I will not try to discuss these matters at length. But this I can say without hesitation: The family ties, so far as they are natural, are opportunities for loyalty; so far as they are deliberately chosen or recognized, are in stances of the choice of a loyalty. From our point of view, therefore, they must be judged as all other opportunities and forms of loyalty are judged. That such opportunities and forms alter their character as civilization changes is inevitable, and need be no matter for super stitious cares regarding whatever was arbitrary in traditional views of family authority. But, after all, fidelity and family devotion are amongst the most precious opportunities and instances of loyalty. Faithlessness can never become a virtue, however your traditions about the forms of faithfulness may vary in their external details. Whoever deliberately breaks the tie to which he is devoted loses the oppor tunity and the position of the loyal self, and in so far loses the best sort of thing that there is in the moral world. No fondness for individual ism will ever do away with this fact. We want more individuals and more rational individ ualism; but the only possible ethical use of an individual is to be loyal. He has no other destiny.
When a man feels his present ties to be arbitrary or to be a mechanical bondage, he sometimes says that it is irrational to be a mere spoke in a wheel. Now, a loyal self is always more than a spoke in a wheel. But still, at the worst, it is better to be a spoke in the wheel than a spoke out of the wheel. And you never make ethical individuals, or enlarge their opportunities, merely by breaking ties. Hence, so far as a change in family tradition actually involves a loss of opportunities and forms of loyalty, which tradition used to emphasize, our new social order has lost a good thing. Do we see at present just what is taking its place? If the patriarchal family must pass away or be profoundly altered, surely we should not gain thereby unless there were to result a new family type, as rich in appeal to our human affections and our do mestic instincts as the old forms ever were.
But in our present American life the family tie has been weakened, and yet no substitute has been found. We have so far lost certain opportunities for loyalty.
Now, how shall we hope to win back these opportunities? I answer: We can win back something of what we have lost if only we in this country can get before ourselves and our pub lic a new, a transformed conception of what loyalty is. The loyalties of the past have lost their meaning for many people, simply because people have confounded loyalty with mere bondage to tradition, or with mere surrender of individual rights and preferences. Such people have forgotten that what has made loyalty a good has never been the convention which undertook to enforce it, but has always been the spiritual dignity which lies in being loyal.
As to individual rights and preferences, no body can ever attain either the one or the other, in full measure, apart from loyalty to the clos est and the most lasting ties which the life of the individual in question is capable of accept ing with hearty willingness. Ties once loyally accepted may be broken in case, but only in case, the further keeping of those ties intact involves disloyalty to the universal cause of loyalty. When such reason for breaking ties exists, to break them becomes a duty; and then, indeed, a merely conventional persist ence in what has become a false position, is itself a disloyal deed. But ties may never be broken except for the sake of other and still stronger ties. No one may rationally say: "Loyalty can no longer bind me, because, from my deepest soul, I feel that I want my individual freedom." For any such outcry comes from an ignorance of what one's deep est soul really wants.
Disloyalty is moral suicide. Many a poor human creature outlives all that, in the present life, can constitute his true self, — outlives as a mere psychological specimen any human expression of his moral personality, and does so because he has failed to observe that his loyalty, so far and so long as it has been his own, has been the very heart of this moral personality. When loyalty has once been fully aroused, and has then not merely blundered but died, there may, indeed, remain much fluttering eagerness of life; as if a stranded ship's torn canvas were still flapping in the wind. But there cannot remain freedom of personal exist ence. For the moral personality that once was loyal, and that then blindly sought free dom, is, to human vision, dead. What is, in such a case, left of the so-called life is merely an obituary. Curious people of prominence have sometimes expressed a wish to read their own obituaries. But it is hardly worth while to live them.
People sometimes fail to observe this fact, partly because they conceive loyalty as something which convention forces upon the indi vidual, and partly because they also conceive loyalty, where it exists, as merely a relation of one individual to other individuals. Both views, as we now know, are wrong. No con vention can predetermine my personal loyalty without my free consent. But then, if I loyally consent, I mean to be faithful; I give myself; I am henceforth the self thus given over to the cause; and therefore essential un faithfulness is, for me, moral suicide. Mean while, however, no mere individual can ever be my whole object of loyalty; for to another individual human being I can only say, "So far as in me lies I will be loyal to our tie, to our cause, to our union." For this reason the loyal are never the mere slaves of convention; and, on the other hand, they can never say one to another, "Since we have now grown more or less tired of one another, our loyalty ceases." To tire of the cause to which my whole self is once for all committed, is indeed to tire of being my moral self. I cannot win my freedom in that way. And no individual, as individual, ever has been, or ever can be, my whole cause. My cause has always been a tie, an union of various individuals in one.
Now, can our American people learn this lesson in so far as this lesson is illustrated by family ties? Can they come to see that loyalty does not mean the bondage of one individual to another, but does mean the exaltation of individuals to the rank of true personalities by virtue of their free acceptance of enduring causes, and by virtue of their lifelong service of their common personal ties? If this lesson can be learned by those serious-minded peo ple who have been misled, in recent times, by a false form of individualism, then we shall indeed not get rid of our moral problems, but we shall vastly simplify our moral situation. And a rational individualism will still remain our possession. How to treat the disloyal remains indeed a serious practical problem. But we shall never learn to deal with that problem if we suppose that the one cure for disloyalty, or the one revenge which we can take upon the disloyal, lies in a new act of disloyalty, that is, in the mere assertion of our individual freedom. Train our people to know the essential preciousness of loyalty. In that way only can you hope to restore to the family, not, indeed, all of its older conven tional forms, but its true dignity. The prob lem, then, of the salvation of the family life of our nation resolves itself into the general problem of how to train our people at large into loyalty to loyalty.
The second great opportunity for loyalty is furnished, to the great mass of our people, by their relations to our various political powers and institutions, and to our larger social or ganizations generally. And here we meet, in the America of to-day, with many signs that our political and social life form at present a poor school in the arts of loyalty to loyalty.
Loyalty, indeed, as I have repeatedly said, we still have present all about us. The pre cious plain and obscure people, who are loyal to whatever they understand to be worthy causes, and, on the other hand, those promi nent and voluntary public servants, who in so many cases are our leaders in good works, — these we have so far still with us. And new forms of loyalty constantly appear in our so cial life. Reform movements, trades-unions, religious sects, partisan organizations, both good and evil, arouse in various ways the loyalty of great numbers of people. Yet these special loyalties do not get rightly organized in such form as to further loyalty to loyalty. Narrow loyalties, side by side with irrational forms of individualism and with a cynical contempt for all loyalty, — these are what we too often see in the life of our country. For where the special loyalties are, amongst our people, most developed, they far too often take the form of a loyalty to mutually hostile partisan organiza tions, or to sects, or to social classes, at the expense of loyalty to the community or to the whole country. The labor-unions demand and cultivate the loyalty of their members; but they do so with a far too frequent emphasis upon the thesis that in order to be loyal to his own social class, or, in particular, to his union, the laborer must disregard certain duties to the community at large, and to the nation, — du ties which loyalty to loyalty seems obviously to require. And party loyalty comes to be misused by corrupt politicians to the harm of the state. Therefore loyalty to special organi zations such as labor-unions comes to be mis directed by such leaders as are disloyal, until the welfare of the whole social order is en dangered.
The result is that the very spirit of loyalty itself has come to be regarded with suspicion by many of our social critics, and by many such partisans of ethical individualism as those whose various views we studied in our second lecture. Yet surely if such ethical individualists, ob jecting to the mischiefs wrought by the cor rupt politicians, or by the more unwise leaders of organized labor, imagine that loyalty is responsible for these evils, such critics have only to turn to the recent history of corporate misdeeds and of the unwise mismanagement of corporations in this country, in order to be reminded that what we want, at present, from some of the managers of great corporate inter ests is more loyalty, and less of the individual ism of those who seek power. And I myself should say that precisely the same sort of loyalty is what we want both from the leaders and from the followers of organized labor. There is here one law for all.
