WHAT MAY I HOPE? By GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD WHAT CAN I KNOW? An Inquiry into Truth, its Nature, the Means of its Attainment, and its Relations to the Practical Life. Crown 8vo. pp. viii-311. WHAT OUGHT I TO DO? An Inquiry into the Nature and Kinds of Virtue and into the Sanctions, Aims, and Values of the Moral Life. Crown 8vo. pp. x-311. WHAT SHOULD I BELIEVE? An Inquiry into the Nature, Grounds, and Value of the Faiths of Science, Society, Morals, and Religion. Crown 8 vo. pp. xvi-275. WHAT MAY I HOPE? An Inquiry into the Sources and Reasonable- ness of The Hopes of Humanity, especially the Social and Religious. Crown 8 vo. pp. xvi-310. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. WHAT MAY I HOPE? AN INQUIRY INTO THE SOURCES AND REASONABLENESS OF THE HOPES OF HUMANITY, ESPECIALLY THE SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS BY GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD, LL.D. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK LONDON, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 1915 COPYRIGHT, BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. PREFACE THE psychology and philosophy of knowledge have excited the interest of the world's best thinkers through many centuries of history. Especially did Aristotle, the greatest of teachers among the ancient Greeks, write several voluminous works dealing with the different main aspects of this subject. In his De Anima, or Psychology, he discussed the phenomena of sense-perception, including dreams; he also discoursed upon the functions of the Nous, or mind, both receptive and active even to the extent of having an im- mediate grasp upon the highest truths. His Treatise on Logic, or so-called Organon, ana- lyzed the intellectual processes of conception, judgment, and the syllogism, with such skill and thoroughness that it was not until recent times that any considerable modifications of the formal laws of thought were considered neces- sary. In these works and in his Metaphysics, [v] 313784 PREFACE he treated the categories in a way to lay for all time a foundation for the theory of knowledge, that branch of philosophical discipline which has now received the somewhat pretentious title of "Epistemology." The Dialogues of Aristotle's master, the ever- illustrious Plato, were, so far as their method is concerned, built upon the hypothesis that all the processes of human thought, which result in the conceptions and morally influential ideas of human nature, need a critical examination in order to distinguish between the real knowl- edge and the pretentious and false opinions which are embodied in them. Before, during, and after the lives of these two immortals, every phase of scepticism and agnosticism was rife in Greece and in her colo- nies; and the arguments by which the views destructive of the very foundations of science were supported, have received no important additions whatever from the mouths and pens of their modern followers. In Oriental, and especially in Indian reflec- tive thinking, quite as earnest and subtle ar- gumentation went on for centuries, as to the [vi] PREFACE foundations and surety of knowledge, touch- ing the world of physical appearances, the human soul, and the gods or other invisible existences assumed by human minds in order the better to account for their own more imme- diately assured experiences. In these quarters of the world, many schools of Hindu and Bud- dhistic philosophy, with widely divergent views as to the foundations and assurance of the belief that man can somehow come into a living commerce with Reality, have contended and flourished more or less vigorously. The gen- eral result, however, has been the doctrine that the world of sense and of self-consciousness is all illusory. Thus a free and unguarded do- main has been left for speculation as to the existence and nature of that which is truly Real. It is plain, then, that he who attempts seri- ously to consider for himself or for others the question, What can I know? has available much of both popular advice and scientific dicta from the past, to assist him in groping for an answer. For the same answer, the student expert in the current psychology and philoso- [vii] PREFACE phy will find an abundance of material, an enormous library of pamphlets and bulky volumes, ready to hand. The case is scarcely less favorable for the study of others' opinions by the one who raises the question, What ought I to do? Indeed, in some respects it is even more favorable. Both Plato, in substantially all his Dialogues, and Aristotle in his critical writings on Ethics, Politics and Poetics, as well as frequently in a more casual way in all his other writings, con- stantly bring before their readers questions of right and wrong conduct, and undertake the discussion of the principles which ought to enable every individual, if he will, to decide between the two. In ancient Greece, the Sophists made the psychology and philosophy of morals a matter of chief interest and heated debate. Neither could the most confirmed Sceptics, or the most pronounced Agnostics, venture to pretend that morals had for them no concern. Among the ancients there was, however, a sort of tacit consent, if not explicit agreement, in accord with the assertion of Aristotle, that [ viii ] PREFACE subjects in ethics did not such was their very nature admit of a strictly scientific treatment. All this has remained true through the succeeding centuries of ethical controversy; it remains true at the present hour. In dis- cussing moral problems, whether in a theoreti- cal or a practical way, we cannot bring to bear the conclusions of psychological science or the accepted principles of the philosophy of con- duct, in the same authoritative manner as is available when discussing many of the prob- lems of knowledge. In attempting to answer the question, What ought I to do? we are, therefore, obliged to appeal rather to enlight- ened moral consciousness and to the changes in the customary morals which the develop- ment of such a consciousness produces, than to the results of experimental or other forms of a so-called scientific psychology, or to a meta- physics with claims to be based upon such a psychology. In approaching the question, What should I believe? we are still more strictly debarred from any appeal to scientific authority or to the most widely accepted principles of a specu- [ix] PREFACE lative philosophy. Our beliefs seem to stand much farther from the sources of demonstra- tion, or other forms of producing irresistible conviction, than either our knowledges or our morals. Indeed, the very nature of belief ap- appears to distinguish it from the assurance which belongs to all "knowledge- judgments," whether these repose upon personal observa- tions and inferences or upon the authority of others. The sanest and most influential of the principles which regulate the habits of our daily life or conduct, are easily proved to rest upon grounds of observation and inference that are, at least in all the most important instances, sufficient to justify a claim to confidence in their evidence. But the beliefs of men seem much more than either science or morality to be infected with doubts; since they certainly are much more dependent on obscure and shift- ing and often irrational instincts and emotions. With this fact of psychology agrees the fact of history. In treating of the nature and the obligations of this attitude of the mind called "Belief," we could find comparatively little that had been written or taught in the past, worthy [xl PREFACE of entire confidence from the point of view of its claim to a strictly scientific character. We are now ready for a confession which we have been approaching in a roundabout and we fear the reader will think a somewhat evasive and shambling way. The general phe- nomena of that experience of the human mind which is called "Hoping," do not lend them- selves to scientific treatment; and we shall make no pretence that they do. If some am- bitious young psychologist should propose to subject them to the tests of the psychological laboratory, or even to the method of the ques- tionaire, we should not expect for him a brilliant success. Human hopes are even more difficult to enumerate, to describe, and to weigh or measure, than are human beliefs. Even callow boys and girls are particularly shy about dis- closing their hopes, and not less, where they might be supposed with some show of reason to be able to do so, if they sincerely wished so to do. Nor would the sincerest wish make most of them capable of any such description as would be useful for the purpose of laying the foundations of an exact science. Men and [xi] PREFACE women of mature years, of the riper wisdom, and of chastened emotions, who might be much more competent to contribute material for the theses of enterprising candidates for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, will not respond to the methods of science, when the subject of their hopes concerns anything which makes their tabulating and analysis worth the considering. The answer to the question, What may I hope? must, then, consist of a series of reflec- tions based upon the experience of hope, whether as descried and remembered in one's own case; or as suggested by the popular language and action of the multitude; or as recorded in the memories and diaries of those who have had the richest experiences in this, as it is likely in all the other emotional and sentimental life. It will reveal opportunities rather than dictate terms; it will hold out chances rather than promulgate laws. But while disclaiming all attempts at the scientific or logical method, and all pretence of having reduced to a science the results of this method, we may avail ourselves of one impor- [xii] PREFACE tant distinction which stood us in good turn when we were considering the nature and the claims of human beliefs and faiths. This is the very commonplace distinction between the lesser and the greater. In arguing their reason- ableness and their claims upon the will, and also their promises of practical advantage, these two classes of hopes do not stand upon the same grounds. How they differ, it will be one of the more important and grateful tasks to point out in its proper place. That they do differ, and that the assurance of hope which attaches itself to the greatest hopes is the greatest and most reasonable and productive of practical good, this is the truth which alone justifies the seri- ousness and value of any attempt to answer the inquiry, What may I hope? [ xiii ] CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE ... 1 II. RIGHTS AND LIMITATIONS OF HOPING . . 35 HI. THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE 65 IV. THE PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING ... 93 V. CONCERNING HOPES, SCIENTIFIC, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL 122 VI. THE HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION . . 161 VII. THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY . . . .201 VIII. THE HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM . . 262 INDEX . 307 [XV] "I will pass then beyond this power of my nature also, rising by degrees unto Him who made me... Yea, I will pass beyond it, that I may approach unto Thee, sweet Light" AUGUSTIN WHAT MAY I HOPE? CHAPTER I NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE T is recorded as a tradition of that semi- mythical philosopher, Thales of Miletus, ^ that on being asked what possession of all those within the grasp of man is most universal, he answered: "Hope; for they who have it, often have nothing else." Now Thales lived six and a quarter centuries before the Christian era. He was assigned the headship of the Seven Wise Men as an evidence of the esteem in which his practical wisdom and statesmanlike ability were held. But he was also credited with much mathematical and astronomical knowledge; and he was the first to turn the currents of Greek thinking, in its efforts to explain the world of experience, away from an appeal to the spiritual influences of the gods, toward the efficiency of WHAT MAY I HOPE? natural forces that were, from the origin of things, combined with the matter out of which things were believed to have been made. Evi- dently, then, Hope stood in his thought as a foremost efficient psychological force for ex- plaining the actions of the human race. Some- thing like this same view was concealed in the saying of Goethe who declared, "Hope is the second soul of the unhappy"; for this would seem to imply that when all the life has gone out of an individual or a nation, if only the emotion of hoping can be revived, another efficient active principle may be incorporated into the same dead body. Such language as has just been quoted is indeed figurative and does not serve strictly to define either the nature or the sources of the various attitudes of the mind which we are accustomed to characterize by the one word> Hope. It does, however, suggest certain im- portant inquiries. Among inquiries into the nature and sources of hope the most obvious one, perhaps, concerns itself with the universality of the phenomenon, and with the reasons for its universality. That [2] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE the wise Thales was right when he declared the power of hoping to be the most universal pos- session of mankind, we have indeed no avail- able way of proving by induction. We cannot collect a toll of the emotional experiences of all mankind. But, then, if such a toll were neces- sary to any kind of either theoretical or practi- cal knowledge of human nature, it could not be provided. Nor is psychology alone in its defi- ciency of power to establish by such an induc- tion its most trustworthy universals. There is not a positive science that can lay down any one of its most generally credited laws or principles on a basis of facts collected from an observa- tion of all, without exception, of the particular cases. It is not by absolutely complete induc- tion, any more than by absolutely convincing demonstration, that we learn the nature and the ways of any portion of the vast Reality, in which we live and move and have our being. We need not, however, much hesitate to pro- claim as a fact the universality of hope, and its place among the emotions under the influence of which every man looks upon the complex of things and of other men which constitutes the [3] WHAT MAY I HOPE? individual's environment. All men hope, for something, to some extent, and at some times; indeed, we are probably safe in saying that everybody is at all times hoping for some- thing or other. To turn this discovery of fact assuming, as we seem justified in doing, that it is a fact into a form of words which has slightly more the smack of science, we may say: Hoping is ^natural for man. It is not at all unlikely that we shall have to leave the final explanation of the experience in the large, without any very much more definite explanation. It would in- deed be rather mortifying to the scientific pride of the psychologist to be obliged to accept this fact without further explanation; as, for example, in the celebrated case of the reason why "dogs delight to bark and bite." Of this, the well-known account is: "because it is their nature to." But the delight which the animal has in this form of activity, and the defensive value of it as expressing and securing "the will to live," may help us vastly in the under- standing of the reasons why the animal acts in this way; and, also, why it is well for [4] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE him and for his species that he does act in this way. Something like this attempt at a scientific justification of human hopes may quite properly be adopted in the course of our future discussions. Just now, how- ever, let the simple statements stand undis- puted and unrebuked: It is a fact that all men do hope; and it is therefore natural for man to hope. Like everything else which is true of men in general, the dependence of hoping on the indi- viduality of every member of the species is quite as obvious as its universal naturalness. Indeed, the habit of hoping is, of all emotional habits, about the most conspicuously tempera- mental. This truth is evinced in all the various classifications proposed by psychology for the different main kinds of temperaments. What- ever variations in number and names and de- scription may characterize the proposed lists, they are all pretty sure to make prominent the so-called "sanguine temperament." But the leading mental and emotional characteristic of the sanguine temperament is its hopefulness. Indeed, to be sanguine and to be habitually [5] WHAT MAY I HOPE? hopeful, in the popular language, amount to about the same thing. The dependence of the habit of hoping on the temperament of the individual is obviously great; but it is, though not so obviously, yet in reality, rather complicated. First, we have to notice that every temperament, and perhaps especially the sanguine, is influenced both by external and by physiological conditions. There are changes in the temperature, in the electrical and physical conditions of the atmos- phere, in the landscape and in the distribution of the clouds, that have no small and negligible influence on the hopes of the majority subject to these changes. But even where the influences of this general physical sort are most marked in the case of the majority, the principle of in- dividuality is by no means wholly abrogated or set at naught. In a severe storm at sea, when the multitude of unfortunates, even the most sanguine of them under ordinary circumstances, are greatly depressed and weighed down with frightful forebodings, there may be others who are buoyed up, or even made exultant, by any one of a number of different kinds of hope. [6] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE There are few so little observant of their own changes in mental states, and of the obvious causes of the changes, as not to have learned something, before they come to years of matu- rity, about the dependence of their own hopes on their own bodily conditions. I am not speaking here of the rise and fall of the invalid's hopes of recovery in their sequence upon the daily changes in the symptoms of his disease. My thought is rather to call attention to the significance and certainty of the experience, that all one's hopes, of every sort and degree of intensity and consistency, are influenced by sometimes obvious, but often obscure and scarcely definable, physiological conditions.^ It is even possible to make out a rough exhibit of certain classes of diseases, one distinguishing symptom of which is the marked influence they have upon the depression or the exaltation of the patient's hopes. It would not be true to say that no one dies happy whose disease is located below the diaphragm. Nor can it be proclaimed as true without exception that those afflicted with tuberculosis of the lungs are in- variably hopeful. In all cases, the tempera- [7] WHAT MAY I HOPE? ment, which is something belonging to birth and heredity, although influenced in every in- dividual's case by the changes of environment and of physiological conditions, determines in an important way the changing moods with which are met the changing physical and organic conditions. On even this more purely physical ground of the emotional reactions of hope and of all the rest the permanent influence and value of the psychical characteristics must be chiefly taken into the account. Whatever allowance must be made for the ancestral and the envi- ronmental influences upon the different tem- peraments, it must be admitted that we are comparatively safe in our inferences, only when we can appeal to immediate experience to dis- cover what the different so-called temperaments are actually like, and what they may be ex- pected to impel the individual to think and to do. But more than habits of thought, are habits of emotion, and of the action determined by emotion, dependent upon the different tem- peramental mixtures. We choose the term, "temperamental mixtures"; for few tempera- F81 NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE ments are quite pure examples under any one of the ordinary schemes of classification. Most individuals are, the rather, when described by their psychical characteristics, and this, in spite of the many impressive figures of speech derived from organic types, is the most tenable manner of describing them, most individuals are of "mixed temperament." When, then, we speak of a hopeful or a de- sponding temperament, of a sanguine or a phlegmatic person, we may, in the use of each one of these four types, be describing a quite different mixture, if regarded from the psycho- logical point of view. For example, one man may be sanguine, and so generally inclined to be hopeful, because he is a man of strong will; another, because he is a man of weak will. One individual may be despondent, on account of a lack of certain moral affections; another on account of an excess of other moral affections. Weakness and strength of intellect, in certain specific cases, may operate in the same diver- gent way. The man who sees clearly the laws and principles involved in the future settlement of any issue, though of sanguine temperament, [9] WHAT MAY I HOPE? may be less hopeful in this particular case than is the man who, although of a generally melancholic and doubtful temper, is unaware or thoughtless with regard to these laws and principles. It was the cautious farmers of Maine who were most easily beguiled into in- vesting their hard-earned savings in a scheme for extracting gold from sea-water. Excessive sleepiness or sluggishness, and excessive irrita- bility or "wide-awakeness," may operate in different individuals, in particular circumstan- ces, to make one man hopeful and another despondent. "Indolent phlegm" may be mis- taken for "sanguine hope." The variety of individuality which charac- terizes the universality of the habit of hoping, and of the conditions external and internal which modify the habit, is not, of course, pecu- liar to this attitude alone, toward the physical world and toward life, of the human mind. It is true of every mental and emotional attitude; and it is to be ascribed to the very nature of personal life and to the laws and principles of personal development. The hopes of one man can no more be precisely the same as the hopes [10] NATURE AND SOURCES OP HOPE of another man, than can his thoughts or his beliefs. Indeed, on account of the very vague and evanescent, and as well largely irrational nature of much human hoping, we should naturally expect that men would differ in re- spect of their hopes more than in almost any other way. Even at this preliminary and quite undefined stage of our investigation of the question, What may I hope? it is not improper to reply: You may possibly be quite reasonable in cherishing a considerable stock of hopes of your very own. But then the complement of this is equally true: Every wise man will do well once for all to recognize that a vast number of hopes, not altogether or not at all inappro- priate to other persons, would surely end in disappointment if cherished by him. Not every individual is warranted in having the same hopes. Perhaps the next most obvious characteristic of hope is a certain uniqueness. To be sure, all emotions that succeed in being analyzed out of the infinite complexity of the life of feeling, and so of getting an established name for them- selves, can on that ground alone claim a certain in] WHAT MAY I HOPE? amount of distinction. If they were not some- what unlike other emotions of the simpler sort, or a special compound of elements distinguish- able in the more complex emotions, they could scarcely claim a name and a place for them- selves in the psychology of human feeling. But all this makes the facts still more remarkable. Hope is, according to Thales a remark which we have agreed to accept as substantially true the most universal of human posses- sions. Hoping is an activity, a state or a func- tion (we do not now care which of these two words is employed) of the human consciousness. Psychology calls itself the science which de- scribes and explains the facts of consciousness. And yet among the hundreds of works on psy- chology, large and small, from varied points of view and in many languages, the merest men- tion of the topic, "Hope," is scarcely to be found in one of a hundred. There are scores of pages in the more voluminous books, and even large separate volumes, written on Fear, in connection with which Hope, if mentioned at all, is mentioned only to be placed in con- trast. The psychologist Bain, in his six hun- [12] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE dred large pages on the "Emotions and the Will," has less than two pages on the emotion of hope. Even within this brief space he manages to make the mistake of analysis in identifying it with a certain kind of belief, "tested simply by the elation of its mental tone." He also remarks (p. 531) that the "antithesis of Hope is, not Fear, but despond- ency; of which the highest degree is Despair." Now this is very much the same as to say that the opposite of hope is non-hope; for despond- ency is, in this use of the word, simply the withdrawal of the promise (spondeo) which hoping has made, or would make, and the ensuing condition of hopelessness into which this withdrawal plunges the soul. But while Professor Bain is not successful in providing an "antithesis" for the emotion of hopefulness, he is quite in the right when he denies that the emotion of fear affords, in a way to meet the demands of psychological analysis, the desired form of opposed feeling. Love and hate, attraction and repulsion, cour- age and cowardice, and numerous other pairs, are both popularly and critically bound to- flSl WHAT MAY I HOPE? gether as opposites in the same class of mental attitudes or tendencies. They rule each other out of the mind or of the seat of control for the practical life. They contend together, and conquer from each other more or less of the domain ruled over by the will; but they do not quietly coexist. The emotions- of Fear and Hope, however, do not stand in such relations of contrast, antithesis, or opposition. For they do not belong to the same class of emotions. And if we make a brave attempt at forcing them into a place side by side under one of many headings or rubrics, such, for example, as the animal emotions, emotions of the intellect, emotions of action, the aesthetic emotions, the moral emotions, etc. we find ourselves pretty completely baffled at the very start. Fear, in its lower forms, is one of the most distinctly animal of all the emotions. For this reason, books like those of Angelo Mosso bear- ing this title, can find an abundance to say about the action of the reflex nervous system, of the circulation of blood in the brain, and the beating of the heart, in producing this emotion; and about the tremblings, physiognomy of F141 NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE pain, and insane frights and terrors which the emotion in its more intense forms produces. In men, as in dogs and other animals, and even in fishes and beetles, fear seems for the most part to be a nearly, if not quite completely, physical affair. Of all the emotions, it lends itself best to the quite inadequate and now discredited Lange-James theory, that the feel- ing is essentially nothing but the complex of sensations arising from the physiological con- dition of the peripheral organism. Doubtless, in not a few, perhaps in the majority of cases of sudden and vague fears, or seizures of almost insane terror, the elements of sensational origin are the principal factors in the emotion itself. But this is decidedly not so in the human feel- ings which we designate as our fainter or our firmer and more elevated hopes. In many of the animal fears, it is quite impossible to tell with any approach to precision, what we are afraid of. Hope seems, however, to demand some sort of clearness of the mental picture of the object for which the hope is entertained. One may indeed speak of vague longings, and of aspirations and ambitions that are as yet [15] WHAT MAY I HOPE? far from defining themselves in the conscious- ness of the Self that experiences them. These may arouse and stimulate the development of certain hopes; and these hopes may be doomed either to fulfilment or to disappointment. But it is not good psychology to call these longings, aspirations, and ambitions themselves by the term "hopes." There must be some rather dis- tinct mental activities of the higher order of intellect and imagination, under the guidance of associations which are themselves born of previous experiences of pain or pleasure, in order that hope may spring up in any mind. We cannot, then, speak of animal hopes as we may somewhat freely speak of animal fears. Probably none of the lower animals is capable of any conscious state even faintly resembling a man's hope. The dog over whose head we hold the tempting piece of meat, although his jaws are dripping with the secretions excited by a pleased expectancy, is not the mental and emotional counterpart of the man who looks forward to even the physical reward of his efforts at the realization of a deferred hope. Nor if we throw the animal back into the con- [16] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE dition of restlessness which preceded by an hour the time of feeding, do we excite within it feelings resembling those of the most closely allied of human hopes. On the other hand, if dog and man are startled by some threatening noise, or are made to witness the snatching away of the alluring physical comfort by robber paws or robber hands, their first emotions of fear and anger are almost precisely, both physiologically and psychically, alike. In saying this it is, of course, not meant that the emotion of human hope is without any physi- ological basis or physiological effects. But any cautious and thoughtful student of the subject, even when equipped with the most delicate appa- ratus for solving the problem, would be slow to say just what that basis is, and what those effects are. All emotional conditions tend to affect the heart and general circulation, to raise slightly the temperature of the brain, to produce changes in the muscular system, and to alter the physi- ognomy. In the cases of more exalted condi- tions of hopefulness, all these physiological phenomena may be observed. In the more prolonged and quiet conditions of the moral [17] WHAT MAY I HOPE? and religious hopes, the detection of the physi- cal basis and physical reverberations would be much more difficult, even if it could be accom- plished at all. We may grant, as we must, that this is just as true of intellectual and spiritual fears, or of moral anger when kept in control, as it is of the conditions and the effects of hoping. But the contention is only par- tially justified. For in all cases of the intensi- fying of a hope to the highly emotional stage, it is the allied forms of emotion which seem to be chiefly responsible for the most marked of the physiological effects. If, for example, the hope gets a sudden and great accession through the added belief that it is now quite surely to be realized, the emotions of joyful surprise spring up with great strength. And these emotions are distinctly and powerfully influential over the condition of the organs, both central and peripheral. In fact, these emotions, when very intense, often produce a dangerous and even fatal shock. On the other hand, if the hope lingers and grows fainter and less probable of any realization in spite of all one's wisest plans and utmost efforts to obtain the thing [18] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE hoped for, there naturally ensues a condition of faint-heartedness which may culminate in despondency or even in utter despair. But despondency and despair are not so much the opposite of hope as we have already said as they are the negation of hope. Melancholia of every sort has quite uniformly a distinctly marked physical causation and physical ex- pression. It may, or it may not, follow upon the loss or the diminution of some cherished hope. This is largely a matter of tempera- ment and training in self-control. However it comes about, it is usually responsible for many evil effects upon the physical organism. This fact does not throw much additional light upon the physiological basis of hope, that is, beyond what everybody knows by common rumor, if not as is extremely likely by his own experience, namely, that a hopeful condition of mind favors the improved func- tioning of all the vital organs, conspicuously those concerned in circulation and digestion. The somewhat unique character of hope as disproving the effort to make it the antithesis of the much more distinctly animal, physio- [19] WHAT MAY I HOPE? logical (and so explicable on physical grounds), emotion of fear may be illustrated in yet other ways. The more intellectual and imaginative, not to say spiritual, the fear becomes, the more possible it seems to be, not to make it the ade- quate antithesis of hope, but to lessen certain of the sharper contrasts of the two. When Kingsley affirms: "He who fears Virtue fears Him whose likeness Virtue is": or Southey makes Joan of Arc confess, "I have wrestled vainly with the Lord And stubbornly, I fear me"; they mean to depict attitudes of mind of a very subtle and complex sort, which contain not a few of the elements of thinking and imagina- tion, that much more nearly resemble those entering into the higher forms of hoping. 4 ''Fearing Virtue," and so fearing Him whose likeness Virtue is, does not, indeed, amount to precisely the same thing as hoping for the re- wards of virtue; and fearing a Holy God is not precisely the same thing as placing one's hopes in such a God. Nor when Joan of Arc is fear- some of having wrestled with the Almighty both [20] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE too stubbornly and in the end vainly, is she altogether in the condition of the soul who wrestled with an equal stubbornness, and yet would not confess failure, but kept on saying: "Hope thou in God, who is the health of my countenance and my God." But certainly, these attitudes of fear toward their objects are not the "antithesis" of the attitude of hope toward the same objects. Indeed, the fears and the hopes depend upon essentially the same conceptions of those objects. They in- volve and supplement each other, if they are not precisely identical. There are not a few things which we both fear and hope for at the same time, according to the particular aspect of them which happens to be prominent or which we voluntarily assume to regard. There are the fearsome hopes of the young girl at the thought of becoming a bride; or of a married woman at the thought of giving birth to a child. These fears and hopes do not stand apart, or move the soul by their contrasts, so much as they blend in one complex attitude, the elements of which keep changing in inten- sity, toward the same future even, according [21] WHAT MAY I HOPE? as that event presents this or that of its many aspects before the expectant mind. There is another curious evidence of the unique character of the mental state of hoping. There is a great dearth of synonyms for the word Hope. In the richest of the modern languages we are furnished with only a single word from each. If you want to express the idea of hope you can do it in a single word only by using the one word hope. Yet there is truth of fact and profounder truth of ethics, in what Epictetus said: "A ship ought not to be held by one anchor, nor life by a single hope." In fact, the lives of men in general are "held" by a great variety of ever-shifting hopes. And yet we have only one word to express what is the essential characteristic of them all. If now we go to our dictionaries to obtain more exact information as to just what hoping is, we are told: "It is desire accompanied by expectation;" "cheerful expectation;" "a con- fident looking for a future event." But this definition is more than ordinarily disappoint- ing. For, at least some expectation is not simply the "accompaniment" of desire in [22] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE forming the complex emotion of hope; it is of the very essence of what we mean when we speak of hope. The accompaniment of some expectancies is anything but cheerful, anything but an end which we desire or for which we hope. Indeed, in attempting to specify the ingredients of the compound medicine for the mind which hoping proves itself to be, we must certainly add something important to the de- sire and the expectancy. This something addi- tional is the feeling of trust. Without trusting something or somebody and indeed, as a rule, without trusting many things and more than one person we cannot indulge ourselves in hoping. This is illustrated by the fact that, while the French word for hope (esp6rance) seems rather to lay emphasis on the element of expectation, the German word (Hqffnung) lays more emphasis on the element of trust. The German word, therefore, seems of all three most suggestive of the more spiritual nature of certain hopes which have for their objects the beliefs and faiths of morality and religion. These three forms of feeling desire, expec- [23] WHAT MAY I HOPE? tation, and a certain attitude of trust seem, therefore, to constitute the more noteworthy affective factors of the complex emotion of Hope. The intensity of each one may greatly vary in the individual cases of hoping. It habitually does vary in dependence on the tem- perament of the individual indulging or cherish- ing the hope; and also, in dependence on the nature of the object which it is hoped to realize. Desire may be intense, expectation small, and confidence weak. This is the modification of the emotion with which the physician and friend look upon the dying man and quote in a faint-hearted way the motto of despondency: "While there is life, there is still hope." The complex emotion of hoping is, however, invariably a sort of blend of the various affec- tive factors which compose it; it cannot dis- pense with any of them, although it is not the precise equivalent of any one or two of the three. Like all instances of psychical chemis- try, the nature of the compound can be known only through experience; it cannot be pre- dicted a priori, as it were. Take before the most exalted intellect the proposition: With so [24] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE many grains of desire, mix so many of expecta- tion, and to this add so many more of a certain kind of trust: What will the compound be? and no answer could possibly be forthcoming. We must have the experience of hoping in order to know what it is to hope. A more accurate description of the nature of hope requires some analysis of its intellectual sources. Thus far we have only dealt with the emotional side of human hopes, and have vaguely implied that they, of course, since all men "do the trick" of hoping, must have their roots in human nature. We have used the makeshift of an explanation in saying, "It is natural for all men to hope." But in consider- ing the unique character of this so universal emotion, its dependence in a special way on the intellect and the imagination has been at least indicated. When compared with many other forms of feeling, such as both the popular and the scientific language associate most closely with it, hope appears to be less animal, more intellectual, and, therefore, prospectively fitted for more exalted spiritual uses. How true this seeming is may speedily be discovered when it [25] WHAT MAY I HOPE? is understood in what relations hoping stands toward knowing and believing. Of course, no one would think of identifying hoping with a "kind of" knowing; for the approaches to a perfect knowledge lead in a direction away from the increased intensity and efficiency of merely hoping. The identification of hope with a "kind of" belief, which Professor Bain suggests, has already been sufficiently refuted. Yet we cannot understand the nature of hope as an experience of emotion unless we take chiefly into our account the way in which hope lays its basis, so to say, in knowledge; but especially in beliefs and faiths, personal and moral. Without some knowledge that has reference to the object of the hope, and to the probable or possible means of its attainment, hope can have no foundation in experience. Intellect and imagination, by their joint working, must create the object of desire. In this work of creation, they are, as a matter of course, depend- ent upon the knowledge acquired through past experiences of observing, learning, inferring, and whatever other means are available for obtaining the particular desirable knowledge. [26] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE But desire wants to get possession of its object. The way to get possession must be planned; and the plan must be framed in accordance with at least a certain minimum of knowledge as to the selection and use of the proper means for its accomplishment. The savage desires the maiden of another tribe; he has some ex- pectation of winning her; he trusts his own craft and strength of persuasion; he has the hope of winning her. The confidence and the expectation, as well as the desire, imply various kinds of knowledge derived from past experi- ences with persons and with things. The same conclusion holds, whether it is proposed to ob- tain the hoped-for bride by forcible rape or by the more complicated and concealed methods of modern civilized courtship. What I know absolutely nothing about, that I cannot desire, or expect to obtain, or trust myself or other persons or things for the means of attaining. The absolutely and completely unknown can- not be the object of hope. There are degrees of knowledge, however, and different ways of attaining the different degrees. It is not, in general, the higher de- [27] WHAT MAY I HOPE? grees of knowledge which form the basis of our hopes. If one knows with a complete certainty that any desired good is in the future coming to one, in this case one can scarcely any longer be said to be hoping for it. But hopes have to do with future goods. And although we may assume, and may actually feel as though we were sure of the future, we are never in fact quite so sure as of the present or the past. The son who knows that his father has left him by will a certain piece of property, is more apt to say that he "expects" some day to be its owner, than that he "hopes" to own it. The expecta- tions of the nephew whose rich bachelor uncle has become displeased with him for his extrava- gance are, the rather, to be classed among the more doubtful hopes. If I have deliberately planned to take a train for New York tomorrow morning, I seem warranted in saying that I fully expect to go. To express oneself in terms of hope only, about matters of this sort, would seem to give evidence of a lack of foresight and decision of character. In such matters, a man ought to know what he is going to do at least twenty-four hours in advance. But if, under [28] NATURE AND SOURCES OP HOPE conditions of poor health or of pressure of other duties, I am asked whether I shall be at a cer- tain convention a month from now, I can only say: "I hope to be there." The bride who goes to the church at the appointed hour to meet her promised husband, expects to be mar- ried; if she can only say that she hopes the bridegroom will be there, she either shows her fear for his safety or her distrust of his fidelity. We must conclude, then, that the knowledge which forms the basis of our hopes is such as seems to us at the time only to have a certain incomplete degree of evidence as to the future event. It is not such knowledge as enables the astronomer to predict that a certain transit or eclipse will take place and be visible at a cer- tain time and locality; it is, the rather, such as prompts him to say that he hopes he will be on the spot to observe the phenomenon, and that the weather will be favorable. It is, custom- arily, the projection into the future of cer- tain inferences that, with reference to that future, have only a higher or lower degree of probability, which forms the basis for human hopes. [29] WHAT MAY I HOPE? We hasten to call attention to the fact that this knowledge, which forms the basis of our hoping, implies the trust of reason in its own power to make credible inferences; and also reason's trust in the stability of certain relations among things, and between us and things, and among men in their dealings with one another. If nothing were doubtful, we should not hope; if everything were doubtful, we could not hope. Hope depends upon future probabilities. It "deals in futures," as the phrase is. It involves a species of betting, of taking chances, of trying one's luck in the lottery of life. But it is not for this any the less essentially reasonable, if made to be so under the control of experience and of the chastened will. It follows from the character of this relation between knowing and hoping, that the power of drawing just inferences is what safeguards the wisdom of human hopes. These inferences do not need to attain the character of demon- strative certainty, or even of the conclusions of the positive sciences, in order to justify human hopes. The development and modi- fication of human hopes must, however, take [30] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE these demonstrations and results into their ac- count. In this way it may perhaps soon come to be high time for relinquishing the hope of making machines capable of perpetual motion; or of running the mechanism of society and of government with a perfect smoothness, as long as the men and women who compose society and "run" the government are so rough in thought, in manners, and in morals. From all this it appears that the more safe and specially appropriate sphere for human hopes is to be found in connection with human beliefs. Indeed, the feeling of trusting which has been found to be a part of the emotional mixture which we call hoping, is essentially dependent on intellectual belief. This "intel- lectual belief" is essentially dependent upon probable evidence; but it is not therefore necessarily unreasonable. It is, on the con- trary, that attitude of intellect and imagination toward its object, on the basis of which most of our intercourse with things, and all our inter- course with our fellow men, is habitually conducted. What we believe in as desirable and attainable, although only on grounds of [31] WHAT MAY I HOPE? probability, that we hope for. The intellectual attitude