Philosophy is at once a product of civilization and a stimulus to its development. It is the solvent in which the inarticulate and conflicting aspirations of a people become clarified and from which they derive directing force. Since, however, philosophers are likely to clothe their thoughts in highly technical language, there is need of a class of middle-men-interpreters through whom philosophy penetrates the masses. By American tradition, the philosophers have been professors; the interpreters, clergymen. Professors are likely to be deflected by the ideas embodied in the institutions with which they associate themselves. The American college, in its foundations, was designated a protector of orthodoxy and still echoes what Santayana has so aptly called the “genteel tradition,” the tradition that the teacher must defend the faith. Some of the most liberal New England colleges even now demand attendance at daily chapel and Sunday church. Less than a quarter of a century ago, one could still find, among major non-sectarian institutions, the clergyman-president, himself a teacher, crowning the curriculum with a senior requirement, Christian Evidences, in support of the Faith.
The nineteenth century organized a vigorous war against this genteel tradition. Not only were the attacks of rationalism on dogma reinforced by the ever-mounting tide of scientific discovery within our institutions of learning, but also the news of these scientific discoveries began to stir the imagination of the public, and to carry the conflict of science and theology beyond the control of the church-college. The greatest leaven was Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” of which two American editions were announced as early as 1860, one year after its publication in England. The dogma of science came publicly to confront the dogma of theology. Howsoever conservative the college, it had to yield to the new intellectual temper and the capitulation was facilitated by the army of young professors whom cheapened transportation and the rumour of great achievements led to the universities of Germany.
From the point of view of popular interest, the immediate effects of these pilgrimages were not wholly advantageous to philosophy. In losing something of their American provincialism, these pilgrims also lost their hold on American interests. The problems that they brought back were rooted in a foreign soil and tradition. To students they appeared artificial and barren displays of technical skill. Thus an academic philosophy of professordom arose, the more lonely through the loss of the ecclesiastical mediators of the earlier tradition. But here and there American vitality showed through its foreign clothes and gradually an assimilation took place, the more easily, perhaps, since German idealism naturally sustains the genteel tradition and thrives amid the modes of thought that Emerson had developed independently and for which his literary gifts had obtained a following.
Wherever New England has constituted the skeletal muscles of philosophic culture, its temper has remained unchanged. Calvinism was brought to America because it suited this temper, and the history of idealism in America is the history of its preservation by adaptation to a changing environment of ideas. Its marks are a sense of the presence of the Divine in experience and a no less strong sense of inevitable evil. Jonathan Edwards writes, “When we behold the light and brightness of the sun, the golden edges of an evening cloud, or the beauteous bow, we behold the adumbrations of His glory and goodness; and in the blue sky, of his mildness and gentleness. There are also many things wherein we may behold His awful majesty: in the sun in his strength, in comets, in thunder, with the lowering thunder-clouds, in ragged rocks and the brows of mountains.” Emerson’s version is: “Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws.... She arms and equips an animal to find it place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence.... Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. Every moment instructs and every object; for wisdom is infused into every form.” And Royce’s: “When they told us in childhood that we could not see God just because he was everywhere, just because his omnipresence gave us no chance to discern him and to fix our eyes upon him, they told us a deep truth in allegorical fashion.... The Self is so little a thing merely guessed at as the unknown source of experience, that already, in the very least of daily experiences, you unconsciously know him as something present.”
In its darker aspect this temper gives us Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” whose choices we may not fathom. But Emerson is not far behind: “Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.... At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed in a few minutes. Etc.... Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in the clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.” For Royce, “the worst tragedy of the world is the tragedy of the brute chance to which everything spiritual seems to be subject amongst us—the tragedy of the diabolical irrationality of so many among the foes of whatever is significant.”
Emersonian philosophy fails in two respects to satisfy the demands of the puritanical temperament upon contemporary thought. In building altars to the “Beautiful Necessity,” it neglects to assimilate the discoveries of science, and it detaches itself from the Christian tradition within which alone this spirit feels at home. Both of these defects are met by the greatest of American idealists, Professor Royce.
In character and thought Royce is the great reconciler of contradictions. Irrational in his affections, and at his best in the society of children, he stands for the absolute authority of reason; filled with indignation at wrong and injustice, he explains the presence of evil as an essential condition for the good; keenly critical and not optimistic as to the concrete characters of men, he presents man as the image of God, a part of the self-representative system through which the Divine nature unfolds itself. Never was there a better illustration of Pascal’s dictum that we use our reasons to support what we already believe, not to attain conclusions. And never was there greater self-deception as to the presence of this process.
What man not already convinced of an Absolute could find in error the proof of a deeper self that knows in unity all truth? Who else could accept the dilemma “either ... your real world yonder is through and through a world of ideas, an outer mind that you are more or less comprehending through your experience, or else, in so far as it is real and outer, it is unknowable, an inscrutable X, an absolute mystery”? Without the congeniality of belief, where is the thrill in assimilating self-consciousness as infinite to a greater Infinite, as the infinite systems of even numbers, or of odd numbers, or an infinity of other infinite series can be assimilated to the greater infinity of the whole number series as proper parts? Yet Royce has been able to clothe these doctrines with vast erudition and flashes of quaint humour, helped out by a prolix and somewhat desultory memory, and give them life.
By virtue of the obscurantist logic inherent in this as in other transcendental idealisms, there is a genuine attachment to a certain aspect of Christianity. The identification of the Absolute with the Logos of John in his “Spirit of Modern Philosophy” and the frequent lapses into Scriptural language are not mere tricks to inspire abstractions with the breath of life. By such logic “selves” are never wholly distinct. If we make classifications, they are all secundum quid. Absolute ontological sundering is as mythical as the Snark. The individual is essentially a member of a community of selves that establishes duties for him under the demands of Loyalty. This is the basis of Royce’s ethics. But the fellowship in this community is also a participation in the “beloved community” within which sin, atonement, and the dogma of Pauline Christianity unfold themselves naturally in the guise of social psychology. In such treatment of the “Problem of Christianity” there is at most only a slight shifting of emphasis from the somewhat too self-conscious individualism of his earliest philosophy.
Royce used to tell a story on himself that illustrates a reaction of a part of the public to idealistic philosophy. At the close of a lecture before a certain woman’s organization, one of his auditors approached him with the words: “Oh, my dear Professor Royce, I did enjoy your lectures so much! Of course, I didn’t understand one word of it, but it was so evident you understood it all, that it made it very enjoyable!” The lady, though more frank in her confession, was probably not intellectually inferior to a considerable portion of the idealist’s public. James notes the fascination of hearing high things talked about, even if one cannot understand. But time is, alas, productive of comparative understanding, and it may be with Royce, as with Emerson before him, that growth of understanding contributes to narrowing the circle of his readers. The imported mysteries of Eucken and Bergson offer newer thrills, and a fuller sense of keeping up to date.