Individuals are no better off; personality is constructedin the same way. If, indeed, the world had been made for us, we might have been spared this warfare to man upon earth. Life might have been the obvious irrational flow of bliss so vividly described by William James; nature and human nature would have been one; bridging the gulf between them would never have been the task of the tender-minded among philosophers. Unfortunately our mere numerical difference, the mere numerical difference of the interests which compose our egos, makes the trouble, so that we are compelled to devote most of our lives to converting the different into the same. The major part of our instincts serve this function recognizably, e.g., nutrition, and the "higher powers" do so no less, if not so obviously. Generalization is nothing more, thinking nothing else. It is the assimilation of many instances into one form, law, or purpose; the preservation of established contents of value, just as nutrition is the preservation of life by means of the conversion of foreign matter into the form and substance of the body. By bowels and by brain, what is necessary, what will feed the irrationally given interest, is preserved and consumed: the rest is cast off as waste, as irrelevance, as contradiction.
The relation may, of course, also reverse itself. Face to face with the immovable and inexorable, the mind may accept it with due resignation, or it may challenge its tyranny and exclude it from its world. It may seek or create or discover a substitute that it is content to accept, though this will in turn alter the course and character of the interest which in such an instancedefines the mind's action. Thus, a way out for one of the lovers of the same girl might be to become a depressed and yearning bachelor, realizing his potential sexuality in the vicarious reproduction of reverie and sentiment; another might be to divert the stream of his affections to another girl, reorganizing his life about a different center and acquiring a new system of practical values determined by this center; a third might be a complete redirection of his sexual energies upon objects the interest in which we would call, abnormal and anti-social in one case, and in another lofty and spiritual. In the latter case sexuality would have been depersonalized; it would have changed into poetic and humanitarian passion; it would have become love as Plato means us to take the word. But each of these processes would have been a conversion, through the need defined by an identical instinct, of thesame into the different; the human nature which existed at the beginning of the change would be deeply other than the human nature in which the change culminated. In each case a condition thrust upon the spirit by its environment would have occasioned the creation and maintenance of an environment demanded by the spirit. Yet in so far as it was not trulythe sameas that envisaged in the primitive demand, it would still imply the tragedy of the world not made for us and the "problem of evil," in which the life of the spirit is persistently a salvage of one of two always incompatible goods, a saving by surrender.
And this is all that a mind is—an affair of saving and rejecting, of valuing with a system of objects ofwhich a living body and its desires and operations, its interests, are focal and the objects marginal, for its standard. Mind, thus, is neither simple, nor immutable, nor stable; it is a thing to be "changed," "confused," "cleared," "made-up," "trained." One body, I have written elsewhere,89"in the course of its lifetime, has many minds, only partially united. Men are all too often "of two minds." The unity of a mind depends on its consistent pursuit ofoneinterest, although we then call it narrow; or on the coöperation and harmony of its many interests. Frequently, two or more minds may struggle for the possession of the same body; that is, the body may be divided by two elaborately systematized tendencies to act. The beginning of such division occurs wherever there is a difficulty in deciding between alternative modes of behavior; the end is to be observed in those cases of dual or multiple personality in which the body has ordered a great collection of objects and systematized so large a collection of interests in such typically distinct ways as to have set up for itself different and opposed "minds." On the other hand, two or fifty or a million bodies may be "of the same mind."
Unhappily, difference of mind, diversity and conflict of interests is quite as fundamental, if not more so, as sameness of mind, coöperation and unity of interests. This the philosophical tradition sufficiently attests. To Plato man is at once a protean beast, a lion, and an intellect; the last having for its proper task to rulethe first and to regulate the second, which is always rebellious and irruptive.90According to the Christian tradition man is at once flesh and spirit, eternally in conflict with one another, and the former is to be mortified that the latter may have eternal life. Common sense divides us into head and heart, never quite at peace with one another. There is no need of piling up citations. Add to the inward disharmonies of mind its incompatibilities with the environment, and you perceive at once how completely it is, from moment to moment, a theater and its life a drama of which the interests that compose it are at once protagonists and directors. The catastrophe of this unceasing drama is always that one or more of the players is driven from the stage of conscious existence. It may be that the environment—social conditions, commercial necessity, intellectual urgency, allies of other interests—will drive it off; it may be that its own intrinsic unpleasantness will banish it, will put it out of mind; whatever the cause, it is put out. Putting it out does not, however, end the drama; putting it out serves to complicate the drama. For the "new psychology"91shows that whenever an interest or a desire or impulsion is put out of the mind, it is really, if not extirpated, put into the mind; it is driven from the conscious level of existence to the unconscious. It retains its force and direction, only its work now lies underground. Its life henceforward consists partly in a direct oppugnance to theinhibitions that keep it down, partly in burrowing beneath and around them and seeking out unwonted channels of escape. Since life is long, repressions accumulate, the mass of existence of feeling and desire tends to become composed entirely of these repressions, layer upon layer, with every interest in the aggregate striving to attain place in the daylight of consciousness.
Now, empirically and metaphysically, no one interest is more excellent than any other. Repressed or patent, each is, whether in a completely favorable environment or in a completely indifferent universe, or before the bar of an absolute justice, or under the domination of an absolute and universal good, entitled to its free fulfilment and perfect maintenance. Each is a form of the good; the essential content of each is good. That any are not fulfilled, but repressed, is a fact to be recorded, not an appearance to be explained away. And it may turn out that the existence of the fact may explain the effort to explain it away. For where interests are in conflict with each other or with reality, and where the loser is not extirpated, its revenge may be just this self-fulfilment in unreality, in idea, which philosophies of absolute values offer it. Dreams, some of the arts, religion, and philosophy may indeed be considered as such fulfilments, worlds of luxuriant self-realization of all that part of our nature which the harsh conjunctions with the environment overthrow and suppress. Sometimes abortive self-expressions of frustrated desires, sometimes ideal compensations for the shortcomings of existence, they are always equally ideal reconstructions of the surrounding evil of the worldinto forms of the good. And because they are compensations in idea, they are substituted for existence, appraised as "true," and "good," and "beautiful," and "real," while the experiences which have suppressed the desires they realize are condemned as illusory and unreal. In them humanity has its freest play and amplest expression.
This has been, and still to a very great extent remains, most specifically true of philosophy. The environment with which philosophy concerns itself is nothing less than the whole universe; its content is, within the history of its dominant tradition, absolutely general and abstract; it is, of all great human enterprises, even religion, least constrained by the direction and march of events or the mandate of circumstance. Like music, it expresses most truly the immediate and intrinsic interests of the mind, its native bias and its inward goal. It has been constituted, for this reason, of the so-called "normative" sciences, envisaging the non-existent as real, forcing upon nature pure values, forms of the spirit incident to the total life of this world, unmixed with baser matter. To formulate ultimate standards, to be completely and utterly lyrical has been the prerogative of philosophy alone. Since these standards reappear in all other reconstructions of the environment and most clearly in art and in religion, it is pertinent to enumerate them, and to indicate briefly their bearing on existence.
The foremost outstanding is perhaps "the unity ofthe world." Confronted by the perplexing menace of the variation of experience, the dichotomies and oppositions of thoughts and things, the fusion and diversifications of many things into one and one into many, mankind has, from the moment it became reflective, felt in the relation of the One and the Many the presence of a riddle that engendered and sustained uneasiness, a mystery that concealed a threat. The mind's own preference, given the physiological processes that condition its existence, constitution, and operation, could hardly come to rest in a more fundamental normation than Unity. A world which isoneis easier to live in and with; initial adjustment therein is final adjustment; in its substance there exists nothing sudden and in its character nothing uncontrollable. It guarantees whatever vital equilibrium the organism has achieved in it, ill or good. It secures life in attainment and possession, insuring it repose, simplicity, and spaciousness. A world which is many complicates existence: it demands watchful consideration of irreducible discrete individualities: it necessitates the integration and humanization in a common system of adjustment of entities which in the last analysis refuse all ordering and reject all subordination, consequently keeping the mind on an everlasting jump, compelling it to pay with eternal vigilance the price of being. The preference for unity, then, is almost inevitable, and the history of philosophy, from the Vedas to the Brahma Somaj and from Thales to Bergson, is significantly unanimous in its attempts to prove that the world is, somehow, through and through one. That the oneness requiresproofisprima facieevidence that it is a value, a desiderate, not an existence. And how valuable it is may be seen merely in the fact that it derealizes the inner conflict of interests, the incompatibilities between nature and man, the uncertainties of knowledge, and the certainties of evil, and substitutes therefore the ultimate happy unison which "the identity of the different" compels.
Unity is the common desiderate of philosophic systems of all metaphysical types—neutral, materialistic, idealistic. But the dominant tradition has tended to think this unity in terms ofinterest, ofspirit, ofmentality. It has tended, in a word, to assimilate nature to human nature, to identify things with thevaluesof things, to envisage the world in the image of man. To it, the world is all spirit, ego, or idea; and if not such through and through, then entirely subservient, in its unhumanized parts, to the purposes and interests of ego, idea, or spirit. Why, is obvious. A world of which the One substance is such constitutes a totality of interest and purpose which faces no conflict and has no enemy. It is fulfilment even before it is need, and need, indeed, is only illusion. Even when its number is many, the world is a better world if the stuff of these many is thesamestuff as the spirit of man. For mind is more at home with mind than with things; the pathetic fallacy is the most inevitable and most general. Although the totality of spirit is conceived as good, that is, as actualizing all our desiderates and ideals, it would still be felt that, even if the totality were evil, and not God, but the Devil ruled the roost, the world so constitutedmust be better than one utterly non-spiritual. We can understand and be at home with malevolence: it offers at least the benefits of similarity, of companionship, of intimateness, of consubstantiality withwill; its behavior may be foreseen and its intentions influenced; but no horror can be greater than that of utter aliency. How much of religion turns with a persistent tropism to the consideration of the devil and his works, and how much it has fought his elimination from the cosmic scheme! Yet never because it loved the devil. The deep-lying reason is the fact that the humanization of Evil into Devil mitigates Evil and improves the world. Philosophy has been least free from this corrective and spiritizing bias. Though it has cared less for the devil, it has predominantly repudiated aliency, has sought to prove spirit the cause and substance of the world, and in that degree, to transmute the aliency of nature into sameness with human nature.
With unity and spirituality,eternitymakes a third. This norm is a fundamental attribute of the One God himself, and interchangeable with his ineffable name: the Lord is Eternal, and the Eternal, even more than the One, receives the eulogium of exclusive realness. To the philosophical tradition it is the most real. Once more the reason should be obvious. The underlying urge which pushes the mind to think the world as a unity pushes it even more inexorably to think the world as timeless. For unity is asserted only against the perplexities of a manyness which may be static and unchanging, and hence comparatively simple. But eternity is asserted and set against mutability: it is the negationof change, of time, of novelty, of the suddenness and slaughter of the flux of life itself, which consumes what it generates, undermines what it builds and sweeps to destruction what it founds to endure. Change is the arch-enemy of a life which struggles for self-preservation, of an intellect which operates spontaneously by the logic of identity, of a will which seeks to convert others into sames. It substitutes a different self for the old, it falsifies systems of thought and deteriorates systems of life. It makes unity impossible and manyness inevitable. It upsets every actual equilibrium that life attains. It opens the doors and windows of every closed and comfortable cosmos to all transcosmic winds that blow, with whatever they carry of possible danger and possible ill. It is the very soul of chaos in which the pleasant, ordered world is such a little helpless thing. Of this change eternity is by primary intention the negation, as its philological form shows. It isnot-time, without positive intrinsic content, and in its secondary significances, i.e., in those significances which appear in metaphysical dialectic, without meaning; since it is there a pure negation, intrinsically affirming nothing, of the same character as "not-man" or "not-donkey," standing for a nature altogether unspecific and indeterminable in the residual universe. By a sort of obverse implication it does, however, possess, in the philosophic tradition, a positive content which accrues to it by virtue of what it denies. This content makes it a designation for the persistence and perdurability of desiderated quality—from metaphysical unity and spirituality to the happy hunting-grounds or a woman'saffection. At bottom it means the assurance that the contents of value cannot and will not be altered or destroyed, that their natures and their relations to man do not undergo change. There is no recorded attempt to prove that evil is eternal: eternity iseternity of the good alone.
Unity, spirituality, and eternity, then, are the forms which contents of value receive under the shaping hands of the philosophic tradition, to which they owe their metaphysical designation and of which the business has so largely and uniquely been toprovethem the foundations and ontological roots of universal nature. But "the problem of evil" does not come to complete solution with these. Even in a single, metaphysically spiritual and unchanging world, man himself may still be less than a metaphysical absolute and his proper individuality doomed to absorption, his wishes to obstruction and frustration. Of man, therefore, the tradition positsimmortalityandfreedom, and even the materialistic systems have sought to keep somehow room for some form of these goods.
To turn first to immortality. Its source and matrix is less the love of life than the fear of death—that fear which Lucretius, dour poet of disillusion, so nobly deplored. That he had ever himself been possessed of it is not clear, but it is perfectly clear that his altogether sound arguments against it have not abolished its operation, nor its effect upon human character, society, and imagination. Fear which made the gods, made also the immortality of man, the denial of death. What the fear's unmistakable traits may be has never been articulatelysaid, perhaps never can be said. Most of us never may undergo the fear of death; we undergo comfort and discomfort, joy and sorrow, intoxication and reaction, love and disgust; we aim to preserve the one and to abolish the other, but we do not knowingly undergo the fear of death. Indeed, it is logically impossible that we should, since to do so would be to acquire an experience of death such that we should be conscious of being unconscious, sensible of being insensible, aware of being unaware. We should be required to be and not to be at the same instant, in view of which Lucretius both logically and wisely advises us to remember that when death is, we are not; and when we are, death is not.
Experience and feeling are, however, neither logical nor wise, and to these death is far from the mere non-being which the poet would have us think it. To these it has a positive reality which makes the fear of it a genuine cause of conduct in individuals and in groups, with a basis in knowledge such as is realized in the diminishing of consciousness under anæsthetic, in dreams of certain types, and most generally in the nascent imitation of therigor mortiswhich makes looking upon the dead such a horror to most of us. Even then, however, something is lacking toward the complete realization of death, and children and primitive peoples never realize it at all. Its full meaning comes out asan unsatisfied hunger in the livingrather than as a condition of the dead, who, alive, would have satisfied this hunger. And the realization of this meaning requires sophistication, requires a lengthy corporate memory andthe disillusions which civilization engenders. Primitive peoples ask for no proof of immortality because they have no notion of mortality; civilized thinking has largely concerned itself about the proof of immortality because its assurance of life has been shaken by the realization of death through the gnawing of desire which only the dead could still. Theproofwhich in the history of thought is offered again and again, be it noted, is not of the reality of life, but of the unreality and inefficacy of death. Immortality is like eternity, a negative term; it isimmortality. The experienced fact is mortality; and the fear of it is only an inversion of the desire which it frustrates, just as frustrated love becomes hatred. The doctrine of immortality, hence, springs from the fear of death, not from the love of life, and immortality is a value-form, not an existence. Now, although fear of death and love of life are in constant play in character and conduct, neither constitutes the original, innocent urge of life within us. "Will to live," "will to power," "struggle for existence," and other Germanic hypostases of experienced events which the great civil war in Europe is just now giving such an airing, hardly deserve, as natural data, the high metaphysical status that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and company have given them. They follow in fact upon a more primary type of living, acting form, a type to which the "pathetic fallacy" or any other manner of psychologizing may not apply. The most that can be said about this type is that its earlier stages are related to its later ones as potential is to kinetic energy. If, since we are discussing a metaphysical issue,we must mythologize, we might call it the "will to self-expression." Had this "will" chanced to happen in a world which was made for it, or had it itself been the substance of the world, "struggle for existence," "will to live," and "will to power," never could have supervened. All three of these expressions designate data which require an opposite, a counter-will, to give them meaning. There can be a struggle for existence only when there are obstacles thereto, a will to live only when there are obstructions to life, a will to power only when there is a resistance against which power may be exercised. Expression alone is self-implying and self-sufficient, and in an altogether favorable environment we might have realized our instincts, impulses, interests, appetites and desires, expressed and actualized our potentialities, and when our day is done, have ceased, as unconcerned about going on as about starting.
Metchnikoff speaks somewhere of an instinct toward death and the euphoria which accompanies its realization. He cites, I think, no more than two or three cases. To most of us the mere notion of the existence and operation of such an instinct seems fanciful and uncanny. Yet from the standpoint of biology nothing should be more natural. Each living thing has its span, which consists of a cycle from birth through maturation and senescence to dissolution, and the latter half of the process is as "fateful" and "inevitable" as the former! Dying is itself the inexpugnable conclusion of that setting free of organic potentialities which we call life, and if dying seems horrid and unnatural, itseems so because for most of us death is violent, because its occasion is a shock from without, not the realization of a tendency from within. In a completely favorable environment we should not struggle to exist, we should simply exist; we should not will to live, we should simply live, i.e., we should actualize our potentialities and die.
But, once more alas, our environment is not completely favorable, and there's the rub. That disorderly constellation of instincts and appetites and interests which constitutes the personality of the best of us does not work itself out evenly. At the most favorable, our self-realizations are lopsided and distorted. For every capacity of ours in full play, there are a score at least mutilated, sometimes extirpated, always repressed. They never attain the free fullness of expression which is consciousness, or when they do, they find themselves confronted with an opponent which neutralizes their maturation at every point. Hence, as I have already indicated, they remain in, or revert to, the subterranean regions of our lives, and govern the making of our biographies from their seats below. What they fail to attain in fact they succeed in generating in imagination to compensate for the failure; they realize themselves vicariously. The doctrine of immortality is the generic form of such vicarious self-realization, as frequently by means of dead friends and relatives to whose absolute non-being the mind will not assent, as by means of the everlasting heaven in which the mind may forever disport itself amid those delights it had to forego on earth. Much of the underlying motive ofthe doctrine is asehnsuchtand nostalgia after the absent dead; little a concern for the continuity of the visible living. And often this passion is so intense that system after system in the philosophic tradition is constructed to satisfy it, and even the most disillusioned of systems—for example, Spinoza's—will preserve its form if not its substance.
That the "freedom of the will" shall be a particularized compensatory desiderate like the immortality of the soul, the unity, the spirituality, and the eternity of the world is a perversion worked upon this ideal by the historic accident we call Christianity. The assumptions of that theory concerning the nature of the universe and the destiny of man, being through and through compensatory, changed freedom from the possible fact and actual hope of Hellenic systems into the "problem" of the Christian ones. The consequent controversy over "free-will," the casuistic entanglement of this ideal with the notion of responsibility, its theological development in the problem of the relation of an omnipotent God to a recalcitrant creature, have completely obscured its primal significance. For the ancients, the free man and the "wise man" were identical, and the wise man was one who all in all had so mastered the secrets of the universe that there was no desire of his that was not actually realized, no wish the satisfaction of which was obstructed. His way in the world was a way without let or hindrance. Now freedom and wisdom in this sense is never a fact and ever a value. Its attainment ensues upon created distinctions between appearance and reality, upon thepostulation of the metaphysical existence of the value-forms of the unity, spirituality, and the eternity of the world, in the realization of which the wise man founded his wisdom and gained his freedom. Freedom, then, is an ideal that could have arisen only in the face ofobstruction to action directed toward the fulfilling and satisfying of interests. It is the assurance of the smooth and uninterrupted flow of behavior; the flow of desire into fulfilment, of thought into deed, of act into fact. It is perhaps the most pervasive and fundamental of all desiderates, and in a definite way the others may be said to derive from it and to realize it. For the soul's immortality, the world's unity and spirituality and eternity, are but conditions which facilitate and assure the flow of life without obstruction. They define a world in which danger, evil, and frustration are non-existent; they so reconstitute our actual environment that the obstructions it offers to the course of life are abolished. They make the world "rational," and in the great philosophic tradition the freedom of man is held to be a function of the rationality of the world. Thus, even deterministic solutions of the "problem of freedom" are at bottom no more than the rationalization of natural existence by the dialectical removal of obstructions to human existence. Once more, Spinoza's solution is typical, and its form is that of all idealisms as well. It ensues by way of identification of the obstruction's interest with those of the obstructee: the world becomes ego or the ego the world, with nothing outside to hinder or to interfere. In the absolute, existence is declared to be valuede facto; in fact,de jure.And by virtue of this compensating reciprocity the course of life runs free.
Is any proof necessary that these value-forms are not the contents of the daily life? If there be, why this unvarying succession of attempts toprovethat they are the contents of daily life that goes by the name of history of philosophy? In fact, experience as it comes from moment to moment is not one, harmonious and orderly, but multifold, discordant, and chaotic. Its stuff is not spirit, but stones and railway wrecks and volcanoes and Mexico and submarines, and trenches, and frightfulness, and Germany, and disease, and waters, and trees, and stars, and mud. It is not eternal, but changes from instant to instant and from season to season. Actually, men do not live forever; death is a fact, and immortality is literally as well as in philosophic discourse not so much an aspiration for the continuity of life as an aspiration for the elimination of death, purelyimmortality. Actually the will is not free, each interest encounters obstruction, no interest is completely satisfied, all are ultimately cut off by death.
Such are the general features of all human experience, by age unwithered, and with infinite variety forever unstaled. The traditional philosophic treatment of them is to deny their reality, and to call them appearance, and to satisfy the generic human interest which they oppose and repress by means of the historical reconstruction in imaginative dialectic of a world constituted by these most generalized value-forms and then to eulogize the reconstruction with the epithet"reality." When, in the course of human events, such reconstruction becomes limited to the biography of particular individuals, is an expression of their concrete and unique interest, is lived and acted on, it is called paranoia. The difference is not one of kind, but of concreteness, application, and individuality. Such a philosophy applied universally in the daily life is a madness, like Christian Science: kept in its proper sphere, it is a fine art, the finest and most human of the arts, a reconstruction in discourse of the whole universe, in the image of the free human spirit. Philosophy has been reasonable because it is so unpersonal, abstract, and general, like music; because, in spite of its labels, its reconstructions remain pure desiderates and value-forms, never to be confused with and substituted for existence. But philosophers even to this day often have the delusion that the substitutions are actually made.92
It is the purity of the value-forms imagined in philosophy that makes philosophy "normative." The arts, which it judges, have an identical origin and an indistinguishable intent, but they are properly its subordinates because they have not its purity. They, too, aim at remodeling discordant nature into harmony with human nature. They, too, are dominated by value-forms which shall satisfy as nearly as possible all interests,shall liberate and fulfil all repressions, and shall supply to our lives that unity, eternity, spirituality, and freedom which are the exfoliations of our central desire—the desire to live. But where philosophy has merely negated the concrete stuff of experience and defined its reality in terms of desire alone, the arts acknowledge the reality of immediate experience, accept it as it comes, eliminating, adding, molding, until the values desiderated become existent in the concrete immediacies of experience as such. Art does not substitute values for existence by changing their rôles and calling one appearance and the other reality: art converts values into existences, it realizes values, injecting them into nature as far as may be. It creates truth and beauty and goodness. But it does not claim for its results greater reality than nature's. It claims for its results greater immediate harmony with human interests than nature. The propitious reality of the philosopher is the unseen: the harmonious reality of the artist must be sensible. Philosophy says that apparent actual evil is merely apparent: art compels potential apparent good actually to appear. Philosophy realizes fundamental values transcendentally beyond experience: art realizes them within experience. Thus, men cherish no illusions concerning the contents of a novel, a picture, a play, a musical composition. They are taken for what they are, and are enjoyed for what they are. The shopgirl, organizing her life on the basis of eight dollars a week, wears flimsy for broadcloth and the tail feather of a rooster for an ostrich plume. She is as capable of wearing and enjoying broadclothand ostrich plume as My Lady, whose income is eight dollars a minute. But she has not them, and in all likelihood, without a social revolution she never will have them. In the novels of Mr. Robert Chambers, however, or of Miss Jean Libbey, which she religiously reads in the street-car on her way to the shop; in the motion picture theater which she visits for ten cents after her supper of corned beef, cabbage, and cream puffs, she comes into possession of them forthwith, vicariously, and of all My Lady's proper perquisites—the Prince Charming, the motor-car, the Chinese pug, the flowers, and the costly bonbons. For the time being her life is liberated, new avenues of experience are actually opened to her, all sorts of unsatisfied desires are satisfied, all sorts of potentialities realized. All that she might have been and is not, she becomes through art, here and now, andcontinuously withthe drab workaday life which is her lot, and she becomes this without any compensatory derealization of that life, without any transcendentalism, without any loss of grip on the necessities of her experience: strengthened, on the contrary, and emboldened, to meet them as they are.
I might multiply examples: for every object of fine art has the same intention, and if adequate, accomplishes the same end—from the sculptures of Phidias and the dramas of Euripides, to the sky-scrapers of Sullivan and the dances of Pavlowa. But there is need only to consider the multitude of abstract descriptions of the æsthetic encounter. The artist's business is to create the other object in the encounter, and this object, in Miss Puffer's words, which are completely representative and typical, is such that "the organism is in a condition of repose and of the highest possible tone, functional efficiency, enhanced life. The personality is brought into a state of unity and self-completeness." The object, when apprehended, awakens the active functioning of the whole organism directly and harmoniously with itself, cuts it off from the surrounding world, shuts that world out for the time being, and forms a complete, harmonious, and self-sufficient system, peculiar and unique in the fact that there is no passing from this deed into further adaptation with the object. Struggle and aliency are at end, and whatever activity now goes on feels self-conserving, spontaneous, free. The need of readjustment has disappeared, and with it the feeling of strain, obstruction, and resistance, which is its sign. There is nothing but the object, and that is possessed completely, satisfying, and as if forever. Art, in a word, supplies an environment from which strife, foreignness, obstruction, and death are eliminated. It actualizes unity, spirituality, and eternity in the environment; it frees and enhances the life of the self. To the environment which art successfully creates, the mind finds itself completely and harmoniously adapted by the initial act of perception.
In the world of art, value and existence are one.
If art may be said to create values, religion has been said to conserve them. But the values conserved are not those created: they are the values postulated by philosophy as metaphysical reality. Whereas, however, philosophy substitutes these values for the world of experience, religion makes them continuous with the world of experience. For religion value and existence are on the same level, but value is more potent and environs existence, directing it for its own ends. The unique content of religion, hence, is a specific imaginative extension of the environment with value-forms: the visible world is extended at either end by heaven and hell; the world of minds, by God, Satan, angels, demons, saints, and so on. But where philosophy imaginatively abolishes existence in behalf of value, where art realizes value in existence, religion tends to control and to escape the environment which exists by means of the environment which is postulated. The aim of religion is salvation from sin. Salvation is the escape from experience to heaven and the bosom of God; while hell is the compensatory readjustment of inner quality to outer condition for the alien and the enemy, without the knowledge of whose existence life in heaven could not be complete.
In religion, hence, the conversion of the repressed array of interests into ideal value-forms is less radical and abstract than in philosophy, and less checked by fusion with existence than in art. Religion is, therefore, at one and the same time more carnal and less reasonable than philosophy and art. Its history and protagonists exhibit a closer kinship to what is called insanity93—that being, in essence, the substitution in actual life of the creatures of the imagination which satisfy repressed needs for those of reality which repressthem. It is a somnambulism which intensifies rather than abolishes the contrast between what is desired and what must be accepted. It offers itself ultimately rather as a refuge from reality than a control of it, and its development as an institution has turned on the creation and use of devices to make this escape feasible. For religion, therefore, the perception that the actual world, whatever its history, is nownotadapted to human nature, is the true point of departure. Thus religion takes more account of experience than compensatory philosophy; it does not de-realize existent evil. The outer conflict between human nature and nature, primitively articulated in consciousness and conduct by the distress engendered through the fact that the food supply depends upon the march of the seasons,94becomes later assimilated to the inner conflict between opposing interests, wishes, and desires. Finally, the whole so constituted gets expressed in the idea of sin. That idea makes outward prosperity dependent upon inward purity, although it often transfers the locus of the prosperity to another world. Through its operation fortune becomes a function of conscience and the one desire of religious thinking and religious practice becomes to bring the two to a happy outcome, to abolish the conflicts. This desiderated abolition is salvation. It is expressed in the ideas of a fall, or a separation from heaven and reunion therewith. The machinery of this reunion of the divided, the reconversion of the differentiated into the same, consists of the furniture of religious symbols andceremonials—myths, baptisms, sacraments, prayers, and sacrifices: and all these are at the same time instruments and expressions of desires. God is literally "the conservation of values."95"God's life in eternity," writes Aristotle, who here dominates the earlier tradition, "is that which we enjoy in our best moments, but are unable to possess permanently: its very being is delight. And as actual being is delight, so the various functions of waking, perceiving, thinking, are to us the pleasantest parts of our life. Perfect and absolute thought is just this absolute vision of perfection."96
Even the least somnambulistic of the transcendental philosophies has repeated, not improved upon Aristotle. "The highest conceptions that I get from experience of what goodness and beauty are," Royce declares, "the noblest life that I can imagine, the completest blessedness that I can think, all these are but faint suggestions of a truth that is infinitely realized in the Divine, that knows all truth. Whatever perfection there is suggested in these things, that he must fully know and experience."
But this æsthetic excellence, this maximum of ideality is in and by itself inadequate. God, to be God, mustwork. He is first of all the invisible socius, the ever-living witness, in whose eyes the disharmonies and injustices of this life are enregistered, and who in the life everlasting redresses the balances and adjusts the account. Even his grace is not unconditional; it requiresa return, in deed or faith; a payment by which the fact of his salvation is made visible. But this payment is made identical by the great religions of disillusion with nothing other than the concrete condition from which the faithful are to be saved. If the self is not impoverished, unkempt, and hungry, in fact, it is made so. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but self-defilement is godliness; sainthood, if we are to trust the lives of saints, whether in Asia or in Europe, is coincident with insanitation; saintly virtues are depressed virtues,—humility, hope, meekness, pity; and such conditions of life which define the holy ones are unwholesome—poverty, asceticism, squalor, filth. Hence, by an ironic inversion, religions of disillusion, being other-worldly, identify escape from an actual unpropitious environment with submergence in it; that being the visible and indispensable sign of an operative grace. So the beatitudes: the blessed are the poor, the mourners, the meek. Beginning as a correction of the evils of existence, religion ends by offering an infallible avenue of escape from them through postulating a desiderated type of existence which operates to gather the spirit to itself. For this reason the value-forms of the spirituality or spiritual control of the universe and of the immortality of the soul have been very largely the practical concern of religion alone, since these are the instruments indispensable to the attainment of salvation. In so far forth religion has been an art and its institutional association with the arts has been made one of its conspicuous justifications. So far, however, as it has declared values to be operative without makingthem actually existent it has been only a black art, a magic. It has ignored the actual causes in the nature and history of things, and has substituted for them non-existent desirable causes, ultimately reducible to a single, eternal, beneficent spirit, omnipotent and free. To convert these into existence, an operation which is the obvious intent of much contemporary thinking in religion,97it must, however, give up the assumption that they already existquaspirit. But when religion gives up this assumption, religion gives up the ghost.
What it demands of the ghost, and of all hypostatized or anthropomorphized ultimate value-forms, is that they shall work, and its life as an institution depends upon making them work. Christian Science becomes a refuge from the failure of science, magic from mechanism, and by means of them and their kind, blissful immortality, complete self-fulfilment is to be attained—after death. There is a "beautiful land of somewhere," a happy life beyond, but it is beyond life. In fact, although religion confuses value and existence, it localizes the great value-forms outside of existence. Its history has been an epic of the retreat and decimationof the gods from the world, a movement from animism and pluralism to transcendentalism and monism; and concomitantly, of an elaboration and extension of institutional devices by which the saving value-forms are to be made and kept operative in the world.
Let us consider this history a little.
Consciousness of feeling, psychologists are agreed, is prior to consciousness of the objects of feeling. The will's inward strain, intense throbs of sensation, pangs and pulses of pleasure and pain make up the bulk of the undifferentiated primal sum of sentience. The soul is aware of herself before she is aware of her world. A childish or primeval mind, face to face with an environment actual, dreamt, or remembered, does not distinguish from its privacy the objective or the common. All is shot through with the pathos and triumph which come unaccountably as desired good or evaded evil; all has the same tensions and effects ends in the same manner as the laboring, straining, volitional life within. These feelings, residuary qualities, the last floating, unattached sediment of a world organized by association and classified by activity, these subtlest of all its beings, finally termed mind and self, at first suffuse and dominate the whole. Even when objects are distinguished and their places determined these are not absent; and the so-called pre-animistic faiths are not the less suffused with spirit because the spiritual has not yet received a local habitation and name. They differ fromanimism in this only, not in that their objects are characterized by lack of animation and vital tonality. And this is necessary. For religion must be anthropopathic before it becomes anthropomorphic; since feeling, eloquent of good and evil, is the first and deepest essence of consciousness, and only by its wandering from home are forms distinguished and man's nature separated from that of things and beasts.
When practice has coördinated activity, and reflection distinguished places, animism proper arises. First the environment is felt as the soul's kindred; then its operations are fancied in terms dramatic and personal. The world becomes almost instinctively defined as a hegemony of spirits similar to man, with powers and passions like his, and directed for his destruction or conservation, but chiefly for their own glory and self-maintenance. The vast "pathetic fallacy" makes religion of the whole of life. It is at this point indistinguishable from science or ethics. It is, in fact, the pregnant matrix of all subsequent discourse about the universe. Its character is such that it becomes the determinating factor of human adaptations to the conditions imposed by the environment, by envisaging the enduring and efficacious elements among these conditions as persons. The satisfaction of felt needs is rendered thereby inevitably social; and in a like manner fear of their frustration cannot be unsocial. Life is conceived and acted out as a miraculous traffic with the universe; and the universe as a band of spirits who monopolize the good and make free gifts of evil, who can be feared, threatened, worshiped, scolded, wheedled,coaxed, bribed, deceived, enslaved, held in awe, and above all, used for the prosecution of desiderated ends and the fulfilment of instinctive desires. The first recorded cognized order is a moral order in which fragmentary feelings, instinctive impulsions, and spontaneous imaginings are hypostatized, ideas are identified with their causes, all the contents of the immature, sudden, primitive, blundering consciousness receive a vital figure and a proper name. So man makes himself more at home in the world without,—that world which enslaves the spirit so fearfully and with such strangeness, and which just as miraculously yields such ecstasy, such power, such unaccountable good! In this immediate sense the soul controls the world by becoming symbolic of it; it is the world's first language. It is, however, an inarticulate, blundering, incoherent thing and the cues which it furnishes to the nature of the environment are as often as not dangerous and misleading. When bows and arrows, crystals and caves, clouds and waters, dung and dew, mountains and trees, beasts and visions, are treated as chiefs and men must be treated, then the moral regimen initiated, taking little account of the barest real qualities manifested by these things, and attributing the maximum importance to the characters postulated and foreign, is successful neither in allaying evil nor in extending good. Its benefits are adventitious and its malfeasance constant. Food buried with the dead was food lost; blood smeared upon the bow to make it shoot better served only to make the hands unskilful by impeding their activity. Initiation, ceremony, sacrificial ritual, fasting, and isolation involvedprivations for which no adequate return was recovered, even by the medicine-man whose absolute and ephemeral power needed only the betrayal of circumstances for its own destruction, taking him along with it, oftener than not, to disgrace or death.
As the cumulus of experience on experience grew greater, chance violations of tradition, or custom, or ritual, or formula achieving for the violator a mastery or stability which performance and obedience failed to achieve, the new heresy became the later orthodoxy, for in religion, as in all other matters human, nothing succeeds like success. An impotent god has no divinity; a disused potency means a dying life among the immortals as on the earth. And as the gods themselves seemed often to give their worshipers the lie, the futility of the personal and dramatic definitions of the immediate environment became slowly recognized, the recognition varying in extent, and clearer in practice than in discourse.
Accordingly the most primitive of the animisms underwent a necessary modification. The plasticity of objects under destructive treatment, the impotence oftaboobefore elementary needs, the adequate satisfactions which violations of the divine law brought,—these killed many gods and drove others from their homes in the hearts of things. The objects so purged became matters of accurate knowledge. Where animation is denied thewholeenvironment, wisdom begins to distinguish between spirit-haunted matter and the purely material; knowledge of person and knowledge of things differentiate, and science, the impersonal and more potentknowledge of the environment, properly begins. Familiarity leads to control, control to contempt, and for the unreflective mind, personality is not, as for the sophisticated, an attribute of the contemptible. The incalculable appearance of thunder, the magic greed of fire, the malice, the spontaneity, the thresh and pulse as of life which seems to characterize whatever is capricious or impenetrable or uncontrollable are too much like the felt throbs of consciousness to become dehumanized. To the variable alone, therefore, is transcendent animation attributed. Not the seasonal variation of the sun's heat, but the joy and the sorrow of which his heat is the occasion made him divine. When the gods appear, to take the place of the immanent spirits immediately present in things, they appear, therefore, as already transcendent, with habitations just beyond the well-known: on high mountains, in the skies, in dark forests, in caves, in all regions feared or unexplored. But chiefly the gods inhabit those spaces whence issue the power of darkness and destruction, particularly the heaven, a word whose meaning is now, as it was primitively, identical with divinity. The savage becomes a pagan by giving concrete personality to the dreadful unknown. Thence it is that the ancient poet assigns the gods a lineage of fear; and fear may truly be said to have made the gods, in so far as the gods personify the fear which made them.
The moral level of these figments alters with the level of their habitation; their power varies with their remoteness; Zeus lives in the highest heaven and is arbiter of the destiny of both gods and man. To him andto his like there cannot be the relation of equality which is sustained between men and spirits of the lower order. His very love is blasting; interchange of commodities, good for good and evil for evil is not possible where he is concerned. Gods of the higher order he exemplifies, even all the gods of Olympus, of the Himalayas, of Valhalla, are literally beings invoked and implored, as well as dwellers in heaven. To them man pays a toll on all excellence he gains or finds; libations and burnt-offerings, the fat and the first fruits: he exists by their sufferance and serves their caprice. He is their toy, born for their pleasure, and living by their need.
But just because men conceive themselves to be play-things of the gods, they define in the gods the ideals of mankind. For the divine power is power to live forever, and the sum of human desire is just the desire to maintain its humanity in freedom and happiness endlessly. And exactly those capacities and instruments of self-maintenance,—all that is beauty, or truth, or goodness, the very essence of value in any of its forms,—the gods are conceived to possess and to control: these they may grant, withhold, destroy. They are as eternal as their habitations, the mountains; as ruthless as their element, the sea; as omnipresent as the heavens, their home. To become like the gods, therefore, the masters and fathers of men, is to remain eternally and absolutely human: so that who is most like them on earth takes his place beside them in heaven. Hercules and Elias and Krishna, Çaka-Muni and Ishvara, Jesus and Baha Ullah. Nay, they are the verygods themselves, manifest as men! The history of the gods thus presents a double aspect: it is first a characterization of the important objects and processes of nature and their survival-values,—the sun, thunder, rain, and earthquakes; dissolution, rebirth, and love; and again it is the narration of activities native and delightful to mankind. Zeus is a promiscuous lover as well as a wielder of thunderbolts; Apollo not only drives the chariot of the sun; he plays and dances, discourses melody and herds sheep.
But while the portrait of the heart's desire in fictitious adventures of divinity endears the gods to the spirit, the exploration of the elements in the environment whose natures they dramatically express, destroys their force, reduces their number, and drives them still further into the unknown. Olympus is surrendered for the planets and the fixed stars. With remoteness of location comes transmutation of character. The forces of the environment which were the divinity are now conceived as instrumental to its uses. Its power is more subtly described; its nature becomes a more purely ideal expression of human aspiration. Physical remoteness and metaphysical ultimacy are akin. God among the stars is better than God on Olympus. If, as with the Parsees, the unfavorable character of the environment is expressed in another and equal being,—the devil, then the god of good must, in the symbolic struggle, become the ultimate victor and remain the more potent director of man's destiny. In religion, therefore, when the mind grows at all by experience, monism develops spontaneously. For the character of the god becomesincreasingly more relevant to hope than to the conditions of hope's satisfaction. And what man first of all and beyond all aspires to, is that single, undivided good,—the free flow of his unitary life, stable, complete, eternal. There is hence always to be found a chief and father among the gods who, as mankind gain in wisdom and in material power, consumes his mates and his children like Kronos or Jahweh, inherits their attributes and performs their functions. The chief divinity becomes the only divinity; a god becomes God. But divinity, in becoming one and unique, becomes also transcendent. Monotheism pushes God altogether beyond the sensible environment. Personality, instead of being the nature of the world, has become its ground and cause, and all that mankind loves is conserved, in order that man, whom God loves, may have his desire and live forever. Life is eternal and happiness necessary, beyond nature,—in heaven. Finally, in transcendental idealism, the poles meet; what has been put eternally apart is eternally united; the immaterial, impalpable, transcendent heaven is made one and continuous with the gross and unhappy natural world. Oneisthe other; the other the one. Godisthe world and transcends it;isthe evil and the good which conquers and consumes that evil. The environment becomes thus described as a single, eternal, conscious unity, in which all the actual but transitory values of the actual but transitory life are conserved and eternalized. In a description of God such as Royce's or Aristotle's the environment is the eternity of all its constituents that are dearest to man. Religion, which began as a definition of the environmentas it moved and controlled mankind, ends by describing it as mankind desires it to be. The environment is now the aforementioned ideal socius or self which satisfies perfectly all human requirements. Pluralistic and quarrelsome animism has become monistic and harmonious spiritism. Forces have turned to excellences and needs to satisfactions. Necessity has been transmuted to Providence, sin has been identified with salvation, value with existence, and existence with impotence and illusion before Providence, salvation, and value.
With this is completed the reply to the question: Why do men contradict their own experience? Experience is, as Spinoza says, passion and action, both inextricably mingled and coincident, with the good and evil of them as interwoven as they. That piecemeal conquest of the evil which we call civilization has not even the promise of finality. It is a Penelope's web, always needing to be woven anew. Now, in experience desire anticipates and outleaps action and fact rebuffs desire. Desire realizes itself, consequently, in ideas objectified by the power of speech into independent and autonomous subjects of discourse, whereby experience is One, Eternal, a Spirit or Spiritually Controlled, wherein man has Freedom and Immortality. These, the constantly desiderated traits of a perfect universe, are in fact the limits of what adequacy environmental satisfactions can attain, ideas hypostatized, normative of existence, but not constituting it. With them, in philosophy and religion, the mind confronts the experiencesof death and obstruction, of manifoldness, change and materiality, and denies them, as Peter denied Jesus. The visible world, being not as we want it, we imagine an unseen one that satisfies our want, declaring the visible one an illusion by its side. So we work a radical substitution of desiderates for actualities, of ideals for facts, of values for existences. Art alone acknowledges the actual relations between these contrasting pairs. Art alone so operates as in fact to convert their oppugnance into identity. Intrinsically, its whole purpose and technique consists of transmutation of values into existences, in the incarnation the realization of values. The philosophy and religion of tradition, on the contrary, consists intrinsically in the flat denial of reality, or at least, co-reality, to existence, and the transfer of that eulogium to value-forms as such.
Metaphysics, theology, ethics, logic, æsthetics, dialectic developments as they are of "norms" or "realities" which themselves can have no meaning without the "apparent," changing world they measure and belie, assume consequently a detachment and self-sufficiency they do not actually possess. Their historians have treated them as if they had no context, as if the elaboration of the ideal tendencies of the successive systems explained their origin, character, and significance. But in fact they are unendowed with this pure intrinsicality, and their development is not to be accounted for as exteriorization of innate motive or an unfoldment of inward implications. They have a context; they are crossed and interpenetrated by outer interests and extraneous considerations. Their meaning, in so far asit is not merely æsthetic, isnilapart from these interests and considerations of which they are sometimes expressions, sometimes reconstructions, and from which they are persistently refuges.
Philosophy and religion are, in a word, no less than art, social facts. They are responses to group situations without which they cannot be understood. Although analysis has shown them to be rooted in certain persistent motives and conditions of human nature by whose virtue they issue in definite contours and significances, they acquire individuality and specific importance only through interaction with the constantly varying social situations in which they arise, on which they operate, and by which they are in turn operated on. Philosophy has perhaps suffered most of all from nescience of those and from devoting itself, at a minimum, to the satisfaction of that passion for oneness, for "logical consistency" without which philosophic "systems" would never arise, nor the metaphysical distinction between "appearance" and "reality"; and with which the same systems have made up a historic aggregate of strikingly repugnant and quarrelsome units. It is this pursuit of consistency as against correctness which has resulted in the irrelevance of philosophy that the philosopher, unconscious of his motives and roots, or naïvely identifying, through the instrumentality of an elaborate dialectic, his instinctive and responsive valuations of existence with its categoric essences, confuses with inward autonomy and the vision of the "real." Consequently, the systems of tradition begin as attempts to transvalue social situations whose existenceis troublesome and end as utterances of which the specific bearing, save to the system of an opponent, is undiscoverable. The attempt to correct the environment in fact concludes as an abolition of it in words. The philosophic system becomes a solipsism, a pure lyric expression of the appetites of human nature.
For this perversity of the philosophic tradition Plato is perhaps, more than any one else, answerable. He is the first explicitly to have reduplicated the world, to have set existences over against values, to have made them dependent upon values, to have assigned absolute reality to the compensatory ideals, and to have identified philosophy with preoccupation with these ideals. Behind his theory of life lay far from agreeable personal experience of the attitude of political power toward philosophic ideas. Its ripening was coincident with the most distressing period of the history of his country. The Peloponnesian War was the confrontation of two social systems, radically opposed in form, method, and outlook. Democracy, in Athens, had become synonymous with demagoguery, corruption, inefficiency, injustice and unscrupulousness in every aspect of public affairs. The government had no consistent policy and no centralized responsibility; divided counsel led to continual disaster without, and party politics rotted the strength within. Beside Athens, Sparta, a communistic oligarchy, was a tower of strength and effectiveness. The Spartans made mistakes; they were slow, inept, rude, and tyrannical, but they were a unit on the war, their policy was consistent, responsibilities were adequately centered, good order and loyalty designated theaims and habits of life.98The Republic is the response to the confrontation of Spartan and Athenian; the attempt to find an adequate solution of the great social problem this confrontation expressed. The successful state becomes in it the model for the metaphysical one, and the difference between fact and ideal is amended by dialectically forcing the implications of existence in the direction of desire. Neither Athens nor Sparta presented a completely satisfactory social organization. There must therefore exist a type of social organization which is so satisfying. It must have existed from eternity, and must be in essence identical with eternal good, identical with that oneness and spirituality, lacking which, nothing is important. This archetypal social organization whose essence is excellence, it is the congenital vocation of the philosopher to contemplate and to realize. Philosophers are hence the paragons among animals, lovers of truth, haters of falsehood and of multiplicity, spectators of all time and all existence. In them the power to govern should be vested. Their nature is of the same stuff as the Highest Good with which it concerns itself, but being such, it appears, merely "appears" alas! irrelevant to the actual situations of the daily life. The philosopher is hence opposed and expelled by that arch-sophist, Public Opinion: the man on the street, failing to understand him, dubs him prater, star-gazer, good-for-nothing.99He becomes an ineffectual stranger, an outlaw, in a world in which he should be master.
Plato's description of the philosopher and philosophy is, it will be seen, at once an apology and a program. But it is a program which has been petrified into a compensatory ideal. The confession of impotence, the abandonment of the programmatic intent is due to identification of the ideal with metaphysical fact, to the hypostasis of the ideal. With Christianism, that being a philosophy operating as a religion, world-weariness made the apology unnecessary and converted the hypostasis into the basis of that program of complete surrender of the attempt to master the problems of existence upon which ensued the arrest of science and civilization for a thousand years. The Greeks were not world-weary, and consequently, their joy in life and existence contributed a minimum of relevance to their other-worldly dreams. Need it be reasserted that the whole Platonic system, at its richest and best in the Republic, is both an expression of and a compensation for a concrete social situation? Once it was formulated it became a part of that situation, altered it, served as another among the actual causes which determined the subsequent history of philosophy. Its historic and efficacious significance is defined by that situation, but philosophers ignore the situation and accept the system as painters accept a landscape—as the thing in itself.
Now, the æsthetic aspect of the philosophic system, its autonomy, and consequent irrelevancy, are undeniable. Once it comes to be, its intrinsic excellence may constitute its infallible justification for existence, with no more to be said; and if its defenders or proponentsclaimed nothing more for it than this immediate satisfactoriness, there would be no quarrel with them. There is, however, present in their minds a sense of the other bearings of their systems. They claim them, in any event, to betrue, that is, to be relevant to a situation regarded as more important because more lastingly determinative of conduct, more "real" than the situation of which they are born. Their systems are offered, hence, as maps of life, as guides to the everlasting. That they intend to define some method for the conservation of life eternally, is clear enough from their initial motivation and formal issue: all the Socratics, with their minds fixed on happiness or salvation according to the prevalence of disillusionment among them; the Christian systems, still Socratic, but as resolutely other-worldly as disillusioned Buddhists; the systems of Spinoza, of Kant, the whole subsequent horde of idealisms, up to the contemporary Germanoid and German idealistic soliloquies,—they all declare that the vanity and multiplicity of life as it is leads them to seek for the permanent and the meaningful, and they each find it according to the idiosyncrasies of the particular impulses and terms they start with. That their Snark turns out in every case to be a Boojum is another story.
Yet this story is what gives philosophy, like religion, its social significance. If its roots, as its actual biography shows, did not reach deep in the soil of events, if its issues had no fruitage in events made over by its being, it would never have been so closely identified with intelligence and its systematic hypostasis would neverhave ensued. The fact is that philosophy, like all forms of creative intelligence, is a tool before it is a perfection. Its autonomy supervenes on its efficaciousness; it does not precede its efficaciousness. Men philosophize in order to live before they live in order to philosophize. Aristotle's description of the self-sufficiency of theory is possible only for a life wherein theory had already earned this self-sufficiency as practice, in a life, that is, which is itself an art, organized by the application of value-forms to its existent psycho-physical processes in such a way that its existence incarnates the values it desiderates and the values perfect the existence that embodies them.
The biography of philosophy, hence, reveals it to have the same possibilities and the same fate that all other ideas have. Today ideas are the patent of our humanity, the stuff and form of intelligence, the differentiæ between us and the beasts. In so far forth, they express the surplusage of vitality over need, the creative freedom of life at play. This is the thing we see in the imaginings and fantasies of childhood, whose environment is by social intent formed to favor and sustain its being. The capacity for spontaneity of idea appears to decrease with maturity, and the few favored healthy mortals with whom it remains are called men of genius. William James was such a man, and there are a few still among the philosophers. But in the mass and in the long run, ideas are not a primary confirmation of our humanity; in the mass and long they are warnings of menace to it, a sign of its disintegration. Even so radical an intellectualist as Mr. Santayana cherishesthis observation to the degree of almost suggesting it as the dogma that all ideas have their origin in inner or outer maladjustment.100However this may be, that the dominant philosophic ideas arise out of radical disharmonies between nature and human nature need not be here reiterated, while the provocative character of minor maladjustments is to be inferred from the fertility of ideas in unstable minds, of whatever type, from the neurasthenic to the mad. Ideas represent in these cases the limits of vital elasticity, the attempt of the organism to maintain its organic balance; it is as if a balloon, compressed on one side, bulged on the other.
Ideas, then, bear three types of relations to organic life, relations socially incarnated in traditional art, religion, and philosophy. First of all they may be an expression of innate capacities, the very essence of the freedom of life. In certain arts, such as music, they are just this. In the opposite case they may be the effect of the compression of innate capacities, an outcome of obstruction to the free low of life. They are then compensatory. Where expressive ideas are confluent with existence, compensatory ideas diverge from existence; they become pure value-forms whose paramount realization is traditional philosophy. Their rise and motivation in both these forms is unconscious. They are ideas, but not yet intelligence. The third instance falls between these original two. The idea is neither merely a free expression of innate capacities, nor a compensation for their obstruction or compression. Arising as the effect of a disharmony, it develops as anenchannelment of organic powers directed to the conversion of the disharmony into an adjustment. It does notuse upvital energies like the expressive idea, it is not an abortion of them, like the compensatory idea. It uses them, and is aware that it uses them—that is, it is a program of action upon the environment, of conversion of values into existences. Such an idea has the differentia of intelligence. It is creative; it actually converts nature into forms appropriate to human nature. It abolishes the Otherworld of the compensatory tradition in philosophy by incarnating it in this world; it abolishes the Otherworld of the religionist, rendered important by belittling the actual one, by restoring the working relationships between thoughts and things. This restoration develops as reconstruction of the world in fact. It consists specifically of the art and science which compose the efficacious enterprises of history and of which the actual web of our civilization is spun.
Manifest in its purity in art, it attends unconsciously both religion and philosophy, for the strands of life keep interweaving, and whatever is, in our collective being, changes and is changed by whatever else may be, that is in reach. The life of reason is initially unconscious because it can learn only by living to seek a reason for life. Once it discovers that it can become self-maintaining alone through relevance to its ground and conditions, the control which this relevance yields makes it so infectious that it tends to permeate every human institution, even religion and philosophy. Philosophy, it is true, has lagged behind even religion inrelevancy, but the lagging has been due not to the intention of the philosopher but to the inherent character of the task he assumed. Both art and religion, we have seen, possess an immediacy and concreteness which philosophy lacks. Art reconstructs correlative portions of the environment for the eye, the ear, the hopes and fears of the daily life. Religion extends this reconstruction beyond the actual environment, but applies its saving technique at the critical points in the career of the group or the individual; to control the food-supply, to protect in birth, pubescence, marriage, and death. All its motives are grounded in specific instincts and needs, all its reconstructions and compensations culminate with reference to these. Philosophy, on the other hand, deals with thewholenature of man and hiswholeenvironment. It seeks primaries and ultimates. Its traditional task is so to define the universe as to articulate thereby a theory of life and eternal salvation. It establishes contact with reality at no individual, specific point: its reals are "real in general." It aims, in a word, to be relevant to all nature, and to express the whole soul of man. The consequence is inevitable: it forfeits relevance to everything natural; touching nothing actual, it reconstructs nothing actual. Its concretest incarnation is a dialectic design woven of words. The systems of tradition, hence, are works of art, to be contemplated, enjoyed, and believed in, but not to be acted on. For, since action is always concrete and specific, always determined to time, place, and occasion, we cannot in fact adapt ourselves to the aggregate infinitude of the environment, or that to ourselves.Something always stands out, recalcitrant, invincible, defiant. But it is just such an adaptation that philosophy intends, and the futility of the intention is evinced by the fact that the systems of tradition continue side by side with the realities they deny, and live unmixed in one and the same mind, as a picture of the ocean on the wall of a dining room in an inland town. Our operative relations to them tend always to be essentially æsthetic. We may and do believe in them in spite of life and experience, because belief in them, involving no action, involves no practical risk. Where action is a consequence of a philosophic system, the system seems to dichotomize into art and religion. It becomes particularized into a technique of living or the dogma of a sect, and so particularized it becomes radically self-conscious and an aspect of creative intelligence.