CHAPTER III
PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON WORTH, AND ON THE REASONS WHY THE METHOD EMPLOYED BY ETHICS MUST BE THE OPPOSITE OF THAT EMPLOYED BY THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES
The moral equality of men is a corollary of the attribution of worth to all men. Did we not ascribe worth to them, there is no reason why we should not make servile use of them. But there are admittedly formidable difficulties in the way of attributing worth to human nature.
The first and most obvious of these is the existence of repulsive traits in human beings, such as sly cunning, deceit, falsehood, grossness, cruelty: homo homini lupus! Secondly, there is the prevalent error of employing ethical terms, like good and bad, to denote the merely attractive and repellent traits.[23] Attractive traits, such as gentleness, sweetness, kindness, a sympathetic disposition, are, in those fortunate enough to possess them, pleasing accidents of nature. We delight in them, but have no reason to ascribe the superlative quality of worth to those who possess them. If the evil that men do revolts us, the so-called good in them does not give us the right to surround their heads with the nimbus of worth. Thirdly, and perhaps even more deterrent than the ever-present spectacle of evil and the inadequacy of so-called goodness, is the commonplaceness, the cheapness of men.
It must be admitted that, with rare exceptions, our estimates of others are apt to be low rather than lofty. Can we ascribe worth to those whom we hold cheap? The reason of our habitual under-estimation of fellowmen I think is that we regard them from the standpoint of the use to which we can put them, and do not see them from the inside, as it were, in the light of the marvelous energies of which human nature is the scene. The grossest matter, the most ordinary physical happenings, reveal to the instructed eye of the scientist the play of forces which it taxes the most powerful intellects in some measure to apprehend and describe. Yet these miracles escape the dull senses of those of us who deal with the forces of nature from the point of view of their immediate use. We turn on the electric light, but have little more than a crude surmise of the things that the word electricity meant to Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, or Hertz. And as we turn on the electric light, so we turn on our fellowmen, as it were, to use them. The thought of the poet—“What a piece of work is man, how infinite in faculty!” occurs to us only at scattered moments. And yet things transpire in the inner life of human beings far more marvelous than the chemical processes or the flux of electric waves, did we but attend to them. There is in particular one kind of energy to which the quality of worth may well attach itself. It is unlike the physical forces; it is not a transformed mode of mechanical energy. It is sui generis, underivative, unique; it is synonymous with highest freedom; it is power raised to the Nth degree. It is ethical energy. To release it in oneself is to achieve unbounded expansion. Morality, as commonly understood, is a system of rules, chiefly repressive. Ethical energy, on the contrary, is determined by the very opposite tendency; a tendency, it is true, never more than tentatively effectuated under finite conditions. And because the energy is unique, it points toward a unique, irreducible, hence substantive entity in man, from which it springs. This entity is itself incognizable, yet the effect it produces requires that it be postulated. The category of substance, which is almost disappearing from science, is to be reinstalled in ethics. Ethics cannot dispense with it. This, as a prelude, may suffice to indicate the path along which we shall proceed.
The Reason Why the Method of Ethics Must Be the Opposite of the Method Employed by the Physical Sciences
Physical science begins from the bottom and builds upwards. It analyzes phenomena into their elements, and thereupon seeks to combine these elements into structures that shall correspond to experience. In this business it never comes to a finish. Its analysis of the elements is provisional. Every element is hypothetical. Indeed it is plain in the nature of the case that no element can be ultimate. An element is a unit, and every empirical unit necessarily conceals in its bosom a plexus of which it is the unification. The very idea of unit requires for its complement a manifold of some kind. In hypothetical units, or ideal constructs that have for their purpose to lead to the discovery and arrangement of real phenomena, science abounds. Atoms, electrons, energy conceived as a substance by Ostwald, Spencer’s physiological units, are examples.
The results achieved by science are never more than approximations in the sense that the units, the bricks with which the house is built, are liable to be rejected, and the constructions achieved are subject to revision.
The point however which I wish to emphasize is that the scientist is satisfied of the truth, the reality of its partial results. Newton, for instance, in formulating the law of gravitation has, so to speak, marked off a strip of reality. The ground covered cannot be lost; when some natural law is enunciated, the proper conditions for its discovery and verification having been observed, a sure footing in reality has been gained, science standing to this extent on terra firma, though beyond the domain within which the law applies the phenomena may be heaving and billowing like the sea.
Now the question I am intent upon is, Why is it possible for science to be content with partial acquisition? Why does it profess to know positively a part without knowing the whole? And why can ethics not take a step without an ideal of the whole?
Kant’s chief purpose in the Critique of Pure Reason was to vindicate the certainty of the physical knowledge of a part as being compatible with total ignorance of the whole. The older metaphysics was engaged in the attempt to supply the whole, to sketch it out in order to give certainty to the part that is within the reach of science. The older metaphysics said to science: You have in hand the conditioned, but remember the conditioned depends on the unconditioned. Unless, therefore, you round out what you possess, with the help of the unconditioned, the certainty you seem to have within the field of the conditioned disappears. Again, science traces causes, and the older metaphysicians insisted that the whole chain of causes hangs in air unless it be attached to a first cause. Now Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason really amounts in nuce to this: you do not require the whole in order to explain the part. Link the partial phenomena together in a certain way, a way dependent on the joint action of the space and time intuitions and the categories, and you will gain the desired certainty. The certainty is in the linkage. We may add link to link of the chain of reality without troubling to consider by what piers it is supported or on what shore the piers rest—if indeed there be piers and shores at all. The bridge hangs over the River of Time and we can safely travel on it. How we get on to this bridge we do not know, and where we shall leave it we cannot know either.
It is a mistake to speak of Kant as a rationalist pure and simple. When he expelled the older metaphysics he antagonized pure rationalism. The older metaphysics held that the mere existence of the conditioned proves the existence of the unconditioned, requires the unconditioned. In Kant’s answer to this lies the gist of his enterprise in philosophy: You are quite right, he says, that the idea of the conditioned requires the idea of the unconditioned, logically, rationally. But observe well, nature is not just logical or rational. There is an irrational element in it, namely, extended manifold and temporal sequence. Juxtaposition and sequence are irrational, because, if I interpret him rightly, in the case of each the relation presented to the mind is that of parts outside each other—in the one case alongside, in the other before and after; while in the logical or rational relation the parts are implicit in the whole as in the case of the premises of a syllogism and the conclusion, the relation of a genus to the species, the universal to the particular.
We have in nature, according to Kant, a partnership between the irrational and the rational factors. And thereupon he proceeds to argue that we impose laws on nature, understanding thereby that we get hold of reality or objectivity in so far as we are able to imprint the rational element upon the irrational. The positing of the thing per se, which has proved a stumbling-block to many, is no more than a confession that we shall never succeed entirely in this business of subjecting the irrational to the rational factor. The thing per se is the X that remains over when the rational function has done its utmost. A thing, a real object, is that which is imprinted with, penetrated with, rationality. The manifolds of space and time, of juxtaposition and sequence are incapable of completely receiving this imprint, that is, of completely responding to our quest for reality, and this their incompetency is expressed in the notion of the thing per se.
To return to the main question as to the difference between the method by which science proceeds and the reverse method prescribed to ethics, I ask, Why is absolute knowledge of nature impossible? The answer is, Because absolute knowledge would mean the completely rational construction of nature, and this is prevented by the irrational element existing in it. But why has the relative knowledge we possess the character of certainty? Why are we sure of the law of gravitation? Why are we justified in saying that science within certain limits plants her foot on terra solida? Because at certain points the sense data do coincide with the rational requirements. There are recurrent phenomena of such a kind, coupled together in such a way, that each is capable of mathematical measurement, and that the sequence of the one after the other can therefore be predicted.
Nature might have been arranged quite otherwise. The time spans might have been so long, as to prevent our observing the recurrences. A day-fly cannot observe the periodicity of the earth’s revolution around its axis. The fact however that there is this partial correspondence between human rationality and the unknown nature of things is a bare fact, incapable of explanation.[24] The answer, then, I take it, is: our knowledge of nature is relative, which means incompletely rational, because of the foreign element in nature unamenable to the operation of the rational, the synthetic, function. This relative knowledge is none the less certain, that is, in some sense absolute, because of the partial coincidence of the phenomena of nature and the synthetic processes of the mind.
With this degree of certainty we must perforce content ourselves, in dealing with outside nature. In trying to understand and interpret that which is not ourselves, we hit upon barriers which cannot be transcended, upon a foreign factor which opposes itself to our endeavors. But it is otherwise in the sphere of conduct. Here, if there is to be certainty at all, in regard to right as distinguished from wrong, if there is to be such a thing as right in the strict sense, we cannot content ourselves with the paradoxical, relative-absolute just described. For here we not merely interpret but act, and we must possess an ideal plan of the whole if we are to be certain of our rightness in any particular part of conduct. For in conduct there is no such partial coincidence between the rational and the irrational as in the case of physical law. There is not a single partial rule of conduct, neither “Thou shalt not kill” nor “Thou shalt not lie,” nor any other that, taken by itself, is of itself ethically right. It may be right, it may be wrong. It takes its ethical quality from the plan of conduct as a whole, and without reference to the whole it is devoid of rightness.[25]
I have thus indicated the ground of the distinction between the method of science and the method of ethics, a distinction, it is true, to which Kant himself did not adhere. Partial coincidence of the rational with the irrational is expressed in physical law; absence of such concurrence destroys any attempt to build up an ethical theory on the empirical method. We cannot plant our feet on the part, gaining there the sense of certainty: we must creatively conceive the ideal of the whole and educe every partial mode of ethical conduct from that.
But how shall we proceed in the construction of such an ideal, for it is obvious that knowledge, in the scientific sense of the word, is entirely out of the question?
CHAPTER IV
THE IDEAL OF THE WHOLE
To recapitulate and at the same time to enlarge somewhat the points thus far covered in Book II: Kant proclaims man an end per se. This promises a philosophic basis for an ethical world-view. The promise is not kept. Kant takes as his point of departure absolute obligation, and attempts to deduce out of an empty formula a worthwhile object. Kant’s formula is: Treat man never merely as a means, but also as an end per se. But how far man may be treated as a means, and what the relation of the means to the end may be is left undetermined. An upper crust of morality is formed, as it were, upon the empirical flood of passions, desires, etc. A straight line is drawn beyond which the under world in every man may not emerge. But a truly instrumental view of the means as related to the end is not established. This is one of the great gaps in Kant’s system. Note the almost puerile reason given for culture: we should cultivate our talents weil sie zu allerhand Zwecken nützlich sein mögen.
Kant’s ethical order is a duplicate of the physical order. The notion of law is taken from physics, and expanded into the concept of law in general. Ethical behavior is represented as behavior motivated by the notion of lawfulness. Law is characterized by universality and necessity. Chapter II, however, shows that in physics universality is predicated on the ground of an ascertained necessary connection. In physics, necessity has its true meaning as pertaining to a relation between one thing and another. If the linkage can be established, the universality follows. In Kant’s ethics, on the contrary, necessity is taken as the consequence of the universality and the proper meaning of necessity is lost. Self-consistency takes the place of the relation to something else. The ideal society, as described, would therefore be a society of self-preserving rational intelligences, ethically solipsistic.
Next we began the investigation into the idea of worth. Why do men hold themselves and others cheap? They regard each other from the point of view of the use to be made of others and of their own life, and not from the point of view of the energies deployed. The turning on of electric power was used as an illustration. Nevertheless, even exceptional men, men regarded as illustrating in the highest degree the mental energies implicit in human nature, would not possess the quality of worth, that is, of being ends per se, merely on the score of their scientific or their artistic activities. We cannot say that the world would be less perfect if there were no scientists to discover its laws. There is a supreme, a unique energy and it is to this that the quality of worth belongs.[26]
The ethical quality called worth is the supreme good, and must be accessible to all, even to those to whom the lesser goods are denied. Ethics is a system of thought which stands or falls with the contention that while the better may be within reach only of the exceptional few, the best is within reach of all.
In attempting to approach the task of building up a world-view based on ethical experience, it became unavoidable to consider the method by which the approach might be made, and for this purpose to contrast the methods of science and the methods of ethics. Science, as we have seen, collects its bricks and builds its house by composition. Science analyzes phenomena into units, which it then combines. The mystery is how science can achieve certainty in respect to certain phenomena of nature without previous knowledge of the whole of nature. Kant’s answer is that there is partial congruity between the mental functions and the data that come to us from the unknown. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason faces in two directions. It expels the older metaphysics which assumed that the empirical world is rational throughout, or rationalizable, and which thence argued the existence of the unconditioned as necessarily implied in the existence of the conditioned, and of a first cause as actually implied in the chain of causes and effects. Kant contends that there is an irrational element, namely, bare juxtaposition (part outside part), and bare sequence (part before and after part), while the logical or rational relation implies that the part is to be conceived as implicit in the whole. Juxtaposition and sequence, therefore, can never be completely rationalized. On the other hand, Kant undertakes to prove that whatever of reality we know is traceable to the projection of the rational factor upon the irrational. One might even say that, according to Kant, the mind itself produces the irrational factor, since the intuitions of space and time are according to him, functions of the mind itself—the mind setting up a manifold so constituted as to receive sense impressions. At any rate the capital point to which we were led up was that science puts her foot on terra firma in a restricted area, without reference to what lies beyond, while if we are to proceed in ethics at all, we must begin with some ideal plan of the whole, since in ethics we are not interpreting a foreign nature, but act upon natures similar to our own; and since, in the case of conduct, there is no such partial concurrence of the rational and irrational as in physics, no one of the so-called moral modes of behavior being moral when taken separately. Hence the conclusion that there is no possibility of establishing the conception of worth unless we have some ideal of the whole in which and in relation to which the incomparable worthwhileness of a human being can be made good.
We need hardly again remind ourselves that this conception of worth, or of man as end per se, is not a mere abstraction, and that our interest in it is not academic. Every outcry against the oppression of man by man, or against whatsoever is morally hideous, is but the affirmation of the cardinal principle that a human being as such is not to be violated, is not to be handled like a tool, but is to be respected and revered as an end per se. But what do we mean by end per se, and how account for this notion? Does it come into our mind like a bolt from the blue, or is it revealed as prefigured in the human mind when we follow it into its intimate constitution?
