What must be true about the universe if even loyalty itself is a genuine good, and not a merely inevitable human illusion?
Well, loyalty is a service of causes. A cause, if it really is what our definition re quires, links various human lives into the unity of one life. Therefore, if loyalty has any basis in truth, human lives can be linked in some genuine spiritual unity. Is such unity a fact, or is our belief in our causes a mere point of view, a pathetic fallacy? Surely, if any man, however loyal, discovers that his cause is a dream, and that men remain as a fact sundered beings, not really linked by genuine spiritual ties, how can that man re main loyal? Perhaps his supreme good in deed lies in believing that such unities are real. But if this belief turns out to be an THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY illusion, and if a man detects the illusion, can he any longer get the good out of loyalty?
And as for even this personal good that is to be got out of loyalty, we have all along seen that such good comes to a loyal man's mind in a very paradoxical way. A loyal man gets good, but since he gets it by believ ing that his cause has a real existence outside of his private self, and is of itself a good thing, he gets the fascination of loyalty not as a private delight of his own, but as a ful filment of himself through self-surrender to an externally existing good, — through a will ing abandonment of the seeking of his own delight. And so the loyal man's good is essentially an anticipation of a good that he regards as not his own, but as existent in the cause. The cause, however, is itself no one fellow-man, and no mere collection of fellow- men. It is a family, a country, a church, or is such a rational union of many human minds and wills as we have in mind when we speak of a science or an art. Now, can such causes contain any good which is not simply a col- LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY lection of separate human experiences of pleasure or of satisfaction? Thus, then, both the reality and the good of a loyal man's cause must be objects of the loyal man's belief in order that he should be able to get the experience of loyalty. And if his loyalty is indeed well founded, there must be unities of spiritual life in the universe such that no one man ever, by himself, experiences these unities as facts of his own consciousness. And these higher unities of life must possess a degree and a type of goodness, — a genuine value, such that no one man, and no mere collection of men, can ever exhaustively ex perience this goodness, or become personally possessed of this value.
How paradoxical a world, then, must the real world be, if the faith of the loyal is indeed well founded! A spiritual unity of life, which transcends the individual experience of any man, must be real. For loyalty, as we have seen, is a service of causes that, from the human point of view, appear superpersonal. Loyalty holds these unities to be good. If THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY loyalty is right, the real goodness of these causes is never completely manifested to any one man, or to any mere collection of men. Such goodness, then, if completely experienced at all, must be experienced upon some higher level of consciousness than any one human being ever reaches. If loyalty is right, social causes, social organizations, friendships, fam ilies, countries, yes, humanity, as you see, must have the sort of unity of consciousness which individual human persons fragmen- tarily get, but must have this unity upon a higher level than that of our ordinary human individuality.
Some such view, I say, must be held if we are to regard loyalty as in the end anything more than a convenient illusion. Loyalty has its metaphysical aspect. It is an effort to conceive human life in an essentially super human way, to view our social organizations as actual personal unities of consciousness, unities wherein there exists an actual experi ence of that good which, in our loyalty, we only partially apprehend. If the loyalty of LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY the lovers is indeed well founded in fact, then they, as separate individuals, do not constitute the whole truth. Their spiritual union also has a personal, a conscious existence, upon a higher than human level. An analogous unity of consciousness, an unity superhuman in grade, but intimately bound up with, and in clusive of, our apparently separate personali ties, must exist, if loyalty is well founded, wherever a real cause wins the true devotion of ourselves. Grant such an hypothesis, and then loyalty becomes no pathetic serving of a myth. The good which our causes possess, then, also becomes a concrete fact for an experience of a higher than human level. That union of self-sacrifice with self-assertion which loyalty expresses becomes a conscious ness of our genuine relations to a higher social unity of consciousness in which we all have our being. For from this point of view we are, and we have our worth, by virtue of our relation to a consciousness of a type superior to the human type. And meanwhile the good of our loyalty is itself a perfectly concrete good, THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY a good which is present to that higher experi ence, wherein our cause is viewed in its truth, as a genuine unity of life. And because of this fact we can straightforwardly say: We are loyal not for the sake of the good that we privately get out of loyalty, but for the sake of the good that the cause — this higher unity of experience — gets out of this loyalty. Yet our loyalty gives us what is, after all, our supreme good, for it defines our true position in the world of that social will wherein we live and move and have our being.
