If the reader has become thoroughly weary of the world of doubt, we are only glad of the fact. Armed with a genuine philosophy, a man may indeed go back to that world, and find in it an expression of ideal truth in empirical form. We hope to have such a right ourselves in time; but, without a well thought out philosophy, a man venturing into the world of empirical facts to find there any religious significance actually discovers himself to be in a nest of hornets; and he deserves as much. We desired to bring the reader to feel this with us; else our own prudent flight from that world to another might seem to him unnecessary. Now we are ready to come nearer to our former question. What right has any one to assume that empirical external world at all as having any absolute truth? “ O thou that hast troubled us,” we may say, “ what art thou at bottom more than our own assumption? Wliat right has that external world to be the sole region where we could seek the religious truth, when per¬ chance the external world, as we assumed it, is not a truth at all? Let us consider once more our steps. Perchance the religiously inspiring reality is in some higher world. If we are only skeptical enough, per¬ chance we shall find that Reality. Then, indeed, the old assumption of an external world of empir¬ ical facts may remain a part of our future thought, but it will get a new sense, and occupy a new place.
The first answer that occurs to this our question about the meaning of the external world that has so far troubled us, is this: The assumed world is no fixed datum, to which we are bound to submit at all hazards, but a postulate, which is made to sat¬ isfy certain familiar human needs. If this postulate is found to have no religious significance, we may supplement the doubt thus arising by remembering that we who postulated once have the right to postu¬ late again. Our religiously satisfactory truth may be reached, not by hypotheses about powers in the empirical world, but by a deeper faith in something that is eternal, and behind or above the world of the senses.
This view gives us a new world, the world of the Postulates. W e cannot be content to remain in this world, but we must pass through it on our way up¬ wards. Let us hear it described.
I.
The world of Doubt has passed before us, a huge mass of inexplicable facts. Here and there we find a connection; we hope that we shall soon find more connection; but still the vast plan, if indeed there be a plan, we search for in vain. But now, strangely enough, all this doubt affects in no wise the willing trustfulness of our devotion to the interests, not only of common life, but also of science. The doubt con¬ fuses us only when we talk of religion. That the world as a whole is dark, nobody admits more cheer¬ fully than does the modern scientific man, even when he looks to his science for all his religious consola¬ tion. For he seeks no consolation save what the phenomena as such furnish. But his philosophical doubt about the ultimate foundation of science is no check to his scientific ambition. He believes in science just as ardently as if he did not in the very first breath of each new philosophical dispute de¬ clare that the real world is unknowable. His faith in the methods of his specialty is as firm as his in¬ difference to all extra - scientific speculation. His work is in fact done with a kind of instinctive con¬ fidence in himself and his fellows. The instinct is no doubt highly trained, but it remains an instinct, and a delightful one it is to him. The untrained instincts of the unscientific man must indeed be crit¬ icised and altered in many respects ere they can serve the purposes of science; but, after all the crit¬ icisms and alterations, the instinct remains with al¬ most all men an instinct, — useful, pleasing, yes, in¬ dispensable; but its philosophical justification few people care to know, while its self-confidence every scientific essay, or lecture, or instructor will attest.
Why now is it that, trusting as we all do this scientific instinct, we all feel it hard to give a like trust to the religious instinct, whose most general tendency is to have some sort of faith in the goodness of things? Why is it that the doubtfulness and the contradictions of the real world seem to everybody to throw a cloud upon religion, even when it is not supernatural religion, but to have no significance whatever for the bases of science? This scientific notion of a world of law, all of whose facts could conceivably be predicted by one formula, why does that remain in our minds untouched by the doubts of the skeptical philosophers, while the same skep¬ ticism at once seems to remove from us that trust in the moral goodness of things which religion has tried to establish in our hearts? Shall the world be indifferent to one set of our ideals, and not to another? Shall the moral value of things be dark, and not also their value for the purposes of science? Why is the one doctrine so different from the other?
You are placed in a world of confusion, and you as¬ sert that in its ultimate and eternal nature it answers your moral needs. That seems presumptuous. You did not make that world. How do you know whether it cares for your moral ideals? Very well then, be impartial. You are placed in a world of confusion, and you assert that it answers your intellectual needs, namely, that it is a world of order, whose facts could be reduced to some rational and intelligi¬ ble unity. What business have you to do that? In both cases you transcend experience. Nature gives you in experience partial evil that you cannot in all cases perceive to be universal good. Nature also gives you in experience partial chaos that you can¬ not in all cases perceive to be universal order. But unwaveringly you insist that nature is orderly, that the chaos is an illusion; and still you do not feel ready to insist that the partial evil is universal good. Why is this so? Is the ethical side of reality less important than the other? Or is it the very im¬ portance of the religious aspect of things that makes us more ready to doubt the truth of this aspect!
Such questions occur to us as suggesting a possi¬ ble way out of our difficulties. It is not exactly our desired way, but is it not possibly a good way t Sci¬ ence, namely, uses a certain kind of faith, whenever such faith is practically necessary. This scientific faith is indeed no faith in particular uninvestigated facts, but it is a faith in general methods and princi¬ ples. The creed of science knows of no dogmas about unexperienced single facts, as such; but it does know of dogmas about the general form of the laws that must be assumed to govern all experience. Now why may not religion be reduced to certain essential general and fundamental moral demands, that we must make in the presence of reality? Why are not these a legitimate, yes, a morally necessary object of faith? Why, as the scientific man postulates a the¬ oretical rationality in the world, may not we postu¬ late a moral rationality in the world? These ques¬ tions stand in our path. Might not the answer to them transform our barren doubts into something less disheartening?
We see what all this supposed religious faith would mean. It would not be a faith in any partio ular facts of experience that might have for us per¬ sonally a selfish value, whether greater or less. It would be, like the scientific faith, wholly general. It would demand that the world in its entirety should be regarded as in some higher sense morally ra¬ tional. It would say: The real world must be, what¬ ever its true nature, at least as high in the moral scale as my highest ideals of goodness. Have we a right to such a faith? Let us cautiously consider this point.
But at once we must distinguish the proposed re¬ ligious faith from what we should call mere blind faith. Blind faith in what we cannot establish is indeed inadmissible. But then, is there not another kind of faith, the kind that Kant used in his prac¬ tical philosophy? To this may we not now turn? Perhaps the world of the powers, approached in the usual way, is dark, but the world for the practical reason may be opened in another way. Kant said, in effect: “ Such and such supersensual realities, of re¬ ligious significance, cannot be theoretically proven; but we can see why we ought to postulate their ex¬ istence, that is, we can see why we ought to act as if they existed. Behind the veil of sense, we must postulate that there is an intelligible world, in which all is harmony, and in which the highest good is realized.” May we not also try with Kant to do this?
We shall in any case find this effort, an effort that has been so often made since Kant, a subject well worth our study and careful examination. In truth it is not by itself satisfactory; but we shall see that it enters as one moment into the higher view that we shall hereafter reach. So, in our own way, we shall now try to answer the question sug¬ gested to us by Kant’s method. Does not then the religious aspect of the world lie in the fact that, de¬ spite the contradictions of the world of sense, we may, and indeed, morally speaking, must postulate, that the Eternal, of which this world is the mere show, is in itself absolutely righteous? We shall not be able to answer this question with a simple affirmative; but still, postulates must enter in some wise into every moment of our lives, and must there¬ fore have some value in religion.
II.
In the last chapter we sought for a demonstration of religious truth, and found none. But perhaps it was not demonstration that we should have sought. Possibly religion may be content to rest on postu¬ lates.
A postulate is a mental way of behavior. In so far it is like all other thought. In general, to be¬ lieve that a thing exists is to act as if it existed. But the act may be forced upon one, or it may be freely chosen. One cannot fail to act upon the prin¬ ciple that 2 -J- 2 = 4, so soon as he perceives it. But one may voluntarily determine to act in a given way, not being rationally forced so to do, and well know¬ ing the risk. In such cases one voluntarily takes to himself the form of belief called a postulate. Thus, apart from any philosophic theory, we all postulate a certain kind of uniformity in nature. We do so, whenever we reflect upon the matter, volun¬ tarily. For we then say that surprises are always possible, and that any law may have exceptions, but that we must act as if we knew certain laws to have no possible exceptions. Postulates, however, are not blind faith. Postulates are voluntary assumptions of a risk, for the sake of a higher end. Passive faith dares not face doubt. The postulate faces doubt, and says: u So long as thou canst not make thyself an absolute and certain negative, I propose to act as if thou wert worthless, although I do well see thy force.” Blind faith is emotion, and often cowardly emotion. The postulate is deliberate and courageous volition. Blind faith says: “ I dare not question.” The postulate says: “ I dare be responsible for as¬ suming.” Examples of both are very common.
