History as literature, and other essays

by Theodore Roosevelt

In the same way I heartily sympathize with his condemnation of the men who stridently proclaim that “science has disposed of religion,” and with his condemnation of the scientific men who would try to teach the community that there is no real meaning to the words “right” and “wrong,” and who therefore deny free-will and accountability. Even as sound a thinker as Mr. Bernard, whose book is rightly, as he calls it, “an essay in constructive biology,” who in his theory of group development has opened a new biological and even sociological field of capital importance, who explicitly recognizes the psychical accompaniment of physical force as something distinct from it, and whose final chapter on the integration of the human aggregate shows that he has a far nobler view of life than any mere materialist can have, yet falls into the great mistake of denying freedom of the will, merely because he with his finite material intelligence can not understand it. Dr. Dwight is right in his attitude toward the scientific men who thus assume that there is no freedom of the will because on a material basis it is not explicable. Whenever any so-called scientific men develop, as an abstract proposition, a theory in accordance with which it would be quite impossible to conduct the affairs of mankind for so much as twenty-four hours, the wise attitude of really scientific men would be to reject that theory, instead of following the example of the, I fear not wholly imaginary, scientist who, when told that the facts did not fit in with his theory, answered: “So much the worse for the facts.” M. Bergson, in his “Creative Evolution,” has brought out with convincing clearness the great truth that the human brain, so able to deal with purely material things, and with sciences, such as geometry, in which thought is concerned only with unorganized matter, works under necessarily narrow limitations—limitations in reality very, very narrow, and never to be made really broad by mere intellect—when it comes to grasping any part of the great principle of life. Reason can deal effectively only with certain categories. True wisdom must necessarily refuse to allow reason to assume a sway outside of its limitations; and where experience plainly proves that the intellect has reasoned wrongly, then it is the part of wisdom to accept the teachings of experience, and bid reason be humble—just as under like conditions it would bid theology be humble. A certain school of Greek philosophers was able to prove logically that there was not, and could not be, any such thing as motion, and that, even if there were, it was quite impossible logically for a pursuing creature ever to overtake a fleeing creature which was going at inferior speed; but all that was really accomplished by this teaching was to prove the need of much greater intellectual humility on the part of those who believed that they were capable of thinking out an explanation for everything. Mr. Bernard ought not to have been caught in such a dilemma, because of the very fact that he does not cast in his lot with the crass materialists; for he admits that there are many things we do not know, that there is much which our intelligence—necessarily functioning in material fashion—can not understand. It is just as idle for a man to try to explain everything in the moral and spiritual world by that which he is able to apprehend of the material world as it would be for a polyp to try to explain the higher emotions of mankind in terms of polyp materialism. Not only would it be quite impossible to conduct even the lowest form of civil society without practical acknowledgment of free-will and accountability—an acknowledgment always made in practice by every single individual of those who deny it in theory—but even in their writings the very men who deny free-will and accountability inevitably and continually use language which has no meaning except on the supposition that both of them exist. Mr. Bernard, for instance, on the same page on which he denies freedom of the will, makes an impatient plea for just laws, and explains that by “just laws” he means laws that are in accordance with the highest conceptions of human relationships; he complains that the legal idea of justice is invariably far behind that of our psychic perceptions; and elsewhere, as on page 457, he speaks of the “duties” of man and of his “moral perceptions,” and on page 473 he asks for perfection of the community, so that “social life worked out by the highest wisdom of mankind will at once rise to a newer and higher physical and psychic level.” All of this is meaningless if there are no such things as freedom of the will and accountability; and its goes to show that even a profound and original thinker, if he has dwelt too long in the realms where the pure materialist is king, needs to pay heed to M. Bergson’s pregnant saying that “pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense, which is an altogether different thing.” A part, and an essential part, of the same truth is expressed by Mr. Taylor when he paraphrases Saint Augustine in insisting that “the truths of love are as valid as the truths of reason.”

Dr. Dwight and the many men whose habits of thought are similar to his perform a real service when they keep people from being led astray by the mischievous dogmas of those who would give to each passing and evanescent phase of materialistic scientific thought a dogmatic value; and our full acknowledgment of this service does not in the least hinder us from also realizing and acknowledging that the advance in scientific discovery, which has been and will be of such priceless worth to mankind, can not be made by men of this type, but only by the bolder, more self-reliant spirits, by men whose unfettered freedom of soul and intellect yields complete fealty only to the great cause of truth, and will not be hindered by any outside control in the search to attain it. A brake is often a useful and sometimes an indispensable piece of equipment of a wagon; but it is never as important as the wheels. As the University of Wisconsin declared when Dr. Richard T. Ely was tried for economic heresy: “In all lines of investigation the investigator must be absolutely free to follow the paths of truth wherever they may lead.”

It is always a difficult thing to state a position which has two sides with such clearness as to bring it home to the hearers. In the world of politics it is easy to appeal to the unreasoning reactionary, and no less easy to appeal to the unreasoning advocate of change, but difficult to get people to show for the cause of sanity and progress combined the zeal so easily aroused against sanity by one set of extremists and against progress by another set of extremists. So in the world of the intellect it is easy to take the position of the hard materialists who rail against religion, and easy also to take the position of those whose zeal for orthodoxy makes them distrust all action by men of independent mind in the search for scientific truth; but it is not so easy to make it understood that we both acknowledge our inestimable debt to the great masters of science, and yet are keenly alive to their errors and decline to surrender our judgment to theirs when they go wrong. It is imperative to realize how very grave their errors are, and how foolish we should be to abandon our adherence to the old ideals of duty toward God and man without better security than the more radical among the new prophets can offer us. The very blindest of those new scientific prophets are those whose complacency is greatest in their belief that the material key is that which unlocks all the mysteries of the universe, and that the finite mind of man can, not merely understand, but pass supercilious judgment upon, these mysteries. Mr. Wallace stands in honorable contrast to the men of this stamp. No one has criticised with greater incisiveness what he properly calls “the vague, incomprehensible, and offensive assertions of the biologists of the school of Haeckel.” He shows his scientific superiority to these men by his entire realization of the limitations of the human intelligence, by his realization of the folly of thinking that we have explained what we are simply unable to understand when we use such terms as “infinity of time” and “infinity of space” to cover our ignorance; and he stands not far away from the school of MM. Boutroux and Bergson, and, old man though he is, comes near the attitude of the more serious among the younger present-day scientific investigators—of the stamp of Professor Osborn, of the American Museum of Natural History—in his readiness to acknowledge that the materialistic and mechanical explanations of the causes of evolution have broken down, and that science itself furnishes an overwhelming argument for “creative power, directive mind, and ultimate purpose” in the process of evolution.

The law of evolution is as unconditionally accepted by every serious man of science to-day as is the law of gravitation; and it is no more and no less foolish to regard one than the other as antagonistic to religion. To reject either on Biblical grounds stands on a par with insisting, on the same grounds, that geological science must reconcile itself—and astronomy as well—to a universe only six thousand years old. The type of theologian who takes such a position occupies much the same intellectual level with the strutting materialists of the Haeckel type. To all men of this kind I most cordially commend a capital book, “Evolution and Dogma,” by the Rev. J. A. Zahm, one-time professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.

The great distinguishing feature of the centuries immediately past has been the extraordinary growth in man’s knowledge of, and power to understand and command, his own physical nature and his physical surroundings in the universe. It is this growth which so sharply distinguishes modern civilization, the civilization which we may roughly date as beginning about the time of Columbus’s voyage, from all preceding civilizations; and it has not only immeasurably increased man’s power over nature, but, when rightly understood, has also measurably added to his inner dignity and worth, and to his power and command over things spiritual no less than material. This conquest could have been achieved only by men who dared to follow wherever their longing for the truth led them, and who were masters of their own consciences, and as little servile to the past as to the present. But no such movement for the uplifting of mankind ever has taken place, or ever will or can take place, without being fraught also with great dangers to mankind. Our hope lies in progress, for if we try to remain stationary we shall surely go backward; and yet as soon as we leave the ground on which we stand in order to advance there is always danger that we shall plunge into some abyss.

Naturally, the men who have taken the lead in these extraordinary material discoveries have often tended to think that there is nothing to discover or to believe in except what is material. Much of the growth in our understanding of nature has been due to men whose high abilities were nevertheless rigidly limited in certain directions. Our knowledge of solar systems so inconceivably remote that the remoteness is itself unreal to our senses; our knowledge of animate and inanimate forces working on a scale so infinitesimal and yet so powerful as to be almost impossible for our imaginations to grasp; our knowledge of the eons through which life has existed on this planet; the extraordinary advances in knowledge denoted by the establishment of such doctrines as those of gravitation and of evolution; in short, the whole enormous incredible advance in knowledge of the physical universe and of man’s physical place in that universe, has been due to the labor of students whose special tastes and abilities lay in the direction of dealing with what is purely material. Their astounding success, and the far-reaching, indeed the stupendous, importance of their achievements, have naturally tended to make those among them who possess genuine but narrow ability, whose minds are keen but not broad, assume an attitude of hard, arrogant, boastful, self-sufficient materialism: a mental attitude which glorifies and exalts its own grievous shortcomings and its inability to perceive anything outside the realm of the body. This attitude is as profoundly repellent as that of the civil and ecclesiastical reactionaries, the foes of all progress, against whom these men profess to be in revolt; and, moreover, it is an attitude which is itself as profoundly unscientific as any of the anti-scientific attitudes which it condemns. The universal truth can never be even imperfectly understood or apprehended unless we have the widest possible knowledge of our physical surroundings, and unless we fearlessly endeavor to find out just what the facts and the teachings of these physical surroundings are; but neither will it ever be understood if the physical and material explanations of life are accepted as all-sufficient. By none is this more clearly recognized than by the most acute and far-sighted of the investigators into physical conditions. Says Mr. Bernard: “There are psychic elements wholly different in kind from the physical elements ... [they] constitute, in a way impossible to define, a new character, quality, element—or shall we at once boldly borrow a term from mathematics and call it a new ‘dimension’ of our environment, hitherto three-dimensional? These various mental conditions lead us to believe that at any moment, while being driven through this three-dimensional environment, we may also be plunged into a psychic condition which hangs like an atmosphere over our particular physical surroundings.”

Not only every truly religious, but every truly scientific, man must turn with relief from the narrowness of a shut-in materialism to the profound and lofty thought contained in the writings of William James, of his biographer, M. Émile Boutroux, and of another philosopher of the same school, M. Bergson. M. Boutroux’s study of William James gives in brief form—and with a charm of style and expression possible only for those who work with that delicate instrument of precision, French prose—the views which men of this stamp hold; and be it remembered that, like James, they are thoroughly scientific men, steeped in the teachings of material science, who acknowledge no outside limitation upon them in their search for truth. They have a far keener understanding of the world of matter than has been attained by the purely materialistic scientists, just because, in addition, they also understand that outside of the purely physical lies the psychic, and that the realm of religion stands outside even of the purely psychic. M. Boutroux’s book on “Science and Religion” has been translated into English—and we owe a real debt of gratitude to Messrs. Nield and Mitchell for their excellent translations of MM. Boutroux and Bergson. There is much talk of the conflict between science and religion. The inherent absurdity of such talk has never been better expressed than by M. Boutroux when he says that such opposition “is the result of our defining both science and religion in an artificial manner by, on the one hand, identifying science with physical science, and, on the other hand, assuming that religion consists in the dogmas which merely symbolize it.” M. Boutroux’s book, like M. Bergson’s “Creative Evolution,” must be read in its entirety; mere extracts and condensations can not show the profound philosophical acumen with which these men go to the heart of things, and prove that science itself, if correctly understood, renders absurd the harsh and futile dogmatism of many of those who pride themselves upon being, above all things, scientific. For, as these writers point out, the work of the scientist is conditioned upon the existence of the free determination of a spirit which, dominating the scientific spirit, believes also in an æsthetic and moral ideal. They see the material, the physical body, in its relation to other physical bodies; and back of and beyond the physical they see life itself, consciousness, which is to be conceived of as something always dynamic and never static, as a “stream of consciousness,” a “becoming.”

As M. Boutroux finely says, religion gives to the individual his value and treats him as an end in himself, no less than treating him from the standpoint of his duties to other individuals. This philosophy is founded on a wide and sympathetic understanding of the facts of the material world, a frank acceptance of evolution and of all else that modern science has ever taught; and so those who profess it are in a position of impregnable strength when they point out that all this in no shape or way interferes with religion and with Christianity, because, as they hold, evolution in religion has merely tended to disengage it from its own gross and material wrapping, and to leave unfettered the spirit which is its essence. To them Christianity, the greatest of the religious creations which humanity has seen, rests upon what Christ himself teaches; for, as M. Boutroux phrases it, the performance of duty is faith in action, faith in its highest expression, for duty gives no other reason, and need give no other reason, for its existence than “its own incorruptible disinterestedness.” The idea thus expressed is at bottom based on the same truth to which expression is given by Mr. Taylor when he says: “The love of God means not despising but honoring self; and for Christians on earth the true love of God must show itself in doing earth’s duties and living out earth’s full life, and not in abandoning all for dreams, though the dreams be of heaven.” To men such as William James and these two French philosophers physical science, if properly studied, shows conclusively its own limitations, shows conclusively that beyond the material world lies a vast series of phenomena which all material knowledge is powerless to explain, so that science itself teaches that outside of materialism lie the forces of a wholly different world, a world ordered by religion—religion which, says M. Boutroux, must, if loyal to itself, work according to its own nature as a spiritual activity, striving to transform men from within and not from without, by persuasion, by example, by love, by prayer, by the communion of souls, not by restraint or policy; and such a religion has nothing to fear from the progress of science, for the spirit to which it is loyal is the faith in duty, the search for what is for the universal good and for the universal love, the secret springs of all high and beneficent activity.

It is striking to see how these two gifted Frenchmen, by their own road, reach substantially the same conclusion which, by a wholly different method, and indeed in treating religion from a wholly different standpoint, is also reached by the president of Bowdoin College. Mr. Hyde’s short volume combines in high degree a lofty nobility of ethical concept with the most practical and straightforward common-sense treatment of the ways in which this concept should be realized in practice. Each of us must prescribe for himself in these matters, and one man’s need will not be wholly met by what does meet another’s; personally, this book of President Hyde’s gives me something that no other book does, and means to me very, very much.

We must all strive to keep as our most precious heritage the liberty each to worship his God as to him seems best, and, as part of this liberty, freely either to exercise it or to surrender it, in a greater or less degree, each according to his own beliefs and convictions, without infringing on the beliefs and convictions of others. But the professors of the varying creeds, the men who rely upon authority, and those who in different measures profess the theory of individual liberty, can and must work together, with mutual respect and with self-respect, for certain principles which lie deep at the base of every healthy social system. As Bishop Brent says: “The only setting for any one part of the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only relationship big enough for any one man is all the rest of mankind.” Abbot Charles, of Saint Leo Abbey, in Florida, has recently put the case for friendly agreement among good men of varying views, when he summed up a notably fine address in defence—as he truly says, friendly defence—of his own church by enunciating the plea for “true peace founded on justice,” worked out in accordance with what he properly calls one of the “dearest blessings that heaven can give, the spirit that springs from religious liberty.” However widely many earnest and high-minded men of science and many earnest and high-minded men of religious convictions may from one side or the other disagree with the teachings of the earnest and high-minded students of philosophy whom I have quoted, yet surely we can all be in agreement with the fundamentals on which their philosophy is based. Surely we must all recognize the search for truth as an imperative duty; and we ought all of us likewise to recognize that this search for truth should be carried on, not only fearlessly, but also with reverence, with humility of spirit, and with full recognition of our own limitations both of the mind and the soul. We must stand equally against tyranny and against irreverence in all things of the spirit, with the firm conviction that we can all work together for a higher social and individual life if only, whatever form of creed we profess, we make the doing of duty and the love of our fellow men two of the prime articles in our universal faith. To those who deny the ethical obligation implied in such a faith we who acknowledge the obligation are aliens; and we are brothers to all those who do acknowledge it, whatever their creed or system of philosophy.