doctrine of unexperienceable, unknowable “Things in Themselves.” And as if this were not enough, they identify Truth with relationship to this unknowable. Thereby in behalf of the notion of Truth in general, they land in scepticism with reference to the possibility of any truth in particular. The pragmatist _is_ bound to deny _such_ transcendence.
(2) That he is thereby landed in pure subjectivism or the reduction of every existence to the purely mental, follows only if experience means only mental states. The critic appears to hold the Humian doctrine that experience is made up of states of mind, of sensations and ideas. It is then for _him_ to decide how, on _his_ basis, he escapes subjective idealism, or “mentalism.” The pragmatist starts from a much more commonplace notion of experience, that of the plain man who never dreams that to experience a thing is first to destroy the thing and then to substitute a mental state for it. More particularly, the pragmatist has insisted that experience is a matter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and re-adjustments, of co-ordinations and activities, rather than of states of consciousness. To criticise the pragmatist by reading into him exactly the notion of experience that he denies and replaces, may be psychological and unregenerately “pragmatic,” but it is hardly “intellectual.”
_Pupil: Objection Three._ You remind me, curiously enough, of a contention of my old instructor to the effect that the pragmatist, when criticised, always shifts his ground. To avoid solipsism and subjectivism, he falls back on things independent of ideas, adducing them in order to pass upon the truth or falsity of the latter. But thereby he only covertly recognizes the intellectualistic standard.
Thus he swings unevenly between a denial of science and a clamorous reiteration, in new phraseology, of what all philosophers hold.
_Teacher: Reply._ Your words have indeed a familiar sound. Apparently, the average intellectualist has got so accustomed to taking truth as a Relation at Large, without specification or analysis, that any attempt at a concrete statement of just what the relationship is appears to be a denial of the relation itself; in which case, he interprets an occasional reminder from the pragmatist that the latter is, after all, attempting to specify the nature of the relation, to be a surrender of the pragmatist’s own case, since it admits after all that there is some relation!
However that may be, the pragmatist holds that the relation in question is one of correspondence between existence and thought; but he holds that correspondence instead of being an ultimate and unanalyzable mystery, to be defined by iteration, is precisely a matter of cor-respondence in its plain, familiar sense. A condition of dubious and conflicting tendencies calls out thinking as a method of handling it. This condition produces its own appropriate consequences, bearing its own fruits of weal and woe. The thoughts, the estimates, intents, and projects it calls out, just because they are attitudes of response and of attempted adjustment (_not_ mere “states of consciousness”), produce their effects also. The kind of interlocking, of interadjustment that then occurs between these two sorts of consequences constitutes the correspondence that makes truth, just as failure to respond to each other, to work together, constitutes mistake and error--mishandling and wandering. This account may, of course, be wrong--may involve a maladjustment of consequences--but the error in the account, if it exists, must be specific and empirical, and cannot be located by general epistemological accusations.
_Pupil: Objection Four._ Well, even admitting this version of pragmatism, you cannot deny it still contravenes common sense; for, according to you, the correspondence that constitutes truth does not exist till _after_ ideas have worked, while common sense perceives and knows that it is the antecedent agreement of the ideas with reality that enables them to work. If you make the truth of the existence of a Carboniferous age, or the landing of Columbus in 1492, depend upon a future working of an idea about them, you commit yourself to the most fantastic of philosophies.
_Teacher: Reply._ May I recall to your attention the accusation of “shifting ground” when hard pressed? The intellectualist began, if I remember correctly, with conceiving truth as a relation of thought and existence; has he not, in your last objection, substituted for this conception an identification of the bare existence or event with truth? Which does he mean? How will he have it? The existence of the Carboniferous age, the discovery of America by Columbus are not truths; they are events. Some conviction, some belief, some judgment with reference to them is necessary to introduce the category of truth and falsity. And since the conviction, the judgment, is as matter of fact subsequent to the event, how can its truth consist in the kind of blank, wholesale relationship the intellectualist contends for? How can the present belief jump out of its present skin, dive into the past, and land upon just the one event (that _as_ past is gone forever) which, by definition, constitutes its truth? I do not wonder the intellectualist has much to say about “transcendence” when he comes to dealing with the truth of judgments about the past; but why does he not tell us how we manage to know when one thought lands straight on the devoted head of something past and gone, while another thought comes down on the wrong thing in the past?
_Pupil._ Well, of course, knowledge of the past is very mysterious, but how is the pragmatist any better off?
