English Prose / A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice of the Art of Writing

by Unknown

I have already indicated that, while loyalty always includes personal affections, while you can never be loyal to what you take to be a merely abstract principle, nevertheless, it is equally true that you can never be genuinely loyal merely to an individual human being, taken just as this detached creature. You can, indeed, love your friend, viewed just as this individual. But love for an individual is so far just a fondness for a fascinating human presence, and is essentially capricious, whether it lasts or is transient. You can be, and should be, loyal to your friendship, to the union of yourself and your friend, to that ideal comradeship which is neither of you alone, and which is not the mere doubleness that consists of you and your friend taken as two detached beings who happen to find one another's presence agreeable. Loyalty to a friendship involves your willingness actively and practically to create and maintain a life which is to be the united life of yourself and your friend—not the life of your friend alone, nor the life of yourself and your friend as you exist apart, but the common life, the life above and inclusive of your distinctions, the one life that you are to live as friends. To the tie, to the unity, to the common life, to the union of friends, you can be loyal. Without such loyalty friendship consists only of its routine of more or less attractive private sentiments and mere meetings, each one of which is one more chance experience, heaped together with other chance experiences. But with such true loyalty your friendship becomes, at least in ideal, a new life—a life that neither of you could have alone; a life that is not a mere round of separate private amusements, but that belongs to a new type of dual yet unified personality. Nor are you loyal to your friendship merely as to an abstraction. You are loyal to it as to the common better self of both of you, a self that lives its own real life. Either such a loyalty to your friendship is a belief in myths, or else such a type of higher and unified dual personality actually possesses a reality of its own,—a reality that you cannot adequately describe by reporting, as to the taker of a census, that you and your friend are two creatures, with two distinct cases of a certain sort of fondness to be noted down, and with each a separate life into which, as an incident, some such fondness enters. No; were a census of true friendship possible, the census taker should be required to report: Here are indeed two friends; but here is also the ideal and yet, in some higher sense, real life of their united personality present,—a life which belongs to neither of them alone, and which also does not exist merely as a parcel of fragments, partly in one, partly in the other of them. It is the life of their common personality. It is a new spiritual person on a higher level.

Or again, you are loyal to some such union as a family or a fraternity represents. Or you are loyal to your class, your college, your community, your country, your church. In all these cases, with endless variety in the details, your loyalty has for its object each time, not merely a group of detached personalities, but some ideally significant common life; an union of many in one; a community which also has the value of a person, and which, nevertheless, cannot be found distributed about in a collection of fragments found inside the detached lives of the individual members of the family, the club, the class, the college, the country, the church. If this common life to which you are loyal is a reality, then the real human world does not consist of separate creatures alone, of the mere persons who flock in the streets and who live in the different houses. The human world, if the loyal are right, contains personality that is not merely shut up within the skin, now of this, now of that, human creature. It contains personalities that no organism confines within its bounds; that no single life, that no crowd of detached lives, comprises. Yet this higher sort of common personality, if the loyal are right, is as real as we separate creatures are real. It is no abstraction. It lives. It loves, and we love it. We enter into it. It is ours, and we belong to it. It works through us, the fellow servants of the common cause. Yet we get our worth through it,—the goal of our whole moral endeavor.

For those who are not merely loyal, but also enlightened, loyalty, never losing the definiteness and the concreteness of its devotion to some near and directly fascinating cause, sees itself to be in actual spiritual unity with the common cause of all the loyal, whoever they are. The great cause for all the loyal is in reality the cause of the spread and the furtherance of the cause of the universal loyalty of all mankind: a cause which nobody can serve except by choosing his own nearer and more appreciated cause—the private cause which is directly his own—his family, his community, his friendship, his calling, and the calling of those who serve with him. Yet such personal service—your special life cause, your task, your vocation—is your way of furthering the ends of universal humanity. And if you are enlightened, you know this fact. Through your loyalty you, then, know yourself to be kin to all the loyal. You hereupon conceive the loyal as one brotherhood, one invisible church for which and in which you live. The spirit dwells in this invisible church,—the holy spirit that wills the unity of all in fidelity and in service. Hidden from you by all the natural estrangements of the present life, this common life of all the loyal, this cause which is the one cause of all the loyal, is that for which you live. In spirit you are really sundered from none of those who themselves live in the spirit.

All this, I say, is what it is the faith of all the loyal to regard as the real life in which we live and move and have our being, precisely in so far as men come to understand what loyalty is. Thus, then, in general, to be loyal is to believe that there are real causes. And to be universally loyal is to believe that the one cause of loyalty itself, the invisible church of all the loyal, is a reality; something as real as we are. But causes are never detached human beings; nor are causes ever mere crowds, heaps, collections, aggregations of human beings. Causes are at once personal (if by person you mean the ordinary human individual in his natural character) and super-personal. Persons they are, because only where persons are found can causes be defined. Super-personal they are, because no mere individual human creature, and no mere pairs or groups or throngs of human beings, can ever constitute unified causes. You cannot be loyal to a crowd as a crowd. A crowd can shout, as at a game or a political convention. But only some sort of organized unity of social life can either do the work of an unit or hold the effective loyalty of the enlightened worker who does not merely shout with the throng. And so when you are really loyal to your country, your country does not mean to you merely the crowd, the mass of your separate fellow citizens. Still less does it mean the mere organs, or the separate servants of the country,—the custom house, the War Department, the Speaker of the House, or any other office or official. When you sing "My country, 'tis of thee," you do not mean, "My post-office, 'tis of thee," nor yet, "My fellow citizens, 'tis of you, just as the creatures who crowd the street and who overfill the railway cars," that I sing. If the poet continues in his own song to celebrate the land, the "rocks and rills," the "woods and templed hills," he is still speaking only of symbols. What he means is the country as an invisible but, in his opinion, perfectly real spiritual unity. General Nogi, in a recent Japanese publication about Bushido, expressed his own national ideal beautifully in the words: "Here the sovereign and the people are of one family and have together endured the joys and sorrows of thousands of years." It is that sort of being whereof one speaks when one expresses true loyalty to the country. The country is the spiritual entity that is none of us and all of us—none of us because it is our unity; all of us because in it we all find our patriotic unity.

Such, then, is the idea that the loyal have of the real nature of the causes which they serve. I repeat, If the loyal are right, then the real world contains other beings than mechanisms and individual human and animal minds. It contains spiritual unities which are as real as we are, but which certainly do not belong to the realm of a mere nature mechanism. Does not all this put the problems of our philosophy of life in a new light?

But I have no doubt that you may at once reply: All this speech about causes is after all merely more or less pleasing metaphor. As a fact, human beings are just individual natural creatures. They throng and struggle for existence, and love and hate and enjoy and sorrow and die. These causes are, after all, mere dreams, or at best entities as we have just described. The friends like to talk of being one; but there are always two or more of them, and the unity is a pretty phrase. The country is, in the concrete, the collection of the countrymen, with names, formulas, songs, and so on, attached, by way of poetical license or of convenient abbreviation or of pretty fable. The poet really meant simply that he was fond of the landscape, and was not wholly averse to a good many of his countrymen, and was in any case fond of a good song. Loyalty, like the rest of human life, is an illusion. Nature is real. The unity of the spirit is a fancy.

This, I say, may be your objection. But herewith we indeed stand in the presence of a certain very deep philosophical problem concerning the true definition of what we mean by reality. Into this problem I have neither time nor wish to enter just now. But upon one matter I must, nevertheless, stoutly insist. It is a matter so simple, so significant, so neglected, that I at once need and fear to mention it to you,—need to mention it, because it puts our philosophy into a position that quite transforms the significance of that whole modern view of nature upon which I have been dwelling since the outset of this lecture; fear to mention it, because the fact that it is so commonly neglected shows how hard to be understood it has proved.

That disheartening view of the foreign and mechanical nature of the real world which our sciences and our industrial arts have impressed upon the minds of so many of us; that contempt for superstition; that denial of the supernatural, which seems to the typical modern man the beginning of wisdom;—to what is all this view of reality due? To the results, and, as I believe, to the really important results, of the modern study of natural science. But what is the study of natural science? Practically considered, viewed as one of the great moral activities of mankind, the study of science is a very beautiful and humane expression of a certain exalted form of loyalty. Science is, practically considered, the outcome of the absolutely devoted labors of countless seekers for natural truth. But how do we human beings get at what we call natural truth? By observation—so men say—and by experience. But by whose experience? By the united, by the synthesized, by the revised, corrected, rationally criticized, above all by the common, experience of many individuals. The possibility of science rests upon the fact that human experience may be progressively treated so as to become more and more an unity. The detached individual records the transit of a star, observes a precipitate in a test tube, stains a preparation and examines it under a microscope, collects in the field, takes notes in a hospital—and loyally contributes his little fragment of a report to the ideally unified and constantly growing totality called scientific human experience. In doing this he employs his memory, and so conceives his own personal life as an unity. But equally he aims—and herein consists his scientific loyalty—to bring his personal experience into unity with the whole course of human experience in so far as it bears upon his own science. The collection of mere data is never enough. It is in the unity of their interpretation that the achievements of science lie. This unity is conceived in the form of scientific theories; is verified by the comparative and critical conduct of experiments. But in all such work how manifold are the presuppositions which we make when we attempt such unification! Here is no place to enumerate these presuppositions. Some of them you find discussed in the textbooks of the logic of science. Some of them are instinctive, and almost never get discussed at all. But it is here enough to say that we all presuppose that human experience has, or can by the loyal efforts of truth seekers be made to possess, a real unity, superior in its nature and significance to any detached observer's experience, more genuinely real than is the mere collection of the experiences of any set of detached observers, however large. The student of natural science is loyal to the cause of the enlargement of this organized and criticized realm of the common human experience. Unless this unity of human experience is a genuine reality, unless all the workers are living a really common life, unless each man is, potentially at least, in a live spiritual unity with his fellows, science itself is a mere metaphor, its truth is an illusion, its results are myths. For science is conceived as true only by conceiving the experiences of countless observers as the sharing of a common realm of experience. If, as we all believe, the natural sciences do throw a real, if indeed an inadequate, light upon the nature of things, then they do so because no one man's experience is disconnected from the real whole of human experience. They do so because the cause to which the loyal study of science is devoted, the cause of the enlargement of human experience, is a cause that has a supernatural, or, as Professor Münsterberg loves to say, an over-individual, type of reality. Mankind is not a mere collection of detached individuals, or man could possess no knowledge of any unity of scientific truth. If men are really only many, and if they have no such unity of conscious experience as loyalty everywhere presupposes, then the cause of science also is a vain illusion, and we have no unified knowledge of nature, only various private fancies about nature. If we know, however ill, nature's mechanism, we do so because human experience is not merely a collection of detached observations, but forms an actual spiritual unity, whose type is not that of a mechanism, whose connections are ideally significant, whose constitution is essentially that which the ideal of unified truth requires.

So, then, I insist, the dilemma is upon our hands. Either the sciences constitute a progressive, if imperfect, insight into real truth—and then the cause of the unity of human experience is a real cause that really can be served exactly as the lover means to be loyal to his friendship and the patriot to his country; and then also human life really possesses such unity as the loyal presuppose—or else none of this is so. But then loyalty and science alike deal with metaphors and with myths. In the first case the spiritual unity of the life that we lead is essentially vindicated. Causes such as the loyal serve are real. The cause of science also is real. But in that case an essentially spiritual realm, that of the rational unity of human experience, is real; and possesses a grade both of reality and of worth which is superior to the grade of reality that the phenomena of nature's mechanism exhibit to us. In the other case the sciences whose results are supposed to be discouraging and unspiritual vanish, with all their facts, into the realm of fable, together with the world that all the loyal, including the faithful followers of the sciences, believe to be real.

I have here no time to discuss the paradoxes of a totally skeptical philosophy. It is enough to say that such a total skepticism is, indeed, self-refuting. The only rational view of life depends upon maintaining that what the loyal always regard as a reality, namely, their cause, is, indeed, despite all special illusions of this or of that form of imperfect loyalty, essentially a type of reality which rationally survives all criticisms and underlies all doubts.