If Royce’s philosophy of religion has not the success that might have been anticipated among those seeking a freer religion, it is probably, as Professor Hocking suggests, because “idealism does not do the work of religious truth.” Royce has no interest in churches or sects. Christ is for him little more than a shadow. Prayer and worship find no place in his discussion. The mantle of the genteel tradition must then fall on other shoulders, probably those of Hocking himself. His “Meaning of God in Human Experience” is an effort to unite realism, mysticism, and idealism to establish Christianity as “organically rooted in passion, fact, and institutional life.” Where idealism has destroyed the fear of Hell, this new interpretation “restores the sense of infinite hazard, a wrath to come, a heavenly city to be gained or lost in the process of time and by the use of our freedom”!
In this philosophy, we ask, what has religion done for humanity and how has it operated? Its effects appear in “the basis of such certainties as we have, our self-respect, our belief in human worth, our faith in the soul’s stability through all catastrophes of physical nature, and in the integrity of history.” But if we accept this “mass of actual deed, once and for all accomplished under the assurance of historic religion” and through the medium of religious dogma and practice, does this guarantee the future importance of religion? Much has been accomplished under the conception that the earth was flat, but the conception is nevertheless not valid.
It is too soon to estimate the depth of impression that this philosophy will make on American culture. Professor Hocking warns us against hastening to judge that the world is becoming irreligious. He believes that the current distaste for the language of orthodoxy may spring from the opposite reason, that man is becoming potentially more religious. If so, this fact may conspire with the American tradition of the church-college to verify Professor Cohen’s assertion that “the idealistic tradition still is and perhaps will long continue to be the prevailing basis of philosophic instruction in America.” But there are signs that point to an opposite conclusion and the means of emancipation are at hand both in a change of popular spirit and within philosophy itself.
The economic and social conditions that scattered the more adventurous of the New Englanders through the developing West, and the tides of immigration of the 19th century, have weakened the hold of the Calvinistic spirit. These events, and scientific education, are producing a generation that can look upon the beauties of nature, be moved to enjoyment, admiration, and wonder by them without, on that account, feeling themselves in the presence of a supernatural Divine principle. Success in mastering nature has overcome the feeling of helplessness in the presence of misfortune. It breeds optimists of intelligence. To a cataclysm such as the San Francisco earthquake, it replies with organized relief and reconstruction in reinforced concrete. If pestilence appears, it seeks the germ, an antitoxin, and sanitary measures. There are no longer altars built to the Beautiful Necessity.
Within philosophy, the most radical expression of this attitude appears in the New Realism, and in the instrumentalism of Dewey. In 1910, six of the younger American philosophers issued in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method “The Programme and First Platform of Six Realists,” followed shortly by a co-operative volume of studies to elaborate the doctrine. Their deepest bond of union is a distaste for the romantic spirit and obscurantist logic of Absolute Idealism. Hence their dominant idea is to cut at the very foundations of this system, the theory of relations in general, and the relation of idea and object in particular. Young America is not fond of the subtleties of history, hence these realists take their stand upon the “unimpeachable truth of the accredited results of science” at a time when, by the irony of history, science herself has begun to doubt.
To thwart idealism, psychology must be rewritten. While consciousness exists there is always the chance that our world of facts may fade into subjective presentations. Seizing a fruitful suggestion of James’, they introduce us to a world of objects that exists quite independently of being known. The relations of these objects are external to them and independent of their character. Sometimes, however, there arise relations between our organisms and other objects that can best be described by asserting that these objects have entered into our consciousness. How then can we fall into error? Only as nature makes mistakes, by reacting in a way that brings conflict with unnoted conditions. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Realism as yet to American thought is the contribution of some of its apostles to its implicit psychology, already independently established as behaviourism, the most vital movement in contemporary psychology.
The highly technical form of the Six Realists’ co-operative volume has kept their doctrine from any great reading public. But in its critical echoes, the busy American finds a sympathetic note in the assertion of the independent reality of the objects with which he works and the world in which he has to make his way. His also is practical faith in science, and he is glad to escape an inevitable type of religion and moral theory to be swallowed along with philosophy. Until the New Realists, however, develop further implications of their theory, or at least present congenial religious, moral, and social attitudes, their philosophy has only the negative significance of release. If it is going to take a deep hold on life, it must also be creative, not replacing dogma by dogma, but elaborating some new world vision. As yet it has told us little more than that truth, goodness, and beauty are independent realities, eternal subsistencies that await our discovery.
Professor Perry has outlined a realistic morality. For him a right action is any that conduces to goodness and whatever fulfils an interest is good. But a good action is not necessarily moral. Morality requires the fulfilment of the greatest possible number of interests, under the given circumstances; the highest good, if attainable, would be an action fulfilling all possible interests. This doctrine, though intelligible, is hard to apply in specific instances. In it realism dissolves into pragmatism, and its significance can best be seen in connection with that philosophy, where it has received fuller development and concrete applications.
Pragmatism obtained its initial impulse through a mind in temper between the sturdy common sense of the New Realists and the emotionalistic romanticism of the Idealists, or rather comprehending both within itself. This mind is that of William James, the last heir of the line of pure New England culture, made cosmopolitan by travel and intellectual contacts. Of Swedenborgian family, skilled alike in science and art, James lived the mystical thrills of the unknown but could handle them with the shrewdness of a Yankee trader. With young America, his gaze is directed toward the future, and with it, he is impatient of dogma and restraint. He is free from conventions of thought and action with the freedom of those who have lived them all in their ancestry and dare to face realities without fear of social or intellectual faux pas. With such new-found freedom goes a vast craving for experience. For him, the deepest realities are the personal experiences of individual men.
James’ greatest contribution is his “Psychology.” In it he places himself in the stream of human experience, ruthlessly cutting the gordian knots of psychological dogma and conventions. The mind that he reports is the mind each of us sees in himself. It is not so much a science of psychology as the materials for such a science, a science in its descriptive stage, constantly interrupted by shrewd homilies wherein habit appears as the fly-wheel of society, or our many selves enlarge the scope of sympathetic living. Nor is it congenial to this adventurer in experience that his explorations should constrain human nature within a scientist’s map. Not only must the stream of consciousness flow between the boundaries of our concepts, but also in the human will there is a point, be it ever so small, where a “we,” too real ever to be comprehended by science or philosophy, can dip down into the stream of consciousness and delay some fleeting idea, be it only for the twinkling of an eye, and thereby change the whole course and significance of our overt action. Freedom must not unequivocally surrender to scientific determinism, or chance to necessity.