The Spirit of Modern Philosophy/Lecture 1

by Josiah Royce

THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.

LECTURE I.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION.

In the following course of lectures I shall try to suggest, in a fashion suited to the general student, something about the men, the problems, and the issues that seem to me most interesting in a limited, but highly representative portion of the history of modern philosophy. I undertake this work with a keen sense of the limitations of my time and my powers. I plead as excuse only my desire to interest some of my fellow-students in the great concerns of philosophy.

I.

The assumption upon which these lectures are based is one that I may as well set forth at the very beginning. It is the assumption that Philosophy, in the proper sense of the term, is not a presumptuous effort to explain the mysteries of the world by means of any superhuman insight or extraordinary cunning, but has its origin and value in an attempt to give a reasonable account of our own personal attitude towards the more serious business of life. You philosophize when you reflect critically upon what you are actually doing in your world. What you are doing is of course, in the first place, living. And life involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage. The critical inquiry into what all these things mean and imply is philosophy. We have our faith in life; we want reflectively to estimate this faith. We feel ourselves in a world of law and of significance. Yet why we feel this homelike sense of the reality and the worth of our world is a matter for criticism. Such a criticism of life, made elaborate and thorough-going, is a philosophy.

If this assumption of mine be well-founded, it follows that healthy philosophizing, or thorough-going self-criticism, is a very human and natural business, in which you are all occasionally, if not frequently engaged, and for which you will therefore from the start have a certain sympathy. Whether we will it or no, we all of us do philosophize. The difference between the temperament which loves technical philosophy and the temperament which can make nothing of so-called metaphysics is rather one of degree than of kind. The moral order, the evils of life, the authority of conscience, the intentions of God, how often have I not heard them discussed, and with a wise and critical skepticism, too, by men who seldom looked into books. The professional student of philosophy does, as his constant business, precisely what all other people do at moments. In the life of non-metaphysical people, reflection on destiny and the deepest truths of life occupies much the same place as music occupies in the lives of appreciative, but much distracted amateurs. The constant student of philosophy is merely the professional musician of reflective thought. He daily plays his scales in the form of what the scoffers call “chopping logic.” He takes, in short, a delight in the technical subtleties of his art which makes his enthusiasm often incomprehensible to less devoted analysts of life. But his love for speculation is merely their own natural taste somewhat specialized. He is a sort of miser, secretly hoarding up the treasures of reflection which other people wear as the occasional ornaments of intercourse, or use as a part of the heavier coinage of conversation. If, as non-professional philosophers, you confine your reflections to moments, the result is perhaps a serious talk with a friend, or nothing more noteworthy than an occasional hour of meditation, a dreamy glance of wonder, as it were, at this whole great and deep universe before you, with its countless worlds and its wayward hearts. Such chance heart searchings, such momentary communings with the universal, such ungrown germs of reflection, would under other circumstances develop into systems of philosophy. If you let them pass from your attention you soon forget them, and may then even fancy that you have small fondness for metaphysics. But, none the less, all intelligent people, even including the haters of metaphysics, are despite themselves occasionally metaphysicians.

II.

All this, however, by way of mere opening suggestion. What you wish to know further, through this introductory lecture, is, how this natural tendency to reflect critically upon life leads men to frame elaborate systems of philosophy, why it is that these systems have been so numerous and so varied in the past, and whether or no it seems to be true, as many hold, that the outcome of all this long and arduous labor of the philosophers has so far been nothing but doubtful speculation and hopeless variety of opinion. I suppose that a student who knows little as yet of the details of philosophic study feels as his greatest difficulty, when he approaches the topic for the first time, the confusing variety of the doctrines of the philosophers, joined as it is with the elaborateness and the obscurity that seem so characteristic of technical speculation. So much labor, you say, and all thus far in vain! For if the thinkers really aimed to bring to pass an agreement amongst enlightened persons about the great truths that are to be at the basis of human life, how sadly, you will say, they seemed to have failed! How monstrous on the one hand their toils! Hegel’s eighteen volumes of published books and of posthumously edited lecture notes are but a specimen of what such men have produced. A prominent English philosopher was flippantly accused, a few years since, in a gay and irresponsible volume of reminiscences, of having been the writer of books that, as the scoffing author in substance said, “fill several yards on the shelves of our libraries.” The prominent philosopher indignantly responded, in a letter addressed to a literary weekly. “His critic,” said he, “was recklessly inaccurate.” As a fact his own collected works, set side by side on a shelf, cover a little less than two feet! How vast the toil, then, and on the other hand, to what end? A distinguished German student of the history of philosophy, Friedrich Albert Lange, upon one occasion, wrote these words: “Once for all we must definitely set aside the claim of the metaphysicians, of whatever school and tendency, that their deductions are such as forbid any possible strife, or that if you only first thoroughly come into possession of every detail of some system six fat volumes long, then, and not till then, you will recognize with wonder how each and every individual conclusion was sound and clear.” Does not this assertion of Lange’s, this definitive setting aside of the claim of the metaphysicians, seem warranted by the facts? What one of these systems, six fat volumes long, has ever satisfied in its entirety any one but the master who wrote it, and the least original and thoughtful of his pupils? What so pathetic, then, in this history of scholarly production, as this voluminous and systematic unpersuasiveness of the philosophers? They aimed, each one in his own private way, at the absolute, and so, if they failed, they must, you will think, have failed utterly. Each one raised, all alone, his own temple to his own god, declared that he, the first of men, possessed the long-sought truth, and undertook to initiate the world into his own mysteries. Hence it is that so many temples lie in ruins and so many images of false gods are shattered to fragments. I put the case thus strongly against the philosophers, because I am anxious to have you comprehend from the start how we are to face this significant preliminary difficulty of our topic. It may be true that the philosophers deal with life, and that, too, after a fashion known and occasionally tried by all of us. But is not their dealing founded upon vain pretense? How much better, you may say, to live nobly than to inquire thus learnedly and ineffectually into the mysteries of life? As the “Imitation of Christ” so skillfully states the case against philosophy, speaking indeed from the point of view of simple faith, but using words that doubters, too, can understand, “What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility, and be thus displeasing to the Trinity? For verily it is not deep words that make a man holy and upright. I had rather feel contrition than be skillful in the definition thereof.” And again, “Tell me now where are all those masters and teachers, whom thou knewest well, when they were yet with you, and flourished in learning? Their stalls are now filled by others, who perhaps never have one thought concerning them. Whilst they lived they seemed to be somewhat, but now no one speaks of them. Oh, how quickly passeth the glory of the world away! Would that their life and knowledge had agreed together! For then would they have read and inquired unto good purpose.” Or once again, and this time in the well-known words of Fitzgerald’s “Omar Khayyám” stanzas: —

“Why all the Saints and Sages who discussed

Of the two worlds so learnedly are thrust

Like foolish prophets forth. Their words to Scorn

Are scattered, and their mouths are stopt with dust.”

Well, if such is the somewhat portentous case against philosophy, what can we say for philosophy? I answer first, that the irony of fate treats all human enterprises in precisely this way, if one has regard to the immediate intent of the men engaged in them. Philosophy is not alone in missing her directly sought aim. But true success lies often in serving ends that were higher than the ones we intended to serve. Surely no statesman ever founded an enduring social order; nay, one may add that no statesman ever produced even temporarily the precise social order that he meant to found. No poet ever gave us just the song that in his best moments he had meant and hoped to sing. No human life ever attained the fulfillment of the glorious dreams of its youth. And as for passing away, and being forgotten, and having one’s mouth stopped with dust, surely one is not obliged to be either a saint or a sage to have that fate awaiting one. But still the saints and sages are not total failures, even if they are forgotten. There was an enduring element about them. They did not wholly die.

In view of all this, what we need to learn concerning philosophy is, not whether its leaders have in any sense failed or not, but whether its enterprise has been essentially a worthy one, one through which the human spirit has gained; whether the dark tower before which these Rolands have ended their pilgrimage has contained treasures in any way worthy of their quest. For a worthy quest always leaves good traces behind it, and more treasures are won by heroes than they visibly bring home in their own day. A more careful examination of the true office of philosophy may serve to show us, in fact, both why final success in it has been unattainable and why the partial successes have been worth the cost. Let such an examination be our next business.

III.

The task of humanitj^, to wit, the task of organizing here on earth a worthy social life, is in one sense a hopelessly complex one. There are our endlessly numerous material foes, our environment, our diseases, our weaknesses. There are amongst us men ourselves, our rivalries, our selfish passions, our anarchical impulses, our blindness, our weak wills, our short and careful lives. These things all stand in the way of progress. For progress, for organization, for life, for spirituality, stand, as the best forces, our healthier social instincts, our courage, our endurance, and our insight. Civilization depends upon these. How hopeless every task of humanity, were not instinct often on the side of order and of spirituality. How quick would come our failure, were not courage and endurance ours. How blindly chance would drive us, did we not love insight for its own sake, and cultivate contemplation even when we know not yet what use we can make of it. And so, these three, if you will, to wit, healthy instinct, enduring courage, and contemplative insight, rule the civilized world. He who wants life to prosper longs to have these things alike honored and cultivated. They are brethren, these forces of human spirituality; they cannot do without one another; they are all needed.

Well, what I have called contemplative insight, that disposition and power of our minds whereby we study and enjoy truth, expresses itself early and late, as you know, in the form of a searching curiosity about our world and about life, a curiosity to which you in vain endeavor to set bounds. As the infant that studies its fist in the field of vision does not know as yet why this curiosity about space and about its own movements will be of service to it, so throughout life there is something unpractical, wayward, if so you choose to call it, in all our curious questionings concerning our world. The value of higher insight is seldom immediate. Science has an element of noble play about it. It is not the activity, it is the often remote outcome of science, that is of practical service. Insight is an ally of the moral nature of man, an ally of our higher social instincts, of our loyalty, of our courage, of our devotion; but the alliance is not always one intended directly by the spirit of curious inquiry itself. A singular craft of our nature links the most theoretical sorts of inquiry by unexpected ties with men’s daily business. One plays with silk and glass and amber, with kites that one flies beneath thunder clouds, with frogs’ legs and with acids. The play is a mere expression of a curiosity that former centuries might have called idle. But the result of this play recreates an industrial world. And so it is everywhere with our deeper curiosity. There is a sense in which it is all superfluous. Its immediate results seem but vanity. Oue could surely live without them; yet for the future, and for the spiritual life of mankind, these results are destined to become of vast import. Without this cunning contrivance of our busy brains, with their tireless curiosity and their unpractical wonderings, what could even sound instinct and the enduring heart have done to create the world of the civilized man?

Of all sorts of curiosity one of the most human and the most singular is the reflective curiosity whose highest expression is philosophy itself. This form of curiosity scrutinizes our own lives, our deepest instincts, our most characteristic responses to the world in which we live, our typical “reflex actions.” It tries to bring us to a self-consciousness as to our temperaments. Our temperaments, our instincts, are in one sense fatal. We cannot directly alter them. What philosophy does is to find them out, to bring them to the light, to speak in words the very essence of them. And so the historical office of the greatest philosophers has always been to reword, as it were, the meaning and the form of the most significant life, temperaments, and instincts of their own age. As man is social, as no man lives alone, as your temperament is simply the sum total of your social “reflex actions,” is just your typical bearing towards your fellows, the great philosopher, in reflecting on his own deepest instincts and faiths, inevitably describes, in the terms of his system, the characteristic attitude of his age and people. So, for instance, Plato and Aristotle, taken togetlier, express for us, in their philosophical writings, the essence of the highest Greek faith and life. The Greek love of the beautiful and reverence for the state, the Greek union of intellectual freedom with conventional bondaoe to the forms of politics and of religion, the whole Greek attitude towards the universe, in so far as the Athens of that age could embody it, are made articulate in enduring form in the speculations of these representative men. They consciously interpret this Hellenic life, — they do also more: they criticise it. Plato especially is in some of his work a fairly destructive analyst of his nation’s faith. And yet it is just this faith, incorporated as it was into his own temperament, bred into his every fibre, that he must needs somehow express in his doctrine. And now perhaps you may already see why there is of necessity nothing absolute, notliing final, about much that a Plato himself may have looked upon as absolute and as final in his work. Greek life was not all of human life; Greek life was doomed to pass away; Greek instincts and limitations could not be eternal. The crystal heavens that the Greek saw above him were indeed doomed to be rolled up like a scroll, and the elements of his life were certain to pass away in fervent heat. But then, into all nobler future humanity, Greek life was certain to enter, as a factor, as a part of its civilized instincts, as an ennobling passion in its artistic production, as a moment of its spirituality. And therefore, too, Plato’s philosophy, doomed in one sense not to be absolute or final, has its part, as a fact, in your own reflection to-day, and would have its part in the absolute philosophical estimate of the highest human life if ever we attained that estimate. If philosophy criticises, estimates, and to that end rewords life, if the great philosopher expresses in his system the most characteristic faiths and passions of his age, then indeed the limitation of the age will be in a sense the limitation of the philosophy; and with the life whose temperament it reflectively embodied the philosophy will pass away. It will pass away, but it will not be lost. A future humanity will, if civilization healthily progresses, inherit the old kingdom, and reembody the truly essential and immortal soul of its old life. This new humanity, including in itself the spirit of the old, will need something, at least, of the old philosophy to express in reflective fashion its own attitude towards the universe. This something that it needs of the old philosophy may not be that which the philosopher had himself imagined to be his most absolute possession. Like the statesman, he will have builded better than he knew. As Cæsar’s Roman empire had for its destiny not to exclude the Germans, as Cæsar had driven out Ariovistus, but to civilize and to Christianize them, and finally to pass in great part over to their keeping, so Plato’s philosophy had for its office to suggest thoughts that Christianity afterwards made the common treasure of the very humanity that his mind would have regarded as hopelessly barbarian. No, the philosopher’s work is not lost when, in one sense, his system seems to have been refuted by death, and when time seems to have scattered to scorn the words of his dust-filled mouth. His immediate end may have been unattained; but thousands of years may not be long enough to develop for humanity the full significance of his reflective thought.

Insight, this curious scrutiny of ours into the truth, keeps here, as you will see, its immediately unpractical, its ultimately significant character. There is indeed a sense in which life has no need of the philosopher. He does not invent life, nor does he lead in its race; he follows after; he looks on; he is no prophet to inspire men; he has a certain air of the playful about him. Plato, in a famous passage, makes sport of the men of the world, who are driven by business, who are oppressed by the law courts, whose only amusement is evil gossip about their neighbors. The philosopher, on the contrary, according to Plato, has infinite leisure, and accordingly thinks of the infinite, but does not know who his next neighbor is, and never dreams of the law courts, or of finishing his business at any fixed hour. His life is a sort of artistic game; his are not the passions of the world; his is the reflection that comprehends the world. The Thracian servant maids laugh at him, as the one in the story laughed at Thales, because he stares at the heavens, and hence occasionally falls into wells. But what is he in the sight of the gods, and what are the servant maids? When they are some day asked to look into the heavens, and to answer concerning the truth, what scorn will not be their lot? After some such fashion does Plato seek to glorify the contemplative separation from the pettiness of life which shall give to the philosopher his freedom. And yet, as we know, this freedom, this sublime playfulness, of even a Plato, does not suggest the real justification of his work. This game of reflection is like all the rest of our insight, indirectly valuable because from it all there is a return to life possible, and in case of a great thinker like Plato, certain to occur. The coming humanity shall learn from the critic who, standing indeed outside of life, embodied in his reflection the meaning of it.

Thus far, then, my thought has been simply this. Humanity depends, for its spirituality and its whole civilization, upon faiths and passions that are in the first place instinctive, inarticulate, and in part unconscious. The philosopher tries to formulate and to criticise these instincts. What he does will always have a two-fold limitation. It will, on the one hand, be criticism from the point of view of a single man, of a single age, of a single group of ideals, as Plato or Aristotle embodied the faith of but one great age of Greek life, and did that from a somewhat private and personal point of view. This first necessary limitation of the philosopher’s work makes his system less absolute, less truthful, less final than he had meant it to be. Another humanity will have a new faith, a new temperament, and in so far will need a new philosophy. Only the final and absolute humanity, only the ultimate and perfect civilization, would possess, were such a civilization possible on earth, the final and absolute philosophy. But this limitation, as we have seen, while it dooms a philosopher to one kind of defeat, doesn’t deprive his work of worth. His philosophy is capable of becoming and remaining just as permanently significant as is his civilization and its temperament; his reflective work will enter into future thought in just the same fashion as the deeper passions of his age will beget the spirits ual temper of those who are to come after.

There remains as second limitation, so we have seen, the always seemingly unfruitful critical attitude of the philosopher. He speculates, but does not prophesy; he criticises, but does not create. Yet this limitation he shares with all theory, with all insight; and the limitation is itself only partial and in great measure illusory. Criticism means self-consciousness, and self-consciousness means renewed activity on a higher plane. The reflective play of one age becomes the passion of another. Plato creates Utopias, and the Christian faith of Europe afterwards gives them meaning. Contemplation gives birth to future conduct, and so the philosopher also becomes, in his own fashion, a world-builder.

IV.

But now, having said so much for the philosopher, I may venture to say yet more, that if his work is not lost in so far as it enters into the life of the humanity which comes after him, there is yet another and a deeper sense in which his labor is not in vain. For truth is once for all manifold, and especially is the truth about man’s relation to the universe nmuifold. The most fleeting passion, if so be it is only deep and humane, may reveal to us some aspect of truth which no other moment of life can fully express. I know how difficult it is to comprehend that seemingly opposing assertions about the world may, in a deeper sense, turn out to be equally true. I must leave to later discussions a fuller illustration of how, for instance, the optimist, who declares this world to be divine and good, and the pessimist, who finds in our finite world everywhere struggle and sorrow, and who calls it all evil, may be, and in fact are, alike right, each in his own sense; or of how the constructive idealist, who declares all reality to be the expression of divine ideals, and the materialist, who sees in nature only matter in motion and law absolute, may be but viewing the same truth from different sides. All this, I say, will be touched upon hereafter. What I here want to suggeest is that the truth about this world is certainly so manifold, so paradoxical, so capable of equally truthful and yet seemingly opposed descriptions, as to forbid us to declare a philosopher wrong in his doctrine merely because we find it easy to make plausible a doctrine that at first sight appears to conflict with his own. Young thinkers always find refutation easy, and old doctrines not hard to transcend: and yet what if the soul of the old doctrines should be true just because the new doctrines seemingly oppose, but actually complete them? Our reflective insights, in following our life, will find now this, now that aspect of things prominent. What if all the aspects should contain truth? What if our failure thus far to find and to state the absolute philosophy were due to the fact, not that all the philosophies thus far have been essentially false, but that the truth is so wealthy as to need not only these, but yet other and future expressions to exhaust its treasury? I speak thus far tentatively and vaguely. I must illustrate a little, although at best I can thus far only suggest.

Some people have a fashion of recording their reflective moments just as they happen to come. If such persons chance to be poets, the form of the record is often the thoughtful lyric. And the thoughtful lyric poem usually possesses the very quality which made Aristotle call poetry a “more philosophical” portrayal of human life than history. It is indeed marvelous how metaphysical a great poem of passion almost always is. The passion of the moment makes its own universe, flashes back like a jewel the light of the far-off sun of truth, but colors this reflected light with its own mysterious glow. “You are, you shall be mine,” cries the strong emotion to the earth and to the whole choir of heaven, and the briefest poem may contain a sort of philosophic scheme of the entire creation. The scheme is sometimes as false as the passion portrayed is transient; but it is also often as true as the passion is deep, and whoever has once seen how variously and yet how significantly the moods expressed in great poems interpret both our life and the reality of which our life forms part, will not be likely to find that philosophical systems are vain merely because the philosophers, like the poets, differ. In fact the reason why there is as yet no one final philosophy may be very closely allied to the reason why there is no final and complete poem. Life is throughout a complicated thing; the truth of the spirit remains an inexhaustible treasure house of experience; and hence no individual experience, whether it be the momentary insight of genius recorded in the lyric poem, or the patient accumulation of years of professional plodding through the problems of philosophy, will ever fully tell all the secrets which life has to reveal.

It is for just this reason, so I now suggest, that when you study philosophy, you have to be tolerant, receptive, willing to look at the world from many sides, fearless as to the examination of what seem to be even danoerous doctrines, patieat in listening to views that look even abhorrent to common sense. It is useless to expect a simple and easy account of so paradoxical an affair as this our universe and our life. When you first look into philosophy you are puzzled and perhaps frightened by those manifold opinions of the philosophers of which we have thus far had so much to say. “If they, who have thought so deeply, differ so much,” you say, “then what hope is there that the truth can ever be known?” But if you examine further you find that this variety, better studied, is on its more human side largely an expression of the liveliness and individuality of the spiritual temperaments of strong men. The truth is not in this case “in the middle.” The truth is rather “the whole.” Let me speak at once in the terminology of a special philosophical doctrine, and say that the world spirit chose these men as his voices, — these men and others like them, and that in fact he did so because he had all these things to voice. Pardon this fashion of speech; I shall try to make it clearer hereafter. Their experience then, let me say, is, in its apparently confusing variety, not so much a seeing of one dead reality from many places, but rather a critical rewording of fragments of the one life which it is the destiny of man to possess and to comprehend. These warring musicians strike mutually discordant tones. But let each sing his song by himself, and the whole group of Meistersänger shall discourse to you most excellent music. For grant that the philosophers are all in fact expressing not dead truth, but the essence of human life, then because this life is many-sided, the individual expressions cannot perfectly agree. It is the union of many such insights that will be the one true view of life. Or again, using the bolder phrases, let us say that all these thinkers are trying to comprehend a little of the life of the one World Spirit who lives and moves in all things. Then surely this life, which in our world needs both the antelopes and the tigers to embody its endless vigor, that life which the frost and cold, the ice and snow, do bless and magnify, is not a life which any one experience can exhaust. All the philosophers are needed, not merely to make jarring assertions about it, but to give us embodiments now of this, now of that fragment of its wealth and its eternity. And in saying this I don’t counsel you in your study of philosophy merely to jumble together all sorts of sayings of this thinker and of that, and then to declare, as makers of eclectic essays and of books of extracts love to say, “This is all somehow great and true.” What I mean is that, apart from the private whims and the non-essential accidents of each great philosopher, his doctrine will contain for the critical student an element of permanent truth about life, a truth which in its isolation may indeed contradict the view of his equally worthy co-workers, but which, in union, in synthesis, in vital connection with its very bitterest opposing doctrines, may turn out to be an organic portion of the genuine treasure of humanity. Nobody hates more than I do mere eclecticism, mere piecing together of this fragment and that for the bare love of producing fraudulent monuments of philosophic art. But the fact is that, frauds aside, the god-like form of truth exists for us men, as it were, in statuesque but scattered remnants of the once perfect marble. Through the whole ruined world, made desolate by the Turks of prejudice and delusion, the philosophers wander, finding here and there one of these bits of the eternal and genuine form of the goddess. Though I hate fraudulent restorations of a divine antiquity, still I know that, notwithstanding all, these fragments do somehow belong together, and that the real truth is no one of the bits, but is the whole goddess. What we who love philosophy long for is no piece-work, but that matchless whole itself.

The kind of philosophical breadth of view for which I am now pleading is not, I assure you, the same as mere vagueness, merely lazy toleration, of all sorts of conflicting opinions. Nobody is more aware than I am that the errors and false theories of the philosophers are facts as real as are the manifold expressions which they give to truth. I am not pleading for inexactness or undecisiveness of thought. What I am really pleading for, as you will see in the sequel, is a form of philosophic reflection that leads to a very definite and positive theory of the universe itself, the theory, namely, which I have just suggested, a theory not at all mystical in its methods, nor yet, in its results, really opposed to the postulates of science, or to the deeper meaning at the heart of common sense. This theory is that the whole universe, including the physical world also, is essentially one live thing, a mind, one great Spirit, infinitely wealthier in his experiences than we are, but for that very reason to be comprehended by us only in terms of our own wealthiest experience. I don’t assume the existence of such a life in the universe because I want to be vague or to seem imaginative. The whole matter appears to me, as you will hereafter see, to be one of exact thought. The result, whatever it shall be, must be reached in strict accord with the actual facts of experience and the actual assumptions of human science. The truth, whenever we get it, must be as hard and fast as it is manifold. But the point is that if the universe is a live thing, a spiritual reality, we, in progressing towards a comprehension of its nature, must needs first comprehend our own life. And in doing this we shall pass through all sorts of conflicting moods, theories, doctrines; and these doctrines, in the midst of their conflict and variety, will express, in fragmentary ways, aspects of the final doctrine, so that, as I said, the truth will be the whole.

V.

Thus far I have spoken of the various opinions and of the general human significance of the philosophers. I called attention, also, a little while since, to the apparently unpractical attitude that they assume towards life. In this connection I have already suggested that their criticism of life has often its destructive side. In these present days, when philosophy is frequently so negative, it is precisely this destructive, this skeptically critical character of philosophy, that to the minds of many constitutes its best-known character, and its most obvious danger. It is not mine to defend recent philosophy from the charge of being often cruelly critical. To many of us it might, indeed, in pity be said: “Mayest thou never know what thou art.” I have myself more than once felt the pang, as I have studied philosophy, of finding out to my sorrow what I am. I have, therefore, many times lamented that philosophy is indeed often so sternly and so negatively critical of many things that our hearts have loved and prized. If any one fears the pangs of self-consciousness, it is not my office to counsel him to get it. But I must, indeed, point out here that when a wise philosophy is destructive, the true fault lies not with the critic who finds the wound in our faith, but with the faith that has secretly nursed its own wounds in unconsciousness. Philosophy, in the true sense of that word, never destroys an ideal that is worth preserving. Coming to consciousness of yourself can only bring to light weakness in case the weakness already exists in you. If you fear, I say, the pang of such a discovery, — and, as I can assure you, the pang is often keen, — then do not try philosophy. For the rest, however, this relation of philosophy to positive faith is one whereof I may speak in yet a very few words before I leave it. Let me point out in what sense philosophy is critical, but in what sense also it can hope to be constructive.

Of course philosophy, as thus far described, is sure to begin at once, if it can, with inquiries into the largest and most significant instincts, the deepest faiths of humanity. These, when it discovers them, it will single out and criticise. Hence, indeed, the philosophers are always talking of such problems as duty and God. Hence they inquire how we can come to know whether there is any external world at all, and, if so, whether this world is to be treated as dead matter, or as live mind. Hence they are curious to study our ideas of natural law, of moral freedom, of time, of space, of causation, of self. They pry into the concerns of faith as if these were theirs by divine right. They are not only prying, they are on one side of their activity merciless, skeptical, paradoxical, inconsiderate. They don’t ask, it would seem, how dear your faith is to you; they analyze it, as they would the reflex action of a starfish, or the behavior of a pigeon; and then they try to estimate faith objectively, as an editor looks critically at a love-sonnet which somebody has sent him (a sonnet written with the author’s heart’s blood), and weighs it coolly and cruelly before he will consent to find it available. Even so the philosopher has his standard of the availability of human faiths. You have to satisfy this with your creed before he will approve you. All this sometimes seems cynical, just as the editor’s coolness may become provoking. But then, as you know, the editor, with all his apparent cruelty, is a man of sympathy and of more than negative aims. He has to consider what he calls availability, because he has his critical public to please. And the philosopher — he, too, has to be critical and to seem cruel, because he also has a public to please with his estimate; and his chosen public ought to be no less than the absolute judge, the world spirit himself, in whose eyes the philosopher can find favor only if he be able to sift the truth from the error. That is why he is rigid. Nothing but an absolute critical standard ought to satisfy him, because lie wants nothing short of the truth itself. He will fail to get it, but then, as I have said, we all of us fail more or less in some career or other; and the metaphysician, with his one talent of critical estimate, must do what he can.

Yet I hasten to correct this seemingly too lifeless a picture of the philosopher’s cruel analysis of passion, by a reference to the thoughts upon which I have already dwelt. From the often disheartening difficulties and incompleteness of the human search for absolute truth, we who read philosophy continually find ourselves returning, hand to hand with the author himself, to the world of the concrete passions which he criticises. We find this world at each return more fair and yet more serious, because we know it better. The sacred tears that were shed in it are none the less sacred because we have been trying to find out from the critic what they meant. Their mystery, long pried into, becomes even the dearer for that. The criticised passions become like old letters, treasured up by a lover after his dear friend’s death, — often read and reread, until the reader has looked at every curve to know why it was traced in just this way. He has found out, or not, — still the search was consoling. So, too, we have analyzed our long past life; and now the more confidently may we henceforth live in the new life before us. We have criticised, so much the more cheerfully may we enjoy. I once saw something of a pair of literary lovers, friends of mine, who, being a trifle reflective, were prone to amuse themselves by affecting to treat each other’s productions with a certain editorial coldness and severity of critical estimate. They wrote poems to each other, suppressing or changing of course the names, and then each, wholly ignoring whom this poem might be intended to mean, used to pick the other’s work to pieces with an air of gentle and pathetic disdain. “Here the sentiment somehow failed to justify its object, being expressed unmusically. There the experiment was a clever one, but the lines were such as a dispassionate observer (like either of us who should happen not to be the author) could not approve, might even smile at.” These people never precisely quarreled, to my knowledge, at least over their literary criticism. I was not able to make out altogether why they did this sort of thing, but, so far as I could discover, they both liked it, and were the better lovers for it. I conjecture that their delight must have resembled the kind of joy that philosophical students take in analyzing life. Let me admit frankly: it is indeed the joy, if you like, of playing cat and mouse with your dearest other self. It is even somewhat like the joy, if so you choose to declare, which infants take in that primitive form of hide and seek that is suited to their months. “Where is my truth, my life, my faith, my temperament?” says the philosopher. And if, some volumes further on in the exposition of his system, he says, “Oh! there it is,” the healthy babies will be on his side in declaring that such reflections are not wholly without their rational value. But why do I thus apparently degrade speculation by again deliberately comparing it with a game? Because, I answer, in one sense, all consciousness is a game, a series of longings and of reflections which it is easy to call superfluous if witnessed from without. The justification of consciousness is the having of it. And this magnificent play of the spirit with itself, this infantile love of rewinning its own wealth ever anew through deliberate loss, through seeking, and through joyous recognition, what is this, indeed, but the pastime of the divine life itself? We enter into the world of the spirit just when even the tragedy of life becomes for our sight as much a divine game as a divine tragedy, when we know that the world is not only serious, terrible, cruel, but is also a world where a certain grim humor of the gods is at home; when we see in it a world, too, where a serene and childlike confidence is justified, a world where courage is in place as well as reverence, and sport as well as seriousness; where, above all, the genius of reflection, expressing at once vast experience of life and a certain infantile cheerfulness or even sportiveness of mood, rightfully lets itself loose in the freest form, now assuming a stern and critical air, now demurely analyzing, as if there were nothing else to do, now prying into men’s hearts like a roguish boy playing with precious jewels, now pretending that all faith is dead, now serenely demonstrating unexpected truths, and, last of all, plunging back again into life with the shout of them that triumph.

VI.

It now behooves me, in conclusion, to say something of the relation of a course of lectures like the one herewith begun to the technicalities of philosophical study. There is a great deal in every noteworthy metaphysical treatise which can be grasped only by special study. I shall make little attempt to transgress into this more technical field during these lectures. I must, indeed, discuss topics which only a rare kindliness on your part can make clearly comprehensible, for they are, once for all, serious and difficult, but I do not understand it to be the purpose of our present discourse to give what in the University would be called an Introduction to the literature of metaphysics proper. The only question that can arise about such a proceeding as I here propose is, of course, a question as to whether it is worth while to separate the general consideration of philosophical tendencies from a more minute study of the works of the philosophers. Such a question only the outcome can decide. I am aware that it is hard to be historically accurate in what I have to say without being much more specific than I shall have time to be. I must warn you at the outset that a full and fair understanding of any great thinker demands a knowledge, both of the history of thought in general, and of his own period in particular, which it is very hard, even for the professional student, after years of study, to attain. All fragmentary views, meanwhile, have something of the misleading about them. Yet, on the other hand, the necessary imperfections of a partial expression of the truth never ought to discourage us from expressing all the truth that we can. The purpose of the subsequent lectures will in any case be sufficiently accomplished, if they bring you nearer to the throbbing heart of this intense modern speculative interest, so that you shall better know that warm blood flows in philosophic veins.

For the rest, I confess to you that, although I myself often take a certain personal delight in the mere subtleties of speculation, although I also enjoy at times that miserliness which makes the professional student hoard up the jewels of reflection for the sake of gloating over their mere hardness and glitter, I find always that when I come to think of the thing fairly, there is, after all, no beauty in a metaphysical system, which does not spring from its value as a record of a spiritual experience. I love the variety of the philosophers, as I love the variety of the thoughtful looks which light up earnest young faces. I love all these because they express passion, wonder, truth. But alas for me if ever I have for professional reasons to study a book behind whose technical subtleties I can catch no glimpse of the manly heart of its author. His conclusions may be sound. I shall then hate him only the more for that. Error may be dull if it chooses; but there is no artistic blasphemy equal to so placing the harp of truth as to make it sound harsh and wooden when you strike it fairly. Philosophical books I have read, with whose doctrines, as doctrines, I have even been forced in great measure to agree; and yet, so lifeless, so bloodless, were their authors, so reptilian were the cold and slowly writhing sentences in which their thought was expressed, that I have laid down such volumes with a sense of disgrace and rebellion, “bitterly asbamed,” as a friend of mine has expressed the same feeling in my hearing, “bitterly ashamed to find myself living in a universe whose truth could possibly be made so inefficacious and uninteresting.” To be sure, in saying all this I am far from desiring to make technical metaphysics easy, for the study is a laborious one; and there are many topics in logic, in the theory of the sciences, and in ethics, to whose comprehension there is no royal road. But then, once your eyes opened, and you will indeed find subjects that at first seemed dry and inhuman full of life and even of passion; as, for instance, few sciences are in their elementary truths more enticing to the initiated, more coy and baffling to the reflective philosophical student, in fact, more romantic, than is the Differential Calculus. But if such matters lie far beyond our present field, I mention them only to show that even the hardest and least popular reflective researches are to be justified, in the long run, by their bearings upon life.