Part 8

So then, as I insist, whatever your opinions, your expression of them is an appeal to some wider insight that you regard as real, and that you view as a live insight which comprehends your ideas, and which sees how they are related to genuine experience. This, I affirm, is the universal form which all opinion takes. A true opinion is true, because in fact it expresses what the wider insight confirms. A false opinion is false, because it is refuted by the light of this same wider view. Apart from such a confirmation or refutation in the light of such a larger view, the very concepts of truth and error, as applied to opinions which are not wholly confirmed or set aside by the instantaneous evidence of the moment when the opinions are formed or uttered, have no meaning. True is the judgment that is confirmed by the larger view to which it appeals. False is the assertion that is not thus confirmed. _Upon such a conception the very ideas of truth and error depend. Without such a conception truth and error have no sense_. If such a conception is not itself {110} a true view of our situation, that is, if there is no wider insight, our opinions have neither truth nor error, and are all of them alike merely meaningless. When you are ignorant, you are ignorant of what the wider view makes clear to its own insight. If you blunder or are deluded, your blunder is due to a defective apprehension which the wider view confirms. And thus, whether you are ignorant or blundering, wise or foolish, whether the truth or the falsity of your present opinion is supposed to be actual, one actuality is equally and rationally presupposed, as the actuality to which all your opinions refer, and in the light of which they possess sense. _This is the actuality of some wider insight with reference to which your own opinion gets its truth or its falsity_.

To this wider insight, to this always presupposed vision of experience as it is, of the facts as they are, you are always appealing. Your every act of assertion displays the genuineness of the appeal and exemplifies the absolute rational necessity of asserting that the appeal is made to an insight that is itself real.

Frequently you do, indeed, call this insight merely the common-sense of mankind. But, strange to say, this common-sense of mankind is always and inevitably conceived by you in terms that distinguish it from the fleeting momentary views of any or of all merely individual men. Men--if I may judge them by my own case, and by what I hear other {111} men confess--men, when taken merely as individuals, always live from moment to moment in a flickering way, normally confident, indeed, but clearly seeing at any one instant very little at a time. They are narrow in the span of the more direct insight. They grasp data bit by bit, and comprehend, in their instantaneous flashes of insight, only little scraps and tiny bundles of ideas. I who now speak to you cannot hold clearly and momentarily before my mind at once even all of the meaning that I try to express in two or three of my successive sentences. I live looking before and after, and pining for what is not, and grasping after unity; and I find each moment crumbling as it flies; and each thought and each sentence of my discourse drops into momentary forgetfulness so soon as I have carefully built up its passing structure. In our life all thus flows. We fly from one flash of insight to another.

But nevertheless our opinions, so we say, reflect sometimes the common-sense of mankind. They conform to the verdict of humanity. But who amongst us ever goes beyond thus confidently holding that he reflects the common-sense of mankind? Who amongst us personally and individually experiences, at any moment, the confirmation said to be given by the verdict of humanity? The verdict of humanity? What man ever finds immediately presented to his own personal insight that totality of data upon which this verdict is said to depend? {112} The common-sense of mankind? What mortal man is there who ever finds incorporated in his flickering, fleeting, crumbling, narrow moments of personal experience the calm and secure insight which this common-sense of mankind, or of enlightened mankind, is said to possess?

No, the common-sense of mankind is, for us all, a sort of super-individual insight, to which we appeal without ourselves fully possessing it. This "_common_"-sense of mankind is just the sense _which no man of us all ever individually possesses_. For us all it is, indeed, something superhuman. We spend part of our busy little lives in somewhat pretentiously undertaking to report its dicta. But it is simply one of the countless forms in which we conceive the wider insight to be incorporated. _The true rational warrant for this confidence of ours lies in the fact that whatever else is real, some form of such a wider insight, some essentially super-individual and superhuman insight is real_. For unless it is real our opinions, including any opinion that we may have that doubts or questions or denies its reality, are all equally meaningless. Thus even when we appeal to common-sense we really appeal to a genuine but super-human insight.