Our knowledge of the world we live in is extremely limited—in its details it is confined to the planet we live on, extending to the myriads of celestial bodies beyond us only by means of scant generalizations. If we have knowledge of only so small a portion, how can we frame an ideal of the whole? At the same time we must remember that the world we actually know, this earth and yonder starry myriads, is in very truth our world, the world as it exists for us, a world which with the help of data coming to us from the unknown, we ourselves have built up on certain constructive principles; and that these principles have been found, within certain limits, availing.[27] I say availing within certain limits. The defeat they meet with beyond those limits is due to the intractable elements of juxtaposition and sequence, of the time and space manifolds, which in themselves are incapable of being completely rationalized.
Now the ideal of the whole is a plan or scheme in which the constructive principles of the mind are conceived as having untrammeled course and unhindered application, and the task of world-building, or rather universe-building, is in idea carried out to completion.
The attempt to present an ideal forecast, or outline of the whole of reality, as it would satisfy a mind constituted like ours, an ideal landscape of this sort, is not at all to be confounded with the arrogation of a priori knowledge. A priori knowledge is supposed to be a kind of knowledge, and knowledge of the whole is utterly and confessedly beyond our reach. The phrase a priori, too, is objectionable and unfortunate for two reasons. First, as just said, because it has been supposed to be a kind of knowledge. By some theologians men were supposed to possess a priori knowledge of God.[28] Secondly, because the word a priori suggests precedence in time, and our knowledge of the human mind and of its irreducible capacities comes out only in the course of experience. Much that has been called a priori, that is implicit in experience, did not become explicit until after prolonged experience. The Greek thinkers before Aristotle doubtless thought in terms of syllogism, but it was not until Greek science had attained a certain ripeness that Aristotle was able to dissect out the logic which had previously been employed more or less unconsciously.
Instead, therefore, of using the term a priori, which gives rise to the two-fold misapprehension of an a priori knowledge and of temporal precedence, and instead of throwing out the child with the bath, that is, of ignoring the independent part played by our mental constitution in building up experience, and in affording us the conviction of certainty, and of reality, it is highly desirable that a new term be found to take the place of a priori. The term “functional finality” suggests itself to me for this purpose.[29]
My field is ethics. I am entirely desirous of sticking to my own last, that is, dealing with such concepts as the data of my subject force upon me. I do not wish to trespass, or to seem to trespass, on the domain of my neighbors. Hence in dealing with functional finalities I must deal with them primarily as they appear in the field of ethics, that is, in the domain of the actions and reactions of human beings upon one another. Irreducible principia of ethics are the functional finalities, which prescribe rules for such intercourse, or better which create a scheme of ideal intercourse whereby the conduct of men shall be measured and determined.
I must, however, glance for a moment at fields outside my own, for the purpose not of controversy but of elucidation; not to deal with the subject matter of my neighbors, but to mark off my own more definitely. What then, I ask, is the most general expression by which to designate the singularities of the human mind, the principles on which it acts, its immutable modes of behavior, the invariants that recur amid all the complex varieties of its processes? The principal invariants are the positing of a manifold of some kind, and the apprehending of that manifold as coherent. The manifold is not given, but is posited by the mind. The positing is a mental function, just as much as the apprehending of the plurality as coherent is a mental function. The particular manifolds of space and time experience are said to be given, but they would not be received by the mind were not the function of manifold-positing prepared to apprehend them.
In recent physical science the notion of the manifold plays a conspicuous rôle. Subtle speculations are employed to define the kinds of manifold which the physicist finds opportune, and the kind of unity of which these manifolds are respectively capable. The two terms mentioned are themselves the most abstract conceivable, and naturally, that which is here taken to underlie all the constructive, world-building activity of the mind in every possible direction can only be expressed in the most sublimated language. But the notions themselves, or rather the acts of the mind, the functions designated, are rich and replete with concrete utility when applied to subject matter in the different fields.
Wherever we turn we find that the assurance of reality depends on the joint use of the two principles mentioned, the joint operation of the two kinds of mental action; that is to say—on the positing of a manifold and on the simultaneous apprehension of the subject matter to which it relates as coherent, as unified.
The simultaneity, the inseparableness of the two mental acts or functions in regard to the same subject-matter is the essential point on which hangs the web of the argument here submitted. Thus in geometry space must be regarded as a continuum, unbroken, uninterrupted at any point, and at the same time the same space must be treated as capable of puncture, of linear and superficial delimitations; that is to say, of division. That which is one must yet be apprehended as divided; that which is divided, or delimitated, must yet be apprehended as one. The difficulties that arise spring from the vain endeavor to separate the two inseparable acts—the act of apprehending the manifold of space sub specie pluralitatis, and the act of apprehending it sub specie unitatis. Hence arises the puzzling question: How can that which is continuous be divided, how can chasms between the parts of space, however infinitesimal, be bridged? Witness the problem of Zeno, and the pragmatist solution of it by a demonstration that satisfies us indeed as to the fact (which no one doubts), but leaves the mental puzzle as before; and also Bergson’s Method of accounting for division by a comparison of the inner and the outer flux, wherein he seems to overlook the difficulty that for the purpose of comparison two points must be fixed, one in each flux, that is to say, the division in the flux must be regarded as already existing.
In the physical sciences we are compelled to assume on the one hand the atomic or granular constitution of matter, in other words, manifoldness. On the other hand, if “action at a distance” is to be escaped, we are bound to assume a continuum of some sort like the ether. Again, in the organic world there is the manifold of structures and functions, and the unity of organism. To whatever object of inquiry we give our attention, we find ourselves not only restricted fundamentally to the two functions described, but we discover that to their insunderable co-operation we owe whatever of truth we possess.
Now the business of ethics is to define its own subject-matter, that is to say the particular kind of manifold with which it deals, and the kind of unity of which that manifold is susceptible. But as I approach this first goal of my enterprise, there is one obstacle which I must try to remove out of the way of the reader, before I can hope to win him to a hospitable consideration of my conclusions. The jointness or inseparableness of the two acts out of which certainty or reality issues has created all the difficulties. The fact that the manifold must be regarded as remaining a manifold, unaltered in its character as such, not derivative from the One (there is no such One), and that the unity does not contrariwise result from the manifold in the sense of springing from or being derived from it;—in other words that we must see the same landscape of things and events both sub specie pluralitatis and sub specie unitatis—has been the stumbling-block. The history of philosophy might be written under the two headings: 1, monistic systems that undertake, collapsing in their futile effort, to derive the world and its plurality from the One, as if there were such an One, out of whose bosom philosophy might evoke the many (creational systems, pantheistic systems, emanation systems, evolution systems); 2, pluralistic systems that essay, with equal lack of success, to explain the unity as somehow the offspring of the plurality.
Why then have these systems flourished? Why are these vain undertakings still renewed? The reason is that we cannot understand the joint action of the two functions, and the very point where enlightenment is needed is for us to recognize that no fundamental truths can be understood by us, that we can only look at them, contemplate and accept them. The point, I say, where enlightenment is needed is that the habit of trying to understand is due to a prejudice, to what may be called the superstition of causality.
