia. The Berkeleyan procedure, therefore, is an ob- jective construction, according to which a series of sense images of what might and approximately does go on in the brain, which from the standpoint of psychology is only an abstraction, is taken inward and used to confuse thought. It is an alien point of view, imported from the objective into the very different subjective sphere. Otherwise, we could never conceive that a sensation or perception could occur without a real outer cause, independent of it and persisting, indifferent as to whether it was perceived or not. Thus, the psychologist, if he remain true to his own consciousness, will always be able to see that things I/perceived are really outer things. Though I may not know all about their meta-sensuous nature, they are external and inde- 162 JOURNAL OP RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY pendent of myself. To deny this, means to impair the founda- tions of the very idea of causation and of the ego, both of which find their best paradigms in the perceptive process. The New Theory of Vision wrecks youth and leaves ingenuous souls floating in gurgite vasto. The wreckers thus have them at their mercy. Euclid rests back on a more primitive eye- geometry, which it amplifies and confirms. But Berkeleyism rests only upon the dreamy revery of fatigue, and daily life, to say nothing of serious science, is its standing refutation. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. Jt/N-9 '64 -Q IN STACKS 9. 1QR4I LD 21A-50m-8,'61 (Cl795slO)476B General Library University of California Berkeley 2*9320