Borden Parker Bowne, his life and his philosophy

Front matter

McConnell, Francis John, 1871-1953.

OTHER BOOKS BY BISHOP McCONNELL

CHRISTIAN FOCUS

Chapter I

ORDEN PARKER BOWNE was born at Leonardville near what is now called Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, January 14, 1847. The ancestry of the Bowne family can be traced back to William and Ann Bowne, English Puritans, who in 1631 came to Salem, Massachusetts, and thirty years later moved to Monmouth County, New Jersey. James Bowne, the son of William and direct ancestor of Borden Parker Bowne, was a leader in the settlement of New Jersey, noted for his fairness especially in dealing with the Indians, whose language he so mastered that he often acted as interpreter between them and the whites. | Borden Parker always spoke of his father, Joseph Bowne, and of his mother, Margaret Parker Bowne, with deepest respect. ‘There seemed to be nothing in his memory of his early days to becloud his feeling of admiring regard for them. The father was evidently a man of solidity and deep moral sense, not given to much speech, but when he did speak doing so forcefully and to the point. He was an abolitionist when it cost something to speak against slavery. He was called in those days a “‘squire’—in other words, a justice of the peace —and for many years a considerable portion of his income was in legal fees. The mother was likewise a character of straightforward simplicity with a marked vein of mystic piety, and yet a notable housekeeper, keeping her silver spoons and her mahogany table always scrupulously bright. The home was a farmhouse of moderate size and altogether unpretentious, well built, of about the same type as could be found by the score in American rural sections a hundred years ago, and completely adapted to its purposes.

Farmers in those days had little ready money, and their aim in house building was to get as much for their expenditure as possible. The Bowne family was large, consisting of the parents and six children; the youngsters came into such closeness of contact with one another as to bring out into expression the strong characteristics of each. Some of the experiences of the boyhood days furnished a storehouse of apt illustrations, which was later drawn upon to set forth the profoundest teachings of metaphysics. There was begotten in the young Bowne also a fondness for nature’s processes which grew stronger with the passage of the years. ‘The Bowne roses, grown in the garden at Longwood, were a late ripening of the love of plant life which began in the early days in Jersey. After his return from Europe in 1882 Bowne visited the home place, looked from the porch over the sixty-five-acre farm, and declared that 1t was “real living” just to gaze again on the old scenes. Something of the spell of the early life remained on the mind of Bowne to the end. He used to say that having passed his boyhood near the sea with his windows looking out upon salt water, he did not believe he could ever live happily far from the ocean; and that if fate had compelled him to return to the homestead of his boyhood, after he had reached the age of sixty, he could contentedly live out his remaining days among the early memories.

In any community, no matter how remote, incidents occur which by their arresting, dramatic quality fasten themselves in the minds of growing youngsters unforgettably. No one who ever heard Bowne in his later days describe some events in the neighborhood in which he lived as a boy could fail to be impressed with the strong sense for the dramatic which must have marked him from early years. I recall in particular one such story. There lived in the Leonardville neighborhood a brilliantly endowed physician, who after giving promise of an unusual career, fell into the drink habit, and went from bad to worse, always coming out of his sprees in an agony of remorse. Recovering consciousness from one such debauch, the drunkard found himself staring death in the face. His half-crazed mind realized that the end was at hand, and he besought his tipsy crony, a lawyer, to console the last moments by reciting a prayer. All this took place in a tumble-down barn into which the drinkers had crept to sleep off their stupor. <A terrific thunderstorm was raging, and the neighbors, wondering at seeing a light in the abandoned building, went out into the wild night to seek the cause. They found the dying man trying to pull himself together to face death, with the gin-soaked lawyer sitting in a light made by an inch of candle reciting the Lord’s Prayer and entering exceptions and suggesting improvements in the Prayer as he muttered along! The dramatic qualities of the scene Bowne never forgot—the fury of the night itself, the contrasts between the significant and the absurd, the sublime and the mean, the tragic and the ridiculous did not fade from his memory. Such an incident encountered in later life might have seemed to him sordid and degrading, but not so as etched in a youthful mind keenly responsive to the dramatic.

I put here a quotation from an article in The Christian Advocate, December 20, 1894, to show how Professor Bowne drew upon boyhood memories for illustrations in expounding philosophy :

The veriest crank has but to label himself a scientist to gain prestige with the untrained. This fact has made science, scientist, and scientific the great question-begging epithets of our time. The logical state of the case is well illustrated by the following legend out of the region of my childhood: There was in that region a family of wealth and social prestige by the name of Hartshorne. On one occasion there had been a drawing of the seine, resulting in an apostolic draught of fishes. These were sent across the bay to the New York market in charge of a hired man, to whom, as often happens with the servants in wealthy families, the name of his employer was above every name. But the day was hot, and the fish spoiled; and when the clerk of the market, as the inspector was then called, came around, he ordered the man in charge of the fish to remove them. Now, to the hired man this interference was something incredible, and, thinking to end the matter by a great stroke, he bawled out, “My name’s Hartshorne.” But the inspector was a person of much uncircumcision of heart and speech, and there was no fear of Hartshorne before his eyes. Accordingly, he made the unfeeling reply: “Hartshorne or the devil’s horn, you can’t sell that stuff here.”

Which thing is an allegory. The man’s name was not Hartshorne, and if it had been, the fish were spoiled nevertheless. In like manner we have many persons of slender gifts who are fond of giving themselves out as scientists and their crude imaginings as science; and when the critic complains of the product, their favorite device is to arrogate to themselves the prestige of science by assuming the name. But as in the case of the hired man of the legend, they have no right to the name; and in any case the stuff is bad. We need, then, to be on our guard against this undiscriminating faith, and try both the sciences and the scientists as well as the spirits.

The Bowne conscience too was from the outset extremely sensitive, so sensitive that, combined with a proneness to ask questions and to keep on asking them, it might have driven its possessor to distraction if 1t had not been held in check by an indefinable good sense. For example, the young Borden Parker at a tender age took so seriously the duty of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, that for a period he wondered if he could honestly reply to the question: “What time is it?” For the instant the question is answered the hands of the clock have moved and the answer is no longer true. The youngster got through with all this overrefinement, however, very early. It is interesting to note that there is an echo of this childish reasoning, faint but nevertheless distinct, in the discussion in Metaphysics of Zeno’s flying arrow, as to the sense in which a moving object is in a given place at any particular instant.

The religious atmosphere of the home in New Jersey was most wholesome. The father’s piety was of the substantial, weighty type which commanded respect from the children and from the neighbors. President Eliot once remarked, with wisdom, that the best legacy a father can leave a son is the memory of a character which the son can always respect, that this is better than the memory of a character which the son can love but cannot always quite respect. There was no lack of affection on the part of the younger Bowne for the elder, but respect, thoroughgoing and genuine, was predominant.

The mother was equally rigorous in solid righteousness— but she seems to have possessed a vein of mysticism as well. Highty years ago Methodism laid heavy stress on what was called Christian perfection, or entire santification, or heart purity. The aim of historic Methodism in the preaching of such high experience was self-evident enough. ‘There was partly the altogether practical attempt to hold before converts something more than an initial experience. Wesley and his followers knew well enough that not all converts to Methodism would ever get especially close to Christian perfection, but they knew also that the converts would reach something more than a merely rudimentary discipleship if a high ideal were held before them. So there was preached the possibility of attaining a sinless state of grace in this life, this attainment to be achieved through an experience often conceived of after the fashion of a critical change like an instantaneous conversion, though there is no record that either Wesley in England or Asbury in America ever claimed personally an achievement of this nature. In Bowne’s boyhood the Methodist emphasis was strongly upon Christian perfection. ‘There was published in New York a monthly called the Guide to Holiness which the mother in the Bowne home pored over by the hour. The numbers were cherished as if each were Holy Writ. Bowne used to say that as a boy he had seen the magazine in the home by the shelfful. Now, the Guide was much more worthy than we of to-day who smile at the older Methodist accent are likely to realize. It started its readers to the perusal of the classic mystic literature of all ages—the writings of Fénelon and Madame Guyon, for example.

