A Pluralistic Universe E-Book

William James

• Herausgeber: Andura Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Experience the life-changing power of William James with this unforgettable book.

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Leseprobe

A Pluralistic Universe

by William James

Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in

Philosophy

CONTENTS

LECTURE I

THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC THINKING 1

  Our age is growing philosophical again, 3. Change of tone since 1860, 4.

  Empiricism and Rationalism defined, 7. The process of Philosophizing:

  Philosophers choose some part of the world to interpret the whole by, 8.

  They seek to make it seem less strange, 11. Their temperamental

  differences, 12. Their systems must be reasoned out, 13. Their tendency

  to over-technicality, 15. Excess of this in Germany, 17. The type of

  vision is the important thing in a philosopher, 20. Primitive thought,

  21. Spiritualism and Materialism: Spiritualism shows two types, 23.

  Theism and Pantheism, 24. Theism makes a duality of Man and God, and

  leaves Man an outsider, 25. Pantheism identifies Man with God, 29. The

  contemporary tendency is towards Pantheism, 30. Legitimacy of our demand

  to be essential in the Universe, 33. Pluralism versus Monism: The 'each-

  form' and the 'all-form' of representing the world, 34. Professor Jacks

  quoted, 35. Absolute Idealism characterized, 36. Peculiarities of the

  finite consciousness which the Absolute cannot share, 38. The finite

  still remains outside of absolute reality, 40.

LECTURE II

MONISTIC IDEALISM 41

  Recapitulation, 43. Radical Pluralism is to be the thesis of these

  lectures, 44. Most philosophers contemn it, 45. Foreignness to us of

  Bradley's Absolute, 46. Spinoza and 'quatenus,'47. Difficulty of

  sympathizing with the Absolute, 48. Idealistic attempt to interpret it,

  50. Professor Jones quoted, 52. Absolutist refutations of Pluralism, 54.

  Criticism of Lotze's proof of Monism by the analysis of what interaction

  involves, 55. Vicious intellectualism defined, 60. Royce's alternative:

  either the complete disunion or the absolute union of things, 61.

  Bradley's dialectic difficulties with relations, 69. Inefficiency of the

  Absolute as a rationalizing remedy, 71. Tendency of Rationalists to fly

  to extremes, 74. The question of 'external' relations, 79. Transition to

  Hegel, 91.

LECTURE III

HEGEL AND HIS METHOD 83

  Hegel's influence. 85. The type of his vision is impressionistic, 87.

  The 'dialectic' element in reality, 88. Pluralism involves possible

  conflicts among things, 90. Hegel explains conflicts by the mutual

  contradictoriness of concepts, 91. Criticism of his attempt to transcend

  ordinary logic, 92. Examples of the 'dialectic' constitution of things,

  95. The rationalistic ideal: propositions self-securing by means of

  double negation, 101. Sublimity of the conception, 104. Criticism of

  Hegel's account: it involves vicious intellectualism, 105. Hegel is a

  seer rather than a reasoner, 107. 'The Absolute' and 'God' are two

  different notions, 110. Utility of the Absolute in conferring mental

  peace, 114. But this is counterbalanced by the peculiar paradoxes which

  it introduces into philosophy, 116. Leibnitz and Lotze on the 'fall'

  involved in the creation of the finite, 119. Joachim on the fall of

  truth into error, 121. The world of the absolutist cannot be perfect,

  123. Pluralistic conclusions, 125.

LECTURE IV

CONCERNING FECHNER 131

  Superhuman consciousness does not necessarily imply an absolute

  mind, 134. Thinness of contemporary absolutism, 135. The

  tone of Fechner's empiricist pantheism contrasted with that of the

  rationalistic sort, 144. Fechner's life, 145. His vision, the 'daylight

  view,' 150. His way of reasoning by analogy, 151. The whole universe

  animated, 152. His monistic formula is unessential, 153. The

  Earth-Soul, 156. Its differences from our souls, 160. The earth as

  an angel, 164. The Plant-Soul, 165. The logic used by Fechner,

  168. His theory of immortality, 170. The 'thickness' of his imagination,

  173. Inferiority of the ordinary transcendentalist pantheism,

  to his vision, 174.