Blind faith the fond parent has, who says of his wicked son: “ I know that he must be good, hence I will not suspect him, nor train him; I will not watch him, nor warn others against him.” A pos¬ tulate the wise parent makes, who sends his fullgrown son boldly out into the world, with the best attainable safeguards, saying: “ It is useless to keep him longer in leading-strings, or to protect him from the world. It is now his place to fight his own bat¬ tles, since I have done what I could to get him ready. I postulate that he will win the fight; I treat him, and must treat him, as if he were sure to win, al¬ though I well know the risks.” The sea-captain beginning his voyage postulates that he can get through. The general postulates that he will be victorious. The Prime Minister of a country postu¬ lates that he can do his country better service than could the Opposition. We all postulate that our lives are worth the trouble. Yet we all know per¬ fectly well that many just such postulates must in the nature of things be blunders. But they imply not blind faith, but active faith. With blind faith little good is done in the world; without active faith, expressed in postulates, very little practical good can be done from day to day. Blind faith is the ostrich behind the bush. The postulate stands out like the lion against the hunters. The wise shall live by postulates.
III.
III.
But how is this postulating activity actually re¬ lated to our knowledge of reality? Much more closely than one might suppose. Very much of our thought naturally rests upon a blind faith, or upon what many take to be a blind faith; but this, when we reflect upon it with due attention to the office it fills, is transformed before our eyes into practically unavoidable postulates. Such are the assumptions upon which our science rests in forming its ideal of an “ universal formula.” There may indeed be some deeper basis for these postulates of science. But most men know nothing of this basis. And so, when we accepted in our last chapter these postulates, we had to admit that they are a kind of faith. If we then nevertheless objected to certain religious doc¬ trines that they rest on insufficient evidence, we did this because they set themselves up as dogmas.
With further consideration, we might come to accept some one of them again in the form, not of a demon¬ strable dogma, but of a practically unavoidable pos¬ tulate, uncertain of course, but taken and to be taken on risk; just as every one of us goes through the world taking all sorts of risks day by day. Any¬ thing not contradictory may be a possible object of postulates; although, again, every postulate is to be assumed only after careful criticism, and only be¬ cause we cannot do better.
To do justice then to the proper office of postu¬ lates in our religious theory, we must sooner or later consider in what cases they naturally arise, what is the proper extent of their use, what is the basis upon which they can be made, in any special case, to rest; and, finally, whether, in view of all this, we can give them any important place in our religious doctrine. We confess at once that we want something much better than a postulate as the basis of our religion, in case we can get it. If postulates are to have any part in our religion, we want them to be justified by some ultimate religious certainty that is more than a postulate. We shall investigate all that in time. We shall see what we shall see. Meanwhile, what is the work of postulates in the actual daily life of human thought?
Popular belief about an external world is for the first an active assumption or acknowledgment of something more than the data of consciousness. What is directly given in our minds is not external. All direct data are internal facts; and in the strict¬ est sense all data are direct. Suppose a merely passive acceptance of what is in consciousness, and you have no belief in an external world. An addition to the data of consciousness, a more or less clearly vol¬ untary reaction, is involved in your idea of external reality. The truth of this principle appears when your belief in any particular object is called in ques¬ tion. You hold that you see yonder a snowy moun¬ tain. Your companion insists that beyond the wide misty valley there is to be seen only a gray cloud. You reassert your belief, and in the reassertion feel more definitely than at first the active addition of your own belief to the meagre data of sense. The addition existed, however, in your first assertion. Or again, one man is trying, perchance in sport, to make another doubt the existence of material ob¬ jects. “ There is no external matter,” says the first. “ There are but these states of consciousness in our minds. Nothing beyond them corresponds to them.”
The second, maintaining the position of the man of common sense, retorts sharply: “ Doubtless I cannot refute altogether your fine-spun arguments; but they are nevertheless nonsense. For I persist in believing in this world of sense. I live in it, I work for it, my fellows believe in it, our hearts are bound up in it, our success depends upon our faith. Only dreamers doubt it. I am not a dreamer. Here is a stone; I hit it. Here is a precipice; I fear and shun it. My strongest conviction is concerned with the exist¬ ence of this world of sense. Do your worst; I am not afraid of talk.” Thus then by every device of the active spirit, by reminding himself of his most cherished interests, of his affections and hatreds, by arousing liis social sentiments, by bodily acts, the practical man preserves himself from fantastical spec¬ ulation. When better-trained thinkers call the belief in an external reality “ a natural conviction, to be re¬ tained until we are compelled to abandon it, or “ a convenient working hypothesis, to be received on the testimony of consciousness, testimony assumed to be trustworthy until the opposite is proven, what are these but similar practical considerations, appeals to the will? Concerning data of immediate conscious¬ ness such remarks would be wholly out of place. That I see a certain color at this moment is not a 11 convenient working hypothesis. Is consciousness merely a “ presumably trustworthy witness” when it testifies to the pangs of toothache? Nobody could balance evidence as to the reality of his sensation qud sensation when consciousness is filled with the sound of a street-organ. Sound, color, pang, these are data, not merely things believed in. But the external world — that is actively accepted as being symbolized or indicated by the present conscious¬ ness, not as being given in the present consciousness.
