our petty lives, how must he regard this self-seeking loneliness of disposition? What is this heroic life but an overflow from the great stream of universal life, a pool, that, left to itself by some subsiding flood, slowly dries away in its shallow stagnancy, until it becomes a mud-puddle? And as for the proof of this, what becomes of your hero if you take him at his word, and leave him to himself like a rhi¬ noceros? Then indeed he soon sinks to the level of a peevish animal. His admirable character is what it is by reason of his conflicts with his fellows, and by reason of the respect that he excites in others. Stop talking about him, cease admiring him, do not even fight with him, ignore him utterly; and with these external supports see his inner heroism vanish. He exists as hero, in fact, only because he is in or¬ ganic relation to the world about him. His boasted loneliness is an illusion. Could not Mephistopheles have his laugh here tc5o?
But the Titan is often properly the hero not only of a comedy, but also of a tragedy; and a tragedy, as we know, always discovers to us the gloomy worth¬ lessness of this individual life as such. Mortal man, once brought to possess the moral insight, finds his destiny not in himself, but in the life about him, or in the ideal life of God. And the tragedy expresses one way of getting this insight.
In short, just what the Heresy of Prometheus as¬ serts to be the perfect, namely, the complete and all- sided development of life, just that can belong only to the general, not to the individual life. Hence Titanism always contradicts itself. It says that I, THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE the narrow, limited self, who am dependent for every quality of my life on constant living intercourse with other people, must become perfect, independent, practically infinite. But to ask this is to ask that I destroy myself, and my Titanism with me. Unquiet is and must be the life that seeks perfection in any group of selves. And so the ideal cannot here be found.
V.
V.
Somewhat hastily, as our limits have required, we have pursued the definition of our ideal through the imperfect forms of individualism. And now what must it be that the moral insight, with its Universal Will, demands of the possible future moral humanity, not as the negative task of preparing the way for goodness, but as the positive ideal task of the com¬ munity in which the moral insight is attained? This demand is: Organize all Life. And this means: Find work for the life of the coming moral human¬ ity which shall be so comprehensive and definite that each moment of every man’s life in that perfect state, however rich and manifold men’s lives may then be, can be and will be spent in the accomplish¬ ment of that one highest impersonal work. If such work is found and accepted, the goal of human prog¬ ress will be in so far reached. There will then be harmony, the negative expression of the moral in¬ sight; and there will be work, and organization of work. And this work will be no more the work of so and so many separate men, but it will be the work of man as man. And the separate men will not 212 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY know or care whether they separately are happy; for they shall have no longer individual wills, but the Universal Will shall work in and through them, as the one will of two lovers finds itself in the united life of these twain, so that neither of them asks, as lover, whether this is his perfection or the other’s that he experiences. For their love makes them one. In such wise we must figure to ourselves the ideal state of humanity. And anything short of that we are required by the moral insight to alter in the direction of that end.
The reader may ask, What work can be found that can thus realize the universal will? It is not for us to know the whole nature of that work. We set before us the ideal task to discover such forms of activity as shall tend to organize life. The com¬ plete organization we cannot now foresee. But we can foresee in what general direction that human activity will tend, if it is ever discovered. For we have certain human activities that do now already tend to the impersonal organization of the life of those engaged in them. Such activities are found in the work of art, in the pursuit of truth, and in a genuine public spirit. Beauty, Knowledge, and the State, are three ideal objects that do actually claim from those who serve them harmony, freedom from selfishness, and a wholly impersonal devotion. Both in art and in the service of the state, the weakness of human nature makes men too often put personal ambition before the true service of their chosen ideal. The faultiness of all such individualism is, however, generally recognized. The dignity and se- THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE verely impersonal relationships and language of offi¬ cial life are intended to express the sense that no in¬ dividual has as such the right to recognition at the moment when he exercises an official function. He lives at the time wholly in his office. The state is just then everything. Even so all higher criticism professes to disregard the personal pleasure of the artist, and the personal whim of the critic. The production and the criticism of Art are no amuse¬ ments of two individuals. They are work done in the service of the one mistress, the divine art it¬ self. But still, notwithstanding the recognition of this ideal devotion to one’s country or to one’s art, our typical politician and our typical ambitious ar¬ tist show us that these activities still but imperfectly overcome individualism, or lead men to the higher plane of moral life. Better success in organizing life one finds, when one passes to the activity of truth¬ seeking, especially in fields where human thought is best master of itself, and best conscious of its powers. When one considers the work of a company of scientific specialists, — how each one lives for his science, and how, when the specialty is advanced and well organized, no one in official expressions of his purely scientific purposes dares either to give himself airs of importance as an individual, or to show any benevolence or favoritism or fear in con¬ sidering and testing the work of anybody else; when one sees how impersonal is this idea of the scientific life, how no self of them all is supposed to have a thought about his science because it pleases him, but solely because it is true, — when one consid- 214 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY ers all this, one sees faintly what the ideal relation of mankind would be, if the ideal work for all men were found. This devoted scientific spirit is itself only an ideal even to-day; and all sorts of personal motives still interfere to disturb its purity. But here, at all events, one sees dimly in a concrete in¬ stance what the organization of life may yet be¬ come.
Now suppose a world in which men had some one. end of activity that united somehow all the differ¬ ent strivings of our nature, — aesthetic, social, theo¬ retical. Suppose that in the pursuit of this end all the petty, selfish aims of individuals had been for¬ gotten. Suppose that men said no longer: “ I have won this good thing for myself and my friends,” but only, “This good is attained,” no matter by whom. Suppose that thus all life was organized in and through this activity, so that a man rose up and lay down to rest, ate and drank, exercised and amused his senses, met his fellows, talked with them, lived and planned with them, built his cities, wan¬ dered over the oceans, searched the heavens with his telescopes, toiled in his laboratories, sang his songs, wrote his poems, loved and died, all for the service of this one great work, and knew his life only as the means to serve that one end, then would the ideal of the moral insight be attained. The world of life would be as one will, working through all and in all, seeking the ends of no one individual, caring not for any stupid and meaningless “ aggre¬ gate ” of individual states, but getting what 4s in¬ sight it demands, the absolute Unity of Life. Then THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE indeed we should have reached the ideal; and this being the ideal, all is good that helps us in the di¬ rection thereof, and all is evil that drives us in the opposing direction.
The imperfection and the relative justification in its place of benevolent hedonism are thus indicated. The moral insight being attained by all men as an experience, this insight could not will for individuals such painful experiences as would degrade the suf¬ ferers below the level of the insight itself, back to the struggles and the illusions of individualism. It would be the business of men then as now, to remove useless pain out of the world, not however for any other reason than that pain implies separation of the sufferer from the consciousness of universal life, and consequent disharmony of his will in its relation to other wills. Pain that springs from selfish disap¬ pointments we must often temporarily increase, that we may lead a man out of himself. But for the rest, the moral insight rejects pain, though only be¬ cause it means disharmony of the wills that are in the world.
Thus we have completed the expression of our gen¬ eral ideal. We must add a few concrete precepts that this ideal has to give us concerning the conduct of our daily life. Plainly, if such a goal as this is what we aim at from afar, the acts of our lives must be influenced by it. Wliat relation between me and my neighbor to-day does this moral law establish?
Thou and I, neighbor, have in this world no rights as individuals. We are instruments. The insight that begins in me when I find thee, must go further 216 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY I find not only thee, but also Life Universal. In¬ asmuch as I do anything for thee, I do it also to the life universal; but, even so, it is only because I serve the life universal that I dare serve thee. Thy happiness, however near and dear thou art to me, is but a drop in this vast ocean of life. And we must be ready to sacrifice ourselves to the Whole. But while we live together, and while we may with¬ out sin enjoy each other’s presence, how shall we treat each other? As mere masses of happy or miserable states? As selves to be made separately perfect! No, that cannot be. We must live united with each other and the world. Therefore must we do our part to find work vast enough to bring us all in so far as may be into unity, without cramping the tal¬ ent of any of us. Each then is to do his work, but so as to unite with the work of others. How may we accomplish this? By seeking to develop every form of life that does bring men into such oneness. Our vocation, whatever it be, must not end simply in increasing what people call the aggregate happi¬ ness of mankind, but in giving human life more interconnection, closer relationship. Therefore we must serve as we can art, science, truth, the state, not as if these were machines for giving people pleas¬ ant feelings, but because they make men more united. When we urge or seek independence of character, we must do so only because such independence is a temporary means, whose ultimate aim is harmony and unity of all men on a higher plane. In all this we must keep before us very often the high ideal that we are trying to approach. And when we judge of THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE a good action we must say, not that this was good be¬ cause it made some one happy, but that it was good because it tended directly or remotely to realize the Universal Will.
And so, however much mere harmony may be our aim, we must be ready very often temporarily to fight with disorganizing and separating tendencies, forces, or men. When we fight we must do so for the sake of conquering a peace in the name of the Highest. And so we must fight resolutely, fearlessly, merci¬ lessly. For we care not how many stubbornly disor¬ ganizing spirits are crushed on the way. The One Will must conquer. But on the other side we must be very careful of every soul, and of every tendency that may, without destruction, be moulded into the service of the Universal Will. The moral insight desires that no hair fall from the head of any living creature unnecessarily. The one aim is stern to its steadfast enemies, but it is infinitely regardful of all the single aims, however they may seem wayward, that can at last find themselves subdued and yet realized in its presence, and so conformed to its will. All these rivulets of purpose, however tiny, all these strong floods of passion, however angry, it desires to gather into the surging tides of its infinite ocean, that nothing may be lost that consents to enter. Its unity is no abstraction. The One Will is not a one¬ sided will. It desires the realization of all possible life, however rich, strong, ardent, courageous, mani¬ fold such life may be, if only this life can enter into that highest unity. All that has will is sacred to it, save in so far as any will refuses to join with the 218 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY others in the song and shout of the Sons of God. Its warfare is never intolerance, its demand for sub¬ mission is never tyranny, its sense of the excellence of its own unity is never arrogance; for its warfare is aimed at the intolerance of the separate selves, its yoke is the yoke of complete organic freedom, its pride is in the perfect development of all life. When we serve it, we must sternly cut off all that life in ourselves or in others that cannot ultimately conform to the universal will; but we have nothing but love for every form of sentient existence that can in any measure express this Will.
VI.
VI.
We have done for the present with the ideal, and must turn to reality. Our religious consciousness wants support for us in our poor efforts to do right. Is this real world that we have so naively assumed thus far, in any wise concerned to help us in realizing ideals, or to support us by any form of approval in our search for the right? We must face this prob¬ lem coolly and skeptically, if we want any result. We must not fear the thunders of any angry dog¬ matic thinker, nor the pain that such researches must cause us if they are unsuccessful. It is something very precious that we seek, and we must run great risks, if need be, to get it.
Let us begin to define a little better what this is that we seek. By a support for moral acts in outer reality, we do not mean merely or mainly a power that will reward goodness. The moral insight cares THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE not for individual rewards. Only the good intention is truly moral. Good acts done for pay are selfish acts. So the outer support that we want in our mo¬ rality is not reward as such. We want to know that, when we try to do right, we are not alone; that there is something outside of us that harmonizes with our own moral efforts by being itself in some way moral. This something may be a person or a tendency. Let us exemplify what we mean by some familiar cases. Job seeks, in his consciousness of moral integrity, for outer support in the midst of his sufferings. Now whatever he may think about rewards, they are not only rewards that he seeks. He wants a vindi¬ cator, a righteous, all-knowing judge, to arise, that can bear witness how upright he has been; such a vindicator he wants to see face to face, that he may call upon him as a beholder of what has actually happened. “ Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat. I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would know the words which he would answer me, and understand what he would say unto me...There the righteous might dis¬ pute with him; so should I be delivered forever from my judge. Behold I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him: But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me I shall come forth as gold.”
So again in the great parable of the judgment day.
220 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, the moral force of the story is not expressed by the rewards and punishments described, any more than in Elijah’s vision on Horeb, — the Lord was in the thunder and in the fire. But the moral force of the scene lies in the concluding words that the judge is made to speak to the multitudes of just and unjust. “ Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto me.” That is, if we may paraphrase the words of the judge: “ I,” he says, “ represent all beings. Their good is mine. If they are hungry or naked or sick or im¬ prisoned, so am I. We are brethren; ours is all one universal life. That I sit in this seat, arbiter of heaven and hell, makes me no other than the rep¬ resentative of universal life. Such reverence as ye now bear to me is due, and always was due, to the least of these my brethren.” The infinite sacredness of all conscious life, that is the sense of the story; the rest is the scenic accompaniment, which, whether literally or symbolically true, has no direct moral significance. Now the knowledge such as Job sought, the knowledge that there is in the universe some con¬ sciousness that sees and knows all reality, including ourselves, for which therefore all the good and evil of our lives is plain fact, — this knowledge would be a religious support to the moral consciousness. The knowledge that there is a being that is no respecter of persons, that considers all lives as equal, and that estimates our acts according to their true value, _.
this would be a genuine support to the religious need in us, quite apart from all notions about reward and punishment. A thinking being, a seer of all THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE good and evil, is thus desired. This thinking being would still have religious significance, even if it had no other attributes than these. Should we find it necessary to regard this being as without affection, sympathy, or even power to act, as without willing¬ ness to avenge wrong-doing, if we had to deprive it of everything else that is human save knowledge; let this be a passionless and perfect knowledge, an absolutely fair judgment of our moral actions, and there would still be in the world something of religious value. It is not affirmed that we ought to rest content with such a conception as this, but at all events this conception would not be valueless. Even so again, the conception of some natural ten¬ dency in the world that, being “ a power not our¬ selves,” “ makes for righteousness,” this conception, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has so well shown us, would have a religious value. Something of this kind then, more or less definite and full of life, is what we seek. What indication is there that such search is not hopeless? For the author’s part, he professes to be quite willing to accept any result of research, how¬ ever gloomy or skeptical, to which he is led by gen¬ uine devotion to the interests of human thought as thought. But he insists that as moral beings we should make clear to ourselves what are the inter¬ ests of thought, and that we should see whether they do lead us to results that are not wholly skeptical, nor altogether gloomy. There is no reason for clip¬ ping our own wings for fear lest we should escape from our own coops and fly over the palings into our own garden. Let us get all the satisfaction from 222 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY \ philosophy that we can. In truth we shall never get too much.
But, for the rest, the reader must be reminded of one thing that was said in the opening chapter about the magnitude and boldness of the demands that re¬ ligious philosophy makes in coming to the study of the world. We said that we will be satisfied only with the very best that we can get. We want to find some reality that our ideal aims can lead us to regard as of Infinite Worth. If we cannot find that, then the best possible aspect of reality must be chosen instead. We will not be satisfied with little, if we can get much. Our religious demands are boundless. We will not falsify the truth; nor yet will we dread any disaster to our ideal aims, how¬ ever great the disappointment that would result from failure. But, while pursuing the truth with rever¬ ence, we will not withdraw our demands until we see that we can get no certain success in them.
We insist, therefore, that the religiously valuable reality in the world shall be, if so we can find it, a Supreme Reality, no mere chance outcome of special circumstances, but an ultimate aspect of things.
Furthermore, the special form that our ideal has taken demands another character in our object of religious satisfaction. It must be such as to support the realization of our particular ideal. If a power, it must aim at the unity of our lives; if in some other way approved as the deepest truth of things, it must show us how our ideal either can be realized by us, or else is already realized at the heart of this truth.
THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE Such is the work of our second book. We ap¬ proach it not as if we expected any mystical revela¬ tion, but solely as having for our one desire to find out what a sensible man ought reasonably to think of the world wherein he finds himself.
■ ' ’ • BOOK II.
THE SEARCH FOR A RELIGIOUS TRUTH CHAPTER VIII.
THE WORLD OF DOUBT When we turn from our world of ideals to the world actually about us, our position is not at once a happy position. These ideals that we have agreed upon, in so far as they are our own, do not make the world, and people differ endlessly about what the world is and means. Very naturally, then, we also must ourselves begin with difficulties and doubts. For if we want a religious doctriue that in these days can stand us in good stead, we must fear nothing, and must run the risk of all the disasters of thought. The warfare of faiths is so angry and ancient, that we must be content if, with our best efforts, we get anything out of it at all. As millions of brains must toil, doubtless, for centuries before any amount of ideal agreement among men is attained or even ap¬ proximated, we must be content if we do very little and work very hard. We can be tolerably certain that in a world where nearly all is dark very much of our labor will be wasted. But this is natural. There is the delight of activity in truth-seeking; but when, at the outset, you compare your hopes and claims with the shadowy and doubtful results that you may reach, the comparison cannot seem other¬ wise than melancholy. Through the failures of mil- 228 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY lions of devoted servants, the humanity of the future may possibly (we do not, at least at this point in our study, know that it will certainly) be led to a grand success. This far-off divine event to which, for all we know, our fragment of creation may be moving, but which at any rate we regard with longing and delight, constitutes the moral aim of our philosophic studies. It is good to strive.
In the present chapter, therefore, we shall devote ourselves for the most part to negative criticism of certain views that are or may be held about the real world.
I.