LOYALTY AND INSIGHT[77]
JOSIAH ROYCE
Upon an occasion like this, when the children, the servants, and the friends of this institution meet for their annual festival, there is one word that best expresses the spirit of the occasion. It is the word "loyalty,"—loyalty to your College, to its ideals, to its life, and to the unity and effectiveness of this life. And amongst the ideals that inspire the life of your College, and make that life effective and united, there is one which is prominent in all your minds, whatever your special studies, your practical aims, or your hopes. It is the ideal of furthering, in all your minds, what we may call insight,—the ideal of learning to see life as it is, to know the world as we men need to know it, and to guide our purposes as we ought to guide them. It is also the ideal of teaching to others the art of just such insight.
These two words, then, "loyalty" and "insight," name, one of them, the spirit in which, upon such occasions as this, we all meet; the other, the ideal that determines the studies and the researches of any modern institution of learning. Upon each day of its year of work your College says to its children and to its servants and to its community: "Let us know, let us see, let us comprehend, let us guide life by wisdom, and in turn let us discover new wisdom for the sake of winning new life." But upon a day like the present one, the work of the year being laid aside, your College asks and receives your united expression of loyalty to its cause. Perhaps some of you may feel that for just this moment you have left behind, at least temporarily, the task of winning insight. You enjoy, for the hour, the fruits of toil. Study and research cease, you may say, for to-day, while the spirit of loyalty finds its own free expression and takes content in its holiday.
I agree that the holidays and the working days have a different place in our lives. But it is my purpose in this address to say something about the connections between the spirit which rules this occasion—the spirit of loyalty—and the ideal by which the year's work has to be guided,—the ideal of furthering true insight. The loyalty that now fills your minds is merely one expression of a certain spirit which ought to pervade all our lives—not only in our studies, but in our homes, in our offices, in our political and civic life—not merely upon holidays, or upon other great occasions, but upon our working days; and most of all when our tasks seem commonplace and heavy. And, on the other hand, the insight which you seek to get whenever, in the academic world, you work in the laboratory or in the field, in the library or in the classroom or alone in your study, the insight that you try both to embody in your practical life and to enrich through your researches,—just this insight, I say, is best to be furthered by a right cultivation of the spirit of loyalty.
I suppose that when I utter these words, you will easily give to them a certain general assent. But I want to devote this address to making just such words mean more to you than at first they may appear to mean.
First, then, let me tell you what I myself mean by the term "loyalty." Then let me deal with my principal thesis, which is that the true spirit of loyalty is not merely a proper accompaniment of all serious work, but is an especially important source of a very deep insight into the meaning of life, and, as I personally believe, into the nature of the whole universe.
Three sorts of persons, I have noticed, are fond of using the term "loyalty." These are quite different types of persons; or, in any case, they use the word upon very different occasions. But these very differences are to my mind important. The first type of those who love to use the term "loyalty" consists of those who employ it to express a certain glow of enthusiastic devotion, the type of the lovers, of the students when the athletic contests are near, of the partisans in the heat of a political contest, or of the friends of an institution upon a day like this. To such persons, or at least at such moments, loyalty is conceived as something brilliantly emotional, as a passion of devotion. The second class of those who are fond of the word "loyalty" are the warriors and their admirers. To such persons loyalty means a willingness to do dangerous service, to sacrifice life, to toil long and hard for the flag that one follows. But for a third type of those who employ the word, loyalty especially means steady, often unobtrusive, fidelity to more or less formal obligations, such as the business world and the workshop impose upon us. Such persons think of loyalty as, first of all, faithfulness in obeying the law of the land, or in executing the plans of one's official superiors, or in serving one's employer or one's client or one's chief, or one's fraternity or other social union. In this sense the loyal servant may be obscure and unemotional. But he is trustworthy. Now, a word which thus so forcibly appeals to the lovers who want to express their passionate devotion, and also to the soldiers who want to name that obstinate following of the flag which makes victory possible; a word which business men also sometimes use to characterize the quietly and industriously faithful employee who obeys orders, who betrays no secrets, and who regards the firm's interest as his own;—well, such a word, I think, is not as much ambiguous as deep in its meaning. For, after all, loyal emotions, loyal sacrifice of life, loyal steadiness in obscure service, are but various symptoms of a certain spirit which lies beneath all its various expressions. This spirit is a well-known one. All the higher life of society depends upon it. It may manifest itself as enthusiasm upon an occasion like this, or as contempt for death upon the battle field, or as quiet service when the toil of life is grim, or as the cool fidelity that pursues the daily routine of office or of workshop or of kitchen with a steady persistence and with a simple acceptance of traditional duties or of the day's toil. But the spirit thus manifested is not exhausted by any of its symptoms. The appearances of loyalty are manifold. Its meaning is one. And I myself venture to state what the true spirit of loyalty is by defining the term thus: By loyalty I mean the thorough-going, the voluntary, and the practical devotion of a self to a cause. And by a cause I mean something of the nature that the true lover has in mind when he is wisely devoted to his love; that the faithful member of a family serves when the family itself is the cause dear to him; that the member of a fraternity, or the child of a college, or the devoted professional man, or the patriot, or the martyr, or the faithful workman conceives when he thinks of that to which he gives his life. As all these illustrations suggest, the cause to which one can be loyal is never a mere collection of individuals; nor is it ever a mere abstract principle. This cause, whether in the church or the army or the workshop, in the home or in the friendship, is some sort of unity whereby many persons are joined in one common life. The cause to which a loyal man is devoted is of the nature of an institution, or of a home life, or of a fraternity, wherein two or more persons aim to become one; or of a religion, wherein the unity of the spirit is sought through the communion of the faithful. Loyalty respects individuals, but aims to bring them together into one common life. Its command to the loyal is: "Be 'one undivided soul of many a soul'". It recognizes that, when apart, individuals fail; but that when they try to unite their lives into one common higher selfhood, to live as if they were the expressions, the instruments, the organs of one ideally beautiful social group, they win the only possible fulfillment of the meaning of human existence. Through loyalty to such a cause, through devotion to an ideally united social group, and only through such loyalty, can the problems of human personality be solved. By nature, and apart from some cause to which we are loyal, each of us is but a mass of caprices, a chaos of distracting passions, a longing for happiness that is never fulfilled, a seeking for success which never attains its goal. Meanwhile, no merely customary morality ever adequately guides our lives. Mere social authority never meets our needs. But a cause, some unity of many lives in one, some call upon the individual to give himself over to the service of an idealized community—this gives sense to life. This, when we feel its presence, as we do upon this occasion, we love, as the lovers love the common life of friendship that is to make them one, or as the mothers delight in the life that is to unite themselves and their children in the family, or as the devout feel that through their communion in the life of their church they become one with the Divine Spirit. For such a cause we can make sacrifices, such as the soldier makes in following the flag. For what is the fortune of any detached self as compared with the one cause of the whole country? And just such a voluntary devotion to a cause can ennoble the routine of the humblest daily business, in the office, in the household, in the school, at the desk, or in the market place, if one only finds the cause that can hold his devotion—be this cause his business firm or his profession or his household or his country or his church, or all these at once. For all these causes have their value in this: that through the business firm, or the household, or the profession, or the spiritual community, the lives of many human selves are woven into one, so that our fortunes and interests are no longer conceived as detached and private, but as a giving of ourselves in order that the social group to which we are devoted should live its own united life.
With this bare indication of what I mean by loyalty, I may now say that of late years I have attempted to show in detail, in various discussions of our topic, that the spirit of loyalty, rightly understood, and practically applied, furnishes an adequate solution for all the problems of the moral life. The whole moral law can be summed up in the two commandments: first, Be loyal; and secondly, So choose, so serve, and so unify the life causes to which you yourself are loyal that, through your choice, through your service, through your example, and through your dealings with all men, you may, as far as in you lies, help other people to be loyal to their own causes; may avoid cheating them of their opportunities for loyalty; may inspire them with their own best type of loyalty, and may so best serve the one great cause of the spread of loyalty among mankind. Or, if I may borrow and adapt for a worthy end Lincoln's immortal words, the moral law is this: Let us so live, so love, and so serve, that loyalty "of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," but shall prosper and abound.
The scheme of life thus suggested is, I believe, adequate. I next want to tell what bearing the spirit of loyalty has upon insight.