LECTURE V

THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS 179

  The assumption that states of mind may compound themselves, 181. This

  assumption is held in common by naturalistic psychology, by

  transcendental idealism, and by Fechner, 184. Criticism of it by the

  present writer in a former book, 188. Physical combinations, so-called,

  cannot be invoked as analogous, 194. Nevertheless, combination must be

  postulated among the parts of the Universe, 197. The logical objections

  to admitting it, 198. Rationalistic treatment of the question brings us

  to an _impasse_, 208. A radical breach with intellectualism is required,

  212. Transition to Bergson's philosophy, 214. Abusive use of concepts,

  219.

LECTURE VI

BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM 223

  Professor Bergson's personality, 225. Achilles and the tortoise, 228.

  Not a sophism, 229. We make motion unintelligible when we treat it by

  static concepts, 233. Conceptual treatment is nevertheless of immense

  practical use, 235. The traditional rationalism gives an essentially

  static universe, 237. Intolerableness of the intellectualist view, 240.

  No rationalist account is possible of action, change, or immediate life,

  244. The function of concepts is practical rather than theoretical, 247.

  Bergson remands us to intuition or sensational experience for the

  understanding of how life makes itself go, 252. What Bergson means by

  this, 255. Manyness in oneness must be admitted, 256. What really exists

  is not things made, but things in the making, 263. Bergson's

  originality, 264. Impotence of intellectualist logic to define a

  universe where change is continuous, 267. Livingly, things _are_ their

  own others, so that there is a sense in which Hegel's logic is true,

  270.

LECTURE VII

THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE 275

  Green's critique of Sensationalism, 278. Relations are as immediately

  felt as terms are, 280. The union of things is given in the immediate

  flux, not in any conceptual reason that overcomes the flux's aboriginal

  incoherence, 282. The minima of experience as vehicles of continuity,

  284. Fallacy of the objections to self-compounding, 286. The concrete

  units of experience are 'their own others,' 287. Reality is confluent

  from next to next, 290. Intellectualism must be sincerely renounced,

  291. The Absolute is only an hypothesis, 292. Fechner's God is not the

  Absolute, 298. The Absolute solves no intellectualist difficulty, 296.

  Does superhuman consciousness probably exist? 298.

LECTURE VIII

CONCLUSIONS 301

  Specifically religious experiences occur, 303. Their nature, 304.

  They corroborate the notion of a larger life of which we are a part,

  308. This life must be finite if we are to escape the paradoxes of

  monism, 310. God as a finite being, 311. Empiricism is a better

  ally than rationalism, of religion, 313. Empirical proofs of larger

  mind may open the door to superstitions, 315. But this objection

  should not be deemed fatal, 316. Our beliefs form parts of reality,

  317. In pluralistic empiricism our relation to God remains least

  foreign, 318. The word 'rationality' had better be replaced by the

  word 'intimacy,' 319. Monism and pluralism distinguished and

  defined, 321. Pluralism involves indeterminism, 324. All men use

  the 'faith-ladder' in reaching their decision, 328. Conclusion, 330.

NOTES 333

APPENDICES

  A. THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS 847

  B. THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY 870

  C. ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING 895

INDEX 401

LECTURE I

THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC THINKING

As these lectures are meant to be public, and so few, I have assumed

all very special problems to be excluded, and some topic of general

interest required. Fortunately, our age seems to be growing

philosophical again--still in the ashes live the wonted fires. Oxford,

long the seed-bed, for the english world, of the idealism inspired by

Kant and Hegel, has recently become the nursery of a very different

way of thinking. Even non-philosophers have begun to take an interest

in a controversy over what is known as pluralism or humanism. It

looks a little as if the ancient english empirism, so long put out of

fashion here by nobler sounding germanic formulas, might be repluming

itself and getting ready for a stronger flight than ever. It looks as

if foundations were being sounded and examined afresh.

Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying

every one we meet under some general head. As these heads usually

suggest prejudicial associations to some hearer or other, the life

of philosophy largely consists of resentments at the classing, and

complaints of being misunderstood. But there are signs of clearing up,

and, on the whole, less acrimony in discussion, for which both Oxford

and Harvard are partly to be thanked. As I look back into the sixties,

Mill, Bain, and Hamilton were the only official philosophers in

Britain. Spencer, Martineau, and Hodgson were just beginning. In

France, the pupils of Cousin were delving into history only, and

Renouvier alone had an original system. In Germany, the hegelian

impetus had spent itself, and, apart from historical scholarship,

nothing but the materialistic controversy remained, with such men as

Büchner and Ulrici as its champions. Lotze and Fechner were the sole

original thinkers, and Fechner was not a professional philosopher at

all.

The general impression made was of crude issues and oppositions, of

small subtlety and of a widely spread ignorance. Amateurishness was

rampant. Samuel Bailey's 'letters on the philosophy of the human

mind,' published in 1855, are one of the ablest expressions of english

associationism, and a book of real power. Yet hear how he writes of

Kant: 'No one, after reading the extracts, etc., can be surprised to

hear of a declaration by men of eminent abilities, that, after years

of study, they had not succeeded in gathering one clear idea from the

speculations of Kant. I should have been almost surprised if they had.

In or about 1818, Lord Grenville, when visiting the Lakes of England,

observed to Professor Wilson that, after five years' study of Kant's

philosophy, he had not gathered from it one clear idea. Wilberforce,

about the same time, made the same confession to another friend of

my own. "I am endeavoring," exclaims Sir James Mackintosh, in the

irritation, evidently, of baffled efforts, "to understand this

accursed german philosophy."[1]

What Oxford thinker would dare to print such _naïf_ and

provincial-sounding citations of authority to-day?

The torch of learning passes from land to land as the spirit bloweth

the flame. The deepening of philosophic consciousness came to us

english folk from Germany, as it will probably pass back ere long.

Ferrier, J.H. Stirling, and, most of all, T.H. Green are to be

thanked. If asked to tell in broad strokes what the main doctrinal

change has been, I should call it a change from the crudity of the

older english thinking, its ultra-simplicity of mind, both when it was

religious and when it was anti-religious, toward a rationalism

derived in the first instance from Germany, but relieved from german

technicality and shrillness, and content to suggest, and to remain

vague, and to be, in, the english fashion, devout.

By the time T.H. Green began at Oxford, the generation seemed to

feel as if it had fed on the chopped straw of psychology and of

associationism long enough, and as if a little vastness, even though

it went with vagueness, as of some moist wind from far away, reminding

us of our pre-natal sublimity, would be welcome.

Green's great point of attack was the disconnectedness of the reigning

english sensationalism. _Relating_ was the great intellectual activity

for him, and the key to this relating was believed by him to

lodge itself at last in what most of you know as Kant's unity of

apperception, transformed into a living spirit of the world.

Hence a monism of a devout kind. In some way we must be fallen angels,

one with intelligence as such; and a great disdain for empiricism

of the sensationalist sort has always characterized this school of

thought, which, on the whole, has reigned supreme at Oxford and in the

Scottish universities until the present day.

But now there are signs of its giving way to a wave of revised

empiricism. I confess that I should be glad to see this latest wave

prevail; so--the sooner I am frank about it the better--I hope to

have my voice counted in its favor as one of the results of this

lecture-course.

What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to their

most pregnant difference, _empiricism means the habit of explaining

wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts

by wholes_. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since

wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic

views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a

picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of

the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that

the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the

whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of

which we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of

conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested

originally by the parts. All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived

of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it

which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists

take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one

man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a

thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically

be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented

without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.

Another man, struck by the disconnectedness and mutual accidentality

of so many of the world's details, takes the universe as a whole to

have been such a disconnectedness originally, and supposes order to

have been superinduced upon it in the second instance, possibly

by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of

portions that originally interfered.

Another will conceive the order as only a statistical appearance, and

the universe will be for him like a vast grab-bag with black and white

balls in it, of which we guess the quantities only probably, by the

frequency with which we experience their egress.