Let us not here spend time, however, upon analysing this or that special form in which we are accustomed, for one special purpose or another, to conceive the wider insight. What is clear is that we constantly, and in every opinion, in every confession of {113} ignorance appeal to such an insight. That such an insight is real, must be presupposed even in order to assert that our present opinions are errors. What interests us most at this point is, however, this, that whatever else the whole real universe is, the real universe exists only in case it is the object, and the very being, of such an insight, of such an inclusive experience, of such a view of what is. For, when you hold any opinions whatever about the real world, or about any of its contents, characters, or values, your opinions are either true or false, and are true or false by virtue of their actual conformity to the live insight which experiences what makes them true or false, and which therefore _ipso facto_ experiences what the real world is. If there is no such world-possessing insight, then, once more, your opinions about the world are neither true nor false. Or, otherwise stated, if there is no such inclusive insight there is no world. To the real world, then, this insight which comprehends the world, and which knows whatever is true to be true, and whatever is false about the world to be false--to the real world this insight, I say, belongs. And the whole world belongs to it and is its object and essence. Whatever is real is real for that insight, and is in its experience, and exists as its possession, and as its well-known and well-comprehended content, and as its image and expression and meaning.

All this I say, as you may note, not because I hold in high esteem any of our private human {114} opinions, but only because, _except in the light of such an all-seeing comprehension of facts as they are, our individual opinions about the world cannot even be false_. For opinion, in all its fleeting blindness and in its human chaos of caprices, is ceaselessly an appeal to the judge, to the seer, to the standard experience, to the knower of facts as they are, to the wider view, to the decisive insight. And opinions about reality in its wholeness, about the world, about the all, are appeals to the all-judging insight, to the all-seeing view, to the knowledge and experience that grasps the totality of facts, to the widest outlook, to the deepest insight, to the absolute rational decision. If this be so, then an opinion to the effect that there exists no such widest and deepest insight, and no such final view, is itself just such an appeal to the final insight, simply because it is an opinion about reality. To assert then that there is no largest view, no final insight, no experience that is absolute, is to assert that the largest view observes that there is no largest view, that the final insight sees that there is no such insight, that the ultimate experience is aware that there is no ultimate experience. And such an assertion is indeed a self-contradiction.

This, I assert, is the only rational way of stating the nature of opinion, of truth or error, and consequently of reality. This is the synthesis which reason inevitably accomplishes whenever it rightly views the nature and the implications of even our most flickering and erroneous and uncertain {115} opinions. We can err about what you will. But if we err, we simply come short of the insight to which we are aiming to conform, and in the light of which our ideas get absolutely all of their meaning. In every error, in every blunder, in all our darkness, in all our ignorance, we are still in touch with the eternal insight. We are always seeking to know even as we are known.

I have sought in this sketch to vindicate the general rights of rational insight as against mere momentary or fragmentary intuition. I have also tried to show you what synthesis of reason gives us a genuinely religious insight.

"My first penitent," said the priest of our story, "was a murderer." "And I," said the nobleman, "was this priest's first penitent."

"I am ignorant of the vast and mysterious real world"--thus says our sense of human fallibility and weakness when we are first awakened to our need of rational guidance. The saying is true. The mystery is appalling. "I am ignorant of the real world." Yes; but reason, reflecting upon the nature and the essential meaning of opinion, of truth, of error, and of ignorance, points out to us this thesis: "That of which I am ignorant is that about which I can err. But error is failure to conform my momentary opinion to the very insight which I mean and to which I am all the while appealing. Error is failure to conform to the inclusive insight which {116} overarches my errors with the heaven of its rational clearness. Error is failure to grasp the very light which shines in my darkness, even while my darkness comprehends it not. That of which I am ignorant is then essentially the object of a super-human and divine insight."

"I am ignorant of the world. To be ignorant is to fail to grasp the object of the all-inclusive and divine insight." That is the expression of our situation. Reason easily makes the fitting synthesis when it considers the priest and the nobleman. I ask you to make the analogous synthesis regarding the world and the divine insight. This synthesis here takes form in concluding that the world is the object of an all-inclusive and divine insight, which is thus the supreme reality.

I have but sketched for you the contribution of reason to our quest. This contribution will seem to many of you too abstract and too contemplative to meet vital religious needs. In fact, what I have said will mean little to you unless you come to see how it can be translated into an adequate expression in our active life. To this task of such a further interpretation of the mission of the reason as a guide of life my next lecture shall be devoted.

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IV

THE WORLD AND THE WILL

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IV

THE WORLD AND THE WILL

I could not discuss, in my last lecture, the office of the reason as a source of religious insight without sketching for you what insight I personally regard as the most important result of the right use of reason. This sketch was of course, in my own mind, a part of an extended body of philosophical doctrine. It does not lie within the intent of these lectures to present a system of philosophy. I ought, nevertheless, to begin this lecture by saying a few words about the relation of my last discussion to certain religious and philosophical opinions of which you have all heard, and by indicating why it has seemed to me worth while to call your attention to the mere hint of a philosophy with which the last discussion closed. Having thus indicated the setting in which I want you to see the brief exposition of a general theory which I find to be indispensable for our main purpose, I shall devote the rest of this lecture to the task of connecting the insight which reason gives to us with the main purpose of our inquiry, namely, with the undertaking to know the nature and the way of salvation. Reason is of importance in so {120} far as what it shows us enables us to direct our will and to come into closer touch with truths which are not only theoretical, but also practical.

We shall therefore discuss at some length the relation of our rational knowledge to our active life, and the relation of our rational will to the world in which we are to work out our salvation if we can.

I

The nature and the teachings of the human reason have interested philosophers from very nearly the beginning of philosophical inquiry. What I told you about the subject in our former discussion reports a decidedly modern version of a very old opinion--an opinion which has been repeatedly examined, revised, assailed, and defended. Let me say a word as to its history.

Plato held that, through our reason, we are able to rise beyond the world of sense and to hold communion with a realm of ideally significant and eternal being. What Plato really meant by his ideal realm, and in what sense the world of what Plato called the eternal realities, the forms or ideas, could be, as Plato held it to be, a divine world, in its worth and dignity, later philosophy repeatedly attempted to grasp.

The results of such philosophical thinking have deeply affected the history of religion and still influence the religious interest of all of you. One {121} version of that philosophical tradition whose origin is in the thought of Plato--a late version, and also one greatly transformed by motives of which Plato had known in his day nothing, is the familiar version to which, in the last lecture, I in passing alluded--the prologue to our Fourth Gospel. You will all agree that this prologue attempts to state a religious insight. The relation of this New Testament view of the world of the reason to the doctrine which still later came to be formulated by the theologians of the Christian Church I have here not time to discuss. It is enough now to say that an opinion according to which our articulate reason, as well as the more inarticulate intuition of faith, has some sort of access to the world of the "Logos," and some sort of participation in a genuine apprehension of the divine life, has come to form part of the religion in which you all have been trained. In so far, then, it is surely right to say that the reason, as the philosophers have defined it, has been an actual source of religious opinion and experience.

In modern times, and especially since Kant, philosophy has been led to see the older doctrines of the human reason, and of its knowledge of the divine, from various decidedly novel points of view. The sketch of a theory of the reason as a source of insight, which I gave, was influenced by Kant's famous teaching about the nature and unity of human experience. Kant stated this theory as the doctrine that all our human knowledge involves an {122} interpretation of the data of our senses in the light of what he called the "unity of apperception." In less technical terms, Kant's meaning is that all facts of which a human experience can obtain knowledge are known to us as the possible objects of an insight which we conceive to be virtually one, as the insight of our own truly knowing Self, and as the insight without reference to which no opinion of ours has any sense whatever. This one cognitive Self is, according to Kant, the conceived virtual subject or possessor of all that we view as our experience. And this presupposed unity is the condition of all our knowledge.

But Kant's doctrine, as he stated it, is in many ways problematic and dissatisfying. The form of philosophical idealism which I myself defend goes in certain respects far beyond Kant's position. The "one experience," in which, according to him, we find a place for any fact which we conceive as knowable at all, is defined by Kant as a virtual insight, not, so to speak, a live and concrete consciousness. He regards it also as purely human, as a knowledge of appearances--not of any ultimate realities. The form of philosophical idealism which, at the last time, I outlined depends, however, upon simply universalising, and rendering live and concrete, Kant's conception of the Self, of the united experience, to which we appeal, and in the light of which our opinions get all their sense--all their character and value as true or as false opinions. {123} This one Self, this unity of experience, to which we always appeal, cannot consistently be viewed by us as merely our own individual or private self, or as merely human; and its insight cannot rationally be interpreted merely as an insight into what is apparent, that is into what is not really real. Nor can it be viewed merely as something virtual--a possible unity of experience, to which we would appeal if we could. In my opinion it must be conceived as more live and real and concrete and conscious and genuine than are any of our passing moments of fleeting human experience. It must be viewed as an actual and inclusive and divinely rational knowledge of all facts in their unity. And the very nature of facts, their very being as facts, must be determined by their presence as objects in the experience of this world-embracing insight. This was the philosophical theory that I sketched in my former lecture. This is my view of what reason teaches.

Now this thesis, this somewhat remote descendant of the Platonic doctrine of the function of reason, this modern version of the concept of the "Logos" as the light that "shineth in the darkness" of our ordinary human experience, this revision and transformation of the Kantian theory of knowledge, has, by virtue of the long history of the doctrine in question, and by virtue of the difficult considerations upon which, as a philosophical thesis, it rests, a highly technical character. This technical aspect of the teaching in question forbids, in these lectures. {124} any adequate exposition, or criticism, or defence of its problems and of its merits as a basis for a system of philosophy. And you will surely not find unnatural the fact that a study of the function of the reason should indeed involve such technical and complex issues. I mention these issues only to say at once how and how far, in the present lectures, we are concerned with them.

We are seeking a way of salvation. And in these discussions we are mainly concerned with the sources of insight into what that way is. I am not attempting to work out, in your presence, a systematic philosophy. Why, then, have I introduced this mere sketch of philosophical idealism into our inevitably crowded programme? I answer: I have done so because I have wanted to illustrate the office of reason by telling you in my own way how I view the matter. The reason is, in fact, a source of religious insight to many people who do not reflect upon its deliverances as philosophers seek to reflect, and who may not agree with me in what little I have time to expound of my own philosophical opinions. My effort has been to tell in philosophical terms what such people really mean.

In such people reason very often shows itself indirectly and concretely, by its fruits, through their deeds, through their purpose, in a word, through their will. We shall ere long see how this can be and is the case. Reason is present in such lives and inspires them. A genuine relation to some {125} spirit of all truth, a perfectly sincere touch with an articulate and universal insight, a translation of the lesson and the meaning of the synthetic reason into a definite practical postulate that life shall be and is an essentially reasonable and therefore an essentially divine enterprise--such I find to be the essence of the religious insight of many serious minds. Beside the earnest devotion of such people to the business which life assigns to them, the mere theories of a philosopher may seem shadowy enough. And if such people comment upon what they hear of my philosophy by saying that they do not understand it, and doubt whether they agree with it, I am not on that account at all disposed to complain of them, or to assert that reason is to them no source of religious insight. I take pleasure, however, in observing that, in my opinion, they agree with my doctrine in the concrete, and express it in their religious life far better than I can express it in my technical terms, however much these people may fail to grasp what my terms mean or to accept my formulations. The best expression of your reason is your life, if you live as one enlightened from above ought to live. You are not obliged to accept a technical formula in order to embody the spirit of that formula in your daily work. I know many men who are far more the servants and ministers of the true rational insight than, in my present human life, I shall ever succeed in becoming, and who, nevertheless, either are impatient of every {126} philosophical theory, or, if philosophically trained, are opposed to me in my philosophy.

Nevertheless, I need to express, in my own way, what is the insight that is really at the heart of the lives of just such people. What I am first interested in emphasising is of course this, that, in my opinion, my interpretation of the insight of which reason is the source, actually expresses one important aspect of the spirit in which those live whom I regard as the true servants of the divine reason. But my interest in the matter does not cease here. I can, of course, express my opinions only in the terms that appeal to me. But whatever you think of my formulas, I am very anxious to have you see that, as the life of such people convincingly shows, reason has been, and is, a source of religious insight to them, and that our philosophical differences relate simply to the way in which we formulate our interpretation of the meaning of this source.

Reason has been such a source of insight. That is true as an historical fact. If you can find anything in the Platonic dialogues which appeals to you as involving an insight that has religious value, you must recognise this truth. It is a mere matter of history that Christian doctrine as it has come down to us is, in one aspect, profoundly affected by Plato's influence. The myth of the men in the cave, in the "Platonic Republic," the myth in Plato's "Phaedrus," which tells about the banishment of the soul from its heavenly life and from its intercourse with the {127} ideal world, and which interprets all our loftier human loves as a longing of the soul for its divine home land--these myths are allegories which Plato intended to illustrate his own view of what reason teaches us. These myths express in figurative speech a philosophy that actually affects to-day your own religious interests. For instance, this philosophy influences your traditional conception of God, and your ideas about the immortal life of the soul. And if the prologue of the Fourth Gospel seems to you to contain any truth, your religious ideas are again moulded by a form of ancient philosophy which dealt with the nature and with the insight of the reason. My own sketch of modern philosophy is but a reinterpretation of the very truth which that ancient doctrine attempted to portray. Historically, then, some of your religious opinions are actually due to the work of the reason. My philosophy simply tries to interpret to you this work.