Part 9

And reason not only has been, but now is, such a source of insight. And this is the case whenever you try to apply the "rule of reason" to any problem of your life, and hereby gain a confidence that, by being as reasonable and fair as you can, you are learning to conform your life to the view which, as you suppose, an all-wise God takes of its meaning. My philosophy simply tries to tell you why you have a right to hold that an all-wise being is real.

I am anxious, I say, to have such facts about the {128} office of reason recognised, whatever you may think of my philosophy. And this is my purpose when I use my philosophy merely to illustrate the office of reason. For indispensable as individual religious experience is, in all the capriciousness of its feelings--indispensable also as social religious experience is, with all its insistence upon human love and also upon human religious convention--the synthetic use of the reason, that is, the systematic effort "to see life steadily and see it whole," is also indispensable. The recent efforts to make light of the work of reason--efforts to which, at the last lecture, I directed your attention, would tend, if taken by themselves, to result in basing religion upon an inarticulate occultism, upon a sort of psychical research that would regard whatever witch may peep and mutter, whatever mystic may be unable to tell what he means, whatever dumb cry of the soul may remain stubbornly inarticulate, as a _more_ promising religious guide than is any form of serious and far-seeing devotion to the wider insight, which ought to survey life and to light our path.

Let my own appeal to philosophy, then, even if you do not agree with my formulas, stand as my protest against occultism and against the exclusive devotion to the inarticulate sources of religious insight. That I also prize the perfectly indispensable office of the more child-like intuitions, when they occupy their true place, you already know from my first two lectures. We cannot in our present life {129} do without these child-like intuitions. We cannot be just to them without aiming to live beyond them and to put away childish things.

II

If my interpretation of the reason thus gets its worth from the fact that it attempts by a formula simply to illustrate the view which the servants of the divine reason actually and practically translate into life, and express through their spirit and through their deeds, you may hereupon object that my view of the reason as a source of religious insight still seems to you to be one which it is not easy to translate into life at all. What does it profit a man, you will say, to view the whole world as the object present to an all-embracing and divine insight? How does such a view give a man the power to live more reasonably than he otherwise would live? Is a world-embracing reason that sees all things in their unity really that master of life whom our simpler religious intuitions call upon us to seek as our Deliverer from our natural chaos of desires? I have just asserted that there are people who devote their lives to the service of such a divine reason. But if the divine reason is eternal and perfect, and if it sees all reality as an unity, and if this is its only function, how can any one serve it at all? The eternal needs no help, you may insist, and apparently has no concern for us. We need, for our {130} salvation, something, or some personal deliverer, that can teach us not merely to utter true assertions, but to live worthy lives. How does the insight of the reason enlighten us in this respect? What would one do for a divine Logos, for an all-observant and all-comprehending seer? Could one love such a being, or devoutly commune with his perfect but motionless wisdom? Is it true then, as I have just maintained it to be true, that the insight of the reason, as I have expounded it in my sketch of a philosophy, does really inspire the earnest and devoted souls whose spirit I have attempted to express? Whatever they may think of my philosophy, have I been just to their practical fervour and to their energetic devotion? Do they merely say: God is omniscient, therefore our life has its purpose defined, and we are saved?

In brief, the insight of the reason, as I have been stating its dicta, may seem to you, at best, to show us a sort of heaven which, as I said, overarches our unwisdom with its starry clearness, but which as you may now add we can neither reach, nor use, nor regard as a rational inspiration of our active life. If it is real, it can observe us, as it observes all reality. But can it save us? It can rise above us. But can it enter into our will and give us a plan of life? Granting the validity of the argument sketched in our last lecture, what has the all-wise knower of truth to do with our salvation?

These are familiar objections to such a view as {131} mine. James repeatedly urged them in his comment upon what he regarded as not merely the fallibility, but the futility, or, as he said, the "thinness" of the idealistic interpretation of the world of the reason. Similar objections have been urged by many of the critics of any doctrine similar to mine. Are these objections just?

III

I can answer such questions only through a certain gradual approach to their complications. I want to show you how the insight of the reason not only points out a heaven that overarches us, but also reveals an influence that can inwardly transform us. To this end I shall next illustrate, by instances taken from life, how some people actually view their own personal relations to what they take to be the divine reason. I shall thus indicate in what way such people connect this divine reason with personal needs of their own which they regard as vital. Then I shall show why this not only is so in the lives of some people, but ought to be so for all of us. As a result we shall soon find that, just as our first statement of the insight of reason, if indeed it is a true statement, transforms our view of the sense in which the world is real, so a deeper study of the relations of insight to action transforms our first cruder notion of the reason itself, of its office in life, and of the truth that it reveals.

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I begin with illustrations taken from life. A former college student of mine, some of whose papers upon his own religious experience I was not very long ago privileged to read, undertook, in one of these papers, to explain how, at the time, he viewed the place of prayer in his own life. He was a man capable, upon the one hand, of deep emotion and of rich inner life, but on the other hand highly self-critical and disposed to doubt. After a somewhat plentiful early interest in religion, the result of home training and of personal experience, he had come, as he studied more, and looked about his world more critically, to part company almost altogether with positive faiths about religious matters. His childhood beliefs had dropped away. Doubts and disbeliefs had taken their place. In opinion, when he wrote his papers for me, he was mainly disposed to a pure naturalism. The gods of the past had vanished from his life almost altogether.

"But," said he, in his account (I follow not his exact words but their general sense), "one old religious exercise I have never quite given up. That was and is prayer. A good while ago I dropped all conventional forms of prayer. I did not say my prayers in the old way. And when I prayed I no longer fancied that the course of nature or of my luck was going to be altered for my sake, or that my prayers would help me to avoid any consequences of my folly or my ignorance. I did not pray to get anybody to mix in my affairs, so as to get me things {133} that I wanted. But this was, and is, my feeling about prayer: When things are too much for me, and I am down on my luck, and everything is dark, I go alone by myself, and I bury my head in my hands, and I think hard that God must know it all and will see how matters really are, and understands me, and in just that way alone, by understanding me, will help me. And so I try to get myself together. And that, for me, is prayer."

I cannot repeat my student's precise form of expression. I think that I express to you the spirit of what he wrote. In any case, this form of prayer is not peculiar to that man. You see in what way the thought of the divine wisdom became a practical thought for him--a thought at once rational and, as far as it went, saving. When life shattered his little human plans--well, he lifted up his eyes unto the hills. He won a sort of conscious and reasonable union with the all-seeing life. He did not ask its aid as a giver of good fortunes. He waited patiently for the light. Now I do not think that to be an expression of the whole insight of reason; but, so far as it went, that sort of prayer was an essentially religious act. And for that youth it was also a very practical act.

Let me turn to another case. Many years ago I well knew a man, much older than myself, who has long since died. A highly intelligent man, ambitious for the things of the spirit, he was also beset with some defects of health and with many worldly {134} cares. His defects of health made him sensitive to the sort of observation that his physical weaknesses often attracted. In addition, he had enemies, and once had to endure the long-continued trial of a public attack upon his reputation--an attack from which he at length came forth triumphant, but not without long suffering. Once I heard him telling about his own religion, which was the faith of a highly independent mind. "What I most value about my thought of God," he in effect said, "is that I conceive God as the one who knows us through and through, and who estimates us not as we seem, but as we are, and who is absolutely fair in his judgment of us." My friend had no concern for future rewards and punishments. The judgment of God to which he appealed, and in which, without any vanity, he delighted, was simply the fair and true judgment, the divine knowing of us all just as we are.

Now do you not know people whose religion is of this sort? And are not all such forms of religion, as far as they go, practical? Is the recognition of an all-seeing insight, as something real, not in itself calming, sustaining, rationalising? Does it not at the very least awaken in us the ideal which I repeatedly mentioned in our last lecture, the ideal of knowing ourselves even as we are known, and of guiding our lives in the light of such a view of ourselves? Can such an ideal remain wholly a matter of theory? Is it not from its very essence an appeal to the will? {135} Was not my elder friend finding a guiding principle of action in a world where he was often misunderstood? Could one steadily conceive God in these terms without constantly renewing one's power to face the world with courage?

Surely you all know many people who value the divine as they define the divine, mainly because they conceive God as what they call the Great Companion. And, for many such, it is the intimately perfect insight of this companion that they seem to themselves most to value. The ways of this companion are to them mysterious. But he knows them. They repeat the word: "He knoweth the way that I take." He sees them. He is close to them. He estimates them. So they view the matter. Is not such a conception a vitally important spring of action for those who possess it?

These illustrations suggest that one ill appreciates the insight of reason, even as so imperfectly and one-sidedly sketched by me at the last lecture, who does not see that this insight has an extremely close connection with the will.

IV

Our illustrations have now prepared the way for a general review of the relations between our reason and our will. We are ready at length to ask whether any insight of reason, whether any general view of the nature and of the unity of the world or of life, {136} could possibly be a merely theoretical insight. And if we rightly answer this question, we shall be prepared to reply to the objection that, according to the doctrine of the last lecture, the divine insight which overarches our ignorance, and which has all reality for its object, is a lifeless, or an unpractical, or a merely remote type of pure knowledge.

Our attempt to deal with this new question can best be made by taking a direct advantage of what some of you may suppose to be the most formidable of all objections to the whole argument of the last lecture. In my sketch of a philosophy of the reason, I have so far deliberately avoided mentioning what many of you will have had in mind as you have listened to me, namely, that doctrine about our knowledge, and about truth, and about our mode of access to truth, which to-day goes by the name of Pragmatism. Here we have to do, once more, with some of the favourite theses of James's later years. We have also to do with a view with which my present audience is likely to be familiar, at least so far as concerns both the name pragmatism and the best-known fundamental theses of the pragmatist. For I speak in the immediate neighbourhood of one of the most famous strongholds of the recent pragmatic movement. I can give but a comparatively small portion of our limited time to the task of explaining to you how I view those aspects of pragmatism which here concern our enterprise. Yet this summary discussion will go far, I hope, to show how {137} I view the relations between the reason and the will, and in how far our will also seems to me to be a source of religious insight.

That human knowledge is confined to the range furnished by human experience, and cannot be used to transcend that experience, is an opinion widely represented in all modern discussion, and especially in the most recent times. My own account of the insight which I refer to the reason depends not upon simply ignoring this general doctrine about the limitations of our human knowledge, but upon an effort to get a rational view of what it is that we mean by human experience. My result, as I have stated it, may have seemed paradoxical; and I am far from supposing that my brief sketch could remove this paradoxical seeming, or could answer all objections. My thesis is essentially this, that you cannot rationally conceive what human experience is, and means, except by regarding it as the fragment of an experience that is infinitely richer than ours, and that possesses a world-embracing unity and completeness of constitution. My argument for this thesis has been dependent on an assertion about the sense in which any opinion whatever can be either true or false, and upon a doctrine regarding that insight to which we appeal whenever we make any significant assertion.

Now this argument will seem to some of you to have been wholly set aside by that account of the nature of judgments, of assertions, and of their truth or falsity, which pragmatism has recently {138} maintained. A new definition of truth, you will say--or, an old definition revived and revised; a new clearness also as to the ancient issues of philosophy; an equally novel recent assimilation of philosophical methods to those that have long been prominent in natural science--these things have combined, at the present moment, to render the Platonic tradition in philosophy and the laborious deductions of Kant, as well as the speculations of the post-Kantian idealists, no longer interesting. I ought, you may insist, to have taken note of this fact before presenting my now antiquated version of the idealistic doctrine of the reason. I ought to have considered fairly the pragmatist's theory of truth. I should then have seen that our human experience may safely be left and must rationally be left, to fight its own way to salvation without any aid from the idea of an universal or all-embracing or divine insight.

How does pragmatism view the very problem about the truth and error of our human opinions which has led me to such far-reaching consequences? For the first, it is the boast of pragmatists that they deal, by preference, with what they call "concrete situations," and our "concrete situation" as human beings dealing with reality is, as they maintain, something much more readily comprehensible than is the idealistic theory of a divine insight. Truth and error are characters that belong to our assertions for reasons which need no overarching heavenly insight to make them clear. In brief, as the {139} pragmatists tell us, the story of the nature of truth and of error is this:

An assertion, a judgment, is always an active attitude of a man, whereby, at the moment when he makes this assertion he directs the course of his further activities. To say "My best way out of the woods lies in that direction" is, for a wanderer lost in the forest, simply to point out a rule or plan of action and to expect certain results from following out that plan. This illustration of the man in the woods is due to James. An analogous principle, according to pragmatism, holds for any assertion. To judge is to expect some concrete consequence to follow from some form of activity. An assertion has meaning only in so far as it refers to some object that can be defined in empirical terms and that can be subjected to further direct or indirect tests, whereby its relations to our own activities can become determinate. Thus, then, a judgment, an opinion, if it means anything concrete, is always an appeal to more or less accessible human experience--and is not, as I have been asserting, an appeal to an overarching higher insight. When you make any significant assertion, you appeal to whatever concrete human observations, experiments, or other findings of data, actual or possible, can furnish the test that the opinion calls for. If I assert: "It will rain to-morrow," the assertion is to be verified or refuted by the experience of men just as they live, from moment to moment.

{140}

It remains to define, a little more precisely, wherein consists this empirical verification or refutation for which a human opinion calls. An opinion is a definite one, as has just been said, because it guides the will of the person who holds the opinion to some definite course of action. An opinion then, if sincere and significant, has _consequences,_ leads to deeds, modifies conduct, and is thus the source of the experiences which one gets as a result of holding that opinion and of acting upon it. In brief, an opinion has what the pragmatists love to call its _"workings."_ Now when the workings of a given opinion, the empirical results to which, through our actions, it leads, agree with the expectations of the one who holds the opinion, the opinion is to be called true. Or, in the now well-known phrase, "An idea (or opinion) is true if it works." To use the repeated example of Professor Moore, an opinion that a certain toothache is due to a condition present in a given tooth is true, when an operation performed upon that tooth, and performed as a consequence of that opinion, and with the expectation of curing the toothache works as expected. For the operation is itself one of the workings of the opinion in question.

To assert an opinion, then, is not to appeal to an essentially superior insight, but is to appeal to the workings that follow from this opinion when you act upon it in concrete life. No other sort of truth is knowable.

{141}

A consequence of these views, often insisted upon by pragmatists, is that truth is relative to the various "concrete situations" which arise; so that absolute or final truth is indefinable by us mortals. Hence an opinion may be true for a given purpose, or in one situation (because in that situation its workings prove to be as expected), although it is relatively false when applied to some other situation, or to some wider range of experience. Absolute truth is as unobservable by us in our experience as is absolute position or absolute motion in the physical world. Every truth is definable with reference to somebody's intentions, actions, and successes or failures. These things change from person to person, from time to time, from plan to plan. What is true from the point of view of my plans need not be so from your point of view. The workings of an opinion vary in their significance with the expectations of those concerned. Truth absolute is at best a mere ideal, which for us throws no light upon the nature of the real world.

Thus, at a stroke, pragmatism, as understood by its chief representatives at the present time, is supposed to make naught of the subtle, and, as the pragmatists say, airy and fantastic considerations upon which my sketch of a philosophical idealism at the last lecture depended. Truth, they insist, is a perfectly human and for us mortals not in the least a supernatural affair. We test it as we can, by following the experienced workings to which our {142} ideas lead. If these workings are what we meant them to be, our opinions are just in so far proven true. If no human and empirical tests of the workings of an opinion are accessible to us, the opinion remains in so far meaningless. If concrete tests lead to workings that disappoint our human expectations, our opinions are in so far false. Moreover (and upon this all the pragmatists lay great stress), truth is for us a temporal affair. It changes, it flows, it grows, it decays. It can be made eternal only by tying ourselves, for a given purpose, to abstract ideas which we arbitrarily require to remain, like mathematical definitions, unchanged. Even such ideas have no sense apart from the uses to which they can be put. Concrete truth grows or diminishes as our successes in controlling our experience, through acting upon our beliefs, wax or wane. Truth is subject to all the processes of the evolution of our concrete lives. The eternal is nothing that can be for us a live presence. What we deal with is, like ourselves, fluent, subject to growth and decay, dynamic, and never static. The pragmatist recoils with a certain mixture of horror and amusement from the conception of an all-inclusive divine insight. That, he says, would be something static. Its world of absolute reality would be a "block universe" and itself merely an aspect of a part, or perhaps the whole, of just this block. Its supposed truth would be static like itself, and therefore dead.

{143}

But does pragmatism forbid us to have religious insight? No; James, in ways which you have repeatedly heard me mention, insists that pragmatism leaves open ample room for what he thinks to be the best sort of religion, namely, for a religion suited to what he calls the "dramatic temper" of mind. Truth, so far as we men can attain to it, has indeed to be human enough. But nothing forbids us to entertain the belief that there are superhuman and supernatural realities, forms of being, living and spiritual personalities, or superpersonalities, as various and lofty as you please, provided only that they be such as to make whatever evidence of their being is accessible to us capable of definition in a human and empirical way. The truth, namely, of our belief about such beings, has to be tested by us in terms of our own concrete religious experience. Such beliefs, like others, must "work" in order to be true. That is, these beliefs, however they arise, must lead to conduct; and the results of this conduct must tend to our religious comfort, to our unity of feeling, to our peace, or power, or saintliness, or other form of spiritual perfection. The fruits of the spirit are the empirical tests of a religious doctrine; and, apart from those uprushes of faith from the subconscious whereof we have spoken in previous lectures, there are for James no other tests of the truth of religious convictions than these. The truth of religion consists in its successful "workings."