called sophistry and delusion. Why spend time to puzzle over these insoluble mysteries? Hence his method is: swift work, clear statement of known difficulties, keen ridicule of hasty assumptions, and then a burning of the old deserted Moscow of the¬ ology, and a bewildering flight into the inaccessible wintry wastes, where no army of religious philoso¬ phers shall follow him. Now for our part we want to be as skeptical as anybody; and we personally al¬ ways admire the freedom of motion that pure skepti¬ cism gives. Our trouble with it all, however, is that, after we have enjoyed the freedom and the frosty air of pure philosophic skepticism for a while, we find ourselves unexpectedly in the midst of philosophic truth that needs closer examination. The short and easy agnostic method is not enough. You must sup¬ plement skepticism by philosophy; and when you do so, you find yourself forced to accept, not indeed the old theology of your childhood, but something that satisfies, oddly enough, certain religious long¬ ings, that, as skeptic, you had carefully tried to for¬ get. Then you find yourself with what you may have to call a religious doctrine; and then you may have to state it as we are here going to do, not in an easy or fascinating way, such as the pure skeptic can so well follow, but at all events with some approach to a serious and sustained effort to consider hard ques¬ tions from many sides. The skeptical method is not only a good, but also a necessary beginning of relig¬ ious philosophy. But we are bound to go deeper than mere superficial agnosticism. If, however, any reader is already sure that we cannot go deeper, and that modern popular agnosticism has exhausted all that can be said on religious questions, then we bid him an immediate and joyous farewell. If we had not something to say in this book that seems to us both foreign to the popular modern agnostic range of discussion, and deeper than the insight of popular modern skepticism, we should say nothing. The un¬ dertaking of this book is not to wrangle in the old way over the well-known ordinary debates of to-day, but to turn the flank of the common popular thought on these topics altogether, by going back to a type of philosophic investigation, that is nowadays fa^-miliar indeed to a certain school of specialists, but forgotten by the general public. In this type of in¬ vestigation, we have furthermore something to offer that seems to us no mere repetition of the views of other thinkers, but an effort to make at least one lit¬ tle step in advance of the thoughts that the great masters of philosophy have given to us. Yet we know indeed that the range of any useful indepen¬ dent thought in philosophy must be, in case of any one individual, very narrow.
The other mood and its method remain. It is the mood of excessive reverence. It wastes capital let¬ ters on all the pronouns and adjectives that have to do with the objects of religious faith; but it fears to do these objects the honor to get clear ideas about them. Now we respect this mood when it appears in men who do well their life-work, who need their re¬ ligious faith for their work, and who do not feel any calling as truth-seekers. No man has any business to set up his vocation as the highest one; and the man for whom truth is useful in his actual life-work as an inspiration, revealed to him only in feeling, is welcome to his feelings, is worthy of all regard from those whose vocation is philosophy, and shall not be tormented by our speculations. He is careful and troubled about many things; the world needs him, and philosophy does not. AVe only lay claim to our own rights, and do not want to interfere with his. Our right to clear thought, we must insist upon. For looked at philosophically, and apart from the nec¬ essary limitations of the hard worker, all this dumb reverence, this vague use of vague names, has its se¬ rious dangers. You are reverent, we may say to the man who regards philosophic criticism as a dangerous trifling with stupendous truths; you are reverent, but what do you reverence? Have a care lest what you reverence shall turn out to be your own vague and confused notions, and not the real divine Truth at all. Take heed lest your object of worship be only your own little pet infinite, that is sublime to you mainly because it is yours, and that is in truth about as divine and infinite as your hat. For this is the danger that besets these vague and lofty sentiments.
Unreflected upon, uncriticised, dumbly experienced, dumbly dreaded, these, your religious objects, may become mere feelings, mere visceral sensations of yours, that you have on Sunday mornings, or when you pray. Of course, if you are a worker, you may actually realize these vague ideas, in so far as they inspire you to work. If they do, they shall be judged by their fruits. Otherwise, do not trust too confidently their religious value. You, individually regarded, are but a mass of thought and feeling. What is only yours and in you, is not divine at all. Unless you lift it up into the light of thought and examine it often, how do.you know into what your cherished religious ideal may not have rotted in the darkness of your emotions? Once in a while, there does come to a man some terrible revelation of him¬ self in a great sorrow. Then in the tumult of an¬ guish he looks for his religious faith to clothe his nakedness against the tempest; and he finds per¬ haps some moth-eaten old garment that profits him nothing, so that his soul miserably perishes in the frost of doubt. Such a man has expected God to come to his help in every time of need; but the only god he has actually and consciously had, has been his own little contemptible, private notion and dim feeling of a god, which he has never dared fairly to look at. Any respectable wooden idol would have done him better service; for then a man could know where and what his idol is. Such is only too apt to be the real state of the man who regards it as profanity to think clearly and sensibly on religious topics.
We claim, then, the right to criticise as fearlessly, as thoroughly, and as skeptically as may be, the foundations of conduct and faith. For what we crit¬ icise are, at the outset, our own notions, which we want to have conform to the truth, if so be that there is any truth. As for doubt on religious questions, that is for a truth-seeker not only a privilege but a duty; and, as we shall experience all through this study, doubt has a curious and very valuable place in philosophy. Philosophic truth, as such, comes to us first under the form of doubt; and we never can be very near it in our search unless, for a longer or shorter time, we have come to despair of it alto¬ gether. First, then, the despair of a thorough-going doubt, and then the discovery that this doubt con¬ tains in its bosom the truth that we are sworn to discover, however we can, — this is the typical philo¬ sophic experience. May the memory of this sugges¬ tion support the failing patience of the kindly dis¬ posed reader through some of the longer and more wearisome stretches of dry skeptical analysis over which we must try to journey together. Whatever may be the truth, it must lie beyond those deserts.
BOOK I.
THE SEARCH FOR A MORAL IDEAL V CHAPTER II.
“Certain spirits, by permission, ascended from hell, and said to me, ‘ You have written a great deal from the Lord, write something also from us.’ I replied, ‘What shall I write?’ They said, ‘Write that every spirit, whether he be good or evil, is in his own delight, — the good in the delight of his good, and the evil in the delight of hi^ evil.’ I asked them, * What may your delight be? ’ They said that it was the delight of committing adultery, stealing, defrauding, and lying...I said, ‘ Then you are like the unclean beasts.’...They answered, ‘If we are, we are.’ ” — Swedenborg, Divine Providence.
“ There 's nothing, either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” — Hamlet.
With which of the two considerations mentioned in our introduction shall a religious philosophy be¬ gin? Of its two chief considerations, the moral code, and the relation of this code to reality, which is the one that properly stands first in order? We have already indicated our opinion. The philosophy of religion is distinguished from theoretic philosophy precisely by its relation to an ideal. If possible, therefore, it should early be clear as to what ideal it has. The ideal ought, if possible, to be studied first, since it is this ideal that is to give character to our whole quest among the realities. And so the first part of religious philosophy is properly the dis¬ cussion of ethical problems.
I.
The theoretic philosopher might interpose just here, and insist that as one can be moral only in a real world, the philosopher has a theoretical right and duty to point out, first of all, wherein consists the reality of the world and whereon is based our assurance of this reality. Yet this strictly logical order we must decline, in the present discussion, to follow. Our interest is, first of all, with the ideal in its relation to human life. So much of the world of commonplace reality as we have to assume in any and every discussion of the ideal, we accept in this first book wholly without theoretical question. For such questions, in their relation to religious philoso¬ phy, the proper place will come later. But at the outset we will suppose a moral agent in the presence of this concrete world of human life in which we all believe ourselves to exist. Beyond the bright circle of these commonplace human relations, all shall for the present remain dark to this moral agent. His origin, his destiny, his whole relation to nature and to God, if there be a God, he shall not at the outset know. But he shall be conceived as knowing that he is alive in the midst of a multitude of living fel¬ lows. With them he is to have and to define and to develop certain moral relations. For his life, or for human life in general, he is to form his ideal.
Then later, after forming and striving to realize this ideal of his, he is to come to the real physical world, and to ask of it how it stands related to these, lhis moral needs. In the answer to this question he is to find, if at all, the completion of his religious phi¬ losophy. When he comes to this second stage, which our second book is to treat, he may find himself obliged to analyze afresh and skeptically the naive theoretic notions that he has possessed concerning na¬ ture, and so even concerning his own fellow-men. But for his analysis itself he will have a fresher courage, because he will have filled himself with the love of an ideal, whose realization he will be hoping some¬ how to find all through all the tedious wanderings of his theoretic study. If the order of his whole thought is thus not the order of the truth itself, still his little inconsequence in beginning his religious philosophy with assumptions that he proves only after he has gone some distance in his investigation, may be a useful concession both to his own human weakness and to the needs of his practical nature.
With the search for the ideal, then, we begin, ex¬ pressly assuming, in this part of the first book, with¬ out proof, as much of the world of daily life as may be necessary to a study of the moral law in its ap¬ plication to this daily life. Yet, with this explana¬ tion, we are only at the beginning of the troubles that arise in examining the relation between the basis of ethics and the real world. These troubles form a great part of the obscurity of moral doc¬ trine.
II.
II.
In treating of ethical doctrine, it is common to avoid by all sorts of devices the main and most diffi¬ cult problem of all. Men like to fill half a volume \ with a description of the “moral sentiments,” or with a panegyric of the “ moral principle in man,” or in these days especially, with a great deal of talk about savages and about the “ evolution of the moral sense.” Having occupied so many pages in enter¬ taining digressions, when they come, if they ever do come, to the central problem, namely, the nature of moral distinctions considered purely as such, such writers have no time to do more than to appeal to the common sense of readers, and then to pass on to consequences. It seldom occurs to them that a de¬ scription of the “ moral faculties ” in this man or in that, or a history of moral and immoral notions and practices as they have come up among men in the order of evolution, is no more a “ moral philosophy,” in the proper sense, than is a description of the coin¬ age or of the products of any country or of the world a true explanation of the difference between com¬ mercial solvency and insolvency.
We for our part shall be obliged, however, by our limited space, to aim forthwith at the heart of the problem of a philosophical ethic. What is the real nature of this distinction between right and wrong? What truth is there in this distinction? Is this truth relative to particular conditions, or independ¬ ent thereof? What ideal of life results? These things we want to know; and we do not want to spend our time more than we shall be obliged to do in irrelevant descriptions of the mental states of this or that man. All mental states now interest us only in so far as we first see what logical bearing they may have upon our problem. We shall have to describe a good deal, but that work will have only its proper subordinate place.
As for the main problem itself, we can best bring its nature home to ourselves by considering forth¬ with some aspects of an old and often neglected question, namely, the very question before referred to about the proper relation of one’s moral ideal to the reality that he may have recognized.
We are to form a moral ideal apart, as we have said, from any theory of the physical universe out¬ side of man. But is this practicable? Is not every moral theory dependent in truth on a theory of things? Is it possible for us to make for ourselves our ideal, and only afterwards to go to the real world and to see if our ideal is realized? Must not rather our ideal be founded, in the very nature of the case, on what we know, or think we know, about the world? Is not then this whole undertaking of ours a blunder? Is a rational moral distinction possible save through a knowledge of the facts about the world? Can the ideal say to the world: “ I demand that thou shouldst be like me? ” Must not the ideal rather humbly say: “ Thus and thus it is in truth, and therefore I am what I am? ” The nature of moral ideals and distinctions is plainly involved just here. We must look closely at these questions; for to answer them aright is to answer the fundamental questions of all ethical phi¬ losophy.
To understand then more justly the nature of this difficulty, let us consider more closely the two possi¬ ble answers to the foregoing questions. Let us call \ a man who insists in spite of all upon going to the real world, to find there in some way the sole basis for his ideal distinctions between good and evil, an ethical realist. Let us on the other hand call him who would somehow demonstrate if he could some ideal as the true and only moral ideal, without in any wise making it depend upon physical reality, a moral idealist. Let us then let the two parties discuss, in their opposing ways, the question at issue. Let us hear their views briefly stated and argued. First the view of the extreme ethical realists: “ Go to real¬ ity,” they say, “ and to whatever reality you need to consider. Thence derive your notion of duty. Mo¬ rality must not be built in the air, but on a solid foundation of natural fact. Your moral doctrine may have to depend upon all that you can find out about the universe.” — On the other hand we have the idealistic doctrine: “ Morality,” say the sup¬ porters of this view, “is for the first an ideal. From reality one learns the relations that are to be judged by the ideal, but cannot by any searching find the ideal itself. From reality one can learn the means; the End of action is an Ideal, independent of all real¬ ity save the bare existence of our choice of this End.
As Prometheus defied Zeus, so the moral conscious¬ ness could and must defy the forces of nature in case they made the ideal forever hopeless. If the good be unattainable, that makes it no less the good. If the existent world were the worst world imaginable, it would not be justified by the mere fact that it was the real world. Ideals must be realized in so far as we can realize them, but what can be realized need not therefore turn out to be the ideal. The judg¬ ments: This is, and, This is good, are once for all different; and they have to be reached by widely dif¬ ferent methods of investigation.” — Such are the two opposing views. We cannot yet repeat in detail the arguments for each, but we can suggest a few of them.
“ See,” says the supporter of the first view, “ how absurd it is to evolve moral theories out of one’s inner consciousness. What happens to such theories? Either nature favors them, and then they survive in the struggle for life, or they are unequal to the tasks of the real world, and then their supporters go mad, or die. But in the first case they are merely such theories as could have been much better reached by a process, not of guessing at truth, but of study¬ ing nature’s laws. In the second case, the result is enough for common sense people. The moral theory that is destined to die out for want of supporters can hardly triumph over more useful opinions. If we want a moral theory, we must therefore consider what kind of action, what rule of life, wins in the battle of existence, and tends most to outlive its rivals. That rule is the one destined to become universal.”
The maintainers of the second view are ready with their answer. “ What sort of morality is this?” they say. “ Is this the morality of the martyrs? Is this an ideal that can satisfy us? The preservation of truly valuable life may indeed be an end in itself, and therefore an action that tends, on the whole, to destroy rather than to save such life may be bad from any point of view; but the moral thinker is not, on \ that account, bound to choose a code that will make its believers survive. The believers are not all who are affected by obedience to the code, and it may be the believer’s place to be sacrificed, either because his life is worth less than his ideal, or because the unbelievers may somehow be bettered through his death. And, in general, what would be the conse¬ quence of the consistent following out of the prin¬ ciple that the true goal is conformity to reality?
Assume that, for instance, a man in society is to reg¬ ulate his actions solely according to the demands that society as a real power makes upon him, in view of his place in the social organism, and that morality thus expresses simply the requirements that the in¬ dividual must meet if he is to remain a successful member of this social organism. Then, to get your moral code, you are to examine the facts of social life. You are to see, for example, what each man must nowadays do if he is to be tolerable to his fellows. You will find something of this sort: It will not do for him to kill his fellows, or to steal from them, or openly to insult them. It will be un¬ profitable for him to be caught in cheating them, or in lying to them. He will do well to help them as far as his means allow, and so to get a reputation for kind-heartedness and public spirit, as well as for strict integrity. For such, at least in our society, are some of the requisite or useful kinds of adjust¬ ment to our environment. On these is founded our moral code, if it is to be founded on' reality alone.
“ But these requirements are not equally good in all societies. Once a power to kill certain kinds of people was a necessary condition to happy social life. A reputation for fearlessness, for prowess, for mili¬ tary skill, for a certain kind of cunning, for perfect willingness to take your weaker enemy’s property; all this was a part of the necessary adjustment to one’s environment. Was all this then for that soci¬ ety true morality? If morality were the body of rules governing successful adjustment to the social environment, then morality would be relative to the environment, and would vary with it. So even now such rules vary with one’s social position. Minis¬ ters of religion are considered to be best adjusted to the environment if they are outwardly meek, save when defending their creeds against heretics. But politicians are best adjusted when they are aggres¬ sive and merciless. A poet or artist is best adjusted if he has a reputation for very ideal and impersonal aims, and he can then even afford to leave his debts unpaid; but a business man must be very concrete in behavior, severely definite in his dealings with his fellows. And so runs the world away. Find your place, and farm it cleverly, for that is the whole duty of man.
“ Such would be,” say our idealists, “ the conse¬ quences of looking simply to reality for a definition of the moral code. There would no longer be a dif¬ ference between morality and cleverness. Practical skill in the art of living is what survives in this world: and if it is survival, or tendency to survival, that distinguishes a true from a false moral code, then universal cleverness as a moral code would on the whole tend to survive, with its adherents.
