Part 23

The immense dialectic of the thought of these men has presented so many aspects of the religious problem that it must have left in the reader a sense of confusion if not of bewilderment. Such a baffled mood comes on every thoughtful student, not once, but again and again, as he reviews the past and tries to estimate the value of its gain; to consider what has definitely perished with its time, what perhaps marks development and points somewhither.

Let me then suggest as well as may be done in a few words some things these men have put behind them and some things to which, with all their mutual opposition, they seem resultantly to point.

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In the first place, their common assumption has been that the way of arriving at religious truth was by reason or experience, not by what is commonly called “revelation.” There is nothing new or modern in this attitude of mind. The earliest critics of popular religion share the feeling that (as Xenophanes wrote, in the sixth century B.C.):

By no means at the beginning did the gods reveal all things to mortals, But mortals themselves, by inquiry, in time have made gradual progress.

And even among those who did not mean to be critics, we find some devoutly maintaining that divine revelation brings naught that reason and experience cannot confirm; naught, then, they could not have reached: “Non alia est philosophia, i.e., sapientiae studium, et alia religio,” writes John Scotus in the ninth century. “Quid est aliud de philosophia tractare nisi verae religionis regulas exponere? Conficitur inde veram esse philosophiam veram religionem conversimque veram religionem esse veram philosophiam.” (De praedest. proem.)

But those who from revelation turn to reason and those who turn to experience for evidence in all matters, are of two different tempers of mind and habits of thought. The first we found represented in Spinoza with his Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata; the second in Hume with his methods of natural history and human history.

Of these two schools, I think we may regard the first as definitely closed. That is, to establish the existence of God by logic alone and as a necessity of thought, would only be dreamed of today by those who meant by God, by logic, and by thought’s necessity something quite different from anything the seventeenth century rationalist could have meant by those terms.

Yet to say that the method of a Spinoza is dead, is not to say that his contribution to the spiritual problems with which he dealt is naught. Nothing could be more important to our whole attitude toward these problems than Spinoza’s insight: The scientific demand that we treat nature as an inviolable mechanism and the ethical demand that the human element in nature remain a free agent are consistent. It can readily be seen that all the rest of one’s thoughts about the world must hang upon one’s acceptance or non-acceptance of this reconciliation of mechanical necessity and living freedom. (It must not be supposed, however, that all later thought was agreed that Spinoza had effected this reconciliation; perhaps the present writer is without company in thinking that Spinoza’s indications in this sense may be followed to a clear and satisfactory issue.)

If the method of rationalism has lost meaning for us, do we then abide in the confidence that experimental science must find all that is to be found of an object for religion to attach itself to? To my thinking, no! Or rather, the meaning of experience and with it of empirical science has been so altered by later reflection that the relation between human desire and human finding is no longer conceived to be that austere separation which a Hume, a Clifford or a Huxley made the basis of intellectual honesty and even of moral honor.

There is nevertheless one result of the empirical philosophy which it is hard to believe we shall ever set aside. Whatever we may have come to think experience means, those who have once entered into the spirit of these clear thinkers will not lightly abandon the idea that experience is one. There is not for most of us one kind of experience that confirms the law of falling stones and revolving planets, another unrelated kind that gives us a sympathetic but inarticulate insight into life and its ways, and yet another which in incomparable theophanies reveals to us another world. In a word, empiricism has taught us to accept the postulate that whatever the nature of our beliefs, their meaning must be communicable, their evidence must be demonstrable by one to another.

What has happened to change things since Hume’s day is, first of all, just a deeper searching into the meaning of experience itself, with perhaps this finding: that the reality our empirical science reveals to us is not merely a thing found and received but also a thing willed and made. Kantian criticism it was that suggested the part played by the knower in the formation of the thing known. This knower was not merely informed by experience as to the world he had chanced on, but of himself he informed his world. Imperfect, disconnected and unconvincing as were Kant’s efforts to state and illustrate this conception, it is nevertheless to him that one turns for the first suggestion of that idealism whose more recent expressions have been illustrated in the chapter on Pragmatism.

Meanwhile, really unaffected by this development of method are Schopenhauer’s gloomy findings and Nietzsche’s exaltation of the might of man. Just as the facts of life as he observed it left Hume unable to point to anything in experience that could guide life religiously, so these facts as Schopenhauer more fully took them in left life irreligious and blind. Again, it was but what he took to be a broader experience that led Nietzsche to conceive the destiny and perfectability of life to lie within the control of life itself, and it is only a still broader view of experience that robs this philosophy for us of what inspiration it had and leaves it but a gospel of gritting-the-teeth.

Yet we may not lay aside these two “findings” regarding life without noting how deeply each has seen into the human heart. If the insight of each is directly contradictory to the insight of the other, it is because the human heart is in contradiction with itself.

It can listen, this heart of man, to the voice of Schopenhauer crying for peace. It can understand this voice even to the point of feeling that the peace of those who have ceased to be is happier than the being of those who have lost hope of peace. Not indeed for us is the “melius est ipsum esse quam non esse” of older simpler times.

But on the other hand, Nietzsche would not make the appeal he does if man did not shrink from every vision of peace that has ever been offered to him, as from something worse than nonentity. Indeed we “envy not the dead that rest....

“What peace could ever be to me The joy that strives with strife?”

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Thus it would seem that the philosophy which alone can bring to pass that gladness of the moment which comes not from its content, but from what there is mixed in it of fulfilment and of promise--that philosophy must give validity to two theses:

(1) Reality must in all its aspects be shown to be such a thing as human effort may make and mould.

(2) This effort must set before itself an ideal in which are consistently included all that is genuine in the old ideals calling themselves Peace and War.

If the first of these theses was the topic of the chapter on Pragmatism, the second was that which inspired the conception of Progress. Only if to each moment of life there is vividly present the sense that it is a moment of creation, and equally present a satisfaction in the vision of what is to be created, can the moment be a joyous one. Not joyous in a way to wring from us a “Verweile doch! du bist so schön!” But joyous with that quality which would let our Ave be a welcome to the hoped for, our Vale a benediction on a promise left behind.

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If our Modern Thinkers have done aught to help us so to pass a moment, why, so, let them pass.

Finis

INDEX

à Kempis, Schopenhauer and, 167.

Amiel, 217.