Part 17

We are no longer sure of very much, and among the things we are most doubtful about is just this distinction between what man has made and what he has found. To prove this, no one need go further afield than just to consider himself. Surely I may say of myself, my character, my private life that it is man-made, for am not I the man that made it? It expresses all my ideals so far as I could realize them, and never would it have been just what it is had I not moulded it that way. And yet, who among us has not sat up of nights with that strange being he calls himself, and wondered however he came to bring so uncompanionable a companion home with him and where the devil he found him? Ernst Mach tells an amusing anecdote at his own expense. One day he was mounting the steps of a bus when he noticed at the other end of the aisle a man’s face peering into his. He had no more than asked himself “Where have I seen that degenerate looking pedagogue before?”--when he discovered he was looking into a mirror.

And who, wearying of this sorry companion, has not tried to change him for a better, only to find himself after a longer or shorter while with the same old fellow at his elbow--a trifle more set in his ways, perhaps, but otherwise little altered? Of the sadder sort of autobiographies I should put the Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel easily first. Not from pain or poverty, not from the malice of other men nor any disgrace of outer fortune did he suffer, but just from the being that was himself. “From the beginning,” he writes in 1858, “I have been a dreamer fearing to act--in love with perfection and as incapable of renouncing her demands as of meeting them. In short, a mind of wide vision and a character of no strength; curious to feel all that is to be felt, unfit for any action.” “Here,” comments his friend, Edmond Scherer, “we have Amiel’s cross. He wanted--he wanted to want--to will, and will-power was wanting in him. He cursed the inner spell that was on him, but he could not shake it off. After each attempt to break it he fell back into himself again, more bewildered, more weary and bruised than ever. In the waging of these combats the years wore on, until the moment was near when Amiel would have to acknowledge to himself that the circle was definitely closed behind him.” Would you say that Amiel had made his destiny or found it? Would you say that any of us is of his own workmanship, or does our life slowly unfold itself to us as to Oedipus his fate?

What is thus suggested by self-examination is confirmed by the study of other lives. The friend whose wayward course has made your affection anxious for him--can you, with the best will in the world, change him from himself? Some, out of bitterness of their experience, have said it would be easier to repeal the law of gravitation than in any way to alter human destiny. Others to be sure are more sanguine, and will not give up seeking a way so long as there is a will to save. But whether, even when they appear to succeed, it is not rather their patience that is rewarded by being allowed to live long enough to witness what would have come about without any of their doing, or whether character is more truly a thing made by human effort than a thing found and unfolded to our observation--respecting these matters there is divergence of opinion.

Now, confidence in our ability to tell what we have made from what we have found once shaken, there is no saying how far our questioning mind may carry us. No saying, I mean, in the case of any individual man--for it is easy enough to tell the general history of this doubt and uncertainty. It reaches all the way from those who think that back of all apparent creating by finite beings there is a Nature with its laws that was never made, but can only little by little be made out. Let us call those who think in this way “Realists.” Historic uncertainty then reaches all the way from the realists to those who think that heaven, the earth, and all that in them is, have no reality save as they are the thought and work of finite minds. We will call these thinkers “Idealists.” From realist to idealist and back again, through all intermediate phases, the dialectic of history swings; but it does not merely mark time therefore, it also measures progress. It is of one moment--I think a rather interesting moment--of this progress that I would speak in due order. Let this, then, be my prologue--and so to the tale.

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In 1907, William James wrote of the philosophy to which he had devoted the last ten or twelve years: “I fully expect to see the pragmatist view,” so he called this philosophy, “run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then, it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally, it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters.”

Looking back over the years that have lapsed since this was written, I cannot say that James’s prophecy as to the future of pragmatism has been fulfilled; but that the world, at least the world in which I have lived, has lost its first sense of the absurdity of pragmatism is undoubtedly true. No one was more bitten than I with this first feeling of the absurd, unless it was some other of my kind among those who gathered of an evening in 1896 to listen to a reading of James’s now famous little essay on “The Will to Believe”--the essay which, so far as James was concerned, opened the campaign for pragmatism. James had written the paper that winter as a lecture to be delivered before the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, and I cannot recall what the occasion was that brought a small number of us graduate students at Harvard together to hear it re-read; but I do recall that we were very much bewildered and not a little shocked by the reading.

Not all, I dare say, who afterwards read this “Will to Believe” will have experienced any such shock and bewilderment, nor will many have felt what we found so upsetting in a bit of writing that was, as writing, certainly, altogether delightful. But you must know that this particular gathering was made up of students who had been brought up in that theory of truth which I have called the realistic, and their habitual attitude toward truth was such that they held their truth the truer the more they were its discoverers and the less they had had to do with the making of it.

There were, to begin with, the laboratory men. Now, a laboratory is a school of the most rigid discipline--a discipline whose first principle is “keep yourself out of your experiment.” I think you will understand what I mean by this when I say that a scrupulous experimenter about to take conclusive readings in a matter that promises to be of some value to science will, if possible, get another observer ignorant of their import to take these readings for him, lest something of his own excitement and anxiety corrupt his very touch, sight and hearing, and warp his result to his will. And, what was this James was defending--a “Will to Believe”? No wonder some wag of the lot dubbed it “The Will to Make Believe”! And what was this again James was saying--“For purposes of discovery ... indifference is to be less highly recommended, and science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the game.... On the other hand, if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the positive fool.” Had James addressed a gathering of the Sons of St. Patrick, in the sense of demonstrating to them that the Pope of Rome was the Beast mentioned in Revelations, he might have called forth a noisier response, but none less sympathetic than ours.

One who would invite a man to bring his enthusiasms, his likings and dislikings, in short, any will of his other than the will to persevere, into a laboratory with him would naturally not forbid him to keep all this equipment by him in whatever pursuit of truth he might engage, whether of history, economics, morals or religion. And just as James shocked the realist spirit of that little Harvard gathering of a score of years ago, so have his writings fallen afoul of realism wherever they have been read--and perhaps few writers on philosophy have been more widely read than William James. This is to have made enemies indeed, for the genius of realism, the spirit of the seeker who would find what he might find and call it truth, naked, unclothed upon with garments of human interpretation, has sometime breathed in every science and every art.

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Take the realistic historian now--but you will doubtless know this character better if I show him to you, and the effect he produces upon other temperaments, than if I merely describe him as a type. Among the most entertaining of the reviews that Anatole France contributed to “Le Temps,” in the late 80’s and early 90’s, is one that he devotes to a work “tout à fait solide et puissant” of Louis Bourdeau, “L’Histoire et les Historiens, essai critique”--a critical essay on history considered as an objective science--“in which,” as France remarks, “M. Bourdeau puts works on history in a class with fables and Mother Goose tales.

“‘History,’ says M. Bourdeau, ‘is not and cannot be a science.’ The reasons he gives for this have not failed to make an impression on my mind, and perhaps there is a special reason why they should impress me--the sum of which is that I had tried to point out these reasons before he did. I had thrown out suggestions of them flippantly and in a spirit of badinage ten years ago in a little book of mine called the ‘Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.’ I set no store by them then, but, now that I see they are worth something, I am in haste to claim them.

“‘In the first place,’ I said in this little book,--‘In the first place, what is history? History is the written presentation of past events. But what is an event? Is it any fact whatever? No, sir. It is a noteworthy fact. Now, how is the historian to judge whether a fact is noteworthy or not? He judges according to his taste and caprice, follows his own idea, in short, proceeds after the manner of an artist. For facts do not of their own accord divide themselves into historical facts and non-historical facts. Again, a fact is something extremely complex. Does the historian represent facts in all their complexity? No, that is impossible. He will represent them stripped of the greater part of their detail, consequently truncated, mutilated, different from what they were. As to the interrelation of these facts, the less said of that the better. If a so-called historic fact is brought about (which is possible) by one or more non-historic facts--and for that very reason unknown--how can the historian establish a relation between these facts?’

“These, if I am not mistaken, are the fundamental ideas upon which M. Louis Bourdeau rests his right to refuse to history any scientific value....

“Indulgent minds find a way to get along with the treacheries of history. This muse is false, they think, but she no longer deceives us when we have found out that she is deceiving us. Constant doubt shall be our kind of certitude, they say. Prudently, we will go our way from error to error toward a relative kind of truth, for even a lie is some kind of a truth....

“But as for M. Bourdeau, he does not wish to be deceived even knowingly, and he absolutely repudiates history. He drives her from his door as deceitful, shameless, dissolute, having sold herself to the powerful, a courtesan in the pay of kings, an enemy of the people, wanton and false.”

So far, the picture of non-objective history in all its ugliness--history as it has been written in the past. But now the history of the future, objective history, realistic history--ah, that will be quite another story. It is Bourdeau who speaks: “The historians of the future will have for their first task the gathering and interpreting of statistical data concerning the common events of life. The activity of thought always expresses itself in acts, and the only way to take account of these is, after having classified them under definite functions, to set them down at the moment of their happening, to count them under given conditions of population, of time and place, then to compare these results whether simultaneous or successive, to note the variations of the function and to make the inductions that they warrant. Thus, and only thus, may we some day know what the multitudes that make up humanity are doing.

“This is the way we must write history from now on, not only in the young countries which, like Australia, Canada, La Plata, are founded under new conditions, but even in the old societies of Europe that, like the others, hope to work out for themselves an ideal order of labor, of peace and of liberty. For one who has reached our point of advancement, any other way of studying history is inexact and childish. A reform is coming, and will either be made by the historians or in spite of them. The age of literary historiography is about to close; that of scientific history about to open. When it shall be able to reconstruct for us the life of a people in the way we have indicated, we shall see that no story can offer so much of interest, of instruction and of grandeur.”

I do not know that every one is bound to share Bourdeau’s enthusiasm for statistical history. Perhaps some will hope with France that they may not be spared to read history written in this way, and will solace themselves the meanwhile with their Thucydides and Herodotus. But at least, all will have caught the martial tread of realism resounding through these passages.

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In the laboratory sciences the objective spirit sits as a strong man in his castle, impregnable, unattackable. There we see him dreaming dreams of conquest, the fair domain of history, in which we may include economics, seems ready to fall to his bow and spear for the world’s endless betterment. And what lies beyond? Lands that are the fairest, richest, most desired of all; and yet which will take all his daring, all his courage, all his steadfastness and an undying enthusiasm to make his own. They are the lands of morals and religion.

I like those chapters of history that tell how the spirit of the experimenter sets out to conquer the realms that have so long been ruled by masters with whom he can have no sympathy--tradition, coming out of the vague mists of the past; superstition, born of human ignorance; mysticism, inarticulate, ecstatic, offering reasons for itself that are reasons only to those who ask for none. To win all this for objectivity, for the kingdom of the kind of truth that believes only because the experiment says so, the experiment that any unbeliever may repeat for himself and abide by the result--this is surely a brave adventure, and whether they meet victory or defeat one cannot refuse one’s enthusiasm to those who have had courage to make it.

Of those who set forth in this way, I should call David Hume the father. Would you, for example, know what is right and what is wrong? Then turn not to inspired writings, but travel widely through the civilizations of different countries and different times and seek as you would seek any other historical fact, first, what people called good and what they called bad. Then, if underlying the vast contradictions of historic precept you find nevertheless an agreement in the purpose these precepts, set in their native settings, served, why, then, you will have arrived at the only meaning good and bad can have.

Or, would you know whether this is God’s world or no? Turn not to reputed miracles, and indulge not in idle dreams of another world in which the faulty humanity and utter finiteness of this one will have found its supplement and correction; but, take just the order and purpose of this world as your best experience reveals it to you. It may be that this seeking will leave you dark, puzzled, uncertain; but better the unrest of judgment suspended than the dream-like peace of faith unfounded.

It fortifies my soul to know That, though I perish, truth is so.

wrote Arthur Clough. And, again, he has written:

To spend uncounted years of pain, Again, again and yet again, In working out in heart and brain The problem of our being here; To gather facts from far and near, Upon the mind to hold them clear, And, knowing more may yet appear, Unto one’s latest breath to fear The premature result to draw-- Is this the object, end and law, And purpose of our being here?