In short, the popular assertion of an external world, being an assertion of something beyond the data of consciousness, must begin in an activity of judgment that does more than merely reduce present data to order. Such an assertion must be an active construction of non-data. We do not receive in our senses, but we posit through our judgment, whatever external world there may for us be. If there is really a deeper basis for this postulate of ours, still, at the outset, it is just a postulate.
All theories, all hypotheses as to the external world, ought to face this fact of thought. If the his¬ tory of popular speculation on these topics could be written, how much of cowardice and shuffling would be found in the behavior of the natural mind before the question: “ How dost thou know of an external reality? ” Instead of simply and plainly answer¬ ing: “ I mean by the external world in the first place something that I accept or demand, that I posit, postulate, actively construct on the basis of sensedata,” the natural man gives us all kinds of vague compromise answers: “ I believe in the external re¬ ality with a reasonable degree of confidence; the experience of mankind renders the existence of ex¬ ternal reality ever more and more probable; the Creator cannot have intended to deceive us; it is un¬ natural to doubt as to external reality; only young people and fantastic persons doubt the existence of the external world; no man in his senses doubts the external reality of the world; science would be im¬ possible were there no external world; morality is undermined by doubts as to the external world; the immovable confidence that we all have in the prin¬ ciple of causality implies the fixity of our belief in an external cause of our sensations.” Where shall these endless turnings and twistings have an end?
The habits of the law-courts as condensed into “ rules of evidence,” the traditional rules of debate, the fashion of appealing to the “ good sense ” of honor¬ able gentlemen opposite, the motives of shame and fear, the dread of being called “ fantastical,” Philis¬ tine desire to think with the majority, Philistine terror of all revolutionary suggestions, the fright or the anger of a man at finding some metaphysician trying to question what seem to be the foundations upon which one’s bread winning depends, — all these lesser motives are appealed to, and the one ultimate motive is neglected. The ultimate motive with the man of every-day life is the will to have an exter¬ nal world. Whatever consciousness contains, reason will persist in spontaneously adding the thought: “ But there shall be something beyond this.” The external reality as such (e. g. the space beyond the farthest star, any space not accessible, even whatever is not at any moment given in so far as it is viewed from that moment, in particular every past event) is never a datum. We construct but do not receive the external reality. The “ immovable certainty ” is not such a dead passive certainty as that with which we receive a pain or an electric shock. The pop¬ ular assurance of an external world is the fixed de¬ termination to make one, now and henceforth.
In the general popular conceptions of reality we find then the first use of postulates. W e have as yet no justification for them. But even thus we get no adequate idea of their use and of their number. W e must look at the facts of every-day mental life a lit¬ tle more closely. For there is a curious tendency of many to make these postulates appear something else than what they are. Often they are interpreted as if they were no postulates at all, but data of sense. Often, again, their active nature is disre¬ garded in yet another way, and they appear as blind passive faith. Such in fact they must appear if we reflect upon their mere content, and not upon the processes by which we get them. But if we inter¬ pret them rightly, we shall see that they ought to be regarded as beliefs, taken for the first on risk, and because the risk is worth taking.
IY.
Sometimes we hear men asserting that their be¬ liefs are independent of their will. Such a man will express himself in some such way as the follow¬ ing: — “ I try to conquer prejudice; but having done this, I can do no more. My belief, whatever it is, forms itself in me. I look on. My will has noth¬ ing to do with the matter. I can will to walk or eat; but I cannot will to believe. I might as well will that my blood should circulate.”
But is this expression a fair one? Does such a man really remain passive in the struggle that goes on within him? We think not. These beliefs in such a man have resulted, we hold, from a sort of struggle between him and the surrounding world. The world has tried sometimes to check his thought, and to confine it to one channel; sometimes to con¬ fuse his thought, and to scatter it into spray before the quick, heavy blows of innumerable, disconnected sense apparitions. But the man, if he is a man of energy, has controlled the current of his thought. He has fought hard, now for freedom from oppres¬ sive narrowness of thought, now for wholeness and unity of thought; and perhaps he has in so far conquered as to be the master of 'a manly and manysided system of doctrine. W e think him responsible for this system; and we hold that any such man ought to admit the responsibility.