_Teacher._ The reply to that may be inferred from what has already been said. The past event has left effects, consequences, that are present and that will continue in the future. Our belief about it, if genuine, must also modify action in _some_ way and so have objective effects. If these two sets of effects interlock harmoniously, then the judgment is true. If perchance the past event had no discoverable consequences or our thought of it can work out to no assignable difference anywhere, then there is no possibility of genuine judgment.
_Pupil._ You have, perhaps, anticipated my next objection, which was that upon the pragmatic theory (by which truth is constituted by future consequences) there are no truths about what is past and gone, since in respect to that ideas can make no difference. For, I suppose, you would say that the difference made is in the effects that continue, since ideas may work out to facilitate or to confuse our relations to these effects. Nevertheless, I am not quite satisfied. For when I say it is true that it rained yesterday, surely the object of my judgment is something past, not future, while pragmatism makes all objects of judgment future.
_Teacher: Reply._ You confuse the content of a judgment with the _reference_ of that content. The content of any idea about yesterday’s rain certainly involves past time, but the distinctive or characteristic aim of judgment is none the less to give this content a future reference and function.
_Pupil: Objection Five._ But your argument requires an absurd identification of truth and verification. To verify ideas is to find out that they were already true; or possessed of the truth relation prior to its discovery in verification. But the pragmatist holds that the act of finding out that ideas are true creates the thing that is found. In short, you confuse the psychology of finding out with the reality found out.
_Teacher: Reply._ Many intellectualists have now gone so far as to admit that _verification_ is the testing of a judgment by the consequence it imports, the difference it makes--its working. But they still deny any organic connection between the “antecedent” truth property of ideas and the verification (or “making true”) process.
Surely they admit either too much or too little. (i) If an idea about a past event is already true because of some mysterious static correspondence that it possesses to that past event, how in the world can its truth be _proved_ by the _future consequences_ of that idea?
Why is it that the intellectualist has not produced any positive theory about the relation of verification to his notion of truth?
(ii) Moreover, if verification consists in the experimental working out of a belief, the intellectualist thereby admits that his _own_ theory of truth can be _known_ to be true only as it is verified by its workings. But if the theory that truth is a ready-made static property of judgments _is_ true, how in the world _can_ it be verified by making any specific differences in the course of events? Everywhere we have to proceed _as if_ the pragmatic theory were the right one.
(iii) If he admits that the pragmatic theory of verification is true, what meaning remains to the statement that the idea had the truth property in advance? Why, simply that it had the property of _ability to work_--an ability revealed by its actual working. How can a given fact be an objection to the pragmatic theory when that fact has a definitely assignable meaning on the pragmatic theory, while upon the anti-pragmatic theory it just has to be accepted as an ultimate, unanalyzable fact?
As to your remark about verification being merely psychological, I have something to say. Colleagues of mine are steadily at work in various laboratories on various researches, forming hypotheses, experimenting, testing, corroborating, refuting, modifying ideas. One of them, for example, recently put an immense pendulum in place in order to repeat and test Foucault’s experiment with reference to the earth’s rotation.
Do you regard such verification processes as merely psychological?
_Pupil._ I don’t know. Why do you ask?
_Teacher._ Because if the objector means that such experimental provings are _merely_ psychological, he has of course relegated to the merely psychological (wherever that may be) all the technique of all the physical sciences--a rather high price to pay for the confutation of the pragmatist. The intellectualist is thus in the dilemma either of conceding to the pragmatist the whole sphere of concrete scientific logic or else of himself regarding all science as merely subjective?
Which horn does he choose?
_Pupil: Objection Six._ I noticed a moment ago that you spoke of the pragmatic theory of truth being true. Surely the pragmatist does not live up to his reputation of having a sense of humor when he claims assent to his theory on the ground that it is true. What is this but to admit intellectualism?
_Teacher: Reply._ My son, we are evidently nearing the end. Naturally, the pragmatist claims his theory to be true in the pragmatic sense of truth: it works, it clears up difficulties, removes obscurities, puts individuals into more experimental, less dogmatic, and less arbitrarily sceptical relations to life; aligns philosophic with scientific method; does away with self-made problems of epistemology; clarifies and reorganizes logical theory, etc. He is quite content to have the truth of his theory consist in its working in these various ways, and to leave to the intellectualist the proud possession of a static, unanalyzable, unverifiable, unworking property.
_Pupil: Objection Seven._ Nevertheless, the pragmatist is always appealing to the judgments of others to corroborate his own judgment.
Surely this admits the principle of a judgment that is correct, true, _in se_.
