of many men in the complex of a single expe rience. And if our credit of the assertion that many men exist is convertible into cash at all, that cash is not laid up where the moth and rust of our private human experience doth from moment to moment corrupt the very data that we see; but is laid up in a realm where our experiences, past, present, future, are the ob ject of a conspectus that is not merely temporal and transient. Now all the natural sciences make use of the persuasion that the experiences of various men exist, and that there is a unity of such experiences. This thesis, then, is no invention of philosophers.
My colleague, in answer, would of course insist that as a fact you and I are now believing that many men exist, and that human experi ence in its entirety exists, merely because, in the long run, we find that this belief is indeed congruous with our current and purely per sonal experience, and is therefore an expedi ent idea of ours. But I, in answer, insist that common sense well feels this belief to be indeed from moment to moment expedient, and yet THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY clearly distinguishes between that expediency and the truth which common sense all the while attributes to the belief. The distinction is pre cisely the one which my fancied illustration of the pragmatist on the witness-stand has sug gested. It is a perfectly universal distinction and a commonplace one. Tell me, "This opinion is true," and whatever you are talking about I may agree or disagree or doubt; yet in any case you have stated a momentous issue. But tell me, "I just now find this belief expedient, it feels to me congruous" and you have explicitly given me just a scrap of your personal biography, and have told me no other truth whatever than a truth about the present state of your feelings.
If, however, you emphasize my colleague's wording to the effect that a truth is such because it proves to be an idea that is expedient "in the long run," I once more ask you: When does a man experience the whole of the real facts about the "long run"? At the begin ning of the long run, when the end is not yet, or at the end, when, perhaps, he forgets, like LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY many older men, what were once the expe diencies of his youth? What decides the truth about the long run? My exalted moments, when anything that I like seems true, or my disappointed moments, when I declare that I have always had bad luck? To appeal to the genuinely real "long run" is only to appeal in still another form to a certain ideally fair conspectus of my own whole life, — a conspec tus which I, in my private human experience, never get. Whoever gets the conspectus of my whole life, to see what, in the long run, is indeed for me expedient, - - whoever, I say, gets that conspectus, if such abeing there indeed is, --is essentially superhuman in his type of consciousness. For he sees what I only get in the form of an idea; namely, the true sense and meaning of my life.
In vain, then, does one try adequately to de fine the whole of what we mean by truth either in terms of our human feelings of expediency or in terms of our instantaneous thrills of joy in success, or in terms of any other verifications that crumble as the instant flies. All such THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY verifications we use, just as we use whatever perishes. Any such object is a fragment, but we want the whole. Truth is itself a cause, and is largely as one must admit, for us mortals, just now, what we called, in our last lecture, a lost cause — else how should these prag- matists be able thus to imagine a vain thing, and call that truth which is but the crumbling expediency of the moment? Our search for truth is indeed a practical process. The attainment of truth means success. Our veri fications, so far as we ever get them, are mo mentary fragments of that success. But the genuine success that we demand is an ethical success, of precisely the type which all the loyal seek, when they rejoice in giving all for their cause.
VI But you will now all the more eagerly de mand in what sense we can ever get any war rant for saying that we know any truth what ever. In seeking truth we do not seek the mere crumbling successes of the passing instants of human life. We seek a city out of sight.
LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY What we get of success within our passing experience is rationally as precious to us as it is, just because we believe that attainment to be a fragment of an essentially superhuman suc cess, which is won in the form of a higher expe rience than ours, — a conspectus wherein our human experiences are unified. But what warrant have we for this belief?
I will tell you how I view the case. We need unity of life. In recognizing that need my own pragmatism consists. Now, we never find unity present to our human experience in more than a fragmentary shape. We get hints of higher unity. But only the frag mentary unity is won at any moment of our lives. We therefore form ideas -- very fallible ideas — of some unity of experience, an unity such as our idea of any science or any art or any united people or of any community or of any other cause, any other union of many hu man experiences in one, defines. Now, if our ideas are in any case indeed true, then such an unity is as a fact successfully experienced upon some higher level than ours, and is experienced THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY in some conspectus of life which wins what we need, which approves our loyalty, which fulfils our rational will, and which has in its whole ness what we seek. And then we ourselves with all our ideas and strivings are in and of this higher unity of life. Our loyalty to truth is a hint of this unity. Our transient successes are fragments of the true success. But sup pose our ideas about the structure of this higher unity to be false in any of their details. Sup pose, namely, any of our causes to be wrongly viewed by us. Then there is still real that state of facts, whatever it is, which, if just now known to us, would show us this falsity of our various special ideas. Now, only an expe rience, a consciousness of some system of con tents, could show the falsity of any idea. Hence this real state of facts, this constitution of the genuine universe, whatever it is, must again be a reality precisely in so far as it is also a con spectus of facts of experience.
We therefore already possess at least one true idea, precisely in so far as we say: "The facts of the world are what they are; the real LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY universe exposes our errors and makes them errors." And when we say this, we once more appeal to a conspectus of experience in which ours is included. For I am in error only in case my present ideas about the true facts of the whole world of experience are out of concord with the very meaning that I myself actively try to assign to these ideas. My ideas are in any detail false, only if the very expe rience to which I mean to appeal, contains in its conspectus contents which I just now im perfectly conceive. In any case, then, the truth is possessed by precisely that whole of experience which I never get, but to which my colleague also inevitably appeals when he talks of the "long run," or of the experiences of humanity in general.
Whatever the truth, then, or the falsity of any of my special convictions about this or that fact may be, the real world, which refutes my false present ideas in so far as they clash with its wholeness, and which confirms them just in so far as they succeed in having significant relations to its unity,— this real world, I say, THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY is a conspectus of the whole of experience. And this whole of experience is in the closest real relation to my practical life, precisely in so far as, for me, the purpose of my life is to get into unity with the whole universe, and pre cisely in so far as the universe itself is just that conspectus of experience that we all mean to define and to serve whatever we do, or what ever we say.
But the real whole conspectus of experience, the real view of the totality of life, the real expression of that will to live in and for the whole, which every assertion of truth and every loyal deed expresses -- well, it must be a con spectus that includes whatever facts are indeed facts, be they past, present, or future. I call this whole of experience an eternal truth. I do not thereby mean, as my colleague seems to imagine, that the eternal first exists, and that then our life in time comes and copies that eternal order. I mean simply that the whole of experience includes all temporal happenings, contains within itself all changes, and, since it is the one whole that we all want and need, LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY succeeds in so far as it supplements all failures, accepts all, even the blindest of services, and wins what we seek. Thus winning it is prac tically good and worthy.
But if one insists, How do you know all this? I reply: I know simply that to try to deny the reality of this whole of truth is simply to reaffirm it. Any special idea of mine may be wrong, even as any loyal deed may fail, or as any cause may become, to human vision, a lost cause. But to deny that there is truth, or that there is a real world, is simply to say that the whole truth is that there is no whole truth, and that the real fact is that there is no fact real at all. Such assertions are plain self-contradictions. And on the other hand, by the term "real world," defined as it is for us by our ideal needs, we mean simply that whole of experience in which we live, and in unity with which we alone succeed.
Loyalty, then, has its own metaphysic. This metaphysic is expressed in a view of things which conceives our experience as bound up in a real unity with all experience, — an THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY unity which is essentially good, and in which all our ideas possess their real fulfilment and success. Such a view is true, simply because if you deny its truth you reaffirm that very truth under a new form.
Truth, meanwhile, means, as pragmatism asserts, the fulfilment of a need. But we all need the superhuman, the city out of sight, the union with all life, — the essentially eternal. This need is no invention of the philosophers. It is the need which all the loyal feel, whether they know it or not, and whether they call themselves pragmatists or not. To define this need as pragmatism in its recent forms has done, to reduce truth to expediency, is to go about crying cash, cash, in a realm where there is no cash of the sort that loyalty demands, that every scientific inquiry presupposes, and that only the unity of the experiences of many in one furnishes.
If we must, then, conceive recent pragmatism under the figure of a business enterprise, — a metaphor which my colleague's phraseology so insistently invites, — I am constrained there- LOYALTY, TRUTH, AND REALITY fore to sum up its position thus: First, with a winning clearness, and with a most honor able frankness it confesses bankruptcy, so far as the actually needed cash payments of significant truth are concerned. Secondly, it nevertheless declines to go into the hands of any real receiver, for it is not fond of any thing that appears too absolute. And thirdly, it proposes simply and openly to go on doing business under the old style and title of the truth. "After all," it says, "are we not, every one of us, fond of credit values?"
But I cannot conceive the position of the loyal to be, in fact, so hopelessly embarrassed as this. The recent pragmatists themselves are, in fact, practically considered very loyal lovers of genuine truth. They simply have mistaken the true state of their accounts. We all know, indeed, little enough. But the loyal man, I think, whether he imagines himself to be a recent pragmatist or not, has a ra tional right to say this: My cause partakes of the nature of the only truth and reality that there is. My life is an effort to manifest such THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY eternal truth, as well as I can, in a series of temporal deeds. I may serve my cause ill. I may conceive it erroneously. I may lose it in the thicket of this world of transient expe rience. My every human deed may involve a blunder. My mortal life may seem one long series of failures. But I know that my cause liveth. My true life is hid with the cause and belongs to the eternal.
VIII LOYALTY AND RELIGION LECTURE VIII LOYALTY AND RELIGION TT7E began these lectures with a confessedly * inadequate definition of loyalty. At the last time we laid a basis for anew definition of loyalty. In this concluding lecture, we are to develop that definition, and to draw conclusions regarding the relation of loyalty to religion. Both enterprises will require a further develop ment of our theory of truth.
Loyalty, so we said at the outset, is the will ing and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause. We defined a cause as something that unifies many human lives in one. Our intent in making these definitions was mainly practical. Our philosophy of loyalty was and is intended to be a practical philosophy. We used our definition first to help us to find out THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY the purpose of life, and the supreme good which human beings can seek for themselves. We found this good to be, indeed, of a paradoxical seeming. It was a good found only by an act of sacrifice. We then developed the concep tion of loyalty to loyalty, and learned that, with this means of defining the one cause which is worthy of all men's devotion, we could unify and simplify the chaotic code of our conven tional morality, could do full justice to the demands of a rational ethical individualism, and could leave to every man his right and his duty to choose some special personal cause of his own, while we could yet state the ideal of a harmony of all human causes in one all-em bracing cause. Upon this basis we also could form a theory of conscience, — a theory which views conscience at once as rational and uni versal in its authority, and yet as individual in its expression in the life of each man, so that every man's conscience remains his own, and is, to himself, in many ways, mysterious; while the whole business of any man's conscience is, nevertheless, to direct that man to find his LOYALTY AND RELIGION individual place in the one, universal, rational, moral order.
Hereupon we illustrated our theory of loyalty by applying it to a study of some of our own national problems. And next, our account of the practice of loyalty culminated in a doc trine of the nature of training for loyalty. Here we found the great paradox of loyalty afresh illustrated. Loyalty wins not only by sacrifice, but also by painful labor, and by the very agony of defeat. In this our human world the lost causes have proved themselves, in history, to be the most fruitful causes. In sum, loyalty is trained both through the pres ence of personal leaders, and through that idealization of our causes which adversity nourishes, which death illumines, and which the defeats of present time may render all the clearer and more ideally fascinating.
All these results showed us that loyalty has about it a character such as forbids us, after all, to interpret the true good of loyalty in terms of our merely individual human experiences. Man discovers, indeed, even within the limits THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY of his own personal experience, that loyalty is his ethical destiny, and that without it he can win no peace; while, with loyalty once in possession of his active powers, he seems to himself to have solved the personal problem of the purpose of his life. But loyalty thus appears, after all, in the individual life, in a deeply mysterious form. It says to a man: "Your true good can never be won and veri fied by you in terms to which the present form and scope of our human experience is adequate. The best that you can get lies in self -surrender, and in your personal assurance that the cause to which you surrender yourself is indeed good. But your cause, if it is indeed a reality, has a good about it which no one man, and no mere collection of men, can ever verify. This good of the cause is essentially superhuman in its type, even while it is human in its embodiment. For it belongs to an union of men, to a whole of human life which transcends the individuality of any man, and which is not to be found as something belonging to any mere collection of men. Let your supreme good, then, be this, LOYALTY AND RELIGION that you regard the cause as real, as good, and that, if the cause be lost to any merely human sight, you hold it to be nevertheless living in its own realm, — not apart, indeed, from human life, but in the form of the fulfilment of many human lives in one."
Now, this mysterious speech of loyalty im plies something which is not only moral, but also metaphysical. Purely practical considera tions, then, a study of our human needs, an ideal of the business of life, --these inevi tably lead us into a region which is more than merely a realm of moral activities. This region is either one of delusions or else one of spiritual realities of a level higher than is that of our present individual human expe rience.
In the last lecture we undertook to consider this larger realm of spiritual unities which must be real in case our loyalty is not based upon illusion. And we attempted to sketch a general theory of truth which might show us that such spiritual unities are indeed realities, and are presupposed by our every effort to THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY define truth. Thus our ethical theory has transformed itself into a general philosophical doctrine; and loyalty now appears to us not only as a guide of life but as a revelation of our relation to a realm which we have been obliged to define as one of an eternal and all-embracing unity of spiritual life.
We have called this realm of true life, and of genuine and united experience, — this realm which, if our argument at the last time was sound, includes our lives in that very whole which constitutes the real universe, --we have called this realm, I say, an eternal world, - eternal, simply because, according to our theory, it includes all temporal happenings and strivings in the conspectus of a single con sciousness, and fulfils all our rational purposes together, and is all that we seek to be. For, as we argued, this realm of reality is conscious, is united, is self-possessed, and is perfected through the very wealth of the ideal sacrifices and of the loyal devotion which are united so as to constitute its fulness of being. In view of the philosophy that was thus sketched, I LOYALTY AND RELIGION now propose a new definition of loyalty; and I say that this definition results from all of our previous study: Loyalty is the will to manifest, so far as is possible, the Eternal, that is, the conscious and superhuman unity of life, in J the form of the acts of an individual Self. Or, if you prefer to take the point of view of an individual human self, if you persist in looking at the world just as we find it in our ordinary experience, and if you regard the metaphysical doctrine just sketched merely as an ideal theory of life, and not as a demonstrable philosophy, I can still hold to my definition of loyalty by borrowing a famous phrase from the dear friend and colleague some of whose views I at the last time opposed. I can, then, simply state my new definition of loyalty in plainer and more directly obvious terms thus: Loyalty is the Will to Believe in something eternal, and to express that belief in the practical life of a human being.
This, I say, is my new definition of loyalty, and in its metaphysical form, it is my final definition. Let me expound it further, and THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY let me show a little more in detail how it re sults from the whole course of our inquiry, II However kindly you may have followed the discussion of my last lecture, some of you will feel doubts as to the theory of truth and of reality which I opposed to the doctrines of recent pragmatism, and which I now lay at the basis of my final definition of loyalty. I approached my own theory by the way of a polemic against my colleague's recently stated views regarding the nature of truth. But polemic often hinders our appreciation of some aspects of the questions at issue, even while it may help us to emphasize others. So let me now point out, apart from a polemic against other theories of truth, what is my main mo tive for viewing the real world as I do, and why I suppose that viewing the world as I do helps us to understand better the business of loyalty.
People who have faith in this or in that form of superhuman and significant reality often ask what they can do to turn their faith into LOYALTY AND RELIGION something that more resembles clear insight. Shall they look into the evidences that are adduced in favor of this or of that miraculous story? Shall they themselves seek for the miraculous in their own personal experience? Will psychical research throw any light on the mysteries of being? Or, perhaps, will some sort of special mystical training reveal the higher truth? What is the way that leads towards the spiritual world? And thus those who doubt whether there are such higher reali ties to be found still sometimes try to get rid of these doubts by various appeals either to more or less magical arts, or to extraordinary personal experiences, or to mystical transforma tions of their personal life.
Now, whatever may be said of wonders, or of mystical revelations, our philosophy of loyalty is naturally interested in pointing out a road to the spiritual world, if, indeed, there be such a world, — a road, I say, which has a plain rela tion to our everyday moral life. And it seems to me, both that there is a genuinely spiritual world, and that there is a path of inquiry which THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY can lead from such a practical faith in the higher world as loyalty embodies in its deeds, to a rational insight into the general constitu tion of this higher realm. I do not offer my opinions upon this subject as having any authority. I can see no farther through stone walls than can my fellow, and I enjoy no special revelations from any superhuman realm. But I ask you, as thoughtful people, to consider what your ordinary life, as rational beings, implies as its basis and as its truth.
What I was expounding at the close of my last lecture was a view of things which seems to me to be implied in any attempt to express, in a reasonable way, where we stand in our universe.
We all of us have to admit, I think, that our daily life depends upon believing in realities which are, in any case, just as truly beyond the scope of our ordinary individual experience as any spiritual realm could possibly be. We live by believing in one another's minds as realities. We give credit to countless reports, documents, and other evidences of present LOYALTY AND RELIGION and past facts; and we do all this, knowing that such credit cannot be adequately verified by any experience such as an individual man can obtain. Now, the usual traditional ac count of all these beliefs of ours is that they are forced upon us, by some reality which is, as people say, wholly independent of our knowledge, which exists by itself apart from our experience, and which may be, therefore, entirely alien in its nature to any of our human interests and ideals.
But modern philosophy, — a philosophy in whose historical course of development our recent pragmatism is only a passing incident,— that philosophy which turns upon analyzing the bases of our knowledge, and upon reflectively considering what our human beliefs and ideas are intended to mean and to accomplish, has taught us to see that we can never deal with any wholly independent reality. The recent pragmatists, as I understand them, are here in full and conscious agreement with my own opinion. We can deal with no world which is out of relation to our experience. On the con- THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY trary, the real world is known to us in terms of our experience, is defined for us by our ideas, and is the object of our practical endeav ors. Meanwhile, to declare anything real is to assert that it has its place in some realm of experience, be this experience human or superhuman. To declare that anything what ever is a fact, is simply to assert that some prop osition, which you or I or some other think ing being can express in the form of intelligible ideas, is a true proposition. And the truth of propositions itself is nothing dead, is nothing independent of ideas and of expe rience, but is simply the successful fulfilment of some demand, — a demand which you can express in the form of an assertion, and which is fulfilled in so far, and only in so far, as some region of live experience contains what meets that demand. Meanwhile, every proposition, every assertion that anybody can make, is a deed; and every rational deed involves, in effect, an assertion of a fact. If the prodigal son says, "I will arise and go to my father," he even thereby asserts something to be true LOYALTY AND RELIGION about himself, his father, and his father's house. If an astronomer or a chemist or a statistician or a man of business reports "this or this is a fact," he even thereby performs a deed, — an act having an ideal meaning, and embodying a live purpose; and he further declares that the constitution of experience is such as to make this deed essentially reason able, successful, and worthy to be accepted by every man.
The real world is therefore not something independent of us. It is a world whose stuff, so to speak, — whose content, — is of the nature of experience, whose structure meets, validates, and gives warrant to our active deeds, and whose whole nature is such that it can be inter preted in terms of ideas, propositions, and conscious meanings, while in turn it gives to our fragmentary ideas and to our conscious life whatever connected meaning they possess. Whenever I have purposes and fail, so far, to carry them out, that is because I have not yet found the true way of expressing my own relation to reality. On the other hand, pre- THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY cisely in so far as I have understood some whole of reality, I have carried out successfully some purpose of mine.
There is, then, no merely theoretical truth, and there is no reality foreign, in its nature, to experience. Whoever actually lives the whole conscious life such as can be lived out with a definitely reasonable meaning, — such a being, obviously superhuman in his grade of consciousness, not only knows the real world, but is the real world. Whoever is conscious of the whole content of experience possesses all reality. And our search for reality is simply an effort to discover what the whole fabric of experience is into which our human experience is woven, what the system of truth is in which our partial truths have their place, what the ideally significant life is for the sake of which every deed of ours is undertaken. When we try to find out what the real world is, we are simply trying to discover the sense of our own individual lives. And we can define that sense of our lives only in terms of a con scious life in which ours is included, in which LOYALTY AND RELIGION our ideas get their full meaning expressed, and in which what we fail to carry out to the full is carried out to the full.
Ill Otherwise stated, when I think of the whole world of facts, — the " real world, " - I inevi tably think of something that is my own world, precisely in so far as that world is any object of any reasonable idea of mine. It is true, of course, that, in forming an idea of my world of facts, I do not thereby give myself, at this in stant, the least right to spin out of my inner consciousness any adequate present ideas of the detail of the contents of my real world. In thinking of the real world, I am indeed think ing of the whole of that very system of expe rience in which my experience is bound up, and in which I, as an individual, have my very limited and narrow place. But just now I am not in possession of that whole. I have to work for it and wait for it, and faithfully to be true to it. As a creature living along, from moment to moment, in time, I therefore indeed THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY have to wait ignorantly enough for coming experience. I have to use as I can my fallible memory in trying to find out about my own past experience. I have no way of verifying what your experience is, except by using tests - and again the extremely fallible tests — which we all employ in our social life. I need the methods of the sciences of experience to guide me in the study of whatever facts fall within their scope. I use those practical and momentary successes upon which recent prag matism insists, whenever I try to get a concrete verification of my opinions. And so far I stand, and must rightly stand, exactly where any man of common sense, any student of a science, any plain man, or any learned man stands. I am a fallible mortal, simply trying to find my way as I can in the thickets of ex perience.
And yet all this my daily life, my poor efforts to remember and to predict, my fragmentary inquiries into this or that matter of science or of business, my practical acknowledgment of your presence as real facts in the real LOYALTY AND RELIGION world of experience, my personal definition of the causes to which I devote myself, — these are all undertakings that are overruled, and that are rendered significant, simply in so far as they are reasonable parts of one all-embrac ing enterprise. This enterprise is my active attempt to find out my true place in the real world. But now I can only define my real world by conceiving it in terms of experience. I can find my place in the world only by dis covering where I stand in the whole system of experience. For what I mean by a fact is something that somebody finds. Even a merely possible fact is something only in so far as somebody actually could find it. And the sense in which it is an actual fact that somebody could find in his experience a de terminate fact, is a sense which again can only be defined in terms of concrete, living, and not merely possible experience, and in terms of some will or purpose expressed in a con scious life. Even possible facts, then, are really possible only in so far as something is actually experienced, or is found by some- THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY body. Whatever is real, then, be it distant or near, past or future, present to your mind or to mine, a physical fact or a moral fact, a fact of our possible human experience, or a fact of a superhuman type of experience, a purpose, a desire, a natural object or an ideal object, a mechanical system or a value, — whatever, I say, is real, is real as a content present to some conscious being. Therefore, when I inquire about the real world, I am simply asking what contents of experience, human or superhuman, are actually and consciously found by some body. My inquiries regarding facts, of what ever grade the facts may be, are therefore inevitably an effort to find out what the world's experience is. In all my common sense, then, in all my science, in all my social life, I am trying to discover what the universal conscious life which constitutes the world con tains as its contents, and views as its own.
But even this is not the entire story of my place in the real world. For I cannot inquire about facts without forming my own ideas of these facts. In so far as my ideas are true, LOYALTY AND RELIGION my own personal ideas are therefore active processes that go on within the conscious life of the world. If my ideas are true, they succeed in agreeing with the very world con sciousness that they define. But this agree ment, this success, if itself it is a fact at all, is once more a fact of experience, - - yet not merely of my private experience, since I myself never personally find, within the limits of my own individual experience, the success that every act of truth seeking demands. If I get the truth, then, at any point of my life, my success is real only in so far as some con scious life, which includes my ideas and my efforts, and which also includes the very facts of the world whereof I am thinking, actually observes my success, in the form of a conspec tus of the world's facts, and of my own efforts to find and to define them.
In so far, then, as I get the truth about the world, I myself am a fragmentary conscious life that is included within the conscious con spectus of the world's experience, and that is in one self-conscious unity with that world