I would not lay much stress on this profusion of material concerning mysticism in the Bowne home as a factor in the development of Borden Parker except that to a degree it set a problem for him. In spite of the remorselessly logical temper of his mind he used to say that he recognized within himself the tendencies to mysticism which, if not curbed, could easily have run to excess. At least it was always easy for him to understand the excesses of the mystic temperament at the very moment when he was severely and almost savagely denouncing such excesses. His service to Methodism in correcting a tendency to overemotionalism will be the theme of a later chapter. Here I wish to point out that Bowne was familiar with the mystic type from the time when he first knew religion. ‘The late Dr. Daniel Steele, in his day a foremost exponent of the doctrine of Christian perfection, used to quote Bowne’s Ethics as a philosophical warrant for the doctrine. What Bowne said was that the goal of sincere moral endeavor is to bring all phases of human nature—intellectual, emotional, and volitional —into subjection to the moral ideal. The life throughout must be made moral. Stated thus, the aim at perfection is indeed fundamental in the moral struggle, but there were many phases of the Methodist teaching other than this. The Christian Advocate was in the house from its first issue in 1826, and the only surviving member of the family, Miss Letitia Bowne, still takes the paper. The Bowne home insisted upon a morality which touched all phases of conduct. It was a solid foundation on which Borden Parker built from the outset. The emotional aspects of religion—one-sided and often absurd—he also knew, and early learned how to guard against them.

The Bowne home was loyal to Methodism, though some of the contacts with Methodist preachers and church members were not fortunate for a mind as keen and a conscience as alert as Borden Parker’s. The ordinary Methodist preacher at the middle of the last century was not altogether the ideal character he is sometimes painted. Not all took Francis Asbury as their pattern for studied imitation. The glory of the Methodist Church in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century was on the frontier. Men still living when Bowne was a boy had seen Asbury as he moved to and fro through New Jersey on his trips from Maine to Kentucky and from northern New York to Georgia. To them, and to those of us of a later day, Asbury seems the type and representative of the Methodism of the time. There were Methodists not quite of the Asbury mold. Asbury himself complains of encountering lazy Methodist preachers, though the laziness, in his eyes, consisted chiefly in lying abed till sunrise. More serious was his complaint that the lazy preacher of this type wanted his “dram” as soon as he got out of bed. The frontier demanded a rather rough preacher, somewhat of the Cartwright variety. The pioneer saddlebag itinerant was not always to be distinguished by a look of ineffable religious ecstasy in his eyes. The picture, which many of us have seen, of the itinerant on horseback fording a stream, his eyes turned upward to the skies, while the whirling current played around his knees, is not altogether historical.

The pioneer preacher kept his legs out of the water as long as he could, and did not look up at the skies while crossing fords. Now, Bowne was reared in a home where the solid virtues of the Methodist itinerants were not by any means overlooked, but there were some preachers whose virtues were not solid. ‘The roughness which had its place on the frontier too often degenerated into coarseness in communities which had left the frontier conditions behind. The young Bowne saw too many preachers whose rawness made a bad impression upon him, too many who spoke with a voice, or at least a noise, of authority to which they were not entitled. A group of preachers, returning from a Conference one day, stopped in the Bowne neighborhood, expecting entertainment in the middle of the afternoon. One hostess explained that she had cleared her tables and had nothing left in the pantry. Whereupon two or three preachers chased down some of the good woman’s chickens and wrung their necks, thus chivalrously helping her to find food, or in this case, more properly, provender. Another itinerant acquaintance was a notable glutton, with a fondness for entering in his diary lists of dishes he had eaten, along with a record of more spiritual experiences. One night he made an entry to the effect that after preaching service he had gone to supper with a lay brother and had “partaken of the following viands.” Then followed an appalling enumeration of foods which had been consumed. The entry in the diary the next morning was to the effect that the diarist felt that “somehow the Lord had hidden his face.” 'This same brother once felt aggrieved because Mrs. Bowne cooked a clam pie of such savory seductiveness that one whiff of its fragrance tempted him into breaking a religious fast. The early Methodist preachers soon got beyond the dram-drinking of which Asbury complained, but they were powerful in the chewing of tobacco and were not overdelicate in the process.

The instance of preacher-rudeness which Bowne remembered most vividly occurred in the home at supper one night. A preacher had invited himself to stay as guest. The main dish was a huge bowl of what was once called—perhaps is still called—succotash; that is, Indian corn and beans cooked together—a most appetizing and satisfactory food, which the mothers of those of us now beyond middle life knew so well how to cook. ‘The preacher, however, was not pleased. When the head of the Bowne household offered him a portion he gave a scornful sniff and remarked, “I don’t eat fodder.” The youngsters sat aghast at this contempt of a favorite dish and this disrespect to the father. Mr. Bowne, senior, went on quietly serving the others and when he had finished remarked that if the good brother saw anything on the table that he could eat he might help himself. It must be admitted that this rather limited the preacher’s gustatory prospects.

The laymen of those days also had some peculiar views which were calculated to make dubious impression upon a

YOUTH | 1 Ye thoughtful and impressionable youth. ‘The old-time Methodists lived in a simplicity which was intended to be a protest against worldliness. As a reaction from the laxity in England which prevailed when Wesley began his preaching this protest was wholesome. By the severe plainness of their apparel the Methodists bore witness against the extravagance of the “world,” though most of them indeed had not enough of this world’s goods to disobey the command of the Discipline not to put on gold and costly apparel. In America the almost forced plainness became a badge of Methodistic loyalty. The peril in all this was that artificial standards of Christian living could be set up, and were set up. Borden Parker saw from his boyhood this tendency to artificiality in religious ethics. Some of his later-day protests against professedly Christian standards came out of juvenile reaction against the exactness of the mechanicalized ethics which he saw working their customary moral havoc in the Jersey community. One Sunday afternoon. Borden was sitting out in front of the house with his father when along came a neighbor. After a word of greeting the caller remarked: “I reckon Brother Lufburrow is a-gittin’ worldly.”

“Why ?”

“Didn’t you notice that he wore a pair of gloves to meetin’ this mornin’?”

The gloves which had made this damaging revelation of soul were of black cotton. At another time the neighborhood was set agog by the report that a bishop in Connecticut had ordained a minister without taking the gloves off his ordaining hands. The report was probably a base slander, but it supplied material for debate in plenty, only here the debate soon passed beyond the question of worldliness to that of the validity of the orders thus bestowed. One ministerial worthy gave it as his opinion that an ordination with gloved hands was no more efficacious than if it had been administered through a ten-foot pole.

I mention incidents of this sort to make clear the beginnings of some reactions which came to full statement years later.. Borden Parker Bowne did more than anyone else of his time to clarify the thinking of the Methodist Church as to central phases of religious experience. If he had not come from a ‘home where inner piety was soundly taught, and from a community where, in spite of such incidents as I have mentioned, the preachers effectively set forth sturdy moral and religious doctrine, and if he had not himself responded to that teaching, he would never have kept the fires of a devotion to Methodism burning through all the years. His own loyalty gave him a right to speak sharply about the dangers of the Methodist type of experience. “Religion,” he used to say, “is a dangerous drug unless it is wisely administered.” His own recollections furnished him with illustrations of wise and unwise administration.

All of which reduces at last to this—that Borden Parker Bowne had a normal and happy home life in his boyhood, with unusual opportunity in training in some insights which proved of value to him in his after religious and philosophical study. Perhaps we overdo the emphasis on the naturalness of life on the American farm of seventy-five or a hundred years ago. In some aspects the farmer’s life was quite as artificial in those days as city life. Yet there can be little doubt that being reared, if not on a farm in the present-day use of the term, at least under essentially rural conditions, was of significance for one whose career was to be in. philosophy. When Bowne announced his doctrine of what he called objective idealism there were enough of the half-baked critics to call out that such philosophy could only be the fine-spun intellectual web of a mind that had never known close contact with actual things. Kicking stones and pounding on the ground has been the favorite answer of crude common sense to idealism since the days of Doctor Johnson. Such common sense overlooks the force of the word “objective” as describing idealism. Bowne was never tired of remarking that in any sound idealism we must recognize an order outside of ourselves which we do not make but find, an order which has existence independent of us, an existence with meanings which may not be for us at all. The actual working with plants and weeds, the close observance of weathers and seasons, does not often make for idealistic philosophy. It is here altogether too manifest that we are dealing with a natural scheme of things which we do not make but find. For that objectivity Bowne had most thorough respect. Whatever the philosophy, he insisted that it must start from the actual world and never lose sight of that world.

There is only a word or two to be spoken as to the schoolroom education of those years. It was very simple and elementary. Until Borden Parker entered Pennington Seminary he had had only training in what we should call the “grades” and that was not of high order, judged by the later-day standards. Yet the schools then did somehow get youngsters pointed toward worth-while books. Bowne made Don Quixote so much his own that he fastened the stories of the knight’s exploits to scenes of his boyhood neighborhood that he might make them more vivid. The famous conflict with the sheep, in his child’s fancy, took place just beyond a bridge near his home! He seemed almost to have committed Gil Blas to memory. How often in later life he castigated officials, who advanced causes by undue and unreasonable pressure, with the story of Gil’s response to the tender appeal of the bandit, who, with a blunder-buss pointed full in Gil’s face, tearfully besought him for God’s sake to drop something into his hat!

The schools of the time, too, taught lessons of order which were important. There probably was not an especially worthy pedagogy in the unnatural quiet of the schoolroom, where whispering was a deadly offense, but some of the first glimpses into the iron rigidity of law came to our ancestors of three quarters of a century ago in the stiffness of schoolroom regulations. Judged by our “milder lights and softer airs” the old discipline was all wrong, but it seemed well enough then in teaching obedience to authority. There always was a trace of | iron in the blood of Bowne as a pedagogical disciplinarian. According to the custom in his boyhood he put in a winter teaching school after he had himself finished all the elementary work. He was then only a little over sixteen, and slight. There was in the school a notable rowdy who had driven out teacher after teacher, making it difficult for the school board to get anyone even to attempt to teach. The bully’s mirth when he learned that Borden Bowne was to be the new teacher was at high pitch, and all the youngsters were on tiptoe with expectancy, waiting for the first encounter. Sure enough, as young Bowne stood just in front of the rowdy’s desk one morning, the rowdy rose behind the desk and leaned toward Bowne with an insulting remark. Bowne seized the rebel by the back of the neck as he leaned forward, bent the body down till the posterior made a most excellent presentation for punishment, and then plied a rod so mightily that the bully fainted. It was a rough sort of pedagogy, to be sure, but it brought quiet and made possible keeping open the school.

At just about seventeen Borden Parker left home, accepting the invitation of friends in Brooklyn to live with them while working as the driver of a truck, or delivery wagon, for a grocer in Brooklyn to see “how he would like it.” The work was mostly done along the waterfront under what would now be the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember going with Bowne to look over the scenes of these early labors. I do not think that we found the store. We did find the stable where Bowne cared for the grocer’s horse and we found the house in which he roomed. He was content to look over the buildings from the outside. The recollections which seemed to be most vivid in his memory were of his desperate homesickness, of his pride in his quickly acquired skill in loading a truck so that it would “ride” best, and of his interest in the fiery directness with which teamsters would talk to one another, when one violated a rule of the road, or blocked traffic. Time and again I have seen him stop to survey critically a truck whose load was not trimmed aright, or to listen to comments made to one another by irate truckmen in the streets of Boston or New York. I think he considered the eloquence of the later days lacking in fire as compared with that of the earlier.

In spite of the homesickness of those first months away from home, Bowne felt then and always continued to feel the lure of the New York streets, though he soon relinquished the Brooklyn work in order to prepare for college. During the last ten years of his life he used to visit relatives who resided in what was called the Saint Mark’s section of Brooklyn, about five short blocks from the New York Avenue Methodist Church. He repeatedly walked from there to the Methodist Book Rooms at 150 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. I have known him to start down near Brooklyn Bridge and walk along on an East Side avenue up to the neighborhood of the Grand Central Station. I never could get him to see anything hopeless in East Side conditions, in those days of a quarter century ago. He always seemed to feel there was an optimism about East Side life which redeemed it from squalor. I could not help thinking that this optimism came partly out of contrast with European cities with which he was familiar, but more especially out of fondness for New York. In any case, he delighted to roam the streets of New York.

The late Dr. John Handley is authority for the following statement, which is confirmed by Miss Letitia Bowne, sister of Borden Parker: “At a Quarterly Conference in the Navesink Church, held October 19, 1867, presided over by the Rev. Dr. Elwood H. Stokes, the pastor, Dr. William T. Abbott, recommended Borden P. Bowne for local preacher’s license. In the Conference sat his father, Joseph Bowne, a local preacher and the oldest member of that body, and a brother, Joseph Bowne, Jr., the acting secretary of the meeting. His examination was greatly out of the ordinary. His readiness to answer all questions on the Discipline and doctrines of the church was pronounced. When asked if he had read the Discipline he answered, ‘I studied it as a boy.’ ‘To the question, ‘What do you think of it? he replied: ‘On the whole I regard . it as a very excellent little book, both for church government and for Christian helpfulness.’ His answers as to the doctrines were supported by Scripture, giving book, chapter, and verse. The presiding elder, Dr. Stokes, was never more surprised and interested in any examination he ever conducted than in this one.

“His first sermon was preached in his home church on Sabbath evening, December 29, 1867, from the text, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’”’ (Gen. 4. 9.)

Chapter II

N the year 1865 Borden Parker announced to his mother that he had concluded to go through college. ‘The father supplied the little money necessary to get the boy a

_“®- start at Pennington Seminary. Borden had set his mind toward New York University chiefly because that had been

near enough at hand to monopolize his field of vision in educa-

tional matters. When he was ready to enter, his brother,

William P. Bowne, owner of a grain and feed store in Jersey City, found work for him in the store which made it a

for him to pay the expenses of the college course.

Young Bowne had no idea how to go about preparing for college. He had studied nothing whatever beyond what were called the “common branches.” All he knew was to go ahead and get out the work for the entrance examinations. He did it all in less than a year of study by himself and at Pennington Seminary. In later years he used to say that he might have killed himself if he had not been blessed with immense vitality. His schedule during those months of preparation was fourteen hours a day for study,.one hour for meals, one for exercise and eight for sleep. ‘To be sure the entrance requirements were not as stiff as now, but think of acquiring any sort of knowledge of Latin and Greek, algebra and geometry in so short time! Bowne got more than a “sort of knowledge.’”’ He passed the entrance tests with distinction. It might seem that one studying at this rate would be left with a positive aversion to the courses taken, but not so Bowne. Probably the reason why he was able to do so much with so little physical strain was his avid interest in all the themes. There does not seem to have been any subject of importance which was not interesting to him. Some of the students of Bowne’s earlier classes at Boston University have said that during quiz periods, while the pupils were wrestling with examination problems, the Professor would be whiling away the time solving original problems in geometry. ‘Toward the close of his life Bowne used to say that all this was apocryphal. I am inclined to | think that the problems were not geometry as such, but mechanics, on which Bowne said that he “doted.” 'This fondness for mechanics served to good advantage in the discussion of cosmological problems in his Metaphysics, notably in the treatment of Newton’s laws of motion.