Meanwhile, in case of the ill-advised labor agitations, and of the corrupt party manage ment, the cure, if it ever comes, surely will include cultivating amongst our people the spirit of loyalty to loyalty. Loyalty in itself is never an evil. The arbitrary interference with other men's loyalties, the disloyalty to the universal cause of loyalty, is what does the mischief here in question. The more the laborer is loyal to his union, if only he learns to conceive this loyalty as an instance of loyalty to loyalty, the more likely is his union to become, in the end, an instrument for social harmony, and not, as is now too often the case, an influence for oppression and for social dis organization. The loyalty which the tradesunions demand of their members is at present too often viewed as a mere class loyalty, and also as opposed to the individual freedom of choice on the part of those laborers who do not belong to a given union, or even to those who are in the union, but whose right choice and interests are sometimes hindered by their own union itself. But our people must learn that loyalty does not mean hostility to another man's loyalty. Loyalty is for all men, kings and laborers alike; and whenever we learn to recognize that fact, loyalty will no longer mean fraternal strife, and will no longer excuse treason to the country for the sake of fidelity to corrupt leaders or to mischievous agita tions.
VI VI But you may hereupon ask how the masses of our people are to learn such a lesson of loyalty to loyalty. I admit that the problem of teaching our people what the larger loyalty means is at present peculiarly difficult. And it is rendered all the more difficult by the fact that, for us Americans, loyalty to our nation, as a whole, is a sentiment that we find to be at present by no means as prominent in the minds of our people as such sentiments have been in the past in other nations. Let me explain what I mean by this assertion.
The history of our sentiment towards our national government is somewhat different from the history of the sentiment of patriotism in other countries. We have never had a king as the symbol of our national dignity and unity. We have, on the other hand, never had to war against a privileged class. Our constitutional problem which led to the Civil War was a different problem from that which the French Revolution, or the English political wars of the seventeenth century, have exemplified. At one time loyalty to the nation stood, in the minds of many of our people, in strong contrast to their loyalty to their state, or to their section of the country. This contrast led in many cases to a bitter conflict between the two sorts of loyal interests. At last such conflicts had to be decided by war. The result of the war was such that, from one point of view, the national government and the authority of the nation, as a whole, have won a position that is at present politically unquestionable. The supremacy of the national government in its own sphere is well recognized. Within its legal limits, its power is popularly regarded as irresistible. The appearance of its soldiers at any moment of popular tumult is well known to be the most effective expression of public authority which we have at our disposal, even although the body of soldiers which may be accessible for such a show of force happens to be a very small body. Viewed, then, as a legal authority and as a physical force, our national government occupies at present a peculiarly secure position. And so, the President of the United States is, at any moment, more powerful than almost any living monarch. All this, viewed as the outcome of our long con stitutional struggle, would seem of itself to sug gest that the American people have become essentially loyal to our national government. But, nevertheless, is this quite true? I think that almost any thoughtful American has to admit that in time of peace we do not regard our national government with any such intense sentiments of loyalty as would seem from report to be the living, the vital, the constant posses sion of Japanese patriots when they consider their traditional devotion to the nation and to their emperor. For them their country is part of a religion. In their consciousness it is said especially to be the land sacred to the memory of their dead. The living, as they say, are but of to-day. The dead they have always with them in memory, even if not in the determinate form of any fixed belief with re gard to the precise nature of the life beyond the grave. It is said that the Japanese are verv free as to the formulation of all their religious opinions. But in any case their religion includes a reverence for the historic past, a devotion to the dead whose memory makes their country sacred, and a present loyalty which is consciously determined by these religious motives.
Now, the most patriotic American can hardly pretend that he consciously views his country, taken as a whole, in any such religious way. The country is to us an unquestionable political authority. Were it in danger, we should rally to its defence. We have a good many formal phrases of reverence for its history and for its dignity, — phrases which had a much more concrete meaning for our predecessors, when the country was smaller, or when the country was in greater danger from its foes. But, at present, is not our national loyalty somewhat in the background of our practical conscious ness? Are we really at present a highly patriotic people? Certainly, the observer of a presidential canvass can hardly think of that canvass as a religious function, or believe that a profound reverence for the sacred memory of the fathers is at present a very prominent factor in determining our choice of the party for which we shall vote at the polls.
And if you say that political dissensions are always of such a nature as to hide for the moment patriotism behind a mist of present perplexities, you may well be asked in reply whether anywhere else, outside of political dissensions, we have in our national life func tions, ceremonies, expressions of practical de votion to our nation as an ideal, which serve to keep our loyalty to our country sufficiently alive, and sufficiently a factor in our lives. When can the ordinary American citizen say in time of peace that he performs notable acts of devotion to his country, such that he could describe those acts in the terms that the Speaker of the House of Commons used, in the story that I reported to you in my former lecture? In other words, how often, in your own present life, or in the lives of your fellowcitizens, as now you know them, is it the case that you do something critical, significant, in volving personal risk or sacrifice to yourself, and something which is meanwhile so inspired by your love of your nation as a whole that you can say that just then you have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak save as the country itself, in your opinion, requires you to see and to speak?
Now, all this state of things is opposed to our easily forming a conception of what loyalty to loyalty demands of us in our social and political relations. But the faults in question are not peculiar to our American people. They seem to my mind to be merely symptomatic of something which naturally be longs to the general type of civilization upon which, in our national history, we are entering. The philosopher Hegel, in one of his works on the philosophy of history, depicts a type of civilization, which, in his mind, was espe cially associated with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, as well as with the polit ical absolutism of the seventeenth and of the early eighteenth centuries in modern Europe. This type itself was conceived by him as a general one, such that it might be realized in very various ages and civilizations. Hegel called this type of social consciousness the type of the social mind, or of the "Spirit," that had become, as he said, "estranged from itself." Let me explain what Hegel meant by this phrase.
A social consciousness can be of the provincial type; that is, of the type which be longs to small commonwealths or to provinces, such as our own thirteen colonies once were. Or, on the other hand, the social life can be that of the great nation, which is so vast that the individuals concerned no longer recognize their social unity in ways which seem to them homelike. In the province the social mind is naturally aware of itself as at home with its own. In the Roman Empire, or in the state of Louis XIV, nobody is at home. The gov ernment in such vast social orders represents the law, a dictation that the individual finds relatively strange to himself. Or, again, the power of the state, even when it is attractive to the individual, still seems to him like a great nature force, rather than like his own loyal self, writ large. The world of the "self -estranged social mind" of Hegel's defi nition we might, to use a current phrase ology, characterize as the world of the impe rialistic sort of national consciousness, or simply as the world of imperialism. In such a world, as Hegel skilfully points out, the individual comes to regard himself as in rela tion to the social powers, which, in the first place, he cannot understand. The fact that, as in our present civilization, he is formally a free citizen, does not remove his character of self-estrangement from the social world in which he moves. Furthermore, since such a society is so vast as to be no longer easily intelligible, not only its political, but also its other social powers, appear to the individual in a similarly estranged and arbitrary fashion. In Hegel's account stress is laid upon the in evitable conflicts between wealth and govern mental authority, between corporate and polit ical dignities, — conflicts which characterize the imperial stage of civilization in question. In the world of the "self -estranged social mind," loyalty passes into the background, or tends to disappear altogether. The in dividual seeks his own. He submits to major force. Perhaps he finds such submission welcome, if it secures him safety in the acqui sition of private gain, or of stately social posi tion. But welcome or unwelcome, the authority to which he submits, be it the authority of the government or the authority which wealth and the great aggregations of capital imply, is for him just the fact, not a matter for loyalty.
Such a formula as the one which Hegel suggests is always inadequate to the wealth of life. But we are able to understand our national position better when we see that our nation has entered in these days into the realm of the "self -estranged spirit," into the social realm where the distant and irresistible national government, however welcome its authority may be, is at best rather a guarantee of safety, an object for political contest, and a force with which everybody must reckon, than the opportunity for such loyalty, as our distinctly provincial fathers used to feel and express in their early utterances of the national spirit. In the same way in this world of the selfestranged spirit, the other forces of society arouse our curiosity, interest us intensely, must be reckoned with, and may be used more or less wisely to our advantage. But they are the great industrial forces, the aggregations of capital, the combinations of enormous physical power, employed for various social ends. These vast social forces are like the forces of nature. They excite our loyalty as little as do the trade-winds or the blizzard. They leave our patriotic sentiments cold. The smoke of our civilization hides the very heavens that used to be so near, and the stars to which we were once loyal. The conse quences of such social conditions are in part inevitable. I am not planning any social reform which would wholly do away with these conditions of the world of the selfestranged spirit. But these conditions of our national social order do not make loyalty to loyalty a less significant need. They only deprive us of certain formerly accessible op portunities for such loyalty. They lead us to take refuge in our unpatriotic sects, par tisan organizations, and unions. But they make it necessary that we should try to see how, under conditions as they are, we can best foster loyalty in its higher forms, not by destroying the sects or the unions, but by inspiring them with a new loyalty to loyalty.