For another, again, there is no really inherent order, but it is we

who project order into the world by selecting objects and tracing

relations so as to gratify our intellectual interests. We _carve out_

order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived

thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which

parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or

chips of stone.

Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life, and treat the

universe as if it were essentially a place in which ideals are

realized. Others are more struck by its lower features, and for them,

brute necessities express its character better.

All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogies are with some

one or other of the universe's subdivisions. Every one is nevertheless

prone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical ones, that

they are necessities of universal reason, they being all the while, at

bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had far better

be avowed as such; for one man's vision may be much more valuable than

another's, and our visions are usually not only our most interesting

but our most respectable contributions to the world in which we play

our part. What was reason given to men for, said some eighteenth

century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what they

want to think and do?--and I think the history of philosophy largely

bears him out, 'The aim of knowledge,' says Hegel,[2] 'is to divest

the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at home

in it.' Different men find their minds more at home in very different

fragments of the world.

Let me make a few comments, here, on the curious antipathies which

these partialities arouse. They are sovereignly unjust, for all the

parties are human beings with the same essential interests, and no one

of them is the wholly perverse demon which another often imagines him

to be. Both are loyal to the world that bears them; neither wishes to

spoil it; neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence; both

want to keep it as a universe of some kind; and their differences are

all secondary to this deep agreement. They may be only propensities to

emphasize differently. Or one man may care for finality and security

more than the other. Or their tastes in language may be different.

One may like a universe that lends itself to lofty and exalted

characterization. To another this may seem sentimental or rhetorical.

One may wish for the right to use a clerical vocabulary, another a

technical or professorial one. A certain old farmer of my acquaintance

in America was called a rascal by one of his neighbors. He immediately

smote the man, saying,'I won't stand none of your diminutive

epithets.' Empiricist minds, putting the parts before the whole,

appear to rationalists, who start from the whole, and consequently

enjoy magniloquent privileges, to use epithets offensively diminutive.

But all such differences are minor matters which ought to be

subordinated in view of the fact that, whether we be empiricists or

rationalists, we are, ourselves, parts of the universe and share the

same one deep concern in its destinies. We crave alike to feel more

truly at home with it, and to contribute our mite to its amelioration.

It would be pitiful if small aesthetic discords were to keep honest

men asunder.

I shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism. But

if you look behind the words at the spirit, I am sure you will not

find it matricidal. I am as good a son as any rationalist among you to

our common mother. What troubles me more than this misapprehension is

the genuine abstruseness of many of the matters I shall be obliged

to talk about, and the difficulty of making them intelligible at one

hearing. But there two pieces, 'zwei stücke,' as Kant would have said,

in every philosophy--the final outlook, belief, or attitude to which

it brings us, and the reasonings by which that attitude is reached and

mediated. A philosophy, as James Ferrier used to tell us, must indeed

be true, but that is the least of its requirements. One may be true

without being a philosopher, true by guesswork or by revelation.

What distinguishes a philosopher's truth is that it is _reasoned_.

Argument, not supposition, must have put it in his possession. Common

men find themselves inheriting their beliefs, they know not how. They

jump into them with both feet, and stand there. Philosophers must

do more; they must first get reason's license for them; and to the

professional philosophic mind the operation of procuring the license

is usually a thing of much more pith and moment than any particular

beliefs to which the license may give the rights of access. Suppose,

for example, that a philosopher believes in what is called free-will.

That a common man alongside of him should also share that belief,

possessing it by a sort of inborn intuition, does not endear the man

to the philosopher at all--he may even be ashamed to be associated

with such a man. What interests the philosopher is the particular

premises on which the free-will he believes in is established, the

sense in which it is taken, the objections it eludes, the difficulties

it takes account of, in short the whole form and temper and manner

and technical apparatus that goes with the belief in question.

A philosopher across the way who should use the same technical

apparatus, making the same distinctions, etc., but drawing opposite

conclusions and denying free-will entirely, would fascinate the first

philosopher far more than would the _naïf_ co-believer. Their common

technical interests would unite them more than their opposite

conclusions separate them. Each would feel an essential consanguinity

in the other, would think of him, write _at_ him, care for his good

opinion. The simple-minded believer in free-will would be disregarded

by either. Neither as ally nor as opponent would his vote be counted.

