Part 18

Over these verses Clough has written: “Perchè pensa? Pensando s’invecchia.”

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Why think, indeed, when thinking leaves one old--so old, so cold, so sadly wise? That thinking--the realist’s way of thinking--does leave one in melancholy mood may be no objection to thinking in this way; but it may not be ignored as a fact of history. Realism’s hymn of triumph is written by the best of its poets and the most sincere of its prophets--Leconte de Lisle. One does not attempt to translate a Leconte de Lisle, but the thought of the final verses of his poem on the Southland may be put in some such way as this--

Man, if with heart full of joy or bitterness Thou go at noonday through these radiant fields-- Flee! Nature is empty and the sun consumes; Nothing here is alive, nothing sad, nothing joyous.

But if having put tears behind thee and laughter Thou be turned to forgetfulness of this troubled world, No longer knowing how to pardon nor how to curse, And would taste a last sad volupté--

Come! The sun speaks to thee a glorious language; Lose thyself in its implacable flame And return slow-footed to the vile city of men, Thy soul seven times steeped in divine nothingness.

It is like that. This wondering in a world we did not make and cannot change, in which all our creating is illusory--a chance trivial expression of what the world has made us--with no other purpose in our wandering but

For to admire and for to see, For to be’old this world so wide.

--why yes, the fulness of such experience comes as near as can be to bringing us to a seven-fold sense of the néant divin.

Well, when a man’s philosophy has turned bitter to his tongue and hangs heavy on his heart, there are three things he may do. He may abide by the consequences of his philosophy, and seeing no fault in the premises accept the conclusion with all valiance. Or, he may rebel against all logic and reason and trust that sympathies and antipathies are safer guides to truth than any evidence could be. Or, finally, he may examine the premises anew. It is, I must confess, only to the last--to the reasoners and critics who go patiently to work to re-examine old beliefs--that I lend a respectful ear. But I do not know that I can begin an account of the backward swing from such extreme realism as I have pictured to such extreme idealism as I can tell only part of before I close, better than by letting the mere spirit of unreasoning revolt against this selfless objectivity express itself.

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With an exquisite insight into the psychology of those he calls “Wir Gelehrten,” and with no care for the truth or error of the ways of the objective spirit, Nietzsche registers his revolt against all this spirit stands for. “However gratefully we may still welcome the objective spirit,” he writes in his “Jenseits von Gut und Böse,” “in the end we must learn to put some caution into our gratitude and some restraint on the enthusiasm with which selflessness and impersonality of mind have come to be extolled as ends in themselves, as an emancipation and an enlightenment. The objective man who no longer curses or upbraids, the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct after a thousand whole or half failures has at last come to full growth and blossoming, is surely the most precious tool there is; but his proper place is in the hands of a stronger man than he is. We say he is an instrument--he is a mirror, he is no end in himself. The objective man is indeed a mirror. Accustomed to subject himself to all that is to be known, without any other pleasure than such as the knowing, the mirroring gives, he waits till something comes his way, then spreads himself delicately before it so that the light foot-steps and ghostly passing of spirit things may not be lost to his surface and integument. What there is of a person still left in him seems to him accidental, often arbitrary, oftener still disturbing; so much has what was his very self become a medium through which pass and in which are reflected foreign forms and happenings. If he tries to think about himself at all, it is an effort for him and more often than not a failure. He changes easily; he tries to grasp his own needs, and only then is he clumsy and awkward. Perhaps it is his health that bothers him, or the petty pent-up character of wife or friend, or the lack of companions and companionship. Oh, yes, he tries to think out what is the matter with him. No use! Already his thought has swept on to the more general case, and tomorrow he will know as little as he did yesterday what’s to be done about it. He has lost serious interest in himself, time spent on himself is wasted. He is cheerful, not for want of things to worry about, but for want of fingers and hands to lay hold on his trouble. His way of taking whatever turns up, his sunny unconstrained hospitality to anything that comes along, his way of wishing everybody well, his dangerous indifference to the difference between yes and no--ah, how often he has to pay for these his virtues! And, as just a man, he is too often taken for the caput mortuum of these virtues. Would you have him love or hate--I mean love or hate as God, women and brutes understand love and hate--why, he will do the best he can and give what he can. But no one should be disappointed if this is not much; if just here he shows himself ungenuine, unattached, unreliable--rotten. His love is thought out, his hates are trumped up and rather a tour de force, little side issues and exaggerations. He is only genuine when nothing prevents him from being objective. His mirroring and everlastingly even soul can no longer say ‘yes,’ no longer say ‘no.’ It imposes nothing on anything, neither does it upset anything. It says with Leibnitz, ‘Je ne méprise presque rien.’”

If in this passage Nietzsche reveals his delicate antipathy for a character we had all been taught to worship, in others he shows himself a pragmatist before that word had been heard of. The philosopher for him is no wanderer of the seas, accepting what shores he comes upon whether they smile on him or frown. For Nietzsche, the philosopher is a Caesarian conqueror who has his way with truth, and truth is such a thing as a strong man may have his way with.

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But, “I am not of those of whom one asks ‘why?’” Nietzsche has somewhere written, and this is so true that I can use him for no more than a vehement example of spleen. If I am to enter upon the path of a more or less reasoned reaction against that objectivity we have all sometime held sacred, I must turn to those of whom one can ask “why?” And, notably, to William James.

Now, if I do turn to James to ask him “why?”--Why is not the realist, with all his sad heroism and resigned courage, the noblest and best that man has imagined?--he answers, or I take him to, Because realism is a philosophy of little faith! Faith it is that makes worlds, realistic science has only the wit to acknowledge and the strength to suffer what faith has wrought. Bold to endure, it is timid to change, and a world in the making needs its makers, needs its poets and actors more than it needs audience or spectator. At the bottom of the realist’s brave heart lurks an abiding fear--the fear of making a fool of himself. But a world in the making like a battle in the fighting cries out for fools and the foolhardy. Faith risks to the point of folly, and because all making anew is a colossal risk, let us have colossal faith.

Here, if I am not mistaken, you have the principal difference between the realism that went before and the pragmatism that came after. The faith which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner. For there are such things, the pragmatist contends, as faiths that realize themselves, beliefs that come true only because they are firmly held and courageously acted upon, hopes that would never have been fulfilled had not he who held them gone ahead in the confident expectation that they would be fulfilled. Take, James would have you, just that familiar class of questions of fact, “questions concerning personal relations, states of mind between one man and another. Do you like me or not?--for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt [as the realists say] ad extorquendum assensum meum, ten to one your liking never comes. How many women’s hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they must love him! He will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence, and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification.”

These be but trifling affairs of commonplace life if you will, but the imagination sweeps easily on from the relation of man and man to all that man’s work which is done shoulder to shoulder. “A social organism,” James goes on, “of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before anyone else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train robbing would never even be attempted.”

Have you ever, O patient reader, in the heat of a political campaign for what you thought were better things met with that cool chilling intelligence that hastens to warn you against trying to change human nature? As it was in the beginning it is now and ever shall be, gangs without end. Amen! And he is right, this unduped and undupable intelligence is right--but on one condition only: The world will always be as it was at the beginning if it is exclusively inhabited by unduped and undupable intelligences--by realists, in short. Or, have you ever tried to refresh your tired soul with what the Germans have written of Realpolitik? If so, you will already know a great deal of what pragmatism is not. It is not a philosophy of the “what never has been never can be” temper of mind.

“There are cases,” James puts it, “where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which would say [with Huxley] that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality into which a thinking being may fall.’...”

I am afraid there is about the pragmatist something of that dangerous citizen who will not hesitate on occasion to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire and shatter it to bits, full of the faith that it can be remoulded closer to the heart’s desire.

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“But now,” James returns to his argument, “these are all childish human cases, and have nothing to do with the great cosmical matters, like the question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to that....

“To most of us religion comes in a way that makes a veto on our active faith illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having a personal form. The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active centers on our own account. We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld unless we met the hypothesis half way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who, in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn,--so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance. This feeling ... that by obstinately believing that there are gods ... we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the being and essence of the religious hypothesis.”

I do not lay this passage before you as an example of clear thinking and cogent reasoning. Who does not find it baffling, elusive, leading to no kind of action, must have a mind differently constituted from mine or from any with which I am more intimately acquainted. It is, if you please, the groping of a faith that feels it has a right to exist, but does not know as yet what is right for it to do. All of which is most unpragmatic--not at all practical. But perhaps this very quality, this manner of James’s of feeling his way through the dark en tâtonnant, with his heart’s courage for his only light, is what most endears him to our age. We sit with Zarathustra midst shattered tables of the law, and our awkward fingers cannot grave new ones hurriedly. We fumble, we hesitate, we begin again. We fumble, we hesitate, but we do, if we are idealists, begin again.

Now, one of the new things we have tried is just this manner of meeting the universe half way in the matter of religious faith. And this trial has been no interchange of philosophical abstractions; but a struggle of very living men. To tell about it will perhaps illustrate better than anything else the appeal pragmatism made to some and the offense it gave to others.

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We have all known, though doubtless our fathers knew him better, that studious theologian who, as proof of a devout life’s industry, left behind him a Testament worn to something like its elemental dust. He was a realist in temperament, and sought God and God’s meaning in documents as an historian might seek to reconstruct some character of the past from the archives. He was supplemented in his labors by learned indefatigable searchers of other remains of the past from whose ruins they sought to bring corroborative testimony. He was opposed only by other students who had pored over their Testaments with equal devotion, if to opposite purpose, and by other archaeologists who had searched the ruins with equal pains, if with other result. But protagonist and antagonist alike of the Christianity into which we were born were realists. Neither dreamt that the existence or non-existence, the benevolence or cruelty, the oneness or manyness of God were matters with which his personal wishes and strivings, his finite wantings and not wantings could have anything to do. If you had suggested to either that perhaps God was still in the making and that those who would know Him must strain their eyes toward the future, not keep them fixed on the past--it is a question which would have been first to put you down as an impious fellow and a blasphemer.