But a realistic opponent is not thus silenced. “ Such caricatures,” he insists, “ do not fairly repre¬ sent my doctrine.” He, too, has an ideal but it is wholly dependent on reality. What he means by conformity to reality as the foundation of a moral code is properly expressed by the more thoughtful advocates of the doctrine of evolution. “ Adjust¬ ment to one’s real surroundings is always,” they say, “ one very important element in morality. But there are higher and lower forms of adjustment. Cannibals, or conquerors, or bad politicians, may be sufficiently adjusted to their environment to be mo¬ mentarily successful; but true philanthropists and truly great statesmen -are better than they, since the statesmen and philanthropists have a higher form of adjustment than have the others, and are thus higher in the scale of progress. There is in the world a constant evolution of higher out of lower forms of life. This applies also to society. And on this fact of evolution depends the true morality. The ideal morality is that form of adjustment of the social man to his environment towards which society in its progress forever tends.” How then shall we define our moral code? “ Why, once more,” says the evo¬ lutionist, “ by the facts. Do not make your code first and then judge the world. You will do well to accept the universe even if you did not make it. But examine the world to see in what way it is tend¬ ing. Then conform yourself to that tendency; try to hasten- the realization of the coming ideal perfec¬ tion. Progress does not depend on you, but you will do well to assist progress. So, by experience, we are to find the direction in which society is moving, we are to discover the goal toward which this move¬ ment tends, and this object of life, once formulated, is to give us our moral code.”
Again, however, the idealist objects. This, he admits, is a view higher, no doubt, than the preced¬ ing; but is it a clear and consistent view? Will it bear criticism? In one respect, as appears to him, it fails badly. However certain and valuable the facts about evolution may be, the theory that founds morality wholly upon these facts of evolution is de¬ fective, because it confuses the notion of evolution with the notion of progress, the conception of growth in complexity and definiteness with the conception of growth in moral worth. The two ideas are not necessarily identical. Yet their identity is assumed in this theory. How does it follow that the state toward which a physical progress, namely, evolution, tends, must be the state that is to meet with moral approval? This is not to be proved unless you have already done the very thing that the doctrine of evo¬ lution wishes to teach you to do, that is, unless you have already formed a moral code, and that inde¬ pendently of what you know of the facts of natural evolution. lYhy is the last state in an evolution better than the former states? Surely not because it is the last stage, surely not because it is physically more complex, more definite, or even more perma¬ nent; but solely because it corresponds to some ideal that we independently form. Why should my ideal necessarily correspond with reality? Why should what I approve turn out to be that which exists? And why, if any correspondence is to exist, should that particular bit of reality that comes at the end of a physical process called evolution be just the one bit that is to answer my ideal demands? It will be very satisfactory if such correspondence be¬ tween the real and the ideal is found to result; but how can I know beforehand that it must result?
Evolution and progress: what do the terms re¬ spectively mean? Evolution, we learn, is an increase in the complexity, definiteness, individuality and organic connection of phenomena. But progress is any series of changes that meets with the constantly increasing approval of somebody. The growth of a tree or of a thistle is an evolution. The climbing of a hill for some purpose may throughout be a prog¬ ress. Evolution may or may not meet with the ap¬ proval of anybody; and a pessimist might fully accept some proposed law of evolution. But unless there is some approval from some source, we have no progress. How thoughtless then it is, our idealist insists, to confound such different notions. But is a case of evolution ever a process of degeneration? Certainly. You want to eat asparagus before it is full grown. Hence every moment of its evolution after a certain point is for you distinctly a degenera¬ tion. You want the potatoes in your cellar to keep fresh. If they sprout, a process of evolution has be¬ gun, but every moment of it is for you the reverse of progress. The egg that begins to incubate is in full course of evolution; but what if it is wanted for market? Might not the evolution of the whole world conceivably be for the moral consciousness what such cases of evolution are for the purposes of ordinary life?
“But,” the realist may say, “in fact the world does grow better. The course of evolution is on the whole a progress.” “ Be it so,” the idealist answers, “ but how can we know it? Only by first setting up our moral ideal, and then comparing the facts with this ideal. If we know what we mean by bet¬ ter, we can judge whether the world is growing better. But we may not pretend to determine what is better by simply observing how the world grows. Growth and improvement are not identical ideas. One may grow while growing ever worse.”