In a measure this is doubtless as it should be, but like all

professionalism it can go to abusive extremes. The end is after all

more than the way, in most things human, and forms and methods may

easily frustrate their own purpose. The abuse of technicality is

seen in the infrequency with which, in philosophical literature,

metaphysical questions are discussed directly and on their own merits.

Almost always they are handled as if through a heavy woolen curtain,

the veil of previous philosophers' opinions. Alternatives are wrapped

in proper names, as if it were indecent for a truth to go naked. The

late Professor John Grote of Cambridge has some good remarks about

this. 'Thought,' he says,'is not a professional matter, not something

for so-called philosophers only or for professed thinkers. The best

philosopher is the man who can think most _simply_. ... I wish that

people would consider that thought--and philosophy is no more than

good and methodical thought--is a matter _intimate_ to them, a portion

of their real selves ... that they would _value_ what they think, and

be interested in it.... In my own opinion,' he goes on, 'there is

something depressing in this weight of learning, with nothing that can

come into one's mind but one is told, Oh, that is the opinion of such

and such a person long ago. ... I can conceive of nothing more noxious

for students than to get into the habit of saying to themselves about

their ordinary philosophic thought, Oh, somebody must have thought it

all before.'[3] Yet this is the habit most encouraged at our seats of

learning. You must tie your opinion to Aristotle's or Spinoza's; you

must define it by its distance from Kant's; you must refute your

rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does all

spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed.

Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequent

dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is

appalling. It comes from too much following of german models and

manners. Let me fervently express the hope that in this country you

will hark back to the more humane english tradition. American students

have to regain direct relations with our subject by painful individual

effort in later life. Some of us have done so. Some of the younger

ones, I fear, never will, so strong are the professional shop-habits

already.

In a subject like philosophy it is really fatal to lose connexion with

the open air of human nature, and to think in terms of shop-tradition

only. In Germany the forms are so professionalized that anybody who

has gained a teaching chair and written a book, however distorted and

eccentric, has the legal right to figure forever in the history of the

subject like a fly in amber. All later comers have the duty of quoting

him and measuring their opinions with his opinion. Such are the rules

of the professorial game--they think and write from each other and for

each other and at each other exclusively. With this exclusion of the

open air all true perspective gets lost, extremes and oddities count

as much as sanities, and command the same attention; and if by chance

any one writes popularly and about results only, with his mind

directly focussed on the subject, it is reckoned _oberflächliches

zeug_ and _ganz unwissenschaftlich_. Professor Paulsen has recently

written some feeling lines about this over-professionalism, from

the reign of which in Germany his own writings, which sin by being

'literary,' have suffered loss of credit. Philosophy, he says, has

long assumed in Germany the character of being an esoteric and

occult science. There is a genuine fear of popularity. Simplicity of

statement is deemed synonymous with hollowness and shallowness. He

recalls an old professor saying to him once: 'Yes, we philosophers,

whenever we wish, can go so far that in a couple of sentences we can

put ourselves where nobody can follow us.' The professor said this

with conscious pride, but he ought to have been ashamed of it. Great

as technique is, results are greater. To teach philosophy so that the

pupils' interest in technique exceeds that in results is surely a

vicious aberration. It is bad form, not good form, in a discipline

of such universal human interest. Moreover, technique for technique,

doesn't David Hume's technique set, after all, the kind of pattern

most difficult to follow? Isn't it the most admirable? The english

mind, thank heaven, and the french mind, are still kept, by their

aversion to crude technique and barbarism, closer to truth's natural

probabilities. Their literatures show fewer obvious falsities and

monstrosities than that of Germany. Think of the german literature of

aesthetics, with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic personage

as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre! Think of german books on

_religions-philosophie_, with the heart's battles translated into

conceptual jargon and made dialectic. The most persistent setter of

questions, feeler of objections, insister on satisfactions, is the

religious life. Yet all its troubles can be treated with absurdly

little technicality. The wonder is that, with their way of working

philosophy, individual Germans should preserve any spontaneity of

mind at all. That they still manifest freshness and originality in so

eminent a degree, proves the indestructible richness of the german

cerebral endowment.

Let me repeat once more that a man's vision is the great fact about

him. Who cares for Carlyle's reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or Spencer's?

A philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character, and all

definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions

of human characters upon it. In the recent book from which I quoted

the words of Professor Paulsen, a book of successive chapters by

various living german philosophers,[4] we pass from one idiosyncratic

personal atmosphere into another almost as if we were turning over a

photograph album.

If we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce

themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage

in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so

many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole

drift of life, forced on one by one's total character and experience,

and on the whole _preferred_--there is no other truthful word--as

one's best working attitude. Cynical characters take one general

attitude, sympathetic characters another. But no general attitude

is possible towards the world as a whole, until the intellect has

developed considerable generalizing power and learned to take pleasure

in synthetic formulas. The thought of very primitive men has hardly

any tincture of philosophy. Nature can have little unity for savages.

It is a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a checkered play of light and

shadow, a medley of impish and elfish friendly and inimical

powers. 'Close to nature' though they live, they are anything but

Wordsworthians. If a bit of cosmic emotion ever thrills them, it is

likely to be at midnight, when the camp smoke rises straight to the

wicked full moon in the zenith, and the forest is all whispering with

witchery and danger. The eeriness of the world, the mischief and the

manyness, the littleness of the forces, the magical surprises, the

unaccountability of every agent, these surely are the characters most

impressive at that stage of culture, these communicate the thrills

of curiosity and the earliest intellectual stirrings. Tempests and

conflagrations, pestilences and earthquakes, reveal supramundane

powers, and instigate religious terror rather than philosophy. Nature,

more demonic than divine, is above all things _multifarious_. So many

creatures that feed or threaten, that help or crush, so many beings

to hate or love, to understand or start at--which is on top and which

subordinate? Who can tell? They are co-ordinate, rather, and to adapt

ourselves to them singly, to 'square' the dangerous powers and keep

the others friendly, regardless of consistency or unity, is the chief

problem. The symbol of nature at this stage, as Paulsen well says,

is the sphinx, under whose nourishing breasts the tearing claws are

visible.

But in due course of time the intellect awoke, with its passion for

generalizing, simplifying, and subordinating, and then began those

divergences of conception which all later experience seems rather

to have deepened than to have effaced, because objective nature has

contributed to both sides impartially, and has let the thinkers

emphasize different parts of her, and pile up opposite imaginary

supplements.

Perhaps the most interesting opposition is that which results from the

clash between what I lately called the sympathetic and the cynical

temper. Materialistic and spiritualistic philosophies are the rival

types that result: the former defining the world so as to leave man's

soul upon it as a soil of outside passenger or alien, while the latter

insists that the intimate and human must surround and underlie the

brutal. This latter is the spiritual way of thinking.

Now there are two very distinct types or stages in spiritualistic

philosophy, and my next purpose in this lecture is to make their

contrast evident. Both types attain the sought-for intimacy of view,

but the one attains it somewhat less successfully than the other.

The generic term spiritualism, which I began by using merely as the

opposite of materialism, thus subdivides into two species, the more

intimate one of which is monistic and the less intimate dualistic. The

dualistic species is the _theism_ that reached its elaboration in the

scholastic philosophy, while the monistic species is the _pantheism_

spoken of sometimes simply as idealism, and sometimes as

'post-kantian' or 'absolute' idealism. Dualistic theism is professed

as firmly as ever at all catholic seats of learning, whereas it has

of late years tended to disappear at our british and american

universities, and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less

open or disguised. I have an impression that ever since T.H. Green's

time absolute idealism has been decidedly in the ascendent at Oxford.

It is in the ascendent at my own university of Harvard.

Absolute idealism attains, I said, to the more intimate point of view;

but the statement needs some explanation. So far as theism represents

the world as God's world, and God as what Matthew Arnold called a

magnified non-natural man, it would seem as if the inner quality of

the world remained human, and as if our relations with it might be

intimate enough--for what is best in ourselves appears then also

outside of ourselves, and we and the universe are of the same

spiritual species. So far, so good, then; and one might consequently

ask, What more of intimacy do you require? To which the answer is

that to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be

substantially fused into it, to form one continuous soul and body with

it; and that pantheistic idealism, making us entitatively one with

God, attains this higher reach of intimacy.

The theistic conception, picturing God and his creation as entities

distinct from each other, still leaves the human subject outside of

the deepest reality in the universe. God is from eternity complete, it

says, and sufficient unto himself; he throws off the world by a free

act and as an extraneous substance, and he throws off man as a third

substance, extraneous to both the world and himself. Between them, God

says 'one,' the world says 'two,' and man says 'three,'--that is the

orthodox theistic view. And orthodox theism has been so jealous of

God's glory that it has taken pains to exaggerate everything in the

notion of him that could make for isolation and separateness. Page

upon page in scholastic books go to prove that God is in no sense

implicated by his creative act, or involved in his creation. That his

relation to the creatures he has made should make any difference to

him, carry any consequence, or qualify his being, is repudiated as a

pantheistic slur upon his self-sufficingness. I said a moment ago that

theism treats us and God as of the same species, but from the orthodox

point of view that was a slip of language. God and his creatures

are _toto genere_ distinct in the scholastic theology, they have

absolutely _nothing_ in common; nay, it degrades God to attribute to

him any generic nature whatever; he can be classed with nothing. There

is a sense, then, in which philosophic theism makes us outsiders and

keeps us foreigners in relation to God, in which, at any rate, his

connexion with us appears as unilateral and not reciprocal. His action

can affect us, but he can never be affected by our reaction. Our

relation, in short, is not a strictly social relation. Of course in

common men's religion the relation is believed to be social, but that

is only one of the many differences between religion and theology.

This essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts of

collateral consequences. Man being an outsider and a mere subject to

God, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades the

field. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but our

magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however

strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of

criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our

relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the

same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist

thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in

scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established

without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the most we

can do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho such

adhesion as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to.

The situation here again is radically dualistic. It is not as if the

world came to know itself, or God came to know himself, partly through

us, as pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists _per

se_ and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of us

knows it or is ignorant, and it would continue to exist unaltered,

even though we finite knowers were all annihilated.

It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has

always operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox

theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the

various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences

of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic

superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God

as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some

people a more worthy conception than God as external creator. So

conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he made

it less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an

external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. I

have been told by Hindoos that the great obstacle to the spread

of Christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogma

of creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the

requirements of even the illiterate natives of India.

Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with

Hinduism in this matter. Those of us who are sexagenarians have

witnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations of

intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the

thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if

it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological

machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age

of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and

eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of

God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,'

sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage

religion. The vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has opened,

and the rising tide of social democratic ideals, have changed the type

of our imagination, and the older monarchical theism is obsolete or

obsolescent. The place of the divine in the world must be more organic

and intimate. An external creator and his institutions may still be

verbally confessed at Church in formulas that linger by their mere

inertia, but the life is out of them, we avoid dwelling on them, the

sincere heart of us is elsewhere. I shall leave cynical materialism

entirely out of our discussion as not calling for treatment before

this present audience, and I shall ignore old-fashioned dualistic

theism for the same reason. Our contemporary mind having once for all

grasped the possibility of a more intimate _Weltanschauung_, the only

opinions quite worthy of arresting our attention will fall within the

general scope of what may roughly be called the pantheistic field of

vision, the vision of God as the indwelling divine rather than the

external creator, and of human life as part and parcel of that deep

reality.

As we have found that spiritualism in general breaks into a more

intimate and a less intimate species, so the more intimate species

itself breaks into two subspecies, of which the one is more monistic,

the other more pluralistic in form. I say in form, for our vocabulary

gets unmanageable if we don't distinguish between form and substance

here. The inner life of things must be substantially akin anyhow to

the tenderer parts of man's nature in any spiritualistic philosophy.

The word 'intimacy' probably covers the essential difference.

Materialism holds the foreign in things to be more primary and

lasting, it sends us to a lonely corner with our intimacy. The brutal

aspects overlap and outwear; refinement has the feebler and more

ephemeral hold on reality.