As the nation has in so many respects be come estranged from our more intimate con sciousness, we have lost a portion of what, in the days before the war, used to absorb the loyalty of a large proportion of our country men. I speak here of loyalty to the separate states and to the various provinces of our country. Such provincial loyalty still exists, but it has no longer the power that it possessed when it was able to bring on civil war, and very nearly to destroy the national unity. Instead of dangerous sectionalism, we now have the other dangerous tendency towards a war of classes, which the labor-unions and many other symptoms of social discontent em phasize. We have that corrupt political life which partisan mismanagement exemplifies. And we have that total indifference to all forms of loyalty which our seekers after individual power sometimes exhibit, and which occasion ally appears as so serious an evil in the conduct of the business of certain great corporations.
All these, I insist, are in our present Ameri can life symptoms of the state of the selfestranged spirit. The decline of family loy alty, of which I spoke a while since, may be regarded as another symptom of the same general tendency. Loyalty itself, under such conditions, remains too often unconscious of its true office. Instead of developing into the true loyalty to loyalty, it fails to recognize its own in the vast world of national affairs. It is dazzled by the show of power. It limits its devotion to the service of the political party, or of the labor-union, or of some other sec tarian social organization. In private life, as we have seen, it too often loses control of the family. In public life it appears either as the service of a faction, or as a vague fondness for the remote ideals.
VII And nevertheless, as I insist, loyalty to loyalty is not a vague ideal. The spirit of loyalty is practical, is simple, is teachable, and is for all normal men. And in order to train loyalty to loyalty in a great mass of the people, what is most of all needed is to help them to be less estranged than they are from their own social order.
To sum up, then, this too lengthy review, the problem of the training of our American people as a whole to a larger and richer social loyalty is the problem of educating the selfestranged spirit of our nation to know itself better. And now that we have the problem before us, what solution can we offer?
The question of what methods a training for loyalty should follow, is the special prob lem of our next lecture. But there is indeed one proposal, looking towards a better train ing of our nation to loyalty, which I have here to make as I close this statement of our na tional needs. The proposal is this. We need and we are beginning to get, in this country, a new and wiser provincialism. I mean by such provincialism no mere renewal of the old sectionalism. I mean the sort of pro vincialism which makes people want to ideal ize, to adorn, to ennoble, to educate, their own province; to hold sacred its traditions, to honor its worthy dead, to support and to multiply its public possessions. I mean the spirit which shows itself in the multiplying of public libraries, in the laying out of public parks, in the wrork of local historical associa tions, in the enterprises of village improve ment societies, --yes, even in the genea logical societies, and in the provincial clubs. I mean also the present form of that spirit which has originated, endowed, and fostered the colleges and universities of our Western towns, cities, and states, and which is so well shown throughout our country in our American pride in local institutions of learning. Of course, we have always had something of this provin cialism. It is assuming new forms amongst us. I want to emphasize how much good it can do in training us to higher forms of loyalty.
That such provincialism is a good national trait to possess, the examples of Germany and of Great Britain, in their decidedly con trasting but equally important ways, can show us. The English village, the English country life, the Scotsman's love for his own native province, --these are central features in de termining the sort of loyalty upon which the British Empire as a whole has depended. Germany, like ourselves, has suffered much from sectionalism. But even to-day the Ger man national consciousness presupposes and depends upon a highly developed provincial life and loyalty. One of the historical weak nesses of France has been such a centraliza tion of power and of social influence about Paris as has held in check the full develop ment of the dignity of provincial consciousness in that country. Now, in our country wre do not want any mutual hatred of sections. But we do want a hearty growth of provincial ideals. And we want this growth just for the sake of the growth of a more general and effective patriotism. We want to train na tional loyalty through provincial loyalty. We want the ideals of the various provinces of our country to be enriched and made definite, and then to be strongly represented in the government of the nation. For, I insist, it is not the sect, it is not the labor-union, it is not the political partisan organization, but it is the widely developed provincial loyalty which is the best mediator between the narrower interests of the individual and the larger patriotism of our nation. Further centraliza tion of power in the national government, with out a constantly enriched and diversified pro vincial consciousness, can only increase the estrangement of our national spirit from its own life. On the other hand, history shows that if you want a great people to be strong, you must depend upon provincial loyalties to me diate between the people and their nation.
The present tendency to the centralization of power in our national government seems to me, then, a distinct danger. It is a substitu tion of power for loyalty. To the increase of a wise provincialism in our country, I myself look for the best general social means of train ing our people in loyalty to loyalty. But of course such training in loyalty to loyalty must largely be a matter of the training of indi viduals, and to the problem of individual train ing for loyalty our next lecture will be devoted.
VI LECTURE VI TWO objections which have been expressed to me by hearers of the foregoing lectures of this course deserve a word of mention here, as I begin the present discussion of the work of training individuals for a loyal life.
The first of these objections concerns my use of the term " loyalty. " " Why," so the ob jection runs, "why can you not avoid the endless repetition of your one chosen term, * loyalty'? Why would not other words, such as fidelity, devotion, absorption, trustworthi ness, faithfulness, express just as well the moral quality to which you give the one name that you have employed?"
The second objection concerns my defini tion of the term "loyalty," and is closely connected with the first objection. It runs as follows: "Why do you insist that the cause which the loyal man serves must be a social cause? Why might one not show the same essential moral quality that you define, when the cause that he serves is something quite unearthly, or something earthly but quite unsocial? Saint Simeon on his pillar, Buddha seeking enlightenment under his lonely tree, the Greek geometer attempting to square the circle, — were they not as faithful as your loyal man is? And were their causes social causes?"
I reply to these objections together. I have defined my present usage of the popular term "loyalty" in my own distinctly technical way. Loyalty so far means for us, in these lectures, the willing, the thoroughgoing, and the prac tical devotion of a self to a cause. And a cause means, in these lectures, something that is conceived by its loyal servant as unify ing the lives of various human begins into one life. Now, I know of no other word whose popular usage comes closer than does that of the good old word "loyalty" to embodying the meaning that I have given to the term. I think, then, that I have a right to my technical definition. It is based upon popular usage, and goes beyond that usage only in a very natural way. I intend soon to show you that we are now ready to substitute for this first tech nical definition another and a still more sig nificant definition which will reveal to us, for the first time, the true spirit of the enterprise in which all the loyal are actually engaged. But I can reach this higher definition only through the simpler definition. To that, in adequate as it is, my discussion must cling until we are ready for something better.
Granting, however, my owTn definition of my term, I cannot easily use any other popular or philosophical term in the same way. I cannot substitute the word "devotion" for the term "loyalty, " since loyalty is to my mind a very special kind of devotion. A man might be devoted to the pursuit of pleasure; but that would not make him loyal. Fidelity, again, is, in my own account, but one aspect of loyalty. Loyalty includes fidelity, but means more, since, besides fidelity, decisive ness and the acceptance of a cause also be long to loyalty; and the fidelity of a dog to his master is only a pathetic hint of loyalty, or a fragment of the disposition that, in human beings, expresses itself in the full reasonable ness of loyal life. The same comment holds in case of the word "faithfulness." As for ab sorption, the loyal are absorbed in their cause, but the angry man is absorbed in his pas sion. Yet such absorption is not what I have in mind. The loyal, again, possess trust worthiness, but a watch may also be trust worthy; and that word ill expresses the vol untary nature of the spirit of loyalty.
I cannot find, then, another term to meet my purpose. My usage of this term is justi fied mainly by that simplification of our con ceptions of the moral life which our theory has made possible.
As for my insistence upon the social aspect of the loyal life, that insistence implies two assertions about such cases as those of the lonely saint on the pillar, or Buddha seeking enlightenment, or the geometer trying to solve his problem. The first assertion is that all such lonely enterprises have moral value only when they are indeed a part of one's service of the cause of humanity. The saint on the pillar was presumably trying to add to the store of merits which the universal church was supposed to possess. If so, he had a social cause which he served; namely, the church, — the mystic union of all the faithful. His cause may have been wrongly conceived by him, but it was, in our sense, a cause, and a social one. The Buddha of the legend was seeking to save not only himself but mankind. He was loyal, therefore, in our sense. As for the geometer, his search for the solution of his problem concerned one of the deepest com mon interests of the human mind; namely, an interest in the discovery and possession of rational truth. Truth is for everybody; and it unifies the lives of all men. Whoever seeks for a truth, as important as geometrical truth is, and seeks it with a serious devotion, has a social cause. And no utterly lonely devotion to anything is morally worthy of a human being.