_Teacher: Reply._ The pragmatist says that judgment _is_ pragmatic, _i.e._, originated under conditions of need for a survey and statement, and tested by efficiency in meeting this need. And then you think you have refuted him by saying that any appeal to judgment is intellectualistic! Such begging of the question convinces me that the radical difficulty of the intellectualist is that he conceives of the pragmatist as beginning with a theory of truth, when in reality the latter begins with a theory about judgments and meanings of which the theory of truth is a corollary.
_Pupil: Objection Eight._ Nevertheless, you are endeavoring to convert your opponent to a certain theory. Surely that is an intellectual undertaking, and in theory (at least) the theoretical criterion, as Mr.
Bradley has well said, must be supreme.
_Teacher: Reply._ A little reflection will convince you that you are going around in the same old circle. Since men have to act together, since the individual subsists in social bonds and activities, to convert another to a certain way of looking at things is to make social ties and functions better adapted, more prosperous in their workings.
Only if the pragmatist held the _intellectualist’s_ position, would he appeal to other than what is ultimately a practical need and a practical criterion in endeavoring to convert others.
_Pupil: Objection Nine._ Still the pragmatic criterion, being satisfactory working, is purely personal and subjective. Whatever works so as to please me is true. Either this is your result (in which case your reference to social relations only denotes at bottom a _number_ of purely subjectivistic satisfactions) or else you unconsciously assume an intellectual department of our nature that has to be satisfied; and whose satisfaction is truth. Thereby you admit the intellectualistic criterion.
_Teacher: Reply._ We seem to have got back to our starting-point, the nature of satisfaction. The intellectualist seems to think that because the pragmatist insists upon the factor of human want, purpose, and realization in the making and testing of judgments, the impersonal factor is therefore denied. But what the pragmatist does is to insist that the human factor must work itself out in _co-operation_ with the environmental factor, and that their co-adaptation _is_ both “correspondence” and “satisfaction.” As long as the human factor is ignored and denied, or is regarded as _merely_ psychological (whatever, once more, that means), this human factor will assert itself in irresponsible ways. So long as, particularly in philosophy, a flagrantly unchastened pragmatism reigns, we shall find, as at present, the most ambitious intellectualistic systems accepted simply because of the personal comfort they yield those who contrive and accept them. Once recognize the human factor, and pragmatism is at hand to insist that the believer must accept the full consequences of his beliefs, and that his beliefs must be tried out, through acting upon them, to discover what is their meaning or consequence. Till so tested, he insists that beliefs, no matter how noble and seemingly edifying, are dogmas, not truths. Till the testing has been worked out very completely and patiently, he holds his beliefs as but provisional, as working hypotheses, as methods:--and he recognizes the probability that, as additional modes of testing develop, more and more so-called truths will be relegated to the category of working hypotheses--till the dogmatic mind is crowded out and starved out. At present, the ignoring by philosophers of the part played by personal education, temperament, and preference in their philosophies is the chief source of pretentiousness and insincerity in their systems, and is the ground of the popular disregard for them.
_Pupil._ What you say calls to mind something of Chesterton’s that I read recently: “I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth.
Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.” You would say, if I understand you aright, that to fall back upon a supposed necessity of the “human mind” to believe in certain absolute truths, is to evade a proper demand for testing the human mind and all its works.
_Teacher._ My son, I am glad to leave the last word with you. This _enfant terrible_ of intellectualism has revealed that the chief objection of absolutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal (or “subjective”) factor in belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the personal milk in the absolutist’s cocoanut.
BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES[26] I Beliefs look both ways, towards persons and toward things. They are the original Mr. Facing-both-ways. They form or judge--justify or condemn--the agents who entertain them and who insist upon them. They are of things whose immediate meanings form their content. To believe is to ascribe value, impute meaning, assign import. The collection and interaction of these appraisals and assessments is the world of the common man,--that is, of man as an individual and not as a professional being or class specimen. Thus things are characters, not mere entities; they behave and respond and provoke. In the behavior that exemplifies and tests their character, they help and hinder; disturb and pacify; resist and comply; are dismal and mirthful, orderly and deformed, queer and commonplace; they agree and disagree; are better and worse.
Thus the human world, whether or no it have core and axis, has presence and transfiguration. It means here and now, not in some transcendent sphere. It moves, of itself, to varied incremental meaning, not to some far off event, whether divine or diabolic. Such movement constitutes conduct, for conduct is the working out of the commitments of belief.
That believed better is held to, asserted, affirmed, acted upon. The moments of its crucial fulfilment are the natural “transcendentals”; the decisive, the critical, standards of further estimation, selection, and rejection. That believed worse is fled, resisted, transformed into an instrument for the better. Characters, in being condensations of belief, are thus at once the reminders and the prognostications of weal and woe; they concrete and they regulate the terms of effective apprehension and appropriation of things. This general regulative function is what we mean in calling them characters, forms.
For beliefs, made in the course of existence, reciprocate by making existence still farther, by developing it. Beliefs are not made _by_ existence in a mechanical or logical or psychological sense.
“Reality” naturally instigates belief. It appraises itself and through this self-appraisal manages its affairs. As things are surcharged valuations, so “consciousness” means ways of believing and disbelieving. It is interpretation; not merely existence aware of itself as fact, but existence discerning, judging itself, approving and disapproving.
This double outlook and connection of belief, its implication, on one side, with beings who suffer and endeavor, and, its complication on the other, with the meanings and worths of things, is its glory or its unpardonable sin. We cannot keep connection on one side and throw it away on the other. We cannot preserve significance and decline the personal attitude in which it is inscribed and operative, any more than we can succeed in making things “states” of a “consciousness” whose business is to be an interpretation of things. Beliefs are personal affairs, and personal affairs are adventures, and adventures are, if you please, shady. But equally discredited, then, is the universe of meanings. For the world has meaning as somebody’s, somebody’s at a juncture, taken for better or worse, and you shall not have completed your metaphysics till you have told whose world is meant and how and what for--in what bias and to what effect. Here is a cake that is had only by eating it, just as there is digestion only _for_ life as well as _by_ life.
So far the standpoint of the common man. But the professional man, the philosopher, has been largely occupied in a systematic effort to discredit the standpoint of the common man, that is, to disable belief as an ultimately valid principle. Philosophy is shocked at the frank, almost brutal, evocation of beliefs by and in natural existence, like witches out of a desert heath--at a mode of production which is neither logical, nor physical, nor psychological, but just natural, empirical. For modern philosophy is, as every college senior recites, epistemology; and epistemology, as perhaps our books and lectures sometimes forget to tell the senior, has absorbed Stoic dogma.
Passionless imperturbability, absolute detachment, complete subjection to a ready-made and finished reality--physical it may be, mental it may be, logical it may be--is its professed ideal. Forswearing the reality of affection, and the gallantry of adventure, the genuineness of the incomplete, the tentative, it has taken an oath of allegiance to Reality, objective, universal, complete; made perhaps of atoms, perhaps of sensations, perhaps of logical meanings. This ready-made reality, already including everything, must of course swallow and absorb belief, must produce it psychologically, mechanically, or logically, according to its own nature; must in any case, instead of acquiring aid and support from belief, resolve it into one of its own preordained creatures, making a desert and calling it harmony, unity, totality.[27] Philosophy has dreamed the dream of a knowledge which is other than the propitious outgrowth of beliefs that shall develop aforetime their ulterior implications in order to recast them, to rectify their errors, cultivate their waste places, heal their diseases, fortify their feeblenesses:--the dream of a knowledge that has to do with objects having no nature save to be known.
Not that their philosophers have admitted the concrete realizability of their scheme. On the contrary, the assertion of the absolute “Reality” of what is empirically unrealizable is a part of the scheme; the ideal of a universe of pure, cognitional objects, fixed elements in fixed relations. Sensationalist and idealist, positivist and transcendentalist, materialist and spiritualist, defining this object in as many differing ways as they have different conceptions of the ideal and method of knowledge, are at one in their devotion to an identification of Reality with something that connects monopolistically with passionless knowledge, belief purged of all personal reference, origin, and outlook.[28] What is to be said of this attempt to sever the cord which naturally binds together personal attitudes and the meaning of things? This much at least: the effort to extract meanings, values, from the beliefs that ascribe them, and to give the former absolute metaphysical validity while the latter are sent to wander as scapegoats in the wilderness of mere phenomena, is an attempt, which, as long as “our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things,” will attract an admiring, even if suspicious, audience. Moreover, we may admit that the attempt to catch the universe of immediate experience, of action and passion, coming and going, to damn it in its present body in order expressly to glorify its spirit to all eternity, to validate the meaning of beliefs by discrediting their natural existence, to attribute absolute worth to the intent of human convictions just because of the absolute worthlessness of their content--that the performance of this feat of virtuosity has developed philosophy to its present wondrous, if formidable, technique.
But can we claim more than a _succès d’estime_? Consider again the nature of the effort. The world of immediate meanings, of the world empirically sustained in beliefs, is to be sorted out into two portions, metaphysically discontinuous, one of which shall alone be good and true “Reality,” the fit material of passionless, beliefless knowledge; while the other part, that which is excluded, shall be referred exclusively to belief and treated as mere appearance, purely subjective, impressions or effects in consciousness, or as that ludicrously abject modern discovery--an epiphenomenon. And this division into the real and the unreal is accomplished by the very individual whom his own “absolute” results reduce to phenomenality, in terms of the very immediate experience which is infected with worthlessness, and on the basis of preference, of selection that are declared to be unreal! Can the thing be done?
Anyway, the snubbed and excluded factor may always reassert itself.
The very pushing it out of “Reality” may but add to its potential energy, and invoke a more violent recoil. When affections and aversions, with the beliefs in which they record themselves and the efforts they exact, are reduced to epiphenomena, dancing an idle attendance upon a reality complete without them, to which they vainly strive to accommodate themselves by mirroring, then may the emotions flagrantly burst forth with the claim that, as a friend of mine puts it, reason is _only_ a fig leaf for _their_ nakedness. When one man says that need, uncertainty, choice, novelty, and strife have no place in Reality, which is made up wholly of established things behaving by foregone rules, then may another man be provoked to reply that all such fixities, whether named atoms or God, whether they be fixtures of a sensational, a positivistic, or an idealistic system, have existence and import only in the problems, needs, struggles, and instrumentalities of conscious agents and patients. For home rule may be found in the unwritten efficacious constitution of experience.
That contemporaneously we are in the presence of such a reaction is apparent. Let us, in pursuit of our topic, inquire how it came about and why it takes the form that it takes. This consideration may not only occupy the hour, but may help diagram some future parallelogram of forces. The account calls for some sketching (1) of the historical tendencies which have shaped the situation in which a Stoic theory of knowledge claims metaphysical monopoly, and (2) of the tendencies that have furnished the despised principle of belief opportunity and means of reassertion.
II Imagination readily travels to a period when a gospel of intense, and, one may say, deliberate passionate disturbance appeared to be conquering the Stoic ideal of passionless reason; when the demand for individual assertion by faith against the established, embodied objective order was seemingly subduing the idea of the total subordination of the individual to the universal. By what course of events came about the dramatic reversal, in which an ethically conquered Stoicism became the conqueror, epistemologically, of Christianity?
How are our imaginations haunted by the idea of what might have happened if Christianity had found ready to its hand intellectual formulations corresponding to its practical proclamations!
That the ultimate principle of conduct is affectional and volitional; that God is love; that access to the principle is by faith, a personal attitude; that belief, surpassing logical basis and warrant, works out through its own operation its own fulfilling evidence: such was the implied moral metaphysic of Christianity. But this implication needed to become a theory, a theology, a formulation; and in this need, it found no recourse save to philosophies that had identified true existence with the proper object of logical reason. For, in Greek thought, after the valuable meanings, the meanings of industry and art that appealed to sustained and serious choice, had given birth and status to reflective reason, reason denied its ancestry of organized endeavor, and proclaimed itself in its function of self-conscious logical thought to be the author and warrant of all genuine things.
Yet how nearly Christianity had found prepared for it the needed means of its own intellectual statement! We recall Aristotle’s account of moral knowing, and his definition of man. Man as man, he tells us, is a principle that may be termed either desiring thought or thinking desire. Not as pure intelligence does _man_ know, but as an organization of desires effected through reflection upon their own conditions and consequences. What if Aristotle had only assimilated his idea of theoretical to his notion of practical knowledge! Because practical thinking was so human, Aristotle rejected it in favor of pure, passionless cognition, something superhuman. Thinking desire is experimental, is tentative, not absolute. It looks to the future and to the past for help in the future. It is contingent, not necessary.
It doubly relates to the individual: to the individual thing as experienced by an individual agent; not to the universal. Hence desire is a sure sign of defect, of privation, of non-being, and seeks surcease in something which knows it not. Hence desiring reason culminating in beliefs relating to imperfect existence, stands forever in contrast with passionless reason functioning in pure knowledge, logically complete, of perfect being.
I need not remind you how through Neo-Platonism, St. Augustine, and the Scholastic renaissance, these conceptions became imbedded in Christian philosophy; and what a reversal occurred of the original practical principle of Christianity. Belief is henceforth important because it is the mere antecedent in a finite and fallen world, a temporal and phenomenal world infected with non-being, of true knowledge to be achieved only in a world of completed Being. Desire is but the self-consciousness of defect striving to its own termination in perfect possession, through perfect knowledge of perfect being. I need not remind you that the _prima facie_ subordination of reason to authority, of knowledge to faith, in the medieval code, is, after all, but the logical result of the doctrine that man as man (since only reasoning desire) is merely phenomenal; and has his reality in God, who as God is the complete union of rational insight and being--the term of man’s desire, and the fulfilment of his feeble attempts at knowing.
Authority, “faith” as it then had to be conceived, meant just that this Being comes externally to the aid of man, otherwise hopelessly doomed to misery in long drawn out error and non-being, and disciplines him till, in the next world under more favoring auspices, he may have his desires stilled in good, and his faith may yield to knowledge:--for we forget that the doctrine of immortality was not an appendage, but an integral part of the theory that since knowledge is the _true_ function of man, happiness is attained only in knowledge, which itself exists only in achievement of perfect Being or God.
For my part, I can but think that medieval absolutism, with its provision for authoritative supernatural assistance in this world and assertion of supernatural realization in the next, was more logical, as well as more humane, than the modern absolutism, that, with the same logical premises, bids man find adequate consolation and support in the fact that, after all, his strivings are already eternally fulfilled, his errors already eternally transcended, his partial beliefs already eternally comprehended.
The modern age is marked by a refusal to be satisfied with the postponement of the exercise and function of reason to another and supernatural sphere, and by a resolve to practise itself upon its present object, nature, with all the joys thereunto appertaining. The pure intelligence of Aristotle, thought thinking itself, expresses itself as free inquiry directed upon the present conditions of its own most effective exercise. The principle of the inherent relation of thought to being was preserved intact, but its practical locus was moved down from the next world to this. Spinoza’s “God or Nature” is the logical outcome; as is also his strict correlation of the attribute of matter with the attribute of thought; while his combination of thorough distrust of passion and faith with complete faith in reason and all-absorbing passion for knowledge is so classic an embodiment of the whole modern contradiction that it may awaken admiration where less thorough-paced formulations call out irritation.
In the practical devotion of present intelligence to its present object, nature, science was born, and also its philosophical counterpart, the theory of knowledge. Epistemology only generalized in its loose, although narrow and technical way, the question practically urgent in Europe: How is science possible? How can intelligence actively and directly get at its object?
Meantime, through Protestantism the values, the meanings formerly characterizing the next life (the opportunity for full perception of perfect being), were carried over into present-day emotions and responses.
The dualism between faith authoritatively supported as the principle of this life, and knowledge supernaturally realized as the principle of the next, was transmuted into the dualism between intelligence now and here occupied with natural things, and the affections and accompanying beliefs, now and here realizing spiritual worths. For a time this dualism operated as a convenient division of labor. Intelligence, freed from responsibility for and preoccupation with supernatural truths, could occupy itself the more fully and efficiently with the world that now is; while the affections, charged with the values evoked in the medieval discipline, entered into the present enjoyment of the delectations previously reserved for the saints. Directness took the place of systematic intermediation; the present of the future; the individual’s emotional consciousness of the supernatural institution.
Between science and faith, thus conceived, a bargain was struck.
Hands off; each to his own, was the compact; the natural world to intelligence, the moral, the spiritual world to belief. This (natural) world for knowledge; that (supernatural) world for belief. Thus the antithesis, unexpressed, ignored, _within experience_, between belief and knowledge, between the purely objective values of thought and the personal values of passion and volition, was more fundamental, more determining, than the opposition, explicit and harassing, _within knowledge_, between subject and object, mind and matter.
This latent antagonism worked out into the open. In scientific detail, knowledge encroached upon the historic traditions and opinions with which the moral and religious life had identified itself. It made history to be as natural, as much its spoil, as physical nature. It turned itself upon man, and proceeded remorselessly to account for his emotions, his volitions, his opinions. Knowledge, in its general theory, as philosophy, went the same way. It was pre-committed to the old notion: the absolutely real is the object of _knowledge_, and hence is something universal and impersonal. So, whether by the road of sensationalism or rationalism, by the path of mechanicalism or objective idealism, it came about that concrete selves, specific feeling and willing beings, were relegated with the beliefs in which they declare themselves to the “phenomenal.”
III So much for the situation against which some contemporary tendencies are a deliberate protest.
What of the positive conditions that give us not mere protest, like