THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY consciousness. And it is in this unity with the world consciousness that I get my success, and am in concord with the truth.
But of course any particular idea of mine, regarding the world, or regarding any fact in the world, may be false. However, this pos sibility of my error is itself a real situation of mine, and involves essentially the same rela tion between the world and myself which obtains in case I have true ideas. For I can be in error about an object only in case I really mean to agree with that object, and to agree with it in a way which only my own purposes, in seeking this agreement, can pos sibly define. It is only by virtue of my own undertakings that I can fail in my un dertakings. It is only because, after all, I am loyal to the world's whole truth that I can so express myself in fallible ideas, and in fragmentary opinions that, as a fact, I may, at any moment, undertake too much for my own momentary success to be assured, so that I can indeed in any one of my assertions fail justly to accord with that world consciousness LOYALTY AND RELIGION which I am all the while trying to interpret in my own transient way. But when I thus fail, I momentarily fail to interpret my place in the very world consciousness whose life I am trying to define. But my failure, when and in so far as it occurs, is once more a fact, - and therefore a fact for the world's con sciousness. If I blunder, but am sincere, if I think myself right, but am not right, then my error is a fact for a consciousness which in cludes my fallible attempts to be loyal to the truth, but which sees how they just now lose present touch with their true cause. Seeing this my momentary defeat, the world con sciousness sees, however, my loyalty, and in its conspectus assigns, even to my fragmentary attempts at truth, their genuine place in the single unity of the world's consciousness. My very failure, then, like every loyal failure, is still a sort of success. It is an effort to define my place in the unity of the world's conspec tus of all conscious life. I cannot fall out of that unity. I cannot flee from its presence. And I err only as the loyal may give up their THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY life for their cause. Whether I get truth, then, or whether I err in detail, my loyal search for truth insures the fact that I am in a significant unity with the world's conscious life.
The thesis that the world is one whole and a significant whole of conscious life is, for these reasons, a thesis which can only be viewed as an error, by reinstating this very assertion under a new form. For any error of mine concerning the world is possible only in so far as I really mean to assert the truth about the world; and this real meaning of mine can exist only as a fact within the conspectus of consciousness for which the real whole world exists, and within which I myself live.
This, then, in brief, is my own theory of truth. This is why I hold this theory to be no fantastic guess about what may be true, but a logically inevitable conclusion about how every one of us, wise or ignorant, is ac tually defining his own relation to truth, whether he knows the fact or not. I ex- LOYALTY AND RELIGION pressed my theory at the last time in terms of a polemic against the recent pragmatists; but as a fact their view, in its genuine and deeper meaning, is no more opposed to mine than my young Russian's vehement protest against loyalty, quoted in my second lecture, was, in its true spirit, opposed to my own view. My young Russian, you may remember, hated what he took to be loyalty, just because he was so loyal. And even so my friends, the recent pragmatists, reassert my theory of truth even in their every attempt to deny it. For, amongst other things, they assert that their own theory of truth is actually true. And that assertion implies just such a conspectus of all truth in one view, — just such a con spectus as I too assert.
IV We first came in sight of this theory of truth, in these discussions, for a purely prac tical reason. Abstract and coldly intellectual as the doctrine, when stated as I have just stated it, may appear, we had our need to THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY ask what truth is, because we wanted to know whether the loyal are right in supposing, as they inevitably do suppose, that their per sonal causes, and that their cause of causes, namely, universal loyalty, that any such causes, I say, possess genuine foundation in truth. Loyalty, as we found, is a practical ser vice of superhuman objects. For our causes transcend expression in terms of our single lives. If the cause lives, then all conscious moral life — even our poor human life — is in unity with a superhuman conscious life, in which we ourselves dwell; and in this unity we win, in so far as we are loyal servants of our cause, a success which no transient human experience of ours, no joyous thrill of the flying moment, no bitterness of private defeat and loss, can do more or less than to illustrate, to illumine, or to idealize.
We asked: Is this faith of the loyal in their causes a pathetic fallacy? Our theory of truth has given us a general answer to this intensely practical question. The loyal try to live in the spirit. But, if thereupon LOYALTY AND RELIGION they merely open their eyes to the nature of the reasonable truth, they see that it is in the spirit only that they do or can live. They would be living in this truth, as mere passing fragments of conscious life, as mere blind series of mental processes, even if they were not loyal. For all life, howe er dark and frag mentary, is either a blind striving for con scious unity with the universal life of which it is a fragment, or else, like the life of the loyal, is a deliberate effort to express such a striving in the form of a service of a super- hum&n cause. And all lesser loyalties, and all serving of imperfect or of evil causes, are but fragmentary forms of the service of the cause of universal loyalty. To serve uni versal loyalty is, however, to view the interests of all conscious life as one; and to do this is to regard all conscious life as constituting just such an unity as our theory of truth requires. Meanwhile, since truth seeking is indeed it self a practical activity, what we have stated in our theory of truth is itself but an aspect of the very life that the loyal are leading.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY Whoever seeks any truth is loyal, for he is determining his life by reference to a life which transcends his own. And he is loyal to loy alty; for whatever truth you try to discover is, if true, valid for everybody, and is there fore worthy of everybody's loyal recognition. The loyal, then, are truth seekers; and the truth seekers are loyal. And all of them live for the sake of the unity of all life. And this unity includes us all, but is superhuman.
Our view of truth, therefore, meets at once an ethical and a logical need. The real world is precisely that world in which the loyal are at home. Their loyalty is no pathetic fallacy. Their causes are real facts in the universe. The universe as a whole possesses that unity which loyalty to loyalty seeks to express in its service of the whole of life.
Herewith, however, it occurs to us to ask one final question. Is not this real world, whose true unity the loyal acknowledge by their every deed, and whose conscious unity every process of truth seeking presupposes, — is not this also the world which religion LOYALTY AND RELIGION recognizes? If so, what is the relation of loyalty to religion?
The materials for answering this question are now in our hands. We have been so deliberate in preparing them for our present purpose, just for the sake of making our answer the simpler when it comes.
We have now defined loyalty as the will to manifest the eternal in and through the deeds of individual selves. As for religion, — in its highest historical forms (which here alone concern us), — religion, as I think, may be de fined as follows. Religion (in these its high est forms) is the interpretation both of the eternal and of the spirit of loyalty through emotion, and through a fitting activity of the imagination.
Religion, in any form, has always been an effort to interpret and to make use of some superhuman world. The history, the genesis, the earlier and simpler forms of religion, the relations of religion and morality in the THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY primitive life of mankind, do not here con cern us. It is enough to say that, in history, there has often been a serious tension be tween the interests of religion and those of morality. For the higher powers have very generally seemed to man to be either non- moral or immoral. This very tension, only too frequently, still exists for many people to-day. One of the greatest and hardest discoveries of the human mind has been the discovery of how to reconcile, not religion and science, but religion and morality. Whoever knows even a small portion of the history of the cults of mankind is aware of the difficulties to which I refer. The superhu man has been conceived by men in terms that were often far enough from those which loy alty requires. Whoever will read over the recorded words of a writer nowadays too much neglected, the rugged and magnifi cently loyal Old Testament prophet Amos, can see for himself how bravely the difficulty of conceiving the superhuman as the righteous, was faced by one of the first who ever viewed LOYALTY AND RELIGION the relation of religion and morality as our best teachers have since taught us to view them. And yet such a reader can also see how hard this very task of the prophet was. When we remember also that so great a mind as that of the originator of Buddhism, after all the long previous toil of Hindoo thought upon this great problem, could see no way to recon cile religion and morality, except by bringing them both to the shores of the mysterious and soundless ocean of Nirvana, and sinking them together in its depths (an undertaking which Buddha regarded as the salvation of the world), we get a further view of the nature of the problem. When we remember that St. Paul, after many years of lonely spiritual struggle, attempted in his teaching to recon cile morality and religion by an interpretation of Christianity which has ever since kept the Christian world in a most inspiring ferment of theological controversy and of practical con flict, we are again instructed as to the serious ness of the issue. But as a fact, the experi ence of the civilized man has gradually led him THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY to see how to reconcile the moral life and the religious spirit. Since this reconciliation is one which our theory of truth, and of the con stitution of the real world, substantially jus tifies, we are now ready for a brief review of the entire situation.
People often say that mere morality is something very remote from true religion. Sometimes people say this in the interests of religion, meaning to point out that mere morality can at best make you only a more or less tolerable citizen, while only religion can reconcile you, as such people say, to that superhuman world whose existence and whose support alone make human life worth living. But sometimes almost the same assertion is made in the interest, of pure morality, viewed as something independent of religion. Some people tell you, namely, that since, as they say, religion is a collection of doubtful beliefs, of superstitions, and of more or less exalted emotions, morality is all the better for keep ing aloof from religion. Suffering man needs your help; your friends need as much happi- LOYALTY AND RELIGION ness as you can give them; conventional morality is, on the whole, a good thing. Learn righteousness, therefore, say they, and leave religion to the fantastic-minded who love to believe. The human is what we need. Let the superhuman alone.
Now, our philosophy of loyalty, aiming at something much larger and richer than the mere sum of human happiness in individual men, has taught us that there is no such sharp dividing line between the human and the superhuman as these attempts to sunder the provinces of religion and morality would imply. The loyal serve something more than individual lives. Even Nietzsche, individu alist and ethical naturalist though he was, illustrates our present thesis. He began the later period of his teaching by asserting that "God is dead"; and (lest one might regard this as a mere attack upon monotheism, and might suppose Nietzsche to be an old-fash ioned heathen polytheist) he added the fa mous remark that, in case any gods whatever existed, he could not possibly endure being THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY himself no god. " Therefore" so he rea soned, "there are no gods." All this seems to leave man very much to his own devices. Yet Nietzsche at once set up the cult of the ideal future being called the Uebermensch or Superman. And the Uebermensch is just as much of a god as anybody who ever throned upon Olympus or dwelt in the sky. And if the doctrine of the "Eternal Recurrence," as Nietzsche defined it, is true, the Uebermensch belongs not only to the ideal future, but has existed an endless number of times already.
If our philosophy of loyalty is right, Nietz sche was not wrong in this appeal to the superhuman. The superhuman we indeed have always with us. Life has no sense without it. But the superhuman need not be the magical. It need not be the object of superstition. And if we are desirous of uni fying the interests of morality and religion, it is well indeed to begin, as rugged old Amos began, by first appreciating what righteous ness is, and then by interpreting righteous ness, in a perfectly reasonable and non-super- LOYALTY AND RELIGION stitious way, in superhuman terms. Then we shall be ready to appreciate what religion, whose roots are indeed by no means wholly in our moral nature, nevertheless has to offer us as a supplement to our morality.
VI Loyalty is a service of causes. But, as we saw, we do not, we cannot, wait until some body clearly shows us how good the causes are in themselves, before we set about serving them. We first practically learn of the good ness of our causes through the very act of serving them. Loyalty begins, then, in all of us, in elemental forms. A cause fascinates us - - we at first know not clearly why. We give ourselves willingly to that cause. Here with our true life begins. The cause may indeed be a bad one. But at worst it is our way of interpreting the true cause. If we let our loyalty develop, it tends to turn into the service of the universal cause. Hence I deliberately declined, in this discussion, to base my theory of loyalty upon that meta- THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY physical doctrine which I postponed to my latest lectures. It is a very imperfect view of the real world which most youth get before them before they begin to be loyal. Hosts of the loyal actually manifest the eternal in their deeds, and know not that they do so. They only know that they are given over to their cause. The first good of loyalty lies, then, in the fact which we emphasized in our earlier lectures. Reverberating all through you, stirring you to your depths, loyalty first unifies your plan of life, and thereby gives you what nothing else can give, — your self as a life lived in accordance with a plan, your conscience as your plan interpreted for you through your ideal, your cause expressed as your personal purpose in living.
In so far, then, one can indeed be loyal without being consciously and explicitly reli gious. One's cause, in its first intention, appears to him human, concrete, practical. It is also an ideal. It is also a superhuman entity. It also really means the service of the eternal. But this fact may be, to the hard-.
LOYALTY AND RELIGION working, and especially to the unimaginative, and, in a worldly sense, fairly successful man, a latent fact. He then, to be sure, gradually idealizes his cause as he goes; but this ideal izing in so far becomes no very explicitly emphasized process in his life, although, as we have seen, some tendency to deify the cause is inevitable.
Meanwhile, such an imperfectly developed but loyal man may also accept, upon tradi tional grounds, a religion. This religion will then tell him about a superhuman world. But in so far the religion need not be, to his mind, an essential factor in his practical loy alty. He may be superstitious; or he may be a religious formalist; or he may accept his creed and his church simply because of their social respectability and usefulness; or, finally, he may even have a rich and genuine religious experience, which still may remain rather a mysticism than a morality, or an aesthetic comfort rather than a love of his cause.
In such cases, loyalty and religion may long THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY keep apart. But the fact remains that loy alty, if sincere, involves at least a latent belief in the superhuman reality of the cause, and means at least an unconscious devotion to the one and eternal cause. But such a belief is also a latent union of morality and religion. Such a service is an unconscious piety. The time may come, then, when the morality will consciously need this union with the religious creed of the individual whose growth we are portraying.
This union must begin to become an ex plicit union whenever that process which, in our sixth lecture, we called the idealizing of the cause, reaches its higher levels. We saw that those higher levels are reached in the presence of what seems to be, to human vision, a lost cause. If we believe in the lost cause, we become directly aware that we are indeed seeking a city out of sight. If such a cause is real, it belongs to a superhuman world. Now, every cause worthy, as we said, of lifelong service, and capable of unifying our life plans, shows sooner or later that it is LOYALTY AND RELIGION a cause which we cannot successfully express in any set of human experiences of transient joys and of crumbling successes. Human life taken merely as it flows, viewed merely as it passes by in time and is gone, is indeed a lost river of experience that plunges down the mountains of youth and sinks in the deserts of age. Its significance comes solely through its relations to the air and the ocean and the great deeps of universal experience. For by such poor figures I may, in passing, symbolize that really rational relation of our personal experience to universal conscious experience, - that relation to which I have devoted these last two lectures.
Everybody ought to serve the universal cause in his own individual way. For this, as we have seen, is what loyalty, when it comes to know its own mind, really means. But whoever thus serves inevitably loses his cause in our poor world of human sense-experience, because his cause is too good for this present temporal world to express it. And that is, after all, what the old theology meant when it THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY called you and me, as we now naturally are, lost beings. Our deepest loyalty lies in devot ing ourselves to causes that are just now lost to our poor human nature. One can express this, of course, by saying that the true cause is indeed real enough, in the higher world, while it is our poor human nature which is lost. Both ways of viewing the case have their truth. Loyalty means a transformation of our nature.
Lost causes, then, we must serve. But as we have seen, in our sixth lecture, loyalty to a lost cause has two companions, grief and imag ination. Now, these two are the parents of all the higher forms of genuinely ethical religion. If you doubt the fact, read the scriptures of any of the great ethical faiths. Consult the psalter, the hymns, the devotional books, or the prayers of the church. Such religion interprets the superhuman in forms that our longing, our grief, and our imagination in vent, but also in terms that are intended to meet the demands of our highest loyalty. For we are loyal to that unity of life which, LOYALTY AND RELIGION as our truer moral consciousness learns to believe, owns the whole real world, and con stitutes the cause of causes. In being loyal to universal loyalty, we are serving the unity of life.
This true unity of the world-life, however, is at once very near to us and very far from us. Very near it is; for we have our being in it, and depend upon it for whatever worth we have. Apart from it we are but the gur gling stream soon to be lost in the desert. In union with it we have individual significance in and for the whole. But we are very far from it also, because our human experience throws such fragmentary light upon the de tails of our relation to its activities. Hence in order to feel our relations to it as vital relations, we have to bring it near to our feelings and to our imaginations. And we long and suffer the loneliness of this life as we do so. But because we know of the details of the world only through our empirical sciences, while these give us rather materials for a rational life than a view of the unity of life, we are THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY indeed left to our imagination to assuage grief and to help in the training of loyalty. For here, that is, precisely as to the details of the system of facts whereby our life is linked to the eternal, our science forsakes us. We can know that we are thus linked. How we are linked, our sciences do not make manifest to us.
Hence the actual content of the higher ethical religions is endlessly rich in legend and in other symbolic portrayal. This por trayal is rich in emotional meaning and in vivid detail. What this portrayal attempts to characterize is, in its general outline, an absolute truth. This truth consists in the following facts: First, the rational unity and goodness of the world-life; next, its true but invisible nearness to us, despite our ignorance; further, its fulness of meaning despite our barrenness of present experience; and yet more, its interest in our personal destiny as moral beings; and finally, the certainty that, through our actual human loyalty, we come, like Moses, face to face with the true will of LOYALTY AND RELIGION the world, as a man speaks to his friend. In recognizing these facts, we have before us what may be called the creed of the Abso lute Religion.
You may well ask, of course, whether our theory of truth, as heretofore expounded, gives any warrant to such religious convictions. I hold that it does give warrant to them. The symbols in which these truths are expressed by one or another religion are indeed due to all sorts of historical accidents, and to the most varied play of the imaginations both of the peoples and of the religious geniuses of our race. But that our relations to the world-life are relations wherein we are consciously met, from the other side, by a superhuman and yet strictly personal conscious life, in which our own personalities are themselves bound up, but which also.is not only richer but is more concrete and definitely conscious and real than we are, — this seems to me to be an inevitable corollary of my theory of truth.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY VII And now, finally, to sum up our whole doc trine of loyalty and religion. Two things belonging to the world-life we know - - two at least, if my theory is true: it is defined in terms of our own needs; and it includes and completes our experience. Hence, in any case, it is precisely as live and elemental and con crete as we are; and there is not a need of ours which is not its own. If you ask why I call it good - - well, the very arguments which recent pragmatism has used are, as you re member, here my warrant. A truth cannot be a merely theoretical truth. True is that which successfully fulfils an idea. Whoever, again, is not succeeding, or is facing an evil, or is dissatisfied, is inevitably demanding and defining facts that are far beyond him, and that are not yet consciously his own. A knower of the totality of truth is therefore, of neces sity, in possession of the fulfilment of all rational purposes. If, however, you ask why this world-life permits any evil whatever, or LOYALTY AND RELIGION any finitude, or any imperfections, 1 must in deed reply that here is no place for a general discussion of the whole problem of evil, which I have repeatedly and wearisomely considered in other discussions of mine. But this obser vation does belong here. Our theory of evil is indeed no "shallow optimism," but is founded upon the deepest, the bitterest, and the dearest moral experience of the human race. The loyal, and they alone, know the one great good of suffering, of ignorance, of finitude, of loss, of defeat — and that is just the good of loyalty, so long as the cause itself can only be viewed as indeed a living whole. Spiritual peace is surely no easy thing. We win that peace only through stress and suffer ing and loss and labor. But when we find the preciousness of the idealized cause empha sized through grief, we see that, whatever evil is, it at least may have its place in an ideal order. What would be the universe without loyalty; and what would loyalty be without trial? And when we remember that, from this point of view, our own griefs are the griefs THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY of the very world consciousness itself, in so far as this world-life is expressed in our lives, it may well occur to us that the life of loyalty with all its griefs and burdens and cares may be the very foundation of the attainment of that spiritual triumph which we must conceive as realized by the world spirit.
Perhaps, however, one weakly says: "If the world will attains in its wholeness what we seek, why need we seek that good at all?" I answer at once that our whole philosophy of loyalty instantly shows the vanity of such speech. Of course, the world-life does not obtain the individual good that is involved in my willing loyalty unless indeed I am loyal. The cause may in some way triumph without me, but not as my cause. We have never defined our theory as meaning that the world- life Is first eternally complete, but then asks us, in an indifferent way, to copy its perfections. Our view is that each of us who is loyal is doing his unique deed in that whole of life which we have called the eternal simply because it is the conspectus of the totality of LOYALTY AND RELIGION life, past, present, and future. If my deed were not done, the world-life would miss my deed. Each of us can say that. The very basis of our theory of truth, which we found upon the deeds, the ideas, the practical needs, of each of us, gives every individual his unique place in the world order — his deed that no body else can do, his will which is his own. "Our wills are ours to make them thine." The unity of the world is not an ocean in which we are lost, but a life which is and which needs all our lives in one. Our loyalty de fines that unity for us as a living, active unity. We have come to the unity through the under standing of our loyalty. It is an eternal unity only in so far as it includes all time and change and life and deeds. And therefore, when we reach this view, since the view simply fulfils what loyalty demands, our loyalty re mains as precious to us, and as practical, and as genuinely a service of a cause, as it was before. It is no sort of "moral holiday" that this whole world-life suggests to us. It is precisely as a whole life of ideal strivings in THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY which we have our places as individual selves and are such selves only in so far as we strive to do our part in the whole, — it is thus, and thus only, that our philosophy of loyalty regards the universe.
Religion, therefore, precisely in so far as it attempts to conceive the universe as a con scious and personal life of superhuman mean ing, and as a life that is in close touch with our own meaning, is eternally true. But now it is just this general view of the universe as a *!
rational order that is indeed open to our rational knowledge. No part of such a doc trine gives us, however, the present right as human beings to determine with any certainty the details of the world-life, except in so far as they come within the scope of our scien tific and of our social inquiries. Hence, when religion, in the service of loyalty, inter prets the world-life to us with symbolic detail, it gives us indeed merely symbols of the eternal truth. That this truth is indeed eternal, that our loyalty brings us into personal relations with a personal world-life, which values our LOYALTY AND RELIGION every loyal deed, and needs that deed, all this is true and rational. And just this is what religion rightly illustrates. But the parables, the symbols, the historical incidents that the religious imagination uses in its portrayals, — these are the more or less sacred and transient accidents in which the "real presence" of the divine at once shows itself to us, and hides the detail of its inner life from us. These acci dents of the religious imagination endure through many ages; but they also vary from place to place and from one nation or race of men to another, and they ought to do so. Whoever sees the living truth of the personal and conscious and ethical unity of the world through these symbols is possessed of the absolute religion, whatever be his nominal creed or church. Whoever overemphasizes the empirical details of these symbols, and then asks us to accept these details as literally true, commits an error which seems to me simply to invert that error whereof, at the last time, I ventured to accuse my pragmatist friends. Such a literalist, who reads his THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY