The World and the Individual, First Series

Front matter

THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL

Gifford Lectures Delivered before the University of Aberdeen

FIRST SERIES: THE FOUR HISTORICAL CONCEPTIONS OF BEING

Preface

PREFACE

The Lectures upon which this volume is based were delivered before the University of Aberdeen between January 11 and February 1, 1899. They appear in a decidedly more extended form than that in which they were delivered; and they have been subject to some revision. Lecture VII, in particular, has been much lengthened in the final preparation for publication. These differences between the lectures as read and the printed volume have seemed to me necessary, in order to complete my statement of the problems at issue, and of the solution that I offer.

The plan of the whole course is explained more at length in the opening lecture. Lord Gifford’s Will calls upon his lecturers for a serious treatment of some aspect of the problems of Natural Religion. These problems themselves are of the most fundamental sort; and in this first Series I have not seen my way clear to attempting anything less than a philosophical inquiry into first principles. The second Series, especially in its later lectures, will contain the more detailed application of these first principles to problems that directly concern religion. But the reader of the present lectures will not fail to discover how I define, in general terms, God, the World, the finite Individual, and the most fundamental relations that link them together. But these, as I suppose, are the essential problems of the Philosophy of Religion.

The philosophy here set forth is the result of a good many years of reflection. As to the most essential argument regarding the true relations between our finite ideas and the ultimate nature of things, I have never varied, in spirit, from the view maintained in Chapter XI of my first book, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. That chapter was entitled The Possibility of Error, and was intended to show that the very conditions which make finite error possible concerning objective truth, can be consistently expressed only by means of an idealistic theory of the Absolute, — a theory whose outlines I there sketched. The argument in question has since been restated, and set into relations with other matters, without fundamental alteration of its character, and in several forms; once in my Spirit of Modern Philosophy (in a shape intended for a popular audience, but with an extended discussion of the historic background of this argument); again, in the book called The Conception of God, where my own statement of the argument has the further advantages of Professor Howison’s kindly exposition and keen criticism; and still again, in the paper called The Implications of Self-Consciousness, published in the Studies of Good and Evil. In the present lectures this argument assumes a decidedly new form, not because I am in the least disposed to abandon the validity of the former statements, but because, in the present setting, the whole matter appears in new relations to other philosophical problems, and becomes, as I hope, deepened in its significance by these relations. The new statement, indicated already in the opening Lecture, is especially developed in Lecture VII, and is defended against objections in Lecture VIII.

While this central matter regarding the definition of Truth, and of our relation to truth, has not essentially changed its place in my mind, I have been doing what I could, since my first book was written, to come to clearness as to the relations of Idealism to the special problems of human life and destiny. In my first book the conception of the Absolute was defined in such wise as led me then to prefer, quite deliberately, the use of the term Thought as the best name for the final unity of the Absolute. While this term was there so defined as to make Thought inclusive of Will and of Experience, these latter terms were not emphasized prominently enough, and the aspects of the Absolute Life which they denote have since become more central in my own interests. The present is a deliberate effort to bring into synthesis, more fully than I have ever done before, the relations of Knowledge and of Will in our conception of God. The centre of the present discussion is, for this very reason, the true meaning and place of the concept of Individuality, in regard to which the present discussion carries out a little more fully considerations which appear, in a very different form of statement, in the Supplementary Essay, published at the close of The Conception of God. As for the term Thought, I now agree that the inclusive use which I gave to it in my first book is not wholly convenient; and in these lectures I use this term Thought as a name for the process by which we define or describe objects viewed as beyond or as other than the process whereby they are defined or described, while, in my Religious Aspect of Philosophy, the term, as applied to the Absolute, referred not only to finite processes of thinking, but also, and expressly, to the inclusive Whole of Insight, in which both truth and value are attained, not as objects beyond Thought’s ideas, but as appreciated and immanent fulfilment or expression of all the purposes of finite Thought. This usage seems to be less effective for purposes of exposition than that which I have tried to employ in this book. Besides, I now more emphasize the distinctions there already implied, while I surrender in no whit my assurance of the unity of God and the World.

As for the present discussion, it is useless to defend its methods to people who by nature or by training are opposed to all thoroughgoing philosophical inquiry. Such are nowadays accustomed to say that they are already well aware of the limits of human thinking, and that they confine themselves wholly to “the realm of experience.” It is useless to tell them that this book also is an inquiry regarding just this realm of experience. For such critics, after a fashion not unknown amongst people who think themselves to be “pure” empiricists, will of course know, quite a priori and absolutely, that there is nothing absolute to be known. Not for such critics, who may be left where God has placed them, but for still open-hearted inquirers, I may as well say, however, that, to my mind, the only demonstrable truths of an ultimate philosophy relate to the constitution of the actual realm of Experience, and to so much only about the constitution of this realm as cannot be denied without self-contradiction. Whenever, in dealing with Experience, we try to find out what, on the whole, it is and means, we philosophize. Our goal is reached, so far as the demonstrable truth is concerned, whenever we have found a series of propositions relating to the constitution of the realm of experience, and such that, as soon as you try to deny these propositions, you implicitly reaffirm them by your very attempt at denial. After you have found these propositions, you have, of course, a right to use them, more or less effectively, as a partial basis for special applications and results which will indeed remain, like all our human knowledge of particulars, more or less hypothetical. But your hypotheses about particular problems must be judged by themselves. Your body of central truth is subject only to the test just mentioned. And you call this truth “absolute” merely because you conceive that it bears this test. Whether it does so is a question of fact, not of authority. And every man must, in such a matter, look for himself before judging about what is offered to him.

As to the principal special features of this discussion, they are: (1) The definition and comparison of what I have called the Four Historical Concepts of Being. I believe this aspect of these lectures to be, in many respects, a novelty in discussion. (2) The form here given to the criticism of Realism in the Third Lecture. (3) The use made of the parallelism between the realistic and the mystical concepts of Being in the Fourth and Fifth Lectures. (4) The transition, in the Sixth and Seventh Lectures, from the concept of the Real as the Valid to that concrete conception of Being which, to my mind, constitutes Idealism. (5) The statement of the finite contrast and the final unity of the External and Internal Meaning of Ideas. (6) The concept of Individuality which is expounded in the Seventh and in the later lectures, and the reconciliation of the One and the Many proposed here and in my Supplementary Essay.

This Supplementary Essay itself, which my publisher has very self-sacrificingly allowed me to add to the present volume, contains my defence against the objections which Mr. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality seems to render so serious as obstacles in the way of any such account as mine of our concrete relations to the Absolute. My defence is itself but a very poor expression of the very deep and positive obligations which I owe to Mr. Bradley’s book, — a book without which much of what appears in my Lectures themselves could never have received anything like the present form. As a part of this defence, I have been led into a discussion of the concept of the quantitative Infinite; and in this portion of my investigation my obligations are indeed numerous, and are, in part, recognized in the notes to the Supplementary Essay. In particular, however, I have now to mention what there can only appear in a very inadequate fashion, viz. my special obligation to Mr. Charles Peirce, not only for the stimulus gained from his various published comments and discussions bearing upon the concept of the Infinite, but for the guidance and the suggestions due to some unpublished lectures of his which I had the good fortune to hear. I need not say that I do not intend, by this acknowledgment, to make him appear responsible for my particular opinions. My own present study of the concept of the Infinite may be justified by its effort to bring into connection a number of apparently unrelated tendencies of recent discussion, and to review the whole issue in the light of my own conception of what constitutes an Individual. The result, as I hope, may serve to justify some of the essential bases of my thesis as to the relations of God and Man.

I regret that Professor Ladd’s Theory of Reality appeared too late for me to take account of this important contribution to the problems of the present volume.

My thanks are due to my colleague, Professor Charles R. Lanman, for his translations of the passages from the Upanishads which appear in the lecture on Mysticism. I have also to thank my other colleagues, Professor Maxime Bôcher and Professor William F. Osgood, for kind suggestions as to the remarks concerning specifically mathematical topics in the Supplementary Essay and in the lectures on Validity. And my especial thanks also are owed to my wife, for invaluable aid in preparing my lectures for publication. That, after all, quite apart from the problematic issues discussed, plain errors doubt- less remain visible in text and in matters of fact, is something for which I alone am responsible. An index to both series of lectures is intended to accompany the Second Series, which will probably appear within a year.

Cambridge, Massachusetts,

October 30, 1899.

Notes

Lecture I

THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL

FIRST SERIES: THE FOUR HISTORICAL CONCEPTIONS OF BEING

LECTURE I

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEMS AND THE THEORY OF BEING

In the literature of Natural Religion at least three different conceptions of the subject are represented. The first of these conceptions regards Natural Religion as a search for what a well-known phrase has called “the way through Nature to God.” If we accept this conception, we begin by recognizing both the existence of the physical world and the validity of the ordinary methods and conceptions of the special sciences of nature. We undertake to investigate what light, if any, the broader generalizations of natural science, when once accepted as statements about external reality, throw upon the problems of religion. It belongs, for instance, to this sort of inquiry to ask: What countenance does the present state of science give to the traditional argument from Design?

The second of our three conceptions views Religion less as a doctrine to be proved or disproved through a study of the external world than as a kind of consciousness whose justification lies in its rank amongst the various inner manifestations of our human nature. Man, so this conception holds, is essentially a religious being. He has religion because his own inmost nature craves it. If you wish, then, to justify religion, or even to comprehend it, you must view it, not as a theory to be proved or disproved by an appeal to external reality, but rather as a faith to be estimated through reference to the inner consciousness of those who need, who create, and who enjoy religion. From this point of view the study of Natural Religion concerns itself less with proof than with confession, with a taxing of interior values, and with a description of the religious experience of mankind. A somewhat extended interpretation of this point of view treats the purely historical study of the various religions of mankind as a contribution to our comprehension of Natural Religion.

But a third conception of the study of Natural Religion remains. This third view identifies the doctrine in question with the fundamental Philosophy of Religion. It is the Nature of Things, viewed in the light of the most critical examination of our reason, that is now the object of an inquiry into Natural Religion. The problems at issue are, for this view, those of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, of Hegel’s Logik, — of all the undertakings that, in the history of thought, have most directly attempted the contemplation of Being as Being. For our first conception the student of Natural Religion, having accepted the natural knowledge of his time as valid, and not having attempted to delve beneath the foundations of that knowledge, seeks to interpret external nature in the light of religious interests. For our second conception Natural Religion is viewed simply as the voice of human nature itself, whose faith is to be expressed, whose ideals are to be recorded, whose will and whose needs are to be, above all, consulted and portrayed, since, for this view, the consciousness of those who believe in religious truth is, when once made articulate, its own apology. But, for our third conception, the office of the student of Natural Religion is to deal with the most fundamental metaphysical problems. He is for this view a thorough-going critic of the foundations of our faith, and of the means of our insight into the true nature of Reality.

All these three conceptions, however much they may differ, have in common what makes it proper enough to view them as conceptions of the study of Natural Religion. For they are all three concerned with religion; they can all alike be pursued without explicit dependence upon any creed as to a revealed religion; and finally, they are busied about some relation between the natural order of truth and the contents of religious doctrine. They differ in the sort of natural truth that forms their starting-point, or that limits the scope of the investigation which they propose. I suppose that no one of these various lines of inquiry will ever come to be wholly neglected. But their office is distinct. And I mention them here in order all the more clearly to say, at the outset, that our own business, in these lectures, is with the most neglected and arduous of the methods of studying the relations between religion and the ultimate problems of the Theory of Being. From the first, to be sure, we shall be concerned, in one sense, with human nature, as every philosophy has to be concerned. And in the latter half of this course the Philosophy of Nature will play a part in our investigation. But the central problem of our discussion will be the question: What is Reality?

I

In thus stating, in the opening words, the plan of these lectures, I do so with a full sense of the shadow that such a programme may, at the first glimpse, seem to cast upon the prospects of our whole undertaking. It is true that, in calling the fundamental problems of the Metaphysic of Religion relatively neglected, I do not fail to recognize that they are both ancient and celebrated, and that some of us may think them even hackneyed. It is certainly not uncommon to call them antiquated. But what I have meant by the phrase “relatively neglected” is that, compared with the more easily accessible fashions of dealing with Natural Religion, the strictly metaphysical treatment less frequently involves that sort of ardent hand-to-hand struggle with the genuine issues themselves that goes on when men are hopefully interested in a study for its own sake. It is one thing to expound, or even to assail, the theology of Hegel or of St. Thomas, or to report any of those various quaint opinions of philosophers in which even the popular mind often delights. It is another thing to grapple with the issues of life for one’s self. The wiser religions have always told us that we cannot be saved through the piety of our neighbors, but have to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. Well, just so the theoretical student of Natural Religion has to learn that he cannot comprehend ultimate philosophical truth merely by reading the reports of other people’s reasonings, but must do his thinking for himself, not indeed without due instruction, but certainly without depending wholly upon his textbooks. And if this be true, then the final issues of religious philosophy may be said to be relatively neglected, so long as students are not constantly afresh grappling with the ancient problems, and giving them renderings due to direct personal contact with their intricacies. It is not a question of any needed originality of opinion, but it is rather a matter of our individual intimacy with these issues.

And now, in recognizing the fact of the comparative neglect of the Theory of Being in the discussions of Natural Religion, I recognize also the motives that tend to make such an inquiry seem, at the first glimpse, unpromising. These motives may be expressed in the forms of three objections, namely, first, that such undertakings are pretentious, by reason of the dignity and the mystery of the topic; secondly, that they are dreary, by reason of the subtle distinctions and the airy abstractions involved in every such research; and thirdly, that they are opposed, in spirit, to the sort of study for which in our day the sciences of experience have given the only worthy model.

Such objections are as inevitable as they are, to lovers of philosophy, harmless. Philosophy necessarily involves a good deal of courage; but so does life in general. It is pretentious to wrestle with angels; but there are some blessings that you cannot win in any other way. Philosophy is an old affair in human history; but that does not make the effort at individuality in one’s fashion of thinking a less worthy ideal for every new mind. As to the dreariness of metaphysics, it is always the case, both in religion, and in thinking about religion, that, just as the letter killeth, and the spirit giveth life, so the mere report of tradition is dreary, but the inward life of thinking for one’s self the meaning within or behind the tradition constitutes the very coming of the Spirit of Truth himself into our own spirits; and that coming of the Spirit, in so far as it occurs at all, never seems to any of us dreary. As for the fine-drawn distinctions and airy abstractions, no distinction is ever too subtle for you, at the moment when it occurs to you to make that distinction for yourself, and not merely to hear that somebody else has made it. And no abstraction seems to you too airy in the hour when you rise upon your own wings to the region where just that abstraction happens to be an element in the concrete fulness of your thoughtful life. Now it chances to be a truth of metaphysics, as it is an experience of religion, that just when you are most individual, most alone, as it were, in your personal thinking, about ultimate and divine matters, you are most completely one with that universal Spirit of Truth of which we just spoke. It is then your personal process of thinking that both gives interest to the subject and secures your relation to the Reality. Hence not the universality nor yet the ultimate character of the principles of which we think, but rather our own sluggishness in thinking, is responsible for the supposed dreariness of the Theory of Being. As Aristotle observed, that Theory itself is what all men most desire. You may in these regions either think or not think the truth; but you cannot think the truth without loving it; and the dreariness which men often impute to Metaphysics, is merely the dreariness of not understanding the subject, — a sort of dreariness for which indeed there is no help except learning to understand. In fact, nobody can ever regret seeing ultimate truth. That we shall hereafter find to be, so to speak, one of the immediate implications of our very definition of Being. When people complain of philosophy as a dreary enterprise, they are then merely complaining of their own lack of philosophical insight. The lover of philosophy can only offer them his sincerest agreement, and sympathy, so far as concerns the ground of their own complaint. He too shares their complaint, for he is human, and finds his own unwisdom dreary. But he is at least looking lovingly toward yonder shining light, while they walk wearily with their backs to the Celestial City.

As to the supposed opposition between the methods of philosophy and those of the special sciences of experience, — it exists, but it does not mean any real opposition of spirit. Here are two ways of getting insight, not two opposed creeds. The very wealth and the growth of modern empirical research furnish especially strong reasons for supposing that the time is near when the central problems of the Theory of Being shall be ready for restatement. Our life does not grow long and healthily in one region, without being ready for new growth in other regions. The indirect influence of special science upon philosophy is sure, but does not always mean a logical dependence of philosophy upon the empirical results of science. Just so, pure mathe- matical science has no logical dependence upon physics. Yet we have all heard how largely physical science has influenced the lines of investigation followed by the modern mathematicians. Within the mathematical realm itself, pure Algebra, when once abstractly defined, is not logically dependent upon Geometry for its principles or for its theories, yet some theories of modern Algebra have actually developed largely under the spell, as it were, of ideas of an unquestionable geometrical origin. Now a similar relation, I think, will in future find the development of pure Philosophy, and in particular of Rational Theology, to the progress of the special sciences, both mathematical and empirical. I do not think it right to regard philosophy merely as a compendium of the results of special science. Philosophy has its own field. But on the other hand, to reflect upon the meaning of life and of science (and in such thorough-going Reflection philosophy consists), is a process whose seriousness and wealth must grow as our human life and science progress. And hence every great new advance of science demands a fresh consideration of philosophic issues, and will insure in the end a power to grasp, more critically and more deeply, the central problem of Being itself. Hence the more we possess of special science, the more hope we ought to have for pure Philosophy.

II

So much then for the most general definition and justification of the proposed scope of these lectures. I cannot forbear to point out the easily recognizable fact that, in thus defining the plan before us, I have merely tried to adhere, so far as I can, to the programme explicitly laid down by Lord Gifford. A study of religion is required of your lecturer, and Lord Gifford, as appears from the words of his Will, would himself have thought, above all, of studying religion not only as a matter of purely natural and rational knowledge, but primarily as a body of Ontological problems and opinions, in other words as, in its theory, a branch of the Theory of Being. It is of “God, the only Substance,” that your lecturer, if his Ontology so far agrees with Lord Gifford’s, will principally speak. Well then, I can best work in the spirit of Lord Gifford’s requirements if I explicitly devote our principal attention to the ultimate problems of Ontology, laying due stress upon their relations to Religion.

And now let me venture to sketch, in outline, the particular discussions by which I propose to contribute my fragment towards a study of the inexhaustible problems propounded by Lord Gifford’s Will. Programmes in philosophy, as Hegel used to say, mean far less than in other enterprises. But even here some sort of programme is needed to fix in advance our attention.

My precise undertaking then, in the following lectures, is to show what we mean by Being in general, and by the special sorts of Reality that we attribute to God, to the World, and to the Human Individual. These I regard as the problems of the ontology of religion. In every step of this undertaking I shall actually be, in a psychological and in an historical sense, dependent, both for my ideas and for their organization, upon this or that philosophical or theological tradition (well known to every student of philosophy); and therefore I must early introduce into my work a sketch of certain philosophical traditions in which we are to be especially interested. Here, of course, you might expect to find, as such an historical introduction to our later critical enterprises, either a summary of the history of the principal religious ideas, or some account of the technical history of the Philosophy of Religion itself. Yet for neither of these two very natural enterprises shall I have time. My very fragmentary historical discussions will be limited to an attempt to depict some of the principal conceptions concerning the ultimate nature of Being, in other words to sketch the history of what one might call the ontological predicate of the expression to be, or to be real, used as a means of asserting that something exists. I shall dwell upon the nature of Being, because to assert that God is, or that the World is, or even, with Descartes, that I am, implies that one knows what it is to be, or in other words, what the so-called existential predicate itself involves. Now it is true that the existential predicate, the word is used to assert the real Being of any object, is often viewed as something of an absolutely simple, ultimate, and indescribable meaning. Yet even if this view were sound, the ultimate and the simple are, in philosophy, as truly and as much topics for reflective study as are the most complex and derived ideas of our minds. Moreover, a great deal of popular religion seems to involve the notion that it is both easier and more important to know that God is, than to know, with any sort of articulation, What God is, so that if you express even a total ignorance of the Divine nature and attribute, there are some very traditionally minded people who will hardly dare to disagree with you, while if you express the least doubt of the assertion that God is, the same people will at once view you with horror as an atheist. Now this preference in much popular religious thinking for the ontological predicate in its purity is not an altogether rational preference. Yet we shall find that it is based upon very deep and even very worthy, if vague, instincts. It is true that if I pretend to know no attributes whatever, characterizing a given object X, I seem to have won very little by believing that X nevertheless exists. Yet the fondness for the Unknowable in theology has been to some extent supported by the dim feeling that even in asserting the bare existence of a being, and especially of God, I am already committed to extremely important attributes, whose definition, even if not yet overt, is already, however darkly, implied in my abstract statement. It is interesting, therefore, to study historically what men have supposed themselves to mean by the ontological predicate.

The basis having been thus laid in the history of the subject, our lectures, at various points in the historical summary, will have at some length to undertake a critical comparison and analysis of the various meanings of the ontological predicate. Such an analysis will constantly show us unexpected connections of these meanings with the concrete interests of religion. We shall find it with ontology, as it certainly is with ethics. People often regard moral philosophy as a topic very abstract and dry. And yet wherever two or three are gathered together indulging in gossip about the doings of their neighbors, their speech, even if it involves out-and-out scandal, is devoted to a more or less critical discussion, to an illustration, and even to a sort of analysis of what are really very deep ethical problems, — problems about what men ought to do, and about the intricate relations between law and passion in human life. Well, as even the most frivolous or scandalous gossip really manifests an intense, if rude concern, for the primal questions of moral philosophy, so our children and all our most simple and devout souls constantly talk ontology, discourse of being, face the central issues of reality, but know it not. Yet once face the true connection of abstract theory and daily life, and then one easily sees that life means theory, and that you deal constantly, and decisively, with the problems of the Theory of Being whenever you utter a serious word. This then is the reason why our ontological studies will bear directly upon the daily concerns of religion.