Part 6

But observe that, as we review these instances, they show us how the social world wherein they bid us seek our salvation is a world whose very essence is transformed by love and by its vision into something that seems to the lover mystical, superhuman, and more than our literal and commonplace social life directly exemplifies. Those who have failed to find in their actual social life such inspirations may, indeed, have to look, as the typical mystics have generally done, elsewhere, for their vision of the divine, than in so much of the social world as they know. And such will, indeed, seek their vision of salvation in solitude. When they tell us of their experience, they may well remind the social enthusiast, as well as the lover, that the religion of love is no religion at all, unless it conceives its human object not only as this creature, or as this collection of needy men and women, but as a hint, or revelation, or incarnation of a divine process--of a process which is not only human but superhuman, and which can never be comprehended in the "mart and the crowded street" unless by the soul that is either mystical enough to meet God also "in the bush," or rationally enlightened enough to know that human {75} life is indeed a revelation of something that is also superhuman.

I conclude, then, for the moment, thus: Social experience seems to lie on the way to salvation. Normally the way to salvation, if there be any such way, must lead through social experience. But when our social experience shows us any such way upward it does so, if it truly does so, because human social life is the hint, the likeness, or the incarnation of a life that lies beyond and above our present human existence. For human society as it now is, in this world of care, is a chaos of needs; and the whole social order groans and travails together in pain until now, longing for salvation. It can be saved, as the individual can be saved, only in case there is some way that leads upward, through all our turmoil and our social bickerings, to a realm where that vision of unity and self-possession which our clearest moments bring to us becomes not merely vision, but fulfilment, where love finds its own, and where the power of the spirit triumphs. Of such a realm the lovers dream and the religions tell. Let us appeal to a further source of insight. Concerning the realities that we need, let us next consult our Reason.

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III

THE OFFICE OF THE REASON

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III

THE OFFICE OF THE REASON

Thus far we have dealt with sources of religious insight which are indispensable, but which confess their own inadequacy so soon as you question them closely. Individual experience can show us, in its moments of wider vision, our ideal, and its times of despair, of aspiration, or of self-examination, our need. But whenever it attempts to acquaint us with the way of salvation, its deliveries are clouded by the mists of private caprice and of personal emotion. Social experience, in its religious aspects, helps the individual to win the wider outlook, helps him also to find his way out of the loneliness of guilt and of failure toward wholeness of life, and promises salvation through love. But, like individual experience, it is beset by what we have called the religious paradox. And it does not solve that paradox. Confessing its own defects, it still undertakes to discern how to overcome them. In so far as it is merely social experience it deals with the world of weak mortals, of futile bickerings, and of love that, in this world, deifies but never quite finds its true beloved. By virtue of this transforming love it indeed gives {80} us the hint that our social world may be an apparition or an incarnation of some diviner life than any mortal now experiences. Yet how can mortals thus ignorant pretend to get insight into anything that is divinely exalted?

Thus, both the sources of insight that we have thus far consulted point beyond themselves. Each says, "If salvation is possible, then human life must be able to come into touch with a life whose meaning is superhuman." Our question is: "Is there, indeed, such a diviner life?" In order to deal with this question, we have resolved to consult still another source of insight, namely, our Reason. The present lecture must deal with this source of insight.

I

"What does one mean by the Reason?" As I attempt to answer this question, with an especial effort to show the relations of reason and religion, I shall be aided by reminding you at the outset that, at the present time, there is a widespread tendency to discredit the reason as a source of any notable insight into life or into the universe. And this tendency depends upon so defining the business of the reason as sharply to oppose, on the one hand, intuition and reason, and, on the other hand, reason and common-sense experience. That is, some of our recent teachers tell us that the only sort of insight which can be of any use in religion must be {81} won by intuitions and cannot be obtained by what these teachers call the abstract reason. By intuition, at least in the religious field, such men mean some sort of direct feeling of the nature of things, some experience such as the mystics have reported, or such as many religious people, whether technical mystics or not, call illumination through faith. Intuitions of this sort, they say, are our only guides in the religious field. As opposed to such direct apprehension, the use of reason would mean the effort to be guided by formulas, by explicitly stated abstract principles, by processes of inference, by calculations, or by logical demonstrations. James is prominent amongst those who thus oppose the abstract reason to the revelations of intuition; and, especially in his later works, he is never weary of emphasising the inarticulate character of all our deepest sources of religious insight. When we get true religious insight, so he teaches, we simply feel convinced that these things are so. If we try to give reasons for our beliefs, James holds that the reasons are inapt afterthoughts, the outcome of sophistication, or are at best useful only in putting our convictions into convenient order for purposes of record or of teaching. James's favourite statement of the contrast here in question identifies the partisans of reason with the defenders of what he calls "barren intellectualism." He maintains that religion is hindered rather than helped by such people. You attain conviction by processes of {82} which the "barren intellect" can give no adequate account. Conviction, in religious matters, emanates, according to James, from those mysterious depths of the subconscious about which I said something in the last lecture. And convictions thus resulting feel overwhelming to the persons who have them. Such convictions are what many denote by the word "intuitions." The effort to define abstract principles, as grounds for holding your convictions to be true, constitutes the only effort of the reason in religious matters which James recognises. According to James, such reasoning processes are inevitably bad. And as a fact, so he insists, nobody seriously believes in God because some theologian or philosopher pretends to have demonstrated his existence. On the contrary, he says, belief in God is intuitive or is nothing of value. And reason is employed in such matters merely because of a frequent overfondness for abstract conceptions, or at best because formulas are useful for the teachers of religious traditions.

Another form of contrast, and one upon which James also often insists, while many other recent writers, whose interests are not those of James, emphasise the same matter, depends upon opposing reason to experience in general, including under the latter term not only the intuitions of the devout, but whatever goes by the name experience in ordinary speech. We see and hear and touch, and by such means get experience. But we make hypotheses and {83} deduce their consequences; we assume premises and demonstrate conclusions; and, according to such writers, what we then do constitutes the typical work of our reason. The characteristic of the reason is that it attempts either to elucidate the meaning of an assertion, or to prove some proposition to be true, without appealing to experience to verify the proposition in question. And such work of the reason, as these writers tell us, is of very limited use, in comparison to the use of our direct experience as a guide. What is found to be true through empirical tests is rightly tested. What is supposed to be proved true by abstract reasoning is thus at best made dependent for its explicit warrant upon the presupposed truth of the premises used in the reasoning process. Or, as is sometimes said, the reason can discover nothing essentially new. It turns its premises over and over, and gets out of them only what has already been put into them. Experience, on the other hand, is full of countless novelties; for what you can find through observation and experiment depends not upon previous assumptions, but upon the skill and the good fortune of the inquirer, and upon the wealth of life and of the real world.

In brief, for those who look at reason in this way, to use your reason is simply to draw necessary inferences from assumed premises. And no premises, as such writers insist, can warrant any inference except the inference of a conclusion which is already hidden away, so to speak, in the premises themselves. {84} Thus reasoning, as they tell us, is a process which, in the conclusion inferred, merely lets out of the bag the cat which was concealed in that bag, namely, in the premises. Reason, therefore, is indeed (so such writers assert) barren wherever novelty is sought. It is useful only for purposes of formulation, and in certain parts of the abstract sciences, where deduction has a technical place, as a means for preparing the way for experimental tests. In life, experience is the guide to true novelty. And therefore, if religious insight can be attained at all, it must be due not to the reason, but to some sort of religious experience.

Such objections to the use of reason in the religious field depend, as you see, upon identifying the reasoning process with the combination of two well-known mental processes; first, the process of forming and using abstract conceptions; secondly, the process of analysing assertions, or combinations of assertions, to make more explicit what is already contained in their meaning. Our next question may well be this: Is such an account of the work of reason just to the actual usage that common-sense is accustomed to make of this familiar name?

II

To this question I must at once answer that we all of us daily use the word reason as the name for a process, or a set of processes, which certainly {85} cannot be reduced to the mere power to form and to use abstract ideas, and to analyse the already predetermined meaning of statements. When we speak of an ill-tempered or of a prejudiced man as "unreasonable," we do not merely mean that he is unable to form or to define abstract ideas, or that he cannot analyse the meaning of his own statements. For sometimes such a man is contentiously thoughtful, and fond of using too many one-sided abstractions, and eager to argue altogether too vehemently. No, when we call him unreasonable, we mean that he takes a narrow view of his life, or of his duties, or of the interests of his fellow-men. We mean, in brief, that he lacks vision for the true relations and for the total values of things. When we try to correct this sort of unreasonableness, we do not say to the petulant or to the one-sided man: "Go to the dictionary, and learn how to define your abstract terms." Sometimes contentiously prejudiced men are altogether too fond of the dictionary. Nor do we merely urge him to form the habit of analysis. No, we may indeed say to him: "Be reasonable"; but we mean: "Take a wider outlook; see things not one at a time, but many at once; be broad; consider more than one side; bring your ideas together; in a word, get insight." For precisely what I defined in my opening lecture as insight is what we have in mind when, in such cases, we counsel a man to be reasonable. So, in such uses of the word reason, reason is not opposed to intuition, as the power to {86} form abstract ideas is supposed by James to be opposed to the power to see things by direct vision. No, reason, in such cases, means simply broader intuition, the sort of seeing that grasps many views in one, that surveys life as it were from above, that sees, as the wanderer views the larger landscape from a mountain top.

When, not long since, in a famous decision, the Supreme Court of the United States called attention to what it called "The rule of reason," and declared its intention to judge the workings of well-known modern business methods by that rule, the court certainly did not mean by "the rule of reason" the requirement that acts said to be "in restraint of trade" must be judged merely through a process of forming abstract ideas or of analysing the signification of assertions. No, the court was explicitly opposing certain methods of estimate which it regarded as falsely abstract; and it proposed to substitute for these false abstractions a mode of judging the workings of certain trade combinations which was to involve taking as wide and concrete and practical a view as possible of their total effects. Everybody who read the court's words understood that, in this case, it was precisely the merely abstract conception of something technically defined as a "restraint of trade" which the court wished, not to make sovereign, but to subordinate to the wider intuition of a fair-minded observer of the whole result, of a given sort of corporate combination. The {87} "rule of reason" was intended to bring the whole question out of the realm of barren abstractions and of mere analysis, and nearer to the realm where the trained observation of the fair minded man would decide the case--nearer, in fact, to the realm of intuition. Only, the decisive intuition must be something broad, and far-seeing, and synthetic, and fair.

Now I submit that this meaning of the word reason is perfectly familiar to all of you. Reason, from this point of view, is the power to see widely and steadily and connectedly. Its true opponent is not intuition, but whatever makes us narrow in outlook, and consequently the prey of our own caprices. The unreasonable person is the person who can see but one thing at a time, when he ought to see two or many things together; who can grasp but one idea, when a synthesis of ideas is required. The reasonable man is capable of synopsis, of viewing both or many sides of a question, of comparing various motives, of taking interest in a totality rather than in a scattered multiplicity.

You may, of course, admit that this use of the word reason is familiar; and still you may say that James's contention is nevertheless sound. For, as you may declare, the real issue is not regarding the meanings that chance to be linked with the word reason, but regarding the relative impotence of that process which James chose to call by this name. As a fact, so you may assert, there exists the familiar process of forming abstract {88} conceptions; and there also exists the process of drawing conclusions through an analysis of what is already contained in the meaning of the assumed premises. Whether or no one calls these two processes, in their usual combination, by the name reasoning, James is right in saying that abstractions, and that such sorts of purely analytic abstract reasoning as he has in mind, are incapable of giving us religious insight. And both James and the others who oppose reason to concrete experience are right in asserting that you get no novel insight whatever through mere abstractions, or through mere analysis, but are dependent for your advances in knowledge upon experience. Therefore, as you may continue, the issue which James and other empiricists raise must not be evaded by any appeal to vaguer uses of the word reason, whether common-sense or the Supreme Court chances to authorise such special forms of expression.

I fully agree to the importance of this comment and of the issue as thus stated. I am ready to consider the issue. But I also insist upon estimating the whole use of reason in its proper context. James, in common with countless other partisans of intuition in religious matters, is fond of insisting that all our nobler intuitions and all our deeper faiths are, in their foundations, inwardly compelling, but inarticulate, and that we degrade them rather than help them when we define their meaning in abstract terms or employ processes of explicit {89} demonstration in their defence. James, in common with many empiricists, also opposes experience in general to all processes of reasoning, and asserts that the latter never teach us anything novel. The issue, fairly viewed, is therefore not a perfectly simple one. It involves the question whether the two modes of getting knowledge between which we are asked to choose are the only modes actually in use. Intuition, and experience in general, are by James and by others sharply contrasted with certain processes of abstraction and of analysis. It is then pointed out that since these latter processes, taken by themselves, never give us any essentially novel insights, you must on the whole cease to use your powers of abstraction and of analysis, except for the mere purpose of record or of teaching, or of some other such technical end--computation, analysis of hypotheses, and the like. You must, at least in religious matters, depend upon the uprushes from your subconscious self or upon whatever else is persuasively inarticulate. In the ultimate decisions of life, inarticulate intuition, mere faith, and that alone, can save you. Hereupon the perfectly fair question arises whether the alternatives are thus exhaustively stated. Must one choose between inarticulate faith and barren abstractions? Must one face the alternative: Either intuition without reasoning, or else relatively fruitless analysis without intuition? Perhaps there is a third possibility. Perhaps one may use one's process of abstraction {90} as a sort of preparation for certain articulate and noble intuitions that cannot be approached, by our human sort of consciousness, through any other way. Perhaps analysis is not the whole process which determines demonstrations. Perhaps synthesis--the viewing of many facts or principles or relations in some sort of unity and wholeness--perhaps a synoptic survey of various articulate truths, can lead us to novel insights. In that case inarticulate intuitions and barren abstractions are not the only instruments between which we must choose. For in that case there will be another sort of aid, a more explicit sort of intuition, a more considerate view of our life and its meaning, which we may adopt, and which may lead us to novel results. And these results may be not only articulate but saving.

Or, to state the issue more generally: In seeking for any sort of novel truth, have we only the choice between the experience of the data of sense or of feeling on the one hand and the analysis of abstract ideas and assertions upon the other? May there not be another source of knowledge? May not this source consist in the synthetic view of many facts in their unity--in the grasping of a complex of relations in their total significance? And may not just this be a source of insight which is employed in many of the processes ordinarily known as reasoning processes? May not the formation of abstract ideas, when wisely used, be merely a means of helping us toward an easier view of larger unities of fact than {91} our present sort of human consciousness could grasp except for this auxiliary device? May not analysis be merely an aspect, a part of our live thinking? May not all genuine demonstration involve synthesis as well as analysis, the making of new constructions as well as the dissection of old assertions? If so, then the issue as presented by James and his allies is not rightly stated, because an essential part of its context is neglected. Abstract conceptions are, in fact, in the live and serious work of thought, a mere preparation for intuitions and experiences that lie on higher levels than those which, apart from abstract conceptions, we men can reach. Reasoning processes are fruitful because they involve sorts of experience, forms of intuition, that you cannot reach without them. In brief, reason and experience are not opposed. There is an opposition between inarticulate intuition and articulate insight. There is also an opposition between relatively blind experience of any sort and relatively rational experience. And, in view of such oppositions, it will be perfectly fair to define reason as the power to get articulate insight--insight into wholes rather than fragments. It will also be fair to define the reasoning process as the process of getting connected experience on a large scale.

Whoever views the matter thus will indeed not be forced to be a one-sided partisan of the reasoning process as thus defined. He will, first, fully admit that the formation of abstract ideas is but a means {92} to an end, and that this end is the enlargement of the range of our view of the connections of our experience. He will secondly admit that, as soon as the process of forming abstract ideas is pursued as an end in itself, pedantry and formalism result, whether the topic be one of religion, or of science, or of the world's daily work. He will further agree with James, and with the empiricists generally, that merely analytic reasoning, if such were, in its isolation, a possible thing, would be indeed "barren intellectualism." And finally, if he is wise, he will go still further. He will not despise instinct, and feeling, and the movings of faith, and the inarticulate intuitions. For he will know that all these things are human, are indispensable, and are the basis upon which the genuine work of the reason, the wider view of life, must be carried toward its fulfilment. For whoever is to comprehend the unities of life must first live. Whoever is to be best able to survey the landscape from the mountain top must first have wandered in its paths and its byways, and must have grown familiar with its valleys and its recesses. Whoever is to get the mature insight must first have become a little child.

But whoever, remembering the New Testament word about becoming as a little child, one-sidedly defends the inarticulate intuitions, as the only source of religious insight, should remember also the word of St. Paul: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a {93} child; but when I became a man I put away childish things."

It is the business of reason not to make naught of the indispensable intuitions of the childlike and of the faithful, but to work toward the insight such that, if we possessed it, we should "know even as we are known." That which is weak in this world may indeed confound many who are called wise; but there is no objection to its becoming also truly wise itself. For then it would all the better know why it had been able to confound false wisdom.

II