I shall have to explain this hardy assertion with some care to prevent misconception. Causality, it will be objected, is the one thread that leads us through the labyrinth of nature. The search for causes enables us to become at home in our world by foreseeing events. In what sense then can it be permissible to speak of the prejudice of causality, nay, of the superstition of it? With what warrant prescribe a limit to the aspirations of the human intellect to push its inquiries to the farthest limit, even so far as to understand the functional finalities themselves, if such there be?
The answer, succinctly put, is this: explaining or understanding things means tracing effects to their causes, and this is only one mode, a somewhat disguised mode, of the joint functional activity of which I have spoken. The manifold in this case is that of the temporal sequence of phenomena, of differences due to change of position in time; and the unity established between them (as for instance energy, of which the sequent phenomena represent the transformations) is an ideal, fictive unity, mentally superimposed (real despite its ideal or imaginary character, because of the necessity we are under to view the sequent phenomena sub specie unitatis). That there is nothing in the antecedent to compel the sequent to follow has been since the days of Hume a commonplace in philosophy. That nevertheless there is such a thing as the prediction of eclipses was made by Kant the basis of his doctrine of synthesis a priori. Be the terms used what they may, what counts is the fact that the joint action of two functions, which itself is inexplicable, not to be understood, that is, not to be referred back to a preceding cause (as if there could be such a thing as a cause why we think in terms of causality) is the foundation of all so-called understanding.
Moreover causality is an incomplete example of the fundamental functional process. We never do thoroughly understand; we gain a certain relief, a certain increased ease of mind by pushing the problem back a step. And what I have called the prejudice of causality, is the unwillingness on our part to acknowledge the fact that we are face to face, in the case of causality, with the inexplicable; that that which helps us partially to understand (and serves for practical purposes well enough) is in its nature not to be understood, one of the modes in which the joint action of the functional finalities manifests itself.
An ultimate principle has been defined as one which is presupposed in every attempt to account for it. The functional finalities of which I speak bear the test of this definition. The upshot of it all is that the constitutive principles of the human mind cannot be explained or understood, but can nevertheless be verified. And verification, in the last analysis, means exemplification. If we look at these ultimate truths, whether in geometry, in physics, or, as we shall later see, in ethics and æsthetics, as enunciated abstractly, baldly, we confront them blankly, we are as it were dumbfounded in their presence. They seem arbitrarily imposed upon us. And why? Because we are endeavoring to understand them. We have acquired the habit of trying to get hold of truth by referring back to some antecedent. And therefore we are uneasy and disconcerted. But the moment we see them exemplified, as in the constructions of the geometer, in the laws or uniformities established by the physicist, etc., we are convinced. The subject-matter of ethics is different. The kind of exemplification is likewise different. But verification is exemplification in ethics as elsewhere; and this will be found to mean that the life, the ethical experience, must lead to the certainty.
And now we have reached the point where a brief discussion of the ethical manifold and its mode of unification comes up in proper order.
CHAPTER V
THE IDEAL OF THE WHOLE AND THE ETHICAL MANIFOLD
The ethical manifold, conceived of as unified, furnishes, or rather is, the ideal of the whole. The ethical manifold is the true universe, not “Universe” in the sense in which the word is too laxly used at present to designate those fragmentary and in many respects unconnected lines of experience which might better by way of discrimination be called World.
The ideal of the whole, as the terms imply, must fulfill two conditions: it must be a whole, that is, include all manifoldness whatsoever; and it must be ideal, or perfectly unified. In such an ideal whole the two reality-producing functions of the human mind would find their complete fruition.
Point 1.—The totality of manifoldness must be comprised.
Point 2.—The connectedness must be without flaw.
From point one it follows that the ethical manifold cannot be spatial or temporal, since juxtaposition and sequence lapse into indefiniteness, abounding without ceasing, but never attaining or promising the attainment of totality. Our first conclusion then is that the ethical manifold is non-temporal and non-spatial.
Furthermore it is necessary and decisive for the theoretical construction here attempted to keep sharply in view, that the manifoldness may not be derived from the unity, or conversely. The manifold remains forever manifold. This means that in the ethical manifold each member[30] will differ uniquely from all the rest, and preserve his irreducible singularity. The member of the ethical manifold was not created by the One or any One. He is not derived as effect from any cause. Causality does not apply to the ethical manifold, being a category of spatial sequence. The member of the ethical manifold, or the ethical unit, as we may now call him (I say him metaphorically and provisionally) is unbegotten, induplicable, unique. In the ethical manifold each infinitesimal member is indispensable, inasmuch as he is one of the totality of intrinsically unlike differentiæ. A duplicate would be superfluous. Inclusion implies indispensableness; no member acquires a place within the ethical universe save on the score of his title, as one of the possible modes of being that are required to complete the totality of manifoldness.
But the reality-producing functions of the mind are two, and they act jointly. The same manifold that is regarded as the scene of irreducible manifoldness, is also regarded sub specie unitatis. The immense practical importance of holding fast to diversity as indefeasible, and at the same time stressing the unity, will amply appear in the course of the third Book. It is this insistence on the two aspects jointly, that distinguishes the theory here worked out from preceding ethical philosophies, and will be found to open new ethical applications to conduct. It is this insistence on the joint action of the two reality-producing functions that will enable us to see in the ideal of the whole a pattern traced, and to derive from this pattern of relations a supreme rule of conduct. If the differences that exist among the members of the manifold be slurred over, if the indefeasible singularity of each member be overlooked, if the many be derived from the One, since the One is an empty concept, we shall gain no light upon the conduct to be followed by each of the many. It is true that our notion of the distinctive difference or the uniqueness of each ethical unit is also empty as far as knowledge goes. The unique is incognizable. Yet we are able to apprehend, and do apprehend, a determinate relation as subsisting between the ethical units, and this relation supplies us with an ideal plan of the ethical universe and a first principle and rule of ethics. The relation is that of reciprocal universal interdependence.
Consider that an infinite number of ethical entities is presented to our minds—each of them radically different from the rest. In what then possibly can the unity of this infinite assemblage consist? In this—that the unique difference of each shall be such as to render possible the correlated unique differences of all the rest. It is in this formula that we find the key to a new ethical system, in this conception we get our hand firmly on the notion of right, and by means of it we discover the object which Kant failed to find, the object to which worth attaches, the object which is so indispensable to the ideal of the whole as to authenticate unconditional obligation or rightness in conduct with respect to it. It is as an ethical unit, as a member of the infinite ethical manifold, that man has worth.[31]
In accordance with the above, the first principle of ethics may be expressed in the following formulas:
A. Act as a member of the ethical manifold (the infinite spiritual universe).
B. Act so as to achieve uniqueness (complete individualization—the most completely individualized act is the most ethical).
C. Act so as to elicit in another the distinctive, unique quality characteristic of him as a fellow-member of the infinite whole.
A and B are comprised in C. I am taking three steps toward a fuller exposition of the meaning of the principle. To act as a member according to A is to strive to achieve uniqueness as declared in B. To achieve uniqueness as declared in C is to seek to elicit the diverse uniqueness in others. The actual unique quality in myself is incognizable, and only appears, so far as it does appear, in the effect produced by myself upon my fellows. Hence, to advance towards uniqueness I must project dynamically my most distinctive mode of energy upon my fellow-members.
Since the finite nature of man is a clog and screen, clouding and checking the action of man viewed as an ethical unit, it follows that no man will ever succeed in carrying out completely the rule which is derived from the ideal pattern. He will invariably meet with partial frustration in his efforts to do so, and yet in virtue of his ethical character he will always renew the effort. While in physical science the recurrence of phenomena supplies the occasion for exemplification or verification, in conduct, or the sphere of volition, not recurrence but the persistence of the effort after defeat is at least a help to verification, arguing in one’s self a consciousness, however obscured, of the relation of reciprocal interdependence and of subjection to the urge or pressure thence derived.[32] It is our own reality-producing functions, exerted to their utmost, to which we are delivered over. Hence the final formulation: So act as to raise up in others the ideal of the relation of give and take, of universal interdependence in which they stand with an infinity of beings like themselves, members of the infinite universe, irreducible, like and unlike themselves in their respective uniqueness.
The simile that may be used is that of a ray of light which has the effect of kindling other rays, unlike but complementary to itself. Each ethical unit, each member of the infinite universe, is to be regarded as a center from which such a ray emanates, touching other centers, and awakening there the light intrinsic in them. Or we may think of a fountain from which stream forth jets of indescribable life-power—playing out of it, playing into other life, and evoking there kindred and yet unkindred life-waves, waves effluent and refluent. Whatever the symbolism may be, inadequate in any case, the idea of the enmeshing of one’s life in universal life without loss of distinctness—the everlasting selfhood to be achieved on the contrary, by means of the cross-relation—is the cardinal point.
I have here to answer one question. By what warrant do I ascribe worth to any human being? Where is the head deserving that this ray that streams out from me shall light upon it? What man or woman merits that he be invested with this glory? Does not the same objection opposed to Kant hold with respect to my own view? It is true that he found no object at all, and sought indirectly to draw from the empty notion of obligation the inference that man is an end per se. Perhaps it will be admitted that the supremely worthwhile object has now been found, the holy thing (holy in two ways, as being inviolable, reverence-inspiring, holding at a distance those who would encroach: and intrinsically priceless as a component of the ethical manifold, as indispensable in a perfect whole). But this object, you will say, is in the air, or in the heavens, and how shall it be made to descend on empirical man?
My answer is that certainly I do not discover the quality of worth in people as an empirical fact. In many people I do not even discover value. Judging from the point of view of bare fact, many of us could very well be spared. Many are even in the way of what is called “progress.” And the suggestion of some extreme disciples of Darwin that the degenerate and defective should be removed, or the opinion of others that pestilence and war should be allowed to take the unpleasant business off our hands, is, from the empirical point of view, not easily to be refuted. I can also enter into, if I do not wholly share, the pessimistic mood with regard to actual human nature expressed by Schopenhauer and others. To the list of repulsive human creatures mentioned by Marcus Aurelius in one of his morning meditations,—the back-biter, the scandal-monger, the informer, etc.—might be added in modern times, the white-slaver, the exploiter of child-labor, the fawning politician, and many another revolting type. And even more discouraging in a way, than these examples of deepest human debasement—the copper natures, as Plato calls them, or the leaden natures, as we might call them—is the disillusionment we often experience with regard to the so-called gold natures, the discovery of the large admixture of baser metal which is often combined with their gold.
It is imperative to acquaint oneself, nay, to impregnate one’s mind thoroughly with these contrary facts, if the doctrine of worth, the sanest and to my mind the most real of all conceptions, is to be saved from the appearance of an optimistic illusion.
The answer to the objection is that I do not find worth in others or in myself, I attribute it to them and to myself. And why do I attribute it? In virtue of the reality-producing functions of my own mind. I create the ethical manifold. The pressure of the essential rationality within me, seeking to complete itself in the perfect fruition of these functions, i.e., in the positing of a total manifold and its total unification, drives me forward. I need an idea of the whole in order to act rightly, in such a way as to satisfy the dual functions within me. My own nature as a spiritual being urges me to seek this satisfaction. This ideal whole, as I have shown, is a complexus of uniquely differentiated units. In order to advance toward uniqueness, in order to achieve what in a word may be called my own truth, to build myself into the truth, to become essentially real, I must seek to elicit the consciousness of the uniqueness and the interrelation in others. I must help others in order to save myself; I must look upon the other as an ethical unit or moral being in order to become a moral being myself. And wherever I find consciousness of relation, of connectedness, even incipient, I project myself upon that consciousness, with a view to awaking in it the consciousness of universal connectedness. Wherever I can hope to get a response I test my power. Fields and trees do not speak to me, as Socrates said, but human beings do. I should attribute worth to stones and to animals could they respond, were the power of forming ideas, without which the idea of relation or connectedness is impossible, apparent in them. Doubtless stones and trees and animals, and the physical world itself, are but the screen behind which lies the infinite universe. But the light of that universe does not break through the screen where it is made up of stones and trees and the lower animals. It breaks through, however faintly, where there is consciousness of relation: and wherever I discover that consciousness I find my opportunity. It is quite possible that the men and women upon whom I try my power will not actually respond. The complaint is often heard from moral persons, or persons who think themselves such, that what they call the moral plan of rousing the moral consciousness in others will not work. Perhaps the plan they follow is not the moral plan at all, but the plan of sympathy or of some other empirically derived rule. But be that as it may, the question is not whether we get the response but whether we shall achieve reality or truth ourselves; in theological terms, save our own life, by trying to elicit the response.
And here one profoundly important practical consideration will come to our aid, namely, the sense of our own imperfection, coupled indeed with the consciousness of inextinguishable power of moral renewal. Instead of attributing the lack of response to the hopeless dullness of the person upon whom we labor, a sense of humility, based on the knowledge of our own exceeding spiritual variability—best moments followed by worst moments, imperfect grasp on our own ideals, most imperfect fidelity in executing them—will lead us to turn upon ourselves, and far from permitting us to despair of others, will impel us rather to make ourselves more fitting instruments of spiritual influence than obviously as yet we are.[33]
CHAPTER VI
THE IDEAL OF THE SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE AND THE GOD-IDEAL
We have seen whence the ideal of a spiritual universe arises. It is unnecessary to prove that the universe is moral. What it is necessary to verify is that a universe exists; for “universe” is an ethical ideal, it is the ethical manifold, or, if we distinguish ethical as concerning relations between man and man, then we may use the term “spiritual” to designate that infinite system of interdependence in which men as ethical units have their place. We begin with the affirmation—Man is an end per se. This wonderful affirmation, which the democracies are darkly and confusedly trying to express in political and social arrangements, constitutes the problem of all problems. It is the great datum of ethics, of which ethical theory must give an account. All other data or problems that have been thrust into the foreground—freedom of the will, responsibility, altruistic self-sacrifice—are secondary, in the sense that they depend for their solution on a right conception of man as end per se. As possessing worth on his own account he is an ethical unit. Only as a member of the infinite spiritual universe does he possess the two-fold attributes implied in worth—inviolability with respect to outsiders and indefeasible, intrinsic preciousness. Therefore I say that around the individual, the ethical unit, we build up as a necessary postulate the spiritual universe. Man ethically considered carries with him this infinite environment.
Does this universe exist or is it a mere figment? It is the product of the reality-producing functions in their ideal completion. It is the necessary postulate required if the idea of right is to have validity, and the idea of right is required by man in so far as he is an agent and not merely a spectator of life. The ethical manifold, the spiritual universe, exists in so far as there is a right.
Have we then reinstated the idea of God as existent? Not the idea of God as an individual. We have on the contrary set aside that idea by affirming that manifoldness cannot be derived from unity, that the positing of plurality is just as much a primary function of the mind as the positing of unity. We have discarded the God-idea as the locus of unity, since the unity subsists in the relation of the units. Strictly speaking, we have replaced the God-idea by that of a universe of spiritual beings interacting in infinite harmony.
But at this point I must go back for a moment to Kant, using his ideas once more as a foil to make my own more explicit. Wilhelm von Humboldt said of Kant that some of the things he had destroyed would never be rebuilt, and that some of the things he had built would never be destroyed.
For more than a hundred years the impression has prevailed that among the things forever destroyed by Kant are the proofs of the existence of God. He is represented as an intellectual giant whose blows have forever shattered the proofs on which the existence of a supersensible reality rested. Kant’s mind was preëminently scientific. He was the philosopher who made explicit the principles underlying Newtonian science as Aristotle had made explicit the logic underlying the Greek science. His philosophy is essentially agnostic. The use that he continues to make of the God-idea can be dissociated from his system with advantage to the latter.[34]
But did Kant indeed destroy the idea of a supersensible reality as existent, or are we warranted in undertaking to build anew the supersensible world.[35] “Du hast sie zerstörrt, die schöne Welt, In deinem Busen baue sie wieder”—not indeed in the realm of mere feelings, but in the sphere of will. The spell of Kant’s shattering attack still rests upon the intellectual world today. The notion of a supersensible reality, if held at all, is held timidly, apologetically and is apt to be based on subjective emotional need. The wish is more or less admitted to be father to the faith—the will to believe is defiantly asserted in despair of sound foundations. A scientist like Dubois-Reymond enumerates seven world riddles, or mysteries that cannot be explained, and after saying that they cannot be explained, he seems to see that no alternative remains but to take refuge in resignation: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus!”
That “explanation” is not the only avenue to truth, that the referring of effects to their causes is not the highest operation of the reality-producing functions, I have pointed out in a previous chapter. But Kant, as has been said, is supposed to have utterly annihilated the arguments intended to demonstrate the existence of God, and it will clear up the matter at issue if we consider wherein he actually succeeded and wherein he quite failed. As he himself declares, his method is regressive; he does not attempt the progressive method path. He seeks to ascertain whether by going backward along the chain of effects and causes, or of conditions, he can somewhere find God as first cause or as unconditioned. He does not look forward looking to the ideals of the will. He does not enter into the realm of ends, where the necessity of determining action in obedience to some universal plan or scheme of relations might have forced itself on his attention. His approach, like his habit of mind, is scientific. He is not primarily an ethicist. Proceeding in this manner he shows that the notion of a first cause is untenable, and he attacks in particular the ontological argument by which every other argument supplements itself at the point where it breaks down.
Did Kant, however, annihilate the Ontological Argument? Yes, in the scholastic form in which it was held. No, in a form, based on the idea of the ethical manifold, in which it can be restated. In the scholastic form it runs: “There is such a thing as the idea of a perfect being. Existence is an element of perfection. If the perfect being did not exist it would be less than perfect. But the ens realissimum, the perfect being, is present as an idea in the mind. Therefore it exists.” The disproof of this amounts to the curt statement that what exists in the mind does not necessarily exist outside of it, or, as Kant put it: “The idea of 100 thalers in the head of a man is one thing, lacking no element of conceptual integrity; while the existence of the 100 thalers in the man’s purse is an entirely different matter.” The evidence of existence, in other words, depends on the synthesis of the data of sense as arranged in the space and time manifold in accordance with the categories of the understanding. Existence is temporal and spatial. To prove that God exists we should have to prove that he exists in the world of the senses. Of any other kind of existence we are agnostic. Kant’s disproof of the Ontological Argument thus depends on his agnosticism.
But suppose that on ethical grounds we find ourselves compelled to affirm that there is an object which has worth, and that to account for the inviolableness, indispensableness and preciousness of this object we are compelled to give free rein to the reality-producing functions, and to place this object having worth as a member in a manifold not spatial and temporal but infinite: and suppose we say that the existence of this worth-endowed object, of this ethical unit with its compeers, is as certain as the notion of rightness is certain, have we not then without blame widened the conception of existence, and placed the Ontological Argument where Kant’s disproof does not even touch it?[36]
One more important remark is here in place, suggested by Kant’s designation of God as the ideal of reason, and by his designation of our highest nature as the rational nature.
Is “rational” equivalent to intellectual? If it be so, then feeling must be classed as irrational, and impulse likewise, since neither feeling nor impulse is subject to logical rules. And then the war will be on between the intellectualists or rationalists and the champions of irrational conceptions of life, since feeling and impulse actually make up the major part of life, and can neither be left out of account nor compressed into intellectualist formulas.[37]
Plainly, there is a deep misunderstanding between the two parties. An error is involved somewhere. It appears to consist in assuming that objectivity can be supplied only by the intellect, in overlooking the fact that the feelings and still more the volition possess intrinsic controls and norms of their own, that Science, the work of the intellect, and art and ethics, spring from a common root, namely, the reality-producing functions. The manifolds with which each of the three respectively deals are different, the methods of synthesis are different, but the root principle, synthesis of the manifold, is identical in all.
To describe our highest nature, therefore, as the rational nature is perilous, since the word rational suggests intellectual. Either we must strain the signification of reason to include feeling and will, which is contrary to common usage, or we should select some other term, such as spiritual, to designate that nature within us which operates in science and art and achieves its highest manifestation in producing the ethical ideal.
Finally, if what has been said regarding the ethical manifold holds good, then a genuine philosophy of life can only be reached by the ethical approach to the problems of life. This has never yet been consistently attempted. The approach has been made from the scientific or the logical side, or as in the case of Plato from the æsthetic, or as in modern times from the biological. Yet the ethical approach is full of promise. A philosophy of physical nature may be feasible without it, a philosophy of art may be possible without it, but not so a philosophy of life. It has not been tried because ethics has lain in the lap of theology, which was itself corrupted by the attempt to apply to ethical problems the inadequate principle of causality in the form of creation theories, while again in recent times, by way of reaction against theology, the solution of ethical questions is sought for in the empirical disciplines where a measure at least of objective certainty has rewarded the investigators. Even Kant, who asserted the independence of ethics, actually made it dependent on Newtonian science. The great task now is, strictly to carry out the idea of the independence of ethics, not indeed as if its principles were unrelated to those of science and art, but in the sense of independently investigating the problems peculiar to ethical consciousness. I am well aware that the attempt made in this volume to take the ethical line of approach to a general philosophy of life, is tentative and defective in a hundred ways, nevertheless it is an attempt in a new direction.
