That skepticism in studying reality is to some ex¬ tent useful, most people will admit. But not every one will follow us at once into the thorough-going and uncompromising skepticism that we shall have to present in the following as the very basis of our positive doctrine. It is surprising how easily the philosophic need is satisfied in the minds of most persons, even in the minds of many professed philo¬ sophic students. A few very complacent questions, readily if unintelligibly answered, put to rest the whole desire that such people feel to cross-examine reason. In fact they seem to hold that a certain disrespect would be shown by questioning reason any more sharply; and so their philosophy is like a Congressional investigation of the doings of a politi¬ cian, conducted by his fellow-partisans. But we feel, in writing this book, that such a philosophy, whose only business it is to “ whitewash ” reason, is an in- THE WORLD OF DOUBT suit to reason. Reason’s investigations of its own na¬ ture are not partisan affairs conducted for the sake of effect; nor does reason seek, like a demagogue, to get a popular “ vindication,” but solely to reach the deepest possible insight into its own absolute truth. Hence we refuse utterly to have the following re¬ garded as in any narrower sense an “ apology ” for any religious truth, since the defensive or apologetic attitude in presence of religious problems is once for all an insult to genuine religion. If there is truth absolute, we desire to know the same, and if we ever get a glimpse of it, doubtless it will need very little apology from us. But meanwhile we propose to doubt fearlessly and thoroughly. If our limits pre¬ vent here the proper exhaustive search for all the actual difficulties of the views that we present, still we want to have, and as far as may be to show, the spirit of honest, determined, conscientious skepti¬ cism. A clerical friend of the author’s impressed him very much in early youth by the words: “ God likes to have us doubt his existence, if we do so sin¬ cerely and earnestly.” These words are almost a truism; they surely ought to be a truism. Yet they have been forgotten in many a controversy. Surely if God exists, he knows at least as much about phi¬ losophy as any of us do; he has at least as much ap¬ preciation for a philosophic problem as we can have. And if his own existence presents a fine philosophic problem, he delights therein at least as much as we do. And he then does not like to see that problem half-heartedly handled by timid, whining, trembling men, who constantly apologize to God because the 230 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY existence of certain fools called atheists forces them to present in very pious language certain traditional proofs of his existence. No, surely not in this spirit would a rational God, if he exists, have us approach the question. But with at least as much coolness and clearness of head as we try to have when we toil over a problem in mathematics; with at least as merciless an analysis of all that is obscure and doubtful and contradictory in our own confused ideas as we should use in studying science; with at least as much eager¬ ness in finding out the weakness and the uncertainty of men’s wavering and ill-trained judgments as we should bring to the examination of an important commercial investment, — with at least so much of caution, of diligence, and of doubt we should ap¬ proach the rational study of the Highest. For what can insult God more than careless blundering? It is shameful that men should ever have treated this matter as if it were the aim of religious philosophy to have a store-house of formulated traditional an¬ swers ready wherewith to silence certain troublesome people called doubters. In these matters the truly philosophic doubt is no external opinion of this or that wayward person; this truly philosophic doubt is of the very essence of our thought. It is not to be “ answered ” or “ silenced ” by so and so much apologetic pleading. The doubt is inherent in the subject-matter as we must in the beginning regard the same. This doubt is to be accepted as it comes, and then to be developed in all its fullness and in all its intensity. For the truth of the matter is con¬ cealed in that doubt, as the fire is concealed in the THE WORLD OF DOUBT stony coal. You can no more reject the doubt and keep the innermost truth, than you can toss away the coal and hope to retain its fire. This doubt is the insight partially attained.
Such must be our spirit. And now, to apply it at once to the problems before us, where shall we be¬ gin our search for a religious truth? We are to find, if possible, some element in Reality that shall have religious significance. But how shall we do this un¬ less we have made clear to ourselves in what sense we know Reality at all? It would seem that our re¬ ligious philosophy must begin with the problem of all theoretical philosophy: What can be our knowledge of this world, and whereon can this knowledge be founded?
A dark and dismal topic, one may say. But re¬ member, here and here only can our beloved treas¬ ure be found buried. Either there is no religious philosophy possible, or it is here; and here we must delve for it. Nor let one be too much terrified at once by the forbidding aspect of the question. It is indeed no easy one; yet to answer it is but to know the real meaning of our own thoughts. This truth that we seek is not in the heavens, nor in the depths; it is nigh us, even in our hearts. Only inattention can be hiding it from us. Let us look closer.