I doubt not that such a view of human life, — such an assertion that the social will is a concrete entity, just as real as we are, and of still a higher grade of reality than ourselves, — will seem to many of you mythical enough. Yet thus to view the unity of human life is, after all, a common tendency of the loyal. That fact I have illustrated in every lecture of this course. That such a view need not be mythical, that truth and reality can be con ceived only in such terms as these, that our philosophy of loyalty is a rational part of a LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY philosophy which must view the whole world as one unity of consciousness, wherein count less lesser unities are synthesized, — this is a general philosophical thesis which I must next briefly expound to you.
Ill My exposition, as you see, must be, in any case, an attempt to show that the inevitable faith of the loyal - - their faith in their causes, and in the real goodness of their causes — has truth, and since I must thus, in any case, dis course of truth, I propose briefly to show you that whoever talks of any sort of truth what ever, be that truth moral or scientific, the truth of common sense or the truth of a phi losophy, inevitably implies, in all his asser tions about truth, that the world of truth of which he speaks is a world possessing a rational and spiritual unity, is a conscious world of experience, whose type of conscious ness is higher in its level than is the type of our human minds, but whose life is such that our life belongs as part to this living whole.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY This world of truth is the one that you must define, so I insist, if you are to regard any proposition whatever as true, and are then to tell, in a reasonable way, what you mean by the truth of that proposition.
The world of truth is therefore essentially a world such as that in whose reality the loyal believe when they believe their cause to be real. Moreover, this truth world has a good ness about it, essentially like that which the loyal attribute to their causes. Truth seek ing and loyalty are therefore essentially the same process of life merely viewed in two different aspects. Whoever is loyal serves what he takes to be a truth, namely, his cause. On the other hand, whoever seeks truth for its own sake fails of his business if he seeks it merely as a barren abstraction, that has no life in it. If a truth seeker knows his busi ness, he is, then, in the sense of our definition, serving a cause which unifies our human life upon some higher level of spiritual being than the present human level. He is therefore essentially loyal. Truth seeking is a moral LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY activity; and on the other hand, morality is wholly inadequate unless the light of eternal truth shines upon it.
This, I say, will be my thesis. Some of you will call it very mystical, or at least a very fantastic thesis. It is not so. It ought to be viewed as a matter of plain sense. It is, I admit, a thesis which many of the most dis tinguished amongst my colleagues, who are philosophers, nowadays view sometimes with amusement, and sometimes with a notable impatience. This way of regarding the world of truth, which I have just defined as mine, is especially and most vivaciously attacked by my good friends, the pragmatists, — a group of philosophers who have of late been dis posed to take truth under their especial pro tection, as if she were in danger from the tendency of some people who take her too seriously.
When I mention pragmatism, I inevitably bring to your minds the name of one whom we all honor, — the philosopher who last year so persuasively stated, before the audience of THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY this Institute, the pragmatist theory of philo sophical method, and of the nature of truth. It is impossible for me to do any justice, within my limits, to the exposition which Professor James gave of his own theory of truth. Yet since the antithesis between his views and those which I have now to indicate to you may be in itself an aid to my own exposition, I beg you to allow me to use, for the moment, some of his assertions about the nature of truth as a means of showing, by contrast, how I find myself obliged to interpret the same problem. The contrast is accompanied, after all, by so much of deeper agreement that I can well hope that my sketch of the current situation in the philosophical controversies about truth may not seem to you merely a dreary report of differences of opinion.
Professor James, in discussing the nature of truth, in his recent book on pragmatism, begins, as some of you will remember, by accepting the classic definition of truth as the agreement of our ideas with reality. Whoever knows or possesses a truth has, LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY then, in his mind, an idea, an opinion, a judg ment, or some complex of such states of mind. If his views are true, then these his ideas or opinions are in agreement with something called reality. Thus, for instance, if a loyal man believes his cause, say, his friendship or his club or his nation, to be a reality, and if his belief is true, his loyal opin ion is in agreement with the real world. So far, of course, all of you will accept the defi nition of truth here in question.
Professor James now goes on to point out that, in some cases, our ideas agree with what we call real things by copying those things. So, if, with shut eyes, you think of the clock on the wall, your image of the clock is a copy of its dial. But, as my colleague continues, our power to copy real objects by ideas of our own is obviously a very limited power. You believe that you have at least some true ideas about many objects which are far too complex or too mysterious for you to copy them. Your power to become sure that your ideas do copy the constitution of anything whatever which THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY exists outside of you is also very limited, be cause, after all, you never get outside of your own experience to see what the real things would be if taken wholly in themselves. Hence, on the whole, one cannot say that the agreement of our ideas with reality which constitutes their truth is essentially such as to demand that our ideas should be copies. For we believe that we have true ideas even when we do not believe them to be copies.
Moreover (and herewith we approach a consideration which is, for my colleague's theory of truth, very essential), not only does truth not consist merely in copying facts; but also truth cannot be defined in terms of any other static or fixed relation between ideas and facts. The only way to conceive that agreement between ideas and facts which constitutes truth is to think of the "practical consequences" which follow from possessing true ideas. "True ideas," in Professor James's words, "lead us, namely, through the acts and other ideas which they instigate, into or up to or towards other parts of experience LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY with which we feel all the while that the orig inal ideas remain in agreement. The con nections and transitions come to us, from point to point, as being progressive, harmo nious, satisfactory. This function of agree able leading is what we mean by an idea's verification." So far my colleague's words. He goes on, in his account, to mention many illustrations of the way in which the truth of ideas is tested, both in the world of common sense, and in the world of science, by the use fulness, by the success, which attaches to the following out of true ideas to their actual empirical consequences. The wanderer lost in the woods gets true ideas about his where abouts whenever he hits upon experiences and ideas which set him following the path which actually leads him home. In science, hy potheses are tested as to their truth, by con sidering wrhat experiences they lead us to anticipate, and by then seeing whether these anticipations can be fulfilled in a satisfactory way. "True," says Professor James, "is the name for whatever idea starts the verification THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY process." For instance, then, the verifiable scientific hypothesis, if once tested by the success of its results in experience, is in so far declared true. And similarly, the idea of following a given path in the woods in order to get home is declared true, if you follow the path and get home.
In consequence, every true idea is such in so far as it is useful in enabling you to an ticipate the sort of experience that you want; and every idea that is useful as a guide of life is in so far true. The personal tests of usefulness, as of truth, are for every one of us personal and empirical. My own direct tests of truth are of course thus limited to my own experience. I find my own ideas true just in so far as I find them guiding me to the experience that I want to get. But of course, as my colleague constantly insists, we give credit, as social beings, to one another's veri fications. Hence I regard as true many ideas that I personally have not followed out to any adequately experienced consequences. The "overwhelmingly large" number of the ideas LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY by which we live, "we let pass for true with out attempting to verify." We do this, says Professor James, "because it works to do so, everything we know conspiring with the belief, and nothing interfering." That is, we regard as true those ideas which we personally find it convenient, successful, expedient to treat as verifiable, even though we never verify them. The warrant of these unverifiable truths is, however, once more, the empirical usefulness of living as if they were verifiable. 'Truth lives," says Professor James, "for the most part on a credit system...But this all points to direct face-to-face verification some where, without which the fabric of truth col lapses like a financial system with no cash basis whatever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other's truth. But beliefs verified concretely by somebody are the posts of the whole superstructure." The indirectly veri fiable ideas, that is, the ideas which some body else verifies, or even those which nobody yet verifies, but which agree sufficiently with THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY verified ideas, we accept because it is advan tageous to accept them. It is the same thing, then, to say that an idea is true because it is useful and to say that it is useful because it is true.
Agreement with reality thus turns out, as my colleague insists, "to be an affair of lead ing, — leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are im portant." And my colleague's account of truth culminates in these notable expressions: 'The true/ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving." "Pragmatism faces forward towards the future." That is, an idea is true by virtue of its expedient outcome. "It pays for our ideas to be validated, verified. Our obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays. The payment true ideas bring are the sole why of our duty to follow them."
The sum and substance of this theory of truth, as you see, is that the truth of an idea LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY is determined by its "success" in yielding what my colleague frequently calls "the cash values in terms of experience/' which appear as consequences of holding this idea. These values may either take the form of direct verifications in terms of sensible facts, as when one finds one's way out of the woods and sees one's home; or else the form of practically satisfying and expedient beliefs, which clash with no sensible experience, and which are personally acceptable to those wrho hold them. It is "expedient" to connect the latter beliefs with sensible cash values when you can. If you cannot turn them into such cash, you are at liberty to hold them, but with the conviction that, after all, the personally expedient is the true.
In any case, as you see, whatever else truth is, it is nothing static. It changes with the expediencies of your experience. And there fore those who conceive the realm of truth as essentially eternal are the objects of my col league's most charming philosophical fury.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY IV We have, then, an authoritative exposition of pragmatism before us. You must see that this doctrine, whether it be a true doctrine, or whether it be indeed simply for some people an expedient doctrine, is certainly one that concerns our philosophy of loyalty, now that indeed we have reached the place where the relation between loyalty and truth has become, for us, a critically important relation. May we venture to ask ourselves, then: Is this pragmatism a fair expression of what we mean by truth?
In reply let me at once point out the extent to which I personally agree with my colleague, and accept his theory of truth. I fully agree with him that whenever a man asserts a truth, his assertion is a deed, — a practical attitude, an active acknowledgment of some fact. I fully agree that the effort to verify this acknowledgment by one's own personal experience, and the attempt to find truth in the form of a practical congruity LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY between our assertions and our attained em pirical results, is an effort which in our in dividual lives inevitably accompanies and sustains our every undertaking in the cause of truth seeking. Modern pragmatism is not indeed as original as it seems to suppose itself to be in emphasizing such views. The whole history of modern idealism is full of such asser tions. I myself, as a teacher of philosophy, have for years insisted upon viewing truth in this practical way. I must joyously confess to you that I was first taught to view the nature of truth in this way when I was a young student of philosophy; and I w^as taught this by several great masters of modern thought. These masters were Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Professor James himself, whose lectures, as I heard them in my youth at the Johns Hopkins University, and whose beau tiful conversations and letters in later years, inspired me with an insight that helped me, rather against his own advice, to read my German idealists aright, and to see what is, after all, the eternal truth beneath all this THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY pragmatism. For Professor James's prag matism, despite its entertaining expressions of horror of the eternal, actually does state one aspect of eternal truth. It is, namely, eternally true that all search for truth is a practical activity, with an ethical purpose, and tnat a purely theoretical truth, such as should guide no significant active process, is a barren absurdity. This, however, is so far precisely what Fichte spent his life in teach ing. Professor James taught me, as a stu dent, much the same lesson; and I equally prize and honor all of my masters for that lesson; and I have been trying to live up to it ever since I first began to study the nature of truth.
So far, then, I am a pragmatist. And I also fully agree that, if we ever get truth, the attainment of truth means a living and prac tical success in those active undertakings in terms of which we have been trying to assert and to verify our truth. I doubt not that to say, "This is true," is the same as to say: "The ideas by means of which I define this LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY truth are the practically and genuinely suc cessful ideas, the ideas such that, when I fol low them, I really fulfil my deepest needs." All this I not only admit; but I earnestly insist that truth is an ethical concept; and I thank from my heart the great pragmatist who so fascinated his audience last year in this place; I thank him that he taught them what, in my youth, he helped to teach me, namely, that winning the truth means winning the success which we need, and for which the whole practical nature of our common hu manity continually groans and travails to gether in pain until now.
And yet, and yet all this still leaves open one great question. When we seek truth, we indeed seek successful ideas. But what, in Heaven's name, constitutes success? Truth- seeking is indeed a practical endeavor. But what, in the name of all the loyal, is the goal of human endeavor? Truth is a living thing. We want leading and guidance. "Lead, kindly light,"— thus we address the truth. We are lost in the woods of time.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY We want the way, the truth, and the life. For nothing else does all our science and our common sense strive. But what is it to have genuine abundance of life? For what do we live?
Here our entire philosophy of loyalty, so far as it has yet been developed, comes to our aid. The loyal, as we have said, are the only human beings who can have any reasonable hope of genuine success. If they do not succeed, then nobody succeeds. And of course the loyal do indeed live with a constant, although not with an exclusive, reference to their own personal experience and to that of other in dividual men. They feel their present fas cination for their cause. It thrills through them. Their loyalty has, even for them, in their individual capacity what Professor James calls a cash value. And of course they like to have their friends share such cash values. Yet I ask you: Are the loyal seeking only the mere collection of their private experiences LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY of their personal thrills of fascination? If you hear loyal men say: "We are in this business just for what we as individuals — we and our individual fellows — can get out of it," do you regard that way of speech as an ade quate expression of their really loyal spirit? When Arnold von Winkelried rushed on the Austrian spears, did he naturally say: " Look you, my friends, I seek, in experiential terms, the cash value of my devotion; see me draw the cash." My colleague would of course retort that the hero in question, accord ing to the legend, said, as he died: " Make way for liberty." He therefore wanted lib erty, as one may insist, to get these cash values. Yes, but liberty was no individual man, and no mere heap of individual men. Liberty was a cause, a certain superhuman unity of the ideal life of a free community. It was indeed expedient that one man should die for the people. But the people also was an unio mystica of many in one. For that cause the hero died. And no man has ever yet experi enced, in his private and individual life, the THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY whole true cash value of that higher unity. Nor will all the individual Swiss patriots, past, present, or future, viewed as a mere collec tion of creatures of a day, ever draw the cash in question. If the cause exists, the treasure exists, and is indeed a cash value upon a level higher than that of our passing human life. But loyalty does not live by selling its goods for present cash in the temple of its cause. Such pragmatism it drives out of the temple. It serves, and worships, and says to the cause: "Be thine the glory."
Loyalty, then, seeks success and from mo ment to moment indeed thrills with a purely fragmentary and temporary joy in its love of its service. But the joy depends on a belief in a distinctly superhuman type of unity of life. And so you indeed cannot express the value of your loyalty by pointing at the mere heap of the joyous thrills of the various loyal individuals. The loyal serve a real whole of life, an experiential value too rich for any ex pression in merely momentary terms.
Now, is it not very much so with our love of LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY any kind of truth? Of course, we mortals seek for whatever verification of our truths we can get in the form of present success. But can you express our human definition of truth in terms of any collection of our human experiences of personal expediency?
Well, as to our concept of truth, let us con sider a test case by way of helping ourselves to answer this question. Let us suppose that a witness appears, upon some witness-stand, and objects to taking the ordinary oath, be cause he has conscientious scruples, due to the fact that he is a recent pragmatist, who has a fine new definition of truth, in terms of which alone he can be sworn. Let us suppose him, hereupon, to be granted entire liberty to express his oath in his own way. Let him accordingly say, using, with technical scrupu losity, my colleague's definition of truth: "I promise to tell whatever is expedient and nothing but what is expedient, so help me fu ture experience." I ask you: Do you think that this witness has expressed, with adequacy, that view of the nature of truth that you really THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY wish a witness to have in mind? Of course, if he were a typical pragmatist, you would in deed be delighted to hear his testimony on the witness-stand or anywhere else. But would you accept his formula?
But let me be more precise as to the topic of this witness's possible testimony. I will use for the purpose Kant's famous case. Somebody, now dead, let us suppose, has actually left with the witness a sum of money as a wholly secret deposit to be some time returned. No written record was made of the transaction. No evidence exists that can in future be used to refute the witness if he denies the transaction and keeps the money. The questions to be asked of the witness relate, amongst other things, to whatever it may be that he believes himself to know about the estate of the deceased. I now ask, not what his duty is, but simply what it is that he ra tionally means to do in case he really intends to tell the truth about that deposit. Does he take merely the "forward-looking" atti tude of my colleague's. pragmatism? Does LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY he mean merely to predict, as expedient, cer tain consequences which he expects to result either to himself or to the heirs of the estate? Of course his testimony will have consequences. But is it these which he is trying to predict? Are they his true object? Or does the truth of his statement mean the same as the expe diency, either to himself or to the heirs, of any consequences whatever which may follow from his statement? Does the truth of his state ment about the deposit even mean the merely present empirical fact that he now feels a belief in this statement or that he finds it just now congruent with the empirical sequences of his present memories? No, for the witness is not trying merely to tell how he feels. He is try ing to tell the truth about the deposit. And the witness's belief is not the truth of his belief. Even his memory is not the truth to which he means to be a witness. And the future con sequences of his making a true statement are for the witness irrelevant, since they are for the law and the heirs to determine. Yet one means something perfectly definite by the THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY truth of the testimony of that witness. And that truth is simply inexpressible in such terms as those which my colleague employs. Yet the truth here in question is a simple truth about the witness's own personal past experience.
Now, such a case is only one of countless cases where we are trying to tell the truth about something which we all regard as being, in itself, a matter of genuine and concrete experience, while nevertheless we do not mean, " It is expedient just now for me to think this," nor yet, "I predict such and such consequences for my own personal experience, or for the future experience of some other individual man; and these predicted consequences con stitute the truth of my present assertion." I say there are countless such cases where the truth that we mean is empirical indeed, but transcends all such expediencies and personal consequences. The very assertion, "Human experience, taken as a totality of facts, exists," is a momentous example of just such an asser tion. We all believe that assertion. If that assertion is not actually true, then our whole LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY frame of natural science, founded as it is on the common experience of many observers, crum bles into dust, our common sense world is nothing, business and society are alike illu sions, loyalty to causes is meaningless. Now that assertion, "Human experience, that is, the totality of the experiences of many men, really exists," is an assertion which you and I regard as perfectly true. Yet no individual man ever has verified, or ever will verify, that assertion. For no man, taken as this indi vidual man, experiences the experience of any body but himself. Yet we all regard that as sertion as true.
My colleague, of course, would say, as in fact he has often said, that his assertion is one of the numerous instances of that process of trading on credit which he so freely illustrates. We do not verify this assertion. But we accept it on credit as verifiable. However, the credit simile is a dangerous one here, so long as one conceives that the verification which would pay the cash would be a payment in the form of such human experience as THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY you and I possess. For the assertion, "The experience of many men exists," is an assertion that is essentially un verifiable by any one man. If the "cash value" of the assertion means, then, its verifiability by any man, then the credit in question is one that simply cannot be turned into such cash by any conceivable process, occurring in our individual lives, since the very idea of the real existence of the experience of many men excludes, by its definition, the direct presence of this experience of various men within the experience of any one of these men. The credit value in ques tion would thus be a mere fiat value, so long as the only cash values are those of the expe riences of individual men, and the truth of our assertion would mean simply that we find it expedient to treat as verifiable what we know cannot be verified. Hereupon, of course, we should simply be trading upon currency that has no cash value. Whoever does verify the fact that the experience of many men exists, if such a verifier there be, is a super human being, an union of the empirical lives LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY