What may I hope? an inquiry into the sources and reasonableness of the hopes of humanity, especially the social and religious

Front matter

WHAT MAY I HOPE?

By GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD

WHAT CAN I KNOW?

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Nature and Sources of Hope ... 1

II. Rights and Limitations of Hoping . . 35

Chapter I

T is recorded as a tradition of that semimythical philosopher, Thales of Miletus, ^ that on being asked what possession of all those within the grasp of man is most universal, he answered: "Hope; for they who have it, often have nothing else." Now Thales lived six and a quarter centuries before the Christian era. He was assigned the headship of the Seven Wise Men as an evidence of the esteem in which his practical wisdom and statesmanlike ability were held. But he was also credited with much mathematical and astronomical knowledge; and he was the first to turn the currents of Greek thinking, in its efforts to explain the world of experience, away from an appeal to the spiritual influences of the gods, toward the efficiency of

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natural forces that were, from the origin of things, combined with the matter out of which things were believed to have been made. Evidently, then, Hope stood in his thought as a foremost efficient psychological force for explaining the actions of the human race. Something like this same view was concealed in the saying of Goethe who declared, "Hope is the second soul of the unhappy"; — for this would seem to imply that when all the life has gone out of an individual or a nation, if only the emotion of hoping can be revived, another efficient active principle may be incorporated into the same dead body.

Such language as has just been quoted is indeed figurative and does not serve strictly to define either the nature or the sources of the various attitudes of the mind which we are accustomed to characterize by the one word* Hope. It does, however, suggest certain important inquiries.

Among inquiries into the nature and sources of hope the most obvious one, perhaps, concerns itself with the universality of the phenomenon, and with the reasons for its universality. That the wise Thales was right when he declared the power of hoping to be the most universal possession of mankind, we have indeed no available way of proving by induction. We cannot collect a toll of the emotional experiences of all mankind. But, then, if such a toll were necessary to any kind of either theoretical or practical knowledge of human nature, it could not be provided. Nor is psychology alone in its deficiency of power to establish by such an induction its most trustworthy universals. There is not a positive science that can lay down any one of its most generally credited laws or principles on a basis of facts collected from an observation of all, without exception, of the particular cases. It is not by absolutely complete induction, any more than by absolutely convincing demonstration, that we learn the nature and the ways of any portion of the vast Reality, in which we live and move and have our being. We need not, however, much hesitate to proclaim as a fact the universality of hope, and its place among the emotions under the influence of which every man looks upon the complex of things and of other men which constitutes the

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individual's environment. All men hope, — for something, to some extent, and at some times; indeed, we are probably safe in saying that everybody is at all times hoping for something or other.

To turn this discovery of fact — assuming, as we seem justified in doing, that it is a fact — into a form of words which has slightly more the smack of science, we may say: Hoping is natural for man. It is not at all unlikely that we shall have to leave the final explanation of the experience in the large, without any very much more definite explanation. It would indeed be rather mortifying to the scientific pride of the psychologist to be obliged to accept this fact without further explanation; — as, for example, in the celebrated case of the reason why "dogs delight to bark and bite." Of this, the well-known account is: "because it is their nature to." But the delight which the animal has in this form of activity, and the defensive value of it as expressing and securing "the will to live," may help us vastly in the understanding of the reasons why the animal acts in this way; and, also, why it is well for him and for his species that he does act in this way. Something like this attempt at a scientific justification of human hopes may quite properly be adopted in the course of our future discussions. Just now, however, let the simple statements stand undisputed and unrebuked: It is a fact that all men do hope; and it is therefore natural for man to hope.

Like everything else which is true of men in general, the dependence of hoping on the individuality of every member of the species is quite as obvious as its universal naturalness. Indeed, the habit of hoping is, of all emotional habits, about the most conspicuously temperamental. This truth is evinced in all the various classifications proposed by psychology for the different main kinds of temperaments. Whatever variations in number and names and description may characterize the proposed lists, they are all pretty sure to make prominent the so-called "sanguine temperament." But the leading mental and emotional characteristic of the sanguine temperament is its hopefulness. Indeed, to be sanguine and to be habitually

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hopeful, in the popular language, amount to about the same thing.

The dependence of the habit of hoping on the temperament of the individual is obviously great; but it is, though not so obviously, yet in reality, rather complicated. First, we have to notice that every temperament, and perhaps especially the sanguine, is influenced both by external and by physiological conditions. There are changes in the temperature, in the electrical and physical conditions of the atmosphere, in the landscape and in the distribution of the clouds, that have no small and negligible influence on the hopes of the majority subject to these changes. But even where the influences of this general physical sort are most marked in the case of the majority, the principle of individuality is by no means wholly abrogated or set at naught. In a severe storm at sea, when the multitude of unfortunates, even the most sanguine of them under ordinary circumstances, are greatly depressed and weighed down with frightful forebodings, there may be others who are buoyed up, or even made exultant, by any one of a number of different kinds of hope.

There are few so little observant of their own changes in mental states, and of the obvious causes of the changes, as not to have learned something, before they come to years of maturity, about the dependence of their own hopes on their own bodily conditions. I am not speaking here of the rise and fall of the invalid's hopes of recovery in their sequence upon the daily changes in the symptoms of his disease. My thought is rather to call attention to the significance and certainty of the experience, that all one's hopes, of every sort and degree of intensity and consistency, are influenced by sometimes obvious, but often obscure and scarcely definable, physiological conditions. It is even possible to make out a rough exhibit of certain classes of diseases, one distinguishing symptom of which is the marked influence they have upon the depression or the exaltation of the patient's hopes. It would not be true to say that no one dies happy whose disease is located below the diaphragm. Nor can it be proclaimed as true without exception that those afflicted with tuberculosis of the lungs are invariably hopeful. In all cases, the tempera-

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ment, which is something belonging to birth and heredity, although influenced in every individual's case by the changes of environment and of physiological conditions, determines in an important way the changing moods with which are met the changing physical and organic conditions.

On even this more purely physical ground of the emotional reactions — of hope and of all the rest — the permanent influence and value of the psychical characteristics must be chiefly taken into the account. Whatever allowance must be made for the ancestral and the environmental influences upon the different temperaments, it must be admitted that we are comparatively safe in our inferences, only when we can appeal to immediate experience to discover what the different so-called temperaments are actually like, and what they may be expected to impel the individual to think and to do. But more than habits of thought, are habits of emotion, and of the action determined by emotion, dependent upon the different temperamental mixtures. We choose the term, "temperamental mixtures"; for few temperaments are quite pure examples under any one of the ordinary schemes of classification. Most individuals are, the rather, when described by their psychical characteristics, — and this, in spite of the many impressive figures of speech derived from organic types, is the most tenable manner of describing them, — most individuals are of "mixed temperament."

When, then, we speak of a hopeful or a desponding temperament, of a sanguine or a phlegmatic person, we may, in the use of each one of these four types, be describing a quite different mixture, if regarded from the psychological point of view. For example, one man may be sanguine, and so generally inclined to be hopeful, because he is a man of strong will; another, because he is a man of weak will. One individual may be despondent, on account of a lack of certain moral affections; another on account of an excess of other moral affections. Weakness and strength of intellect, in certain specific cases, may operate in the same divergent way. The man who sees clearly the laws and principles involved in the future settlement of any issue, though of sanguine temperament,

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may be less hopeful in this particular case than is the man who, although of a generally melancholic and doubtful temper, is unaware or thoughtless with regard to these laws and principles. It was the cautious farmers of Maine who were most easily beguiled into investing their hard-earned savings in a scheme for extracting gold from sea- water. Excessive sleepiness or sluggishness, and excessive irritability or "wide-awakeness," may operate in different individuals, in particular circumstances, to make one man hopeful and another despondent. "Indolent phlegm" may be mistaken for "sanguine hope."

The variety of individuality which characterizes the universality of the habit of hoping, and of the conditions external and internal which modify the habit, is not, of course, peculiar to this attitude alone, toward the physical world and toward life, of the human mind. It is true of every mental and emotional attitude; and it is to be ascribed to the very nature of personal life and to the laws and principles of personal development. The hopes of one man can no more be precisely the same as the hopes of another man, than can his thoughts or his beliefs. Indeed, on account of the very vague and evanescent, and as well largely irrational nature of much human hoping, we should naturally expect that men would differ in respect of their hopes more than in almost any other way. Even at this preliminary and quite undefined stage of our investigation of the question, What may I hope? it is not improper to reply : You may possibly be quite reasonable in cherishing a considerable stock of hopes of your very own. But then the complement of this is equally true: Every wise man will do well once for all to recognize that a vast number of hopes, not altogether or not at all inappropriate to other persons, would surely end in disappointment if cherished by him. Not every individual is warranted in having the same hopes.

Perhaps the next most obvious characteristic of hope is a certain uniqueness. To be sure, all emotions that succeed in being analyzed out of the infinite complexity of the life of feeling, and so of getting an established name for themselves, can on that ground alone claim a certain

[in

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amount of distinction. If they were not somewhat unlike other emotions of the simpler sort, or a special compound of elements distinguishable in the more complex emotions, they could scarcely claim a name and a place for themselves in the psychology of human feeling. But all this makes the facts still more remarkable. Hope is, according to Thales — a remark which we have agreed to accept as substantially true — the most universal of human possessions. Hoping is an activity, a state or a function (we do not now care which of these two words is employed) of the human consciousness. Psychology calls itself the science which describes and explains the facts of consciousness. And yet among the hundreds of works on psychology, large and small, from varied points of view and in many languages, the merest mention of the topic, "Hope," is scarcely to be found in one of a hundred. There are scores of pages in the more voluminous books, and even large separate volumes, written on Fear, — in connection with which Hope, if mentioned at all, is mentioned only to be placed in contrast. The psychologist Bain, in his six hun-

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dred large pages on the "Emotions and the Will," has less than two pages on the emotion of hope. Even within this brief space he manages to make the mistake of analysis in identifying it with a certain kind of belief, "tested simply by the elation of its mental tone." He also remarks (p. 531) that the "antithesis of Hope is, not Fear, but despondency; of which the highest degree is Despair." Now this is very much the same as to say that the opposite of hope is non-hope; for despondency is, in this use of the word, simply the withdrawal of the promise (spondeo) which hoping has made, or would make, and the ensuing condition of hopelessness into which this withdrawal plunges the soul.

But while Professor Bain is not successful in providing an "antithesis" for the emotion of hopefulness, he is quite in the right when he denies that the emotion of fear affords, in a way to meet the demands of psychological analysis, the desired form of opposed feeling. Love and hate, attraction and repulsion, courage and cowardice, and numerous other pairs, are both popularly and critically bound to-

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gether as opposites in the same class of mental attitudes or tendencies. They rule each other out of the mind or of the seat of control for the practical life. They contend together, and conquer from each other more or less of the domain ruled over by the will; but they do not quietly coexist. The emotions of Fear and Hope, however, do not stand in such relations of contrast, antithesis, or opposition. For they do not belong to the same class of emotions. And if we make a brave attempt at forcing them into a place side by side under one of many headings or rubrics, — such, for example, as the animal emotions, emotions of the intellect, emotions of action, the aesthetic emotions, the moral emotions, etc. — we find ourselves pretty completely baffled at the very start.

Fear, in its lower forms, is one of the most distinctly animal of all the emotions. For this reason, books like those of Angelo Mosso bearing this title, can find an abundance to say about the action of the reflex nervous system, of the circulation of blood in the brain, and the beating of the heart, in producing this emotion; and about the tremblings, physiognomy of pain, and insane frights and terrors which the emotion in its more intense forms produces. In men, as in dogs and other animals, and even in fishes and beetles, fear seems for the most part to be a nearly, if not quite completely, physical affair. Of all the emotions, it lends itself best to the quite inadequate and now discredited Lange-James theory, that the feeling is essentially nothing but the complex of sensations arising from the physiological condition of the peripheral organism. Doubtless, in not a few, perhaps in the majority of cases of sudden and vague fears, or seizures of almost insane terror, the elements of sensational origin are the principal factors in the emotion itself. But this is decidedly not so in the human feelings which we designate as our fainter or our firmer and more elevated hopes. In many of the animal fears, it is quite impossible to tell with any approach to precision, what we are afraid of. Hope seems, however, to demand some sort of clearness of the mental picture of the object for which the hope is entertained. One may indeed speak of vague longings, and of aspirations and ambitions that are as yet

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far from defining themselves in the consciousness of the Self that experiences them. These may arouse and stimulate the development of certain hopes; and these hopes may be doomed either to fulfilment or to disappointment. But it is not good psychology to call these longings, aspirations, and ambitions themselves by the term "hopes." There must be some rather distinct mental activities of the higher order of intellect and imagination, under the guidance of associations which are themselves born of previous experiences of pain or pleasure, in order that hope may spring up in any mind.

We cannot, then, speak of animal hopes as we may somewhat freely speak of animal fears. Probably none of the lower animals is capable of any conscious state even faintly resembling a man's hope. The dog over whose head we hold the tempting piece of meat, although his jaws are dripping with the secretions excited by a pleased expectancy, is not the mental and emotional counterpart of the man who looks forward to even the physical reward of his efforts at the realization of a deferred hope. Nor if we throw the animal back into the condition of restlessness which preceded by an hour the time of feeding, do we excite within it feelings resembling those of the most closely allied of human hopes. On the other hand, if dog and man are startled by some threatening noise, or are made to witness the snatching away of the alluring physical comfort by robber paws or robber hands, their first emotions of fear and anger are almost precisely, both physiologically and psychically, alike.

In saying this it is, of course, not meant that the emotion of human hope is without any physiological basis or physiological effects. But any cautious and thoughtful student of the subject, even when equipped with the most delicate apparatus for solving the problem, would be slow to say just what that basis is, and what those effects are. All emotional conditions tend to affect the heart and general circulation, to raise slightly the temperature of the brain, to produce changes in the muscular system, and to alter the physiognomy. In the cases of more exalted conditions of hopefulness, all these physiological phenomena may be observed. In the more prolonged and quiet conditions of the moral

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and religious hopes, the detection of the physical basis and physical reverberations would be much more difficult, even if it could be accomplished at all. We may grant, as we must, that this is just as true of intellectual and spiritual fears, or of moral anger when kept in control, as it is of the conditions and the effects of hoping. But the contention is only partially justified. For in all cases of the intensifying of a hope to the highly emotional stage, it is the allied forms of emotion which seem to be chiefly responsible for the most marked of the physiological effects. If, for example, the hope gets a sudden and great accession through the added belief that it is now quite surely to be realized, the emotions of joyful surprise spring up with great strength. And these emotions are distinctly and powerfully influential over the condition of the organs, both central and peripheral. In fact, these emotions, when very intense, often produce a dangerous and even fatal shock. On the other hand, if the hope lingers and grows fainter and less probable of any realization in spite of all one's wisest plans and utmost efforts to obtain the thing [18]

hoped for, there naturally ensues a condition of faint-heartedness which may culminate in despondency or even in utter despair. But despondency and despair are not so much the opposite of hope — as we have already said — as they are the negation of hope. Melancholia of every sort has quite uniformly a distinctly marked physical causation and physical expression. It may, or it may not, follow upon the loss or the diminution of some cherished hope. This is largely a matter of temperament and training in self-control. However it comes about, it is usually responsible for many evil effects upon the physical organism. This fact does not throw much additional light upon the physiological basis of hope, — that is, beyond what everybody knows by common rumor, if not — as is extremely likely — by his own experience, — namely, that a hopeful condition of mind favors the improved functioning of all the vital organs, conspicuously those concerned in circulation and digestion.

The somewhat unique character of hope as disproving the effort to make it the antithesis of the much more distinctly animal, physio-

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logical (and so explicable on physical grounds), emotion of fear may be illustrated in yet other ways. The more intellectual and imaginative, not to say spiritual, the fear becomes, the more possible it seems to be, not to make it the adequate antithesis of hope, but to lessen certain of the sharper contrasts of the two. When Kingsley affirms:

"He who jears Virtue fears Him whose likeness Virtue is'*:

or Southey makes Joan of Arc confess,

"I have wrestled vainly with the Lord And stubbornly, I fear me";

they mean to depict attitudes of mind of a very subtle and complex sort, which contain not a few of the elements of thinking and imagination, that much more nearly resemble those entering into the higher forms of hoping. "Fearing Virtue," and so fearing Him whose likeness Virtue is, does not, indeed, amount to precisely the same thing as hoping for the rewards of virtue; and fearing a Holy God is not precisely the same thing as placing one's hopes in such a God. Nor when Joan of Arc is fearsome of having wrestled with the Almighty both [20]

too stubbornly and in the end vainly, is she altogether in the condition of the soul who wrestled with an equal stubbornness, and yet would not confess failure, but kept on saying: "Hope thou in God, who is the health of my countenance and my God." But certainly, these attitudes of fear toward their objects are not the "antithesis" of the attitude of hope toward the same objects. Indeed, the fears and the hopes depend upon essentially the same conceptions of those objects. They involve and supplement each other, if they are not precisely identical. There are not a few things which we both fear and hope for at the same time, according to the particular aspect of them which happens to be prominent or which we voluntarily assume to regard. There are the fearsome hopes of the young girl at the thought of becoming a bride; or of a married woman at the thought of giving birth to a child. These fears and hopes do not stand apart, or move the soul by their contrasts, so much as they blend in one complex attitude, the elements of which keep changing in intensity, toward the same future even, according

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as that event presents this or that of its many aspects before the expectant mind.

There is another curious evidence of the unique character of the mental state of hoping. There is a great dearth of synonyms for the word Hope. In the richest of the modern languages we are furnished with only a single word from each. If you want to express the idea of hope you can do it in a single word only by using the one word hope. Yet there is truth of fact and profounder truth of ethics, in what Epictetus said: "A ship ought not to be held by one anchor, nor life by a single hope." In fact, the lives of men in general are "held" by a great variety of ever-shifting hopes. And yet we have only one word to express what is the essential characteristic of them all.

If now we go to our dictionaries to obtain more exact information as to just what hoping is, we are told: "It is desire accompanied by expectation;" "cheerful expectation;" "a confident looking for a future event." But this definition is more than ordinarily disappointing. For, at least some expectation is not simply the "accompaniment" of desire in forming the complex emotion of hope; it is of the very essence of what we mean when we speak of hope. The accompaniment of some expectancies is anything but cheerful, anything but an end which we desire or for which we hope. Indeed, in attempting to specify the ingredients of the compound medicine for the mind which hoping proves itself to be, we must certainly add something important to the desire and the expectancy. This something additional is the feeling of trust. Without trusting something or somebody — and indeed, as a rule, without trusting many things and more than one person — we cannot indulge ourselves in hoping. This is illustrated by the fact that, while the French word for hope (esperance) seems rather to lay emphasis on the element of expectation, the German word (Hoffnung) lays more emphasis on the element of trust. The German word, therefore, seems of all three most suggestive of the more spiritual nature of certain hopes which have for their objects the beliefs and faiths of morality and religion.

These three forms of feeling — desire, expec-

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tation, and a certain attitude of trust — seem, therefore, to constitute the more noteworthy affective factors of the complex emotion of Hope. The intensity of each one may greatly vary in the individual cases of hoping. It habitually does vary in dependence on the temperament of the individual indulging or cherishing the hope; and also, in dependence on the nature of the object which it is hoped to realize. Desire may be intense, expectation small, and confidence weak. This is the modification of the emotion with which the physician and friend look upon the dying man and quote in a faint-hearted way the motto of despondency: "While there is life, there is still hope."

The complex emotion of hoping is, however, invariably a sort of blend of the various affective factors which compose it; it cannot dispense with any of them, although it is not the precise equivalent of any one or two of the three. Like all instances of psychical chemistry, the nature of the compound can be known only through experience; it cannot be predicted a priori, as it were. Take before the most exalted intellect the proposition: With so many grains of desire, mix so many of expectation, and to this add so many more of a certain kind of trust: What will the compound be? and no answer could possibly be forthcoming. We must have the experience of hoping in order to know what it is to hope.

A more accurate description of the nature of hope requires some analysis of its intellectual sources. Thus far we have only dealt with the emotional side of human hopes, and have vaguely implied that they, of course, since all men "do the trick" of hoping, must have their roots in human nature. We have used the makeshift of an explanation in saying, "It is natural for all men to hope." But in considering the unique character of this so universal emotion, its dependence in a special way on the intellect and the imagination has been at least indicated. When compared with many other forms of feeling, such as both the popular and the scientific language associate most closely with it, hope appears to be less animal, more intellectual, and, therefore, prospectively fitted for more exalted spiritual uses. How true this seeming is may speedily be discovered when it

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is understood in what relations hoping stands toward knowing and believing. Of course, no one would think of identifying hoping with a "kind of" knowing; for the approaches to a perfect knowledge lead in a direction away from the increased intensity and efficiency of merely hoping. The identification of hope with a "kind of" belief, which Professor Bain suggests, has already been sufficiently refuted. Yet we cannot understand the nature of hope as an experience of emotion unless we take chiefly into our account the way in which hope lays its basis, so to say, in knowledge; but especially in beliefs and faiths, personal and moral.

Without some knowledge that has reference to the object of the hope, and to the probable or possible means of its attainment, hope can have no foundation in experience. Intellect and imagination, by their joint working, must create the object of desire. In this work of creation, they are, as a matter of course, dependent upon the knowledge acquired through past experiences of observing, learning, inferring, and whatever other means are available for obtaining the particular desirable knowledge.