From a pragmatic point of view the difference between living against

a background of foreignness and one of intimacy means the difference

between a general habit of wariness and one of trust. One might call

it a social difference, for after all, the common _socius_ of us all

is the great universe whose children we are. If materialistic, we

must be suspicious of this socius, cautious, tense, on guard. If

spiritualistic, we may give way, embrace, and keep no ultimate fear.

The contrast is rough enough, and can be cut across by all sorts

of other divisions, drawn from other points of view than that of

foreignness and intimacy. We have so many different businesses with

nature that no one of them yields us an all-embracing clasp. The

philosophic attempt to define nature so that no one's business is left

out, so that no one lies outside the door saying 'Where do _I_ come

in?' is sure in advance to fail. The most a philosophy can hope for is

not to lock out any interest forever. No matter what doors it closes,

it must leave other doors open for the interests which it neglects.

I have begun by shutting ourselves up to intimacy and foreignness

because that makes so generally interesting a contrast, and because it

will conveniently introduce a farther contrast to which I wish this

hour to lead.

The majority of men are sympathetic. Comparatively few are cynics

because they like cynicism, and most of our existing materialists are

such because they think the evidence of facts impels them, or because

they find the idealists they are in contact with too private and

tender-minded; so, rather than join their company, they fly to the

opposite extreme. I therefore propose to you to disregard materialists

altogether for the present, and to consider the sympathetic party

alone.

It is normal, I say, to be sympathetic in the sense in which I use the

term. Not to demand intimate relations with the universe, and not to

wish them satisfactory, should be accounted signs of something wrong.

Accordingly when minds of this type reach the philosophic level, and

seek some unification of their vision, they find themselves compelled

to correct that aboriginal appearance of things by which savages are

not troubled. That sphinx-like presence, with its breasts and claws,

that first bald multifariousness, is too discrepant an object for

philosophic contemplation. The intimacy and the foreignness cannot be

written down as simply coexisting. An order must be made; and in that

order the higher side of things must dominate. The philosophy of the

absolute agrees with the pluralistic philosophy which I am going

to contrast with it in these lectures, in that both identify human

substance with the divine substance. But whereas absolutism thinks

that the said substance becomes fully divine only in the form of

totality, and is not its real self in any form but the _all_-form, the

pluralistic view which I prefer to adopt is willing to believe that

there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance

of reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may

remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and that

a distributive form of reality, the _each_-form, is logically as

acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonly

acquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing. The contrast

between these two forms of a reality which we will agree to suppose

substantially spiritual is practically the topic of this course of

lectures. You see now what I mean by pantheism's two subspecies. If

we give to the monistic subspecies the name of philosophy of the

absolute, we may give that of radical empiricism to its pluralistic

rival, and it may be well to distinguish them occasionally later by

these names.

As a convenient way of entering into the study of their differences,

I may refer to a recent article by Professor Jacks of Manchester

College. Professor Jacks, in some brilliant pages in the 'Hibbert

Journal' for last October, studies the relation between the universe

and the philosopher who describes and defines it for us. You may

assume two cases, he says. Either what the philosopher tells us is

extraneous to the universe he is accounting for, an indifferent

parasitic outgrowth, so to speak; or the fact of his philosophizing

is itself one of the things taken account of in the philosophy, and

self-included in the description. In the former case the philosopher

means by the universe everything _except_ what his own presence

brings; in the latter case his philosophy is itself an intimate

part of the universe, and may be a part momentous enough to give a

different turn to what the other parts signify. It may be a

supreme reaction of the universe upon itself by which it rises to

self-comprehension. It may handle itself differently in consequence of

this event.

Now both empiricism and absolutism bring the philosopher inside

and make man intimate, but the one being pluralistic and the other

monistic, they do so in differing ways that need much explanation. Let

me then contrast the one with the other way of representing the status

of the human thinker.

For monism the world is no collection, but one great all-inclusive

fact outside of which is nothing--nothing is its only alternative.

When the monism is idealistic, this all-enveloping fact is represented

as an absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking them,