The insight that all of us most need and desire is an insight, first, into the business of life itself, and next into the nature and meaning of the real world in which we live. Our forefathers used to center all their views of life and of the world about their religion. Many of the leading minds of to-day center their modern insight about the results of science. In consequence, what I may call the general problems of insight, and the views of life and of the world which most of us get from our studies, have come of late to appear very different from the views and the problems which our own leading countrymen a century ago regarded as most important. The result is that the great problem of the philosophy of life to-day may be defined as the effort to see whether, and how, you can cling to a genuinely ideal and spiritual interpretation of your own nature and of your duty, while abandoning superstition, and while keeping in close touch with the results of modern knowledge about man and nature.
Let me briefly indicate what I mean by this problem of a modern philosophy of life. From the modern point of view great stress has been laid upon the fact that man, as we know man, appears to be subject to the laws of the natural world. Modern knowledge makes these laws appear very far-reaching, very rigid, and very much of the type that we call mechanical. We have, therefore, most of us, learned not to expect miraculous interferences with the course of nature as aids in our human conflict with destiny. We have been taught to regard ourselves as the products of a long process of natural evolution. We have come to think that man's control over nature has to take the general form which our industrial arts illustrate, and which our recent contests with disease, such as the wars with tuberculosis and with yellow fever, exemplify. Man, we have been led to say, wins his way only by studying nature and by applying his carefully won empirical knowledge to the guidance of his arts. The business of life—so we have been moved to assert—must therefore be guided simply by an union of plain common sense with the scientific study of nature. The real world, we have been disposed to say, is, on the whole, so far as we can know it, a mechanism. Therefore the best ideal of life involves simply the more or less complete control of this mechanism for useful and humane ends. Such, I say, is one very commonly accepted result to which modern knowledge seems to have led men. The practical view of life and of its business which expresses this result has been, for many of us, twofold. First, we have been led to this well-known precept: If you want to live wisely, you must, at all events, avoid superstition. That is, you must not try to guide human life by dealing with such supernatural powers, good and evil, as the mythologies of the past used to view as the controlling forces of human destiny. You must take natural laws as you find them. You must believe about the real world simply what you can confirm by the verdict of human experience. You must put no false hopes either in magic arts or in useless appeals to the gods. You must, for instance, fight tuberculosis not by prayer, but by knowing the conditions that produce it and the natural processes that tend to destroy its germs. And so, in general, in order to live well and wisely you must be a naturalist and not a supernaturalist. Or in any case you must conform your common sense not to the imagination that in the past peopled the dream world of humanity with good and evil spirits, but to the carefully won insight that has shown us that our world is one where natural law reigns unyielding, defying equally our magic arts and our prayerful desires for divine aid. But secondly, side by side with this decidedly positive advice, many of us have been brought to accept a practical attitude towards the world which has seemed to us negative and discouraging. This second attitude may be expressed in the sad precept: Hope not to find this world in any universal sense a world of ideal values. Nature is indifferent to values. Values are human, and merely human. Man can indeed give to his own life much of what he calls value, if he uses his natural knowledge for human ends. But when he sets out upon this task, he ought to know that, however sweet and ideal human companionship may be as it exists among men, humanity as a whole must fight its battle with nature and with the universe substantially alone, comfortless except for the comforts that it wins precisely as it builds its houses; namely, by using the mechanisms of nature for its own purposes. The world happens, indeed, to give man some power to control natural conditions. But even this power is due to the very fact that man also is one of nature's products,—a product possessing a certain stability, a certain natural plasticity and docility, a limited range of natural initiative. As a rock may deflect a stream, so man, himself a natural mechanism, may turn the stream of nature's energies into paths that are temporarily useful for human purposes. But from the modern point of view the ancient plaint of the Book of Job remains true, both for the rock and for the man:
"The waters wear away stones,
And the hope of frail man thou destroyest."
In the end, our relations to the universe thus seem to remain relations to an essentially foreign power, which cares for our ideals as the stormy sea cares for the boat, and as the bacteria care for the human organism upon which they prey. If we ourselves, as products of nature, are sufficiently strong mechanisms, we may be able to win, while life lasts, many ideal goods. But just so, if the boat is well enough built, it may weather one or another passing storm. If the body is well knit, it may long remain immune to disease. Yet in the end the boat and the human body fail. And in no case, so this view asserts, does the real world essentially care for or help or encourage our ideals. Our ideals are as foreign to the real natural world as the interests of the ship's company are to the ocean that may tolerate, but also may drown them. Be free from superstition, then; and next: avoid false hopes. Such are the two theses that seem to embody for many minds the essentially modern view of things and the essential result for the philosophy of life of what we have now learned.
But hereupon the question arises whether this is indeed the last word of insight; whether this outcome of modern knowledge does indeed tell the whole story of our relations to the real world. That this modern view has its own share of deeper truth we all recognize. But is this the whole truth? Have we no access whatever to any other aspect of reality than the one which this naturalistic view emphasizes? And again, the question still arises: Is there any place left for a religion that can be free from superstition, that can accept just so much of the foregoing modern results as are indeed established, and that can yet supplement them by an insight which may show the universe to be, after all, something more than a mechanism? In sum, are we merely stones that deflect the stream for a while, until the waters wear them away? Or are there spiritual hopes of humanity which the mechanism of nature cannot destroy? Is the philosophy of life capable of giving us something more than a naturalism—humanized merely by the thought that man, being, after all, a well-knit and plastic mechanism, can for a time mold nature to his ends? So much for the great problem of modern insight. Let us turn to consider the relation of the spirit of loyalty to this problem.
What light can a study of the spirit of loyalty, as I just defined loyalty—what light, I say, can such a study throw upon this problem? Very little—so some of you may say; for any discussion of the spirit of loyalty can tell us nothing to make nature's mechanism more comprehensible. One who favors loyalty as a way of solving life's problems tells us about a certain ideal of human life,—an ideal which, as I have asserted, does tend to solve our personal moral problems precisely in so far as we are able to express this ideal in our practical lives. In order to be loyal you indeed have no need to believe in any of the well-known miracles of popular tradition. And equally, in order to be loyal, you have no need, first, to decide whether nature is or is not a mechanism; or whether the modern view of reality, as just summarized, is or is not adequate; or whether the gods exist; or whether man is or is not one of nature's products and temporarily well-knit and plastic machines. Our doctrine of loyalty is founded not upon a decision about nature's supposed mechanism, but upon a study of man's own inner and deeper needs. It is a doctrine about the plan and the business of human life. It seems, therefore, to be neutral as to every so-called conflict between science and religion.
But now, in answer to these remarks, I have to show that the doctrine of loyalty, once rightly understood, has yet a further application. It is a doctrine that, when more fully interpreted, helps us toward a genuine insight, not only into the plan of life, but into the nature of things. The philosophy of loyalty has nothing to say against precisely so much of naturalism as is indeed an established result of common sense and of the scientific study of nature. The theory of the loyal life involves nothing superstitious—no trust in magic, no leaning upon the intervention of such spiritual agencies as the old mythologies conceived. And yet, as I shall insist, nobody can understand and practise the loyal spirit without tending thereby to get a true view of the nature of things, a genuine touch with reality, which cannot be gained without seeing that, however much of a mechanism nature may appear to be, the real world is something much more than a mechanism, and much more significant than are the waters which wear away stones.
Let me indicate what I mean by repeating in brief my doctrine of loyalty—with reference to the spirit which it involves, and with reference to the view of the realities of human life which it inevitably includes.
Whoever is loyal has found some cause, I have said,—a cause to which, by his inner interests, he is indeed attracted so that the cause is fascinating to his sentiments. But the cause is also one to which the loyal man is meanwhile practically and voluntarily devoted, so that his loyalty is no mere glow of enthusiasm, but is an affair of his deeds as well as of his emotions. Loyalty I therefore defined as the thorough-going and practical devotion of a self to a cause. Why loyalty is a duty; how loyalty is possible for every normal human being; how it can appear early in youth, and then grow though life; how it can be at once faithful to its own, and yet can constantly enlarge its scope; how it can become universally human in its interests without losing its concreteness, and without failing to keep in touch with the personal affections and the private concerns of the loyal person; how loyalty is a virtue for all men, however humble and however exalted they may be; how the loyal service of the tasks of a single possibly narrow life can be viewed as a service of the cause of universal loyalty, and so of the interests of all humanity; how all special duties of life can be stated in terms of a duly generalized spirit of loyalty; and how moral conflicts can be solved, and moral divisions made, in the light of the principle of loyalty; all this I have asserted, although here is indeed no time for adequate discussion. But hereupon I want to concentrate our whole attention, not upon the consequences and applications of the doctrine of loyalty, but upon the most central characteristic of the loyal spirit. This central characteristic of the loyal spirit consists in the fact that it conceives and values its cause as a reality, as an object that has a being of its own; while the type of reality which belongs to a cause is different from the type of reality which we ascribe either to a thing in the physical world or to a law of nature. A cause is never a mere mechanism. It is an essentially spiritual reality. If the loyal human being is right in the account which he gives of his cause, then the real world contains beings which are not mere natural objects, and is subject to laws which, without in the least running counter to the laws of outer nature, are the laws of an essentially spiritual realm, whose type of being is superior to that possessed by the order of nature which our industrial arts use. Either, then, loyalty is altogether a service of myths, or else the causes which the loyal serve belong to a realm of real being which is above the level of mere natural fact and natural law. In the latter case the real world is not indifferent to our human search for values. The modern naturalistic and mechanical views of reality are not, indeed, false within their own proper range, but they are inadequate to tell us the whole truth. And reality contains, further, and is characterized by, an essentially spiritual order of being.
I have been speaking to persons who, as I have trusted, well know, so far as they have yet had time to learn the lessons of life, something of what loyalty means. Come, then, let us consider what is the sort of object that you have present to your mind when you are loyal to a cause. If your cause is a reality, what kind of a being is it? If causes are realities, then in what sort of a real world do you live?