of belief, and the emotional attitude of hope, stand in special and highly significant re- lations to each other. In almost all matters, and not in matters of religion only, we live by faith and hope rather than by science and mathematical or logical demonstration. Our beliefs, both lower and higher, form the basis of both our lower and our higher hopes. Three remarks, all of which only anticipate a small part of their own significance, seem quite logically to follow the analysis which has just been made of the nature and the sources of hope. Of these the first is the very obvious reminder that hoping is a present attitude of mind and heart toward a future good. This patent fact connects two subordinate inquiries with every specific attempt at a practical solution of the main question, What may I hope? These are: Is the thing worth hoping for? and, What are the chances that, for me, it is at all likely, or even possible, of attainment? One may not, y reasonably, hope for what is totally unworthy of one's hopes, or for what is absolutely beyond the reasonable limits of one's obtaining. [32] NATURE AND SOURCES OF HOPE We notice also a certain permissive character to hope; and this should be taken into the ac- count as modifying in a way the harshness of the warnings just uttered against morally wrong and unwise acts and forms of hoping. It was to bring out this permissive character that the word "may" was deliberately chosen. Doubtless one may sometimes, if not habitu- ally, hope for something, the prospect of at- taining which is very remote and obscured with quite reasonable doubts. For although human hopes are in a way based on knowledge, and in a more significant and intimate way based on beliefs and faiths, hope seems entitled to go beyond both knowledge and belief, on wings of inference and imagination that are fitted for flight in very thin air. The fall is far; the risk is great; but the native air of hope is in the blue, above the smoke and grime of earth and above its clouds as well. The third observation is more important still. Just as there are lower and higher beliefs, so there are lower and higher hopes. Some hopes are peculiarly consonant with the spiritual and personal nature of man. They seem like almost [33] WHAT MAY I HOPE? indispensable factors in his personal life. For the best development of this life they are abso- lutely essential. They therefore carry a cer- tain large weight of evidence in their own behalf. This is a truth to which we shall be obliged to refer again and again in all our attempts to throw some light on the prac- tical question, What may I hope? Especially will this appear both necessary and convenient in dealing with the hopes of morality and religion. [34] CHAPTER II RIGHTS AND LIMITATIONS OF HOPING 'NDER what circumstances does a per- mission create an obligation? and How does a privilege become converted into a claim? these are questions the settle- ment of which has much to do with establishing relations of friendship or enmity between indi- viduals and between nations. For example, in the rear of the land occupied by the Bromp- ton Oratory is a stile, the existence of which has for many years been a token of a promise of free passage for any pedestrian, that was given by an ancestor of the present owner. But the permission has by this time created obligations between the landlord and every citizen of the great city. Every beggar's or cripple's hope of saving himself a long walk to get from Bromp- ton Road to Ennismore Gardens or Kensington Gore has been converted into a right to use this stile. But, on the other hand, as a sign of his claim over this privilege, the owner of the land [35] WHAT MAY I HOPE? has the right, and is under the obligation, on due notice to close this free passage once each year. To occasion or cherish hopes is, in gen- eral, to establish rights and undergo obligations. This transformation between permission and obligation, privilege and claim, is often elabo- rately regulated by law. But there are hun- dreds of other cases which have a bearing upon the daily lives of us all, where the outlines between the two sets of relations are not at all so clearly drawn. Is it not considered a fit subject for the mother's solicitude, though not for a summons into court, that the suitor who has created "expectations" in the mind of the daughter should put himself under "obligation" " by declaring his intentions "? He, in his turn, quite as frequently and not less justly, feels himself aggrieved if the hopes which he thinks have been deliberately raised by the same daughter, are flouted as though they implied no claim on his part, or obligation on the part of the one who had excited them. Between considerable bodies of men and between na- tions, there are few more frequent and powerful causes of strife than the promises, made or LIMITATIONS OF HOPING implied and then withdrawn or forfeited; or the privileges that have been granted under certain circumstances and then curtailed or abrogated under changed circumstances. The cowboy who has been permitted to feed his herds upon Government lands acquires in his own thought a perpetual right to this use, and to the hopes which it encourages. He is ready with good conscience to shoot the officer of the same Government when, in the discharge of his duty, and in the name of the law, the latter attempts to carry into effect the reversal of the implied permission. Of wars and threatenings of wars between nations, certain concessions, special permissions and privileges, whether made matters of treaty or not, when the expec- tations encouraged or deliberately manufac- tured by them end in disappointment, have always been among the most fruitful sources. Our analysis of the nature and sources of the emotion of hoping has shown how difficult it must be to reduce its exercise to any precise rules of control, whether by the subject whose hope it is, or by the advice of others, or by the authority of law. So subtle and complex is [37] WHAT MAY I HOPE? this form of human feeling, and so dependent upon the infinite variety of individual charac- teristics, under the ever-changing external circumstances and moods physiologically in- duced, that the science and art of right conduct seem, antecedently to detailed examination, excluded from this sphere. It appears that the emotion of hoping can neither be excited nor regulated by strictly logical processes. It knows no laws of right and wrong behavior; it recognizes no limitations to its demands. For these and other reasons, we put our main prac- tical inquiry in the permissive form. We did not venture to ask, What can I hope? or, What ought I to hope? or even, What should I hope? In fact, however, questions indicating the rights and the limitations of hoping are frequently enough couched in all these terms. Men, in the confidences of friendship, or by way of a sort of pastoral rebuke, not infrequently say to one another: "Surely you cannot hope for that." You ought to be more hopeful; or, It is useless or wrong for me to indulge this hope, these are admonitions which every wise man frequently enough addresses to his own soul. [38] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING And no language having reference to the varied experiences of hoping is more common than that which has reference to their propriety, or its opposite. Every one virtually admits that some hopes are antecedently reasonable; while others are from the very first quite certainly doomed to end in confusion and failure. Yet how often are the most obviously justifiable hopes the most bitterly disappointing; and, on the other hand, how, not so very infrequently, do the hopes which appeared most improbable and even wildest, lead to the most brilliant successes! In this way does experience of the results add to our difficulties when we attempt to define the rights and fix the limitations of the practical uses of the emotion of hoping. In spite of the intrinsic difficulties of the sub- ject, however, it would be a grave mistake to infer from the analysis of the nature and sources of this emotion, or from the practical issues of the different forms which the emotion takes, either its involuntary, and so non-moral, or its totally irrational character. To hope is not a merely mechanical and passive state of the soul. It is intimately connected with the active ex- [39] WHAT MAY I HOPE? ercise of intellect and imagination under the control of will. Even the dependence of every individual's habits of hoping on his tempera- ment and on purely physical and physiological conditions, since this dependence is never from the first and wholly fixed, may be made to em- phasize the voluntary character of this emotion. Hopes, like all other forms of feeling, can be encouraged or discouraged, cherished or par- tially or wholly repressed. The very fact that we use such words as "encouraging" and "discouraging," "cherishing" and "repressing," "holding" and "banishing," shows how the popular estimate gives to the feeling a certain voluntary character. We do not, indeed, tend freely to denounce the hopes of others, unless they involve the avowed incitement to criminal action in the attempt at their realization. But we deprecate them in a way to attach a degree of responsibility on the part of those who, as the phrase is, insist on "entertaining" them. All such words and phrases we repeat imply some degree of rational control over his hopes on the part of every person who is sound in body and in mind. [40] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING But we are even more sure that the "rules of reason" apply to human hopes. If they have their rights and exalted uses, they have also their limitations; and these limitations must be discovered somewhere, not only within the domain of the intrinsically rational, but also within the confines of a world of things and men, constituted as this world is either known or credibly believed to be in fact con- stituted. For the essentially unreasonable, no rational being may venture to hope. For the essentially immoral, whether as end to be at- tained or as means necessary for the attain- ment of some other end, a moral being ought not to hope. With respect to their hopes the limits set by reason to the human race are indeed distant and hazy; they are less easy to descry or to predict than are either the limits of their knowledge or their beliefs. But all hopes must bear some valid relations to knowledge and to belief; and in view of this fact, nothing is surer in connection with the whole inquiry than that some hopes are unreasonable, however much we may be in doubt as to just where the dividing line should [41] WHAT MAY I HOPE? be drawn between the reasonable and the un- reasonable. Any one attempting to throw much needed light upon the rights and limitations of the human (since universal and natural) emotion of hope the possession of the otherwise most poverty-stricken, the accompaniment of the criminal up to the very moment of execution, and the sustainer of the martyr's cheerful or joyful endurance until death must approach the subject with a due admixture of courage and of modesty. He cannot fail to see that certain kinds of hope have superior rights to a place in the conduct of the personal life. He cannot fail to be about equally sure that there are hopes which are essentially forbidden as destructive of the higher interests of the per- sonal life. It will be equally clear that both the nature of things and the nature of man credit some hopes with a good degree of as- surance; while the same environment throws its weight of testimony as to their reasonable- ness heavily against other classes of hopes, when indulged by the same humanity. It will, however, be constantly borne in mind how [42] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING especially difficult it is, in the case of this ex- pansive and complex but extremely useful emo- tion, to define the boundaries which separate the reasonable from the unreasonable, and which set the just and sane limitations of our hoping. To apprehend securely the main considera- tions which must be kept before us in the at- tempt to say anything practically helpful about the rights and limitations of hoping, a backward reference to the nature of the emotion itself is of the first account. The principal emo- tional factors of this attitude toward life and toward the good things of life were said to be these three: Desire, Expectation, and a certain feeling of confidence or Trust, corresponding on the affective side to intellectual belief. It was thought to be due to this usually unrecognized element, that Professor Bain considered he was scientifically exact in identifying Hope with a "certain kind" of belief. Let us now see whether this analysis may not be of some as- sistance in suggesting further details for the solution of the practical problem. Desire is the most immediately conspicuous [43] WHAT MAY I HOPE? kind of feeling present in all activities of hoping. But about desires in general, three things may be said: (1) They all arise in natural appetencies and are directed toward certain forms of ex- perience which intellect and imagination have presented to the mind as something good; (2) while they all appeal to the will and tend to move it to an effort for their attainment, they are all also placed under the control of the will; and (3) they all, therefore, come to be classed under the head of the morally good and bad, as species of motives determining the values of character and conduct when viewed from the moral point of view. From this point of view it follows, then, that all hopes may be divided into the permissible and the impermissible, according to the moral character of the desire that prompts and controls them. Immoral desires can not give birth to morally permis- sible hopes. In this way, then, any honest man may derive a certain "must or must-not," as the answer to the inquiry, "May I or may I not?" cherish this particular hope; and in cherishing it, make its realization the object of my earnest en- [44] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING deavor. What may I hope? is the personal problem, with regard to this particular coveted form of good. There may be no logical un- reasonableness in the expectation; no foolish dreaming of unrealizable conditions in the con- fidence which the hope involves. On the contrary, the inferences which support the expectation may be logically correct and soundly derived from past knowledge of things and men; the trust may accord with the most verifiable of intellectual beliefs. There is, then, a high degree of probability in the feeling; I can in the future, if I so will and work, have that for which I now indulge the ardent desire. But, in spite of all that, the hope may be condemned to suppression and rejection by the steadfast will, on the ground of the immorality of the desire that gave it birth. Desires that do not accord with moral reason cannot take the form of hopes permissible to a being endowed with, and obligated by, the moral principles and moral ideals of personal life. The hopes of every form of covetous desire are, therefore, impermissible in the judgment of the moral, or so-called "practical" reason. [45] WHAT MAY I HOPE? It is written, not only in the Law of Moses, but in the morals of all peoples and in the moral maxims of all religions, Confucian, Buddhist, Mohammedan, as well as Christian: "Thou shalt not (actively) covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neigh- bor's." Thus is the axe laid at the very roots of the tree from which spring four-fifths of all the hopes disastrous to the social and moral welfare of mankind. The man who lusts after the wife of another man may not cherish the hope of some day winning possession of her. The mer- chant who actively covets the trade legitimately belonging to another may not hope to get the unfair advantage of that other. The dealer in false weights and measures, the manufac- turer of adulterated goods to which lying labels are attached, may not hope in this way to reach a coveted standard of financial prosperity. The ruler who indulges in ambitious dreams of world-empire, for the realization of which the forces of violence rather than the conquests of a peaceful righteousness are to be evoked, may [46] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING not indulge himself, or encourage in his people, the hopes that such dreams can in some way be realized. In general, the hopes born of avaricious and covetous desires are imper- missible. They have no legitimate rights in the domain of personal life and of worthy social development; they are barred from the claims of reasonable hopes by the fixed limita- tions of moral reason in its rule over human passions and desires. It is an undoubted fact of human history and of ever-present human experience that a large proportion, perhaps a majority, of the most powerful of the hopes which allure and control the struggles of men with nature and with one another, are of this morally impermissible char- acter. We are tempted then to ask: If the hopes which spring from covetousness were quite denied all right to existence; would not this put a fatal stop to all human endeavor, with its resulting conquest over nature and its beneficial selective influence in bringing about the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the weaker among mankind? In answering this question there must be no puttering with [47] WHAT MAY I HOPE? the issue and no cowardly compromises. The answer of enlightened moral intuition, however backward in the arguments which the survey of history and the so-called sciences of eco- nomics, sociology, and politics, are accustomed to urge, is prompt and decisive to this question, in whatever concealed or illusory form it may be put. Moral reason asserts unqualifiedly the supremacy of the moral issue, and the incom- parable value of the moral ideals. In doing this, however, it distinctly aims to make itself reasonable. And as bearing on the correct and helpful solution of the practical question, What may I hope? it calls to mind such ex- planations and modifications as the following. All these covetous desires and ambitions, which are perpetually leading the individual and the race into immoral hopes and the con- tentions and crimes connected with such hopes, are perversions or distractions of quite legiti- mate forms of man's appetitive and impul- sively emotional nature. The desire of each sex for the other; the desire of something which the individual may call his own, his (proprius) property; a certain "thirst for the land"; the [48] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING desire that one's enterprises should succeed, that the thing "to which one has set one's hand" shall "prosper in one's hand"; the pa- triotic desire that one's country shall grow great in righteousness and in the peace of righteousness, all these are quite natural and lawful forms of desire. Without them, indeed, there could be no efficient motives to human endeavor in securing and improving the material basis of human welfare, or even of human existence. It must also be admitted that there is a legitimate development of morals, as the prac- tical result of the development of the moral ideals and the increase of experience as to the most effective ways of securing their even partial realization. But all this makes even more unjustifiable and contemptible the spe- cious arguments that are put forth to legiti- matize and defend]the indulgence of hopes based on covetous desires and immoral ambitions. How fictitious beliefs are made to support immoral hopes, there are not wanting illustra- tions of the most extreme examples taken from the most recent times. "In the present inter- [49] WHAT MAY I HOPE? course of the so-called 'superior races' with those whom they choose to call 'inferior,' there is testimony, though of a mixed pathetic and ludicrous character, that the former are begin- ning again to raise the debate whether the latter are indeed 'human' in the fullest sense of the word. Those whom greed and revenge prompt the enlightened (sic) of the race to treat as though they were not men, the enlightened will try to make out really are not men. It would not be civilized (not to say Christian) to harry and hunt men like squirrels and rabbits, or tigers and wolves ("Philosophy of Conduct," p. 329). And what an awful picture of mental aberration and of the defeat of all the world's most precious ethical standards has the recent era of Christian civilization shown to be com- mended by inferences framed to justify the hopes that have been fostered by immoral ambitions and desires! When, however, we consider these desires as the sources of some of the dearest and sweetest hopes of the individual and of society, how different is the picture presented by the intellect and the imagination quite in spite [50] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING of its often illusory and dreamlike character for moral approval and support. Honorable desires are not impermissible, even if they so often lead to disappointed hopes. The honest lover may be permitted the somewhat extrava- gant hope that he will find his mistress, when he more fully finds her out, endowed with alto- gether superior qualities of body, mind, and heart. And the returning hope of the woman may be permitted somewhat to overstep the bounds of probability in the degree of her trust in the man she has promised to make her hus- band. This temporary delusion which the "will to live" perpetuates in them both should, if the two are honest and fair-minded souls, as they are morally bound to be, sustain the shock of disillusionment, and assist both in bearing together the common burdens of then* daily life. For this first not quite reasonable hope is partially disappointed only to be replaced by other and perhaps more reasonable and lasting hopes. The man who engages in trade or in manufacture must be allured to his undertak- ings by a hope which in nine cases out of ten is not fully realized, as the proportion of [51] WHAT MAY I HOPE? bankruptcies to successes shows only too clearly. But without these semi-illusory hopes, all do- mestic and business enterprises would be sub- stantially checked, if they were not indeed quite brought to an end. And as to the benefits as well as necessity of hopes that transcend the probable we might almost say, the possible, for all social and political reformers, there can scarcely be any doubt. There is another kind of impermissible hopes which spring from desires less conspicuously immoral than the class which we have just been considering; but which are almost as mis- chievous and but little less universal. These may be called the passive hopes of the self- indulgent and the lazy. The average tramp and "hooligan" is, when not feigning grief or despondency, a very hopeful individual. Some- thing will turn up, or fall into his hand, before his unsatisfied desires become intolerable. And what more intolerable for him than to assist in a laborious way in the fulfilment of his own reasonable hopes? As says the Bhagavad Git a: "When one person suffers the conse- quences of his acts, should his fellow-brothers [52] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING stand by and enjoy the spectacle? Certainly not. They should, led by feelings of universal fellowship, do their duty disinterestedly to- ward the person suffering." The ethical maxim selected by the indolent man for application to his desires as looking toward others, but not to the desires of others as directed toward himself, lays the foundations of hopes according to the morality of the Bhagavad Gfta. But we have no right to hopes, even in themselves coupled with legitimate desires, unless we propose to do our own part bravely and self-sacrificingly, toward their fulfilment. We may not then ourselves indulge, or en- courage others in indulging, hope of the grati- fication of desire at the enforced expense of others, when we are at the same time lazily indulging ourselves in leisure, and trusting to others for doing for us our part in the effort at realizing the hope. The positive side of this consideration calls our attention to the almost limitless possibilities which lie open to the soul of a strenuous nature when inspired by pas- sionate desire to realize some coveted good. It is difficult, it is practically impossible, by any [53] WHAT MAY I HOPE? process of reasoning or appeal to past experi- ence, precisely to set limits to hoping, if only the desires out of which they spring and on which they feed are morally permissible. But there are other kinds of rights which may be assigned to certain hopes and denied to others; and there are other kinds of limita- tions than the strictly moral, to* the permis- sibility of hoping. These are the rights which must be acquired by an intelligent apprecia- tion of the facts and laws of man's physical and social environment; these are the limitations which careful observation and sound inference put upon intellectual vagaries and upon the dreams of undisciplined and foolhardy imagi- nation. Both the rights and the limitations of this sort have their chief reference to that feeling of expectation which we have already seen to be one of the three principal emotional elements of all the active and passive states of hope. The expectations of our hopes must have some degree of sweet reasonableness. Otherwise they have no right to solicit and command the will. To hope for the totally unreasonable is not permissible for a person, [54] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING that is, for a being whose nature it is to be rational. Even the faintest hopes for the most improbable of future good things should have some ground in the present possession of right reason; they should be subject to some limitations set to them by past experience. The hopes of the fanatic and of the insane are not permissible for the man of reasonable mind. Now, while few or none would dispute the very sage statements in which we have just indulged, there is no task more difficult, whether it be presented to the claimant for the title of psychological expert or to the man who, in his distrust of all such sort of pseudo-science, relies upon his own infallible common-sense, than just this : to determine what hopes are rea- sonable, and what not. For every form of human activity has strewn all along the course of its development, on the left hand, hopes once esteemed most sure of success, because entertained by the minds and supported by the energies of the wise and the mighty, but which now lie broken and dismembered; and on the right hand, are fair and stalwart forms of recognized force and authority, which have [55] WHAT MAY I HOPE? been fed on hopes that seemed at first, of all kindred hopes, about the most puny and un- worthy of nourishing. The hopes of the mighty lie low; the hopes of the humble and lowly have become mighty and highly exalted. Towers of Babel, that were to defy the floods of Heaven, are buried in sand; impregnable strongholds are reduced to small piles of ruins; colossal fortunes and empires which those who reared them hoped, most reasonably, to leave to their descendants, are utterly dissipated or have passed into the hands of strangers. But the dreams, deemed wildest, of science, of philanthropists, and of religious reformers, have at the last come true. Society is solidly built upon them. The method of all this passage from the pres- ent and the past to the future, by way of ex- pectancy, which is sometimes a method of sanity and sometimes seemingly a method of madness, needs a few words of explanation. It is by what logic calls "making inferences" that we come to expect future events to be of such, or such another, character. Where our data are quite certain and based on plenty of cred- [561 LIMITATIONS OF HOPING ible experiences, and where the inferences are able to proceed along fairly direct lines, and to lean heavily on the arm of mathematics strengthened by the frequent testing of experi- mentation, we anticipate the future event in the most confident way. We do not say we hope for it; we say, the rather, that we confi- dently expect it, and we build our more doubt- ful hopes upon this expectation. The Chinese mandarin, who knows enough of modern sci- ence confidently to expect the eclipse at the appointed hour, may, since he shares the su- perstitions of the rest of his benighted country- men, only faintly hope somehow to avert the calamity to himself and them which be believes the event to portend. But most of the future we do not know in this lofty a priori scientific way. Indeed, the most important advances of science have not been obtained by processes of inference like that just described. They have been due, the rather, to guesses, to flashes of insight, which excited hopes that it required long and costly processes of trying them out, in order to con- vert them, first, into assured hopes, and then [57] WHAT MAY I HOPE? into the confident expectations from which scientific prediction proceeds. No man can, however, live by science, chiefly or alone. The few eccentric individuals who make a conspicuous boast of doing it, are, as a rule, either conspicuously hopeless in many of the most important relations of life, or conspic- uously liable to disappointment of their most cherished hopes. For the hopes that deter- mine life are, quite without exception, based on beliefs and faiths that, however truly reason- able they may be, cannot claim scientific accu- racy. Marriages are contracted, children are born and nurtured, youth grows to maturity, grows old and dies, all directed and con- trolled by probable beliefs, and by the hopes which such beliefs engender and support. Neither science nor complete scepticism, nei- ther assured predictions as to the future nor hopelessness as to the future, suffices for the safe conduct of life. What is true for every individual is true for all nations as well. The answer to the inquiry, What may I hope? must then insist on the obligation to make, as far as possible, each hope a reasonable [58] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING hope. And the only way to secure this kind of reasonableness is to connect the realization of the hope in the future, by a bond of trustworthy inference, to the present status of this par- ticular hope, and to the maxims derived from experiences of hopings of the same general character. In a word, one is under obligations to use one's mind in judgment as to whether one's hopes are indeed reasonable; that is, whether the expectation which is in them, and which is an essential part of them, is fairly credible, because it is fairly probable. It is the word of wisdom: Try to secure for hope the degree of reasonableness, the lack of which would render the hope impermissible. In this way the chastening of wisdom is brought to bear on vain or exaggerated hopes. All such advice is confessedly vague enough. It can be given suitable concrete application, only as it is worked over by the mind, and incorporated into the purpose, of the individual who desires to make use of it. Nothing is more hopeless than the attempt to disabuse another of his hopes, although they are esteemed vain and foolish by us; unless it be to make ourselves [59] WHAT MAY I HOPE? honestly inclined to disabuse ourselves of our own most vain and foolish hopes. In spite, however, of a certain helplessness which every one must feel who attempts to ad- minister the bitter medicine that is purgative of unreasonable hopes, there are valuable rules governing this kind of thankless practice that it is convenient for the attending physician to bear in mind. The mistaken claim to a right to hope, in expectation of this or that future good, and the mischievous transgression of the limits of a reasonable hoping, generally arise from the individual's believing that some special exception to the laws of the physical universe or of society will be made in his par- ticular case. Is it not reasonable for the fa- vorites of high Heaven to hope as other and ordinary mortals would not dare to hope? This is the hope of the megalomaniac. It may be a mild case, scarcely passing the limits of a modest self-confidence. It may be that of the braggart prize-fighter or the boastful emperor. It may be that of the prince of finance, or the captain of some form of industry. It is that of the man who has forgotten to [601 LIMITATIONS OF HOPING "walk humbly before God"; of him who has trodden the heights of insolence, where the divine Nemesis is watching for the unwary. Or it may be no more uncommon or pretentious than are the emotional attitudes toward life, of the thousands of giddy and thoughtless souls on whose "innocent" but futile hopings, the kindly wise old men and women smile benignantly. But we must at once remind ourselves, as a safeguard against a more than divine attitude of severity toward all such hopes as can never reasonably expect fulfilment, that the world owes much, owes its perpetually renewing sal- vation, to the not altogether "reasonable" hopes of the young and the sanguine. For the relations of human actions to future conse- quences never have been, and probably never will be, Yes ! from the very nature of the case, never can be, reduced to a mechanical system of strictly demonstrable order. The hopes of the inventor, of the discoverer, of the reformer, of the prophet of religion, have al- ways been the hopes of the sanguine; not in- frequently, they have seemed to the men of their generation, as the hopes of children. [611 WHAT MAY I HOPE? We cannot, then, find the same denial of rights, the same claims to strict limitations, in respect to the credibility of the expectations of hope, which we had no difficulty in discovering with respect to the morality of the desires which prompt the activity of hoping. Certain inno- cent but very vague and illusory hopes, which become the springs of much valuable and fruit- ful activity, and which contribute many bene- ficial results, though by no means always of the exact type of the expectations that are in them, are permissible. They have their place in the economy of existence. They may be em- ployed as means to the development of the personal life. And, indeed, is not all human life in some sort a scheme of Divine illusion designed to secure as its end a yet more glori- ous form of Reality? The raising of this last issue, however, in- volves a distinction in human hopes, to which reference has more than once been made al- ready, but the detailed development of which is absolutely necessary for any even partially satisfactory answer of the question, What may I hope? This is the distinction between the [62] LIMITATIONS OF HOPING lesser and the greater hopes; and this distinc- tion culminates in the recognition of certain hopes as of the very most essential characteris- tics of the personal and spiritual life. To be a person at all the individual man must have certain beliefs; and to develop his personality in social relations and only in social relations can personality be developed he must cultivate and act under the guidance of these beliefs. To be the person that every individual man ought to be, and to advance toward the goal of this personal life in the spirit of cheer and undaunted courage, the individual man needs to secure, to cherish, and to cling to, certain hopes. These hopes have to do with the ideals of the personal life, in the individual and in the race. They are the hopes of the spirit that is in every man; but they are also the hopes of humanity. They have, therefore, peculiar rights as they appear before the will for its acceptance and devoted service; but even they are not without certain limita- tions. What those hopes are; what are the obligations which they impose upon the soul and what are the rewards which they offer; [63] WHAT MAY I HOPE? and under what limitations they must be ac- cepted and cherished; these are the inquiries which are of all most important for the an- swer of the practical question, What may I hope? "A man," said Goethe, "must cling to the belief that the incomprehensible is com- prehensible; otherwise, he would not try to fathom it." A man must cling to the hopes which such beliefs warrant and support; other- wise he forfeits the choicest rewards of all human hoping. But of all other hopes except those that hang on these beliefs, the words of the experiences in all ages are embodied in the Arab proverb: "This world is a bridge; pass thou over it; but do not build upon it." [64] CHAPTER III THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE 'N somewhat the same way as reasonable belief is to be distinguished from supersti- tion, so is reasonable hope ("hope that maketh not ashamed") to be distinguished from that which is vain and illusory. It is also true that in somewhat the same way as the strength of the belief furnishes a very effective evidence for the reasonableness of his belief to the man who holds it, so does the assurance of hoping give much additional testimony to the reasonableness of the hope for the mind that entertains it. In both cases, a certain value, which is something more than purely "subjec- tive," cannot easily be denied to this support of truth in a form that is primarily emotional. It is more reasonable to believe what one can honestly believe with a strong feeling of confi- dence in its "objective" truthfulness. It is more reasonable to hope what one can honestly hope with a large measure of firm assurance. [65] WHAT MAY I HOPE? Nor is this measure of emotional evidence to be esteemed as of value to those only who store it in their own bosoms. Beliefs and hopes that are kept ever warm and vital in the bosom of humanity, by being near to its heart and source of vital life-currents, are lawfully as well as actually most well nourished and most vigorous. The truth of this contention is established even by the self-deceits, hypocrisies, and false- hoods, which take refuge under its cloak. It is for this reason that we so often encounter the distressing spectacle of men "whipping them- selves up," as the saying is, into a fine frenzy of protestation over the strength of some belief which, in fact, they have come only doubtfully to hold; or into vehement assertion of their confidence in some hope which, in fact, is just on the point of slipping quite away from them. Not only in theological opinion, but also and no less conspicuously, in science, in politics, and in morals, it is not infrequently those who are just on the borderland of heresy, that pro- test their orthodoxy in the most uncompromis- ing form. The really penitent thief ventured only to pray, "Remember me when thou comest [66] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE into thy kingdom"; and he was silently satis- fied with the hope which sprung from faith in the crucified one by his side. But your really unrepentant scoundrel boasts from the scaffold his newly acquired hope of salvation; or like the dying Empress Dowager of China ends a life of horrid crimes with a proclamation of intention to ascend to heaven, clothed in majestic raiment and mounted upon a dragon. It would be sad misinterpretation, however, of the value, in its own right, which belongs to confidence in the truthfulness of certain faiths, and the assurance of the hopes connected with them, if we were led to distrust, not to say despise, all this class of phenomena on account of the mixing of a large proportion of the spurious with that which is most genuine. At any rate, and growing out of the very nature of the case: Belief is not belief, without some backing of trust behind it, some foundation of confidence underneath it. Hope is not hope, without some measure of assurance, somehow derived. Beliefs are not efficient in human affairs, much less are they triumphant over obstacles and mighty for the pulling down of [67] WHAT MAY I HOPE? the strongholds of error, unless they are them- selves firmly bedded in the minds and ex- periences of those who profess them. Hopes cannot lift up the individuals and the nations which cherish them, unless they are themselves well-grounded in the assurance of their own reasonableness. The anchor of hope "let go," must find bottom and hold, or it is of no avail as an anchor. How then can it be maintained that the emotional element of trust which enters into certain faiths and hopes of the individual and of the race is without evidential value? On the contrary, the assurance of hope is char- acteristic of every reasonable and steadfast form of the emotion of hoping. On the other hand, to assume that we may safely measure the reasonableness of any in- dividual's hoping, or of any individual hope, solely by the strength of the assurance with which it is held, would be an even more foolish and grievous mistake than altogether to dis- credit the value of the element of assurance. We have already had occasion to discuss this aspect of our mental attitudes in its relation to the distinction between knowing and believ- [68] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE ing, under the topic, "Being Sure of What We Know." It was then pointed out: "There is no absolutely sure passage either for the indi- vidual or for the race, from subjective convic- tion to objective certainty. Conviction will always vary in its intensity and steadiness, according to the nature and mental habits of the subject whose conviction it is, and accord- ing to the subject about which the conviction is exercised. On the other hand, the certainty which is attached, or which can reasonably be attached, to any form of knowledge, or to any particular knowledge-judgment, is no fixed affair. Somewhat similar criticism must be made with respect to the Kantian distinction between believing and knowing. . . . His principle of division was just this 'certainty' which was somehow supposed to be added to believing in order to convert it into knowing. But the distinction, when made in so rough and bald a manner, is psychologically false. . . . Indeed, whenever the assurance of belief attains a cer- tain degree of intensity and a quality of steadi- [69] WHAT MAY I HOPE? ness of character, we speak of it as knowledge. On the other hand, when assurance begins to show dim, or to withdraw its support from our judgment, we begin to question whether what we thought knowledge is anything more certain than a doubtful belief. But we are just as ready to say that we do not believe in that way any longer." ("What Can I Know?" pp. 96 ff.) The close connection between our beliefs and our hopes has already been made apparent. Indeed, the chief if not the only sources of our hopes, properly so-called, are to be found in our beliefs. When we really know what is to happen to our desires in the future, we either drop the expectation out of the state of hoping altogether, or else we give to it the perfection and definiteness of content which is necessary to convert it into a scientific prediction. In either case, our mental attitude loses much, if not all, of those affective factors which are essential to the complex emotion of hoping. From this connection between believing merely believing, without positively knowing and hoping, in the more genuine and im- [70] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE pressive meaning of that word, we may suggest a similar doctrine of tests for the assurance, or element of confidence, which belongs to both these related attitudes of mind. We return then to the thought of that per- missive nature of hope, which renders it right, in the sense of being both reasonable and moral, to let our hopes extend beyond our as- sured knowledge and our indubitable beliefs. Even more are we entitled, in the assurance of hope, to transcend the arguments derived by the strictest processes of demonstration from the principles established by the methods of the exact sciences; if this can be done without contradicting or corrupting those principles. Every man, when pressed by the more cruel experiences of this earthly life, is likely some- time to come to the critical position when he must say to himself: "I cannot live in a manner worthy of the ideals of morality and religion, and so as to secure the most precious values of the personal being which I know myself to be, unless I may hope with a good degree of assur- ance for some things which are intellectually secured by only strongly contested beliefs." [71] WHAT MAY I HOPE? This necessity, which is not merely a practical makeshift, or merely a pretence of pragmatic philosophy, but a relation between the different forms of activity and of passion that consti- tute the very essence of personal life, is a rational justification for the assurance of certain hopes. The modifications of all this doctrine of the assurance of hope, with its assignment of ob- jective value to the subjective emotion, have already been rather fully suggested in the treatment of the nature and sources of hope, and of the rights and limitations of the activity of hoping. As an important part of the practical ques- tion, What may I hope? the wise man will be constantly asking himself, How may I avoid the fool's hopes? Foolish hopes, he well knows, are often characterized by the highest degree of the most stubborn but unreasonable assur- ance. Who, that is wise, would not have fewer and less highly strung hopes rather than have so many hopes that in the end make one ashamed, or even lead to one's destruction? But who can afford to dispense with all the THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE hopes that do not admit of having their assur- ance warranted by the indisputable processes of logic; and who can endure a hopeless life long enough to put the assurance of some of his most precious hopes to the waiting test of their actual fulfilment? We cannot wholly escape hopes that will turn out to have been illusory, and to have had only the value of leading us on to exertions which would not otherwise have been made, by arguing away or completely surrendering all our natural rights of hoping. We cannot at least, in youth and prosperity we cannot confine all uplifting emotions of this class to a sort of dull "hoping against hope." It is not thus that success in any form of life is ever to be won. Is not man, then, involved in a paradox with respect to this wholly natural and unavoidable habit of hoping, as curious as it is perplexing? Let the paradox be stated as follows: Without some assurance, no hoping; without much as- surance, or a large degree of sentimental con- viction, no fine and high hopes, none of the hopes that save the soul of the individual and allure to its uplifting the race of men. With [73] WHAT MAY I HOPE? too much "cock-sureness" in hoping comes the degradation and destruction of false and de- lusive hopes; with too much rationalizing of hopes, they vanish or are so thinned out, as it were, as to lose most of their robustness and efficiency for reform. How shall such a paradox admit of practical solution? And are we not, after all, asking ourselves the question, What may I (reasonably) hope? altogether in vain? It would be, indeed, a sad ending to the in- quiry, What may I hope? to discover that, with a view to avoiding the hopes of the fool, the wise man must not, with any degree of assurance, hope at all. But to say this very thing in some sort has often been esteemed the highest de- gree of wisdom. Thus saith the Buddha: "Through birth and re-birth's endless round, Seeking in vain, I hastened on, To find who framed this edifice. What misery! birth incessantly! "O builder! I've discovered thee! This fabric thou shalt ne'er rebuild! Thy rafters all are broken now, And pointed roof demolished lies! This mind has demolition reached. And seen the last of all desire!" [74] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE It is not, however, by "the demolition of the mind" and "the extinction of all desire" that the foolishness of human hopes is to be success- fully thwarted or finally defeated. The best of human hopes must be assured of their "reason- ableness," in the better meaning of the latter word. There are two considerations by which, if we most jealously guard and diligently regu- late our hopes, we shall secure in general a reasonable assurance for the best of them, and escape the follies of the hopes that are essen- tially vain and delusive. The first of these is this: No assurance can be allowed by moral reason to hopes that spring from covetous and selfish desires. He, then, who would avoid vain and foolish hopes must look well to the essential morality of the appetencies and am- bitions on which his hopes are founded. Es- sentially immoral hopes are essentially foolish hopes. Many, perhaps the majority, of covetous desires can, not infrequently, justify their train of hopes by satisfactory arguments as to the high degree of the chances favoring their future [75] WHAT MAY I HOPE? realization. Thus, though unreasonable from the moral point of view, they are made to ap- pear highly reasonable from the point of view which defines their probability. If one dares incur the moral risk of cherishing such hopes, one may be comparatively brave in inferring the chances of their futurity. To say this is, indeed, to seem to contradict some of the most widely accepted of the maxims of antiquity, as well as not a few of the declarations and warn- ings of Sacred Scripture. For these maxims and declarations assign the ultimate profits to persistent righteousness. But, in spite of all seeming, to give greater weight to merely pru- dential considerations than to moral ideals is to accept the facts of life at their face value; but only at their "face" value. In fact, the chances of a man's becoming rich, or politically or socially successful, or powerful, or of having any other form of similar desires gratified, are to-day, as they have always been, rather better, if he is by no means scrupulous as to the moral character of the desires themselves or as to the methods employed to secure their realization. He who enters business, or politics, or society, [76] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE or even the work of some educational or relig- ious institution, with the intention of maintain- ing over his desires the control of even a fairly lofty ethical standard, does well not to be much puffed up with assurance for his hope of success, as measured by the customary standards. He must, on the contrary, be prepared to appear very frequently as a "fool" in the estimate of his rivals; and quite as frequently called one, behind his back if not before his face. Have we not cheerfully admitted that the "face" value of the facts seems to favor the opinion that it is foolish to hope to realize the natural desires that are too much infected with the limitations of moral principles. In the marts and social circles, in the Governments of na- tions, and even in the universities and the churches, there is still, as there has ever been, an under-current of distrust, if not a strong surface current of contempt, for the regulation of solid earthly hopes in accord- ance with the cloudy follies of moral ideal- ism. One must be willing to be called a "God's fool," in order to gain the firm assur- ance which, in the realms of the higher rea- [77] WHAT MAY I HOPE? son, belongs of incontestable right to certain hopes. But is the man really a fool who, in respect of the assurance of his hopes, makes first ac- count of the wise endeavor to ascertain whether those hopes are founded in morally permissible desires; and who, in the efforts to realize his hopes, will not be diverted from the rules of right conduct as prescribed by moral reason? What person, with a wise mind and a heart loyal to the most precious and profound of personal sentiments, can for an instant hesitate as to the answer to be given to such a question as this? "If this is to be a fool, then a fool I will be"; so great is the assurance of my hope that the final issue of fidelity to moral reason will vindicate all the faithful against any charge of folly which may be encountered along the way. Indeed, the surest way to avoid vain hopes, and to secure the assurance which belongs of right only to the hopes that are es- sentially reasonable, is morally to purify the desires from which the hopes arise. But some intellectually timid or cowardly ob- jector will say: How shall I, antecedently to [78] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE experience of my own, and in view of the con- fusion of opinions as to the morals of trade, politics, social intercourse, and the conduct of educational and religious affairs, discover what are the morally permissible hopes; and, more especially, what are the morally permissible ways of attempting to realize such hopes? For, what is more debatable than morals? What is more ineffective than exhortation and instruc- tion to secure right morals for the young human being, previous to some personal experience of the consequences of his own bad or injudicious conduct? There is force in this objection. And he who undertakes to answer for himself or for others the question, What may I hope? is sure sooner or later to feel its force. It is not an altogether easy thing for one who is in- telligently and unswervingly committed to the resolve that he will not be guilty of the folly of cherishing morally impermissible hopes, always to avoid being foolish in the indulgence and active realization of his most virtuous hopings. It is not easy, it is not possible, to be infallible in our hopes; any more, but even less, than in our other emotional and practical attitudes [79] WHAT MAY I HOPE? toward life and its successful conduct. But it is not required that we should be infallible. In respect of our hopings, it is probably far from desirable that we should attempt infallibility. Some of the most valuable and inspiring of hu- man hopes are most distant and long-deferred in their realization. If one pleases to call them illusory, as we do not, much preferring to call them "educatory," still they are alto- gether worthy of every one who aspires to the values of personal life, maintaining an unbroken and undying grasp upon them. But the objector to the hopes founded in the confidence of moral reason, on the ground of their uncertainty, ought to know that there is nothing given to any man to trust, with refer- ence to which he may come nearer to a practi- cal infallibility than his moral intuitions and judgments; if only he will cultivate the habit of keeping them incorrupt, and of obey- ing them. All inferences, and all the intellec- tual beliefs on which such inferences are based, as to the ultimate profit of cherishing immoral desires, and as to the chances of realizing the hopes which are founded upon them, are far [80] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE more subject to fickleness and to fallibility, than are the fundamental moral intuitions and moral judgments. So then, if one must such are the inescapable conditions of man's life and of its environment incur no small risk of folly as touching the assurance of one's hopes, the chances of escaping the maximum of foolish mistakes are on the side of him who sticks to the assurance of the hopes that are morally permissible. Most of the worst fools in the world are those who have relied on the satis- faction of the expectations that take counsel of impermissible desires; even when they make a brave show of proving to themselves by a crafty logic or a confident appeal to the ex- ample of others, that the hopes engendered by such desires are entirely practicable. There are certain hopes, however, which one may entertain with calm assurance, and cherish, and hold to with tenacity of fearless- ness lest at last they should convict one of folly. There are desires and expectations and trusts, out of which one may skilfully compound a fragrant and wholesome mixture for a timorous and fainting soul. And this brings us to the [81] WHAT MAY I HOPE? second of the considerations which promise help in escaping the foolishness of reposing in unreasonable hopes. He who lives in the as- surance of the hopes that spring from moral Idealism is never quite a fool. These hopes find their solid ground in the fundamental and undaunted faiths of morality and religion. These faiths guarantee the verity, the supreme value, and the ultimate triumph, of the moral ideals. They who hold these faiths base upon them the assurance of the hopes which foresee their fulfilment in the future of the individual and of the race. As to times, and degrees, and ways, the hopes of moral Idealism are indeed often enough disappointed. Often enough the time of the fulfilment of the prophecy born of this kind of hope, whether it be of schemes for the im- provement of society, or for the abolition of ancient wrongs, or for the securing of hitherto unrecognized rights, is long deferred. The eye of the man or of the generation which has cherished the hope of the idealist never beholds the full realization of its heart's desire. The fullest measure of this manner of hoping is sel- [82] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE dom or never realized. Perhaps such hoping can never be fully realized under earthly con- ditions; for it is of the very nature of moral ideals to outstrip the efforts which it is possible to make, and the means which it is possible to assemble, for their realization. Oftener than not, it may be, the very measures employed to remove the evils which stand in the way of the fulfilment of these ideals, develop other and unexpected evils, which must become new sub- jects for hopeful attack in the name of the same essentially unchanging ideals. And yet the soul that remains faithful to its moral ideals is unconvicted of essential folly. How the claim just made can be put on a somewhat reasonable basis, or at any rate be- come in the mind of him who makes it a more assured ground for hope, will require some de- tailed examination of the particular hopes which are entitled to make the claim. But the fun- damental truth applying to them all is in the fact that the convictions attaching to the hopes born of moral ideals carry so much of evidence with them, whenever and wherever they fasten upon the human spirit. They bear the mark [83] WHAT MAY I HOPE? of the not-to-be-questioned authority of the Spirit from which they come, and to whose presence in the spirit of man and in the race they furnish an indubitable witness. Even to the onlooker, from the coldest and most non- sentimental and purely intellectual point of view, the self-evidencing authority of these hopes is worthy of no small regard. Men do in spite of all their particular disappoint- ments, as respects times, degrees, and ways of fulfilment cling, with on the whole increasing intelligence and without diminishing tenacity, to the hopes born of the faiths of morality and religion. The best of the race share in the vision of Thoreau, when he says: "I see laws which never fail, of whose failure I never con- ceived. Indeed, I can not detect failure any- where but in my fear. I do not fear that right is not right, that good is not good." In this connection it is pertinent to refer to the fact that, although the assurance of hope can never be based on grounds other than those afforded by some degree of knowledge, or more often of reasonable belief, hope is essentially optimistic. In the debates between [84] ' THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE the various forms of Optimism and Pessimism so-called, the hopes of men are ranged on the side of the former. But there is truth in what Eucken has said: "Of old, it has not been the optimists but the pessimists that can boast of the better knowledge of human nature." Such a seeming confusion can be cleared up only by understanding what we mean by the two words, so frequently misunderstood, so almost univer- sally misused. In the popular disputation it is often enough that the hopeful promoter of some speculative interest, or the enthusiastic but not well-in- formed patriot (?) who is boasting of his coun- try's prowess in war or superiority over other countries in the commerce and arts of peace, or even the devotee who is confident of the ability of the positive sciences to abolish the evils and secure the economic and sanitary redemption of mankind, brings against those who do; not altogether share the fulness of his confidence, the railing or the benignant charge of pessimism. With the over-confident hoper, it is invariably ascribed to pessimistic tenden- cies that others do not share his hopes. With [85] WHAT MAY I HOPE? the sanguine man, such pessimism implies no small degree of either judicial blindness or moral obliquity. Now it is apparent to any one who has fol- lowed the course of our thought concerning the rights and limitations of hoping, and concern- ing the nature of the grounds on which the as- surance of hope must justify itself, if it finds any justification at all, it is apparent, I say, that the use of such words as Optimism and Pessimism has no value in the determination of the reasonableness of the assurance of many kinds of hopes. For such hopes cannot claim the warrant of moral reason or the support of moral ideals. If, on the other hand, they are entertained in defiance of the laws and ideals of the moral life, they are just as impermissible, whether they are considered in respect to the probability of their fulfilment, from the so- called optimistic or the so-called pessimistic point of view. He is in no sense a "pessimist" who refuses to entertain immoral or unreason- able hopes. There is, however, a much larger field, the surveying of which is apt to be strongly influ- [86] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE enced either by the optimism of hope, or by the pessimism which is inevitable as a result of a too inconclusive and an ideally unsupported inference from facts. Whether the world is really growing better, or not, is a question which can scarcely be raised at all, without exciting a volley of epithets in which "opti- mistic" and "pessimistic" are conspicuous words. But this is a question, the meaning of which can not be apprehended, and much less a decision about it reached, without involving several subordinate questions each one hav- ing no small proportions that attempt to discuss the Where, the When, and the How. Geographically considered, the World is a large place. And no one can have travelled over much of it, or have read its history to much purpose, without gaining sufficiency of evidence that large areas of this one World have had very different experiences with respect to every conceivable form of betterment. That many of these areas are economically, socially, and even morally and religiously, much worse off than they have been at other periods of their history, is altogether too obvious for dispute. [87] WHAT MAY I HOPE? Indeed, some of them, as considered from the economic, social, and moral point of view, have been almost completely wiped off of the world's map; so that no comparison with their own past is possible: like that district once con- taining thirty millions of a prosperous people, in which the Chinese General Tso Tsung-t'ang suppressed the Mohammedan rebellion by de- stroying "every living thing." And who is optimistic enough to assure the hope that the World has even yet lived long enough, or grown enough better, to refrain in the future altogether from practising similar methods of betterment? The World is old in its life-history. And the question of its growing better or growing worse is, therefore, always a question of times and seasons. That it is steadily and always, as well as everywhere, going forward, few students of its history could be found to maintain. The prosperous man in his little village takes pride in his optimism to-day. In the next generation the unsuccessful man in that same village will be pessimistic indeed. Even now, there are not wanting wise old men who recall [88] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE with regret the better conditions of that same village a generation or two ago. But above all, in its bearing on the main prob- lem and in its intrinsic importance, is the ques- tion, How? In what respect is the World markedly better than it used to be? In what respect are we entitled to the assurance of hope that it will continue to grow better? The man who most esteems the values provided by the optimistic hopes of science or of material pros- perity will give you one answer; the moral idealist will give you quite another. Observa- tion and the reading of history will confirm you in the opinion that the most optimistic hopes of the former afford no sound basis of a reasonable assurance on which to build the hopes of the latter. Indeed, the most rapid fulfilment of the hopes of the one may serve only to awaken the fears and diminish the hopes of the other. We are not proposing to argue the question in controversy between Optimism and Pessi- mism in this large, historical meaning of the words. We do not believe that it can be ar- gued by any one individual with another, on [891 WHAT MAY I HOPE? a basis approaching a valid scientific induction. If it were possible to summarize all the data having to do with the Where and the When, men would still differ fundamentally as to the respect in which, as to the How. The man who bases his optimism on the inferior values, and who indulges his hopes as to their realiza- tion in the future of the World, would, in fact, continue to measure the good and evil of life by one standard; the man who regards the worth and efficiency for real betterment of the moral ideals, as the only reasonable ground for the assurance of his hopes, would continue to measure the World's claims to betterment by a quite different standard. There is a kind of Optimism, and there is a kind of Pessimism, however, between the claims of which we may find rational ground and man- ageable reasons for the distribution of our hopes. This is the kind of Optimism that opposes the deductions of pessimistic philosophy. It is the Optimism of moral and religious Hope, as opposed to the Pessimism of Absolutism. The doctrine of despair as to the final issue of cosmic and human social and moral evolution [90] THE ASSURANCE OF HOPE may be summarized in somewhat the following way: It is fixed in the very heart of existence, the blind Will, which deceives and by deceiving dominates and controls all the motives that appeal to man's will to live and to propagate his kind, that the World must go from bad to worse, and from worse to yet worse, until the only relief is obtained in the extinction of all conscious life. This is the answer which the Pessimism of Schopenhauer gives to every form of optimistic hoping. Plainly such Pessimism is not to be silenced, much less subjugated, by an appeal to facts as gathered and interpreted by the minor and more doubtful of man's optimistic hopes. To the Pessimism of Absolutism, however, the Optimism which finds its assurance of hope in the faiths of morality and religion replies with the ideal of a coming Divine Kingdom. Its argument to reverse for the moment the course which may be followed in the later attempts to answer the inquiry, What may I hope? can be described as seen from its goal by chaining together such concep- tions and emotions as the following, with [91] WHAT MAY I HOPE? logical processes suited to the ideals of human reason. 1. The Optimism which is the Hope of a Moral Ideal, of a Divine Kingdom. This hope is dependent upon 2. The Belief in the triumph of the Moral Ideal. This belief is founded upon 3. The Experience of Faith as including the reasoned conviction which affirms the perfec- tion of the Moral Attributes of God. In somewhat such way as this does the assur- ance of the highest hopes reach down into the soil of the profoundest and most rational of beliefs. [92] CHAPTER IV THE PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING T is often enough a dictate of practical wis- dom to ask oneself, What is the use of hoping? for this or for that other desired object; since the chances of obtaining it are so very small, or its value, when obtained, is not worth the effort it is likely to cost. The answer given in any particular case like this may take any one of several different forms. The very calling in question of the hope may result in a voluntary stiffening of its element of expectation, and in increased diligence and skill directed toward proving the reasonable- ness of its continuance. Or one may try, more or less successfully, to assume that mental atti- tude which is called the "surrender of the hope." The act of surrender, if measurably successful, may be accomplished by abandoning the expectation; or, more frequently, by think- ing or pretending to think, that we are well rid of the desire which excited the expectation. More [93] WHAT MAY I HOPE? frequently still, perhaps, we have the result of an attempt to give up all hoping, in a "forlorn hope," or a sort of sullen, slowly dying hope. In fully fifty per centum of such cases the hope- less individual lives to be sincerely glad that his hope was disappointed. Very different, however, must our answer be to the question, What is the use of hoping at all? or, Of what practical benefit to humanity are the common hopes which are universal tokens of human nature under the existing circumstances of life's probabilities, of its risks and its rewards, its failures and its triumphs? In this form the question becomes a fairly silly question. It appears like asking, What is the use of having the emotional and practical nature that makes so important a part of being a man at all; and of playing a man's part in the midst of man's physical, economic, and social environment? In treating the question, What are the prac- tical uses of hoping? we are, therefore, somewhat in the position of the investigator of questions of casuistry in morals. We seem to be in search of prudential maxims and wise saws designed [94] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING to secure the increased utility of our perform- ances in the way of indulging or suppressing our emotions, and of cultivating activities of the order characterized by the emotions. Shall we say, that we seek to establish a "technique" of hoping? If one could become expert in such a technique, why should not one play most effectively and mellifluously on the harp-strings of one's own, and of other susceptible natures? Surely, such artistic skill, accompanied as it must be by a succession of rich rewards, would be well worth the effort which its possession must entail. At any rate, we seem bound to seek for it with some particularity; for, on the one hand, we cannot possibly deny to our- selves or object to in others, every manner and degree of hoping; neither can we encourage all manners and degrees of this emotion and its accompanying practical activities, without in- quiring at all into the reasonableness and effec- tive uses of a certain proportion of them. There have already been provided some con- siderations which may now be turned to no small advantage in discussing certain of the more obvious rules governing the practical [95] WHAT MAY I HOPE? uses of human hopes. We may refer with confidence to at least these three. To debate about, or hesitate over, the practical utility of hopes that are founded in immoral desires and ambitions, is impermissible. Immensely practical they may be so far as the achievement of their ends, by the morally unworthy means appropriate to such ends, is made the test of their practicability. But the man who regards the ideals of morality as alone worthy to control his practice, need not debate with himself, or even as a rule with others, over the "practical uses" of such hopes. It has also been shown that there are certain hopes, the nature and reasonableness of which are to be made clearer in subsequent chapters, whose practical uses are of inesti- mable worth, although they have to do with lofty ideals that have their grounds of trust laid in the beliefs and faiths of morality and religion; and although they require a hope that clings to these beliefs and faiths, in spite of much temporary disappointment and the long- deferred character of even their partial fulfil- ment. So abundant and clear are the tokens [96] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING of the practical uses of these moral and religious hopes, that one may truthfully say: Without them there would be little chance of living worthily and well under any circumstances. Yes ! for those who hold them most intelligently and firmly, there would seem, if quite deprived of their practical uses, little worth or interest in living at all. One more consideration we have learned to make, which, although it is more vague and in- definite of application, has no slight influence on all our estimates of the practical utility of human hopes. This is the fact that, in very large measure, their utility is directly dependent on their illusory character. Much of the hop- ing of all men, especially in the earlier periods of life, is a sort of benevolent and divinely ordained deceit. It is a kindly trick of Provi- dence, lest the children of men should too early in their journey discover how trying that journey is surely destined to be, and so should become too easily and quickly discouraged. The reaction which comes with the discovery and it is fortunate if the discovery be not too sudden and shocking how illusory the great [97] WHAT MAY I HOPE? majority of our earlier hopes in fact are, may, however, be in the direction of substituting for these, higher and better-founded hopes. For it is necessary to the successful conduct of life under the influence of feeling, that there should be a succession of hopes. To quote again the saying of Epictetus: "A ship ought not to be held by one anchor: nor life by a single hope." To make the best practical use of hoping, disappointed hope should not be allowed to lead to bitterness or despair. The Technique, or art, of making the best practical use of Hoping has its rightful applica- tion in two directions. These are the exciting of hopes in others, and the indulging of hopes in ourselves. In both respects, one ought to be equally moral as to essentials, and equally wise as to methods of control. But in neither respect can one altogether avoid mistakes, much less establish any claim to complete in- fallibility. The illusory character that belongs to so large a portion of all human hopings has already been declared to have a relation to the education and discipline of the human personal life. This [98] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING is true whether we are dealing with the larger or the lesser hopes, with the hopes founded on doubtful or wicked desires and ambitions, or the hopes founded in the trust of the ultimate value and success of moral and religious ideals. All hoping has practical uses on account of its educatory character. From this general principle something may be learned as to the practical uses which may be made of the parent's or the teacher's chance to encourage or suppress the hopes of the child or of the pupil. The place of hoping in educa- tion raises not a few of the most delicate prob- lems. The young are inevitably subject to two extremes in every kind of their hopings. Both of these are extremes of exaggeration. They exaggerate the pleasure to be derived from the realization of their hopes; and they exagger- ate the probability that their hopes will be realized at all. What parent has not stood helpless before his child in the effort to make the child believe that life would not be one long stretch of an altogether wretched state of dis- appointment, if it should happen to rain on the day of the promised picnic or excursion into [99] WHAT MAY I HOPE? the country. In vain also does one strive to surround the hoping of the child with elaborate safeguards as to the chances that things are likely to turn out unfavorable to its fulfilment. No matter how cautiously is stated the prom- ised satisfaction, both God and man are at once held jointly responsible for its prompt accom- plishment. Hopes of moderate satisfactions, made only in small measure probable of fulfil- ment, are not naturally adapted for the enter- tainment of the childish mind. The childish mind demands full and certain satisfaction for its most extravagant desires. But on the other hand, one cannot leave the little ones, whether old or young in years, to the depressing influences of dull and disap- pointed hopes. Here, as in other lines of con- duct, only that cultivated feeling and fine insight into personal character and special cases, which we call "Tact," will serve to secure the best practical uses of the solicited and en- couraged states of hoping. Similar embarrassments are sure to be en- countered by the teacher of youth, especially of the most promising and hopeful. Such [100] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING pupils do not yet know under what limitations the best of scientific hopes are constantly held in check. Neither do they know the self- confessed, but unrevealed limitations of the best of teachers. Indeed with the teacher, the less extravagant his hopes, the better for him and for the great majority of his pupils. The earnest ones among his pupils expect him to do for them, what he can not: the lazy ones among his pupils expect him to do for them, what he will not. For only one in a hundred of them is any- thing approaching high and reasonable hopes possible. And yet there is not one of them who should have any of his honest hopes ruthlessly crushed. The evils of an injudicious handling of this emotion, for practical purposes, are beyond all doubt. The mischievous effects of hopes that have been either encouraged in an unrealistic and sickly sentimental way, or have been un- sympathetically treated, or cruelly suppressed, are only too conspicuous in the social institutions and civil governments of the present day. On the one hand, we have the whole spirit of organ- ized Socialism and most of its performances, as [101] WHAT MAY I HOPE? well as a large proportion of the current re- formatory and remedial schemes and institu- tions, bolstering up or puffing up hopes of every kind of betterment, with scanty regard to the difficult task of imparting to the individuals who compose the social whole, or who control the governments, the fundamental beliefs of morality and the hopes and practices that de- pend upon these beliefs. It is the same old, very old, fallacy, of encouraging illusory and vanishing hopes, at the expense of the prin- ciples and the conduct, on which we must de- pend for securing the practical benefits of every kind of permissible hoping. The dreadful years in Russia, which followed the dissolution of the first Duma, illustrated most forcibly the baleful effect upon a whole nation of the disappointment of its dreams in hope of a sudden and great accession of political freedom. Similar effects follow the millenarian hopes which periodically excite large bodies of good but improvident people, when the Second Coming does not confirm their expecta- tion of him who came at first to lead the life of obscurity and shrinking from notoriety, and [102] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING to end that life in a manner most disturbing for the time to those of his friends who had trusted him most implicitly. Not a commercial crisis occurs, not even a single savings-bank or civil-service corporation fails, that does not leave a trail behind, of the wrecks of disap- pointed hopes. Bloody riots among the miners and others of the so-called "laboring classes" have no other source of unreasonable violence so powerful as the failure of their employers, or of the leaders of their labor-unions, to make good the hopes they have injudiciously or mali- ciously excited. An endless row of individuals in all times and among all peoples has been going down to death in sullen submission to the inevitable, or in the active bitterness of despair; because they have either been cheated out of their hopes by their fellows, or have doomed themselves to an end bankrupt of hopes, by placing their investments in expectations that had no sufficient securities back of them. Per- haps, no other disaster to the individual, the community, or the nation, can quite equal in appalling completeness the total wreckage of its most highly cherished hopes. [103] WHAT MAY I HOPE? Considerations such as these impart a char- acter of grave seriousness to the questions, What may I hope? and, To what practical uses may I most profitably put the hopes I cherish in myself and the hopes I excite and foster in others? In this matter of casuistry, or the "technique of conduct," as well as in most other matters of the same kind, carelessness or indifference to the probable issues is quite as disastrous as the deliberate intention to do the wrong thing. The man who has speculated with other people's money and has lost, commits suicide, because he cannot face the wrecking of his own hopes of wealth and of the social reverence and obei- sance which he quite reasonably believes the wealth will bring. But he would have done better to remember that the other one whose hopes he had engaged in building on insecure foundations, might, by their failure, be tempted to the suicide of despair equally with himself. For almost all human hopes have a sort of collective quality. They cannot easily be entertained, much less made practical use of, without involving others than ourselves. What [104] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING indeed, may 7 hope for, which does not involve the hoping or the despairing of some brother man? The practical uses sought for my hope, therefore, should include the practical utility of that same hope for that other man. How shrewd are our brokers and promoters of all kinds of interests in making use of the collective character of human hopings, and in the manipu- lation of activities awakened and controlled by such hopings ! In devising methods for the utmost improve- ment of the practical uses of hoping, there is no other consideration inferior to that to which reference has already more than once been made. In order to sustain the conduct of life in an all-round way, so to say, and to the end of life, under the uplifting influence of hoping, there must be provided a constant succession of hopes. Among these hopes there would best be some that have the element of constancy abiding in themselves. This change of objects of desire and expectation affords, indeed, the way in which every individual is inclined to deal with himself, until, at least, he gets old in misfortune and quite wearied out with too [1051 WHAT MAY I HOPE? frequent and too monotonous disappointment of his hopes. If the lover loses at last all ex- pectation of obtaining the woman of his earliest hopes, he seldom needs advice before long to transfer his hopes to some other woman. And the girl of his first hopeful choice is probably no less ready to change her affections and her hopes to another lover. Occasionally, in the first but usually only in the first access of passion over the loss of hope, one of the disap- pointed souls thinks to cheat destiny by taking refuge in a self-inflicted death. Yet more rarely, when both are equally grievously af- flicted, they commit suicide together, d, la mode Japonaise. Then the pitilessly cynical bring out some such saying as "The game is not worth the candle"; or "There are as good fish in the sea as any that have been taken." But the wise and kindly deprecate the inability to turn from disappointed hopes to others which have still fair promise of fulfilment; but especially the lack in any mortal's inner life of those faiths which lay the foundations for hopes ever-freshly springing and eternal. It is the leading thought of the celebrated [1061 PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING life-motto of that greatest of all warriors and statesmen in the Old Japan, leyasu (the motto whose original is so carefully guarded in his shrine at Nikko, and so very seldom shown to visitors), that one should make the journey through life in the spirit in which the wise traveller sets out upon and pursues a long travel through an unfriendly land. This is with caution but never with the loss of true courage; with a fair and not over-sanguine or too despondent estimate of the difficulties of the way; with always tempered but never aban- doned hopefulness. But such moderation as this motto recommends can seldom or never be secured except as the result of the experience acquired by actual progress along the journey. And, therefore, the escape from the evil effects of the illusory character and disappointing end- ing of so many of life's hopes, can be gained only by a succession of such allurements, each period of which is marked by the soul's rising to a level of somewhat more reasonable and definitively moral, and, accordingly, more permissible forms of hoping. This is, indeed, the way in which most pedestrians, when the road is rough and [107] port* been WHAT MAY I HOPE? slimy beneath their feet, and the darkness of oncoming night renders invisible all signs of approaching comfortable shelter, do, in fact, keep up their courage and their hope. - If the hoped-for relief does not appear when the view from the nearest hill-top is gained, they re- place this hope with another which is to be realized only when the hill now just brought into view has, in fact, been climbed. There is many an old man who has kept himself sus- tained and cheery by a perpetual renewal and betterment of his hopes, although not one of them has been altogether, or even more than very partially, realized; and there is many a young man who has been forced to confess a total failure, because he has foolishly clung to some one, and that by no means a very im- portant one, of what might otherwise have his many hopes. We might then safely say in homely phrase to the one who questions, What may I hope? "You may hope for a lot of things; and you will do well to have and to cherish the members of a considerable succession of hopes." For life is not necessarily one-sided and all committed [108] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING to one or two hopes, or under subjection to one or two fears. Make your fears as few as possible, and your hopes as many. And there is one best, if not indeed one only way to do this. The fear of God may relieve the soul of the fear of any man or any thing beside. And the hope which trust in God promotes may bring in its train all other reasonable and morally per- missible hopes. But we return for the time being to a lower level for the embellishment of our theory as to the practical uses of hoping. The man whose principal expectations are related to the daily or prospective success of his business, may transfer some store of this emotion and its prac- tical utility, to the culture of some form of science or of art; or to intercourse with friends who need his hopeful encouragement against their depressing fears; or best of all, to the inciting and nourishing of reasonable hopes in others whose lives, without some such help, would inevitably remain wellnigh hopeless. The inventor who finds his hopes, as long as he looks in only one direction, circumvented, does not altogether lose all hope; but the rather [109] WHAT MAY I HOPE? turns his hopeful searching in another and per- haps quite opposite direction. The truly brave general who has been defeated in battle does not surrender all hope, and retreat to his tent to sulk or commit suicide; he contrives how he may hopefully try again with another kind of strategy. The student of music, whose hope of learning the violin has been quenched in the discovery that his tactile sensations are defec- tive, may turn his attention with hope to learn- ing the piano. Many a dull boy in the classical languages, who has in his own and his teacher's estimate reached the gloomiest regions of despair of ever knowing anything, may be roused to a condition of hopeful endeavor by the discovery that he can do well in mathematics or physics. For, we repeat, there are many hopes permissible for almost any human life; and if one of them will not bring forth the peaceable fruits of a hope fulfilled, some other may confer the same benefit by the early dis- covery of its practical utility. A certain versatility in hoping is, therefore, a most desirable attainment. A considerable mixture of the sanguine is most favorable for [1101 PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING every one's temperament. An education in the art of hoping, both as respects self-culture and the assistance of others, is a most important part of education. The influence of hopes disappointed, only to turn with no less con- fidence to other and more reasonable hopes, seems to be an essential method in life's dis- cipline. The illusoriness of all human hopes, except the few if such there prove to be that have foundations in the unchanging and eternal, may be made practical use of to im- prove the richness of human experience, and to gild the rareness of wisdom which they attain who get the most and best out of this experience. At this point, then, we naturally return to the thought of the important part which certain hopes take in making the best practical use of all human hopings for the upbuilding of personality. These hopes, and the beliefs and faiths on which they repose, constitute the most essential equipment for realizing the ideals of the personal life. On the one hand, these ideals and their faiths and hopes are so related to the practical uses of the personal life, and to the needs of its development, that mi] WHAT MAY I HOPE? its best success cannot be attained without them. On the other hand, they are of such a nature as to assume a well-merited supremacy of control over the attempts at realizing the lesser and lower hopes. They give the prin- ciples which should regulate all the practical uses of all manner of hoping. But, like all such principles they do not furnish the maxims, they do not teach the technique, which should con- trol the reasonableness of now encouraging and now discouraging this or that particular hope. The sources of such a technique are essentially the same as those in which are to be found all the rules for the management of the details of conduct. They are to be learned by insight, wide observation, knowledge of psychological science, and large experience. And they all imply a right moral attitude toward them. What, then, are the suggestions which should be improved not to say, the definite rules which must be adopted in order to realize the greatest practical utility in ourselves and in others, for this so often illusory but, in an ed- ucatory way, invaluable emotion of hope? Of these suggestions, the most important brings [112] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING the control of this emotion before the mandates of the moral law, as themselves supplied and enforced by the ideals of the personal life. The shrewdest practical use of some hopes, even if it caused them in the end to be crowned with the most distinguished success, is impermissible, because forbidden as inconsistent with the higher destiny of the spirit that is in man to be encouraged and cultivated to its own welfare under the ministration of hope. To have such hopes succeed is far worse, as measured by the worth of this destiny, than to have them end in total failure. And, indeed, they seldom do quite succeed; and when they seem to come nearest to a complete and brilliant success, their owner, who has really been their subject and slave, is far more apt to proclaim their worthlessness than his own joy in them and in their issues. But, as it were to balance this allurement of hoping to an evil issue, or to an issue the worth of which is determined by the bitterness of the disappointment, there are certain hopes permissible in their reasonableness and com- mended by the ideals of personal life, whose very [113] WHAT MAY I HOPE? elusiveness seems to add vastly to their value for practical uses. These hopes grow out of trust in the beliefs and faiths of morality and religion. They look toward the progressive realization, in the individual and the race, of the ideals of morality and religion. The result which is the consummation of these hopes, being an ideal existence, their full realization cannot be anything quite at hand, or obtainable in its perfection at any given date or stage of the development of the individual or of the race. But for this very reason, to those who apprehend them by a living faith, and who pursue them with intelligence and unflagging devotion, these hopes are all the more abundant in their practical usefulness, on account of this their illusory but by no means fatally deceptive character. They are, indeed, never realized in their completeness by those who cherish them most carefully, and prize them most highly. The more ardently one follows them, the more does their retreat beyond the region of one's present attainment, fill one with a kind of divinely chastening despair. But they are permissible hopes. From the higher, rational [114] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING point of view, they are reasonable hopes. And from the point of view of the mind that has reached a vital and forceful faith in the realities and values of the life of the spirit, they have become educative and even mandatory hopes. Of such hopes we shall distinguish these three: The hope of moral perfection; the hope of im- mortality; and the hope of a Divine Kingdom. How to put these hopes to their most appropri- ate and efficient practical uses is a question which can be satisfactorily answered only by that culture of feeling and judgment which we have already ventured to characterize as a kind of "Tact." On this matter of tact in the management of human hopes, no detailed instructions can possibly be given. If we had the courage to attempt such instructions, the time and place for them would not be now and here. But we may be permitted to quote a few sentences on the psychology of Tact from a work in which the subject is treated in more extended form. ("Philosophy of Conduct," pp. 420 ff.; from which some quotations are also made in "What Ought I to Do?" p. 241 f.) "The psychology [115] WHAT MAY I HOPE? of tact is an extremely difficult subject to treat scientifically. This is chiefly due to the two following reasons: first, the factors which enter into any judgment of tact are exceedingly subtle and evanescent; and, second, the complexity of the combinations of these factors in the in- dividual judgments of tact is very great. It is the rapidity and immediacy, combined with a certain sureness and appropriateness of his con- clusions, which gives to the tactful person his admirable ability to act aright under compli- cated conditions. This judgment has the char- acter of a judgment of first intention, as it were; we are inclined therefore to call it 'perception/ 'intuition,' or 'insight,' rather than a conclusion reached through any conscious recognition of the grounds on which it is placed. Indeed, the factors which enter into the concluding mental state, the decisions that determine what is to be done in the particular cases, arise so little way above the threshold of consciousness (if they come up out of the sphere of the psycho- physical mechanism at all) and blend together or disappear with such rapidity, as fully to warrant that view of the nature of tact which [116] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING the popular language implies. The How, and the Why, this particular judgment, rather than another, was actually reached cannot gener- ally be assigned by the person whose judgment it is." The fuller doctrine of tact would then go on to analyze its elements into these four: Sensi- tiveness of feeling or quickness of sympathy; insight into the motives of men, generally, and especially into the motives of those composing one's social environment; experience as to the consequences of different courses of conduct; and subtlety of reasoning, or skill in the drawing of detailed inferences. Since all these elements of tact are suscep- tible of detailed cultivation, it is not without warrant if the seeker for an answer to the question, What may I hope with the best chances of turning to good practical account my hoping? gets the somewhat vague, but after all not uninstructive answer: Cultivate diligently that rare skill in the selection and management of the hopes open to human minds and hearts, which, for the lack of a better word, we call a sort of Tact. And this is about all [117] WHAT MAY I HOPE? which it is worth while to attempt saying con- cerning the technique which aims to bring to the highest pitch of utility, for the individual and for the race, the illusory but invaluable, the risky but indispensable, emotion of hoping. There is one point of view, however, from which we may derive a profound reason for maintaining a most encouraging estimate of the practical utility of all human hopes, includ- ing in this respect, at least, even the most illu- sory and universally disappointing of many that are highly prized and snugly cherished. From this point of view we obtain insight into the usefulness of human hopes in relation to the freedom of the human will^XBy this we under- stand the value of hoping, on account of its power to evoke resolution and energy in the pursuit of practical ends which it would other- wise be quite impossible to arouse. How often does the great and final reward for this resolu- tion and this energy come not at all by the way of obtaining the things hoped for; but, the rather, in the first instance, by the way of quickening and cultivating to astounding growths the energies that would, were it not [118] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING for the summons of hope, lie quite dormant; and, second, by the way of securing many other and even more valuable goods than those, to- ward which, precisely, the hopes were originally directed. How often, fortunately, are the "by- products" of hope worth far more than any of its immediate and carefully planned satisfac- tions! The young man hopes for wealth or fame; he realizes habits of industry. He works seven years in joyful hope of Rachel; he gets Leah; but she is the better wife of the two. Indeed, there are hopes that are of more practical usefulness when they are let wither. The dried bud is sweeter than would have been the full-blown rose after its petals had soon fallen. But the main point is that moral free- dom could not reach either its more perfect development or its fuller outcome, were it not for the incitement and allurement of many disappointed hopes. Doubtless, if we could do such a hopelessly vast sum in the arithmetic of human emotions, and could strike off a bal- ance-sheet to show in complete detail the net profits over losses; the disappointments caused by the indulgence of false and illusory hopes [119] WHAT MAY I HOPE? would be far more than compensated for by the good results subjective, or in character, and objective, or in good things procured that had actually been reached by the exertions these same hopes had fostered. Man is made the freer, the more energetic and dominant spirit, by his hopes. Striving, and the increase of the "super-man" by striv- ing, is the greatest, the all-inclusive practical good of high hopefulness. If the things hoped for are selfish and morally unworthy of the free striving which seems to be needed to gain, or even to approach them, even then, certain heroic virtues may be aroused and cultivated by the unworthy hoping. Such are courage, endurance, self-control. But the true hero cannot be made, unless the chastening process of disappointed hopes is thoroughly applied. This is the lesson of all great tragedy, especially of the greatest of all tragedy, that of the ancient Greeks. This is the lesson of life. As says Maurice Baring, com- menting on Pushkin in his work treating of "The Russian People" (p. 217): "All the various roads by which men who are called to mental [120] PRACTICAL USES OF HOPING regeneration eventually attain it are in reality only two: the road of inward transformation, by which man attains to true self-control, or the road of a vital catastrophe, which liberates the soul from the burden of its passions." This is to say that, without the reaction of the free spirit to disappointed hopes, the end of mental regeneration is difficult or impossible for man to obtain. To the spirit who desires the perfection of spiritual heroism, and who asks the question, What may I hope? the an- swer may then well enough be: Set your hopes high and strive and pray to realize them. But be prepared to welcome disappointment in the matter of their realization, in order that you may the better share that purification of the spirit which has triumphed by gaining a free- dom independent of the immediate and com- plete satisfaction of any of its limited and particular hopes. [121] CHAPTER V CONCERNING HOPES, SCIENTIFIC, POLITICAL, AND SOCIAL MONG the greater hopes which may reasonably be cherished by every man who is sincerely willing to comply with the conditions of belief on which they are founded, we have selected three and have raised them to a claim of supremacy over all other forms of human hoping. These hopes have their practical utility in arousing and cultivating the spirit that is in man. However, they can scarcely be called universal in the sense of the dictum uttered by the wise man Thales; for all men do not in fact have them, whether they possess, or not, anything else. Not only savages, but also large numbers among the most highly civilized races, give little thought to their own moral perfection. To use the more definitely religious term, they neither prize nor cherish the hope of salvation. As to the hope of immortality, some vague belief in the existence after death of the human indi- HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL vidual is, indeed, nearly or quite universal. But perhaps in more than half the race, this belief is the source of fear rather than of hope; and where the attitude toward the belief is one, predominatingly, of hoping, its object cannot properly be dignified with the title "immortality," in the more spiritual meaning of the word. As to the hope of a Divine King- dom, while there are adumbrations of the con- ception of an improved social order occurring in various times and scattered places of the world's history, it is only in that form of reli- gious development which began among the Hebrew prophets and is even now scarcely on the threshold of its largest measure of legitimate influence, that the mind and heart of man find their completer satisfactions. Between these rarer but most permissible of hopes, and those which are universal but ordi- narily not so reasonable, whether we consider their moral quality or their practicability, stand certain classes of this emotion which par- take of the characters derived from both. On the one hand, they are less distinctly individual, less closely bound to the faiths of morality and [123] WHAT MAY I HOPE? religion, than are the "hopes of the spirit"; on the other hand, they are more intellectually expansive and unselfish than are the hopes which allure and control the multitude in their daily conduct of material affairs. They are not so intimately concerned with the immediate interests of the personal life, as it is led toward its distant and lofty ideals under the influence of its more noble desires, expectations, and forms of trust. Yet they have much of the same wide horizon, much of faith in the value and triumph of essentially the same ideals; and much of the same altruistic summons and call to self-devotion. They deal the rather, however,- with the concrete problems that con- stantly arise as to the most effective way to secure those practical issues, in the securing of which all substantial betterment of human life under its present conditions, so far as these conditions themselves admit of no substantial alteration, must consist. Thus these hopes have to do with the ideal of a world visible rather than the world of invisible ideals. They undertake the effort to realize a better envi- ronment for this earthly life rather than to [124] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL secure the immortal life. They devise schemes for improving the governments of this earth rather than for bringing about a Kingdom of Heaven, that must be conceived of, if at all adequately, in a timeless and non-sensuous way. This vague preface has been designed to in- troduce a brief discussion of three classes of the most generous and practically useful forms of the hoping of modern civilized peoples. They are the hopes which may be classified as (1) Scientific; (2) Political; and (3) Social. As to the relations of these classes to one another and to the development of the human race, two remarks seem pertinent at the very beginning. And, first: the means for the progressive real- ization of these different kinds of hoping are all, of course, dependently related and in a very intimate way. All political and social improvement, all reaching after and efficient maintaining of the means for organizing and enforcing an improved control over, and an increased welfare of, the great body of the people, is conditioned upon the state of the positive sciences among that people; and upon [125] WHAT MAY I HOPE? the amount of influence which the Government is ready to allow to those sciences. It is science which has made war more swift and more terrible. It is on science, next to the growth of the spirit of justice and brotherliness, that we must rely for doing away with the horrors, and even with the very existence, of war. As for all kinds of social reform and social better- ment, how dependent is society upon the re- alization of the hopes of the ever-advancing and ever-conquering scientific control over the forces of nature and over the bodies and minds of men ! But, on the other hand, unless the politics and social conditions of the land are under the control of those desires and ambitions for the satisfaction of which permissible and reason- able hopes may be entertained, neither the work of scientific research nor the benefits of applied science can be expected in the same exalted way. Unwisdom and unrighteousness undo the beneficent results of growth in knowl- edge. All this interweaving in the political and social fabric, of motives and results apper- taining to these classes of hopes is, in general, [126] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL too obvious to need illustration, and too com- plicated to make it possible in any thorough way to trace the separate threads of its texture. But we have spoken of these hopes, scientific, political, and social, as belonging to modern civilized peoples. This limitation applies quite strictly to the very nature of the case. Sav- ages, or so-called "primitive" races, give little or no evidence of entertaining not to say, even dimly conceiving any of these hopes. The conception of science, in the full modern meaning of the term, has not dawned upon their minds. Much less, then, is it likely that they have opened their eyes to take in those fair prospects of an imagined future, when the growth of human knowledge shall realize the yet more perfect fulfilment of that for which the most extravagant of its dreamers now scarcely venture to indulge the hope. This is not, however, because the savage, or even the "primitive man," is lacking in keen powers of accurate observation, shrewdness of insight, precision in his intellectual processes, or the higher gifts of a thoroughly rational nature. The ancient Greeks were surely not inferior to [127] WHAT MAY I HOPE? us in any of these intellectual qualities neces- sary to the nourishment of the most reasonable of human hopes. But for them, too, the con- ception of science, in the full modern meaning of the word, as applied to the physical world, did not as yet exist. By no means precisely the same thing can be said of the political and social hopes that are rising into prominence in our modern civiliza- tions. Savages and "primitive men" have, indeed, no such hopes. The hope of a political constitution that shall perfectly represent, and as nearly as possible, practically secure, the welfare of all the subjects coming under it, is much too large and too strictly conditioned upon its environment, and upon a long and intricate process of development, to have any place even in the dreams of savage and uncivi- lized life. The same thing is true of the cog- nate conception of an ideal social condition established among men here upon the earth. But for these conceptions, and the hopes con- nected with them, we do not have to wait upon modern times. Many centuries ago they formed themselves in China. The idea of the [128] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL perfect State, and of the perfect social organi- zation within and under the Government of the State, was supposed to be given by Confu- cius and Mencius in unchanging form. Yet nowhere else in the world, perhaps, have the hopes made permissible and seemingly reason- able by the adoption of this conception, been more sadly disappointed than in this same land of China. Nowhere else, perhaps, has govern- ment or society become, in fact, more miserably corrupt. From Plato's "Republic" to Rous- seau's Control social, and later on, there have been innumerable attempts to picture the ideal of human civil and social relations in such man- ner as to excite high hopes of its fulfilment in the near future. Some lessons as to the limi- tations of hopes scientific, political, and social, may indeed be learned from the past. But the character of these hopes at the present time is, in many of its important features, most worthy of our attention. In considering hopes as they are held by the positive sciences of the present day, one of the most important and illumining points of view is that which is taken when we arrive at an [129] WHAT MAY I HOPE? understanding of the nature of their limitations. The rights of hopes scientific are, indeed, of the most undoubted character. They are the rights which belong to all truth of fact, and to the legitimate inferences from fact. The limita- tions of the hopes of science are, then, only such as are consistent with those rights; as, indeed, flow from those rights. It is, indeed, greatly to the advantage of such hopes, prop- erly speaking, that they cannot possibly come into conflict with the moral law, or with the ideals of morality and religion. Individual devotees of science may often enough be con- victed of immoral desires and ambitions in their scientific pursuits; and of exciting expec- tations and fears as well as hopes in others, in ways not countenanced by moral principle. But the mind and heart of science, as such, is ever bent on the discovery and cautious but courageous proclamation of the truth. De- sires and ambitions directed purely toward the knowledge of God, man, and the world of things, and toward the better adjustment of the rela- tions of men to one another, to their physical environment, and to the Divine Being, can not, [ISO] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL as such, incur moral disapprobation as do the desires and ambitions which foster the hopes of any form of material and personal good. It is, indeed, true that in the thought of many, and among them peoples by no means lacking in the evidences of a high degree of civilization, the view has prevailed that the gods are jealous of too great increase of knowl- edge among men. For if knowledge increase among men, shall not they come to possess some of those secrets by which the gods evince their superiority to men; and in the secure possession of which the gods are able to main- tain their supremacy over men? Even the "divine Plato" at one time gave utterance to the opinion that to inquire curiously into the origin and construction of the physical Universe might be deemed to savor somewhat strongly of impiety. Yet wilder dreams concerning the way in which the Supreme One may have made the physical Universe have never come from any asylum for the insane than were indulged, in one of his most celebrated writings, by this same Plato. Our nobler idea of God and saner ideals of morality have removed such unworthy [131] WHAT MAY I HOPE? and childish conceptions of the limitations divinely set to the ambitions and aspirations of the human mind for an unrestricted right to seek the truth, and when found to make wise practical use of it. Of course, in absolving science from these limitations, we are not commending science, whether genuine or falsely so-called, for its attacks on religion, or for the uses made of its results to facilitate the outrages of government by violence, the greed of the avaricious, the swift and facile commission of crime, or the escape from the more immediate consequences of the indulgence in vice. They who make these uses of science must answer for themselves at the bar of moral reason, where neither "ne- cessity" nor personal advantage can serve in the slightest degree as an available excuse. They can not prate of science and its inviolable rights before the court whose issues are always decided with each individual man, according to the moral ideals that spring from the sources of the personal life. As to the intellectual, in distinction from the more distinctly ethical limitations of the hopes [132] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL of science, our opinions must modestly follow "the middle of the way"; although even its course is in places devious, and all along hazy and indistinct enough. That there are limita- tions set to the reasonableness on intellectual grounds, of the ambitions and desires which call forth and nourish the hoping of men for an indefinite increase of knowledge, and for an unrestricted ministry to the welfare of the race through the advance of knowledge, no devotee of science can possibly doubt. But precisely what those limitations are, only science itself can, by its own legitimate advances, with cer- tainty discover. The unchanging nature of the human mind, and the fundamental princi- ples, fixed laws and forms, and ultimate [ends, of the Universe, which science aims to know, must determine these limitations. For knowl- edge and "science" is only another and more popularly imposing name for knowledge is a relation between the two. The very concep- tion of knowledge implies a vital and effective correspondence between the Universe and the mind of man. But both the mind of man and the Universe which is but another name for [133] WHAT MAY I HOPE? the total environment of which man is a part are in a course of unceasing development. Of the spirit that is in man, we must say that we know it, as it is at present, only in part; and we can only faintly conjecture what, when per- fected, it shall be. Of the Spirit that is in the Universe, the individual and the race has only enough knowledge to stimulate the desire and encourage the hope of a never-ending process of learning more. Now there is a bad use and there is a good use which may be made of this view of the in- tellectual limitations of human scientific hopes. The bad use leads to a cynical agnosticism; and this temper is particularly liable to the temptation to assault the faiths and hopes of morality and religion. Science it is then claimed can get along as well without as with the belief that its principles and dicta have any sure ground in the reality of an "extra- mental" world of things and minds. But, of course, religion cannot; nor can a theory of the moral ideals that finds its final place of repose in the faith of a perfectly righteous personal Spirit as the Ground of this "extra-mental" [134] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL world of things and minds. Science may be satisfied with the phenomenal; morals and re- ligion must envisage Reality. While, then, the former may profess a sort of theoretical tolerance of agnosticism in its more absolute form; the latter can tolerate such agnosticism neither theoretically nor practically. But the good use of this doctrine of the in- tellectual limitations of man's scientific hopes widens indefinitely the horizon of these hopes; while at the same time it recommends modesty in the exercise, and caution in the application, of them. The genuine spirit of science will not regard its own hypotheses, or even its own most firmly established so-called laws, as having the right to set fixed limits to its hopes. This, to be sure, is too often done in the name of science. It seems to say to itself, "Now you must no longer hope to discover any fact in- consistent with this generalization" (for ex- ample, the conservation and correlation of energy, or the impossibility of "action from a distance"); or, "You must not accept any explanation of phenomena which appears to take them out of the limits of action and re- [135] WHAT MAY I HOPE? action as applying to a strictly mechanical system." In the name of the freedom of sci- ence, and in the interests of its right always with hope to extend its own limitations, we must protest its ever making itself the slave of its own laws. Laws are not laid down by the posi- tive sciences in order to limit strictly their hopes for the future; but, the rather, to mark the boundaries to which their past work in hope has already carried them forward. Laws are the vehicles in which science rides forward to places where it may, perchance, leave them behind; they are not the stone walls which it has built with its own hands, forever to bar its progress in any particular direction. The limits of the intrinsically unknowable can, indeed, never be passed by human knowledge. But we do not know what those limits are. We modestly recognize that such limits exist, In the name of science we neither boast that we have fixed them in forever unchangeable shape; or that we have just discovered the way in which they may all be removed. We move forward in a hope limited by many mis- takes and errors of the past; but also with a [136] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL hope that recognizes no final limitations save those as yet unrevealed ones which have been set by the hand of the Omniscient himself. In this spirit the reasonable hopes of science take two chief directions. One of these is the direction of a continuous increase of knowledge; the other is the direction of a continuously increased success in the practical uses of knowl- edge for the relief of the evils, and for the larger welfare, of mankind. In the first of these two directions, the goal which determines the hopes of science is the re- duction of the explanation of the Universe on its many sides to some form of a Unity. From facts to laws that bring restricted classes of facts under some one form of generalization; from these laws of a more limited application to laws of more extended generalization and of wider application; from these higher laws to principles that serve to combine them all in a still more comprehensive unity of thought; the positive sciences aim to extend their task of explaining the Universe as a whole. The ultimate goal of their hopes may be said to be the discovery of some one Principle that shall [137] WHAT MAY I HOPE? give unity to all the so-called laws subsumed under it; and that shall serve as a point of start- ing for the explanation of all the facts of experi- ence of which those laws are the generalization. So often, however, as any considerable ap- proach seems to be gained toward the realization of this Ideal, the embodiment of the hopes of the ages of science and philosophy, the bigness and mystery of the actual World of things and of men, seems to snatch the com- pound from the grasp of humanity, resolve it into its infinity of elements, and call upon the workmen to begin their task over again. Nearly a half-century ago, for example, certain formulas were propounded for all the manifold and mysterious phenomena of life; biological science thought to have realized its hopes, so long cherished in vain, of having at hand a comparatively simple explanation of the in- finitely varied differentiations of living forms. Then this one principle was subjected to scores, and finally to hundreds, of variations, some trivial and some so important as really to destroy the unity of the principle for the main- tenance of which they were offered. And now [138] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL the cry is, not "back to Darwin" or "back to Lamarck"; but "back to the facts." On renewed examination, the facts themselves are discovered to exceed in variability and infinity of number all previous stretches of the imagi- nation; and not a single one of the simplest of these facts is adequately explained by the most skilful combination of items selected from all the theories. Such experience of disappointed hopes as the facts of life administer to the loftiest desires and proudest confidences of the positive sciences in their efforts completely to comprehend the Universe, do not, however, serve to destroy those hopes forever and completely, or to upset for all time those confidences of success in the future. For by the advances of science man does constantly understand better both him- self and the world in which he lives. It is a particularly interesting thing to notice in this connection that the hopes of the positive sciences and the hopes of the philosophy of religion, or of that reflective thinking which aims to explain the phenomena of man's re- ligious life and religious development, show [139] VHAT MAY i HOPE? in respect of the goal they are seeking, a notable correspondence. They both seek some one supreme Principle of explanation for all the facts of man's experience. They both cherish the hope to know the World of things and of men, and the development of both in their reciprocal relations, as it appears when viewed in its Unity, and so as admitting of one Source, one Ground, one Final Purpose (sub specie aeternitatis) . And it will not infrequently, if not generally, be found, when they quarrel, it is over details of method rather than over the essentials of the grand conclusion reached by them both. The second of the two directions in which the hopes of science chiefly expend themselves, ad- mits of a more definite tracing and of more definite tests for its successes or its failures. It is the hope of banishing the evils of existing physical and social conditions by applying the discoveries of science to their mitigation or removal. Among such conditions, which man thinks he has the right to consider evil, are the obstacles thrown in his way, whether by nature or by his fellow men, to the more prompt and [140] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL complete realization of his desires for material good and for the relief of bodily sufferings and sicknesses. Modern science (especially as it is proclaimed by the press) greatly encourages these hopes. And who can deny that it has in a generous and notable way made good the hopes it has so freely encouraged? To support this confidence it is not necessary to go over again the ground of the illustrations used in answer to the question, What is the use of knowing? (Chapter X, "What Can I Know?") The comforts and safe-guards of our daily life are full of the illustrations of our obligations, of our enormous debt, to modern science. 1 There are, however, two considerations which form permanent limitations to the hopes of applied science in its beneficent endeavors to promote the welfare of mankind. One of these is derived from the moral sphere. It is not theological dogma alone which ascribes the larger proportion of all the evils that in- flict humanity to ignorance and to wrong-doing. But medical science does not inquire whether the patient to whom its ministrations are sum- moned, is suffering for his own vices, or for [141] WHAT MAY I HOPE? the vices of his ancestors, or without fault of either himself or them. It is as ready and as eager to relieve the sufferings of the licentious roue as of the purest mother in the throes of childbirth. Aeroplanes and submarines, and all the most improved machinery of war, are equally at the service of the injuring and the injured party. The burglar vies with the banker in his efforts to employ the forces of physics and of chemistry in the successful pur- suit of his chosen "profession." But even with all these and innumerable other similar facts in view, he is a short-sighted seer who pretends to descry the time when science shall do away with the evil consequences of hu- man ignorance and sin. The relation between suffering and wrong-doing is firmly bedded in the very constitution of the Universe itself. In- deed, from the religious point of view, the knot in the cord that ties the two together was made by the hand of God himself; and only He can loosen or resolve it in his own ap- pointed way. Neither individuals nor nations can reasonably hope to remove the limitations which the facts and laws and ideals of the [142] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL moral life impose upon the benefactions of science when applied to the relief of the suffer- ings of mankind. In spite of modern science the ancient doctrine of Karma will though it may be in changing form and in subtile and concealed courses hold on its way. The law of "ethical causation" will never be abol- ished or much modified by the positive sciences. No amount of tinkering will make the "covers of the devil's saucepans" fit tight enough to allow no odor of their contents to offend the nostrils. The individual's hope of salvation and the hope of the Kingdom of Heaven for the race, demand for their realization other resources and aids than those that can be pro- vided by the positive sciences. Ignorance and vice will still continue to limit the more extravagant hopes awakened by the growing consciousness of the power to control results which comes with the increase of knowledge. We are led along a somewhat different line of thinking to substantially the same conclu- sion by the fuller knowledge which the sciences themselves impart as to the irremovable con- ditions that limit every sort of advance in the [143] WHAT MAY I HOPE? realization of human hopes. The necessity of toil and suffering as the inescapable means of realizing the noblest and most legitimate of these hopes, this principle, too, seems em- bedded in the very constitution of the Universe. And all the mitigations of evil afforded by the positive sciences introduce us into a further knowledge of their own limitations. The new discoveries carry with them their own checks and embarrassments; or, if they do not do this in a quite obvious way, they bring to the surface the necessity of other kindred or more remote evils. New disadvantages still to be overcome; new obstacles in the path that still await re- moval; new disappointments for the enlarging desires; such are the experiences which dog the footsteps of every forward movement made in the fulfilment of scientific hopes. "The gods sell all things good to men, for toil," said the Greeks. The Kingdom of Heaven must still be taken by violence. And in the lower region of the more vulgar hopings: You can not indefinitely increase the price of butter and sugar and at the same time indefinitely cheapen the cake; you can not at the same time eat and [144] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL keep the same piece of cake. In the wise con- viction of the immovable nature of this sort of limitations, the different forms of modern science are quite as full of warnings against unreason- able hopes as of encouragements for an increase of reasonable hopes. Indeed, this is the chief office of science in the direction of the people's hoping, to encourage, and at the same time to keep it within reasonable limits. The case of hopes political and social is in certain important respects different from that of hopes scientific., In the civil governments and social constitutions and customs of men, the dominance of moral principles and ideals is at once apparent. These hopes have directly to do with the success or failure of the relations of men with one another. The desires and ambi- tions out of which the hopes arise, themselves lie all within the moral sphere. Ambitions, desires, and hopes, all have their immediate ex- pression in forms of conduct. And the sphere of conduct is the sphere of morality. From this fundamental fact follows the too often forgotten truth that the irremovable limitations of all hopes political and social are [145] WHAT MAY I HOPE? set by the conceptions, principles, and ideals of the moral personality, of the moral life and its development under the conditions of its physical and historical environment. Hopes of successful government and of happy and prosperous social relations are intolerable so long as they do not take these ethical limita- tions chiefly into their account. To socialistic dreamers and theoretical purists in government, and to the so-called practical man under the influence of extreme and cynical views of the hopeless corruption and irredeemable selfishness of human nature, these ethical limitations apply with equal cogency and comprehensiveness. As to the practicability of the hopes of the social reformer the truth remains the same, whether he has adopted the method of appeal- ing to the nobler ambitions and more unselfish desires, or of pandering to the more selfish passions and aspirations, whether of the few "leaders" of society or of the multitude sup- posed to be led. The political and social hopes of humanity present in this age a spectacle of the most amazing and partly discouraging, partly en- [146] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL couraging character. These hopes are charac- terized as never before in the history of the world, by a certain type which, under a great variety of modifications, is, nevertheless, sig- nificant of them all. They may all be said to be stamped with the "hall-mark" of Democracy, if we may be allowed to use this word with a sufficient indefiniteness and range of applica- tion. All over the world the democracy, the body of the people hitherto called and consid- ered to be "common," and denied what it now considers to be its legitimate rights in govern- ment and its worthy influence in the social aggregate, is forcing its way above the threshold of the public consciousness. It is whispering and muttering, or uttering hoarse and thunder- ous voices, which threaten the old forms of ordering both government and society, and which encourage high hopes to be realized through the introduction of these old forms re- formed, or of wholly strange and untried forms. This movement, so alarming in some of its aspects and so hopeful in other aspects, has not only seized upon the more autocratic of the governments, and strictly conventionalized of [147] WHAT MAY I HOPE? the social institutions, of Europe; it is a ferment in the veins of the body politic, and in the vital currents of the domestic life and religious rites, of China; it is increasingly powerful in Japan and India; it is finding its way into the sands of the desert and the jungles of Africa, and over the islands of the South Seas. Every- where it is accompanied by the uplifting of hope and, as well, by the downward drag of depressing fears. The underlying principle that the limitation of hopes political and social is set by moral conditions is neglected alike by those who dream in hope and by those who recoil in fear from the sight of the indisputable facts. This neglect is most conspicuous, if not most real and pervasive, among those who acclaim the name and assume the profession of Socialists. The illusoriness of their hopes consists in this. They assume that changes in external condi- tions and social relations can accomplish what is impossible without fundamental changes in the character of the human beings who control the conditions and who more or less voluntarily enter into the relations. Hence it is the im- [148] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL provement of measures, enforced by law or by the strike, or even by violence, rather than the moral improvement of individual men and women, to which they attach their hopes of betterment. Such hopes are from their very nature, and from the first, doomed to disap- pointment and to issues fraught with moral and social disaster. Other hopeful dreams, not to say, wild schemings of hope, indulged in by the advo- cates of a more democratic form of government, or by the patrons of Socialistic plans for the reconstruction of social relations, are either greatly modified or else wholly forbidden by the limitations which applied science puts upon all human endeavors. For, our growing knowledge of the physical universe and of the nature of man shows that most of these dreams can never, under the present constitution of Nature, physical and personal, be made to take the form of wake-a-day truth; that not a few of these plans are largely inconsistent with the fundamental conditions under which all forms of man's social organization come into being at all, or prove themselves unable to sustain the [149] WHAT MAY I HOPE? struggle for existence during any considerable length of time. That everybody should be made rich, or even provided with a satisfactory supply of material good by pooling the earnings of all; that children should be healthier and happier and more moral, when the care of the commune usurps the care of the family; that domestic purity and happiness should be pro- moted by greater freedom of divorce; that the ballot-box will be purified by doubling the number of voters; that business enterprises will be made more surely prosperous by multiplying tenfold the number of directors; that the edu- cation of the public school, when carefully kept uncontaminated by instruction in the fundamental truths of morality and religion, and under the domination of those who have little interest and less wisdom in such important matters, can afford a substitute for the training of parental discipline, the study of sacred scrip- ture at the father's side, and of prayer at the mother's knee; that human jealousies and in- justices and even the natural inequalities of men and women, born of widely differing ancestry and with widely differing natural [150] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL gifts and opportunities, should be adjusted and equalized by acts of Congress; all these and many similar hopes of the rising Democracy and the more extreme of the Socialistic sects, as long as the nature of man and the nature of things are unchanged, will certainly remain un- realized. Worse than this will be the fate of the endeavors at their realization, if continued in the neglect of the underlying principles and lofty ideals of morality and religion. Only an unworthy lack of sympathy and an excess of cowardice, however, can induce any thoughtful observer to look coldly and quite hopelessly on the current plans for a future that shall be characterized by greatly improved governments and profound social reforms. The world owes an enormous and as yet unpaid debt to its dreamers, not only in the fields of science but also and chiefly in the fields of political and social institutions. Never before in the history of the world have the benefactions of the few been so magnificent, the devotions of the many so persistent and self-sacrificing, as at the present time. Perhaps, we ought also to add, that in general, or at least in many [151] WHAT MAY I HOPE? quarters of the world, there has never been before so much of moderation in expectation, so little of fanaticism and extravagance of hope. But the great deficiency in the methods em- ployed for the realization of this hoping, and the chief source of threatening of its outcome, lie in the underestimate of the value, and the timid and distrustful practical use, of educative processes in the truths of morals and religion, and in the application of these truths to the conduct of the daily life. Reforms can never succeed, which do not direct their chief atten- tion and their efforts to the forming of character. Human character cannot be formed aright at the beginning, or reformed when, as always happens, it has indulged itself in the opportunity to shape itself awry, without the pruning and the vitalizing influences of spiritual truths and spiritual ideals. In its theory and its practice, the prevalent hoping of a Rising Democracy and its socialistic leaders, is partly and sadly wrong, but also partly and gloriously right. Many of these socialistic schemes have identified themselves with either an outspoken and contemptuous [152] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL rejection of the truths of religion, or with a mistaken apprehension and a too narrow inter- pretation of what these truths really are. In the former case, they have banished God from the world both of nature and of men. To the leaders of this movement it has too often seemed a truth which scarcely stood in need of demon- stration, that when the people get control of the civil and social institutions, which a crafty combination of Church and State has hitherto arranged for their subjugation, there will be no further need of a God to intermeddle with the affairs of mankind. Under the rule of the Democracy, science will prove quite sufficient having thus her free course and being glorified to provide for an unlimited increase in the welfare of humanity. More often, especially of late, it is the mis- taken apprehension and too narrow interpreta- tion of moral and religious truths and ideals which threatens even the otherwise legitimate hopes of the friends of reforms in state and in the existing social institutions. This deficiency of knowledge and source of weakness in prac- tice are shared by the greater number of [153] WHAT MAY I HOPE? the professed Christians or rather members of Christian churches who with the best of motives have ranged themselves on the side of the people in their efforts at reform. By them it is rightly claimed that the principle of broth- erly sympathy and brotherly love is essentially Christian and essentially socialistic as well. By them it is proclaimed, both in word and in works, and often in both most splendidly, that the faith of Christianity must show itself in works; and that the great field for its works is no narrower than the whole world. For it is indeed the people called "common," the race, whom God loves and is striving to raise into a fuller communion with himself and into the fuller enjoyment of the benefits which this communion secures. The Kingdom of Heaven is essentially democratic; it cannot come with- out the uplift of the whole people in the favor and the service of its King. But there are two respects in which we can commend neither the doctrine nor the practice of these good souls. For, while the religion of Jesus aims to bear fruit in various kinds of worldly welfare, its essential " other- world- [154] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL liness" is the fundamental characteristic which the ardent reformer is quite too apt to lose out of sight. Its practice would indeed deliver men from a vast burden of sicknesses and other kindred ills; but it does not promise to banish any of these ills from the limitations and neces- sities of the present life. The just and fair treatment of all which it commands, would indeed remove that immense burden of poverty which the avarice of the few or of the majority, the greed of the corporations or of the leaders of the labor unions, is so ready to lay upon the shoulders of their fellow men. But the re- ligion of Jesus does not promise to banish pov- erty and the endurance of its privations from among mankind. Its promise is of patience and grace in the bearing of these and other kindred evils. Its command forbids the vol- untary infliction of them by one man on his neighbor, by so-called superior tribes on so-called inferior, by powerful nations on nations that are weaker. It encourages the hope, and gives promise of the arrival, of better times in this world, for all the people; but its peculiar prom- ises are other-worldly; its kingdom remains [155] WHAT MAY I HOPE? forever where it was left by its founder, not of this world, but of the world of the spirit, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God. The other misapprehension which character- izes the democratic and socialistic hopes of the day, even as those hopes are entertained by multitudes of good Christian people, concerns the method of the religion of Jesus. In this respect, this religion is like all religion, like religion essentially considered. Religion deals primarily with the individual, in his individual relations, in his utter loneliness before God. The one question which it presses is this ques- tion: "What is your standing with God?" "Are you right with Him?" The one reform which it urges upon every human being is the forming of one's own spirit after the pattern of the Spirit that is Divine. Attempts at reform in the name of religion, or which call to their aid the forces of religion, while neglecting this great truth, can never hope to succeed. In their democratic and socialistic movements, they carry this question of self-reform straight to every human soul. And the rewards which they promise to the individual, or to the society, [156] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL or to the nation, that wills to reform itself in this way, are primarily the rewards of the spirit that has placed itself in right relations to the Spiritual Source of every form of real good. While, then, we, too, have generous welcome and high hopes for the modern movements toward securing more of the good things of this life for all the people by improved government, and by changes for the better in social relations, our welcome cannot be too unconditional or our hopes too extravagant, if we aim to rest in the reasonable and safe attitude to the move- ments themselves. Hopes political and social, even high hopes, are permissible; but in order to be reasonable, they must be controlled by the ideals and principles of morality and re- ligion, and tempered by the wisdom which comes only from the ages of the experiences of human history. There are hopeful indications on the whole, not a few that many of the promoters of this phenomenon which we have ventured to call the " universal rise of the Democracy," both in high stations and in low stations, and consider- [157] WHAT MAY I HOPE? able numbers of their followers, are coming to realize the inevitable limitations of their hopes, and the indispensable conditions of the ful- filment of them so far as they are capable of fulfilment at all. "Seated in the place which I occupy to-day," said not long ago the President of the French Academy, on welcoming the poet M. Paul Bourget to its membership, "Renan, on receiving Cherbuliez, spoke of the old faiths which he believed to be disappearing and said: 'It is the formulas to which, never- theless, we owe the remains of our virtues. We live of a shadow, of the perfume of an empty vase. After us they will live from the shadow of a shadow.' . . . He spoke thus thirty-two years ago, and behold the sacred vase, the Grail from which our forefathers drew strength and hope, filling again. New generations are rising for whom afresh the height is peopled with stars, generations whose best representatives are, while insisting on the verification of thought in life, yet again be- lieving while not ceasing to know." About the same time, M. Defrenne, president of the alumni of the Normal School of Paris, [158] HOPES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL who had years before publicly proclaimed that he regarded God as merely the superstition of an early and unscientific age, made the following significant confession: "The methods of educa- tion generally employed to-day have lost their attractiveness in emptying themselves of re- ligious tradition; for the religious tradition, be- ing essentially the human tradition, is eminently fitted to train men." "I avow," he goes on to say, "to our confusion and our shame, the pov- erty of the teaching which we give our scholars, the narrowness of spirit that characterizes much of the matter which we put in their hands, the baseness of soul in publishers and authors, which certain changes in the manuals witness to; finally, the pure ignominy of certain falsi- fications." But the same kind of dissatisfaction is not only permeating the most thoughtful observers of the deficiencies of our own existing system of education, both academic and public, but here as elsewhere, it is finding expression in the councils of the settlement-workers and of the labor-unions. In the former the impression is gathering strength that without making fuller [159] WHAT MAY I HOPE? use of the religious motive, and raising the standard of their moral ideals, the rescue of the unfortunate and the reform of the criminal is a practically hopeless task. And do we not hear that the labor-unions are not altogether strange to the voice which proclaims Jesus as the "working-man's friend"? 160] CHAPTER VI THE HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION HE feeling from which, as from a root, springs every form of the complex JLL emotion of hope, is the desire for some kind of known or imagined good. It is desire which is the spur of every form of human en- deavor. Without this spur continually thrust into his side, the lazy animal man would remain content under conditions where supply barely sufficed for maintaining the needs of a bare existence. Progress in every form of industry, art, and conquest over the obstacles opposed to the completeness of the spiritual life, would be at an end. Especially would the aspirations and ambitions which incite and forever stimu- late all attempts at realizing the perfectibility of the personal life cool to a degree below which this life could no longer exist, much less make any noteworthy growth. Dissatisfaction with the present, the refusal to rest content with the measure of good already attained, while imagi- [161] WHAT MAY I HOPE? nation persists in picturing the allurements of a good so much beyond, that is, at least, pos- sible of attainment, is, therefore, a state of mind which is the necessary antecedent or the constant accompaniment of every form of hope. All this is mere common-place in theory and practical maxim, so far as the cherishing of the lower forms of human hoping is concerned. He who is satisfied with his scanty ration of black bread, hopes not for an increase in wages or for an improved crop from his small plot of ground. The hope for more comfortable and decent clothing must be preceded by a distaste for filth and rags. The expectations which are held forth by promoters of all manner of cor- porations, by leaders of labor-unions, and by guilds of artisans, or organizations of grangers; all economic hopes are started and nourished by unsatisfied desire. The same thing is quite as true of hopes scientific, political, and social. With regard to these lower forms of hoping, however, we have already seen that they must submit to certain limitations, in the interests of morality and of common-sense, if they are to receive the approbation of being called quite [162] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION reasonable, or even, in not a few instances, at all permissible. It may be reasonable to ex- pect the addition of cheese and garlic to one's ration of black bread; and that every laborer shall have meat once a week, or (more timidly, pace the beef -trust and the exigencies of cattle- raising) every day; but the indefinite extension of the luxuries of the table so as to meet the unlimited desires of a people, all of whom have become epicures, is scarcely an object for rea- sonable hoping. This kind of desires, and the hopes they kindle and nourish, are in their very nature strictly limited, and should be self-con- trolled. Such is the decision reached by con- sent both of moral consciousness and of sound common-sense. The same thing is not quite true at least, it is not true in the same way of hopes sci- entific, political, and social. Such hopes are not diminished in their permissibility and rea- sonableness by the limits encountered in the stages of their origins and in their early devel- opment. We do not say to science, "Now that you know so much about this or that force or law of nature, you ought to be satisfied and [163] WHAT MAY I HOPE? henceforth strictly control your desire for fur- ther knowledge." Having learned within such limits of accuracy the distance of the sun from the earth, or the speed of light, or the nature of radio-active substances; we do not ask, "What is the use of trying to know more?" Having gained some facts with regard to the localiza- tion of cerebral functions, we are not halted by the inquiry, "Why try to localize them more accurately?" Even less do we recom- mend ceasing to try to discover the causes and cure of cancer, because some progress has been made in this field of etiology and therapeutics. We no longer rebuke the most audacious specu- lations of science as to the origins and funda- mental principles governing the workings of the universe's mechanism, on the ground that to speculate too curiously will be likely to offend the jealous gods, and will induce them to trouble the welfare of men anent their too ambitious projects. In fact, the more we know, the more we want to know. For the desire of knowledge feeds upon itself; and the call to self-control in the hopes it engenders is not directed toward limiting the extent of those hopes, but, the [164] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION rather toward regulating the manner of their gratification and the practical uses made of the rewards which never more than incom- pletely satisfy them. This characteristic of indefinite growth to the desire that awakens the dissatisfaction, to which, in turn, the fulfilment of hope offers only a partial and temporary appeasement, is yet more obvious in the case of the nobler hopes political and social. There are, indeed, instances of government notably that of ancient China, and shall we add? modern Ger- many where a rarely complete satisfaction with themselves has partially paralyzed the effort for any radical improvement. But the desire of perfecting the politics of any country, when thoroughly awakened, is one of those desires which it is difficult to bring to an end by limiting them to any objective, short of a complete realization. And political perfection is not a goal which seems very near to the stages on the road already reached by any of the existing governments. Therefore, we think it wise and fair to say: "One must not expect perfection in one's government, be it that of [165] WHAT MAY I HOPE? an autocracy, a constitutional monarchy, a republic, or a pure democracy." The ideal may be set in that really fine and stimulating phrase: "A government of the people, by the people, and for the people." But until all the people are reasonable in their desires, wise in their measures, and moral in their aims, such an ideal will only, at a distance far away, realize their hopes. Desires for political improvement, however, should not cease to be stimulated, and themselves to stimulate endeavors that look toward continually better results in hope. And no condition is less hopeful for any form of human government than to get the impres- sion that it alone is perfect, or pretty nearly perfect; and that the outside world is, in com- parison, only barbarian. Even more obvious and emphatically true is much of what has just been said, when ap- plied to the hope of social betterment. This hope, when genuine, arises out of the most altruistic desires and ambitions; it needs only wisdom in order to place it among the noblest of the hopes of the best of the race. Indeed, as has already been hinted, it is itself closely [166] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION related to the religious hope of a Divine King- dom. Nothing partial and final fully satisfies this admirable hope. The ideal of the socially perfect life for the individual and for the race is an ideal which lifts itself still more unattain- ably high, the nearer we think ourselves to have devised plans for attaining it. This ambition for social perfection, for the completion of the ideal relations between individuals as existing together in society, the only way in which personality can be developed, or indeed come into being at all, has a sort of divine permis- sion to allure without ever fulfilling its seeming promise to yield itself to man's grasping after it. The desire of it is never finally circumscribed; the hope of it is never fully satisfied; but by being left unsatisfied, the hope itself is never finally quenched. It is ever being disappointed; but it is never quite disappointed, disap- pointed, that is, once for all. In this description we cannot fail to recog- nize something which belongs inseparably to the ambitions of the artist in every form of art. Dissatisfaction is the characteristic of the artistic temperament. Its hopes are never [167] WHAT MAY I HOPE? fully realized. This is because they are the hopes of completeness, the hopes that, in order to be quite realized, must achieve the ideal. But it is of the very nature of the ideal, that it does not assume in the mind of man at once, or at any one time, an absolutely fixed and final form. Thus Newton before his death speaks of himself as "a child picking up a few shells on the shore while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him." Michelangelo passes away, a "life- wearied and labor-hardened man," but praising the limitless beauties of the Chris- tian religion and the unattainable power and mysteries of art. And Beethoven, after having finished the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis, laments: "I feel as if I had written scarcely more than a few notes." This passion for perfection is at the height of its nobility and strength only when it has for its object the attainment of the ideals of morality and religion. The desire for moral completeness, which the especial terminology of religion converts into a longing for a "full salvation," when once fairly aroused, intro- duces into the Self a never-ceasing and never [1681 HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION quite appeased dissatisfaction with itself. The soul that aims at moral perfection can be satis- fied with nothing less than perfection. The spirit that once has a taste of salvation can never desire less than a "full salvation." As with all other similar ambitions which have in themselves the essence of infinity in measure of quantity and of time, so this passion for moral completion must either lead the spirit on in hope, or cause it to react in indifference, or to sink down in despair. It is to the encour- agement of the hope which responds to this passion, by the way of pointing out not only its abstract permissibility but even its prac- tical reasonableness, that we now direct our attention. The historical persistence and magnitude of the hope of moral perfection, the "hope of sal- vation," both as cherished by the individual person for himself, and by the many for the many, or by the "good few" for the race, is an impressive fact. Modern physical science, and human history in most of its records and in many of its aspects, would lead us to minimize the importance of the individual, and empha- [169] WHAT MAY I HOPE? size the insignificance of his hopes. As affect- ing the great whole, what recks it whether one or more individuals get their wings scorched and fall to the ground, having had the hardi- hood to fly too near the central Sun of all spirit- ual light and truth? And, indeed, how dare this grovelling animal, weighted down with a burden of petty ambitions, fears, disappoint- ments, and cares, aspire to the realization of a hope like this? Yet, one impressive answer to the inquiry intended to test the reasonable- ness of such presumptuous daring is the fact that man does so dare. A certain hopeful attitude toward the ideal of moral completeness, a certain kind of the hope of redemption, has by no means been con- fined to Christianity alone. Even the Orphic Mysteries, with their taint of heathenish and non-religious rites and conceptions, aroused and ministered to the beginnings of this hope. And there are religions of redemption, religions of salvation, which antedate the birth of Christ. "How shall a man," asks the Zend-Avesta, "stand right with the Father of the pure world?" And, again, "What is the Way of [170] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION Salvation, the way back to the All-Father?" It is the moral completeness that is entitled to be called "salvation" which the doctrines of Buddhism hold before the expectant soul; it is the hope of this salvation which these doc- trines desire to commend to the soul. Beyond all other religions, Christianity is the religion of redemption. It awakens and stimulates the passion for moral completeness. It promises as the goal of its devotion the fulness of salva- tion. And its fundamental law for the regula- tion of conduct is the word of Jesus: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." We are not at the moment commending this hope of moral perfection to the individual, or expounding the conditions upon which he must, if at all, realize the fulfilment of the desire for salvation. We are simply calling attention to the existence and influence in human history of the desires and ambitions to which this hope speaks words of encouragement and confidence. Reference to this remarkable fact was made in an earlier volume of this series, in a Chapter on "The Weight and Worth of Moral Ideals." [171] WHAT MAY I HOPE? It was then declared that "the ideas of ethics are not mere ideas, or mental images of real things and actual occurrences, revived in memory and reconstructed with an attempt at scientific precision by an act of imagination. These ideas are, the rather, of the sort which artists construct; for, indeed, moral conscious- ness is given to dreaming, has no little of ses- thetical quality, and tends to evoke many pic- tures of things the exact likeness of which is not to be found 'on sea or land' or in any civic or social construction. This kind of work on the part of moral consciousness is no modern affair, or rare gift belonging to the most highly gifted or civilized races. It belongs to the hu- man race, to the personal species, to man as a spirit and an artist of creative talent in matters of the spirit. And it is an historical fact of supreme significance that, even in the lowest stages of human development and among the most uncivilized and savage tribes, in matters of conduct and character a distinction is always recognized between what in fact is, and the idea or ideal of what ought to be. This is to say that, strictly speaking, moral ideas are [172] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION ideas of value. The feeling of moral obligation is a binding to something which has a worth of its own. The reason for this estimate of worth may, indeed, lie outside of the act to which the feeling is directed; but this reason carries with it the weight of an obligation only as it has connection with something which has a worth of its own intrinsic moral worth" ("What Ought I to Do? "p. 154 f.). On reiterating these statements, in order that their fuller significance in the present con- nection may be the better appreciated, it is necessary to call attention, yet more emphati- cally, to the intrinsically unlimited nature of the desires and ambitions in which the hope of moral perfection has its perpetual living spring. He who has lost the ambition for a still improved moral and spiritual development no longer strives and hopes. The self-satisfied Self is in the most hopeless of all conditions with respect to the progressive realization of the desire for moral perfection. The faith of religion that has degenerated into a present confidence in the already accomplished completion of the process of salvation is no longer entitled, to the [173] WHAT MAY I HOPE? hope of an ideally perfect salvation in the future. But this hope which stretches forward to- ward an ever advancing and rising ideal, and which is satisfied to follow with eagerness and courage an object that seems ever farther from complete possession, needs to have reason on its side, as do all other justifiable, not to say, permissible human hopes. It can answer for itself; though not so much by way of bringing forward facts to prove its satisfactory realiza- tion in the past, as by way of expounding its own intrinsic nature and pointing to what in fact its worth appears to be to the aspiring spirit of man. The faiths on which the hope reposes have evidential value in themselves. To ask after the worth of moral completeness, that incomparable good which sets the goal and prescribes the limitations and laws for all the conduct and the evolution of the personal life, is to ask a question which is either utterly unmeaning, or which carries its own answer with it, and needs not to borrow reasons from the outside. "All the values that are ascribable to right [174] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION conduct, in itself and in its consequences, have their final issue in the nature of personal life, and in the relations which can exist only be- tween persons. Beyond this life itself, there is nothing that has value or that can furnish any standard of values. Beyond the value of shar- ing in the highest and best of this personal life, there is nothing, either as a type of existence or as a continuous state, that possesses any real worth. 'What shall a man give (or take) for his personal life?' To answer * Nothing,' as though one were estimating values in a com- parative way, does not go to the depths of such a question. For not only is there nothing in value to be compared with this life, but there is no standard of comparison outside of, or be- yond, the issues of this life. It embodies all values in itself. If we take the point of view of him who put before us the question, 'How much better is a man than a sheep?' after the question mark we can only place the sign of infinity. So far as the sheep has any value, it must be stated in terms of personal worth. For we are not asking the market price of the two of the sheep in the shambles and the [175] WHAT MAY I HOPE? human slave upon the auction block. In asking the question, we are not simply admitting the superior, but the rather the incomparable, worth of personal life " (" What Ought I to Do?" p. 264 f.). From this estimate which the moral beliefs give to the worth of the moral ideal that is, the ideal of moral completeness, of the perfec- tion of the personal life it follows that the hope of possessing this ideal (the desire which pursues in hope, the expectation that trusts the increasing reward of approaching the ful- filment of this hope) carries the grounds of its reasonableness in itself. Is it not reasonable for the spirit to seek in hope that which, for it, is the supremely valuable good? To the mind which has the faith, the question as to the reasonableness of the corresponding hope, promptly and satisfactorily answers itself. But you ask yet again: "Is it then reason- able for one to pursue in hope a good that is, in its very nature, essentially unattainable in its completeness?" By all means, Yes. Moral growth is attainable; and from the point of view of the moral ideal it is for the individual [176] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION person the supreme good. (The still more in- clusive truth that this good for the individual cannot be attained or approached or even con- ceived of, except as embracing and enfolded by the corresponding social good, we omit for the present to take into account.) But like every ideal good and more reasonably and abun- dantly than any other form of the ideal this one of moral completeness, when approached, never ceases to retreat in a divinely alluring way. The good of following it is realized at every step of the pursuit by the soul that con- tinues to believe in it as the supremely valuable good. Were it to be fully attained, it would then cease to stimulate ambition and to secure the pursuit of itself in hope. It is this sort of worth, both ideal and for the practical uses of the personal life, which characterizes all that has most of intrinsic and eternal worth. It is known as bearing the image of the Supreme Ideal; it is followed because conceived of, as it were, sub specie aeternitatis. Such truths concerning the nature and the hopes of completeness for the personal life, take a form that seems clearer to the popular [177] WHAT MAY I HOPE? consciousness and that appeals more powerfully to the heart and to the will, when they are presented in terms of the religious experience. Then we speak of the faith on which the "hope of salvation" reposes, and of the reasonable- ness and assurance of such a hope. This ex- perience entitles one to say: "I believe that I am 'in the way' of being saved; and by fol- lowing this way (the 'path of salvation') I am permitted to indulge the reasonable, not to say the assured hope, of ever drawing nearer to a 'full salvation.'" In all the religions that minister at all suc- cessfully to the hope of salvation the door to that hope is opened by an act of faith. So true is this that faith, when considered as the atti- tude of filial piety, the relation of affectionate trust, is identified with religion, subjectively considered. The man who has experience of this faith is the religious man. To employ a vulgar but expressive phrase: he "has got re- ligion" by placing himself in the filial attitude toward his God. This faith is also called "sav- ing faith"; because it sets the one who has it in the path of salvation; and he who persists [178] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION in holding by it, is guided in this path. Such a faithful soul enters upon and continues in the "way of salvation." But faith cannot save the soul, or even start it well in the way of salvation, unless it becomes the ministering source of hope. "We are saved by (or in) hope." The wholly and finally discouraged be- liever if, indeed, such a permanent mixture of incompatibles as faith and despair were pos- sible would scarcely merit to be called one rightly started in the way of salvation. This form of hoping, too, like all forms of the emotion, is subject to an examination of the grounds of its reasonableness. Primarily considered, such grounds are to be found in the character of the beliefs and faiths which have awakened the hope, and which will be con- stantly "drawn upon," as the phrase is in other somewhat similar matters of individual experi- ence, to nourish and to guide the hope. If the faith is not sound, the hope will be false. If the faith is sound, the hopes based upon it are thus rendered reasonable, essentially so, if not in every particular. For religious hopes, like all other emotions of this kind, often de- [179] WHAT MAY I HOPE? mand certain magnificent and strange and al- most fantastic constructs of imagination on which to feed themselves if they are expected to grow. Thus heaven may take the form of a city with gates of pearl and streets paved with gold, rather than a condition better than it can "enter into the heart of man to conceive" and than any human tongue can undertake to express. In the individual believer the way of salva- tion is entered upon by an experience which brings the conviction of its own value and effi- ciency with itself. With regard to its practical value the experience of a genuine religious faith is its own proof. It proves its value by its work. Excrescences of beliefs and lingering superstitions not a few may cling to it; much growth in knowledge and testing by success or failure in the conduct of the religious life, may be necessary through long stretches of time and by the help of many bitter mistakes, in order to slough them off. But if the sound kernel of faith is there, the conditions of hope are established beyond the necessity of denial or rebuke. [180] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION It is quite time to call back our thoughts to the very limited nature of the essay which we have undertaken to make. The theological doctrine of the Way of Salvation, whether as derived from a comparative study of all the religions which provide for the men of their faith instruction on this matter of chief con- cern (the religions of redemption, properly so- called), or from Christianity, with its incom- parable system of religious truth and of helps to the achievement of moral perfection, the theological doctrine of "The Way," is not the task of this essay. Its attempt is of some- thing far less difficult and dealing with a less exalted theme. We have raised as the last of four important practical questions, this one: "What may I hope?" In the suggestions thrown out toward the partial answer of this question, the psychological nature of the emo- tion of hoping, its rights and limitations in the culture of the personal life, have been partially investigated; and some things which seemed pertinent and useful have been added as to the assurance, the reasonableness, and the practical uses of different kinds of hopes. [181] WHAT MAY I HOPE? In the course of this investigation there have been disclosed certain ambitions and desires that grasp after the ideal good revealed to the human mind by the reasoned faiths of morality and religion. Among them appears the longing of the human spirit or at least, if this is all we are entitled to say, the longing of some human spirits for moral completeness. In these souls, at least, arises a passion of desire for that relief from moral imperfection and weak- ness, from "missing the mark," from sinning and the bitter fruits of sinning, which in the language of religion appears only as the result of a completed Divine work of redemption. To be sure, in the lower stages of the race's moral evolution, these desires and ambitions are ob- scure, perplexed, and even gross in their con- ception of what is really wanted; if indeed they exist at all. But that they do come into exist- ence, at seasons and in spots, as it were, when conditions are favorable to their upspringing, there can be no doubt. And whenever they appear with any good degree of strength and purity, they bear the marks of infinity and eternity. They are the fruits of the spirit that [182] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION is in man, the potentiality of a development which shall bring man nearer to the moral like- ness of the perfect Ethical Spirit whom a rea- soned belief presents to his mind as the object of trust and devoted service. It is not without significance that they who have most realized this potentiality are called "saints" by their fellow men. No other facts in the history of the evolution of personal life are more potent and noteworthy than are the facts which bear witness to these spiritual desires and ambitions. They have sent multitudes to wandering along many by- paths, seeking blindly for the "way of salva- tion." To discover and point out that way, and to induce men to follow in it, has been the special, appropriate task of the religions of redemption. As the results of their seeking, they minister hope to these ambitions and de- sires. For this kind of hoping is as much an impressive phenomenon and a forceful fact of human history as are the desires and ambitions to which the hope aims to minister. Our mod- est task would be incomplete, then, would in- deed be relatively unworthy of attention at all, [183] WHAT MAY I HOPE? if we neglected to give special importance to the reasonableness, and to the permissibility Yes, even to the obligatory character, of this form of hoping. But we repeat, it is not a part of the attempted answer to the question, What may I hope? as a problem of which some satisfactory practical solution is eminently de- sirable, to present the fuller form assumed by the theological doctrine of Salvation, and of its divinely ordained Way. We shall treat this hope as we have treated other hopes when their reasonableness is inquired into from the points of view taken by the science of psychology and by that exercise of reflective thinking which is called the philosophy of religion. From these points of view, the first thing to be noticed with reference to testing the reason- ableness of the hope of salvation is this: it is by its very nature adapted to secure its own realization. A hope looking toward complete- ness of moral and spiritual life, which may be attained by following in the right way, is itself as has already been said a saving hope. It is of essentially therapeutic character. It has healing value. The soothing, as well as stimu- [184] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION lating character, essential to this emotion, may be made resourceful in every form of human endeavor. Indifference and despair are prejudi- cial to all kinds of health bodily, mental, and spiritual; and to the recovery of health, when it has been temporarily impaired or lost. Sick- ness of heart, and feebleness of will, mean the same thing as loss of hope in any form of human life; but above all in the life of the spirit when it sets out on the path toward the winning of its ideal conditions and limitless rewards. So that it may be said in common parlance, though from the psychological point of view: "There is no sense in entering upon the Way of Salva- tion unless one may have some good degree of hope of attaining the end of Salvation." To seek moral completeness without any hope in the process of completing would, indeed, be folly that could be scarcely better acquitted of the moral obliquity attaching to all folly, than to cherish no desire for moral completeness. But hope lends a helping hand in the conduct of the business, that is legitimate and obligatory for every person; because it is, in fact, the business of realizing, as far as possible, the ideal of per- [185] WHAT MAY I HOPE? sonality. The hope of salvation is, in fact, a reasonable hope, because it is, in fact, an efficient hope. But both faith and hope, and the claim to reasonableness, as well as the practical efficiency of both, in their effort to realize the ideal of moral completeness (the salvation of the spirit that is in man), depend upon the success they have in guiding the desires and ambitions into the right Way of Salvation. That faith and hope stand at the entrance to this way, and that they are indispensable to guide and cheer all along the way, needs no further proof or even remark. But at this point the importance of right opinions as to the "cult" of religion comes prominently into view. The primary object of this cult, which is essentially the same in every form of religion, but which attains by far its highest degree of clearness and purity in the Christian religion, is thus stated by De la Saussaye: it is "to maintain the proper and desirable relationship between man and God, and to reinstate it when it has become clouded." Thus understood, however, the nature of any particular form of religious cult will necessarily [186] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION be determined by the conception of what is "the proper and desirable relationship" be- tween man and God; while the conception of this relationship will depend chiefly upon the conception of God. If the divine beings, with whom it is proposed to cultivate the proper and desirable relations, are conceived of as merce- nary or of doubtful and capricious character, then sacrifices, incantations, magical formulas, and prescribed gorgeous or bloody rites, will be assumed to be necessary in order to keep them friendly. But if the way prescribed by Jesus, with his spiritual conception of God as Father, be followed, then, whatever outward forms are adopted as matters of convenience or of concession to the limitations of the human imagination, the worship must be "in the spirit and in truth." The complex nature of the feelings that enter into the practice of every developed form of religious cult was recognized by Darwin when he wrote: "The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, com- plete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, rever- [1871 WHAT MAY I HOPE? ence, fear, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements." (As quoted by Max Miiller, Gifford Lectures for 1888, p. 69, note.) It is no wonder then that the various attempts to classify the phenomena of man's religious life according to the nature of the religious cult employed, like most similar attempts at classification, have been far from successful. But there are two forms prescribed for follow- ing the Way of Salvation that are rightly given the most prominent place in all the greater re- ligions; and that are even indicated by some of the most thoughtful sentiments uttered by devotees of the lower forms of religion. These are Prayer and Sacrifice. The nature and efficiency of both, in promoting the interests of moral completeness, depend upon the con- ception of God, in communion with whom prayer is the medium, and the perpetual sacri- fice of the Self is the service, leading toward the end of salvation. From the point of view of the history and the philosophy of religion we are justified in agreeing with Tiele when he declares ("Ele- ments of the Science of Religion," Second [188] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION Series, p. 133): "The most general, the most constant, and therefore the most important element in worship is Prayer." "Nor do we know," he adds, "of any religion, however de- veloped, in which prayer does not occur." "Thoughts," said the Mandan in North America with reference to the sun-god, the progenitor of his race, "are the best means of reaching him." From a much lower conception of the nature of worship and its place in the Way of Salvation arises the syllogism which is of almost universal currency among the people of India: "The whole world is under the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of the mantras, The mantras are under the power of the Brahman; Brahman is therefore our God." The nature of prayer as a psychological and philosophical necessity for every one desiring, in hope, to follow the Way of Salvation, is of a quite different order from that provided for by any maxims similar to those quoted above. The office of prayer is to put the soul of man into communion with God. And without such communion there can be no hope of finding [189] WHAT MAY I HOPE? or successfully pursuing the right Way. The path leads through, is, in fact, included in, the life of such spiritual communion. Some- thing like this belief is found in the naive, the so-called "natural," religious consciousness of man as he stands in the dawning of the spiritual life. It is the spoken word which is everywhere thought of as the most intelligible and powerful means of communication between man and his fellow man. It is speech, with its appeal and its answer, which facilitates most speedily and most completely the communion of which personal life, as needing much more and sup- plying much more, in distinction from merely animal life, is capable. "Probably," says Brinton ("The Religion of Primitive Peoples," p. 89), "the word is regarded as a magical power in itself." This is the idea of the mantra. It is a mystical formula to which the gods can- not help paying attention, as the saying is. But when in the individual, or in the com- munity of believers, religion has become some- thing far different from magic, with its low- thoughted conception of bargaining with the divine beings, or compelling them with mantras, [190] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION then the inward word of prayer becomes rea- son's most appropriate and efficient way of establishing communion between man and God. Like all the greater hopes, however, or rather, as becomes the very nature of the emo- tion of hoping in general, the hope of sal- vation has its sources in certain faiths. The ministry of this hope which is found in the communion of the human spirit with the Divine Spirit depends for its reasonableness on two beliefs: on that of the receptivity of man, and that of the Divine grace. The hope of an ever-nearer approach to moral completeness is justified only if the belief in the capacity of man for an unlimited moral development is a reasonable belief. In Kant's philosophy of the Practical Reason, the demand of the moral law for such moral completeness was considered to be convincing proof of the Being of God, the author of the law; and also of the immortal des- tiny of man as having capacity, as a Free Will, for such completeness. The Kantian argument is not a demonstration; and the emphasis must be changed as respects man's part in the process necessary to the progressive realization of the [191] WHAT MAY I HOPE? hope of moral completeness. Not by the power of his own decision alone, even when followed by most strenuous endeavor, is man capable of a task like that set by the uncon- ditional law of the moral life. That it would be "easier for a man to cross the gulf of hell on a hair than to live without once sinning" may be a rough and startling way of stating the truth; but the truth is not far otherwise, none the less. Man, as born and conditioned in this, his earthly environment, has not, in fact, the capacity for the requisite moral completeness. But he has the unlimited susceptibility for moral improvement. Man's attitude must be one of willingness to receive, if man's efforts to improve are to be undertaken and carried for- ward with a reasonable hope. And it is through communion with God in prayer that this will- ingness takes form and bears its legitimate fruits. The hope of salvation is made reasonable by the inspiration which comes to man's spirit, in its need of wisdom and strength, by the way of communion with the Spirit of all wisdom and all moral power. To say this is not to drag in [192] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION the supernatural, or even the supernormal, in the fatuous effort to explain phenomena which admit of sufficient explanation in terms of that which is natural and normal to human experi- ence in other spheres of human activity. It is not even to draw a hard and fixed line between the supernatural and the so-called natural. It is simply to maintain at its full value, as neces- sary to all understanding of every phase and every fact of the so-called "natural," the indwell- ing presence and power of a personal Spirit, who is essentially, but not spatially or tempo- rally, Super, as respects all the mechanism with the detailed operations of which the positive sciences quite lawfully busy themselves. To refuse to recognize the inspiration to courage and the guidance in wisdom which they ex- perience who keep the terms of communion with the Source of inspiration, is no more com- mendable, from the scientific point of view, than to refuse to recognize any other most patent class of facts. This same hope receives the support of com- fort in the disappointments, sorrows, and losses that are inescapable in this present life, by the [193] WHAT MAY I HOPE? same avenue of communion with God in prayer. Here, too, the theory of such experiences, if we are inclined to insist upon a theory and to this there is no reasonable objection re- quires no denial or neglect of any of the facts and laws of the so-called natural order, on which the positive sciences so emphatically, and often impatiently, insist. A man of science may well enough be a man of prayer. And if he is sufficiently modest in his scientific claims, he may be a very much convinced and eloquent advocate of the spiritual benefits of prayer, especially by the way of keeping up one's hopes of salvation. ' If now we turn our attention in the other direction we recognize at once the intimate connection between the reasonableness of the hopes inspired and sustained by prayer, and the kind of faith in God which is held by the one who prays. It is to God as the gracious Re- deemer that the prayer of hope is offered. This conception of the Divine Being is not one that has been suddenly imposed upon the race in a sort of thaumaturgic fashion. It is, the rather, a conception that has grown strong and glorious [194] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION in the religious history of the race, and as sup- ported by the reasoned faith of millions of men. We find something approaching it in that most ancient book in the world, the Maxims of Ani, where we read: "Pray humbly with a loving heart all the words of which are uttered in secret. God will listen to thy words; He will accept thy offerings." More abundantly in the prayer offered by the great Assyrian monarch to his god Marduk: "According to thy mercy, Oh Lord, which thou bestowest upon all, Cause me to love thy supreme rule, Implant the fear of thy divinity within my heart, Grant to me whatsoever may seem good before thee, Since it is thou that dost control my life." The doctrine of a redeeming God developed in ancient Egypt with the cult of Osiris; and prayers to God as the redeemer of the bodies and souls of men administered the hope of salvation to not a few in the ancient world. It was among the Hebrew prophets, however, that the conception of Divine Redemption took its most glorious form of hope in pre- Christian times. To the last, however, this con- [195] WHAT MAY I HOPE? ception was national rather than individual, political rather than distinctly spiritual. The answer which sprang from the consciousness of Jesus was a faith in God as the Redeemer of every individual soul that would take toward God the attitude of piety; and of the race, through the continued proclamation and grow- ing efficacy of the offer of redemption. In the religion of Christ, as it took shape after his death, the Hope of Salvation assumed all the marks of a true and complete universality. His message is therefore a Gospel, a ministry of the hope of salvation. "The conception of God as the Redeemer of mankind reaches its highest form in Christian- ity; and by ' highest form' must be understood the form that is most intimate, most effective, most comprehensive, and most rational. To establish its intimacy an appeal to the experi- ence of the Christian believer is the only avail- able or conceivable proof; for this quality is expressed in the subjective attitude of the personal consciousness toward its own weak- nesses, miseries, and sins. To feel relief from these is to be, so far forth, here and now re- [196] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION deemed. From the individual's point of view, the redemption is the relief. The efficiency of the redemption offered and furnished by Chris- tianity may also be in a measure shown his- torically; for an appeal may be made to the fact that the religion of Christ evinces its own essential being in diminishing, as judged by all the objective signs, the amount of human misery and sin. In similar manner, the com- prehensive character of the redemptive process is shown both by the essential content of Chris- tian truth, with its democratic offer of salva- tion, and by its actual entrance into the life of humanity, as a redeeming force, irrespective of differences of race, of social condition, of stages of culture, or even, in a marvellous way, of previous moral conditions. And, finally, it is the work of Christian apologetics, in the broadest meaning of this Study, to show the rationality of the Christian doctrine of God as the Redeemer" ("Philosophy of Religion," Vol. II, p. 4021). The ministry to the Hope of Salvation in the form of Sacrifice is in its origin and lower stages characterized by much of superstition, cruelty, [197] WHAT MAY I HOPE? lust, and selfishness. It has the form of offering a bribe, of paying tribute, or even of deceiving by a trick. "The Redskin offers his sweat; the Black offers his saliva or his teeth; the more practical Greek, a lock of his hair, or even all of it. The Peruvian pulled out a hair from his eyebrow and blew it toward the idol." But here again, we must look for the fragrance in the blossom and not in the bulb, for the purity in the flower and not in the mire out of which its stem struggles upward. Thus the priest, on approaching the god at Abydos, de- clared: "I come before thee, thou Great One, after I have purified myself. ... I am a prophet, and come to thee in order to do what should be done; but I do not come in order to do what should not be done." Out of this condition of doubt emerges the clearer vision of the prophet Micah who sees that the Divine One is not pleased "with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil," but with justice, mercy, and humility, and all in the sight of God. And from this we ad- vance to the Christian conception and practice, which makes the ideal of sacrifice culminate in [198] HOPE OF MORAL PERFECTION a rational, free, and affectionate surrender of man to God; and to the perfection of this surrender in a life of devoted service. In this form, Sacrifice joins with Prayer, in a ministry to the hope of salvation, by effectively pro- moting the actual process of salvation. And at this point the ideal of moral completeness seems nearly or quite to fuse with the purest and most comprehensive religious conception of a "full salvation." If, then, one raises the practical question, What may I hope? with reference to that ideal of personal life for the individual which the faiths of morality picture as moral per- fection and the faiths of religion present in the conception of Salvation, there should be no unsurmountable difficulty in finding an answer to the question. Judged by the tests appropriate to it, this hope seems reasonable enough. It is, indeed, something not to be grasped in a sudden and convulsive way. It is a prize to be won as the end of a long and devoted pursuit, and a faithful use of the appro- priate means. But it has the characteristics which belong to every kind of an ideal; be- [199] WHAT MAY I HOPE? long, indeed, in the highest degree to this highest of all the ideals. It reposes in faiths that transcend the world of sense, but are justi- fied by the desires, expectations, and confi- dences of the spirit that is in man. They are not limited, as are the beliefs and hopes which have to do with material good, by the condi- tions of time and the present environment of the sensuous existence. They have the char- acteristics that come, as we have frequently said, under the conception of eternity (sub specie ceternitatis) . The hope that springs from these beliefs and faiths requires its own special form of culture; and as described and com- mended by the religious experience of the race, its cult requires communion of the spirit of man with the perfect Ethical Spirit of God, in prayer, and a life of rational, free, and affection- ate surrender, in service. The nature of this service will become clearer when disclosed by the hope of a Divine Kingdom. [200] CHAPTER VII THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 'T was a saying of Spinoza that all hope neces- sarily involves dread, and every fear implies a corresponding hope. This saying would seem to apply to the attitude of different in- dividuals, and even of different peoples, toward the belief in an existence after death. The belief itself is well-nigh universal. Indeed, Wundt goes so far as to say that all primitive races think of the spirit as a sensible existence separable from the body, and thus have the way paved, as it were, for the expectation that this spirit will not cease to live and to manifest itself after the death of the body. More par- ticularly, an authority on the religion of the early Greeks, remarking on the reasons for the conjecture that a "soul-cult," "an honoring of the spiritual essence which lies hidden in man and after his death separates itself for an independent existence," belonged to the Greek civilization, adds these confident words F SOI 1 WHAT MAY I HOPE? "as, indeed, everywhere on the earth, to the most ancient practices of religion." We have then a very interesting problem, not only in the comparative study of religion but also in the nature of the life of religious beliefs and emotions, brought to our attention by the fact that perhaps fully half of the race have looked upon the continuance of existence after death, with prevailing fear rather than with any approach to a cheerful hope. "It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded," said Epictetus, "but the fear of pain or death. Hence we commend him who says: 'Death is no ill, but shamefully to die.' Courage, then, ought to be opposed to death, and caution to the fear of death." It is not, however, the "fear of death," which is opposed to the hope of immortality, but the fear of that which is Beyond. Indeed, when in battle or great peril of any sort, and especially in articulo mortis, men in general exhibit no great fear of dying, in itself considered, if it could be so considered. Nature lets her children down with great tenderness into the apparent HOPE OF IMMORTALITY oblivion which follows the loss of all the bodily marks of continued consciousness. When we inquire into the causes of this dif- ference in the attitude of different individuals, and indeed of whole peoples, toward what follows death in respect of the unavoidable con- tinuance of the soul, or spiritual principle be- lieved to be separable from the body, the answer is not that which those who regard the subject from the point of view solely of morality or religion would seem bound to expect. This is to say that, in fact, the causes of the differ- ence do not appear, on examination, to be mainly ethical or religious at all. They appear, on the contrary, to have little to do with morality or religion. Both before and after the destiny of the soul has come to be considered as largely influenced, if not wholly determined, by the higher and more rational interests, not only different individuals but whole peoples show singular tendencies in divergent directions, either of despondency and dread, or of joyful anticipation and of hope. *; In the case of individuals, doubtless, much account is to be taken of the influence of temper- [203] WHAT MAY I HOPE? ament; much, also, of the conditions of comfort or discomfort, and of the common pleasurable experiences, or almost constant misery, amidst which their life is being spent. Perhaps, also, we are quite warranted in speaking of a prevailingly hopeful'or desponding temperament as the char- acteristic of an entire people. Even in these lat- ter days, under the instructions and influence of the Christian religion, and amidst the improved conditions of secular life, it is by no means always the most truly saintly who are most sure of their own future happiness. The main reason why some look with hope and some with great timidity or positive dread toward existence after death (it will be noticed that we are not as yet speaking of "immortal- ity," properly so-called) would seem to be a difference in the love of life. And this difference in the love of life is itself mainly dependent on differences in the experiences of life. Those tend toward hope of a continued existence after death, who have the love of life; and those are apt to love life, who have found life on the whole worth living, if not quite positively good. What has just been said is illustrated in a [204] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY striking way, when we compare the view of future existence for the individual held by the ancient Egyptians with that of the Indians. It cannot be claimed that the moral doctrines of the former were any less clear than those of the latter; or that their religious convictions and tenets were much less advanced. But the Egyptians loved life ; and life in ancient Egypt, being the "gift" of the manageable and usually beneficent Nile, was on the whole a good and happy thing; while always, even quite down to the present time, drought and famine and the awful burden of caste, have made life among the countless millions of India an undesirable thing. Thus from time immemorial in Egypt the "darling idea" of the people has been the continuance of the existence of the souls of their dead. But the desire of the multitudes of India has been "to get off the wheel," to the perpetual turning of which in an endless round of miserable existences yet more mis- erable, if that were possible, than the present existence was proving itself to be the remorse- less theology and selfish cult of Brahmanism had forever consigned them. An elaborate [205] WHAT MAY I HOPE? doctrine of immortality had therefore existed from very early times among the Egyptians, as is proved by inscriptions on the walls of pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, that are as old as 3000 B. c. To the righteous one who appeared before the Judge of the Dead, the verdict ran: "I give unto thee all Life, all Stability, all Power, all Health, and all Joy." But from the wicked his heart was taken away in punishment; he could not have in this condition a quite perfect physical existence even. In Egypt, however, the conditions of accept- ance with the Judge of the Dead, and so of per- mission to live on in by no means a "half -bad" way, were not impossible or extremely difficult to secure. The candidate for immortal life must at least be able to say, "I have not robbed, nor murdered, nor lied, nor caused any to weep, nor insulted the gods." But in India, any reasonable hope of a life beyond, that should be no worse than the present life had been, was, for all except the Brahman, well-nigh unattain- able. And with the ancient Egyptian the re- ward of righteousness was a real life, a continued [206] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY existence in which the individual soul should preserve its indentity; while the ideal of im- mortality of the Brahminical type was the ab- sorption of the individual into Atman, or the World-Soul, from which it came forth. Hence the way of salvation which Buddhism offered to the distressed people of India was the denial of the Brahminical doctrine of the substantial eternity of the soul, and the need of its salva- tion by the Brahminical priesthood and cere- monial. Buddhism also feared the existence of the soul after death. For the lack of the love of life, since life was not known as lovely in India, obsessed the new religion as well as the old. Hence the pathetic meditation of its faith: "Subject to birth, old age, disease, Extinction will I seek to find, Where no decay is ever known, Nor death, but all security." But Buddhism was powerless in its benevolent purpose to relieve the hearts of the people, by substituting the hope of immortal life for the dread of immortality as a ceaseless living death. Not famine, nor battle, nor mortal disease, nor [207] WHAT MAY I HOPE? suicide, can promise success to him who is trying "to get off the Wheel." His cry must ever be, "What misery to be born again, And have the flesh dissolve at death!" The hope of immortality, as we are to raise the question of its permissibility and reason- ableness, is a different feeling from that which simply looks upon the continuance of the con- scious life of the individual after death with a certain pleasurable expectation, or at the worst, without positive dread or repugnance. The state which we call "immortal" cannot be the object of dread. Belief in existence after death may be the occasion of much unpleasant antic- ipations; but the removal of this belief cannot give birth or, in the remotest way, occasion, to the hope of which we are going to speak. Something quite definite must be added to the belief in its universal or so-called natural form, in order to make it the object of hope; and with this addition it cannot remain the object of fear as, according to Spinoza's dictum, the corresponding opposite to the hope. Let us now consider how, in the moral and religious [208] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY evolution of the individual and of the race, the required change is brought about. As we have already seen, there is little room for doubt that the mature Self quite instinc- tively, if not with perfection of logical thinking, clings to the belief that death does not at once and forever end its existence. Indeed it might almost be said that this belief arises in the mind of the savage or primitive man from a psycho- logical inability rather than from a logical proc- ess or a rational necessity. As Von den Steinen says of the native of Brazil: "He knows he will not die." The primitive custom of burying the dead in the uterine posture, the wide- spread belief in one's own double, the custom of interring with the dead the equipments and conveniencies of a future life, the fear of the ghosts of the departed, the supersti- tions that universalize the manifestations of spiritual presences, and scores of other similar performances, all these indications bear wit- ness to the prevalence and spontaneity of this belief. To return to the more thoroughly rationalized conceptions of Buddhism: "life is like a horrid corpse around the neck;" or to [209] WHAT MAY I HOPE? the thought as expressed in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus: "All beasts are happy, For when they die, Their souls are soon dissolved in elements, But mine must live still to be plagued in hell." The belief in an existence to be expected after death may take any one of several forms. It may be expressed in the doctrine of Atman, as reference has already been made to that doc- trine. It may be carried to the point of an attempt at demonstration, as a postulate of the Moral Law, in the fashion of the "Critique of Practical Reason" by Kant. Or it may take the more naive form of the tenets and rites of the lower religions. Or, finally, it may spring as a rational hope out of the very nature of the more ultimate and permanent of the faiths of morality and religion. But as soon as the "ethico-re- ligious" character to the belief gets itself es- tablished, in whatever form, the state of the dead becomes closely dependent upon their standing before the gods, or before the Alone God. The kind of future existence, or even future existence at all, is now conditioned on [2101 HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the relation of the human person to the divine personalities, or to that One Alone Person, "whom faith calls God." It follows, then, that the character of the faith and the hope of immortality held by the enlightened and de- vout of any people will in general accord with the purity and reasonableness of its moral ideals, and the practical attitude of its indi- vidual members toward the Object of religious worship. The facts which support the statement just made are quite too numerous and complicated to admit of detailed presentation at the present time. Indeed, they are coextensive with the entire process which has been going on through centuries of the development of religious doc- trine and practice in matters of so-called "es- chatology." "The eschatology of a nation," says Charles in his "Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life," (p. 310), "is always the last part of their religion to experience the transforming power of new ideas and new facts." As influences over the mind of the individual, as well as of the whole people, with respect to the morally and religiously "colored" hope of [211] WHAT MAY I HOPE? immortality, we have already recited two effi- cient factors, temperament, and the love of life as dependent upon experience of the value of life. The Self cannot, indeed, be imagined as in reality existing, without existing somewhere; if not in any of its hitherto accustomed haunts, in some place; or without continuing in some time, it may be at a slower or a quicker pace of movement, but still in some order and through some endurance of an actual succession of states. Any title of everlastingness or eternity applied to the human soul cannot essentially change its conception of time. Eternal existence for the soul signifies, as regards time, only the re- fusal to set a limit. For the existence of the soul after death, there is only one kind of time conceivable; and this is not Kantian or Berg- sonian time, but only what in a somewhat dif- ferent way from the scientific employment of the term, may be called just "common time." It seems necessary to say thus much, in order to save this conception of the continuance of the existence of the individual after death, as implied in the separability of the soul from the HOPE OF IMMORTALITY body, against the risk of being lost in the fog of an inconceivable mysticism. Such a fate would undoubtedly destroy the practical value of the hope of immortality for the average man, however clearer it might seem to make it to the thought, or dearer to the sentiment, of a select group of metaphysicians. There is one respect, however, in which this natural belief must be greatly changed if it is to be converted into a faith on which to repose the reasonable hope of a desirable immortality. This improvement and elevation have been, however, amply provided for it in the course of its historical evolution. The belief in the soul's continued existence after the death of the present body becomes of importance to re- ligion only when it takes the form of a vehicle for carrying forward into an indefinite future the faith in the moral values, and the stability in development, of the personal life. The ways of expressing and emphasizing this connection are various indeed. But the con- nection itself is highly important, is, indeed, absolutely essential to the reasonableness of the hope. [213] WHAT MAY I HOPE? Now, while it is true, on the one hand, that the natural (?) belief in the existence of the con- scious life of the individual after death is not sufficient to warrant the hope of immortality, in the fulness of meaning which we wish to attach to these words; it is obvious, on the other hand, that the disproof of this belief would be the destruction of the hope. For it is the deathless existence of the individual as a real person, with self -consciousness, recognitive memory, reasoning powers, and the capacities and sentiments which appreciate the value of sesthetical, moral, and religious ideals, whose hope of immortality we aim to secure. The problem of the continuance of the species for an indefinite time, under the future physical conditions of the planet Earth, is not our present care. That problem may be turned over to the physical and chemical sciences, in their application to subjects which have hitherto proved too vast, and which probably are intrinsically baffling, for their shrewdest conjectures. Nor is it our intention simply to commend the wish to be remembered by future generations for having done well by their in- [214] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY terests; the noble but rather vague and sen- timental hope which George Eliot expresses in her hymn, "Oh! may I join the choir invisible," etc. Nor, once more, is it the hope of absorption into the Infinite, of attaining that dreamy state of existence in which all the characteristics of personality are, not glorified, but the rather extinguished. The hope of immortality, in our meaning of the words, cannot repose on a belief that the soul lives on, while surviving the total and final loss of all those characteris- tics, the possession of which give it the claim to be called a soul in the "first instance," as the phrase is. These remarks would seem sufficiently to justify a somewhat lively interest in the univer- sality of the belief in an existence for the in- dividual man after death, in however crude manner the belief may express itself, and with whatever fantastic details it may please the unrestrained imagination to decorate the be- lief. This vigorous and thoroughly healthy interest of the primitive and savage man in [215] WHAT MAY I HOPE? his own Self seems very significant and in- teresting from the point of view which must be assumed by one who inquires, "May I too indulge, in a reasonable way, the hope of im- mortality?" On this point, our sympathy is with the common-sense savage rather than with the metaphysician of a mystical turn. When an attempt is made to estimate the causes which chiefly contribute to the univer- sality of the belief in the soul's existence after death, the more obvious among them belong to two classes. Such a belief seems to be de- manded by the primitive man, in order to ex- plain the phenomena of his dreams, and other psychic manifestations that indicate the sepa- rability of the soul from the body. He sleeps and wakes again to find that he is still in the same physical surroundings. Those who have watched him during his hours of slumber can amply testify that, although he may have rolled over once or twice, he has not moved from the spot in which he laid himself down. But he has in his dreams been far away, in battle or in the chase; he has seen his departed ancestors or hereditary foes; and he remembers [216] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY much which has happened in that "far-away," of which his immediate surroundings bear no trace. Often, too, when he is in dreamy mood but really quite awake, he has seen the ghostly forms recognizably the same and yet how changed of human beings that have left their bodies behind them, either at death or when they had at a great distance entered the land of dreams. Indeed, to his mind there is no lack of spirits embodied, and yet more or less readily changing their bodily shapes. In fact, to the savage or even to the civilized man, one soul does not seem nearly enough to do all the business of which the complex nature of man is plainly capable, at the same time or on different occasions and at different times. To quote from a work in which this subject has been treated in detail ("Philosophy of Re- ligion," Vol. II, Chapters xliv and xlv): "So vague and shifty are the notions of the soul's reality which are in general held by sav- age and primitive peoples, that their beliefs make it impossible to determine which one of the several souls possessed by any individual is going to be preserved. Indeed, it seems equally WHAT MAY I HOPE? possible that several of them should continue at least for a time in existence after death. The savage, in his effort to account for all his experi- ences, readily endows himself with the requisite number of souls. The natives of West Africa are the possessors of no less than four spirits each; the Sioux have three souls; some Dakota tribes rejoice in the sacred number four; and the Navajos, according to Dr. Matthews, think of one of their souls as a sort of astral body. Other tribes of savages are proud of, or troubled with, no fewer than six or seven. Taoism in China provides each individual with three souls; one remains with the corpse, one with the spirit's tablet, and one is carried off to purga- tory. And lest the civilized sceptic scoff at this, he may be asked to remember, not only the threefold designation of the Hebrews, of the animal (nephesh), the human (ruach), and the divine soul (neshamafi), but also Plato's thumos, epithumia, and nous; or the vari- ous conscious, sub-conscious or sub-liminal, and dual, triple, or quadruple selves of some modern psychologists " (p. 488) . As to our own faith, we have often enough declared that one soul for one [218] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY man is quite enough, if only it is enough of a soul. It is easy, however, to attribute altogether too much influence over the universal belief in the existence of the individual after death, to the phenomena of dream-life and to similar phenomena. For, as one investigator of the subject from the historical point of view has aptly remarked, although the endowment of every living thing with a soul of its own is Homeric enough, the Homeric world is not troubled with ghosts; and after the body is burned, the soul does not any longer have the power to show itself even in dreams. Strictly speaking, the experience with dreams and cor- responding psychic experiences, although they may furnish the occasions, could never of them- selves account for man's belief in the continu- ance of his soul after the death of the body. Dogs dream; and if the problem could be laid before them, they would probably be less able than is the naive, natural man to conceive of their own vanishing from conscious existence. But dogs can not raise the problem, much less believe in their own immortality, because, al- [219] WHAT MAY I HOPE? though they dream, and in their dream-life, more fully than in their waking life, resemble man, they are not, like man, metaphysical beings. The reason why man universally, when not sophisticated, so to say, believes in the continuance of the soul after death, is that he has arrived at the notion of the separability of the soul from the body. In his thought, soul, or spirit, has come to have a sort of in- herent existence. It is conceived of as a being which not only can exist apart from the visible physical organism, with which it is most ob- viously connected in its ordinary operations, but is an essentially separable entity; for it does other things when, so far as all visible indications can determine the case, it is not in or with this body. But this is an on- tological affair, a metaphysical belief, in- stinctively inferred (if we may be pardoned such an unusual and not quite fitting com- bination of terms), rather than rationalized by being thoroughly thought out and defended against objections urged from whatever point of view. This ontological belief, or positive conscious- [220] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY ness of being, at least to imagination and thought, separable from the body, though all characteristics of this imagined being are sub- ject to the fundamental limitations of the body, is essential to the development of per- sonal life. But we must now descend to the more fundamental consideration of the primi- tive belief, and then rise to the higher flights of ambition, expectation, and trust in which the ethico-religious hope of immortality con- sists. The experiences which through many cen- turies of human history have induced the unre- flective mind to believe in the separability of the soul from the integrity of structure and functions of the animal body, do not have the same standing as of old, in the light of modern science. The same thing is true of the argu- ment by which the natural and substantial indestructibility (a sort of non posse mori) of the soul was formerly established in the current theology and philosophy. These facts put upon the advocate of the reasonableness of a hope, at least for some, of immortal life, the task of carefully examining by the aid of modern WHAT MAY I HOPE? science the objections which are now urged against the primitive belief. By denying the possibility of maintaining self-consciousness and the other requisites for personal existence, after the dissolution of the physical organism, these objections destroy the hope of immortality at its very root. They maintain that the ab- solute dependence of the soul on this organism has been now proved beyond all doubt. In- stead of what is called Soul being "naturally" indestructible, the series of phenomena to which we give that title is they assert in its very nature, inseparably and essentially bound to the functions of the brain and other organs belonging to the nervous system. When these organs suffer dissolution, or the permanent loss of their power to perform their functions, the series of phenomena which, if it cannot properly be called one of these functions, is, at any rate, inseparably connected with them, of necessity comes to an end. To hope, therefore, for its continuance, or its resumption in connection with some other form or style of body, is to hope for the essentially impossible. In so trenchant and complete fashion does the claim HOPE OF IMMORTALITY of modern science dispose of even the hope, based on whatever moral and religious grounds, of an immortal life. The objections to which reference has just been made are all of one order. They are all physiological or psycho-physical. They are based, however, on a collection of detailed facts determined within certain limits by a vast amount of careful observations and experimen- tation, such as was scarcely dreamed of by the Kantian criticism of the metaphysical proof of immortality, not to say the ancient scoffers and Sadducees. To examine them thoroughly would carry us through many volumes; even to summarize them would be difficult within the limits of a single volume. The results of more than forty years' study of the subject enables the author to say that, in his judgment, the case as it stands at present is a "drawn battle," with the accumulating evidence from the purely scientific points of view turning against rather than in favor of the objections. The empirical results may be summarized in somewhat the following way. There is, on the whole, a notable tendency of the evidence toward WHAT MAY I HOPE? the view that, while the soul, regarded as a self- conscious and rational being, and so capable of developing in accordance with sesthetical, moral, and religious ideals, is, as known to us through its sensuous manifestations, dependency con- nected with the bodily organism; still this con- nection is not absolute and necessarily final: it may be and, indeed, there are certain good grounds for believing that it is capable of developing powers by which it shall outgrow this condition of dependence. Or, to state the conclusion in a more succinct and yet figurative way: The body is the temporary vehicle of the soul in the earlier stages of its journey, rather than its only and perishable but inescapable prison-house or home. The relation is instru- mental and functional, but not "substantial" in any one of the several justifiable meanings of this much-abused word. A brief statement of the principal classes of facts which look, now this way and now that, will serve a convenient purpose at the present point in our attempt to make reasonable the hope of immortality. And first, we may refer to the general conception of life, which the biol- [224] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY ogist regards simply as the complex of phe- nomena shown by natural organic bodies. "The miracle of life," says Haeckel, "is essen- tially nothing else but a change in the material of the living substance, or metabolism of the plasma." From this biological point of view, the evolution of life is one vast continuous process. And the human animal, although at present standing at the head of the process, is only one member of the biological series. Everywhere in the series, biological death is followed by the cessation of all signs of psy- chical life. Since man plainly is a member of this biological series, and possesses all the chemi- cal and physical properties belonging to every one of its members; what hope that he can differ from all the other members in respect of the effects of his biological death? How can biological mortality co-exist with spiritual im- mortality ? But when we turn our attention to the phe- nomena and the development of psychical life, the impression made upon our minds, if we view the phenomena candidly, is of quite a different kind. We may affirm without fear of success- [W1 WHAT MAY I HOPE? ful contradiction, that not the simplest of these phenomena can be stated, much less accounted for, in simple terms of the biological series. When stated, however, in terms of psychology, (terms which biology is quite too ready to bor- row, conceal the real meaning of, and palm them off as its own property), the development of animal forms becomes a history of the way in which obscure feelings of unrest, irritation, need, desire, or the more definite appetites of food, drink, and sex, the emotions of pride, love, hate, and the domestic affections, have driven onward toward their goal the more and more organically complex of the "protoplas- mic molecules." Even in the lower plane of general biology and animal psychology, the evidence for the potent control of the biological series by the psychological is almost, if not quite, as convincing as the evidence for the reverse relation. Rising a step higher in the scale of notable scientific objections to the same primitive belief, we meet the claim to a strict parallelism be- tween the development and all the separate performances of the soul and the development HOPE OF IMMORTALITY and forms of the functioning of the physical organism. And here it is worth noticing that those who most unequivocally advocate such a "parallelism" show that they do not intend to deal fairly with their chosen term. For they do not understand by this a relation of give-and- take on fair measure, as it were, but a relation which renders the soul essentially dependent upon the organism for its power to do anything at all. That a certain parallelism exists be- tween the two processes of evolution, both in the individual man and in the animal series, there can be no manner of doubt. Before it leaves the womb of the mother, the human animal gives tokens that a low form of plant- like or worm-like psychical activity has begun. At birth it is already provided with a rich equip- ment of association-elements in a brain too large to have been needed in its embryonic life. It is equipped, that is to say, for a sudden transition to an environment where a great multitude of new reactions to new sensations will be required, in order that it may start and continue the specific development for which it is by nature destined. But even the fibres in WHAT MAY I HOPE? the higher parts of the spinal cord have not yet been myelinated; this process must proceed in relation to their being used. With the matur- ing of the minuter structure of the brain, as de- pendent on its use, the higher faculties of memory, thought, and volition move at some- what the same pace; and with the decaying strength or impaired character of these func- tions, the mental vigor suffers a somewhat cor- responding decline. What is illustrated by the details of the parallel evolution, physiological and psychical, of the individual man, is also impressively enforced by the two forms of evolution, in the entire race. It is even yet more impressively illustrated by a comparative study of all the animal kingdom. Now it may at once occur to the discerning mind that the very term "parallelism" cannot be properly used for a wholly one-sided affair. If we mean by it a sort of simply going along side by side in the same direction, without any actual connection between the two, then when we say the word "parallelism" we speak a sus- piciously mystical language; but in fact we afford no explanation for either one of the two HOPE OF IMMORTALITY series of occurrences. In very truth, this is not precisely what most advocates of the so-called theory of parallelism intend to accomplish. For it is only by establishing causal relations between phenomena, or rather between the beings whose the phenomena are, that we ever really explain. And the moment we attempt this we become aware that there are about as many reasons to believe that the mind es- pecially in the working of its higher and more developed activities of emotion and will in- fluences the functions of the bodily organism, as that they influence it. Indeed, in the gen- eral course of its development the body is all the while very profoundly influenced by the development of the mind. Under the investigations of modern science this rough parallelizing of the two series of phe- nomena and the two kinds of development has become much more definite and, in some of its particulars, capable of experimental proof in the hands of any one sufficiently trained and skilful for the performing of the experiments. That emotional disturbances, such as fits of pas- sion, or of amorous desire, or of hope or of mel- [229] WHAT MAY I HOPE? ancholy verging upon or terminating in despair, and even feelings of the more distinctly moral and religious order, are continually being in- fluenced by obscure bodily conditions, has been known ever since, and even before, men ceased to be satisfied by ascribing such abnormal states to possession by demons, or to some other supernatural agencies. But we now know better how much the internally secreting glands, the thyroid, the renal, the hypophysis, or the condi- tion of the digestive tract, or some irritating but obscure sensory impulses from the thoracic or the ventral organs, have to do with the pro- duction of such psychical phenomena of emotion and sentiment. Moreover, for a half-century now, and es- pecially since 1870, the so-called "localization of cerebral functions" that is, the discovery of more or less precisely marked-out areas of the brain that have something quite special to do with the production of certain psychical ac- tivities has made no insignificant progress both in the number and in the precision of its achievements. Of these discoveries, a propor- tion have repeatedly been made the basis of [230] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY successful surgical operations upon the brain. What, however, is exceedingly pertinent for our view of the objections which we are subject- ing to a test of their value, surgery has at last been able to remove considerable portions of the cerebral hemispheres without resorting to the use of anaesthetics; and even while the patient remained perfectly conscious and almost entirely free from painful sensations. Thus it is proved at least, that the power of self-con- scious thought and of entertaining the higher sentiments is separable from considerable por- tions of the most in general, for those very functions important parts of the physical organism. Now, of course, it is possible to keep on assert- ing that all this does not prove that the soul can get along in the way of living any sort of a life after it has lost beyond recovery all of its brain. Of course, also, it is impossible to an- swer this assertion by an experimental demon- stration to the contrary. If you take a man's hoe away, he cannot hoe any better than if he deprived himself of the mind to hoe. We talk of the organs of the body; and we cannot talk [231] WHAT MAY I HOPE? sense about the use of those organs without somehow implying that the soul makes use of them as its organs. Smash the organ and the organist can no longer use it. Steal away one of the organ's pipes, and the most skilful or- ganist cannot sound that particular tone on that particular organ. We are not, then, turn- ing the tables on the objector by unlawfully appropriating his own figure of speech. We are only showing that the figure of speech fits as well and, indeed, a little better the belief which is opposed to that of the objection. By the admirable work of scores of competent investigators considerable areas of the hemi- spheres of the human brain have already been mapped out with more or less of scientific pre- cision. The "motor region," or that part lying about the Central Fissure, which has the control of the spinal co-ordinating mechanisms, in accordance with impulses reaching it from various parts of the cortex, is known with no inconsiderable detail. Indeed, single groups of muscles connected with the movements of definite portions of the lower and upper limbs have been "located," as the phrase is. In this HOPE OF IMMORTALITY general region, though on the frontal side of the Central Fissure, the so-called "somesthetic area," or area for the sense of touch in the gen- eral meaning of the term, has been discovered. What is still more impressive in the direction of making the soul dependent in an absolute way upon the integrity of the hemispheres of the brain, is the localization of the areas of "psy- chic blindness," of "psychic or word-deafness," and of the various forms of mental inability to interpret visible and audible phenomena, without complete blindness or complete deaf- ness. (To various phases of this general class of disabilities have been given such technical terms as Alexia, Asymbolia, Achromatopsia, Amusia, Verbal amnesia, Par aphasia, Aster eog- nosis, Agraphia, and similar terms, for the first meaning of all of which the unlearned reader must consult the dictionary; although neither the dictionary nor the expert investigator can as yet make the significance of the phenomena corresponding to the terms altogether plain.) That these, and all facts similar to those just recited, tend to emphasize a very intimate connection between the organism and the [233] WHAT MAY I HOPE? phenomena of mental life, on both the side of disposition and feeling and also the side of sensation and motion, and indeed on all the mental life, since it is all in some sort developed upon a basis of primitive feelings and sensory -motor reactions, there can be no manner of doubt. But there are abundant other facts, equally well established, which should call a halt to the impulse toward any sudden and one-sided conclusions. The most obvious of the psychical processes appear to exert a powerful influence over the physical processes, not even excepting those concerned in the growth and the functioning, whether well or ill, of the hemispheres of the brain. For example, the flow of the gastric juice in the stomach seems to be rather a psychically initi- ated than a purely physiological affair. The nutrition of the tissues, the circulation of the blood, the secretion of different kinds of fluids, the healthy or diseased nature of the vital processes, are dependent upon the states of the mind. If abnormal digestion produces melan- choly, it is equally true that melancholy pro- duces poor digestion. Chagrin and ennui poison [234] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the arterial blood. The sthenic and asthenic effect of various emotions upon the organic functions is quite as obvious and undoubted as is the effect of the functional ^disturbances of the organs in producing the emotions them- selves. The evidence from the most accredited work in the localization of cerebral functions is by no means one-sided in its conclusiveness. Even after the areas of the brain, hitherto chiefly or we may say "naturally" employed for the performance of a certain function are greatly impaired or wholly destroyed, a process of so- called "substitution" may, within rather in- definite limits, take place. And to bring about this process of substitution what we call the will of the individual is of all forces about the most important force to be requisitioned. In the use of the motor areas it is, under ordinary circumstances, the psychical factor, the will, which has its way. There was sound psychol- ogy, as well as keen wit, in the reply of the lively French octogenarian to his young com- panion, when, on returning from a long walk together, the latter complimented him by ex- [235] WHAT MAY I HOPE? claiming: "How well your legs carry you!" "You should say," said the older man, "How well you carry your legs." All the phenomena of suggestion, whether in normal or hypnotic or other abnormal states, emphasize the de- pendence of the bodily functions on the ideas, emotions, and volitions of the mind. The bewitched Redskin wraps himself in his blanket, turns his face to the wall of his tent, and wills to die as he has been told that he will. If "sug- gestion" can elicit brands, stigmata, and other more deeply seated organic and permanent responses, it can also fairly be said to stimulate and effect organic repairs' in the highly sensitive tissues of the hemispheres of the human brain. Indeed, all our soundest psycho-physical the- ories of education emphasize the patent fact that the brain itself can be disciplined and trained by the well-directed and persistent action of the voluntary mind, as truly as the sensory-motor system can be controlled by the brain, considered as a piece of intricate mechan- ism. Psycho-physical and physico-psychical are complementary terms. "When instead of functional temporary dis- [2361 HOPE OF IMMORTALITY turbances, with their inevitable accompaniment of disturbed conditions of the psychical life, we have to consider the mental effects of serious organic lesions or other injuries, the evidence appears yet more conclusive against the sepa- rability of the soul from the bodily organism. Especially impressive is this evidence in all cases of organic diseases of the brain. If wounding, or a tumor, or an abscess, attacks and destroys certain cerebral areas, then aphasia is the result; and the character of the aphasia will depend upon the seat and extent of the dis- ease. In one case, the articulate word-image is lost; in another, the written word-image; in still a third, the unfortunate patient can recognize, select, and will the proper sound or visual sign for the idea, but he has lost command of the cen- ter of voluntary control. As that degeneracy of tissues which is the misfortune of old age in- vades the cerebral areas, memory of the higher and more intelligent sort begins to fail. And if that progressive paralysis of the brain-centers known as general paresis attacks our friend, we stand helpless by, while we see the divine and godlike faculties of the spirit fade away, [237] WHAT MAY I HOPE? one by one, and mark the inevitable end, which will be the reduction of them all to the lowest terms of the merely animal or plant-like exist- ence." ("Philosophy of Religion," Vol. II, p. 525 f.). But even to these extremest cases the "in- strumental theory" of the relations of body and soul does not by any means wholly fail to meet the conditions of a satisfactory applica- tion. Not even in the most desperate, incurable, and fatal of organic diseases is the complete and final dependence of the soul upon the body indisputably evinced. On the contrary, even in the last stages of that "soul-destroying" disease, the progressive paralysis of the insane, there are instances where the mental life has seemed to reappear and to manifest itself in a manner approaching its normal vigor; as though it had by one supreme effort broken loose from the barriers which had been closing round it through the decadence of the brain. As to the psychological causes and symptoms of insanity in general we know far more than we do as to the physiological. More important still is it to insist upon the HOPE OF IMMORTALITY truth that certain activities which are essential to the very nature of a soul, such as man is sup- posed to possess, or better, really to be (that is, essential to the existence and development of a personal life), seem to be of a sort which makes it a barren and inappropriate figure of speech to correlate them in any way whatever with corresponding processes in the nervous system. These activities of the personal life no more resemble the most elaborate and subtle functions of the hemispheres of the brain than they do the mechanical working of a typewriter or a phono- graph. In confirmation of this we quote from the fuller treatment in the work, "Philosophy of Religion" (Vol. II, p. 532 f.), the following passage: "Above the sphere of their investi- gators" (i.e., those of psycho-physical science) " rises a development of the soul's self-conscious and self-determining life, as related to certain sesthetical and ethical ideals, to which all language derived from a study of psycho- physical formulas seems utterly inapplicable. Certainly, artistic and moral sentiments and ideals, religious beliefs and conceptions, and the spirit of filial piety in which the essence of sub- [239] WHAT MAY I HOPE? jective religion consists, are all experiences of the same soul whose sensory-motor life is so strictly correlated with the functions of the bodily mechanism. Certainly, too, these higher activities are rarely or never divorced from the accompaniment of the lower. For it is as an embodied soul, and not as an already dis- embodied spirit, that the human being is an artist, a devotee, a religious idealist. On the other hand, neither a scientific psychology, nor a metaphysic of the Self when based upon such a psychology, can fail to recognize this so- called ' higher nature,' in which to use the language of Kant is the root that furnishes the indispensable condition, of the only worth that men can give themselves. This is the power which elevates man above himself, . . . a power which connects him with an order of things that only the understanding can conceive, with a world that commands the whole sensible world, ... as well as the sum-total of all ends ! This power is nothing but personality, that is, freedom and independence of the mechanism of nature, ... a faculty of a being which is subject to special laws . . . given by its own reason." [240] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY The examination of this class of objections the only ones that are, at present, urged, on defensible and impressive grounds of scientific knowledge ends, then, as we have already said, at the worst, in a drawn battle. But its failure to disprove the primitive belief in the separability of the soul of man from its bodily organism clears the way for the positive con- siderations offered in support of that hope of immortality which we desire to show is reason- able. For this,'reason they have been examined at such length; which is, however, quite in- sufficient to afford them even a fair summary. 1 To secure a reasonable assurance in grounds of belief, for the hope of immortality as we de- sire to present that hope, it is not necessary to examine the demonstrations of the essential indestructibility of the soul, in the form in which those demonstrations were satisfactory to the theology and philosophy of the past. The conceptions of the earlier day as to what it is "really to be," to be a "substance" in the 1 Those readers who desire such a summary may consult the work on "The Elements of Physiological Psychology" by the author and Professor R. W. Woodworth (ed. 1911, Chap. IX, X, of Part I, and Chap. I, II, of Part III). [241] WHAT MAY I HOPE? metaphysical sense, no longer satisfy either physics, or psychology, or ethics, or the philos- ophy of religion. This is as true of those who denied, as of those who approved, these concep- tions. To exist after death as a soul-substance, after the pattern of the soul absorbed in At- man, or of the soul that has attained the ex- tinction of self -consciousness in Nirvana, is not to continue the personal life and its career of personal development. The hope of immortal- ity, in the meaning which the ideals and prom- ises of morality and religion encourage that hope, is directed toward something much better than this. This hope, like all truly reasonable religious hopes, depends upon the acquisition of that spirit which triumphs over death because it has found the path to a spiritual life and a spiritual development, has found, in fact, the "Way of Salvation." The grounds of such a hope are indicated, though not made by any means "sun-clear," or completely recognized, by such sayings as those, for example, of Marcus Aurelius Antoni- nus: "Death is such as generation is, a mys- tery of nature." But, "in truth they (i.e. the HOPE OF IMMORTALITY gods) do exist, and they do care for human beings, and they have put all means in man's power to enable him not to fall into real evils." Still more worthy of reference is the belief of that ancient Stoic who, of all others, came near- est to taking the Christian point of view respect- ing life, and death, and that which is in the Beyond. Epictetus placed his hope for all these phases of the personal development, in the complete submission of his will to the Divine Will; and in the heart that, come what come might, responded in trust and praise to- ward God. "For what else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a night- ingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan; but since I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise God. This is my business; I do it; nor will I ever desert this post, so long as it is permitted me; and I call on you to join in the same song." If, however, we would recognize the nature and grounds of this hope of immortality in its most desirable and reasonable form, we must view it as presented by the religions of redemp- tion; and especially by the Christian religion. [243] WHAT MAY I HOPE? Thus presented it is, in general, the life of a spirit that has been set free from the bonds of sensuous desire and every form of selfishness, and has come to participate in the sinlessness and blessedness of the Holy Spirit, through communion with it and obedience to its behests. In a word, it is a redeemed life. An adum- bration of this conception is found in the promises of the Orphic mysteries. "Blessed is he," says Pindar, "who having seen these rites goeth under the earth. He knoweth the end of life; he knoweth, too, its god-disposed beginning." "Thrice-happy they among mor- tals," exclaims Socrates, "who depart into Hades after their eyes have seen these rites. Yea, for them alone is there life; for all other men there is ill." Even the Buddhist concep- tion of Nirvana cannot remain true to its ideal of a merely negative salvation as the extinction of all personal interests, both good and ill. In its primitive form it is described in these terms of a moral and quasi-divine beatitude: "When the fire of lust is extinct, that is Nirvana; when the fires of infatuation and hatred are extinct, that is Nirvana; when pride ? false belief, and all [244] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY other passions and torments are extinct, that is Nirvana." And the pathetic account of the Death of Buddha represents him, in important respects like the picture which Plato draws of the death of Socrates, as entering into a con- dition of "incomparable security," because it is an "incomparable peaceful state." To Megas- thenes, when he was in India (about 300 B. c.), its "most estimable philosophers, the Brah- mans, seemed to hold, about death and the hereafter," the same opinions as the Greeks. They regarded death as being "for the wise, a birth into real life into the happy life." The uncertain and low condition of the belief in the future existence of the soul, and of the hope of immortal life for the individual, among the early Hebrews, is one of the most surprising facts concerning the religion of the Old Testa- ment. But by its trust in a wholly righteous and compassionate God, to whom his faithful ones might look in full confidence for their re- demption, this religion laid the firmest of foundations for the hope of immortal life. Even down to the time when the conception of Yahweh had undergone a considerable ethical [245] WHAT MAY I HOPE? development, and He had been worshipped as the Living God, the Giver of Life, the still shadowy realm of the dead was not considered as greatly concerning Him. Undoubtedly, "the eschatology of Judaism was particularly de- fective as respects the individual." But the moral basis for the hope of immortality must be found in the message which sums up the teaching of all the later Hebrew prophets: "Say ye to the righteous, it shall be well with him." "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." It was among the ancient Greeks that the philosophical conception of the dual being of man, and so of the separability of his soul from his body, took its earliest ineradicable roots. In the Homeric times, to be sure, the continu- ance of the soul after death seems to be some- how connected with a shadowy corporality. This was at least true then, and probably con- tinued down to the latest times of a distinctively Greek civilization to be true, of the popular belief. But in Greek philosophical thought, "immortal" and "divine" or "god-like," be- came interchangeable conceptions. And Har- nack truly says of the current Grseco-Roman [246] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY philosophy of religion, in the first two centuries: "What was sought above all was to enter into an inner union with the deity, to be saved by him, and to become a partaker in the pos- session and enjoyment of his life." All this was, of course, most favorable to the spread of the Christian doctrine of immortality for the individual. But it was Jesus who in his teachings, his life, and his death, founded the conception of immortal life, and enlisted the faith in it, in a form to call forth the most desirable and reason- able hope. He continually represents the Old- Testament worthies Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as still alive; /or, their God is not a God of the dead but of the living. The true sons of God are they who are counted worthy to obtain the resurrection from the dead, and henceforth become equal to the angels in purity and deathlessness. In the larger sweep of Christ's teaching and life and death there comes into view the promise of salvation as a new and higher spiritual life for the individual not only, but for the vast multitude of redeemed ones. Death puts no obstacles in the way to the tri- [247] WHAT MAY I HOPE? umphant progress of the fulfilment of this promise. The life "beyond" is not simply, or essentially considered, an everlastingly pro- tracted existence for the soul. It is "eternal life," or the life of the spirit united with God. But in gaining Eternity, the soul of the individ- ual person has not lost for this would be a psychologically absurd conclusion its ability to continue unceasingly in existence, although separated, or rather set free, from this perish- able body. " Eternal life " is the life in God, the true life, the life in the "Father's house," in the "everlasting mansions." In the thought of Christ, "eternity surrounds us ever in the garb of time; and its demands are the same yesterday, today, and forever." Jesus' doctrine of the life immortal was expanded in different ways, and by the em- ployment of different figures of speech by the Apostles most notably by Paul and John. The former exults in the prospect of having the sting of sin and death drawn, upon entrance into the enjoyment of the promise of immortal- ity. The psyche, or natural soul, which has had a body appropriated to its uses in its [248] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY earthly existence, when "sown in corruption," will be replaced by an incorruptible bodily manifestation adapted to the exalted uses of the freed spirit of the believer. In the writings which bear the name of John, the essence of this eternal life is a spiritual likeness to Christ; as to its precise form, this has not yet been made manifest, but will be at Christ's appearing. In the "Apocalypse" there is a manifest return to much the same confusion of imagery and lurid pictorial representation which characterize the later Jewish writers. But the original Christian type of the life of hope is not essen- tially changed; it is the life of a spirit redeemed by a union, in faith and love, with an ever- living God. It is not to be reckoned a misfortune or a reproach to Christian theology, and to [the re- flective thinking which is made to support the Christian hope of immortality, that it com- bines with the teachings of its Sacred Scriptures the conceptions and arguments of Greek phi- losophy. As to the relation between these two, it is in place to quote once more from the "Philosophy of Religion" (Vol. II, p. 593). [249] WHAT MAY I HOPE? "Indeed, the Platonic philosophy of the soul's nature and destiny may not improperly be said to have been, in some of its most important factors, the doctrine prevalent in Christian theology almost down to the present time. Plato's firmly rooted belief in the soul's im- mortality depends upon the ontological and necessary priority of reason to matter; it is also essential in order to make reasonable a moral view of the world-order and of its future history. For the whole of man's life is a process of education; but the process is only begun in this life and is to be carried on into a future existence. For the individual soul there are in his doctrine, as in the doctrine of the Catholic Church, three possibilities: those who have been purified by virtue and knowledge will find eternal blessedness; some will pass at death into a state of purgatory; others will be finally condemned without hope of future redemption. In other respects, indeed, Plato's doctrine of the future for the individual soul differed from that evolved by the Christian Church. But it can scarcely be questioned that the most power- ful outside influence in developing the Chris- [250] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY tian doctrine of immortality was that which came from Greek, especially from the Platonic philosophy." May I hope for immortal life? is certainly a question which every individual man, being a person, is entitled and even obligated to raise for himself. This question, although it depends for its answer on the removal of the obstacles to accepting the general belief of humanity in the separability of the soul from the body, and in its continued existence after death, demands for its satisfactory answer something more than this. It demands an extension of faith into the region of the moral and religious ideals, as these ideals have been presented in their most desirable and reasonable form. Let us, then, briefly consider the reasons for such a faith as will serve as a ground on which to repose the hope of immortality. The fundamental personal questions which we now put before every individual are these: In what kind of a Universe do you believe you are living? In what kind of a God, if any, do you place your faith? What is your practical attitude toward this Universe? What is the [251] WHAT MAY I HOPE? personal ideal, if any, which you are striving to attain as a true son of God? To one who in- terprets the world as a vast piece of mechanism, in which the individual man is entangled, and from whose blind workings he cannot possibly escape, the hope of immortality cannot be recommended as a reasonable or even permis- sible hope. For the only reasonable grounds for such a hope are the faith in an ever-living God, who is himself omnipotent, eternal, and omnipresent, perfect Ethical Spirit; and who invites the individual man to become his son, in faith and hope. Or, to say the same truth in a somewhat different way: Ultimately con- sidered, the belief in continued existence after death, as possible for the individual, depends upon the faith in a Universe that is itself grounded in Moral Reason. The hope of im- mortal life for any particular individual depends upon his faith in God as the Redeemer of man. The full assurance of this hope belongs to the individual who has the experience of a conscious and voluntary union with God; to the human finite personality, that is in the practical rela- tions of mind, heart and will, which constitute HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the individual man a true son of the Divine Person, as his Father. All our study of the essential nature of the complex emotion of hope has shown its depend- ence upon the validity of the beliefs and faiths in which any particular hope has its ground. False beliefs foster false hopes. Reasonable beliefs may be made the basis for reasonable hopes. But the loftiest and worthiest of all the forms of this universal human emotion are devoted to the ideals of morality and religion. It is for these hopes that we may urge the rea- sons that support the faiths which support them. And this we have been doing all the way along the approaches to our summary answer to the practical question: "What may I (reasonably) hope?" Granting these faiths, the experience of millions of souls who refuse to mourn for their dead, "because," as Plutarch wrote to his wife on the death of their young daughter, "they have gone to dwell in a better land, and to share a diviner lot," is made to appear a reasonable experience. More forceful still is the confidence with which millions of other souls, dying "in the Lord" of Life, continually [253] WHAT MAY I HOPE? face death, thus reposing upon a faithful God their hope of a desirable immortality. And in this way the testing of experience is added to the abstract reasonings on which the hope that triumphs over death is ever trying more securely to defend itself. In a larger way, the faith on which the hope of immortality reposes, strengthens itself by the contribution which it makes to "theodicy," that is, to the defence of God himself as rul- ing with the perfection of Moral Reason. No other trial to this faith at all equals that which is afforded by the inescapable facts of the present life. A large proportion perhaps, the greater part of these facts makes it diffi- cult to believe that Moral Reason is in actual control of human history, or of the destiny of the individual; and that, therefore, moral ideals will triumph at the last. This is not chiefly because "he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust"; or even because there were innocent persons among "those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them." The seemingly ruthless disregard of [254] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY the waste of human life, and the destruction of human happiness, by the forces of nature, are, indeed, yet more depressing to this faith. But most of all do the profoundest and most serious convictions of the moral order suffer shock at the spectacle of a world of men, in which un- righteousness so generally succeeds in its aims, and righteousness so often fails of its fitting reward. Present this spectacle as skilfuly as we may, so long as its staging is limited to the scenes and the periods of the earthly life, the King of Righteousness does not appear to estab- lish his claim to a satisfactory rule; and with this claim, his right to be worshipped as perfect Ethical Spirit. Now it can scarcely be denied that the exten- sion of the problem set by the ways of God with man into the world of the Spirit and of eternity, both the individual and the race in its historic development, helps greatly toward faith's solution of this problem. From this point of view, the Divine Rule in righteousness is not an already finished affair; nor is it one limited to the things of time and sense alone. From this point of view, the heavenly world [255] WHAT MAY I HOPE? is no longer regarded as something demanding immediate forcible construction. It is a vast moral process, an evolution of a Kingdom of Redemption. It must be worked out for the individual and for society, though beginning in the time "now," as continuing into an indefinite future time; though submissive to present conditions, yet as carried to its triumphant issue under conditions of a much more favorable sort. Thus Divine justice and clemency are both "given a chance," as the phrase is; the moral character of Providence is made more secure to the grasp of faith. And, in truth of fact, it is the hope of immortality which sustains in most minds their confidence in the perfection of Moral Reason as ruler of the affairs of men. There was, then, sound sense in the crushing retort which Napoleon is said to have adminis- tered to M. Mathieu:^"What is your Theo- philanthropy? Oh, don't talk to me of a re- ligion which only lasts me for this life, without telling me whence I come or whither I go." On the other hand, Goethe's sarcasm expresses sentiments which are the exact opposite of the facts of life. "This occupation with the ideas [256] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY of immortality," said he, "is for people of rank, and especially ladies, who have nothing to do. But an able man, who has something regular to do here, and must toil and struggle and pro- duce day by day, leaves the future world to itself, and is active and useful in this." The facts of life refute the unseemly sarcasm. For it is, in fact, just those who "must toil and struggle and produce day by day," who most feel the compulsion to support their faith in the justice and goodness of God, and in the suprem- acy and omnipresence of Moral Reason, by the hope of immortal life. To them it seems as though to ring the curtain down, under the conditions which dominate the present world of time and sense, would .'convert the whole of human history into a sad tragedy; or what would be worse yet to every refined mind a ghastly comedy. Therefore, with them, the hope of immortality is a theodicy. If now we turn around and direct our view again to the susceptibilities and capacities of man, as a subject of the divine rule, we receive additional reasons for that faith on which the hope of immortality may confidently repose. [257] WHAT MAY I HOPE? This aspect of the question has, however, been dwelt upon at sufficient length in the last chap- ter. We then found our way to grounds upon which the hope of Moral Completeness, or to use the specific phrase of religion the hope of salvation, might rest somewhat secure. But we also found that this hope is of a process which must be extended beyond the limits set to it by the dissolution of the bodily organism. For the development of the personal life, in its zeal to become more and more like the perfect pattern, the death of the body is no appropriate termination. We are not, in saying this, unwarrantably exploiting the right of man's wish not to die to find its gratification in fact, and in every particular. It has been most emphatically stated, on the contrary, that the majority of human wishes form no reasonable ground for human hopes. And besides, per- haps half the human race decidedly do not wish to extend, beyond death, an existence they have found so miserable and unsatisfying during its brief continuance here. It requires, then, something more than mere wishing not to die to justify in any measure the hope of immortal [2581 HOPE OF IMMORTALITY life. But this hope, like the hope of moral completeness, and as almost, if not altogether, the same as the hope of salvation, carries in its character and its influence quite different rea- sons for its justification. It is essentially unlike the hopes awakened by any form of wishing for success or happiness as dependent on any kind of material good. We may then say of the hope of immortality in its most assured form something like this: The capacity for becoming a son of God makes reasonable the hope that, by entering and con- tinuing in the way of salvation, one will become a more and more perfect son. The capacity is a divine promise; the susceptibility is a divine gift. Such capacity and susceptibility are the endowment of personality. This view helps us to understand the mental and moral state of those who have attained to the fullest assurance of this hope. They are the souls who are conscious, in the most vital if also in the most sober way, of being united to God by the spirit of sonship. They hope for life immortal because to use without cant, the very ap- propriate phrase which they themselves employ [2591 WHAT MAY I HOPE? - their life is already "in God." For the life, about the reasonableness of which our inquiry is now pressed, is to continue "rooted in a vol- untary, moral union with the Divine Life"; or else it must perish, lacking life in itself; it cannot attain immortality apart from life in God. In a word: The essentials of the belief in immortality for the individual can be main- tained only in the form of a confidence that God, in whom every individual of the human race lives and moves and has his being, will con- tinue to preserve and to develop the life of all those whose preservation and progress accord with his most holy and beneficent World-plan. But the rising faith of religion is that this World- plan will somehow show itself in the future as the redemption of the race. Whatever, of a more definite and concrete character, any one may think necessary for him in order to answer the practical question, What may I hope with regard to this matter of the immortal life? it is not a part of our purpose to attempt to provide. We shall be quite satis- fied if we have, in the limited and modest way [260] HOPE OF IMMORTALITY which is becoming to our entire essay, pointed out some ground on which this hope may establish itself as, not only a permissible, but a highly reasonable hope. In respect of hopes, as well as of beliefs and knowledges, the element of individuality must have fair play. The picture of a heaven, which is very attractive to some, is decidedly repulsive to other equally pious souls. Lofty flights of imagination may be indulged in at times; but soberness is in general better; and extravagances and vagaries of sensuous fancy should be avoided by those who are seeking, in reason, for grounds of hope. But he who enters and faithfully pursues the Way may expect to reach toward the End; he who begins the life which is a union of heart and will with the Divine Life may reasonably and, in the highest form of success may assuredly, hope to attain the life immortal. 261 CHAPTER VIII THE HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM MONG the greater human hopes which have undergone a historical develop- ment, there is one that, although it is, essentially considered, vague and distant, is of all others most exalted and most com- prehensive. Stated in general terms, it may be called the hope of a socially regenerated com- munity. In the more nearly ideal form, it attaches itself to the conception of a society, or state, or even a condition of the entire human race, which shall, through the perfection of its prevailing justice and good-will, secure the highest degree of social prosperity and happiness. The least profound analysis of this hope shows it to be a somewhat heterogeneous mix- ture of physical and moral elements. In such a society, extreme poverty, unnecessary disease, and the economic miseries due to social injustice, will be much diminished, or wholly done away. HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM No one, it is imagined, will go unfed or unclothed at least, so long as the supply of food and clothing avails for all; for no one will have either the disposition or the power to deprive another of his share of the common good. When, however, it is recognized, as even the most ignorant and primitive intellects are quite able to do, that the physical well-being of any society depends in large measure on the conduct of its individual members, the social ideal at once assumes somewhat of a moral character. The ideally prosperous social con- dition is seen to demand some nearer approach to the perfect control of moral ideals over the conduct of those who compose the society. Modern conditions and discoveries have contributed vastly and rapidly toward the enlargement of the social hope. These condi- tions have not only made perfectly obvious the ethnological unity of the human species, but they have also revealed the opportunities and obligations which bind together with ever tightening bands, the different subordinate divisions of the one species. What man is, and what the different races of men are, is fast [263] WHAT MAY I HOPE? becoming known as never before. In spite of many puzzling minor differences, in their essen- tial characteristics and in their fundamental capacities all human beings are found to be alike. The hope of a greatly improved, if not of a perfect social condition, therefore embraces them all; or at least, all who can survive the physical and ethical discipline necessary to im- provement. Within each of these separate social organizations, whether regarded from the politi- cal or the economic point of view, the demand for a comprehensive recognition of the interests of all by each is even more clamorous and insistent. Society must be largely reorganized; no less than this is the requisition of the hour. And its form of reorganization must be such as more nearly to secure the individual prosperity and happiness of all of its members. When taken in this large way, the question which we are about to consider becomes in- timately connected with the problem of the future of the entire human race. What may we hope about this future? Is humanity des- tined more and more to approach the ideal of a wholly prosperous and happy society; because, F2641 HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM as we are obliged to say, a society composed of individuals more intelligent and more right- eously disposed toward one another in all their economic and social relations? With all the recent progress of the positive sciences, when guided by the increased caution and reserve of speculative philosophy, we are not at present able to propose any absolutely certain, or even highly probable, solution for the problem of the final destiny of the human race. Nor does there appear much prospect that either science or philosophy will in the near future be able to pronounce authoritatively upon this problem. The astronomical and physico-chemical sciences are, indeed, just now indulging themselves more boldly than ever be- fore in the role of prediction as to the ultimate fate of this earthly habitation for man. Their prophecies are not altogether encouraging to the literal interpretation of the apocalyptic vision of "a new heaven and a new earth." On the contrary, their most confident expecta- tions are perhaps the most pessimistic. For they paint the picture of a planet, now grown old and without power of self -renewal, in which, [265] WHAT MAY I HOPE? instead of the physical conditions of happy human living being greatly improved, these conditions have become such as to make any kind of human living quite impossible. It thus is made necessary for those who would still indulge the most extravagant hopes for the social future of man under earthly conditions, to remind science that it knows little or nothing, "for certain," about what will be the fate of the physical Universe after the lapse of aeons of astronomical time. The conclusions of biology and anthropology, too, when these sciences assume to extend the r61e of prophecy to the end of the existence of the human race, while they come nearer our daily experiences, and so seem to have a much larger collection of facts in their support, can- not be claimed to be trustworthy foundations for either fears or hopes as to the ultimate destiny of mankind. Indeed, the prophets themselves do not agree in the most essential particulars. For some foresee that the multiplication of the species will go on, with increasing rapidity, until the end comes in an arrest of develop- ment, followed by universal decay and death. [266] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM Others encourage our hopes of arriving, at the worst, at a kind of equilibrium, in which a large, but strictly limited number of the race shall enjoy a fair measure of the good things of life, by maintaining a tolerably just and equitable distribution of these good things. And there are some who deem themselves fortunate in having established on grounds of science the continual advance of humanity, to the extremest limits of the habitable earth and in an endless time, all the while realizing more perfectly their economic and social ideals. Among these three conclusions, the unexpert seeker for a place on which to plant his crop of hopes, must at pres- ent be left to choose according to his tem- perament, or temporary conditions of success or failure. Most uncertain and unreasonable, though most seductive, are those socialistic hopes, espoused by certain classes in the social whole, who are convinced that by advancing their own special interests through legislation or methods of violence, without morally elevating and purifying themselves and all others, they can secure a more righteous and happy state of [267] WHAT MAY I HOPE? society. But we have already exposed suffi- ciently the elusiveness of their hopes. It would seem, then, that the problem of the ultimate destiny of humanity is not for the present solvable in terms of scientific knowledge, or of descriptive history; or even perhaps we may add in terms of scientific belief. Yet the dream of a social condition, approximating more closely, if not completely realizing, man's choicest sesthetical and moral ideals, has arisen and developed to fairer proportions, not only in the minds of the best thinkers, but in the imagination of the millions of mankind. The "setting" of this dream, which can be proposed with any title to confidence, by the physical, biological, and economic sciences, is hazy and doubtful enough. We neither know whether the realization of the dream is absolutely de- pendent upon the everlasting continuance of the present "cosmic system"; nor whether this cosmic system may, or may not, maintain it- self essentially unaltered through countless aeons of time. When we seem to have reached some economic impasse, such as that threatened by the so-called law of Malthus, we are next invited [268] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM to think of a way of escape through the dis- covery of modifying or compensating facts or laws. In what we have said thus far we have not meant to deny that certain grounds for the hope of a vastly improved social condition of human- ity, stretching far into the future, are to be found in both science and philosophy, and also in human history. These are, indeed, not clear or sure enough to form a basis for scientific prediction. But they may, not improperly, be considered as affording grounds for a reason- able hope. Although sociology, in any one of its numerous forms, is far enough from having arrived at anything like a science capable of making predictions, it has, perhaps, dimly dis- cerned certain unchanging principles which underlie man's social evolution. We are not, therefore, disposed to discredit a certain truth in the assurance of HebbePs claim: "Social life in all its nuances is no mere confluence of meaningless accidents; it is the product of the experience of whole millions, and our task is to apprehend the correctness of these experiences." When, however, we "apprehend the correct- [269] WHAT MAY I HOPE? ness of these experiences," the most impressive of them all is this: The hope of a greatly im- proved and more blessed future for the race is dependently connected with the hopes of mo- rality and religion. The realization of all these forms of emotion, whether we identify them or insist upon keeping them apart, is based upon faiths that have a moral and religious character and significance. This is true even of those hopes which try most exclusively to limit them- selves to purely economic and social considera- tions. And when we consider the pictures which speculative philosophy, whether remain- ing chiefly a matter of abstract thinking, or try- ing to place itself on solid grounds of physical and historical facts, has presented of this ideal society, we find the moral and religious features made distinctly prominent. This is about as true of Plato's "Republic" as it is of Augus- tine's "City of God." The call to realize the supreme ideals of social welfare, both in the near and in the distant future, is as distinct in Kant's "Critique of the Practical Reason" as it is in the writings of the Old-Testament prophets. As Rhys Davids has well said: "The sense of [270] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM duty to the race is largely the result of the continuity of human progress." Above all other similar ideals, does the con- ception of an ideal Social Democracy in its modern form build itself upon factors derived from the moral principles and religious con- ceptions of Christianity. It is only as re- ligion breaks itself free from that conception of a tribal God which unites men in a limited way under the feeling, "Thy god is my god," and " Thy people is my people," that any ideal like that of a Social Democracy can be formed and maintained. But the universality of the Christian religion, with its peremptory sum- mons to be, and to behave, as under one com- prehensive bond of brotherhood, as children of one Heavenly Father, is the equivalent to the call for the founding and development of such an ideal. Let us now direct attention to the form which, in the evolution of the faiths of morality and religion, has been given to the conception of a reformed social order, or still better expressed a redeemed society. When the hopes founded in both these faiths attain their highest [271] WHAT MAY I HOPE? stage of development, they combine to present to human thought and imagination the fair picture of a perfected Divine Kingdom. The very conception of morality is, of course, indissolubly connected with social organiza- tion and social relations. The idea of a moral being utterly alone, existing and developing out of all relations whatever to other personal life, is essentially absurd. Moral obligation is obligation of one moral being to another. Duty is a word that involves the meaning of some act or species of conduct which persons, living together under social relations, owe to one another. Virtues are specific forms of the personal life in social relations. But espe- cially is it true of the ideals of morality, what- ever form of pictorial representation they may assume as due to the different degrees in accu- racy of thinking and the ranges and reasonable- ness of the flights of imagination, that they all have of necessity to do with the welfare and happy lot of individuals when constituted into a social unity. When then we raise this ideal to its nth power, so to say, we do not diminish, but the rather emphasize, its essentially social HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM character. The ideal society, from the moral point of view, cannot, indeed, be otherwise com- posed than of individuals who are, each one in his own individual way, striving for the attain- ment of his own moral ideal. For, as we have been at considerable pains to show in our dis- cussion of the question, "What Ought I to Do? " the moral ideal of each individual not only must, but also ought to partake of the charac- teristics of that one individual. Such a high and precious differentiation of the best speci- mens belongs to the superior excellence of per- sonal life over every other form of life most closely resembling it. Something much more, however, and some- thing exceedingly difficult to secure, is necessary to the social ideal in its highest form, than would be supplied, if every individual selected to compose such 'a society were doing his best to "live up to" his own particular ideal. Many an honest group of individuals has made the experi- ment of forming for themselves, with more or less distinct plans for excluding the rest of man- kind, an ideal social organization. But such plans have quite invariably ended in failure. [273] WHAT MAY I HOPE? Communities and communes, with dreams of economic, domestic, political, and other con- ditions of social perfection, have never yet come true in any age or quarter of the earth's history. Sectarian and national churches have failed as notoriously, and in the same way. And all the discoveries of modern history, all the improvements in legislation, and all the kindly offices of a skilled beneficence, have hitherto proved insufficient for the task of framing and conducting, within however narrow limits, an ideal society. These failures have undoubtedly been largely due to the lack of moral complete- ness in the members who have undertaken to compose and conduct them. But by no means wholly so. For although wisdom is one of the virtues most essential to the perfection of the moral life of the individual, perfect wisdom, since it is dependent on perfection of knowledge, is not a "thing to be grasped after" by any individual. Moreover, there are very hard and unyielding physical conditions which perpetu- ally accompany and relentlessly control all the attempts of man to realize his ideal of a quite prosperous and blessed social condition. Such [274] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM a condition would require freedom for all from the curse (?) of poverty and the misfortune (?) of physical weakness, prevalent disease, and too large a percentage of early deaths. While, then, increase in morality among all the indi- viduals forming any social whole has plainly much to do toward diminishing these evils, it seems not at all probable but just the con- trary that the goodness or the knowledge of the individual members of any social organi- zation will ever succeed in quite banishing them. What is still more important to notice with regard to the chances for success in the attempts to attain the social ideal by the improvement of the morality of its members, is this: As long as any considerable portion of the race lags behind in any of the attempts made at realizing the social ideal by any other portion of the race, the laggards must retard, or pull back to their own level, the more advanced part of the entire army. For more and more is it becoming apparent that, if mankind is going to realize to any worthy extent the social ideal, it must be done not only with the consent [275] WHAT MAY I HOPE? but with the co-operation of all mankind. If the races, who think themselves superior, at- tempt to advance in the rewards of a higher and more successful social organization, at the ex- pense of, or to the exclusion of, the races deemed lower, they are themselves doomed from the beginning to the punishment of Cain. The ideals of morality are the sure avengers of all selfish and exclusive attempts to realize the social Ideal. This Ideal must include all man- kind. The rewards of unrighteous treatment of the weaker by the stronger react with awful severity, whether or not they are seemingly successful, against the perpetrators of these wrongs. As the solidarity of the race becomes practically more manifest and more effective, the inevitable conditions which limit all ap- proach to an ideal social order, as seen from morality's point of view, become more manifest. To conquer by craft and by violence is a greater curse than to be conquered. No partial or "sequestered" ideal of a social good can law- fully entertain the hope of realization. We cannot say that the principles which determine even the partial realization of the [276] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM social ideal have always been consciously recog- nized by those who have dreamed most vividly, and worked most devotedly for the consumma- tion of their hope. This fact makes even more astonishing the breadth and persistency, mingled with audacity, with which poets and philosophers, as well as men of religious faith and devotion, have clung to the fair promise, somewhere and in some however distant future, of a morally perfect, a morally redeemed, so- ciety. And as acquaintance has extended with the hitherto unknown tribes and peoples, those who are entitled to be called "authorities" on this subject have not long hesitated to embrace them all. For on this subject it is not the ethnologists or the diplomats or even the his- torians, who are worthiest to be considered authorities; it is, the rather, the poets, the philosophers, and the seers, the promoters of the faith and the hopes of moral idealism. This faith accepts and attempts to interpret the things of time and sense; but it believes that these things, and all the complicated processes of their evolution, do not constitute a world apart from, but, the rather, a world [277] WHAT MAY I HOPE? subordinated to, the world of moral ideals. Expressed in a crude way we may find this truth in the Buddhist's "Awakening of Faith," as follows: "Suchness" (Plato's Realm of Ideas, or in modern scientific terms, the Cosmic Order) "and the realm of birth and death, are not two hostile empires, but two names of the same thing." The whole of human history, then, not only as conducted in its present earthly environ- ment and under its present earthly conditions, is one part in the eternal process of realizing the ideal of a morally complete society. For, to quote a sentence from Sophocles (already more than once quoted) which sums up the faith, expressed by the greatest of Greek dramatists in artistic form, and by the greatest of the Greek philosophers in the form of conclusions argued in the name of reason, it is forever true of these Ideals, "They ne'er shall sink to slumber in oblivion; A power of God is there untouched by time." But the hope of this social ideal is not ex- pressed in artistic or speculative dreams alone. Adumbrations of it, and powerful accessories to the attempts at its attainment, have already [278] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM been discovered in our brief study of the nature and grounds of hopes scientific, political, and social, especially in so far as all of them are more or less intimately concerned with the hopes that spring from the faiths of morality. In all these forms the cause which aims pro- gressively to secure the ideal of a morally per- fect organization of society has its efficient and devoted servants. Each one of these encour- ages himself and all the others with the message, "Say not the Struggle naught Availeth." As to their private fortunes the souls who cherish this hope need no other consolation touching their own future than such as is furnished by the hope itself. "What tho' the destined goal seem faint and far? The patience and the toil are not in vain. What thou hast given in love thou shalt regain If not on earth on some diviner star. Sometimes as through a portal left ajar, The soul peers outward with illumined eyes To a dim shore it leaps to recognize, Where the first fountains of its being are." And it is to such souls as these, whose faith in the ultimate triumph of the principles of moral- [279] WHAT MAY I HOPE? ity is unshaken by delay and seeming defeat, that the realization of the ideals of a reformed condition of human society will be owing at the last, if such a condition ever comes to pass, in a future no matter how remote. It is in the faiths of religion that the hope of an ideal social condition for all peoples finds its highest and most confident expression. In religion, however, when the hope has reached its supreme development, its object takes the form of a redeemed humanity united in a social whole which is truly A Divine Kingdom. To this conception we, therefore, turn our attention as representing the highest flights of human thought and imagination in the effort to con- struct a picture of the future destiny of man. Religion is primarily an affair of the indi- vidual person. As a subjective condition, it is a certain attitude of the individual mind, heart, and will toward an invisible Power, conceived of, necessarily, in terms of personal- ity. This attitude is that of filial piety, an attitude of trust, affection, and the spirit of willing obedience. Its development is the prog- ress in the life of sonship towards and into its [280] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM more perfect form. But religion is also essen- tially a social affair. The sons of the same Father gather themselves, at the first spon- taneously as it were, under family ties or bonds of a community. Thus as Sabatier says (Es- quisse d'une Philosophic de la Religion, p. 104) : "In the same religion, the most diverse spirits, finding themselves affected in the same manner, become related to one another and form a real family united by bonds more strict and more strong than those of blood." As to the prac- tical effect of such a union, "The soul which was hesitating and feeble in isolation, feels itself strengthened, as if it had found the confirma- tion of its personal faith in the faith of others." From the same point of view, Tiele ("Elements of the Science of Religion, Second Series," p. 158) defines the very idea of a church in these words: "Religion is a social phenomenon"; and he adds: "All the more or less independent organizations which embrace a number of kin- dred communities, and in general, in the ab- stract, the whole domain of religion so far as it manifests itself substantially in society" may be properly called "the Church." [281] WHAT MAY I HOPE? As a social affair, or community of individuals, impressed in substantially the same manner, though never, since they are individuals, hold- ing precisely identical beliefs (for this form of mental activity, with its accompaniment of emotions and practical tendencies, cannot - such is its very nature be repeated twice altogether alike in two different personal lives), or moved in pursuit of precisely the same ideals in the form of practical ends; as a social affair, we repeat, religion develops institutions. As institutional, it has to assume some rela- tion to the political and civil, as well as other social institutions, under which the individuals who compose the Church are compelled to live. When once organized and thus brought into more or less close and mutually modifying relations with other forms and institutions of the social order, the religious community is bound to undergo a course of development. In this course, the religious community is in- fluenced by all the other most powerful social forces that constitute its environment, and in its turn, exerts a powerful influence upon all of HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM them. Of this reciprocally modifying social interaction, the most important factors are those which it is customary to group under the abstract terms, Church and State. For the most nearly absolute identity of these two greater forces of social institutions, we should probably have to look to Mohammedanism. Even here, however, it is not quite true, as one writer on the subject has claimed, that "the Mohammedan Church and State are one indis- solubly; and until the very essence of Islam passes away, that unity cannot be relaxed." Such is, indeed, the theory of the Koran, and as well of the tradition which has already at- tained an authority almost, if not quite, equal to that of the Koran. But it is not the theory, when theory comes to the test of a practical application, of the Doctors of Law; and it is becoming less and less the theory which controls the practice of the Mohammedan world. The present prospect is that the political institutions and the religion of Islam will become more and more widely divorced, if anything corresponding to a Mohammedan State continues to exist. And in fact, the faith of Islam has never been [283] WHAT MAY I HOPE? much freer than all the other great religions have been from dissenting sects on grounds of re- ligious belief, and from warring political units seeking control of the so-called State. This necessity, which is put upon every re- ligious organization, as it is laid upon every form of a human institution, of undergoing changes that must, on the whole and "in the long run," as the saying is, be changes for the better, if it is to continue in existence, applies to the beliefs, the ceremonials, the ecclesiastical government, and all the other institutions of the religious community. But it is particu- larly true of the greater religions which have made claims to an universality that implies a larger than usual adaptability. In the cases of the inferior religions, with their restricted claims, the community which comes under their spell is promised the aid of numerous petty and often criminal devices to get the tribal gods on their side; especially in times when their divine help is needed in order to secure the people who believe in them against some common enemy. It follows from what has just been said, and [2841 HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM from much more that might be said in proof of the same conception of the religious com- munity, that the hope of the realized social Ideal, as a Divine Kingdom, depends chiefly upon the future of religion. The belief in, and the worship of, tribal gods no matter by what name such divinities are called can never secure, or even essentially promote, the cause of a universal betterment of human so- ciety. Neither must the divinity, even when selected from a lot of claimants for the right to the confidence, the worship, and the service of all mankind, in all eras and stages of its evolu- tion, be the patron and the protector and the moral ideal for any one alone, among the many classes, or races, or nations, into which human- ity has split itself up. The religion with whose future the social hope of the whole of humanity is bound, must be a religion of truly "uni- versal" character. Only the religions whose beliefs secure that kind of optimism which is born of faith in God as the universal Father and Redeemer, and which as controlling the conduct of life embraces all mankind, can avail for founding this Divine Kingdom as something [285] WHAT MAY I HOPE? independent, for the essentials of its faith and hope, of all the vicissitudes of space and time. The effort at social expansiveness takes dif- ferent forms in the different greater religions. In realizing this effort the religious festival is one of the most effective of the means employed. To feast and sport, as well as to worship to- gether, awakens and enhances the social feeling. Of the eleven national holidays celebrated in Japan, all but two are connected with ancestor worship; the remaining two are of political char- acter. "In all Semitic life the Hag, or religious festival, has always played an important part." In the Babylonian religions, while some of the priests and monarchs arrived at exalted notions of the Deity, and of his relations to men, neither the priests nor the monarchs seem to have been considered the heads or representatives of a religious society, that is, of the whole people as a people of one faith in one God, after the pattern of the kings and priests of Israel. In the valley of the Euphrates, therefore, the germ of a church was not planted; the religions preva- lent had none of the characteristics necessary for a truly social religious development. The [286] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM king was the son of God; but the people were not the people of God, and by this fact bound together into a social unity. The growth of the religious community repre- sented by the Hinduism of India is of a quite different order. Any religious belief, either of a popular character or such a form of reflection as is necessary to found a school of religious philosophy, is permissible in Hinduism. As a speculative system, or rather as a hotch-potch of confused and contending systems, anything is permitted to the believer. In respect of its speculative freedom, Hinduism is perhaps the most nearly universal of all the greater religions. But its doctrine and practice of caste prevents it from all reasonable claim to a true and effec- tive practical universality. The individual Hindu is debarred from the social privilege and incitement to a life in pursuit of a moral ideal as one fortified by the consciousness that he is a member of a community of brothers accepting allegiance and bound to service, as sons, in a divine family. This need of the social motive, and this deficiency in respect of failure to furnish it, was one of the several facts that [287] WHAT MAY I HOPE? gave success to the earlier reforms of Buddhism. Buddhism offered to relieve the people, the multitudes "weary and heavy laden," from the burdens of caste and priestly domination and prescribed ceremonial, and to convert them into a brotherhood of redeemed souls seeking a common salvation. But the redeemed ones had no eternal and omnipresent personal Spirit to serve as their King; and the hope of the community for welfare of the life here and the life in the Beyond could not take the social form. Nirvana is not a social condition. Buddhism had no one Living God; it could not found the faith on which must repose the hope of a universal and eternal Kingdom of God. It was in the thought and work of Jesus that the nobler conception of a universal Divine Kingdom had its birth. The realization of the social ideal by the way of the universalizing of the religion held by the members of the society was, indeed, a conception of the He- brew prophets. In their thought, Israel is God's people, the community which He has chosen and bound to himself, and bound together by HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM a covenant that is everlasting and can never be broken. This social conception of Judaism as dependent on the adherence of all the people to one form of religion served its purpose so long as Judaism retained also its civil and political unity. When this gave way, and was followed by the chaotic conditions of the Macca- bean era, a sort of substitute for it was found in a process which has been not inaptly called "the churchifying of piety." In this way, some choice souls foresaw the possibility of others than the Jews becoming members, with them, of the same socially organized piety. But the views of most, even the most pious and faithful, never separated the conception of the Divine Kingdom from a closely corresponding form of ecclesiastical and political association. The Kingdom of God, as Jesus conceived of it, was not inseparably bound up with any ecclesiastical or political association. As to the latter form of association, this Kingdom stood in contrast or in opposition to "the kingdoms of this world." Not, however, be- cause it countenanced rebellion against them; but because its spirit was of a quite different [289] WHAT MAY I HOPE? order, and its aims and ideals were essentially unlike. Its members were all the redeemed ones, the community of souls who, trusting and following him, had become the sons of God. For, the standard for membership in this King- dom was spiritual, a change of mind, self-sur- render, and a loving trust in Divine Grace, rather than any technical mode of worship or legal conformity. Only in this indefinite and ideal way can Christ be called the founder of the Christian Church. But he not only drew men to himself while his brief life lasted; he also chose apostles and commissioned them to go into the "whole world" and proclaim the glad tidings, or Gospel of his kingdom. A religious community which should take some definite form of social organ- ization, was the natural and necessary result of the working of man's social nature in its reception and application of the religion of Jesus. The more precise forms and laws regu- lating this community were the natural and necessary result of the working of the spirit which animated this community, under the civil, political, and social environment of the time. [290] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM It is not a part of our purpose to trace the various vicissitudes which have shaped the dif- ferent forms taken by the social organization of Christianity as, today, the chief claimant to represent worthily the social religious ideal. That it has already attained this ideal, or made anywhere any very close approach to its attain- ment, no candid student of history or of the pres- ent facts of the case, is likely to maintain. But the parables of Jesus, and his other expressions of insight into the future, teach that the tares and the wheat will not be all and finally sepa- rated, until the divine process of judgment of the two has been quite completed. And neither social science nor Christianity as a social or- ganization equipped for social service, promises to hope any such final solution, under earthly conditions, of the vast problem of economic and moral evil. When, then, we raise the questions, What is to be the future of the Christian religion as a social organization? and, What is the precise state of the social welfare which will be achieved by the universalizing of this organization? we cannot maintain as reasonable either one of [291] WHAT MAY I HOPE? two extreme, and customarily opposed opinions. We are scarcely warranted on grounds of re- ligious faith in hoping that the Church, having become universal in the extent of its member- ship, will accurately and throughout correspond to that social ideal which the conception of a perfected Kingdom of God aims to present. Even less far less can we respond to the predictions of writers like, for example, M. Guyau in his work on "The Irreligion of the Future." "In this age," says he, "of crisis, of religious, moral, and social ruin, of reflective and destructive analysis, the reasons for suffer- ing abound, and they end by seeming to be motives for despair. Each new progress of intelligence or sensibility would appear to be productive of new pains." "In all that remains of sensation or thought for us, one sentiment only is dominant, that of being weary, very weary." To all such complaint our answer is: This abounding of motives for despair, this utter lack of hope for the future social ideal conditions of which the seers of mankind have always indulged themselves in dreaming, is not the fault of the faiths of morality and religion; it is not HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM due to the recognition of the falsity of the claims in which those faiths are founded. Morality and religion do not promise anything to endeav- ors after social betterment which reject the principles, and refuse to trust and serve the ideals, of morality and religion. And if econ- omists, reformers, diplomats, statesmen, social- settlement workers, and socialistic organiza- tions, whatever be their creed or cult, persist in flouting or neglecting these same principles and ideals, they will continue to be subject to over- whelming motives for being "weary, very weary," and even for despair. Without moral- ity and religion, humanity can reasonably entertain no hope of securing the social ideal, or any considerable approach to this ideal. On the part of the Christian Church, too, the grounds of its hope remain reasonable only so long as they are kept pure. When the social ideal of religion drops down to the level at which it is ready to avail itself of any of the morally degrading and corrupt means for extending its domain, for "universalizing" organized piety, which so generally charac- terize the attempts of the kingdoms of this [293] WHAT MAY I HOPE? world to extend themselves, it forfeits its right to hope. We conclude, then, that while the conception of a Church Universal, if constituted after the pattern set by the doctrine and life of Jesus, may hope more and more nearly to approximate the ideal of a Divine Kingdom on earth, it is not the substitute, much less the exact equiva- lent, of this ideal. A truly Divine Kingdom is founded upon a much grander plan, and in- cludes infinitely larger stretches of time and space. And here we listen to the "far cry" that our minds should be brought back to the place from which in their hunt for truth they set out. The hope of a Divine Kingdom is the only permissible form into which can reasonably be set the hope of a Social Ideal. For it is a hope based upon faith in God as the ideal that is, the omnipresent, all-powerful, and ethically perfect Ruler of the Universe, of all things and of all spirits, irrespective of limiting conditions of sense, and time, and space. If there is no such God, there can be no hope for a social ideal; its very conception in the vaguest form, not to say, its attainment through an [294] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM indefinitely long process in "universal" and not merely earthly history, can reasonably raise no semblance however ardent the desire of the faintest expectation. The antithesis to this Divine Rule is the despotism of fate, or the chaos of hell! It has been the custom for all the religious seers of the future social condition of mankind, to frame more or less definitely outlined pic- tures of a World this world or "the other world" that shall form a fitting environment for a community of redeemed souls. It has seemed to all as though the moral and spiritual completeness of personal life demanded some radical changes in its physical surroundings. But Apocalyptic descriptions of A City with golden streets, ablaze with light but devoid of the shining of sun or moon, a crystal sea, and other similar physical accessories, are not the rewards of faith for which the reasonable mind has either longing or hope. It does not mini- mize the longing or threaten the hope, if the physical and chemical sciences demonstrate the impossibility of such a material dwelling- place for the redeemed soul. The same thing [2951 WHAT MAY I HOPE? is not, at least to the same extent, true of the longing and the hope of a life in which there shall no longer be sickness nor suffering nor sorrow nor tears. And the impossibility of securing territory and conditions which will exclude these forms of seeming evil is not at all so manifest when stated in terms of sanitary and therapeutic science. But that there can be no complete freedom from suffering and sympathetic tears until complete redemption has triumphed in all quarters of the Divine Rule would seem to be made sure on ethical and spiritual grounds. And for the redeemed soul, purifying suffering and sympathetic tears have lost their bitterness and their repulsiveness. The environing conditions of the Divine Kingdom, as an object of faith and reasonable hope, are just as little distinctly typified by any existing monarchy or republic, or by any form of political organization spelled in outline by the reveries or dreams of socialistic scheming. Even the future of religion, as represented by the spread of any of the existing churchly organ- izations, or by the so-called Universal Church Triumphant, does not afford ground for the rea- * [ HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM sonable hope of a perfect adjustment of this earthly environment to the perfected society of a race redeemed by Divine Grace. That such an environment is absolutely impossible, however, we cannot say in the name of the phys- ical and chemical sciences. Indeed, these sci- ences have of late been disclosing such amazing but hitherto hidden possibilities of transfor- mation in "matter" no longer to be regarded as "brute" and "dead" that nothing in the way of its achievement can safely be called forever impossible. Radio-active substances now seem able to perform feats which the science of two decades ago would have declared quite beyond the powers of the angels. We must leave, then, this question of the more precise imagery fit to encourage the hope of an environment suitable to the perfected Divine Kingdom, in the region where dreams may be indulged betimes, but in general without placing much confidence in, or attaching much value to, the pictures the imagination presents to men, while dreaming. "But what more specifically said may we reasonably hope for, with reference to the [297] WHAT MAY I HOPE? future of religion? Three things may be said with most comfortable and well-founded as- surance in answer to this question. And, first, the religion of the future will be social, in the higher and better meaning of this word. It will more and more be a power to transform society the ' Great Psychic Uplift ' of the race. No form of positive religion which does not actually effectuate in a large and generous way the social improvement of mankind can reason- ably hope to have its future prolonged. Second : the religion of the future will be ethical in the higher and better meaning of this word. It will be more and more an inspiring and illumining motive for the control of the conduct of the individual in the interests of righteousness, trueness, and all the virtues of mind, will, and heart. No form of religion which does not in fact make men better morally can reasonably hope to^have its future prolonged. But, third: the religion of the future will be a faith in the sense that it will retain a certain characteristic view of the world, of human life and human des- tiny, and of what has worth of the highest and most imperishable kind. This faith within the [298] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM soul of man, as subjective religion, will be the spirit of practical piety, or of loving trust to- ward the Divine Being, and filial feeling and conduct toward all finite spirits as sons of the Infinite and ethically Perfect Spirit. And the normal relation between this faith and the ethical and social functions of religion will be retained; since it belongs to the very constitu- tion of man that his positive view of life, when warmed with emotion, should realize itself in his behavior as a member of society." ("Phi- losophy of Religion," Vol. II, p. 467.) To be a member of this redeemed community is, for the individual, the limit of his most reasonable hope. Like the other greater hopes of morality and religion the hope of moral perfection and the hope of immortality the hope of a Divine Kingdom has its grounds largely within itself. It is a leap from real experience to faith in the Reality of the experienced Ideal. For the individual, it is the hope of realizing in ever fuller measure the thing already experienced namely, an actual process of redemption. For the race, it is the hope of a future which will more and more embrace mankind, in the extent [299] WHAT MAY I HOPE? and thoroughness and perfection of its opera- tions, with all human social institutions and social relations. And to this community of redeemed ones, it rests with God to give it such a habitation and physical and other en- vironment as he is amply able and sees fit to provide. Precisely what and where such an environment may be, we cannot safely predict, or within the bounds of reasonableness quite satisfactorily imagine. But the King of the Kingdom has "many mansions," and he pro- vides a variety of bodies for his various creations which are limited only by his mysterious wisdom and all-embracing good- will. It must be evident to the most casual reader that, for our optimistic view of the hope of a Divine Kingdom, so far as any serious attempt has been made to argue its reasonableness, the argument has proceeded in an order which is nearly the reverse of that customary in theo- logical circles. We may now state the course of thought as it appeals to reason from the point of view held by our goal : 1. The optimism which is the hope of a Di- vine Kingdom; [300] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM This hope is dependent on 2. The belief in the triumph of the moral ideals; This belief is founded on 3. The doctrine, or intellectual faith the reasoned conviction as to the moral attri- butes of God. Here, then, we finally rest the answer to the question, What may I hope? concerning the most important of all human hopes, the hope of salvation, the hope of immortality, the hope of a Divine Kingdom. The answer to this question is in the answer to another question: Have I the firm faith in an ever-living, perfectly righteous, and all-merciful God? What is my last opinion and controlling practical attitude, as an answer to this quite comprehensive ques- tion? And, then, as coming under it: What kind of an Universe is this in which I am ines- capably fated to live? Indeed, from our present point of view we can now see how all the four questions which have occupied us in this series of little books, may be looked back upon as somehow subordinate [301] WHAT MAY I HOPE? to this one, What may I hope? especially with regard to the ultimate goal of humanity. For you and I are human; and our fortune here and destiny in the Beyond is wrapped inex- tricably up in the fate of the Universe; and this, if there be a God, surely rests in the divine hands, and no violence or craft or wisdom of man can wrest it from them. What, then, is the fatal objection that should deter him who has the right kind and degree of faith in God, from arguing thus with himself? My supreme hope is that of a Divine Kingdom; my most con- trolling and comforting faith is personal trust in its King; my most rewarding and obligatory duty is His service; my highest and most worthy knowledge may be looked upon as growing wise in His ways. It will be recalled that the one word which has given the key to the "substance of our doc- trine" as to knowledge, duty, faith, and hope, is this, Personality (or the Personal Life). It is shallow thoughts and frivolous emotions and evil practices gathered about the concepr tion entertained in response to this word, that mar and spoil all the activities and issues of [302] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM the life of the individual man. Modern science, not only biological, but also economic and political, and worst of all, psychological, is largely guilty for all this. Too much have its devotees obscured or neglected the problem: What shall it profit a man (a person), if he gain the whole world and make a mess, and suffer final loss, of his personal life? Too little has modern education, whether as undertaken by the family, or the school, or the state, realized its opportunity and directed its policy, for the development of personality in itself, and as estimated by its own values, rather than by the increase of the material advantages of its environment. But this life is intrusted to the individual man as a thing for development. The Evolu- tion of Personal Life is the only way to get it; just as by the path of evolution alone can any higher form of life be reached. In this form of evolution for himself, every individual man takes a hand; he himself must fight for its prizes and its rewards; and there is absolutely no escape from this war. In his behavior and in his many efforts to find practical answers [303] WHAT MAY I HOPE? for the questions, What can I know? What ought I to do? What should I believe? and, What may I hope? a "person" is bound by his very nature to be reasonable. This is a word of which there has been made constant and varied use. But such use has been due to the fact that we would not mean by "being reasonable" simply being disputatious or skilled in argument, or even wise in the scientific proofs for many conclusions, or learned as respects the causes of many things. By "being reasonable" has been meant, the rather, that docile and modest but eager attitude toward truth and duty, that diligently inquiring mind into the satisfactions and rewards of the faiths of morality and re- ligion, and that selection and seizure of the hopes, which guide, comfort, and encourage in the practical life, just because they are founded in these faiths, all of which is most safe and fitting and practically useful for a rational but finite being in his relations to that Supreme Reason, in whom he and all his environment and his destiny have their Ground. And now it remains only for the reader, and the author, both to answer each of these impor- [304] HOPE OF A DIVINE KINGDOM tant questions for himself and in his own way. For, as was confessed at the very beginning of our acquaintance: No one can answer them for any other one, but only for his very own Self; and the answer must be somewhat different in every individual case. We may part, then, not in the spirit of reciprocal faultfinding, but with the exchange of a cheerful "God-bless- you"; and in parting tell the question we have been asking and answering, for ourselves, all the way through. "How shall I give that which hath been given? "Hold thy heart in thy hand and let thy words keep time to the beat of memory. Thus shall the written page be possessed of an enduring spirit and a pervading light." [305] INDEX ANTONINUS, MARCUS AURE- uus, 242 ARISTOTLE, his theory of knowledge, v f.; and of ethics, viii "AWAKENING OF FAITH" (quo- ted), 278 BAIN, on nature of hope, 12 f ., 26 f., 43 BARING, MAURICE, 120 f. BELIEF, PROBLEM OF, treat- ment hitherto given, ix f.; hope, as dependent on, 31 f., 59 f., 177 f., 191 f. BHAGAVAD G!TA, 52 f . BOURGET, M. PAUL, 158 BRINTON, on religion of "Prim- itive Peoples," 190 CHARLES, doctrine of future life, 211 CHURCH, the, relation to State, 283 f.; Mohammedan view of, 283 f.; not the same as Divine Kingdom, 285 f., 291 f., 293 f.; Hindu con- ception of, 287 DARWIN, on nature of prayer, 187 f. DAVIDS, RHYS, 270 f . DEFRENNE, M., 158 f. DEMOCRACY, hopes of, 147 f., 151 f. DESIRES, as related to hoping, 43 f., 44 f.; immorality of certain kinds of, 46 f., 49 f., 52 f. DIVINE KINGDOM, the hope of, 115, 133 f., 143 f., chap. VIII, 240 f., 248 f., 252 f., 255 f., 258 f., 263 f.; as social re- organization, 241 f., 245 f., 250 f., 257 f.; as religious faith, 255 f., 263 f., 266 f.; Jesus' view of, 288 f . ; as contrasted with earthly kingdoms, 289 f.; Apoca- lyptic visions of, 295 f . ; environing conditions of, 296 f. EPICTETUS (quoted), 22, 98, 202, 243 FAITH, the religious, 174, 178 f., 186, 191 f., 251, 298 f. (See also BELIEF and RELIG- ION) FEAR, as antithesis of hope, 12 f., 15 f., 20 f.; Mosso on, 14 f . FESTIVAL, the religious, 286 f. [307] INDEX GOETHE, on hope, 2, 64; on belief in immortality, 256 f. GUYAU, M., on religion in the future, 292 HAECKEL, on miracle of life, 225 HARNACK, 246 f . HEBBEL, on social develop- ment, 269 f . HOPE, Nature and Sources of, chap. I; universality of, 2 f.; uniqueness of, 11 f., 19 f.; no synonyms for, 22 f . ; com- plexity of, 24 f. ; connection of, with beliefs, 31, 58 f., 169, 179 f., 184 f., 191 f.; permissive character of, 33 f ., 71 f., 108 f., 113; the As- surance of, chap. Ill, 65 f.; educatory nature of, 80 f., 99 f.; of Optimism, 3|; need of a succession of, 105; of moral perfection, chap. VI, 163, 174 f.. 179 f., 184 f.; of immortality, chap. VII, 242 f. HOPING, EMOTION OP, scanty scientific treatment of, xi f., 12 f.; naturalness of, 5 f.; influence of temperament on, 6 f., 8f.; uniqueness of, 11 f.; physiology of, 17 f.; analysis of the, 23 f., 28 f., 30; Rights and Limitations of, chap. II, 42 f., 46 f., 52 f., 54 f., 75 f.; difficulty [308] of assigning rules for, 37 f.; dependence of, on the will, 38 f ., 59 f . ; " rules of reason" applied to, 41 f., 59 f., 75 f., 186 f . ; element of desire in, 44 f ., 75 f . ; of expectation, 44 f.; and of trust, 44 f.; assurance of, 67 f ., 72 f., 77 f.; Practical Uses of, chap. IV, 94 f., 109 f., Ill, 113 f., 120 f.; "technique" of, 98 f., 104 f.; tact in practical uses of, 97 f., 116 f. HOPES, fundamentally differ- ent kinds of, 62 f., 137 f.; of Moral Idealism, 82 f., 97 f., 113 f., 138, 171 f., 175 f . ; illusory character of certain hopes, 97 f., 149 f.; scientific, chap. V, 126, 137 f., 139 f., 164 f.; social, chap. V, 123, 125, 145 f.; of religion, 139 f., 155 f., 179 f., 186 f., 191 f., 246. 247 f., 254 f . IETASU, his motto, 107 IMMORTALITY, hope of, 122, chap. VII, 203 f., 208, 211 f., 215, 222 f., 227 f., 257, 260 f.; origin of belief hi, 203 f., 209 f., 21 If., 219 f.; Brah- minical doctrine of, 207 f.; Buddhistic fear of, 207 f., 244 f.; objections to, con- sidered, 223 f., 226 f., 230 f., INDEX 235 f., 241 !.; arguments for, 242, 243 f., 246 f., 251 f., 254 f., 260 f.; Old Testament doctrine of, 245 f.; Jesus' views concerning, 247 f.; Apostolic doctrine of, 248 f.; influence of Greek philoso- phy, 249 f . ; belief in, as a theodicy, 254 f . KANT, doctrine of belief in immortality, 210 f., 240 KARMA, doctrine of, 143 f. KNOWLEDGE, PROBLEM OF, as treated by Aristotle, v; and Plato, vi; and in India, vif. MANTRA, conception of the, 190 f. MARDUK, prayer of, 195 MAXIMS OF ANI, 195 MEGASTHENES, 245 NIRVANA, doctrine of, 242 f., 244 f. OPTIMISM, as related to human hopes, 84 f., 86 f., 89 f.; the hope of, 92, 300 ORPHIC MYSTERIES, 169, 244 OSIRIS, cult of, 195 f. PARALLELISM, psycho-physical, doctrine of, 226, 229, 231 f. PERFECTION, MORAL, the hope of, chap. VI, 162 f., 166 f., 180 f., 258 f.; historical character of the striving for, 169 f.; worth of the ideal of, 171 f., 175 f., 180 f.; religious nature of, 180 f ., 186 f., 197 f., 257 f . PESSIMISM, the, of Absolutism, 91 f. "PHILOSOPHY OF CONDUCT" (quoted], 49 f., 115 f. "PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION" (quoted], 196 f., 217 f., 236 f., 239 f ., 250 f., 297 f. PINDAR, 244 PLATO, his doctrine of knowl- edge, vi, 131; and of right, viiif.; his "Republic," 129; and on immortality, 245 PRAYER, nature of, 186 f., 188 f . ; Brahminical doctrine of, 189 RELIGION, "cult" of, 186 f.; r-~ as ambition for moral per- fection, 180 f., 197 f., 258 f.; as founded in faith, 191 f.; and hope, 186 f., 191 f., 246 f., 254 f.; and confi- dence in immortality, 247 f., 254 f.; and the Divine King- dom, 279 f., 288 f., 291 f., 297; characteristics of the future, 298 f . RENAN, 158 SABATIER, on nature of re- ligion, 281 [309] INDEX SACRIFICE, as religious cult, 188, 198 f.; different forms of, 198 SALVATION, the hope of, 169, 179 f., 184 f., 191 f., 197 f.; doctrine of the "Way" of, 181 f., 186 f., 188 f., 197 f., 243 SCIENCE, hopes of, chap. V, 122, 125 f., 131 f ., 139, 163; conception of, 127, 132 f., 136 f.; limitations of, 135 f., 164 f. SCHOPENHAUER, pessimism of, 91 SOCIALISM, certain illusory hopes of, 102, 146 f., 149 f., 152 f. SOPHOCLES, 278 SOUL, belief in its separability, 214 f., 218, 238, 246 f.; and multiplicity, 217 f.; Hebrew doctrine of, 218; its natural indestructibility, 222 f., 241; instrumental theory of, 238; substantiality of, 241 f.; Homeric doctrine of, 246 f . SPINOZA, 201, 208 STATE, the, conception of the perfect, 129 f. TACT, as used hi cultivating hope, 100 f., 116 f., 117 f. TEMPERAMENT, the so-called "sanguine" or hopeful, 9 f., 204 f.; influence on hope of immortality, 203 f . THALES, alleged saying of, 1 f., " 12 f. THOREAU, 84 TIELE, 188 f., 281 VON DEN STEINEN, on natural belief in immortality, 209 "WHAT CAN I KNOW" (quo- ted), 69 f., 141 "WHAT OUGHT I TO Do" (quoted), 172 f., 175 f. WUNDT, on belief in immor- tality, 201 ZEND-AVESTA, 170 [310] THE -PLIMPTON -PRESS NORWOOD- MASS -U-S-A Longmans, Green, & Co.'s Publications WHAT CAN I KNOW? An Inquiry into Truth, its Nature, The Means of its Attainment, and its Relations to the Practical Life. By George Trumbull Ladd, LL.D. Crown 8vo., $1.50 net. This book, while bringing to bear on the problem of knowledge the more recent points of view, both psychological and philosophical, aims chiefly at helping the reader in the culture and practical uses of the mental life. Thus it considers not only the nature and guaranties of knowledge, but especially how knowledge may be used to attain its most important ends. These are the ideals and the behavior that have value. Without being controversial, it furnishes material for criticism of the errors and half-truths of Pragmatism and other current theories as to the meaning and worth of Truth. Its conclusions lie in " the middle of the road," between the extremes of intellectual over-confidence or an easy credulousness and excessive skep. ticism or agnostic despair. Inasmuch as all knowledge involves the higher senti- ments and the activities of " free will," its attainment and culture become a matter of personal obligation and moral concernment. In this way this Treatise serves as an Introduction for those which are to follow, and which will treat of Duty, Faith., and Hope, in further defence of a consistent system of rationalism in opinion and in conduct. _____ For such ... as are seeking a satisfying answer to the inquiry propounded by this volume a veteran thinker here cuts an easily traveled path through the mazes of the subject, clearing it of entanglements, and steadily keeping in view its issues in practical value for the rational conduct of life. The Outlook. The man of learning who puts into a little book his best and most availably useful thought, so simply expressed that all who are intelligent, with or without technical training, may understand, does an eminently good thing. . . . Dr. Ladd approaches his subject as one seeking for practical light and leading. Dluminatingly he discusses the question of the limitations of human knowledge, the effects of heredity and of environment, including the opinions of others, everywhere deepen- ing the significance of those lessons which common sense and experience teach with more or less thoroughness to the virtuous and the intelligent. Analyzing the process by which we know, he sums up his results in the notable saying that "knowledge is a matter of the entire man the real knower is the whole self, not as a ' naked mind,' but as a living soul." North American Review. These far reaching questions, as we have intimated, are answered by Professor Ladd from the point of view which he has reached in his own long course of reflective thinking. For the most part his results are not only wholesome and constructive in themselves, but they are stated in moderate terms. Later novelties in the epistemo- logical field are also taken into account, ... the style is planned for the comprehqn- sion of the knower little versed in technical forms. Without writing down to the level of the plain man, Professor Ladd has been at pains to phrase his conclusions as simply as may be. The Philosophical Review, March, 1915. Longmans, Green, & Co.'s Publications WHAT OUGHT I TO DO ? An Inquiry into the Hature and Kinds of Virtue, and into the Sanctions, Aims and Values of the Moral Life. By George Trumbull Ladd, LL.D. Crown 8vo, $1.50 net. This second volume of the Series of Four Questions deals with the problem of Duty in similar manner to that in which the preceding volume dealt with the prob- lem of Knowledge. After defining the meaning of the question, it traces the origins and development of responsibility, in the feelings naively expressed by the phrases " I ought " and " I can." The significance and value of the intention of being good and of doing one's duty are discussed in separate chapters, which are followed by a brief defence of the supreme worth of moral ideals in the evolution of personal life. A chapter on the many virtues is supplemented by one raising the inquiry; " Is there one only virtue ? " in which the essentials of all the^others may be summed up and expressed. Other laws are then contrasted with the Moral Law, and certain maxims helpful for the settling of cases of conscience are then suggested. The book ends with two~chapters which bear the titles, " The Final Issue " and " Morality and Religion." ... a practical treatise on moral conduct that amply repays a careful study. One who reads it repeatedly will be fully rewarded. American Lutheran Survey. Professor Ladd . . . avails himself of the psychological method of approach, avoids abstractions and thinks of the moral life in its concrete situations, which gives his work a practical character. It is a wise and helpful book. The Congregationalist. The work makes a thoughtful analysis of moral ideas, and studies with close, clear reasoning the relations between knowledge and conduct, between the several virtues, between custom and the moral law, and between ethics and religion . . . written in a manner so free from academic or scholastic technicality that it should not fail to attract and stimulate those who, without wishing to specialize, read philosophy for culture's sake. The Scotsman, Edinburgh. ... a volume which it may be presumed sums up the ripest fruits of many long years of reflective thinking on the problems of human conduct. The book, it need hardly be said, contains very much that is worth reading and attending to, an abundance of fertile ideas, keen observations, interesting allusions, the whole con- veyed with that urbanity and geniality . . . characteristic of all the author's writings. The Ecclesiastical Review. ... a book which penetrates to the heart of things and answers the deepest ques- tion which time or eternity will ever raise for any human soul to act upon. Boston Evening Transcript. The very title of this volume pointedly addresses it to a widely felt need in the present crisis of civilization, in the birth pangs of a new social order, and perplexing questions of personal and social duty. The Outlook, N.Y. Longmans, Green, & Co.'s Publications WHAT SHOULD I BELIEVE ? An inquiry into the Nature, Grounds and Value of the Faiths of Science, Society, Morals and Religion. By George Trumbull Ladd, LL.D. Crown 8vo., $1.50 net. The first task of this volume is to describe the elements of the mental attitude of Belief so as to distinguish it, on the one hand, from Knowledge, and on the other, from mere opinion. In this connection the truth of the doctrine of the so- called " will to believe " is briefly discussed. The central thought of the book is reached, however, in a chapter which bears the title " Lesser and Greater Beliefs," and which attempts to distinguish those forms of this mental attitude that make claims upon the conscience, put the person under rational obligations, and offer the comfort and rewards of right belief. Chapters then follow which give more special and detailed consideration to certain scientific and social beliefs; and, after describing the minor differences between simple belief and so-called faith, vindicate at con- siderable length the more important and fundamental of the faiths of morality and of religion. This admirable treatise strongly emphasizes the need of moral earnestness in the selection of the beliefs that have best stood time's test by human experience. For without this the world of men now crying for a rehabilitation of religious faith will cry in vain. The Outlook, N. Y. (This) series of books on knowledge, ethics and belief, to be completed by an inquiry into the sources and reasonableness of human homes is a work of which Americans may be justly proud. . . . Professor Ladd handles sensible questions in a sensible way, and sensible people will thank him for giving them a loaf when they ask for bread The Sun, N.Y. WHAT MAY I HOPE ? An Inquiry into the Sources and Reasonableness of Human Hopes, especially the Social and Religious. By George Trumbull Ladd, LL.D. Crown 8vo., $1.50 net. This fourth and last of the volumes that attempt to deal with problems of practi- cal philosophy in a manner to help toward a better and more truly successful life, has for its subject the complex emotion of Hope. While admitting that psychologi- cal Tscience encounters especial obstacles in this task, the author gives a more complete analysis of the nature and sources of hoping than will be found elsewhere. He then proceeds to consider the limitations, assurance, and practical uses of hope. A chapter follows concerning hopes scientific, political and social. The books closes with a somewhat lengthy discussion of the hope of moral perfection (or in religious terminology, " the hope of salvation "); the hope of immortality; and the hope of a perfect society, or a " Divine Kingdom." The same earnest effort is made which seems by common consent to have been successful in the preceding volumes to maintain throughout clearness and sim- plicity of style, and to keep the practical issues always prominently in mind. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. RENEWALS ONLY TEL. NO. 642-3405 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall T dr^T% ir\ Alij - - x ^ ^ -^- * fitC D LD AU gn AJ-onwj. g T- 1 _ Jl LD2lA-60m-3,'70 (N5382slO)476-A-32 General Library University of California Berkeley MAY241954LC?' 21-lt VB 23175 313784 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY