I agree that the holidays and the working days have a different place in our lives. But it is my purpose in this address to say something about the connections between the spirit which rules this occasion--the spirit of loyalty--and the ideal by which the year"s work has to be guided,--the ideal of furthering true insight. The loyalty that now fills your minds is merely one expression of a certain spirit which ought to pervade all our lives--not only in our studies, but in our homes, in our offices, in our political and civic life--not merely upon holidays, or upon other great occasions, but upon our working days; and most of all when our tasks seem commonplace and heavy. And, on the other hand, the insight which you seek to get whenever, in the academic world, you work in the laboratory or in the field, in the library or in the cla.s.sroom or alone in your study, the insight that you try both to embody in your practical life and to enrich through your researches,--just this insight, I say, is best to be furthered by a right cultivation of the spirit of loyalty.
I suppose that when I utter these words, you will easily give to them a certain general a.s.sent. But I want to devote this address to making just such words mean more to you than at first they may appear to mean.
First, then, let me tell you what I myself mean by the term "loyalty."
Then let me deal with my princ.i.p.al thesis, which is that the true spirit of loyalty is not merely a proper accompaniment of all serious work, but is an especially important source of a very deep insight into the meaning of life, and, as I personally believe, into the nature of the whole universe.
Three sorts of persons, I have noticed, are fond of using the term "loyalty." These are quite different types of persons; or, in any case, they use the word upon very different occasions. But these very differences are to my mind important. The first type of those who love to use the term "loyalty" consists of those who employ it to express a certain glow of enthusiastic devotion, the type of the lovers, of the students when the athletic contests are near, of the partisans in the heat of a political contest, or of the friends of an inst.i.tution upon a day like this. To such persons, or at least at such moments, loyalty is conceived as something brilliantly emotional, as a pa.s.sion of devotion.
The second cla.s.s of those who are fond of the word "loyalty" are the warriors and their admirers. To such persons loyalty means a willingness to do dangerous service, to sacrifice life, to toil long and hard for the flag that one follows. But for a third type of those who employ the word, loyalty especially means steady, often un.o.btrusive, fidelity to more or less formal obligations, such as the business world and the workshop impose upon us. Such persons think of loyalty as, first of all, faithfulness in obeying the law of the land, or in executing the plans of one"s official superiors, or in serving one"s employer or one"s client or one"s chief, or one"s fraternity or other social union. In this sense the loyal servant may be obscure and unemotional. But he is trustworthy. Now, a word which thus so forcibly appeals to the lovers who want to express their pa.s.sionate devotion, and also to the soldiers who want to name that obstinate following of the flag which makes victory possible; a word which business men also sometimes use to characterize the quietly and industriously faithful employee who obeys orders, who betrays no secrets, and who regards the firm"s interest as his own;--well, such a word, I think, is not as much ambiguous as deep in its meaning. For, after all, loyal emotions, loyal sacrifice of life, loyal steadiness in obscure service, are but various symptoms of a certain spirit which lies beneath all its various expressions. This spirit is a well-known one. All the higher life of society depends upon it. It may manifest itself as enthusiasm upon an occasion like this, or as contempt for death upon the battle field, or as quiet service when the toil of life is grim, or as the cool fidelity that pursues the daily routine of office or of workshop or of kitchen with a steady persistence and with a simple acceptance of traditional duties or of the day"s toil.
But the spirit thus manifested is not exhausted by any of its symptoms.
The appearances of loyalty are manifold. Its meaning is one. And I myself venture to state what the true spirit of loyalty is by defining the term thus: By loyalty I mean the thorough-going, the voluntary, and the practical devotion of a self to a cause. And by a cause I mean something of the nature that the true lover has in mind when he is wisely devoted to his love; that the faithful member of a family serves when the family itself is the cause dear to him; that the member of a fraternity, or the child of a college, or the devoted professional man, or the patriot, or the martyr, or the faithful workman conceives when he thinks of that to which he gives his life. As all these ill.u.s.trations suggest, the cause to which one can be loyal is never a mere collection of individuals; nor is it ever a mere abstract principle. This cause, whether in the church or the army or the workshop, in the home or in the friendship, is some sort of unity whereby many persons are joined in one common life. The cause to which a loyal man is devoted is of the nature of an inst.i.tution, or of a home life, or of a fraternity, wherein two or more persons aim to become one; or of a religion, wherein the unity of the spirit is sought through the communion of the faithful. Loyalty respects individuals, but aims to bring them together into one common life. Its command to the loyal is: "Be "one undivided soul of many a soul"". It recognizes that, when apart, individuals fail; but that when they try to unite their lives into one common higher selfhood, to live as if they were the expressions, the instruments, the organs of one ideally beautiful social group, they win the only possible fulfillment of the meaning of human existence. Through loyalty to such a cause, through devotion to an ideally united social group, and only through such loyalty, can the problems of human personality be solved. By nature, and apart from some cause to which we are loyal, each of us is but a ma.s.s of caprices, a chaos of distracting pa.s.sions, a longing for happiness that is never fulfilled, a seeking for success which never attains its goal. Meanwhile, no merely customary morality ever adequately guides our lives. Mere social authority never meets our needs. But a cause, some unity of many lives in one, some call upon the individual to give himself over to the service of an idealized community--this gives sense to life. This, when we feel its presence, as we do upon this occasion, we love, as the lovers love the common life of friendship that is to make them one, or as the mothers delight in the life that is to unite themselves and their children in the family, or as the devout feel that through their communion in the life of their church they become one with the Divine Spirit. For such a cause we can make sacrifices, such as the soldier makes in following the flag. For what is the fortune of any detached self as compared with the one cause of the whole country? And just such a voluntary devotion to a cause can enn.o.ble the routine of the humblest daily business, in the office, in the household, in the school, at the desk, or in the market place, if one only finds the cause that can hold his devotion--be this cause his business firm or his profession or his household or his country or his church, or all these at once. For all these causes have their value in this: that through the business firm, or the household, or the profession, or the spiritual community, the lives of many human selves are woven into one, so that our fortunes and interests are no longer conceived as detached and private, but as a giving of ourselves in order that the social group to which we are devoted should live its own united life.
With this bare indication of what I mean by loyalty, I may now say that of late years I have attempted to show in detail, in various discussions of our topic, that the spirit of loyalty, rightly understood, and practically applied, furnishes an adequate solution for all the problems of the moral life. The whole moral law can be summed up in the two commandments: first, Be loyal; and secondly, So choose, so serve, and so unify the life causes to which you yourself are loyal that, through your choice, through your service, through your example, and through your dealings with all men, you may, as far as in you lies, help other people to be loyal to their own causes; may avoid cheating them of their opportunities for loyalty; may inspire them with their own best type of loyalty, and may so best serve the one great cause of the spread of loyalty among mankind. Or, if I may borrow and adapt for a worthy end Lincoln"s immortal words, the moral law is this: Let us so live, so love, and so serve, that loyalty "of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," but shall prosper and abound.
The scheme of life thus suggested is, I believe, adequate. I next want to tell what bearing the spirit of loyalty has upon insight.
The insight that all of us most need and desire is an insight, first, into the business of life itself, and next into the nature and meaning of the real world in which we live. Our forefathers used to center all their views of life and of the world about their religion. Many of the leading minds of to-day center their modern insight about the results of science. In consequence, what I may call the general problems of insight, and the views of life and of the world which most of us get from our studies, have come of late to appear very different from the views and the problems which our own leading countrymen a century ago regarded as most important. The result is that the great problem of the philosophy of life to-day may be defined as the effort to see whether, and how, you can cling to a genuinely ideal and spiritual interpretation of your own nature and of your duty, while abandoning superst.i.tion, and while keeping in close touch with the results of modern knowledge about man and nature.
Let me briefly indicate what I mean by this problem of a modern philosophy of life. From the modern point of view great stress has been laid upon the fact that man, as we know man, appears to be subject to the laws of the natural world. Modern knowledge makes these laws appear very far-reaching, very rigid, and very much of the type that we call mechanical. We have, therefore, most of us, learned not to expect miraculous interferences with the course of nature as aids in our human conflict with destiny. We have been taught to regard ourselves as the products of a long process of natural evolution. We have come to think that man"s control over nature has to take the general form which our industrial arts ill.u.s.trate, and which our recent contests with disease, such as the wars with tuberculosis and with yellow fever, exemplify.
Man, we have been led to say, wins his way only by studying nature and by applying his carefully won empirical knowledge to the guidance of his arts. The business of life--so we have been moved to a.s.sert--must therefore be guided simply by an union of plain common sense with the scientific study of nature. The real world, we have been disposed to say, is, on the whole, so far as we can know it, a mechanism. Therefore the best ideal of life involves simply the more or less complete control of this mechanism for useful and humane ends. Such, I say, is one very commonly accepted result to which modern knowledge seems to have led men. The practical view of life and of its business which expresses this result has been, for many of us, twofold. First, we have been led to this well-known precept: If you want to live wisely, you must, at all events, avoid superst.i.tion. That is, you must not try to guide human life by dealing with such supernatural powers, good and evil, as the mythologies of the past used to view as the controlling forces of human destiny. You must take natural laws as you find them. You must believe about the real world simply what you can confirm by the verdict of human experience. You must put no false hopes either in magic arts or in useless appeals to the G.o.ds. You must, for instance, fight tuberculosis not by prayer, but by knowing the conditions that produce it and the natural processes that tend to destroy its germs. And so, in general, in order to live well and wisely you must be a naturalist and not a supernaturalist. Or in any case you must conform your common sense not to the imagination that in the past peopled the dream world of humanity with good and evil spirits, but to the carefully won insight that has shown us that our world is one where natural law reigns unyielding, defying equally our magic arts and our prayerful desires for divine aid.
But secondly, side by side with this decidedly positive advice, many of us have been brought to accept a practical att.i.tude towards the world which has seemed to us negative and discouraging. This second att.i.tude may be expressed in the sad precept: Hope not to find this world in any universal sense a world of ideal values. Nature is indifferent to values. Values are human, and merely human. Man can indeed give to his own life much of what he calls value, if he uses his natural knowledge for human ends. But when he sets out upon this task, he ought to know that, however sweet and ideal human companionship may be as it exists among men, humanity as a whole must fight its battle with nature and with the universe substantially alone, comfortless except for the comforts that it wins precisely as it builds its houses; namely, by using the mechanisms of nature for its own purposes. The world happens, indeed, to give man some power to control natural conditions. But even this power is due to the very fact that man also is one of nature"s products,--a product possessing a certain stability, a certain natural plasticity and docility, a limited range of natural initiative. As a rock may deflect a stream, so man, himself a natural mechanism, may turn the stream of nature"s energies into paths that are temporarily useful for human purposes. But from the modern point of view the ancient plaint of the Book of Job remains true, both for the rock and for the man:
"The waters wear away stones, And the hope of frail man thou destroyest."
In the end, our relations to the universe thus seem to remain relations to an essentially foreign power, which cares for our ideals as the stormy sea cares for the boat, and as the bacteria care for the human organism upon which they prey. If we ourselves, as products of nature, are sufficiently strong mechanisms, we may be able to win, while life lasts, many ideal goods. But just so, if the boat is well enough built, it may weather one or another pa.s.sing storm. If the body is well knit, it may long remain immune to disease. Yet in the end the boat and the human body fail. And in no case, so this view a.s.serts, does the real world essentially care for or help or encourage our ideals. Our ideals are as foreign to the real natural world as the interests of the ship"s company are to the ocean that may tolerate, but also may drown them. Be free from superst.i.tion, then; and next: avoid false hopes. Such are the two theses that seem to embody for many minds the essentially modern view of things and the essential result for the philosophy of life of what we have now learned.
But hereupon the question arises whether this is indeed the last word of insight; whether this outcome of modern knowledge does indeed tell the whole story of our relations to the real world. That this modern view has its own share of deeper truth we all recognize. But is this the whole truth? Have we no access whatever to any other aspect of reality than the one which this naturalistic view emphasizes? And again, the question still arises: Is there any place left for a religion that can be free from superst.i.tion, that can accept just so much of the foregoing modern results as are indeed established, and that can yet supplement them by an insight which may show the universe to be, after all, something more than a mechanism? In sum, are we merely stones that deflect the stream for a while, until the waters wear them away? Or are there spiritual hopes of humanity which the mechanism of nature cannot destroy? Is the philosophy of life capable of giving us something more than a naturalism--humanized merely by the thought that man, being, after all, a well-knit and plastic mechanism, can for a time mold nature to his ends? So much for the great problem of modern insight. Let us turn to consider the relation of the spirit of loyalty to this problem.
What light can a study of the spirit of loyalty, as I just defined loyalty--what light, I say, can such a study throw upon this problem?
Very little--so some of you may say; for any discussion of the spirit of loyalty can tell us nothing to make nature"s mechanism more comprehensible. One who favors loyalty as a way of solving life"s problems tells us about a certain ideal of human life,--an ideal which, as I have a.s.serted, does tend to solve our personal moral problems precisely in so far as we are able to express this ideal in our practical lives. In order to be loyal you indeed have no need to believe in any of the well-known miracles of popular tradition. And equally, in order to be loyal, you have no need, first, to decide whether nature is or is not a mechanism; or whether the modern view of reality, as just summarized, is or is not adequate; or whether the G.o.ds exist; or whether man is or is not one of nature"s products and temporarily well-knit and plastic machines. Our doctrine of loyalty is founded not upon a decision about nature"s supposed mechanism, but upon a study of man"s own inner and deeper needs. It is a doctrine about the plan and the business of human life. It seems, therefore, to be neutral as to every so-called conflict between science and religion.
But now, in answer to these remarks, I have to show that the doctrine of loyalty, once rightly understood, has yet a further application. It is a doctrine that, when more fully interpreted, helps us toward a genuine insight, not only into the plan of life, but into the nature of things.
The philosophy of loyalty has nothing to say against precisely so much of naturalism as is indeed an established result of common sense and of the scientific study of nature. The theory of the loyal life involves nothing superst.i.tious--no trust in magic, no leaning upon the intervention of such spiritual agencies as the old mythologies conceived. And yet, as I shall insist, n.o.body can understand and practise the loyal spirit without tending thereby to get a true view of the nature of things, a genuine touch with reality, which cannot be gained without seeing that, however much of a mechanism nature may appear to be, the real world is something much more than a mechanism, and much more significant than are the waters which wear away stones.
Let me indicate what I mean by repeating in brief my doctrine of loyalty--with reference to the spirit which it involves, and with reference to the view of the realities of human life which it inevitably includes.
Whoever is loyal has found some cause, I have said,--a cause to which, by his inner interests, he is indeed attracted so that the cause is fascinating to his sentiments. But the cause is also one to which the loyal man is meanwhile practically and voluntarily devoted, so that his loyalty is no mere glow of enthusiasm, but is an affair of his deeds as well as of his emotions. Loyalty I therefore defined as the thorough-going and practical devotion of a self to a cause. Why loyalty is a duty; how loyalty is possible for every normal human being; how it can appear early in youth, and then grow though life; how it can be at once faithful to its own, and yet can constantly enlarge its scope; how it can become universally human in its interests without losing its concreteness, and without failing to keep in touch with the personal affections and the private concerns of the loyal person; how loyalty is a virtue for all men, however humble and however exalted they may be; how the loyal service of the tasks of a single possibly narrow life can be viewed as a service of the cause of universal loyalty, and so of the interests of all humanity; how all special duties of life can be stated in terms of a duly generalized spirit of loyalty; and how moral conflicts can be solved, and moral divisions made, in the light of the principle of loyalty; all this I have a.s.serted, although here is indeed no time for adequate discussion. But hereupon I want to concentrate our whole attention, not upon the consequences and applications of the doctrine of loyalty, but upon the most central characteristic of the loyal spirit. This central characteristic of the loyal spirit consists in the fact that it conceives and values its cause as a reality, as an object that has a being of its own; while the type of reality which belongs to a cause is different from the type of reality which we ascribe either to a thing in the physical world or to a law of nature. A cause is never a mere mechanism. It is an essentially spiritual reality.
If the loyal human being is right in the account which he gives of his cause, then the real world contains beings which are not mere natural objects, and is subject to laws which, without in the least running counter to the laws of outer nature, are the laws of an essentially spiritual realm, whose type of being is superior to that possessed by the order of nature which our industrial arts use. Either, then, loyalty is altogether a service of myths, or else the causes which the loyal serve belong to a realm of real being which is above the level of mere natural fact and natural law. In the latter case the real world is not indifferent to our human search for values. The modern naturalistic and mechanical views of reality are not, indeed, false within their own proper range, but they are inadequate to tell us the whole truth. And reality contains, further, and is characterized by, an essentially spiritual order of being.
I have been speaking to persons who, as I have trusted, well know, so far as they have yet had time to learn the lessons of life, something of what loyalty means. Come, then, let us consider what is the sort of object that you have present to your mind when you are loyal to a cause.
If your cause is a reality, what kind of a being is it? If causes are realities, then in what sort of a real world do you live?
I have already indicated that, while loyalty always includes personal affections, while you can never be loyal to what you take to be a merely abstract principle, nevertheless, it is equally true that you can never be genuinely loyal merely to an individual human being, taken just as this detached creature. You can, indeed, love your friend, viewed just as this individual. But love for an individual is so far just a fondness for a fascinating human presence, and is essentially capricious, whether it lasts or is transient. You can be, and should be, loyal to your friendship, to the union of yourself and your friend, to that ideal comradeship which is neither of you alone, and which is not the mere doubleness that consists of you and your friend taken as two detached beings who happen to find one another"s presence agreeable. Loyalty to a friendship involves your willingness actively and practically to create and maintain a life which is to be the united life of yourself and your friend--not the life of your friend alone, nor the life of yourself and your friend as you exist apart, but the common life, the life above and inclusive of your distinctions, the one life that you are to live as friends. To the tie, to the unity, to the common life, to the union of friends, you can be loyal. Without such loyalty friendship consists only of its routine of more or less attractive private sentiments and mere meetings, each one of which is one more chance experience, heaped together with other chance experiences. But with such true loyalty your friendship becomes, at least in ideal, a new life--a life that neither of you could have alone; a life that is not a mere round of separate private amus.e.m.e.nts, but that belongs to a new type of dual yet unified personality. Nor are you loyal to your friendship merely as to an abstraction. You are loyal to it as to the common better self of both of you, a self that lives its own real life. Either such a loyalty to your friendship is a belief in myths, or else such a type of higher and unified dual personality actually possesses a reality of its own,--a reality that you cannot adequately describe by reporting, as to the taker of a census, that you and your friend are two creatures, with two distinct cases of a certain sort of fondness to be noted down, and with each a separate life into which, as an incident, some such fondness enters. No; were a census of true friendship possible, the census taker should be required to report: Here are indeed two friends; but here is also the ideal and yet, in some higher sense, real life of their united personality present,--a life which belongs to neither of them alone, and which also does not exist merely as a parcel of fragments, partly in one, partly in the other of them. It is the life of their common personality. It is a new spiritual person on a higher level.
Or again, you are loyal to some such union as a family or a fraternity represents. Or you are loyal to your cla.s.s, your college, your community, your country, your church. In all these cases, with endless variety in the details, your loyalty has for its object each time, not merely a group of detached personalities, but some ideally significant common life; an union of many in one; a community which also has the value of a person, and which, nevertheless, cannot be found distributed about in a collection of fragments found inside the detached lives of the individual members of the family, the club, the cla.s.s, the college, the country, the church. If this common life to which you are loyal is a reality, then the real human world does not consist of separate creatures alone, of the mere persons who flock in the streets and who live in the different houses. The human world, if the loyal are right, contains personality that is not merely shut up within the skin, now of this, now of that, human creature. It contains personalities that no organism confines within its bounds; that no single life, that no crowd of detached lives, comprises. Yet this higher sort of common personality, if the loyal are right, is as real as we separate creatures are real. It is no abstraction. It lives. It loves, and we love it. We enter into it. It is ours, and we belong to it. It works through us, the fellow servants of the common cause. Yet we get our worth through it,--the goal of our whole moral endeavor.
For those who are not merely loyal, but also enlightened, loyalty, never losing the definiteness and the concreteness of its devotion to some near and directly fascinating cause, sees itself to be in actual spiritual unity with the common cause of all the loyal, whoever they are. The great cause for all the loyal is in reality the cause of the spread and the furtherance of the cause of the universal loyalty of all mankind: a cause which n.o.body can serve except by choosing his own nearer and more appreciated cause--the private cause which is directly his own--his family, his community, his friendship, his calling, and the calling of those who serve with him. Yet such personal service--your special life cause, your task, your vocation--is your way of furthering the ends of universal humanity. And if you are enlightened, you know this fact. Through your loyalty you, then, know yourself to be kin to all the loyal. You hereupon conceive the loyal as one brotherhood, one invisible church for which and in which you live. The spirit dwells in this invisible church,--the holy spirit that wills the unity of all in fidelity and in service. Hidden from you by all the natural estrangements of the present life, this common life of all the loyal, this cause which is the one cause of all the loyal, is that for which you live. In spirit you are really sundered from none of those who themselves live in the spirit.
All this, I say, is what it is the faith of all the loyal to regard as the real life in which we live and move and have our being, precisely in so far as men come to understand what loyalty is. Thus, then, in general, to be loyal is to believe that there are real causes. And to be universally loyal is to believe that the one cause of loyalty itself, the invisible church of all the loyal, is a reality; something as real as we are. But causes are never detached human beings; nor are causes ever mere crowds, heaps, collections, aggregations of human beings.
Causes are at once personal (if by person you mean the ordinary human individual in his natural character) and _super_-personal. Persons they are, because only where persons are found can causes be defined.
Super-personal they are, because no mere individual human creature, and no mere pairs or groups or throngs of human beings, can ever const.i.tute unified causes. You cannot be loyal to a crowd as a crowd. A crowd can shout, as at a game or a political convention. But only some sort of organized unity of social life can either do the work of an unit or hold the effective loyalty of the enlightened worker who does not merely shout with the throng. And so when you are really loyal to your country, your country does not mean to you merely the crowd, the ma.s.s of your separate fellow citizens. Still less does it mean the mere organs, or the separate servants of the country,--the custom house, the War Department, the Speaker of the House, or any other office or official.
When you sing "My country, "tis of thee," you do not mean, "My post-office, "tis of thee," nor yet, "My fellow citizens, "tis of you, just as the creatures who crowd the street and who overfill the railway cars," that I sing. If the poet continues in his own song to celebrate the land, the "rocks and rills," the "woods and templed hills," he is still speaking only of symbols. What he means is the country as an invisible but, in his opinion, perfectly real spiritual unity. General Nogi, in a recent j.a.panese publication about Bushido, expressed his own national ideal beautifully in the words: "Here the sovereign and the people are of one family and have together endured the joys and sorrows of thousands of years." It is that sort of being whereof one speaks when one expresses true loyalty to the country. The country is the spiritual ent.i.ty that is none of us and all of us--none of us because it is our unity; all of us because in it we all find our patriotic unity.
Such, then, is the idea that the loyal have of the real nature of the causes which they serve. I repeat, If the loyal are right, then the real world contains other beings than mechanisms and individual human and animal minds. It contains spiritual unities which are as real as we are, but which certainly do not belong to the realm of a mere nature mechanism. Does not all this put the problems of our philosophy of life in a new light?
But I have no doubt that you may at once reply: All this speech about causes is after all merely more or less pleasing metaphor. As a fact, human beings are just individual natural creatures. They throng and struggle for existence, and love and hate and enjoy and sorrow and die.
These causes are, after all, mere dreams, or at best ent.i.ties as we have just described. The friends like to talk of being one; but there are always two or more of them, and the unity is a pretty phrase. The country is, in the concrete, the collection of the countrymen, with names, formulas, songs, and so on, attached, by way of poetical license or of convenient abbreviation or of pretty fable. The poet really meant simply that he was fond of the landscape, and was not wholly averse to a good many of his countrymen, and was in any case fond of a good song.
Loyalty, like the rest of human life, is an illusion. Nature is real.
The unity of the spirit is a fancy.
This, I say, may be your objection. But herewith we indeed stand in the presence of a certain very deep philosophical problem concerning the true definition of what we mean by reality. Into this problem I have neither time nor wish to enter just now. But upon one matter I must, nevertheless, stoutly insist. It is a matter so simple, so significant, so neglected, that I at once need and fear to mention it to you,--need to mention it, because it puts our philosophy into a position that quite transforms the significance of that whole modern view of nature upon which I have been dwelling since the outset of this lecture; fear to mention it, because the fact that it is so commonly neglected shows how hard to be understood it has proved.
That disheartening view of the foreign and mechanical nature of the real world which our sciences and our industrial arts have impressed upon the minds of so many of us; that contempt for superst.i.tion; that denial of the supernatural, which seems to the typical modern man the beginning of wisdom;--to what is all this view of reality due? To the results, and, as I believe, to the really important results, of the modern study of natural science. But what is the study of natural science? Practically considered, viewed as one of the great moral activities of mankind, _the study of science is a very beautiful and humane expression of a certain exalted form of loyalty_. Science is, practically considered, the outcome of the absolutely devoted labors of countless seekers for natural truth. But how do we human beings get at what we call natural truth? By observation--so men say--and by experience. But by whose experience? By the united, by the synthesized, by the revised, corrected, rationally criticized, above all by the common, experience of many individuals. The possibility of science rests upon the fact that human experience may be progressively treated so as to become more and more an unity. The detached individual records the transit of a star, observes a precipitate in a test tube, stains a preparation and examines it under a microscope, collects in the field, takes notes in a hospital--and loyally contributes his little fragment of a report to the ideally unified and constantly growing totality called scientific human experience. In doing this he employs his memory, and so conceives his own personal life as an unity. But equally he aims--and herein consists his scientific loyalty--to bring his personal experience into unity with the whole course of human experience in so far as it bears upon his own science. The collection of mere data is never enough. It is in the unity of their interpretation that the achievements of science lie. This unity is conceived in the form of scientific theories; is verified by the comparative and critical conduct of experiments. But in all such work how manifold are the presuppositions which we make when we attempt such unification! Here is no place to enumerate these presuppositions. Some of them you find discussed in the textbooks of the logic of science.
Some of them are instinctive, and almost never get discussed at all. But it is here enough to say that we all presuppose _that human experience has, or can by the loyal efforts of truth seekers be made to possess, a real unity, superior in its nature and significance to any detached observer"s experience, more genuinely real than is the mere collection of the experiences of any set of detached observers, however large_. The student of natural science is loyal to the cause of the enlargement of this organized and criticized realm of the common human experience.
Unless this unity of human experience is a genuine reality, unless all the workers are living a really common life, unless each man is, potentially at least, in a live spiritual unity with his fellows, science itself is a mere metaphor, its truth is an illusion, its results are myths. For science is conceived as true only by conceiving the experiences of countless observers as the sharing of a common realm of experience. If, as we all believe, the natural sciences do throw a real, if indeed an inadequate, light upon the nature of things, then they do so because no one man"s experience is disconnected from the real whole of human experience. They do so because the cause to which the loyal study of science is devoted, the cause of the enlargement of human experience, is a cause that has a supernatural, or, as Professor Munsterberg loves to say, an over-individual, type of reality. Mankind is not a mere collection of detached individuals, or man could possess no knowledge of any unity of scientific truth. If men are really only many, and if they have no such unity of conscious experience as loyalty everywhere presupposes, then the cause of science also is a vain illusion, and we have no unified knowledge of nature, only various private fancies about nature. If we know, however ill, nature"s mechanism, we do so because human experience is not merely a collection of detached observations, but forms an actual spiritual unity, whose type is not that of a mechanism, whose connections are ideally significant, whose const.i.tution is essentially that which the ideal of unified truth requires.
So, then, I insist, the dilemma is upon our hands. Either the sciences const.i.tute a progressive, if imperfect, insight into real truth--and then the cause of the unity of human experience is a real cause that really can be served exactly as the lover means to be loyal to his friendship and the patriot to his country; and then also human life really possesses such unity as the loyal presuppose--or else none of this is so. But then loyalty and science alike deal with metaphors and with myths. In the first case the spiritual unity of the life that we lead is essentially vindicated. Causes such as the loyal serve are real.
The cause of science also is real. But in that case an essentially spiritual realm, that of the rational unity of human experience, is real; and possesses a grade both of reality and of worth which is superior to the grade of reality that the phenomena of nature"s mechanism exhibit to us. In the other case the sciences whose results are supposed to be discouraging and unspiritual vanish, with all their facts, into the realm of fable, together with the world that all the loyal, including the faithful followers of the sciences, believe to be real.
I have here no time to discuss the paradoxes of a totally skeptical philosophy. It is enough to say that such a total skepticism is, indeed, self-refuting. The only rational view of life depends upon maintaining that what the loyal always regard as a reality, namely, their cause, is, indeed, despite all special illusions of this or of that form of imperfect loyalty, essentially a type of reality which rationally survives all criticisms and underlies all doubts.
"They reckon ill who leave me out; When me thy fly, I am the wings."
This is what the genuine object of loyalty, the unity of the spiritual life, always says to us when we examine it in the right spirit. But the one source of our deepest insight into this unity of the spirit which underlies all the varieties, and which leads us upward to itself past all the sunderings and doubts of existence, is the loyal spirit itself.
Loyalty a.s.serts: "My cause is real. I know that my cause liveth." But the cause, however imperfectly interpreted, is always some sort of unity of the spiritual life in which we learn to share whenever we begin to be loyal. The more we grow in loyalty and in insight into the meaning of our loyalty, the more we learn to think of some vast range of the unity of spiritual life as the reality to which all the other realities accessible to us are in one way or another subordinate, so that they express this unity, and show more or less what it means. I believe that a sound critical philosophy justifies the view that the loyal, precisely in so far as they view their cause as real, as a personal, but also as an over-individual, realm of genuine spiritual life, are comprehending, as far as they go, the deepest nature of things.
Religion, in its higher sense, always involves a practical relation to a spiritual world which, in its significance, in its inclusiveness, in its unity, and in its close and comforting touch with our most intense personal concerns, fulfils in a supreme degree the requirements which loyalty makes when it seeks for a worthy cause. One may have a true religion without knowing the reason why it is true. One may also have false religious beliefs. But in any case the affiliation of the spirit of the higher religion with the spirit of loyalty has been manifest, I hope, from the outset of this discussion of loyalty. By religious insight one may very properly mean any significant and true view of an object of religious devotion which can be obtained by any reasonable means.
In speaking of loyalty and insight I have also given an indication of that source of religious insight which I believe to be, after all, the surest, the most accessible, the most universal, and, in its deepest essence, the most rational. The problem of the modern philosophy of life is, we have said, the problem of keeping the spirit of religion, without falling a prey to superst.i.tion. At the outset of this lecture I told briefly why, in the modern world, we aim to avoid superst.i.tion. The true reason for this aim you now see better than at first I could state that reason. We have learned, and wisely learned, that the great cause of the study of nature by scientific methods is one of the princ.i.p.al special causes to which man can be devoted; for nothing serves more than the pursuit of the sciences serves to bind into unity the actual work of human civilization. To this cause of scientific study we have all learned to be, according to our lights, loyal. But the study of science makes us averse to the belief in magic arts, in supernatural interferences, in special providences. The scientific spirit turns from the legends and the superst.i.tions that in the past have sundered men, have inflamed the religious wars, have filled the realm of imagination with good and evil spirits. Turns from these--to what? To a belief in a merely mechanical reality? To a doctrine that the real world is foreign to our ideals? To an a.s.surance that life is vain?
No; so to view the mission of the study of science is to view that mission falsely. The one great lesson of the triumph of science is the lesson of the vast significance of loyalty to the cause of science. And this loyalty depends upon acknowledging the reality of a common, a rational, a significant unity of human experience, a genuine cause which men can serve. When the sciences teach us to get rid of superst.i.tion, they do this by virtue of a loyalty to the pursuit of truth which is, as a fact, loyalty to the cause of the spiritual unity of mankind: an unity which the students of science conceive in terms of an unity of our human experience of nature, but which, after all, they more or less unconsciously interpret just as all the other loyal souls interpret their causes; namely, as a genuine living reality, a life superior in type to the individual lives which we lead--worthy of devoted service, significant, and not merely an incidental play of a natural mechanism.
This unity of human experience reveals to us nature"s mechanisms, but is itself no part of the mechanism which it observes.
If, now, we do as our general philosophy of loyalty would require: if we take all our loyalties, in whatever forms they may appear, as more or less enlightened but always practical revelations that there is an unity of spiritual life which is above our present natural level, which is worthy of our devotion, which can give sense to life, and which consists of facts that are just as genuinely real as are the facts and the laws of outer nature--well, can we not thus see our way towards a religious insight which is free from superst.i.tion, which is indifferent to magic and to miracle, which accepts all the laws of nature just in so far as they are indeed known, but which nevertheless stoutly insists: "This world is no mere mechanism; it is full of a spiritual unity that transcends mere nature?"
I believe that we can do this. I believe that what I have merely hinted to you is capable of a much richer development than I have here given to these thoughts. I believe, in brief, that in our loyalties we find our best sources of a genuinely religious insight.
Men have often said, "The true source of religious insight is revelation; for these matters are above the powers of human reason."
Now, I am not here to discuss or to criticize anybody"s type of revelation. But this I know, and this the believers in various supposed revelations have often admitted--that unless the aid of some interior spiritual insight comes to be added to the merely external revelation, one can be left in doubt by all possible signs and wonders whereby the revelation undertakes to give us convincing external evidence. Religious faith, indeed, relates to that which is above us, but it must arise from that which is within us. And any faith which has indeed a worthy religious object is either merely a mystic ecstasy, which must then be judged, if at all, only by its fruits, or else it is a loyalty, which never exists without seeking to bear fruit in works. Now my thesis is that loyalty is essentially adoration with service, and that there is no true adoration without practical loyalty. If I am right, all of the loyal are grasping in their own ways, and according to their lights, some form and degree of religious truth. They have won religious insight; for they view something, at least, of the genuine spiritual world in its real unity, and they devote themselves to that unity, to its enlargement and enrichment. And therefore they approach more and more to the comprehension of that true spiritual life whereof, as I suppose, the real world essentially consists.
Therefore I find in the growth of the spirit of loyalty which normally belongs to any loyal life the deepset source of a genuinely significant religious insight which belongs to just that individual in just his stage of development.
In brief: Be loyal; grow in loyalty. Therein lies the source of a religious insight free from superst.i.tion. Therein also lies the solution of the problems of the philosophy of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 77: Commencement address delivered at Simmons College, Boston.
Published in "William James and Other Essays," copyright, 1911. Printed here by permission of The Macmillan Company.]