To study briefly the nature of the process involved in all such cases will be important for our whole doctrine. We shall see thereby how much our the¬ ory of the world must itself tend to fall under the head of the purely practical. We shall appreciate also the limitations of ordinary thought, and the need of some higher ideal standard to rescue us from the pure subjectivity of mere postulates. And we shall be contributing by the way to a question of ap¬ plied ethics, the question of the morality of belief.
Every one recognizes that at least our more ab¬ stract knowledge depends largely upon our own mental activity. Knowing is not mere passive re¬ ception of facts or of truths. Learning is not solely an affair of the memory. The man that without re¬ flection commits things to memory is justly com¬ pared to a parrot, and might yet more justly be compared to the sponge of Hamlet’s figure: “ It is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again.” No knowledge, then, without active hos¬ pitality in the mind that receives the knowledge. But as soon as we recognize in mental life this our power to modify our knowledge by means of our own activity, just so soon do all the old comparisons of the mind to a wax tablet, to a sheet of paper, or to other like passive subjects of impression, lose for us their meaning. Mental life becomes for us, in view of these facts, a field of constant activity. The commonest processes of knowledge acquire a new signifi¬ cance.
Two kinds of activity are concerned in the attain¬ ment of knowledge. One kind consists in simply receiving impressions from without, such as sensa¬ tions, or, on a higher plane, statements of truth; the other consists in modifying and in organizing these impressions. The receptive activity is partly a phys¬ ical activity, since the one who receives information must use his eyes and ears, must keep awake, must at times move about; and this receptive activity is also partly made up of the mechanical processes of the memory. Association by contiguity, or learning by rote, is in the main a receptive process, though this process of reception requires some active effort on the part of the receiver. Committing words and sentences to memory is often hard labor, as we all of us learned when we first were tortured with illwrought geographies and grammars, or with merci¬ less Latin declensions and conjugations. But of the whole of this receptive activity we shall make no further mention in this connection. Simply receiv¬ ing, keeping your mind in a submissive attitude, turning your eyes in the proper direction, using your ears, writing down your notes, memorizing whatever needs memorizing — all this is essential to knowl¬ edge, but has no reactive effect, does not modify the form or the matter of your knowledge. Secondly, however, knowledge is determined for each of us by his own reaction upon what he receives; and this second mentioned kind of mental activity, that which forms our topic at present, consists in a modification as well as in an organization of what we have received from without. All processes of reasoning, and so all original discoveries in science and in phi¬ losophy, all speculations, theories, dogmas, controver¬ sies, and not only these complex processes, but, as we shall see, even simple judgments, commonplace beliefs, momentary acts of attention, involve such independent reaction upon the material furnished to us from without. The nature of this reaction we are further to examine.
Let us consider simpler forms of knowledge. Sense-impressions constantly suggest to us thoughts; in fact, we have few thoughts that are not either im¬ mediately suggested by sense - impressions, or else sustained in their course by a continuous stream of suitable sense-impressions. To carry on even a train of abstract reasoning, sense-impressions either pres¬ ent or repeated seem necessary as supports. But when sense-impressions come to us, what transforms them into thought?
The answer is, First of all, attention, an active mental process. The sense-impression is itself not yet knowledge. A sense-impression to which we give no attention slips through consciousness as a man’s hand through water. Nothing grasps and re¬ tains it. Little effect is produced by it. It is un¬ known. You cannot even tell what it is. For to know what such an unnoticed impression is would be to pay attention to it. But let us now consider some familiar examples of the working of attention. A simple instance will bring home to us how the boundaries of our consciousness are crowded with un* known impressions — unknown, because not attended to; but yet in some inexplicable way a part of our consciousness, since an effort of attention serves to bring them, any one of them, clearly into mental vision. At this instant you are looking at some¬ thing. Now, without moviug your eyes, try, by merely attending to your visual impressions, to say what is now in the field of vision, and where is the boundary line of the field of vision. The experi¬ ment is a little hard, because our eyes, condensed embodiments as they are of tireless curiosity, are al¬ ways restless, and rebel when you try to hold them fast. But conquer them for an instant, and watch the result. As your attention roams about the arti¬ ficially fixed visual field, you will at first, indeed, be confused by the vagueness of all but the centre; but soon you will find, to your surprise, that there are more different impressions in the field than you at first can distinguish. One after another, many va¬ rious impressions will appear. But notice: you can keep your attention fixed on only a portion of the field at a time. The rest of the field is always lost in a dim haze. You must be receiving impressions all the time from all points of the field. But all of these, except the few to which you pay attention, nearly or quite disappear in the dim thickets that seem to surround the little forest-clearing made by our attentive consciousness. A like experiment can be tried with the sense of hearing, when you are in a