This real world that popular thought declares to exist outside of us — we have so far taken it on trust. But now, what right have we so to take it? What do we mean by it? When we say that we can know it, do we not mean that it is in some way bound to conform to some of our thoughts? Or, if 232 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY you will put the matter in the reverse order, and will say, with seeming modesty, that our thought is so constituted as to have a certain likeness to real¬ ity, do you really make the matter clearer? The mysterious conformity between our thought and what is no thought of ours remains, and we have to make clear our assurance of that. This assurance itself, if we got it, would seem to be in just the same position as is the conformity of which it is to assure us. Itself again would be outside of the external real world, and in our thought. Yet this assurance is to tell us something about that external world, namely, its conformity to certain of our thoughts. What can we thus know about any external object at all?
The difficulty is an old one. Our solution of it, if we get any, must determine the whole of our re¬ ligious thought. Let us see at all events where the difficulty arises, and why. Whether or no there is possible any solution, the difficulty plainly lies in a certain conceived relation between us and the world. All the common metaphysical and religious doctrines begin by setting a thinker over against an external world, which is declared independent of his thought, and which his thought is then required to grasp and know. This supposed relation of subject and object gives metaphysics its seemingly insoluble problems. This thinker, whose thought is one fact, while that world out there is another fact, how can he learn by what takes place in his thought, that is, in the one of these two supposed entities, what goes on in the other of these entities, namely, in the world?.Once for all, this marvelous relation of preestablished har- THE WORLD OF DOUBT THE WORLD OF DOUBT mony between these supposed separate entities de¬ mands philosophic deduction. The relation, to be sure, may be itself a metaphysical figment. We hold that it is. We shall try to show hereafter the baselessness of this notion of a world of external fact on one side, in the barren isolation of its tran¬ scendental reality, with an equally lonesome thinker on the other side, somehow magically bound to fol¬ low after the facts of that world. We hold, to put it in plain language, that neither the external world nor the individual thinker has any such reality as traditional popular beliefs, together with most met¬ aphysical schools, have desired us to assume. But, for the first, we cannot yet undertake to trouble the reader with this our philosophic speculation. That will come in its good time, we hope not too unintel¬ ligibly, and it will have its place in our religious doctrine.
We begin, however, with the popular metaphys¬ ical concept, of a separate external world, and of a thinker bound somehow to repeat the facts of it in his thought. We ask, with popular metaphysics: How can we be sure that he does this? And from metaphysical systems, both popular and unpopular, we get an amazing jargon of answers.
The most popular answer, after all, is a threat, a threat repeated endlessly in all sorts of apologetic books, but still a mere base, abject, wholly unphilo- sophical threat. It is said to us that we must be¬ lieve our human thinker to be capable of thinking correctly the facts of this supposed external world, because, if he does not, the result will be disastrous 234 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY to the whole common sense conception of the world. If this thinker does not somehow magically repro¬ duce external facts in his private mind, then is our faith vain, and we are all very miserable. It is as¬ tonishing how this, the most helpless abandonment of all philosophic thought, is constantly reiterated by certain of those who pretend to be philosophers. Can a threat scare us from philosophy? To get a sure foundation for our religion, we begin by asking how a man can really know the external world at all. We get as reply the threat that, unless we ad¬ mit the knowledge of the external world, we must be in eternal doubt, and therefore wretched. To doubt this knowledge, we are told, would be to doubt all that makes life worth living. But it is just because we want to find a sure basis for what makes life worth living that we. begin with this doubt. We are determined to get at the root of this matter, however bitter may be the evil that will befall us if our skepticism does not succeed in get¬ ting past this guarded gateway of philosophy. We persist in asking, all threats to the contrary notwith¬ standing, just how and why and in what sense the external world can be known to us, if indeed this conception itself of an external world is justly formed at all.
Yet we grant that the full force and need and bitterness of our problem may not be plain to the reader, unless he has first undertaken to examine with us at some length the philosophic character and consequences of this popular metaphysical con¬ ception of the external world. To get him to share THE WORLD OF DOUBT well our doubt, we must first provisionally accept this notion of popular metaphysics itself. We must waive for the moment our difficulty, that it may re¬ cur to us with greater importance by and by. Let the reader once come to see that this popular notion of an external world is an utterly vague conception, capable of numberless forms, and religiously unsat¬ isfactory in all of them, and then we shall expect him to feel the force of the deeper philosophic prob¬ lems involved. This present chapter will therefore proceed directly to an examination of the popular notions about the external world. We shall exam¬ ine them, namely, to find whether they offer any religious aspect. We shall find that they do not offer any such aspect in any satisfactory sense. That the good is supreme in the external world as popularly conceived, nobody can establish. This supposed external world is once for all a World of Doubt, and in it there is no abiding place. When the reader has come to feel with us this truth, then he will be ready to look deeper into the matter. Then some other more genuinely philosophic con¬ ception of Reality will have its place. Hence in the rest of this chapter we shall be accepting pro¬ visionally notions that we are hereafter to reject, and assuming much on trust that is at best very doubtful. We shall show that, even so aided, the popular notions about the religious aspect of this world cannot bear criticism. This visible world of popular faith will lose its worth for us. We shall have to look elsewhere.
The religious significance once removed from the 236 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY popular realistic philosophy, with its crudely metar physical notion of things, we shall be ready to listen to skepticism about the foundations of this notion; and we shall be ready for some new conception. This new conception will indeed not falsify the true moral meaning of that innocent faith in a real world upon which we have so far depended in our research. The popular notion of an external world, practically useful for many purposes, and sufficient for many scientific ends, will be refuted and rejected in its contradictions and in its absurdities, but the soul of truth that is in it will be absorbed into a higher conception both of the eternal Reality and of our relation thereto. Our seeming loss will become our gain. That bad dream, the dead and worthless World of Doubt in which most of our modern teach¬ ers remain stuck fast, will be transformed for us. We shall see that the truth of it is a higher World, of glorious religious significance.
So for the first we turn to that supposed world of popular metaphysics, to test its religious value. It is conceived as a world existent in space and time, and as a world of real things which act and interact. For convenience sake, we shall in the following use the word Power to mean any one of these things, or any group of them, that in this external world may be supposed to produce effects upon any other thing or group of things. However these Powers get their ef¬ ficiency, the religious significance of the supposed ex¬ ternal world, if it has any, must lie in the supremacy of the Good in this world of the Powers. One must then view this external world historically as a mass THE WORLD OF DOUBT of Powers, which work together in harmony or in discord, and which give you Products. The religious ideals must find satisfaction here, if at all, in con¬ templating the goodness of these powers and of their works. If the religious ideals here fail, there will be the other aspect open. Regarded in a truly phil¬ osophical way, and in its eternal nature, the world, as we shall hereafter come to see, cannot be supposed to be either a power or a heap of powers. For pow¬ ers have their being only in time, and only in rela¬ tion to one another. If then all fails when we con¬ sider this external world of powers, this figment of popular metaphysics, the eternal nature of reality in some deeper view of that nature may still be found of infinite value to us. In fact we shall find the search for a religious truth, among the powers of this popularly conceived external world, very dishearten¬ ing. The jargon of their contending voices will not unite into any religious harmony. We shall find these powers like the thunder and the fire. The still small voice is not in them. We shall be driven to some other aspect of the world. We shall approach that aspect in ways that imply no disrespect to those who have been so long scientifically studying the history and forces of the assumed external world. Their results, with the practical consequences in daily life, and with all that Agnosticism about the nature and purposes of the powers of this visible world which such men nowadays feel bound to proclaim, we shall on the whole accept. We too shall be Ag- tics, namely, as to the powers that rule the visible world. But we shall find a very different way, un- 238 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY trodden by scientific research, and yet, we hope, not a way of mere dreams, not a way into a world of fancy, but a way that leads us to a point whence we get a glimpse into that other aspect of things. This way Modern Idealism since Kant has been busy in finding and clearing. How wearisome some of the exploring expeditions have been, we well know. Our search also may end in a wilderness; but we fancy ourselves to have found an open path that to some readers will seem at least in part new. And some of the prospects on that road may not be wholly dis¬ heartening, even to the most exacting religious seeker. But all this is anticipation. First then: The World as a theatre for the display of power, physical or metaphysical. This is the World of Doubt.
H.
H.
Let us begin our study of the powers that work to¬ gether in the supposed external reality, by accepting for a moment, without criticism, the notion of this supposed external world from which scientific expe¬ rience sets out. Let us say: there it is, an objective world of moving matter, subject to certain laws. All the powers are but manifestations or forms of mat¬ ter in motion. Planets revolve, comets come and go, tides swell and fall, clouds rise and rivers flow to the sea, lightning flashes, volcanoes are active, living be¬ ings are born, live, and die, all exemplifying certain universal principles, that are discoverable by experi¬ ence, that are capable of being used to predict the future, and that are related to one another in such a THE WORLD OF DOUBT way as to show us a vast connected whole, the nat¬ ural universe. This matter however is dead; these laws are ultimate given truths. We did not make them, cannot see why just they and none other were from the beginning; we must accept them as they are. The whole world is a vast machine. A mind powerful enough might be possessed of the knowl¬ edge that La Place, and, in our own generation, Prof. Du Bois Reymond, have so finely described as the scientific ideal. Such a mind might have an univer¬ sal formula, in its possession, a key to the mysteries of the succession of phenomena. Such a being could then, using this formula, calculate all events, as as¬ tronomers now predict eclipses. At every instant multitudes of air pulsations quiver about us. These, in all their forms, our mind possessed of this univer¬ sal formula, would have been able to predict ages ago, just as certainly as you now can predict that the sun will rise to-morrow morning. All is predeter¬ mined: the glitter of every ice crystal on your frozen window-panes on a winter morning, the quiver of every muscle in the death agony of the fish that you pull out of a mountain-stream, the falling of every yellow leaf in the autumn woods, — each of these events could have been foreseen, mathematically cal¬ culated, and fully described, by one able to use the universal formula, and possessed, myriads of seons ago, of an exact knowledge of the positions of the atoms of the original nebula from which our great stellar system condensed. Such is the natural world.
What religious aspect can this vast machine pos¬ sess? What room is there for a higher element to 240 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY be introduced into this mass of' dead mathematical facts? The answer of some representatives of sci¬ ence in our day is well known to us. Whatever else is doubtful, say such men, there stands fast the great law of progress. Evolution in the physical world becomes actual progress in the world of human life. The world, under the influence of all these far-reach¬ ing laws, is actually growing forever better. Thus natural law agrees with morality. Thus there is a re¬ ligious aspect to the mechanical laws of the universe.
Let us consider once more the law of progress. We spoke of it in a previous chapter. There it did not help us. For we wanted to agree upon the na¬ ture of morality. We were not helped towards such agreement by the knowledge that there is in the world a physical evolution. For we could not tell what ought to be, merely by considering what is. We had first to agree upon a moral law, before we could decide whether evolution is actually progress. But now, perhaps, we can make use of the law of evolution to aid our inquiry into the religious aspect of reality. For now, having defined what the good is, we may estimate whether the world is growing to¬ ward the good. And if the world is morally pro¬ gressing, then one great demand of the religious con¬ sciousness is fulfilled. Then there is a power not ourselves that works for righteousness. Or is this really the consequence of the law of evolution?
The first answer is that if there is any tendency at work in the world that as time goes on more and more helps men in their struggle towards morality, this tendency is indeed, as far as it goes, what we THE WORLD OF DOUBT want to find. And if sucli a tendency is found, as we are told, in evolution, the result is in just so far encouraging. Although the external world still often hinders moral growth, yet, we are told, as evo¬ lution reaches higher and higher stages, the world comes to harmonize more and more with man’s moral growth. This also seems to be what we seek. In time morality will become a natural product of early childhood. Men will be born with characters that we now seek in vain to develop by a life-time of la¬ bor. Natural evolution, then, does help moral prog¬ ress, and the world is more moral to-day than ever before. This then is to be the religious aspect of the outer world. Does it contain enough of the truth of things to content us?
We are far from doubting the scientific worth of the natural laws that have been discovered of late years, and that have made so clear to us the great truth of far-reaching physical evolution. But let us reflect before we accept these facts as furnishing any deeply important contribution to our present prob¬ lem. We thoroughly believe in evolution; but we must take, in these matters, a very high position. If the world of powers apart from man is to have a religious aspect, then this aspect must belong to this world as a whole. A minor power for good is not enough. It will not suffice to find that one bit of reality fights for our moral needs while another bit of reality fights against them, unless we can in some way harmonize these conflicting aspects, or unless we can show that they that be with us are not only more important or significant than they that be 242 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY against us, but are really the deepest truth of things. Else we shall be left face to face with a gloomy world of conflict, where the good and bad are mingled in hopeless confusion. If such a world is the fact, we must accept that fact; but we cannot then say that we have made sure of an answer to our religious needs. Now suppose that in examining the world we found two tendencies at work, equally fundamen¬ tal, equally active, fairly balanced in power, produc¬ ing in the long run equally permanent, equally tran¬ sient results, but always in deadly antagonism to each other, the one making for moral goodness, the other for moral evil. Suppose that the world appeared as the theatre and the result of this struggle of the good and of the evil principles, could we say that we had found in these facts a religious aspect of reality? We should hardly answer in the affirmative. So long as we must fix our minds on this struggle of equally balanced powers, we could not find the world a religiously encouraging vision. We should either have to regard the world in some other and higher aspect, or we should have to give up regarding it as religiously interesting. An answer to our moral needs that is drowned by a hubbub of opposing noises can be no harmonious song. Now we affirm that so long as you look upon the world as a growth in time, as a product of natural forces, as an histor¬ ical development, you can never make it certain, or even probable, that this world is not such a scene of endless warfare. Hence the progress that you may observe can never overbalance the probability that this progress is a transient and insignificant fact, in