What do we live for? What is our duty? What is the true ideal of life? What is the true difference between right and wrong? What is the true good which we all need? Whoever begins seriously to consider such questions as these soon observes certain great truths about the moral life which he must take into account if his enterprise is to succeed, that is, if he is ever to answer these questions.
The first truth is this: We all of us first learned about what we ought to do, about what our ideal should be, and in general about the moral law, through some authority external to our own wills. Our teachers, our parents, our playmates, society, custom, or perhaps some church, --these taught us about one or another aspect of right and wrong. The moral law came to us from without. It 24 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY often seemed to us, in so far, something other than our will, something threatening or socially compelling, or externally restraining. In so far as our moral training is still incomplete, the moral law may at any moment have to assume afresh this air of an external authority merely in order to win our due attention. But if we have learned the moral law, or any part of it, and if we do not ask any longer how we first learned, or how we may still have to learn afresh our duty, but if, on the contrary, we rather ask: "What reason can I now give to myself why a given act is truly right? What reason can I give why my duty is my duty?" -then, indeed, we find that no external au thority, viewed merely as external, can give one any reason why an act is truly right or wrong. Only a calm and reasonable view of what it is that I myself really will, — only this can decide such a question. My duty is simply my own will brought to my clear self- consciousness. That which I can rightly view as good for me is simply the object of my own deepest desire set plainly before my insight.
25 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY For your own will and your own desire, once fully brought to self -consciousness, furnish the only valid reason for you to know what is right and good.
This comment which I now make upon the nature of the moral law is familiar to every serious student of ethics. In one form or another this fact, that the ultimate moral au thority for each of us is determined by our own rational will, is admitted even by apparently extreme partisans of authority. Socrates long ago announced the principle in question when he taught that no man is willingly base. Plato and Aristotle employed it in developing their ethical doctrines. When St. Augustine, in a familiar passage in his Confessions, regards God's will as that in which, and in which alone, our wills can find rest and peace, he indeed makes God's will the rule of life; but he also shows that the reason why each of us, if en lightened, recognizes the divine will as right, is that, in Augustine's opinion, God has so made us for himself that our own wills are by nature inwardly restless until they rest in har- 26 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY mony with God's will. Our restlessness, then, so long as we are out of this harmony, gives us the reason why we find it right, if we are enlightened, to surrender our self-will.
If you want to find out, then, what is right and what is good for you, bring your own will to self -consciousness. Your duty is what you yourself will to do in so far as you clearly dis cover who you are, and what your place in the world is. This is, indeed, a first principle of all ethical inquiry. Kant called it the Prin ciple of the Autonomy or self-direction of the rational will of each moral being.
But now there stands beside this first prin ciple a second principle, equally inevitable and equally important. This principle is, that I can never find out what my owrn will is by merely brooding over my natural desires, or by following my momentary caprices. For by nature I am a sort of meeting place of count less streams of ancestral tendency. From moment to moment, if you consider me apart from my training, I am a collection of im pulses. There is no one desire that is always 27 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY present to me. Left to myself alone, I can never find out what my will is.
You may interpose here the familiar thesis that there is one desire which I always have, namely, the desire to escape from pain and to get pleasure. But as soon as you try to ad just this thesis to the facts of life, it is a thesis which simplifies nothing, and which at best simply gives me back again, under new names, that chaos of conflicting passions and in terests which constitutes, apart from training, my natural life. What we naturally desire is determined for us by our countless instincts and by whatever training they have received. We want to breathe, to eat, to walk, to run, to speak, to see, to hear, to love, to fight, and, amongst other things, we want to be more or less reasonable. Now, if one of these instinc tive wants of ours drives us at any moment to action, we normally take pleasure in such action, in so far as it succeeds. For action in accordance with desire means relief from tension; and that is usually accompanied with pleasure. On the other hand, a thwarted 28 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY activity gives us pain. But only under special circumstances does this resulting pleasure or pain of the successful or of the hindered activ ity come to constitute a principal object of our desire. We all do like pleasure, and we all do shun pain. But a great deal of what we desire is desired by instinct, apart from the memory or the expectation of pleasure and pain, and often counter to the warnings that pleasure and pain have given to us. It is normal to desire food because one is hungry, rather than because one loves the pleasures of the table. It is water that the thirsty man in the desert longs for, rather than pleasure, and rather than even mere relief from pain as such. For much of the pain appears to his consciousness as largely due to his longing for water. Pain, then, is indeed an evil, but it is in part secondary to thwarted desire; while, when pain appears as a brute fact of our feelings, which we indeed hate, such pain is even then only one amongst the many ills of life, only one of the many undesirable objects. The burnt child, indeed, dreads the fire; 29 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY but the climbing child, instinctively loving the ways of his remote arboreal ancestors, is little deterred by the pain of an occasional fall.
Furthermore, if I even admitted that I always desire pleasure and relief from pain, and nothing else, I should not learn from such a principle what it is that, on the whole, I am to will to do, in order to express my desire for pleasure, and in order to escape from pain. For no art is harder than the art of pleasure seeking. I can never learn that art alone by myself. And so I cannot define my own will, and hence cannot define my duty, merely in terms of pleasure and pain.
VI So far, then, we have a rather paradoxical situation before us. Yet it is the moral situa tion of every one of us. If I am to know my duty, I must consult my own reasonable will. I alone can show myself why I view this or this as my duty. But on the other hand, if I merely look within myself to find what it is 30 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY that I will, my own private individual nature, apart from due training, never gives me any answer to the question: What do I will? By nature I am a victim of my ancestry, a mass of world-old passions and impulses, de siring and suffering in constantly new ways as my circumstances change, and as one or an other of my natural impulses comes to the front. By nature, then, apart from a specific training, I have no personal will of my own. One of the principal tasks of my life is to learn to have a will of my own. To learn your own will, — yes, to create your own will, is one of the largest of your human undertakings.
Here, then, is the paradox. I, and only I, whenever I come to my own, can morally justify to myself my own plan of life. No outer authority can ever give me the true rea son for my duty. Yet I, left to myself, can never find a plan of life. I have no inborn ideal naturally present within myself. By nature I simply go on crying out in a sort of chaotic self-will, according as the momentary play of desire determines.
31 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY Whence, then, can I learn any plan of life? The moral education of any civilized person easily reminds you how this question is, in one respect, very partially, but, so far as ordinary training goes, constantly answered. One gets one's various plans of life suggested through the models that are set before each one of us by his fellows. Plans of life first come to us in connection with our endless imitative activities. These imitative pro cesses begin in our infancy, and run on through our whole life. We learn to play, to speak, to enter into our social realm, to take part in the ways and so in the life of mankind. This imitative social activity is itself due to our instincts as social beings. But in turn the social activities are the ones that first tend to organize all of our instincts, to give unity to our passions and impulses, to transform our natural chaos of desires into some sort of order — usually, indeed, a very imperfect order. It is our social exist ence, then, as imitative beings, --it is this that suggests to us the sorts of plans of life 32 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY which we get when we learn a calling, when we find a business in life, when we discover our place in the social world. And so our actual plans of life, namely, our callings, our more or less settled daily activities, come to us from without. We in so far learn what our own will is by first imitating the wills of others.
Yet no, --this, once more, is never the whole truth about our social situation, and is still less the whole truth about our moral situation. By ourselves alone, we have said, we can never discover in our own inner life any one plan of life that expresses our genuine will. So then, we have said, all of our plans get suggested to us by the social order in which we grow up. But on the other hand, our social training gives us a mass of varying plans of life, --plans that are not utterly chaotic, indeed, but imperfectly ordered, — mere routine, not ideal life. Moreover, social training tends not only to teach us the way of other people, but to heighten by contrast our vague natural sense of the importance of THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY having our own way. Social training stimu lates the will of the individual self, and also teaches this self customs and devices for self-expression. We never merely imitate. Conformity attracts, but also wearies us. Meanwhile, even by imitation, we often learn how to possess, and then to carry out, our own self-will. For instance, we learn speech first by imitation; but henceforth we love to hear ourselves talk; and our whole plan of life gets affected accordingly. Speech has, indeed, its origin in social conformity. Yet the tongue is an unruly member, and wags rebelliously. Teach men customs, and you equip them with weapons for expressing their own personalities. As you train the social being, you make use of his natural submis- siveness. But as a result of your training he forms plans; he interprets these plans with reference to his own personal interests; he becomes aware who he is; and he may end by becoming, if not original, then at least obstreperous. And thus society is con stantly engaged in training up children who 34 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY may, and often do, rebel against their mother. Social conformity gives us social power. Such power brings to us a consciousness of who and what we are. Now, for the first time, we begin to have a real will of our own. And hereupon we may discover this will to be in sharp conflict with the will of society. This is what normally happens to most of us, for a time at least, in youth.
You see, so far, how the whole process upon which man's moral life depends in volves this seemingly endless play of inner and outer. How shall my duty be defined? Only by my own will, whenever that will is brought to rational self -consciousness. But what is my will? By nature I know not; for by birth I am a mere eddy in the turbulent stream of inherited human passion. How, then, shall I get a will of my own? Only through social training. That indeed gives me plans, for it teaches me the settled ways of my world. Yet no, — for such training really teaches me rather the arts whereby I may express myself. It makes me clever, 35 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY ambitious, often rebellious, and in so far it teaches me how to plan opposition to the social order. The circular process thus briefly indicated goes on throughout the lives of many of us. It appears in new forms at various stages of our growth. At any mo ment we may meet new problems of right and wrong, relating to our plans of life. We hereupon look within, at what we call our own conscience, to find out what our duty is. But, as we do so, we discover, too often, what wayward and blind guides our own hearts so far are. So we look without, in order to un derstand better the ways of the social world. We cannot see the inner light. Let us try the outer one. These ways of the world appeal to our imitativeness, and so we learn from the other people how we ourselves are in this case to live. Yet no, — this very learning often makes us aware of our personal contrast with other people, and so makes us self-con scious, individualistic, critical, rebellious; and again we are thrown back on ourselves for guidance. Seeing the world's way afresh, I 36 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY see that it is not my way. I revive. I assert myself. My duty, I say, is my own. And so, perhaps, I go back again to my own way ward heart.
It is this sort of process which goes on, sometimes in a hopelessly circular way, when, in some complicated situation, you are mor ally perplexed, and after much inner brood ing give up deciding by yourself and appeal to friends for advice. The advice at first pleases you, but soon may arouse your self- will more than before. You may become, as a result, more wayward and sometimes more perplexed, the longer you continue this sort of inquiry. We all know what it is to seek advice, just with the result of finding out what it is that we do not want to do.
Neither within nor without, then, do I find what seems to me a settled authority, — a settled and harmonious plan of life, — unless, indeed, one happy sort of union takes place between the inner and the outer, between my social world and myself, between my natural waywardness and the ways of my fellows.
37 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY This happy union is the one that takes place whenever my mere social conformity, my docility as an imitative creature, turns into exactly that which, in these lectures, I shall call loyalty. Let us consider what happens in such cases.
VII Suppose a being whose social conformity has been sufficient to enable him to learn many skilful social arts, — arts of speech, of prowess in contest, of influence over other men. Suppose that these arts have at the same time awrakened this man's pride, his self-confidence, his disposition to assert him self. Such a man will have in him a good deal of what you can well call social will. He will be no mere anarchist. He will have been trained into much obedience. He will be no natural enemy of society, unless, indeed, fortune has given him extraordinary oppor tunities to win his way without scruples. On the other hand, this man must acquire a good deal of self-will. He becomes fond of success, 33 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY of mastery, of his own demands. To be sure, he can find within himself no one naturally sovereign will. He can so far find only a general determination to define some way of his own, and to have his own way. Hence the conflicts of social will and self-will are inevitable, circular, endless, so long as this is the whole story of the man's life. By merely consulting convention, on the one hand, and his disposition to be somebody, on the other hand, this man can never find any one final and consistent plan of life, nor reach any one definition of his duty.
But now suppose that there appears in this man's life some one of the greater social pas sions, such as patriotism well exemplifies. Let his country be in danger. Let his ele mental passion for conflict hereupon fuse with his brotherly love for his own country men into that fascinating and blood-thirsty form of humane but furious ecstasy, which is called the war-spirit. The mood in question may or may not be justified by the passing circumstances. For that I now care not. At 39 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY its best the war-spirit is no very clear or ra tional state of anybody's mind. But one reason why men may love this spirit is that when it comes, it seems at once to define a plan of life, — a plan which solves the con flicts of self-will and conformity. This plan has two features: (1) it is through and through a social plan, obedient to the gen eral will of one's country, submissive; (2) it is through and through an exaltation of the self, of the inner man, who now feels glori fied through his sacrifice, dignified in his self- surrender, glad to be his country's servant and martyr, — yet sure that through this very readiness for self-destruction he wins the rank of hero.
Well, if the man whose case we are suppos ing gets possessed by some such passion as this, he wins for the moment the conscious ness of what I call loyalty. This loyalty no longer knows anything about the old circular conflicts of self-will and of conformity. The self, at such moments, looks indeed outwards for its plan of life. "The country needs me," 40 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY it says. It looks, meanwhile, inwards for the inspiring justification of this plan. "Honor, the hero's crown, the soldier's death, the patriot's devotion — these," it says, "are my will. I am not giving up this will of mine. It is my pride, my glory, my self- assertion, to be ready at my country's call." And now there is no conflict of outer and inner.
How wise or how enduring or how prac tical such a passion may prove, I do not yet consider. What I point out is that this war-spirit, for the time at least, makes self- sacrifice seem to be self-expression, makes obedience to the country's call seem to be the proudest sort of display of one's own pow ers. Honor now means submission, and to obey means to have one's way. Power and service are at one. Conformity is no longer opposed to having one's own will. One has no will but that of the country.
As a mere fact of human nature, then, there are social passions which actually tend to do at once two things: (1) to intensify our self- 41 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY consciousness, to make us more than ever determined to express our own will and more than ever sure of our own rights, of our own strength, of our dignity, of our power, of our value; (2) to make obvious to us that this our will has no purpose but to do the will of some fascinating social power. This social power is the cause to which we are loyal.
Loyalty, then, fixes our attention upon some one cause, bids us look without ourselves to see what this unified cause is, shows us thus some one plan of action, and then says to us, "In this cause is your life, your will, your opportunity, your fulfilment."
Thus loyalty, viewed merely as a personal attitude, solves the paradox of our ordinary existence, by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service, and which is not thwarted but en riched and expressed in such service.
I have used patriotism and the war-spirit merely as a first and familiar illustration of loyalty. But now, as we shall later see, there 42 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY is no necessary connection between loyalty and war; and there are many other forms of loyalty besides the patriotic forms. Loyalty has its domestic, its religious, its commercial, its professional forms, and many other forms as well. The essence of it, whatever forms it may take, is, as I conceive the matter, this: Since no man can find a plan of life by merely looking within his own chaotic nature, he has to look without, to the world of social conven tions, deeds, and causes. Now, a loyal man is one who has found, and who sees, neither mere individual fellow-men to be loved or hated, nor mere conventions, nor customs, nor laws to be obeyed, but some social cause, or some system of causes, so rich, so well knit, and, to him, so fascinating, and withal so kindly in its appeal to his natural self-will, that he says to his cause: 'Thy will is mine and mine is thine. In thee I do not lose but find myself, living intensely in proportion as I live for thee." If one could find such a cause, and hold it for his lifetime before his mind, clearly observing it, passionately loving 43 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY it, and yet calmly understanding it, and stead ily and practically serving it, he would have one plan of life, and this plan of life would be his own plan, his own will set before him, expressing all that his self-will has ever sought. Yet this plan would also be a plan of obedience, because it would mean living for the cause.
Now, in all ages of civilized life there have been people who have won in some form a consciousness of loyalty, and who have held to such a consciousness through life. Such people may or may not have been right in their choice of a cause. But at least they have exemplified through their loyalty one feature of a rational moral life. They have known what it was to have unity of purpose.
And again, the loyal have known what it was to be free from moral doubts and scruples. Their cause has been their conscience. It has told them what to do. They have lis tened and obeyed, not because of what they took to be blind convention, not because of a fear of external authority, not even because of what seemed to themselves any purely pri- 44 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY vate and personal intuition, but because, when they have looked first outwards at their cause, and then inwards at themselves, they have found themselves worthless in their own eyes, except when viewed as active, as confi dently devoted, as willing instruments of their cause. Their cause has forbidden them to doubt; it has said: "You are mine, you cannot do otherwise." And they have said to the cause: " I am, even of my own will, thine. I have no will except thy will. Take me, use me, control me, and even thereby fulfil me and exalt me." That is again the speech of the devoted patriots, soldiers, moth ers, and martyrs of our race. They have had the grace of this willing, this active loyalty.
Now, people loyal in this sense have surely existed in the world, and, as you all know, the loyal still exist amongst us. And I beg you not to object to me, at this point, that such devoted people have often been loyal to very bad causes; or that different people have been loyal to causes which were in deadly war with one another, so that loyal people must 45 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY often have been falsely guided. I beg you, above all, not to interpose here the objection that our modern doubters concerning moral problems simply cannot at present see to what one cause they ought to be loyal, so that just herein, just in our inability to see a fitting and central object of loyalty, lies the root of our modern moral confusion and distraction. All those possible objections are indeed per fectly fair considerations. I shall deal with them in due time; and I am just as earnestly aware of them as you can be. But just now we are getting our first glimpse of our future philosophy of loyalty. All that you can say of the defects of loyalty leaves still untouched the one great fact that, if you want to find a way of living which surmounts doubts, and centralizes your powers, it must be some such a way as all the loyal in common have trodden, since first loyalty was known amongst men. What form of loyalty is the right one, we are hereafter to see. But unless you can find some sort of loyalty, you cannot find unity and peace in your active living. You must 46 NATURE AND NEED OF LOYALTY find, then, a cause that is really worthy of the sort of devotion that the soldiers, rushing cheerfully to certain death, have felt for their clan or for their country, and that the martyrs have shown on behalf of their faith. This cause must be indeed rational, worthy, and no object of a false devotion. But once found, it must become your conscience, must tell you the truth about your duty, and must unify, as from without and from above, your motives, your special ideals, and your plans. You ought, I say, to find such a cause, if in deed there be any ought at all. And this is my first hint of our moral code.
But you repeat, perhaps in bewilderment, your question: 'Where, in our distracted modern world, in this time when cause wars with cause, and when all old moral standards are remorselessly criticised and doubted, are we to find such a cause — a cause, all-embrac ing, definite, rationally compelling, supreme, certain, and fit to centralize life? What cause is there that for us would rationally justify a martyr's devotion?" I reply: "A 47 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY perfectly simple consideration, derived from a study of the very spirit of loyalty itself, as this spirit is manifested by all the loyal, will soon furnish to us the unmistakable answer to this question." For the moment we have won our first distant glimpse of what I mean by the general nature of loyalty, and by our common need of loyalty.
48 II INDIVIDUALISM LECTURE II INDIVIDUALISM IN my opening lecture I undertook to define the personal attitude which I called loyalty, and to show that, for our own individual good, we all need loyalty, and need to find causes to which we can be loyal. This was but the beginning of our philosophy of loyalty. Before I take my next step, I must ask you briefly to review the results that we have already reached.
By loyalty, as you remember, I mean in this preliminary view of loyalty, the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause. By a cause that is adapted to call forth loyalty I mean, for the first, something which seems to the loyal person to be larger than his private self, and so to be, in some respect, external to his purely in- 51 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY dividual will. This cause must, in the second place, unite him with other persons by some social tie, such as a personal friendship, or his family, or the state may, in a given case, represent. The cause, therefore, to which the loyal man is devoted, is something that appears to him to be at once personal (since it concerns both himself and other people), and impersonal, or rather, if regarded from a purely human point of view, superpersonal, because it links several human selves, perhaps a vast number of selves, into some higher social unity. You cannot be loyal to a merely impersonal abstraction; and you also cannot be loyal simply to a collection of various sepa rate persons, viewed merely as a collection. Where there is an object of loyalty, there is, then, an union of various selves into one life. This union constitutes a cause to which one may indeed be loyal, if such is his disposition. And such an union of many in one, if known to anybody for whom a person means merely a human person, appears to be something impersonal or superpersonal, just because it 52 INDIVIDUALISM 52 INDIVIDUALISM is more than all those separate and private personalities whom it joins. Yet it is also intensely personal, because the union is in deed an union of selves, and so not a merely artificial abstraction.
That such causes and that a thoroughgoing, willing, practical devotion to them, such as our definition of loyalty demands — that, I say, such things exist in the world, I tried at the last time to illustrate to you. My illus trations were inadequate; for it is simply impossible to show you briefly how Protean the forms of human loyalty are, and yet how similar, amidst all this endless variety of forms, the spirit of loyalty remains, whatever the causes in question may be, and whoever the loyal people are. We began, of course, with marked, traditional, and familiar illus trations. The loyal captain, steadfastly stand ing by his sinking ship until his last possible duty for the service to which he belongs has been accomplished; the loyal patriot, eager to devote every power to living, and, if need be, to dying for his endangered country; the 53 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY loyal religious martyr, faithful unto death, — these are indeed impressive and typical in stances of loyalty; but they are not the only possible instances. Anybody who, for a time, is in charge of the lives of others (for instance, any one who takes a party of children on a pleasure trip) may have the opportunity to possess and to show as genuine a loyalty as does the true-hearted captain of the sinking ship. For danger is everywhere, and to be in charge of life is always an occasion for loyalty. Anybody who has friends may devote his life to some cause which his friendship defines for him and makes, in his eyes, sacred. Any body who has given his word in a serious mat ter may come to think himself called upon to sacrifice every private advantage in order to keep his word. Thus, then, anything which can link various people by fixed social ties may suggest to somebody the opportunity for a lifelong loyalty. The loyal are, therefore, to be found in all orders of society. They may be of very various degrees of intelligence, of power, of effectiveness. Wherever there INDIVIDUALISM INDIVIDUALISM are mothers and brethren, and kindred of any degree, and social organizations of any type; wherever men accept offices, or pledge their word, or, as in the pursuit of science or of art, cooperate in the search for truth and for beauty, — there are to be found causes which may appeal to the loyal interest of somebody. Loyalty may thus exist amongst the lowliest and amongst the loftiest of man kind. The king and the peasant, the saint and the worldling, all have their various op portunities for loyalty. The practical man of the world and the seemingly lonely student of science may be equally loyal.
But whatever the cause to which one is loyal, and whoever it be that is loyal, the spirit of loyalty is always the one which our preliminary definition set forth, and which our former discussion attempted more pre cisely to describe. Whenever a cause, beyond your private self, greater than you are, — a cause social in its nature and capable of link ing into one the wills of various individuals, a cause thus at once personal and, from the 55 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY purely human point of view, superpersonal, — whenever, I say, such a cause so arouses your interest that it appears to you worthy to be served with all your might, with all your soul, with all your strength, then this cause awakens in you the spirit of loyalty. If you act out this spirit, you become, in fact, loyal. And upon the unity of this spirit, amidst all its countless varieties, our future argument will depend. It is essential to that argument to insist that the humblest, as well as the wisest and mightiest of men, may share in this one spirit.
Now, loyalty, thus defined, is, as we have maintained, something which we all, as hu man beings, need. That is, we all need to find causes which shall awaken our loyalty. I tried to indicate to you at the last time the grounds for this our common need for loyalty. In order to do so, I began with a confessedly lower view of loyalty. I have asked you, for the time, in this opening study, to abstract al together from the cause to which any man is loyal, to leave out of account whether that 56 INDIVIDUALISM