When, however, we say that the thinker must study and revere these questions, we must not fancy that because of their importance he may prejudge them. Assumptions, postulates, a ’priori demands, these indeed are in all thinking, and no thinker is without such. But prejudice, i. e. foregone conclu¬ sions in questionable matters, deliberate unwilling¬ ness to let the light shine upon our beliefs, all this is foreign to true thought. Thinking is for us just the clarifying of our minds, and because clearness is necessary to the unity of thought, necessary to lessen the strife of sects and the bitterness of doubt, neces¬ sary to save our minds from hopeless, everlasting wandering, therefore to resist the clarifying process, even while we undertake it, is to sin against what is best in us, and is also to sin against humanity. De¬ liberately insincere, dishonest thinking is downright blasphemy. And so, if we take any interest in these things, our duty is plain. Here are questions of tre¬ mendous importance to us and to the world. We are sluggards or cowards if, pretending to be philo¬ sophic students and genuine seekers of truth, we do not attempt to do something with these questions. We are worse than cowards if, attempting to con¬ sider them, we do so otherwise than reverently, fear¬ lessly, and honestly.
6 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY III.
The religious thought, of our time has reached a position that arouses the anxiety of all serious think¬ ers, and the interest of many who are not serious. W e are not content with what we learned from our fathers; we want to correct their dogmas, to prove what they held fast without proof, to work out our own salvation by our own efforts. But we know not yet what form our coming faith will take. We are not yet agreed even about the kind of question that we shall put to ourselves when we begin any specific religious inquiry. People suggest very va¬ rious facts or aspects of facts in the world as having a religious value. The variety of the suggestions shows the vagueness of the questions that people have in mind when they talk of religion. One man wants to worship Natural Law, or even Nature in gen¬ eral. Another finds Humanity to be his ideal object of religious veneration. Yet another gravely insists that the Unknowable satisfies his religious longings. Now it is something to be plain in expressing a question, even if you cannot give an answer. We shall do something if we only find out what it is that we ought to seek. And the foregoing considerations may help us in this way, even if what follows should be wholly ineffective. For we have tried to give a definition that shall express, not merely what a Buddhist or a Catholic or a Comtist or an Hegelian means by his religion, but what all men everywhere mean by religion. They all want religion to define INTRODUCTION 7 for them their duty, to give them the heart to do it, and to point out to them such things in the real world as shall help them to be steadfast in their de¬ votion to duty. When people pray that they may be made happy, they still desire to learn what they are to do in order to become happy. When saints of any creed look up to their God as their only good, they are seeking for guidance in the right way. The savages of whom we hear so much nowadays have indeed low forms of religion, but these relig¬ ions of theirs still require them to do ’something, and tell them why it is worth while to do this, and make them more or less enthusiastic in doing it. Among ourselves, the poor and the lonely, the desolate and the afflicted, when they demand religious comfort, want something that shall tell them what to do with life, and how to take up once more the burdens of their broken existence. And the religious philoso¬ phers must submit to the same test that humanity everywhere proposes to its religions. If one tries to regulate our diet by his theories, he must have the one object, whatever his theory, since he wants to tell us what is healthful for us. If he tells us to eat nothing but snow, that is his fault. The true object of the theory of diet remains the same. And so if men have expressed all sorts of one-sided, dis¬ heartening, inadequate views of religion, that does not make the object of religious theory less catholic, less comprehensive, less definitely human. A man who propounds a religious system must have a moral code, an emotional life, and some theory of things to offer us. With less we cannot be content. He need 8 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY not, indeed, know or pretend to know very much about our wonderful world, but he must know some¬ thing, and that something must be of definite value.
To state the whole otherwise. Purely theoretic philosophy tries to find out what it can about the real world. When it makes this effort, it has to be perfectly indifferent to consequences. It may not shudder or murmur if it comes upon unspeakably dreadful truths. If it finds nothing in the world but evil, it must still accept the truth, and must calmly state it without praise and without condemnation. Theoretic philosophy knows no passion save the pas¬ sion for truth, has no fear save the fear of error, cherishes no hope save the hope of theoretic success. But religious philosophy has other objects in addi¬ tion to these. Religious philosophy is indeed neither the foe nor the mistress of theoretic philosophy. Re¬ ligious philosophy dare not be in opposition to the truths that theory may have established. But over and above these truths it seeks something else. It seeks to know their value. It comes to the world with other interests, in addition to the purely theo¬ retic ones. It wants to know what in the world is worthy of worship as the good. It seeks not merely the truth, but the inspiring truth. It defines for it¬ self goodness, moral worth, and then it asks, What in this world is worth anything t Its demands in this regard are boundless. It will be content only with the best it can find. Having formulated for itself its ideal of worth, it asks at the outset: Is there then, anywhere in the universe, any real thing of Infinite Worth? If this cannot be found, then INTRODUCTION 9 and then only will religious philosophy be content with less. Then it will still ask: What in this world is worth most? It cannot make realities, but it is determined to judge them. It cannot be content with blind faith, and demands the actual truth as much as theoretic philosophy demands it; but relig¬ ious philosophy treats this truth only as the material for its ideal judgments. It seeks the ideal among the realities.
Upon such a quest as this, we ask the reader to ac¬ company us in the following pages. We have not space to be exhaustive, nor in fact to offer much more than suggestions; but we want the suggestions to be explicit, and we hope that they may stimulate some reader, and may perhaps help him in complet¬ ing his own trains of thought.
IV.
IV.
People come to such questions as these with cer¬ tain prejudices about the method and spirit of in¬ quiry; and all their work may be hampered by these prejudices. Let us say yet a little more of what we think as to this matter. There are two extremes to fear in religious philosophy: indifference that arises from a dogmatic disposition to deny, and timidity that arises from an excessive show of reverence for the objects of religious faith. Both of these extreme moods have their defective methods in dealing with religious philosophy. The over-skeptical man looks with impatience on all lengthy discussions of these topics. There can be nothing in it all, he says; 10 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY nothing but what Hume, in an eloquent passage, called sophistry and delusion. Why spend time to puzzle over these insoluble mysteries? Hence his method is: swift work, clear statement of known difficulties, keen ridicule of hasty assumptions, and then a burning of the old deserted Moscow of the¬ ology, and a bewildering flight into the inaccessible wintry wastes, where no army of religious philoso¬ phers shall follow him. Now for our part we want to be as skeptical as anybody; and we personally al¬ ways admire the freedom of motion that pure skepti¬ cism gives. Our trouble with it all, however, is that, after we have enjoyed the freedom and the frosty air of pure philosophic skepticism for a while, we find ourselves unexpectedly in the midst of philosophic truth that needs closer examination. The short and easy agnostic method is not enough. You must sup¬ plement skepticism by philosophy; and when you do so, you find yourself forced to accept, not indeed the old theology of your childhood, but something that satisfies, oddly enough, certain religious long¬ ings, that, as skeptic, you had carefully tried to for¬ get. Then you find yourself with what you may have to call a religious doctrine; and then you may have to state it as we are here going to do, not in an easy or fascinating way, such as the pure skeptic can so well follow, but at all events with some approach to a serious and sustained effort to consider hard ques¬ tions from many sides. The skeptical method is not only a good, but also a necessary beginning of relig¬ ious philosophy. But we are bound to go deeper than mere superficial agnosticism. If, however, any INTRODUCTION 11 reader is already sure that we cannot go deeper, and that modern popular agnosticism has exhausted all that can be said on religious questions, then we bid him an immediate and joyous farewell. If we had not something to say in this book that seems to us both foreign to the popular modern agnostic range of discussion, and deeper than the insight of popular modern skepticism, we should say nothing. The un¬ dertaking of this book is not to wrangle in the old way over the well-known ordinary debates of to-day, but to turn the flank of the common popular thought on these topics altogether, by going back to a type of philosophic investigation, that is nowadays fa^- miliar indeed to a certain school of specialists, but forgotten by the general public. In this type of in¬ vestigation, we have furthermore something to offer that seems to us no mere repetition of the views of other thinkers, but an effort to make at least one lit¬ tle step in advance of the thoughts that the great masters of philosophy have given to us. Yet we know indeed that the range of any useful indepen¬ dent thought in philosophy must be, in case of any one individual, very narrow.
The other mood and its method remain. It is the mood of excessive reverence. It wastes capital let¬ ters on all the pronouns and adjectives that have to do with the objects of religious faith; but it fears to do these objects the honor to get clear ideas about them. Now we respect this mood when it appears in men who do well their life-work, who need their re¬ ligious faith for their work, and who do not feel any calling as truth-seekers. No man has any business 12 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY to set up his vocation as the highest one; and the man for whom truth is useful in his actual life-work as an inspiration, revealed to him only in feeling, is welcome to his feelings, is worthy of all regard from those whose vocation is philosophy, and shall not be tormented by our speculations. He is careful and troubled about many things; the world needs him, and philosophy does not. AVe only lay claim to our own rights, and do not want to interfere with his. Our right to clear thought, we must insist upon. For looked at philosophically, and apart from the nec¬ essary limitations of the hard worker, all this dumb reverence, this vague use of vague names, has its se¬ rious dangers. You are reverent, we may say to the man who regards philosophic criticism as a dangerous trifling with stupendous truths; you are reverent, but what do you reverence? Have a care lest what you reverence shall turn out to be your own vague and confused notions, and not the real divine Truth at all. Take heed lest your object of worship be only your own little pet infinite, that is sublime to you mainly because it is yours, and that is in truth about as divine and infinite as your hat. For this is the danger that besets these vague and lofty sentiments.
Unreflected upon, uncriticised, dumbly experienced, dumbly dreaded, these, your religious objects, may become mere feelings, mere visceral sensations of yours, that you have on Sunday mornings, or when you pray. Of course, if you are a worker, you may actually realize these vague ideas, in so far as they inspire you to work. If they do, they shall be judged by their fruits. Otherwise, do not trust too INTRODUCTION 13 confidently their religious value. You, individually regarded, are but a mass of thought and feeling. What is only yours and in you, is not divine at all. Unless you lift it up into the light of thought and examine it often, how do.you know into what your cherished religious ideal may not have rotted in the darkness of your emotions? Once in a while, there does come to a man some terrible revelation of him¬ self in a great sorrow. Then in the tumult of an¬ guish he looks for his religious faith to clothe his nakedness against the tempest; and he finds per¬ haps some moth-eaten old garment that profits him nothing, so that his soul miserably perishes in the frost of doubt. Such a man has expected God to come to his help in every time of need; but the only god he has actually and consciously had, has been his own little contemptible, private notion and dim feeling of a god, which he has never dared fairly to look at. Any respectable wooden idol would have done him better service; for then a man could know where and what his idol is. Such is only too apt to be the real state of the man who regards it as profanity to think clearly and sensibly on religious topics.
We claim, then, the right to criticise as fearlessly, as thoroughly, and as skeptically as may be, the foundations of conduct and faith. For what we crit¬ icise are, at the outset, our own notions, which we want to have conform to the truth, if so be that there is any truth. As for doubt on religious questions, that is for a truth-seeker not only a privilege but a duty; and, as we shall experience all through this 14 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY study, doubt has a curious and very valuable place in philosophy. Philosophic truth, as such, comes to us first under the form of doubt; and we never can be very near it in our search unless, for a longer or shorter time, we have come to despair of it alto¬ gether. First, then, the despair of a thorough-going doubt, and then the discovery that this doubt con¬ tains in its bosom the truth that we are sworn to discover, however we can, — this is the typical philo¬ sophic experience. May the memory of this sugges¬ tion support the failing patience of the kindly dis¬ posed reader through some of the longer and more wearisome stretches of dry skeptical analysis over which we must try to journey together. Whatever may be the truth, it must lie beyond those deserts.
BOOK I.
THE SEARCH FOR A MORAL IDEAL V CHAPTER II.
THE GENERAL ETHICAL PROBLEM “Certain spirits, by permission, ascended from hell, and said to me, ‘ You have written a great deal from the Lord, write something also from us.’ I replied, ‘What shall I write?’ They said, ‘Write that every spirit, whether he be good or evil, is in his own delight, — the good in the delight of his good, and the evil in the delight of hi^ evil.’ I asked them, * What may your delight be? ’ They said that it was the delight of committing adultery, stealing, defrauding, and lying...I said, ‘ Then you are like the unclean beasts.’...They answered, ‘If we are, we are.’ ” — Swedenborg, Divine Providence.
“ There 's nothing, either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” — Hamlet.
With which of the two considerations mentioned in our introduction shall a religious philosophy be¬ gin? Of its two chief considerations, the moral code, and the relation of this code to reality, which is the one that properly stands first in order? We have already indicated our opinion. The philosophy of religion is distinguished from theoretic philosophy precisely by its relation to an ideal. If possible, therefore, it should early be clear as to what ideal it has. The ideal ought, if possible, to be studied first, since it is this ideal that is to give character to our whole quest among the realities. And so the first part of religious philosophy is properly the dis¬ cussion of ethical problems.
18 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY I.
The theoretic philosopher might interpose just here, and insist that as one can be moral only in a real world, the philosopher has a theoretical right and duty to point out, first of all, wherein consists the reality of the world and whereon is based our assurance of this reality. Yet this strictly logical order we must decline, in the present discussion, to follow. Our interest is, first of all, with the ideal in its relation to human life. So much of the world of commonplace reality as we have to assume in any and every discussion of the ideal, we accept in this first book wholly without theoretical question. For such questions, in their relation to religious philoso¬ phy, the proper place will come later. But at the outset we will suppose a moral agent in the presence of this concrete world of human life in which we all believe ourselves to exist. Beyond the bright circle of these commonplace human relations, all shall for the present remain dark to this moral agent. His origin, his destiny, his whole relation to nature and to God, if there be a God, he shall not at the outset know. But he shall be conceived as knowing that he is alive in the midst of a multitude of living fel¬ lows. With them he is to have and to define and to develop certain moral relations. For his life, or for human life in general, he is to form his ideal. Then later, after forming and striving to realize this ideal of his, he is to come to the real physical world, and to ask of it how it stands related to these, lhis moral needs. In the answer to this question he is THE GENERAL ETHICAL PROBLEM 19 to find, if at all, the completion of his religious phi¬ losophy. When he comes to this second stage, which our second book is to treat, he may find himself obliged to analyze afresh and skeptically the naive theoretic notions that he has possessed concerning na¬ ture, and so even concerning his own fellow-men. But for his analysis itself he will have a fresher courage, because he will have filled himself with the love of an ideal, whose realization he will be hoping some¬ how to find all through all the tedious wanderings of his theoretic study. If the order of his whole thought is thus not the order of the truth itself, still his little inconsequence in beginning his religious philosophy with assumptions that he proves only after he has gone some distance in his investigation, may be a useful concession both to his own human weakness and to the needs of his practical nature.
With the search for the ideal, then, we begin, ex¬ pressly assuming, in this part of the first book, with¬ out proof, as much of the world of daily life as may be necessary to a study of the moral law in its ap¬ plication to this daily life. Yet, with this explana¬ tion, we are only at the beginning of the troubles that arise in examining the relation between the basis of ethics and the real world. These troubles form a great part of the obscurity of moral doc¬ trine.
II.
In treating of ethical doctrine, it is common to avoid by all sorts of devices the main and most diffi¬ cult problem of all. Men like to fill half a volume 20 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY \ with a description of the “moral sentiments,” or with a panegyric of the “ moral principle in man,” or in these days especially, with a great deal of talk about savages and about the “ evolution of the moral sense.” Having occupied so many pages in enter¬ taining digressions, when they come, if they ever do come, to the central problem, namely, the nature of moral distinctions considered purely as such, such writers have no time to do more than to appeal to the common sense of readers, and then to pass on to consequences. It seldom occurs to them that a de¬ scription of the “ moral faculties ” in this man or in that, or a history of moral and immoral notions and practices as they have come up among men in the order of evolution, is no more a “ moral philosophy,” in the proper sense, than is a description of the coin¬ age or of the products of any country or of the world a true explanation of the difference between com¬ mercial solvency and insolvency.
We for our part shall be obliged, however, by our limited space, to aim forthwith at the heart of the problem of a philosophical ethic. What is the real nature of this distinction between right and wrong? What truth is there in this distinction? Is this truth relative to particular conditions, or independ¬ ent thereof? What ideal of life results? These things we want to know; and we do not want to spend our time more than we shall be obliged to do in irrelevant descriptions of the mental states of this or that man. All mental states now interest us only in so far as we first see what logical bearing they may have upon our problem. We shall have to de- THE GENERAL ETHICAL PROBLEM 21 scribe a good deal, but that work will have only its proper subordinate place.
As for the main problem itself, we can best bring its nature home to ourselves by considering forth¬ with some aspects of an old and often neglected question, namely, the very question before referred to about the proper relation of one’s moral ideal to the reality that he may have recognized.
We are to form a moral ideal apart, as we have said, from any theory of the physical universe out¬ side of man. But is this practicable? Is not every moral theory dependent in truth on a theory of things? Is it possible for us to make for ourselves our ideal, and only afterwards to go to the real world and to see if our ideal is realized? Must not rather our ideal be founded, in the very nature of the case, on what we know, or think we know, about the world? Is not then this whole undertaking of ours a blunder? Is a rational moral distinction possible save through a knowledge of the facts about the world? Can the ideal say to the world: “ I demand that thou shouldst be like me? ” Must not the ideal rather humbly say: “ Thus and thus it is in truth, and therefore I am what I am? ” The nature of moral ideals and distinctions is plainly involved just here. We must look closely at these questions; for to answer them aright is to answer the fundamental questions of all ethical phi¬ losophy.
To understand then more justly the nature of this difficulty, let us consider more closely the two possi¬ ble answers to the foregoing questions. Let us call 22 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY \