The Religious Aspect of Philosophy/Preface
PREFACE.
This book sketches the basis of a system of philosophy, while applying the principles of this system to religious problems. The form and order of the treatment depend on the nature of these latter problems themselves, and are not such as a system of philosophy, expounded solely for its own sake, would be free to take. The religious problems have been chosen for the present study because they first drove the author to philosophy, and because they, of all human interests, deserve our best efforts and our utmost loyalty.
A large portion of this discussion seeks to appeal both to the special student of philosophy and to the general reader. A considerable part, again, can with the very best of fortune hope to interest the special student of philosophy, but cannot hope for more. The Preface must therefore tell what sort of appeal is made to each of the two classes of readers.
To begin with the general reader, who may have the curiosity to glance at this philosophic essay, the author must forthwith confess that while on the one hand he desires to trouble nobody with fruitless and blank negations, and while his aim is therefore on the whole a positive aim, yet on the other hand, as he has no present connection with any visible religious body, and no sort of desire for any such connection, he cannot be expected to write an apology for a popular creed. This confession is made frankly, but not for the sake of provoking a quarrel, and with all due reverence for the faith of other men. If the fox who had lost his tail was foolish to be proud of his loss, he would have been yet more foolish to hide it by wearing a false tail, stolen mayhap from a dead fox. The full application of the moral of the fable to the present case is moreover willingly accepted. Not as the fox invited his friends to imitate his loss, would the present writer aim to make other men lose their faiths. Rather is it his aim not to arouse fruitless quarrels, but to come to some peaceful understanding with his fellows touching the ultimate meaning and value and foundation of this noteworthy custom, so widely prevalent among us, the custom of having a religion. If the author ends by stating for his own part a religious doctrine, it will yet be seen upon reading the same that a man could hold that and much more too; so that what is here said is rather proposed as a basis for a conceivable if very far off reconciliation, than as an argument to dissuade those who may think that they can go further than the author, from proving in a philosophical fashion whatever they can prove. Such people may manage to interpret many of the negations that occur in these pages as directed against an inadequate form, or imperfect understanding, of their more elaborate creed. If they can do so, no one will be more heartily delighted than the author, although he may not agree with them.
As to the relation of this book to what is called modern doubt, it is a relation neither of blind obedience nor of unsympathetic rejection. The doctrine of philosophic idealism here propounded is not what in these days is popularly called Agnosticism. Yet doubting everything is once for all a necessary element in the organism of philosophic reflection. What is here dwelt upon over and over again is, however, the consideration that the doubts of our time are not to be apologetically “refuted,” in the old fashioned sense, but that taken just as they are, fully and cordially received, they are upon analysis found to contain and imply a positive and important religious creed, bearing both upon conduct and upon reality. Not to have once thoroughly accepted as necessary the great philosophic doubts and problems of our day, is simply not to have philosophized as a man of this age. But to have accepted these doubts without in time coming to find the positive truth that is concealed in them, is to treat them as the innocent favorite of fortune in a fairy tale always at first treats his magic gift. It is something common and dingy, and he lays it carelessly away in his empty house, feeling poorer than ever. But see: handle it rightly, and the fairy gift fills your transfigured home with a wealth of gems and gold, and spreads for you a wondrous banquet. To the author has come the fancy that modern doubt may be some such fairy gift as this. And he would like to suggest to some reader what may possibly prove the right fashion of using the talisman.
The general reader, if very "benevolent," may be able to endure the "First Book" of the present volume in its entirety; but in the "Second Book" he will find much that is meant only for the student whose interests are decidedly technical. Some warnings are given in the text, to help the general reader in skipping. But perhaps it may be well for his purpose to confine himself at once in this Book II., at least upon the first reading, to the following passages, namely: in Chapter VIII., to the introductory remarks and the first and the last sections of the chapter; in Chapter IX., to the introductory remarks, and Sections I., II., III., and V.; in Chapter X., to the introductory remarks, and Sections I., II., and IV.; in Chapter XI., to the introductory remarks, and the concluding section only; and then he may try the whole of Chapter XII. Thus he will not be troubled by the technical statement of the proof of our doctrine, and he will see the trend of our thought, which may at least amuse him. If he is then still curious, he may take his own risks and look farther.
The student of philosophy will find in this volume a doctrine that undertakes to be in certain significant respects independent and original, but that, without ceasing to be the author's own system, frankly belongs to the wide realm of Post-Kantian Idealism. Of course no true lover of philosophy ventures, when he calls a doctrine his own, to pretend to more than the very moderate degree of relative originality that the subject in our day permits; and of course the author for his own part feels very deeply how much what he has to offer is the product of what he has happened to read and remember about philosophy and its history. Most of all he feels his debt to Kant; then he knows how much he has gained from Fichte, from the modern Neo-Kantians in Germany, and from the revivers of idealism in recent years in England and America. To Hegel also he has of course a decided debt to acknowledge.
There are in recent philosophical history two Hegels: one the uncompromising idealist, with his general and fruitful insistence upon the great fundamental truths of idealism; the other the technical Hegel of the “Logik,” whose dialectic method seems destined to remain, not a philosophy, but the idea of a philosophy. With this latter Hegel the author feels a great deal of discontent; to the other Hegel, whose insight, as we know, was by no means independent of that of Fichte and other contemporaries, but who was certainly the most many-sided and critical of the leaders of the one great common idealistic movement of the early part of the century, — to him we all owe a great debt indeed. It is, however, a mistake to neglect the other idealists just for the sake of glorifying him. And it is an intolerable blunder to go on repeating what we may have learned from him in the awkward and whimsical speech of the wondrous and crabbed master. If Hegel taught anything, then what he taught can be conveyed in an utterly non-Hegelian vocabulary, or else Hegel is but a king of the rags and tatters of a flimsy terminology, and no king of thought at all. It is therefore absolutely the duty of a man who nowadays supposes that he has any truth from Hegel to propound, to state it in an entirely fresh and individual form. Of Hegelian language repeated to us in place of Hegelian thought, we have had by this time a sickening surfeit. Let us therefore thank men who, like the late lamented Professor Green, have at last been free to speak their own thoughts very much in their own way; and let us be glad too that the number of so-called Hegelians of similar independence is daily growing greater. The author, however, cannot call himself an Hegelian, much as he owes to Hegel.
Further especial acknowledgments the author wants to make to Professor William James, to Mr. Shadworth Hodgson, to Professor Otto Pfleiderer, to Professor Hans Vaihinger, to Professor Otto Liebmann, to Professor Julius Bergmann, to Professor Christoph Sigwart, and to Mr. Arthur Balfour, for the valuable helps in thought that, unknown to them, he, as a reader of their works, has felt, and that he now recognizes as distinctly affecting this book. To Professor William James once more in particular, and also to Professor George Palmer, the author owes numerous oral suggestions that have influenced him more than he now can exactly estimate or fully confess. And then there remain two thinkers to name, men very different from each other, but both for the author very valuable. Of these one was among the first of the German thinkers in the chance order of the author's early reading, the other was deeply influential both by his spoken words and by his writings; the former is that brilliant and stimulating master of contradictions, Schopenhauer, the other is the now departed Lotze, whose lectures the author will never forget nor disregard, although what is here taught is remote enough from most of Lotze's system.
In outer form this work may be considered by the philosophic student as a sort of roughly sketched and very incomplete Phenomenology of the religious consciousness, first on its moral, and then on its theoretical, side. The parts of the argument that the author supposes to contain most relative originality will be found in Book I., Chapters VI. and VII., and in Book II., Chapter XI. On these chapters all else hinges.
The discussion of the Problem of Evil, as it appears in Chapter XII., is, as the author has seen only since that chapter was in type, very closely parallel to part of the discussion of the same question in the new second edition of Pfleiderer's "Religionsphilosophie." Yet, as the thoughts of this new edition of Pfleiderer's argument were indicated in his first edition, although not so clearly expressed, the author claims little originality here, save in the form of presentation, in the illustrations used, and in the reference of the whole to the arguments of Chapter XI. This last matter seems to him, of itself indeed, quite important.
The work as it here appears is an outgrowth of several separate lines of study. The questions of the present Chapter XI. were first attempted by the author in a thesis for the Doctor's degree of the Johns Hopkins University in 1878. The argument has since been essentially altered. Several fragments that are here used as organic parts of the whole book have appeared separately, in various degrees of incompleteness, in the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy," in "Mind," and elsewhere. The present form of the book has grown out of lectures on religious questions to the students of Harvard College; but only a small portion of the manuscript of these lectures has entered into the structure of the book, which, for its own part, tries to be no patchwork, but a single united, if incomplete, study of its chosen problem.
- Cambridge, Mass., January 11, 1885.