In the next book I shall take up the practical consequences that follow from the theory here advanced. Having delineated the ethical ideal, and discovered the invaluable fact that there is a structural plan contained in it, we shall see that our actual human duties may be derived by applying this ideal scheme to the quasi-organic groups already existing in human society. There are provocative correspondences to the ethical ideal in the social life of men; otherwise it would be impossible to apply it. There are human groups in which a quasi-correlative membership in a common life already exists. In the case of each of these groups we find some sort of empirical multiplicity which must be studied scientifically, and also an empirical motive which may be utilized in the interest of developing the ethical relation. The family is the first of these groups which offers a footing in the world of experience for the ideal. In the family natural affection is the motive; in the vocational group, the desire to express a talent or special gift; in the state, patriotism; in the church, the need felt to integrate all human ideals.
Thus the things of earth are to be used as instrumentalities by which we are to become aware of the spiritual reality. Only that the disparateness of the physical world and the ethical universe should ever be kept in the foreground. Every effort to solve the riddle by somehow identifying the two has failed. To account for the existence of a finite world of indefinite extensibility side by side with a universe ex hypothesi infinite is impossible. Instead of seeking to explain let effort go toward utilizing. Let the world be used instrumentally for the purpose of verifying the existence of universe.
For the average man, and indeed for all men, the test of the truth of a theory is in the practice to which it leads. Abstract metaphysical arguments appeal only to a few, and even for them the formula in its abstract guise is unconvincing. Look at the mathematical figure, and see whether the axioms hold good. Look at the sequent phenomena and see whether the so-called law of nature is exemplified. And so with respect to conduct: look at the ways of human behavior traced out in accordance with the plan of the ethical manifold, and see whether such behavior wins the approval of the spiritual nature implicit within you.[38]
NOTE I
There are various points at which the system sketched in the text deviates from current opinion, but in regard to the underlying proposition the reader’s particular attention is called to the remarks on the “prejudice of causality” and to the statement that verification is exemplification.
How can ethical truth be verified? How can we be sure that ethical ideals are more than fine wishes, expressing subjective aspiration, but having no counterpart in the ultimate constitution of things? This is the dark doubt that haunts the minds of ethical writers, as well as of the average man. We ask to have the things we believe in, the objects of our supreme aspiration, verified. How can they be verified?
I think that we shall see light in this matter once we have grasped the thought that verification, both in science and in ethics, is nothing more than exemplification. In the case of causality, in science, verification does not consist in mere recurrence. For if we find, even by a single carefully guarded experiment, that a given phenomenon A is the true antecedent of B, then we take leave to predict that B will always follow A, without regard to the repetition of the sequence in our experience.[39] Indeed, no amount of repetition would justify prediction. The problem in the case of causality is to determine the true antecedent and the true consequent. For at any moment there are innumerable phenomena that might possibly be antecedents of B. How obtain certainty that A is the causal antecedent? By the synthetic process. We assume a unity, say energy. We assume that there are differentiæ, say a certain mathematically determined quantum of mechanical energy in A, and a determined quantum of thermal energy in B. No sooner have these differentiæ been mathematically determined, than in virtue of the assumed unity of energy underlying the differences, we pronounce the nexus to be necessary. We predict that B will always follow A.
Causality, therefore, is an example of a synthesis which over-arches sequences. The fact that the phenomena are sequent does not affect the principle involved. Whenever we contemplate an example of synthesis, that is, defined differentiæ of some sort, and a defined underlying unity of some sort, the mind affirms that reality exists. There are degrees of reality. The degree of completeness with which the synthetic function is carried out in any instance determines the degree.
Ethical verification is likewise exemplification, though in another sense. When the ideal plan of ethical relations is presented, the ideal plan being a synthesis not of sequences but of all co-existent entities whatsoever, the mind assents to this ideal plan as representing the complete synthesis or the complete reality. The more explicitly and definitely the relation between the ethical units is conceived, the greater the conviction of reality resulting. Now frustration after partial achievement has the effect of making more explicit the idea of the plan of relations as it ought to be carried out in human life. And in this sense I would have the reader understand the main practical argument of the book—that frustration is the condition of our intensified conviction as to the reality of the supersensible universe.
In virtue of the constitution of our minds we cannot help acknowledging as real that which is synthesized. Synthesized and real are synonymous terms. Hence the idea of the completed synthesis necessarily is the idea of the ultimate reality.
NOTE II
The three principal respects wherein Kant has failed to justify his affirmation that every human being is to be regarded as an end per se, and not to be used as a tool, are:
1. Out of the bare experience of oughtness, absolute constraint, he seeks to derive personality. Out of the empty categorical imperative he seeks to draw a substantive entity—a being possessed of worth.
2. The society of ends per se described by him is not a true society, but a collection of atomic individuals juxtaposed. The capital flaw in his ethics is here. He begins by detaching the individual. He studies the individual, and discovers, or believes himself to have discovered, that something happens in him (the consciousness of absolute constraint) which entitles him to be considered worth while on his own account.
Next, since the formula of university proposes imitability by others as the test of a moral act, all others are called in as concomitants of the detached atom first considered. Each of the concomitants in turn is an atomic entity. It is in this mechanical way that the conception of a kingdom of ends, or a holy community, is supposed to be validated. Kant’s mistake is to assume that an individual regarded as an isolated being can be worth while, can be an end per se. The notion of end involves relation to others, not mechanical juxtaposition, but intrinsic connection. No one is worth while by himself. He has worth only as an organic member of a spiritual whole. The unique quality which lends him incomparable distinction is the creative life which emanates from him and quickens cognate but diversely modified life in his associates.
3. Kant’s version of the ethical rule is strong on the side of interdiction, but quite inadequate on the positive side. He tells us that we are to look on others not merely as means to our own ends, but also ends per se. The vagueness is in the formula “not merely ... but also.” Where the dividing line is to be drawn he does not tell. I am at liberty to use the services of others in the prosecution of my own interests, as they may use mine, since we are social beings and dependent on one another. But how far may I go in this direction? On this point we are left wholly in the dark. Kant admits into his system the so-called natural ends,[40] such as wealth, culture and the like, gives them leave to abound, only with the proviso that they may not overpass a certain limit,—the limit beyond which they would interfere with the rights of fellowmen. An instrumental view of wealth, science, culture, as positively promoting the ethical end of man, he does not and cannot establish.[41] But the instrumental view is precisely that in which modern society has most at stake, on the working out of which the solution of our most pressing problems,—such as the labor problem, the problem of the family, the problem of patriotism and international relations—is entirely dependent. If Kant has failed at this point, as I believe he has, his usefulness as a guide in the reconstruction of modern life is seriously diminished. What he had set out to demonstrate, the inalienable worth of man, remains; but foundations other than his must be found. For the formula “not merely as a means but also as an end” I would substitute: Treat every man as a spiritual means to thine own spiritual end and conversely ... treat the extent and the manner in which we are to use one another as means being determined by the criterion that our exchange of services shall conduce to the attainment of each other’s ends as ethical beings conjointly.
NOTE III
I would also ask the reader to consider well the effect upon the philosophy of life of the position taken throughout this volume that there is no intellectual bridge between the finite order and the infinite order. This involves dropping creation at the beginning and immortality in its usual sense at the end. Creation is an attempt to show how the world, including man, proceeded out of the infinite. Immortality is an attempt to express how man returns to the infinite. In this volume man’s dealings with the finite order are represented as having for their purpose the achievement of the conviction that there verily is an infinite life, a supersensible universe. Creation systems, pantheistic systems, certain evolutionary systems, also the Hegelian system, are futile attempts to explain the How. But explanation is impossible; for to explain means to understand, and to understand means to trace an effect to its cause. And causality is not the kind of synthesis applicable to a co-existent totality.
Among practical consequences note the difference between the theistic attitude in fatal sickness and the spiritual attitude.[42] The theist presupposes that there is a God to whose will he must patiently submit. But theism is a principle of explanation, the God-idea being employed to account for the finite order. God is thus made responsible for the suffering of the sick as well as for all other evils in the world. Hence the very idea which is presupposed in order to produce patience raises up doubts and perplexities, which imperil patience. If God made the world why does he permit pain and evil? The spiritual attitude, on the contrary, ethically interpreted, does not presuppose the idea of a divine order as a dogma, but offers it as the product of the experience of suffering itself. The conviction that there is in man an essential spiritual self, a holy thing, and a spiritual universe, a holy community, are not gifts to which we fall heir at birth, or by some sort of revelation borrow from the experience of ancient teachers; they are a supreme good to be arduously worked out by ourselves. And the interpretation given to the facts of suffering and frustration is that they can be used as the means of bringing to birth in us that supreme conviction.
In general it may be said that the purpose of existence, both of the individual and of the race, is so to work in the finite world as to become possessed with ever greater distinctness of the conviction of the reality of the wholly real world, the infinite supersensible universe.
The attitude of the Christian is other-worldly. He shuns intimacy with the finite world and turns his face toward his “true home.” The attitude herein described is that of hearty attack upon the business of life, and close embrace of all the partial reality which finite experience contains, with a view of thus acquiring in some measure an appreciation of the utter reality of which these partial realities are hints and glimmerings.
NOTE IV
In the case of any new theory, it is true that one must live with it for a considerable time before acquiring the habit of thinking in accordance with it. The older habits constantly crop up and interfere with the correct understanding of any new point of view. This is especially so of a new attitude towards reality. The world seems topsy-turvy to one who learns for the first time that grass and the leaves of trees are not really green apart from the eye that sees them, that beings with different organs might interpret differently that which stimulates the human eye to its specific color reactions. The heliocentric theory, when first announced by Copernicus, outraged naïve commonsense. It exacted a new habit of thinking in regard to the relation of the sun to the earth,—the real relation, apprehended by intercalated mental processes being the direct opposite of the apparent relation. The sun evidently revolves around the earth, nevertheless the truth is that the earth revolves around the sun.
Modern science reveals behind the palpable world around us unimaginable fluids, speeds, and physical units which are so sublimated in thought as to be barely distinguishable from metaphysical entities. The habit of penetrating with radium-like glance the concrete screen of things, and of seeing behind the screen the company of atoms, ions, etc., may be gradually acquired; but the older habit of regarding the palpable and visible as the truly real continues to assert itself in conflict with the new habit.
The ethical unit in an ethical manifold postulated in the text as the closest, though still symbolic, reading of the ultimate reality, makes a similar demand upon the reader, and requires of him in like manner the formation of a new habit of thinking, against which the older habits will doubtless continue to protest.
The most obstinate of the older habits that stand in the way has been dealt with in the note on causality, namely,—the unscientific habit of ignoring the boundaries of science, and of taking the method employed in the physical sciences as the sole method that leads to certainty. The prejudice of causality is probably ineradicable, just as the illusion that the sun revolves about the earth persists. But we can at least reach the point of realizing that it is a prejudice, and to this extent overcome it. If it be synthesis, or the employment in inseparable conjunction of the two functions mentioned, that for the human mind spells reality, then one kind of synthesis called causality, that of sequent phenomena, does not exclude the ampler, though ideal synthesis, which is carried out in the mental production of the ethical manifold. So much I wish to add to the statements contained in the text in regard to the theory.
But there is also a new habit to be acquired in regard to the practical ethical consequences of the theory. The chief of these is the prizing of distinctive difference above uniformity or sameness. The ethical quality is that quality in which a man is intrinsically unique. The ethical act is the most completely individualized act (I ought perhaps to say personalized, but the completely individualized act is that of a unique personality). In brief, the emphasis is here put on that in which a man differs from all others, and not on the common nature which he shares with the rest; or rather, since the common nature is not denied, the stress is put on the intrinsically different mode in which the common nature is expressed in him.[43]
The accentuation in current ethical discussion of the common nature of man, and the fallacious assumption that the common interests are the pre-eminently moral interests, that uniformity is the test of ethical quality, is easy to understand. It is the reaction of the modern world against feudalism, a social system not yet entirely outgrown, in which the empirical differences of rank and birth were made the basis of intolerably oppressive discriminations, and in which it was an accepted axiom that some men are baked of better clay than others. It is also a reaction against the capitalistic system that has taken the place of the feudal, in which wealth is to a considerable extent made the standard of social appraisement.
It is against these false discriminations that the voice of humanity is now indignantly raised, affirming the moral equality of all men. But equality is mistakenly taken to mean likeness in the sense of sameness, not in the sense of that fundamental likeness on the background of which the desirable unlikenesses stand forth. And this notion of equality as identical with sameness leads to great practical aberrations. Thus, for instance, women are not only to be recognized as the equals of men, but are to be the same as men,—their education patterned on that of men, their specific functions, as far as possible, ignored. For unlikeness is supposed to connote inferiority, and inferiority is justly repelled as morally intolerable. But aside from this one example, the stressing of the common nature, or of the basis of likeness at the expense of the outstanding unlikenesses, leads to other leveling tendencies of which modern democracies furnish many unpleasing illustrations. Thus uniform popular opinion, encompassing the individual on every side, penetrates into his inmost thinking, so that he hardly ventures to hold to his own judgment against the judgments of the majority. And the impulses of the mass tend also to threaten his independence in action. There is indeed a certain intoxication in the very sense of being submerged in a large whole, a certain glad loss of self in great impersonal movements, a certain strain of democratic pantheism, as it were, that takes the place with some of mystic absorption in Deity. But whatever the value that may attach to these upswellings of feeling, it is counterbalanced by the circumstance that in proportion as indiscriminate devotion to society as a whole becomes the paramount motive, the sub-organisms of society, the family, the vocation and the state, in which the ethical personality is ripened, are threatened with effacement. Instead of moral equality it were better to use the term “moral equivalence.” The differences are to be stressed; they are the coruscating points in the spiritual life of mankind. That every man is the equal of his fellows means that he has the same right as each of the others to become unlike the others, to acquire a distinct personality, to contribute his one peculiar ray to the white light of the spiritual life.