The Sources of Religious Insight

by Josiah Royce

V

Now in what way can I hope, you may ask, to answer these impressive and to many recent writers decisive considerations of the pragmatists? My answer, like my foregoing statement of my own form of idealism, depends upon extremely simple considerations. Their interest for our discussion lies in the fact that they have to do with the relation between reason and action, and between the real world and the human will. As a fact, the will as well as the reason is a source of religious insight. No truth is a saving truth--yes, no truth is a truth at all unless it guides and directs life. Therein I heartily agree with current pragmatism and with James himself. On the other hand, the will is a collection of restless caprices unless it is unified by a rational ideal. And no truth can have any workings at all, without even thereby showing itself to be, just in so far as it actually works, an eternal [{145}] truth. And, furthermore, what I have asserted about the insight which the reason gives us is so far from being opposed to the pragmatist's facts, that every rational consideration of the type of truth which they define leads us back to the consideration of absolute truth and to the assertion of an all-inclusive insight. Only, when we view this all-inclusive insight from the point of view which the pragmatists now emphasise (and which I myself have emphasised from a period long antedating the recent pragmatist movement), such a fair estimate of the insight of reason transforms our first and superficial opinion of its nature and of its meaning. It becomes the insight of a rational will, whose expression is the world, and whose life is that in which we too live and move and have our being.

Let me briefly dwell on each of the considerations which I here have in mind. To me, as a philosophical student, they are not new; for, as I repeat, I insisted upon them years ago, before the modern pragmatistic controversy began.

First, then, there are certain respects in which I fully agree with recent pragmatism. I agree that every opinion expresses an attitude of the will, a preparedness for action, a determination to guide a plan of action in accordance with an idea. Whoever asserts anything about the way out of the woods, or about the cause and possible cure of a toothache, defines a course of action in accordance with some purpose, and amongst other things predicts the [{146}] possible outcome of that course of action. The outcome that he predicts is defined in terms of experience, and, so far as that is possible, in terms of human experience. And now this is true, not only of assertions or opinions about toothaches. It is true also of assertions about all objects in heaven or earth. There is no such thing as a purely intellectual form of assertion which has no element of action about it. An opinion is a deed. It is a deed intended to guide other deeds. It proposes to have what the pragmatists call "workings." That is, it undertakes to guide the life of the one who asserts the opinion. In that sense, all truth is practical. If you assert a proposition in mathematics, you propose to guide the computations, or other synthetic processes, of whoever is interested in certain mathematical objects. If you say "There is a God," and know what you mean by the term "God," you lay down some sort of rule for such forms of action as involve a fitting acknowledgment of God's being and significance. So far, then, I wholly side with the pragmatists. There is no pure intellect. There is no genuine insight which does not also exist as a guide to some sort of action.

Furthermore, the proper "workings" of an assertion, the rational results of the application of this opinion to life, must, if the assertion is true, agree with the expectations of the one who defines the assertion. And these "workings" belong, indeed, to the realm of actual and concrete experience, be this [{147}] experience wholly human, or be it, in some respect, an experience which is higher and richer than any merely human experience. Opinions are active appeals to real life--a life to which we are always seeking to adjust ourselves, and in which we are always looking to find our place. The quest for salvation itself is such an effort to adjust our own life to the world's life. And if the world's life finds our efforts to define our relation to the world's actual and perfectly concrete experience inadequate, then our assertions are in just so far false; they lead in that case to blundering actions. We fail. And in such cases our opinions, indeed, "do not work."

All this I myself insist upon. But next I ask you to note that the very significance of our human life depends upon the fact that we are always undertaking to adjust ourselves to a life, and to a type of experience, which, concrete and real though it is, is never reducible to the terms of any purely human experience. Were this not the case; were not every significant assertion concerned with a type and form of life and of experience which no man ever gets; were not all our actions guided by ideas and ideals that can never be adequately expressed in simply human terms; were all this, I say, not the case, then--neither science nor religion, neither worldly prudence nor ideal morality, neither natural common-sense nor the loftiest forms of spirituality would be possible. Here I can only repeat, but now with explicit reference to the active aspect of our opinions [{148}] and of our experience, the comments that I made in my former lecture. Man as he is experiences from moment to moment. What is here and now, not future "workings," not past expectations, but the present--this is what he more immediately gets and verifies. These momentary experiences of his, these pains and these data of perception, are what he can personally verify for himself. And to this life in each instant he is confined, so far as his own personal and individual experience is concerned. But man means, he intends, he estimates, he judges life, not as it appears to him at any one instant, but as "in the long run," or "for the common-sense of mankind," or as "from a rational point of view" he holds that it ought to be judged. Now I again insist--there is not one of us who ever directly observes in his own person what it is which even the so-called common-sense of mankind is said to verify and find to be true. The experience which "mankind" is said to possess is not merely the mere collection of your momentary feelings or perceptions, or mine. It is a conceived integral experience which no individual man ever gets before him. When we conceive it, we first treat it as something impersonal. If it is personal, the person who gets it before him is greater than any man. Yet unless some such integral experience is as concrete and genuine a fact, as real a life, as any life that you and I from moment to moment lead, then all so-called "common-sense" is meaningless. But if such an integral experience [{149}] is real, then that by which the pragmatic "workings" of our private and personal opinions are to be tested and are tested is a certain integral whole of life in which we all live and move and have our being, but which is no more the mere heap and collection of our moments of fragmentary experience, and of our vicissitudes of shifting moods, than a symphony is a mere collection of notes on paper, or of scraped strings and quivering tubes, or of air waves, or even of the deeds of separate musicians.

The life, then, the experience, the concrete whole, wherein our assertions have their workings, with which our active ideas are labouring to agree, to which our will endlessly strives to adjust itself, in which we are saved or lost, is a life whose touch with our efforts is as close as its superiority to our merely human narrowness is concretely and actively triumphant whenever our pettiness gets moulded to a higher reasonableness. And unless such a life above our individual level is real, our human efforts have no sense whatever, and chaos drowns out the meaning of the pragmatists and of the idealists alike. If one asks, however, by what workings our significant assertions propose to be judged, I answer, by their workings as experienced and estimated from the point of view of such a larger life, as conforming to its will, or falling short thereof, as leading toward or away from our salvation. For it is just such a larger life by which we all propose and intend to be judged, whenever we make our active appeal to life take the [{150}] form of any serious assertion whatever. If a man proposes to let his ideas be tested not by his momentary caprice, and not by any momentary datum of experience, but by "what proves to be their workings in the long run," then already he is appealing to an essentially superhuman type of empirical test and estimate. For no man taken as this individual ever personally experiences "the long run," that is, the integral course and meaning, the right estimate and working of a long series of experiences and deeds. For a man individually observes now this moment and now that--never their presupposed integration, never their union in a single whole of significant life.

If a man says that the workings of his ideas are to be tested by "scientific experience," then again he appeals not to the verdict of any human observer, but to the integrated and universalised and relatively impersonal and superpersonal synthesis of the results of countless observers.

And so, whatever you regard as a genuine test of the workings of your ideas is some living whole of experience above the level of any one of our individual human lives. To this whole you indeed actively appeal. The appeal is an act of will. And in turn you regard that to which you appeal as an experience which is just as live and concrete as your own, and which carries out its own will in that it snubs or welcomes your efforts with a will as hearty as is your own. For what estimates your deeds, [{151}] and gives them their meaning, is a life as genuine as yours and an activity as real as yours. Pragmatism is perfectly justified in regarding the whole process as no mere contemplation, no merely restful or static conformity of passive idea to motionless insight, but, on the contrary, as a significant interaction of life with life and of will with will. But the more vital the process, the more pragmatic the test of our active opinions through the conformity or non-conformity of their purposes to the life wherein we dwell and have our being, the more vital becomes the fact that, whether we are saved or lost, we belong to the world's life, and are part thereof, while, unless this life is more than merely human in its rational wealth of concrete meaning, we mortals have no meaning whatever, and the assertions of common-sense as well as of religion lapse into absurdity.