Alcan,De la méthode dans les Sciences.Mach,History of Mechanics, Kegan Paul.Thomson,Science of Life, Blackie.Thomson,Science in the Nineteenth Century, Chambers.New Calendar of Great Men, Macmillan.The Darwin Centenary Volume.Bergson,Creative Evolution.
Alcan,De la méthode dans les Sciences.
Mach,History of Mechanics, Kegan Paul.
Thomson,Science of Life, Blackie.
Thomson,Science in the Nineteenth Century, Chambers.
New Calendar of Great Men, Macmillan.
The Darwin Centenary Volume.
Bergson,Creative Evolution.
FOOTNOTES:[80]See Lewes, 'Aristotle, a chapter in the History of Science'.[81]H. Bouasse,La Méthode dans les Sciences, Alcan.
[80]See Lewes, 'Aristotle, a chapter in the History of Science'.
[80]See Lewes, 'Aristotle, a chapter in the History of Science'.
[81]H. Bouasse,La Méthode dans les Sciences, Alcan.
[81]H. Bouasse,La Méthode dans les Sciences, Alcan.
To contend that there has been progress in Philosophy may seem but a desperate endeavour. For the reproach against it of unprogressiveness is of long standing: where other forms of human knowledge have undoubtedly advanced, Philosophy, in modern times at any rate, has (so it is said) remained stationary, propounding its outworn problems, its vain and empty solutions. Because of this failure it has by common consent been deposed from its once proud position at the head of the sciences and obliged to confess, in the words of the Trojan queen:
modo maxima rerumNunc trahor exul inops.
modo maxima rerumNunc trahor exul inops.
The charge of unprogressiveness is not made against it by its foes alone; the truth of it is admitted by some of its best friends. If Voltaire exclaims 'O métaphysique, métaphysique, nous sommes aussi avancés qu'aux temps des Druides', Kant sadly admits the fact, sets himself to diagnose its cause, and if possible to discover or devise a remedy. Yet we must remember that it was philosophers who first descried those currents in the world of events which the non-philosophic, borrowing the name from them, call Progress, who first attempted to determine their direction and the possible goal of their convergence, and laboured to clear their own and others' minds in regard to the meaning, to capture which the name wasthrown out as a net into the ocean of experience. Nor must we forget that it was in their own chosen field—the world of human thoughts and actions—that they from the beginning seemed to themselves to find the surest evidence of the reality of Progress. While the world that surrounded and hemmed them and their fellows in might or must be regarded as unchanging and unchangeable, doomed for ever to reproduce and monotonously reiterate whatsoever it had once done and been, the mind or spirit of Man in its own realm seemed capable of going beyond all its past achievements and rising to new heights, not merely here and there or in isolated instances but in such numbers or masses as to raise for long periods of history the general level of human efficiency and welfare. It is true that many of those who noted these advances or profited by them did not always admit that they took place in, or were due to the agency of, Philosophy. The advances were most often credited to other powers and the new territory claimed by their representatives. The contributions made by Philosophy to the general improvement of human life were and are obscure, difficult to trace, easily missed or forgotten. It came about that the philosopher was misconceived as one indifferent to ordinary human interests and disdainful of the more obvious advantages secured by others, pressing and urging forward and upward into a cloudland where the light was too dim for the eyes of man and the paths too uncertain for his feet. Unsatisfied with the region where Man had learned by the slow and painful lessons of experience to build himself a habitable city he dreamed of something higher, aspiring to explore beyond and above where the light of that experience shone and illuminated. Perhaps the main idea that the name of Philosophy now to most suggests is that of a Utopian ideal of knowledge so wide and so high that it must be by sane and sober mindspronounced for ever set beyond the reach of human faculty, an ideal which perhaps we cannot help forming and which constantly tempts us forward like a mirage, but which like a mirage leads us into waste and barren places, so much so that it is no small part of human wisdom to resist its subtle seductions and to confine our efforts to the pursuit of such ends as we may reasonably regard as well within the compass of our powers of thought and action. It is folly, we are told, to adventure ourselves upon the uncharted seas into which philosophers invite us, to waste our lives and perhaps break our hearts in the vain search for a knowledge that is for ever denied us. After all, there is much that we can know, and in the knowledge of which we can better the estate of Man, relieving him from many of his most pressing terrors and distresses. To cherish other hopes is to deceive ourselves to our own and our fellows' undoing, to refuse them our help and fail to play our part in the common business of mankind. There is surely in the world enough suffering and sorrow and sin to engage all our energies in dealing with them, nor are our endeavours to do so so plainly fruitless as to discourage from perseverance in them. Where in this task our hearts do faint and fail, are there not other means than the discredited nostrum of Philosophy to revive our hopes and recruit our forces? It was only, we are sometimes reminded, in the darkest days of human history that men turned desperately to Philosophy for comfort and consolation—how surely and demonstrably, we are told, in vain! When other duties are so urgent and immediate, have we even the right to consume our energies otherwise than in their direct discharge? And is it not presumption to ask for any further light than that which is vouchsafed to us in the ordinary course of experience or, if that is insufficient, in and by Religion?
Much in this plea for a final relinquishment of aid from Philosophy in the furtherance of human progress is plausible and more than plausible. Yet the hope or, if you will, the dream of attaining some form or kind or degree of knowledge which the sciences do not and cannot supply and perhaps deny to be possible, some steadiness and firmness of assurance other and beyond the confidence of religious faith, is not yet extinct, is perhaps inextinguishable, and though it often takes extravagant and even morbid and repulsive forms, still haunts and tantalizes many, nor these the least wise or sane of our kind, so that they count all the labour they spend upon its search worth all the pains. Not for themselves alone do they seek it; they view themselves as not alone in the quest, but engaged in a matter of universally human moment. In the measure in which they count themselves to have attained any result they do not hoard it or grudge it to others. The notion of philosophic truth as something to be shared and enjoyed only by a few—as what is called 'esoteric'—is no longer in vogue and is indeed felt to involve an essential self-contradiction; rather it is conceived as something the value of which is assured and enhanced by being imparted. Those who believe themselves to be by nature or (it may be) accident appointed to the office of its quest, by no means feel that they are thereby divided from their fellows as a peculiar people or a privileged and exclusive priesthood, but much rather as fellow servants enlisted and engaged in the public service of mankind. Least of all do they believe that their efforts are foredoomed to inevitable failure, that progress therein is not to be looked for, or that they and their predecessors have hitherto made no advance towards what they and, as they also believe, all men sought and still seek. To them the history of Philosophy for say the last two thousand years is not the dreary and dispiritingnarrative of repeated error and defeat, but the record of a slow but secure and steady advance in which, as nowhere else, the mind of Man celebrates and enjoys triumphs over the mightiest obstacles, kindling itself to an ever-brightening flame. Reviewing its own past in history the spirit of Philosophy sees its own inner light, which is its act and its essence, constantly increasing, spreading ever wider into the circumambient dark, and touching far-off and hitherto undiscovered peaks with the fire of a coming dawn. In place of the starlight of Science or the moonlight of Religion it sees a sun arise flooding the world with light and warmth and life. High hopes, high claims; but can they be made good, or even rationally entertained? Suffice it here that they be openly avowed and proclaimed to be laid up in the heart of the philosophic spirit, 'dreaming', and yet with waking eyes, 'of things to come'. Or rather shall we not say, seeing that its eyes are unsealed and the vision therefore no dream, beholding a present—an ever-present—Reality?
It was Philosophy, or philosophers, as I have said, that first discerned the fact of Progress, named it, and divined its lineaments. To Philosophy the name and notion of Progress belongs as of right—the right of first occupation. Merely to have invented a name for the fact is no small service, for thus the fact was fixed for further study and examination. But with the name Philosophy gave us the idea, the notion, and therewith the fact began to be understood and to become amenable to further and further explanation. To this further explanation Philosophy gave notable assistance. To 'elaborate our concepts' has been said to be the whole business of Philosophy, that is, to arrest the vague and shifting meanings that float before our minds loosely attached to the words of ordinary careless speech, to fix their outlines, distinguishing, defining, ordering and organizing until each mass of meaning is improved and refined into a thought worthy to be called a notion, a fit member of the world of mind, a seat and source of intellectual light. In this work Philosophy proceeds and succeeds simply by reflecting on whatever meaning it has in whatever manner already acquired; it employs no strange apparatus or recondite methods, only continues more thoughtfully and conscientiously to use the familiar means by which the earlier simpler meanings were appropriated and developed, following the beaten tracks of the mind's native and spontaneous movement. Much more rarely than the sciences has it recourse to a technical vocabulary, being content to express itself in ordinary words though using them and their collocations with a careful delicacy and painstaking adroitness. To follow it in these uses demands an effort, for nothing is perhaps more difficult than to force our thoughts to run counter to our customary heedless use of words and to learn to employ them even for a short time with a steady precision of significance. Yet unless this effort is resolutely made we must remain the easy prey of manifold confusions and errors which trip us in the dark. Our words degrade into tokens which experience will not cash—tangles of symbols which we cannot retranslate.
But Philosophy is more than the attempt to refine and subtilize our ordinary words so as to fit them for the higher service of interpretative thought, more even than the endeavour to improve the stock of ideas no matter how come by, by which we interpret to ourselves whatever it imports us to understand. All this it is and does, or strives to do, but only as subsidiary to its true business and real aim. All this it might do and do successfully, and yet make or bring about no substantial progress in itself or elsewhere. And when progress in Philosophy is spoken of, it is not either such improvement in languagenor such improvement in ideas that alone or mainly is meant.
What is claimed for (or denied to it) under the name of Progress is an advance in knowledge, knowledge clear-sighted, grounded, and assured, knowledge of some authentic and indubitable reality. It is by the attainment of such knowledge, by progress in and towards it, that the claim of Philosophy to be progressive must stand or fall. To the question whether it can make good its claim to the possession and increase of this knowledge we must give special attention, for if Philosophy fails in this it fails in all.
The oldest name for the knowledge in question was simply Wisdom and, in some ways, in spite of its apparent arrogance this is the best name for what is sought—or missed. Yet from the beginning the name was felt not sufficiently to distinguish what was meant from the high skill of the cunning craftsman and the worldly wisdom of the man of affairs, the statesman or soldier or trader. In the case of all these it was difficult to disengage the knowledge involved from natural or trained practical dexterity. What was desired and required was knowledge distinguished but not divorced from practice and application—'pure knowledge' as it was sometimes called; not divorced, I repeat, for it was not conceived as without bearing upon the conduct of life, but still distinguished, as furnishing light rather than profit. For good or evil Philosophy began by considering what it sought and hoped to reach as pre-eminently knowledge in some distinctive sense, and having so begun it turned to reflect once more upon what it meant by so conceiving it and to make this meaning more precise and clear. So it came to present to itself as its aim or goal a special kind or degree of knowledge, to be inspired and guided by the hope of that. Practical as in many ways was the concern of ancientphilosophy—its whole bent was towards the bettering of human life—it sought to achieve this by the extension and deepening of knowledge, and not either through the cultivation or refinement of emotion or the organization of practical, civil or social or philanthropic activities. It laboured—and laboured not in vain—to further the increase of knowledge by defining to itself in advance the kind or degree of knowledge which would accomplish the ultimate aim of its endeavour or subserve its accomplishment. Hence we must learn to view with a sympathetic eye its repeated essays to give precision and detail to the conception or ideal of knowledge.
In form the answer rendered to its request to itself for a definition, was determined by the principle that the knowledge which was sought and alone, if found, could satisfy, was knowledge of the real, or as it was at first more simply expressed, of what is, or what really and veritably is. Refusing the name of knowledge except to what had this as its object, men turned to consider the nature of the object which stood or could stand in this relation. With this they contrasted what we, after them, call the phenomena, the appearances, the manifold aspects, constantly shifting with the shifting points of view of the observer or many observers of it, inconstant, unsteady, superficial, mirrored through the senses and imagination, multiplied and distorted in divergent and changing opinions, or misrepresented and even caricatured in the turbid medium of ordinary speech, like a clouded image on the broken waters of a rushing stream. 'It'—so at first they spoke of the object of true or 'philosophic' knowledge—was one and single, eternal and unchangeable, a universe or world-order of parts fixed for ever in their external relations and inward structure. In each and all of us there was, as it were, a tiny mirror that could be cleared so as to reflect all this, and in so far as suchreflection took place an inner light was kindled in each which was a lamp to his path. Knowing—for to know was so to reflect the world as it really was—knowing, man came to self-possession and self-satisfaction—to peace and joy—and was even 'on this bank and shoal of time' raised beyond the reach of all accidents and evils of mortal existence—looking around and down upon all that could harm or hurt him and seeing it to be in its law-abiding orderliness and eternal changelessness the embodiment of good. So viewing it, man learned to feel the Universe his true home, and was inspired not only with awe but with a high loyalty and public spirit. 'The poet says "Dear City of Cecrops", and shall I not say "Dear City of God"?'
The knowledge thus reached or believed to be attainable was more and more discriminated from what was offered or supplied by Art or Science or Religion, though it was still often confused with each and all of them. As opposed to that of Art, it was not direct or immediate vision flashed as it were upon the inner eye in moments of inspiration or excitement; as opposed to that of Science, it was a knowledge that pierced below the surface and the seeming of Nature and History; as opposed to that of Religion (which was rather faith than knowledge), it was sober, unimaginative, cleansed of emotional accompaniment and admixture, the 'dry light' of the wise soul. True to the principle which I have stated, ancient Philosophy proclaimed that the only knowledge in the end worth having was knowledge of Fact—of what lay behind all seeming however fair—Fact unmodified and unmodifiable by human wish or will; it bade us know the world in which we live and move and have our being, know it as it is truly and in itself, and knowing it love it, loyally acquiescing in its purposes and subserving its ends. In all this there was progress (was there not?) to a view, toa truth (how else shall we speak of it?) which has always, when apprehended, begotten a high temper in heroic hearts. Surely in having reached in thought so high and so far the mind of man had progressed in knowledge and in wisdom.
But now a change took place, from which we must date the rise or birth of modern philosophy. Hitherto on the whole the mind of man had looked outward and sought knowledge of what lay or seemed to lie outside itself. So looking and gazing ever deeper it had encountered a spectacle of admirable and awe-compelling order, yet one which for that very reason seemed appallingly remote from, if not alien to, all human businesses and concerns. Now it turned inward and found within itself not only matter of more immediate or pressing interest, but a world that compelled attention, excited curiosity, rewarded study. Slowly and gradually the knowledge of this, the inner world—the world of the thinker's self—became the central object of philosophic reflection. The knowledge that was most required—that was all-important and indispensable (so man began explicitly to realize)—was knowledge of the Self, not of the outer world that at best could never be more than known, but of the self that knew or could know it, that could both know and be known. Henceforward what is studied is not knowledge of reality—of any and every reality—or of external reality, but knowledge of the Self which can know as well as be known. And the process by which it is sought is reflection, for the self-knowledge is not the knowledge of other selves, but the knowledge of just that Self which knows itself and no other. Thus the knowledge sought is once more and now finally distinguished from the knowledge offered or supplied by Art or Science or Religion: not by Art, for the Self cannot appear and has no seeming nor can it any way be picturedor described or imagined; not by Science, for it lies beyond and beneath and behind all observation, nor can it be counted or measured or weighed; not by Religion, for knowledge of it comes from within and the disclosure of its nature is by the self-witness of the Self to its self, not by revelation of any other to it. Thus there is disclosed the slowly-won and slowly-revealed secret of modern Philosophy, that the knowledge which is indispensable, which is necessary as the consummation and key-stone of all other knowledge, is knowledge of the knowing-self, self-knowledge, or, as it is sometimes more technically called, self-consciousness, with the corollary that this knowledge cannot be won by any methods known to or specially characteristic of Science or Art or Religion. To become self-conscious, to progress in self-consciousness is the end, and the way or means to it is by reflection—the special method of Philosophy.
This is the step in advance made by the modern spirit beyond all discoveries of the ancients; it is the truth by the apprehension of which the modern spirit and its world is made what it is. Not outside us lies Truth or the Truth: Truth dwelleth in the inner man—in interiore hominis habitat veritas. Is this not progress, progress in wisdom, and to what else can we ascribe the advance save to Philosophy?
It was one of the earliest utterances of modern Philosophy, and one which it has never found reason to retract, that the Self which knows can and does know itself better than aught else whatsoever, and in that knowledge can without end make confident and sure-footed advance. To itself the Self is the most certain and the most knowable of all realities—with this it is most acquainted, this it has light in itself to explore, of this it can confidently foresee and foretell the method of advance to further and further knowledge. It knows not only its existence butits essence, its nature, and it knows by what procedure, by what ordered effort or exercise of will it can progress to height beyond height of its self-knowledge. I say, it knows it, but it also knows that that knowledge cannot be attained all at once or taken complete and ready-made, for itisitself a progress, a self-created and self-determined progress, and on that condition progress alone is or is real. For it to be is not to be at the beginning or at the end of this process, but to be always coming to be, coming to be what it is not and yet also what it has in it to be. Of nothing else is Progress so intimately the essence and very being; if we ask 'What progresses or evolves?', the most certain answer is 'The spirit which is in man, and what it progresses in, is knowledge of itself, which is wisdom'. Speaking of and for Philosophy I venture to maintain that nothing is more certain than that that spirit which has created it has grown, is growing, and will ever grow in wisdom, and that by reflection upon itself and its history—nor can the gates of darkness and error prevail against the irresistible march of its triumphant progress.
As we look back the history of Philosophy seems strewn with the debris of outworn or outlived errors, but out of them all emerges this clear and assured truth, that in self-knowledge lies the master-light of all our seeing, inexhaustibly casting its rays into the retreating shadow world that now surrounds us, melting all mists and dispelling all clouds, and that the way to it is unveiled, mapped and charted in advance so that henceforward we can walk sure-footedly therein. Yet that does not mean that the work of Philosophy is done, that it can fold its hands and sit down, for only in the seeking is its prize found and there is no goal or end other than the process itself. For this too is its discovery, that not by, but in, endless reflection is the Truth concerning it known, the Truth that each generation must ever anew win and earnit for itself. The result is not without the process, nor the end without the means: the factisthe process and other fact there is none. In other forms of so-called 'knowledge' we can sever the conclusion from its premisses, and the result can be given without the process, but with self-knowledge it is not so and no generation, or individual, can communicate it ready-made to another, but can only point the way and bid others help themselves. And if this, so put, seems hard doctrine, I can only remind you that to philosophize has always meant 'to think by and for oneself'.
It is perhaps more necessary to formulate the warning that what is here called self-knowledge and pronounced to constitute the very essence of the spirit that is in man, is far removed from what sometimes bears its name, the extended and minute acquaintance by the individual mind with its individual peculiarities or idiosyncrasies, its weaknesses and vanities, its whims and eccentricities; nor is it to be confused with the still wider acquaintance with those that make up our common human nature in all its folly and frailty which is sometimes called 'knowledge of human nature'; no, nor with such knowledge as psychological science, with its methods of observation and induction and experiment, offers or supplies. It is knowledge of something that lies far deeper within us—'the inward man', which is not merely alike or akin but is the same in all of us; beneath all our differences, strong against all our weaknesses, wise against all our follies, what each of us rightly calls his true self and yet what is not his alone, but all men's also. As we reflect upon it duly, what discloses or reveals itself to us is a self which is both our very own and yet common or universal, the self of each and yet the self of all. The more we get to apprehend and understand it, the more we become and know ourselves, not so much as being but as becomingone with one another; the differences that sunder us in feeling and thought and action melting away like mist. The removal of these differences is just the unveiling of it, in which it at once comes to be and to be known. In coming to know it we create it. The unity of the spirit thus becomes and is known as indubitable fact, or rather (I must repeat) not as fact, as if it were or were anything before being known, but as something which is ever more and more coming to be, in the measure in which it is coming to be known—known to itself. For this is the hard lesson of modern philosophy, that our inmost nature and most genuine self is not aught ready-made or given, but something which is created in and by the process of our coming to know it, which progresses in existence and substantiality and value as our knowledge of it progresses in width and depth and self-assurance. The process is one of creative—self-creative—evolution, in which each advance deposits a result which prescribes the next step and supplies all the conditions for it, and so constantly furnishes all that is required for an endless progress in reality and worth. This is the process in which the spirit of man capitalizes and substantiates its activities, committing its gains to secure custody, amassing and using them for its self-enrichment—in which it depends on no other than itself and is sovereign master of its future and its fate. This is the way in which selves are made, or rather, make themselves.
This is the discovery of modern Philosophy, the now patent secret which it offers for the interpretation of all mysteries and the solving of all problems—and it offers it with unquestioning assurance, for it has explored the ground and has awakened to the true method of progress within it. And as I have said or implied, to the reflective mind regress is impossible, it cannot go back upon itself, and with due tenderness and gratitude it has set behindit the things of its unreflective childhood. It stands on the stable foundation of the witness of the spirit within us to itself, to its own nature, its own powers and its own rights; it knows itself as the knower, the interpreter, the teacher, and therefore the master and maker of itself. Yet we must not identify or confuse this our deeper or deepest self which we thus create with the separate selves or souls which each of us is; it is not any one of them nor all of them together, unless we give to the word 'together' a new and more pregnant sense than it has yet come to bear. It is not the 'tribal' or 'collective' or 'social' self, for it is not made by congregation or collection or association, but by some far more intimate unification than is signified by any of these terms, namely by coming together in and by knowledge. It is the spirit which is in us all and in which we all are, which is more yet not other than we, without which we are nothing and do nothing and yet which is veritably the spirit of man, the immortal hero of all the tragedy and comedy—the whole drama—of human history; it is of this spirit as it is by it, that Philosophy has in repeated and resolute reflection come to know the nature and the method of its progress. Such knowledge has come into the world and prevails more widely and more potently than ever before; possessed in fullness by but a few, it is open and available to all and radiates as from a beacon light over the whole field of human experience; at that fire every man can light his candle. This is the light in which alone the record of man's thoughts and achievements can be construed and which exhibits them as steps and stages on that triumphant march to higher and higher levels such as alone we can rightly name Progress. Where else than in History, and, above all, in the History of Knowledge, is Progress manifested, and in that where more certainly than in the unretreating and unrevoked advance towardsa deeper, a truer, a wiser knowledge of itself by the spirit that is in and is, Man?
Yes, such knowledge, truth and wisdom now exists and is securely ours, though to inherit it each generation and each individual must win it afresh and having won it must develop and promote it, or it ceases not only to work but to be. For it exists only as it is made or rather only in the act and fact of its progress, and so for it not to progress is at once to return to impotence and nothingness. And it is we who maintain it in being, maintaining it by endless reiterated efforts of reflection, and so maintaining it we maintain ourselves, resting or relying upon it and using it as a source of strength and a fulcrum or a platform for further effort. Upon self-knowledge in this sense all other 'knowledge' reposes; upon it and the knowledge of other selves and the world, which flows from it, depends the possibility of all practical advance. In the dark all progress is impossible.
But since this discovery was made and made good, the spirit of Philosophy has not stood still; it has gone on, and is still going on, to extend and deepen and secure its conquests. Once more it has turned from its fruitful and enlightening concentration on the inner self and its life to review what lies or seems to lie around and outside it. It finds that those who have stayed, or fallen, behind its audacious but justified advance in self-knowledge, still cherish a view of what is external to this (the true or real self so now made patent), thoughts or fancies which misconceive and misrepresent it—thoughts persisted in against the feebler protesting voices of Art and Religion and so held precariously and unstably though apparently grounded upon the authority of Science. To the unphilosophic or not yet philosophic mind the spirit of man, already in imagination multiplied and segregated into individual 'souls', appears to be surrounded with an environmentof alien character, often harsh to man's emotions, often rebellious or untractable to his purposes, often impenetrable to his understanding, and in a word indifferent or hostile to his ideals and aspirations after progress and good. Nay, the individual souls seem to act towards one another separately and collectively as such hindrances, and again, each individual soul seems to be encrusted with insuperable impediments. Even the light within is enclosed in an opaque screen which prevents or counteracts its outflow, so that the spirit within is as it were entombed or imprisoned. 'Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems us in,' we cannot communicate with one another or join with one another in thought or deed; and the hope of progress seems defeated by the recalcitrant matter that shell upon shell encases us. The world of our bodies, of the bodies and spirits of others, and all the vastcompagesof things and forces which we call 'Nature' blinds and baffles us, mocks our hopes and breaks our hearts. How idle to dream that amidst and against all this neutrality or hostility any substantial or secure advance can be made!
In answer to all these thoughts, these doubts and fears, Philosophy is beginning with increasing boldness to speak a word, not of mere comfort and consolation, but of secure and confident wisdom. All this so-called 'external' nature and environment is not hostile or alien to the self or spirit which is in man, it is akin and allied to it as we now know it to be. Whatever is real and not merely apparent in History or Nature is rational, is of the same stuff and character as that which is within us. It too is spiritual, the appearance and embodiment of what is one in nature and mode of being with what lies deepest and is most potent in us. So far as it is not that, it is appearance and not reality, woven like a dream by imagination or endowed with an unstable and shifting quasi-reality by our thoughts and suppositions andfancies about we know not what. Not that it is an illusion, still less a delusion, rather what it is is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality, a symbol beautiful, orderly, awe-inspiring yet mutilated, partial, confused, of something deeper and more real, the expression, the face and gesture, of a spirit that, as ours does, knows itself, its own profound being and meaning, and does what it does in the light of such knowledge, a spirit which above all progresses endlessly towards and in a richer and fuller knowledge of itself. What we call Fact—historical or natural—is essentially such an expression, on the one hand a finished expression, set in the past and therefore for ever beyond the possibility of change and so of progress, an exhausted or dead expression, on the other hand a passing into the light of what was before unknown even to the expresser's self, an act by which was made and secured a self-discovery or self-revelation, a creative act of self-knowledge and so significant and interpretable. This double character of events in History and Nature is dimly descried in what we specially call 'nature', but comes more fully into view in the sphere of human history, where each step is at once a deed and a discovery, a contribution to the constitution of the world of fact and a fulguration of the light within illuminating facts as the condition of its own inexhaustible continuance. The world of Fact, artistic or aesthetic, scientific, moral, political, economic, is what the spirit builds round itself, creating it out of its own substance, while it itself in creating it grows within, evolving out of itself into itself and advancing in knowledge or wisdom and power. And out of its now securely won self-knowledge it declares that it—itself—is the source and spring of all real fact whatsoever, which is its self-created expression, made by it in its own interests, and for its own good, the betterand better to know itself. Nothing is or can be alien, still less hostile to it, for 'in wisdom has it made them all'. Looking back and around it re-reads in all fact the results of its own power of self-expression. Nothing is but what it has made.
All this might perhaps have been put very simply by saying that ever since man has set himself to know his own mind in the right way, he has succeeded better and better, and that in knowing his own mind he has come to know and is still coming to know all else beside, including all that at first sight seems other than, or even counter to, his own mind. He has learned what manner of being he is, how that being has been made and how it continues to be made and developed, and again, how in the course of its self-creation and self-advance it deposits itself in 'fact' and reflecting on that fact rises beyond and above itself in knowledge and power. He is mind or spirit, and what lies behind and around him is spiritual. As he reflects upon this the meaning of it becomes ever more clear and distinct, ordered and organized, and at the same time more substantial, more real, more lively and potent. In becoming known what was before dead and dark and threatening or obstructive or hostile is made transparent, alive, utilisable, contributing to the constantly growing self that knows and is known. Here is the growing point of reality, thefons emanationisof truth and worth and being, evidencing its power not as it were in increase of bulk, but in the enhancing of value. And surely here is Progress, which consists not in mere enlargement or expansion but in the heightening of forces to a new power—in a word, in their elevation to a more spiritual, a more intelligent and therefore more potent, level.
To the artistic eye the universe presents itself as a vast and moving spectacle, to the scientific mind as the theatre of forces which repeat their work with a mechanicaluniformity or perhaps fatally run down to a predestined and predictable final arrest, to the devout or religious soul as the constant efflux of a beneficent will, unweariedly kind, caring for the humblest of its creatures, august, worshipful, deserving of endless adoration and love, while to the philosophic mind it is known and ever more to be known as the self-expression of a mind in essence one with all minds that know it in knowing themselves, know it as the work or product of a mind engaged or absorbed in knowing itself, and so creating itself and all that is requisite that it may learn more and more what is hidden or stored from all eternity within its plenitude. At least we may say that the conception of a Mind which in order to know itself creates the conditions of such knowledge, which wills to learn whatever can be learned of itself from whatever it does, supplies the best pattern or original after which to model our vaguer and more blurred conceptions of progressive existence and being elsewhere. It furnishes to us an ideal of a progress which realizes or maintains and advances itself, for it is independent upon external conditions. The Progress of Philosophy or of Wisdom is a palmary instance of progress achieved out of the internal resources of that which progresses. And after this pattern we least untruly and least unworthily conceive the mode of that eternal and universal Progress which is the life of the Whole within and as part of which we live.
The aim of Philosophy is not edification but the possession and enjoyment of Truth, and the Truth may wear an aspect which, while it enlightens, also blinds or even at first appals and paralyses. And certainly Reality or Philosophy as has come to know it and proclaims it to be, is not such as either directly to warm our hearts or stimulate our energies. Not to do either has Philosophy come into the world, nor so does it help to bring Progress about; nor does it offer prizes to those who pursue eithermoral improvement or business success, nor again does it increase that information concerning 'nature' and men which is the condition of the one and the other, yet to those who love Truth and who will buy no good at the sacrifice of it, what it offers is enough, and to progress towards and in it is for them worth all the world beside; it is, if not the only real progress, that in the absence of which all other progress is without worth or substance or reality. In the end, if any advance anywhere is claimed or asserted, must we not ask: Is the claim founded on truth, is the good or profit seemingly attained a (or the) true good? To whom or to what is it good? Can we stop short of the endeavour to assure ourselves beyond question or doubt that we are right in what answers we render? And where or by what means can we reach this save by turning inward on meditation or reflection, that is by philosophizing?Εἰ φιλοσοφητέον φιλοσοφητεον, εἰ δὲ μή, φιλοσοφητέον; πάντως ἄρα φιλοσοφητέον. Thither the mind of man has always turned when the burden of the mystery of its nature and fate has weighed all but intolerably upon it, and turning has never found itself betrayed, but from knowledge of itself has drawn fresh hope and strength to resume the uninterrupted march of Progress which is its life and its history, its being, its self-formation, in courage moving forwards in and towards the light. It is as if such light were not merely the condition of its welfare, but the food on which it lived, the stuff which it transmuted into substance and energy, out of it making, maintaining and building its very self. So under whatever name, whether we call what we are doing Philosophy or something else, the search for more and more light upon ourselves and our world is the most indispensable activity to which the leagued and co-operative powers of Man can be devoted. Fortunately it is also that in which success or failure depends most certainly upon ourselves and inwhich Progress can with most confidence be looked for. In it we cannot fail if we will to take sufficient trouble; the means to it are open and available; it is our fault if we do not employ them and profit by them. If we have less wisdom than we might have, it is never any one's fault but our own. The door of the treasure-house of Wisdom stands ever open.
C. C. J. Webb,History of Philosophy(Home University Library).Burnet,History of Greek Philosophy.E. J. Bevan,Stoics and Sceptics.Höffding,History of Modern Philosophy(translated).Royce,The Spirit of Philosophy.Merz,History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century.
C. C. J. Webb,History of Philosophy(Home University Library).
Burnet,History of Greek Philosophy.
E. J. Bevan,Stoics and Sceptics.
Höffding,History of Modern Philosophy(translated).
Royce,The Spirit of Philosophy.
Merz,History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century.
Throughout this course of lectures, now come to its close, we have together been engaged in a theoretical inquiry. We have been looking mainly towards the past, to something therefore for ever and in its very nature set beyond the possibility of alteration by us or indeed at all. 'What is done not even God can make to be undone.' Were it otherwise it could not be fact or reality and so not capable of being theorized or studied. In the words of our programme we have analysed what is involved in the conception of Progress, shown when it became prominent in the consciousness of mankind and how far the idea has been realized—that is has become fact—in the different departments of life. We have taken Progress as a fact, something accomplished, and have attempted so taking it to explain or understand it. We have not indeed assumed that it is confined to the past, but have at times enlarged our consideration so as to recognize its continuance in the present and to justify the hope of its persistence in the future. Some of us would perhaps go further and hold that it has, by these and similar reflections, come to be part of our assured knowledge that it must so continue and persist. But however we have widened our purview, what we call Progress has remained to us a course or movement which still presents the appearance of a fact which is largely, if not wholly, independent of us—a fact because independent of us—to which we canoccupy no other attitude than that of interested spectators, interested and concerned, moved or conditioned by it but not active or co-operative in it. So far as it is in process of realization in the vast theatre of nature, inorganic or organic, dead or living, that surrounds us, it pursues its course in virtue of powers not ours and unamenable to our control. And even when we view it within the closer environment of human history its current seems to carry us irresistibly with it. Its existence is indeed of very practical concern to us, but apparently all we can do is to come to know it, and knowing it to allow for it as or among the set conditions of our self-originated or self-governed actions if such actions there be.
The clearer we have become as to the nature of Progress, the more it would appear that it must be for us, because it is in itself, a fact to be recognized in theory, taken into account and reckoned with. It is or it is not, comes to be or does not come to be, and what we have first and foremost to seek, is light upon its existence and character as it is or occurs. Light, we hope, has been cast upon it. We have learned that in its inmost essence and to its utmost bounds Reality—what lies outside and around us—is not fixed, rigid, immobile, was not and is not and cannot be as the ancient or mediaeval mind feigned or fabled, something beyond the reach of time and change—static or stationary—but is itself a process of ceaseless alteration. We have learned also to be dissatisfied with the compromise which, while acknowledging such alteration, all but withdraws it in effect by asserting it to be either in gross or in detail a process of mere repetition. The system of laws which science had taught us to consider as the truth of nature is itself now known to be caught in the evolutionary process, and to be undergoing a constant modification. As in the modern state, so in Nature, the legislative power is not exhausted but incessantly embodies itself in novelforms. Nature itself—natura naturans—is now conceived, and rightly conceived, as a power not bound to laws other than those which it makes for or imposes on itself, and as in its operations at least analogous to a will self-determined, self-governing, creative of the ways and means by which its purpose or purposes are achieved. What that purpose is we have begun to apprehend, and to see its various processes as converging or co-operating towards its fulfilment. In the mythological language which even Science is still obliged to use, we now speak of Nature as 'selecting' or 'devising', and we ascribe to it a large freedom of choice wisely used. We can already at least define the process as guided towards a greater variety and fullness and harmony of life, or (with a larger courage) as pointed towards a heightening or potentiation of life. So defining its goal we can sympathize with and welcome the successful efforts made toward it, and so feel ourselves at heart one with the power that carries on the process in its aspirations and its efforts. But still, we cannot help feeling, it and all its ways lie outside us, and to us it remains an alien or foreign power. I venture to repeat my contention that this is so just because, however much we come to learn of its ways, we do not feel that we are coming to understand it any better, getting inside it, as we do get inside and understand human nature. Its progress is a change, perhaps a betterment, in our environment—in externals—and takes place very largely whether we will and act or no. The larger our acquaintance with it, the more does its action seem to encroach upon the domain within which our volitions and acts can make any difference. Even in social life we seem in the grip and grasp of forces which carry us towards evil or good whether we will or no.Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.The whole known universe outside and around us presents to us the spectacleof what has been called ade factoteleology, and just because it is so, and so widely and deeply so, it leaves little or no room for us to set up our ideals within it and to work for their realization. The fact that the laws which prevail in it are modifiable and modified makes no difference; they modify themselves, and in their different forms still constrain us. And no matter how increasingly beneficent they may in their action appear, they are still despotic and we unfree. The rule of laws which Science discovers encroaches upon our liberties and privacies. What we had hitherto thought our very own, the movement of our impulses and desires and imaginations, are reported by science to be subject to 'laws of association', and we are borne onwards even if also at times upwards on an irresistible flood. We remain bound by the iron necessity of a fate that invades our inmost being—which will not let us anywhere securely alone. I repeat that it matters not how certainly the trend of the tide, which sets everywhere around and outside us, is towards what is good or best for us, it still is the case that it presents itself as neither asking for from us nor permitting to us the formation of any ideals of ours nor any prospect of securing them by our efforts. Were the fact of Progress established and conclusively shown to be all-pervasive and eternal, it still would bear to us the aspect of a paternal government which did good to and for us, but all the more left less and less to ourselves.
This will doubtless be pronounced an exaggeration, and we may weakly refuse to face the impression naturally consequent upon the progress we have made in the ascertainment of the facts concerning the world in which we live. But does not the impression exist? The hateful and desolating impression made on us earlier by the thought of a 'block' universe, once for all and rigidly fixed in unalterable and uniform subjection to eternaland omnipresent law, has dissolved like the baseless fabric of a vision. And why? Just because being found intolerable it was faced and put to the question. Now that there has been substituted for it the spectacle of a universe necessarily or fatally evolving—or, as we have said, progressing—does it not, while still evoking the old awe or reverence, do anything but still daunt and dishearten us? What is our part, we ask, our very own part within all this? What can we within it do? And the answer, that it is ours, if we will, to enter into and live in the contemplation of all this no longer appeals to us. In such a progressive universe we can no longer feel ourselves 'at home'. In it our active nature would seem to exist only to be disappointed and rebuffed.
The only progress which we can care for is the progress which we ourselves bring about, or can believe that we bring about, in ourselves or our fellows or in the world immediately around us. So long as what is so named is something devised and executed by a power not our own—not the same as our own—it may call out from us gratitude and reverence, but the spectacle of the reality of such Progress cannot exercise the attractive force nor, so far as it is realized, beget that creative joy which accompanies even humble acts in which we set an ideal of our own before ourselves, and see it through our efforts emerge into actual existence. A practical ideal must be through and through of our own making. It must be devised by us and set to ourselves for our pursuit, and its coming to be, or be real, must be our doing. The very idea of it must be our own, not given or prescribed, still less imposed, and the process towards it must be our doing too. That there should, on their view of it, ever be protest and rebellion against its tyrannous demands appears to me reasonable and right, and those who make it to be guarding the immediate jewel of man's nature. We should, we might say, if thiswere the whole truth about the universe, acknowledge ourselves as its sons bound to gratitude and obedience because of the fatherly care for us, but it would be an essential complement to our family loyalty that we should insist upon and make good our claims to be grown-up sons and fellow citizens, declining to pronounce it wholly good, if those claims were denied to us. Now all these conditions seem to make straight against the possibility of regarding Progress, in the view of it we have hitherto taken, as an ideal of our action.
In view of this character of the known fact of Progress, so discouraging and disabling to our active or practical nature, certain suggestions have been made which are thought to relieve us from these effects. It is said sometimes that this fatal—if beneficent or beneficial, still fatal—progress leaves as it were certain interstices in the universe within which it loses its constraining force, petty provinces but sufficient, where man is master and determines all events, from which even, it is sometimes conceded, some obscure but important influences are permitted to flow, modifying his immediate surroundings, little sanctuaries where the spirit that is in him and is his devises and realizes ideals of its own. But the notion of such sacrosanct and inviolable autonomies is being steadily undermined, and they are felt, as science becomes more dominant over our imaginations and emotions, to be no more than eddies in the universal stream, only apparently distinct and self-maintained, means made and broken for its purpose, really products and instruments of the world-progress. At any rate, it has been denied that they can rightfully be thought to stand outside it or themselves to exercise any effect upon their fortunes and their fate, still less upon their environment. Another suggestion fully and frankly acknowledges this, but though denying to us any power to affect either the formor the direction of the currents on which we are borne along, declares still open to us the possibility of affecting their speed, and bids us find satisfaction in the thought that by taking thought or resolve we can hasten or delay their and the universal movement. Still another view, abandoning even that hope, proclaims one last choice open to us, namely, that of sullen submission to, or glad and loyal acquiescence in, its irresistible sway. But surely all these suggestions are idle, and but for a moment conceal or postpone the inevitable conclusion that if Progress was, is and must or will be, that is, is necessary, what we think or do makes no difference, and can make no difference to or in it. Whether or no we convert the fact into an ideal, whether or no we set it before as our aim and exert ourselves to work for it, it goes on its way all the same. Either then it is not a fact, never was, and never will be a fact, or it is no possible ideal for which we can act. To be or become a fact, it must be independent of our action or our consent or our liking; if it is not all these it is not an ideal of action, or at any rate not so for us. I must repeat that what is or can be an ideal of action for us must be wholly and solely of our making, the very thought of it self-begotten in our mind, every step to its actual existence the self-created deed of our will. Not that either idea or act comes into being in a void or without suggestion and assistance from without us, but still so that the initiative lies in what we think or do, and so that without us it is unreal and impossible. It is enough, indeed, that we should be contributory, but the ideal must be such that without our irreplaceable co-operation it must fail. The only Progress in which we can take an active interest or make an ideal of action, is one which we conceive and execute, and that the fact we call Progress is not.
So far we have found much argument to show thatwhat we have hitherto called Progress is not and cannot be an ideal of action, or at least of our action. And now we must face another argument more plain and apparently fatal, indeed, specially or peculiarly fatal. For the very notion of Progress is of a process which continues without end, or we have the dilemma that it is either endless or runs to an end in which there is no longer Progress but something else. In either case it is not itself an end or the end, and whatever an ideal of action is, it must be an end—something beyond which there is nothing, which has no Beyond at all. To set before oneself as an ideal of action what one certainly knows to be incapable of attainment or accomplishment, incapable of coming to an end—that is surely futile and vain. Without a best, better or better-and-better has no meaning, and when the best is reached Progress is no more.
The objection may be put in various ways, as thus. What we seek or want or work for, is to be satisfied, and satisfaction is a state, not a process or a progress. Or again, acting is a process of seeking, seeking and striving for something, and surely the seeking cannot itself be the object of the search. Or once more, what we act for is, as we must conceive it, something complete, finished, perfect, but Progress is essentially something incomplete, unfinished, imperfect. We all feel this, and at times at least the thought that what we seek flies ever before, affrights and paralyses: recoiling from such a prospect, we set before our imaginations as the reward or result of our labours, not movement but rest, not creation or production but consumption and fruition. We dream of one day coming to participate in a life or experience so good that there is no change from less good to more good possible within it, and which, if it can be said to progress at all, only, in Milton's magnificent words, 'progresses the dateless and irrevoluble circle of its ownperfections, joining inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over-measure for ever'. Once this ideal has presented itself to our hopes or desires, it degrades by comparison with it to a second-best, the former ideal of endless development from lower to higher. What we want and seek is to be there, to have done with getting there. 'Here is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the cup with the roses around it.' Compared with this, how disconsolate a prospect is that 'of the sea that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the sea'—the endless voyage or quest. Not Progress is or can be the end, but achievement and the enjoyment of it. The progress is towards and for the end; the end is the supreme good and the progress is only good because of it, because it is on the way that leads to it, the way we are content to travel only because it leads there. Once more, and on still surer grounds, we must pronounce what we have come to know as Progress to be no possible ideal of action. What draws us on is the hope of something to be attained in and by the progress. To take Progress, which on the one hand is a fact and on the other is an incomplete fact, to be the end of our striving and our doing is to acquiesce in a self-contradiction.
Yet the counter-ideal of a state in which we shall simply rest from our labours and sit down to enjoy the fruits of them does not promise satisfaction either, and so cannot be the end or ideal. Our desire and our endeavour is not for a moveless, changeless, undeveloping perfection. In fact, so often as the dream of such a state attained has presented itself, it has to thoughtful minds appeared anything but attractive or desirable. Our desire is to go on, and for that we are willing to pay a price—nay, it is for more than merely to go on, it is to advance and increase in perfection, so much so that the ideal itself once more slews round into its opposite and the searchappears worth more than the attainment. It seems that we were not on the other view so wholly wrong, but must try so to frame our ideal of action as to unite both characters and satisfy both demands at once, so that it shall be at once a state and a movement or process, an achievement and a progress, a rest or quiet and a striving after it, a perfection and a perfecting. The combination at first sight appears impossible. Yet both characters it must combine. Here again, I must confess that the idea of mere Progress, even as achieved by our own efforts, seems to me to omit something essential to an ideal of action—of what is worth while our acting for. What is to be an ideal of action must have the character of a fulfilment—something to be consumed, not merely eternally added to. For this character of the (or any) ideal of action the best name is fruition or enjoyment. And the defect in the conception of it as Progress is that it seems to postpone this without a date.
Let us put this truth which we have discovered concerning Progress in a nutshell, hiding or disregarding the internal contradiction. What is the nature, what is the kind of reality, which we have learned to ascribe to Progress (for we did pronounce it real and essentially capable of being realized)? It is that it is fact, yet fact not made but in the making; it is just the name for what is real only through and in the process of becoming real or being realized. Now I have already elsewhere pointed out that while a realization which is also a reality, or a reality which is also a realization, is in nature or what is external to us a mystery and a puzzle, it is just when we look inwards the open secret of our being; in our life or action regarded from within, it appears as something which is only dark because it is so close and familiar to us that inspection of it is difficult, not because it is in itself opaque or unintelligible. To its exemplification or illustration there we must turn for light upon our problem.
Let us for the time disregard the pressure exercised upon us by the suggestions of physical science, or even, I may add, popular and imaginative or opinionative—which is Latin for 'dogmatic'—Religion, and examine how Progress takes place, or is realized and real, within our spirits, or that spirit which is within us. The inward process is one by which that spirit is or is real only in the act or fact of being or coming to be realized, or rather of realizing itself, and the way in which it so becomes or makes itself real is by acknowledging its own past, treating it as fact, recognizing its failures or imperfections therein, projecting on the future an idea or ideal of itself, suggested by those apprehended wants or defects, of what it might be, and using that to supply itself with both energy and guidance, drawing from its own past both strength and light. In all this it acts autonomously, out of itself, and creates both the requisite light and the indispensable force, making its very limitations into new sources and reservoirs of both.
We do not sufficiently note and hold and use the indubitable truth that, in contradistinction to what we call Nature, the forces of the spirit reinforce and re-create themselves in their use, are in their use not consumed but reinvigorated, not dissipated or degraded but recollected and elevated, not expended but enhanced. There is in the realm of spirit which is our nature and our world no law of either the conservation or the degradation of energy. We must not allow ourselves to be brow-beaten by arguments drawn from the obscurer region of physical and external nature. We know ourselves to be energies or energizing powers which increase and do not waste by exercise. That is what we ought to mean by saying that we are wills and not forces,spiritual not physical or natural beings. If need be to confirm ourselves in this knowledge, let us think of what takes place, has taken place in the advance of knowledge, and particularly of the most important kind of knowledge, viz. self-knowledge, how we make it by our reflection upon what we have already in respect of it achieved, recognize how it or we have fallen short or over-shot our mark, define what is required to make good its deficiencies, and find ourselves thereby already in actual possession of the preconceived supplement. The real, the fact, what is attained or accomplished in and by us, prescribes and facilitates, or rather supplies, its own missing complement of perfection. The process carries itself on, the progress realizes itself, the ideal translates itself into the fact or actuality: it accomplishes itself and yet it is the doing of our very self, of the spirit within us. All this is not merely our doing, it is our being, it is the process by which we make our minds, our souls, our very selves or self.
That man is essentially an, or rather the, ideal-forming animal (or rather spirit) has long been noted, and also that the formation of ideals is an indispensable factor in his progress, which is his life and very being. But all the same, this is sometimes put in such a way as to make action, or at least human action, a dispensable accident in the universe, an ineffective and unsubstantial unreality, while at the same time those who put it thus, profess to see through the illusion and to enjoy moments of insight which recognize its nullity. This way of putting it in my judgement intolerably misconceives and misrepresents the truth.
Our ideals of action must be self-made or self-begotten, but yet they must be congruent with known fact; but the manner of such congruence is hard to see, hard to express. Ideals cannot be themselves facts, and thereforecannot be known, but on the other hand they cannot be mere imaginations or suppositions or beliefs, still less, of course, illusions or delusions. They are not visionary, and the apprehension of them is a sort or degree of perception. They point beyond themselves to some higher fact which is not cognizable by our senses or perhaps our understanding, but which is yet genuinely cognizable and so in some high sense fact. Yet they are not, as we envisage them, the fact to which they point, but a substitute for or representative of that—an anticipation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'—a term I do not like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of a certain incumbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is that their reality—it seems a paradox that an ideal should possess 'reality'—consists in their suggestiveness of modes of action and their applicability to it, all this being supported by the conception of a state of affairs beyond and around us which makes it 'right'.
If all this is so, Progress as an ideal of action cannot be precisely identical with Progress as a fact or object of actual or possible knowledge. We can never know what we are aiming at. But though different, the two are and must be congruent, and this may be enough to justify us in using the one name for the two. Unless there were Progress as fact everywhere and always in the universe—outside us—in Nature and History, and unless we took ourselves genuinely to apprehend this, we could not form the practical ideal of Progress, or at least the ideal could not be right. But the difference remains, and we must be prepared for and allow for it; though we can use the knowledge we obtain of the fact of Progress to control and guide our formulation of the practical ideal, we cannotidentify the one with the other. Our imagining and our supposing of what is best for or obligatory upon us to do or work for, must go on under conditions—the conditions of what we know as to the nature of ourselves and our surroundings—and yet under these conditions has a very large liberty or autonomy.
The Progress which is to serve as a practical ideal is not and cannot be the Progress that we know, but must be the result of imagination or supposition, and it is high and necessary wisdom to trust our imaginations and aspirations. The forms which it rightly takes cannot be determined by what we have learned in or from the past; it cometh not with observation, and the sources of experience cannot of themselves supply us with it, and though it comes in and with experience, it does not come from or out of it. Yet it is due to an impression made upon us by the Universe as we by our faculties apprehend it, and is not merely subjective or of subjective origin. Begotten of the imagination, it is appearance, not ultimate reality, and it cannot be thought out or wholly evacuated of mystery and perplexity. Is this not involved in the language we use of it, proclaiming it practical and therefore not theoretical?
Nevertheless, while I must acknowledge this insuperable difference between the Progress we can make our end or ideal and the Progress we believe that in ourselves and around us we apprehend, I still would lay renewed stress upon the congruence and affinity of the two, and urge that the perception of the one—the Progress without us—and the pursuit of the other—the Progress within us—support and fertilize each the other. The more we know or can learn of the one the more effectively do we pursue the other, and conversely. The light and the fruits are bound together: the theory and the practice of Progress cannot be dissevered without the ruin of both.
The ideal of Progress which we present to ourselves is and must be one which is partly determined or limited by past achievement and partly enlarged by the study of what powers higher than our own have accomplished and are accomplishing. The formation of it must move constantly between a respect for what has been achieved and a worship, so to speak, for what is far better than anything that yet has been or become fact, and therefore incumbent or imperative upon us.
The mode and manner of the Progress which is achieved in the Universe has become in various ways clearer to us and opens out undreamt-of possibilities, and our assurance of its reality is ever more and more confirmed, while on the other hand its actual or past results at the lower level of nature have grown and are growing more familiar. We see that Progress is the essential and therefore eternal form of life and spiritual being, which endows it everywhere with worth and substance. With this comes the conviction that the source of all this lies inward, in that inwardness where our true selves lie and springs from the very nature of that. The spirit which is within us is not other than the spirit which upholds and maintains the whole Universe and works after the same fashion. And with regard to this its manner of working, we have learned that it proceeds by taking account of its own past achievements, imagining or conceiving for itself tasks relevant to these but not limited by them, and finds in that the conditions and stimulus to their actualization. It is our business to imitate this procedure and so to contribute to the advance of the whole. No work so done is or can be lost. We are justified in supposing that in so doing we are leagued together in effective co-operation with one another and with all other forces at work in the whole. In and through us, though not in and through us only, Progress goes on, drawing us along with it. Inner and outer Progress, freeallegiance and loyal subjection concur and do not clash, and the world in which we live and act appears to us as it is—a city of God which is also a self-governed and self-administered city of free men.
But above all, what it prescribes to us is the duty—another name for 'the ideal of action'—to seek first light as to the true nature of our world and ourselves, dismissing and disregarding all appearance, however charming or seductive. Unless we learn to see Progress as universal and omnipresent and omnipotent, we shall set before ourselves ideals of action which are false and treacherous. We must exert ourselves not merely to apprehend, but to dwell in the apprehension and vision of it.
And if there were no other reason, we should know it for the right ideal—this command first to seek light—because it is the hardest thing that can be asked of us or that we can ask of ourselves. But what is thus asked is not mere Faith and Hope, but a loyal adherence to the knowledge which is within us.
Is this not the hardest? To-day, when over there in France and Flanders, and indeed almost all over Europe, as in a sort of Devil's smithy, men are busied in the most horrid self-destruction. The accumulated stores of age-long and patient industry are being consumed and annihilated; the works and monuments of civilized life are laid low: all physical and intellectual energies are bent to the service of destruction. The very surface of the kindly and fertile earth is seamed and scarred and wasted. And the human beings who live and move in this inferno, are jerked like puppets hither and thither by the operation of passions to which we dare not venture to give names, lest we be found either not condemning what defiles and imbrutes our nature or denying our meed of praise and gratitude to what ennobles it. All this portentous activity and business flows from no other fount and isfed by no other spring than the spirit which is within us, that spirit which has created that wealth, material, artistic, spiritual, which it is so busily engaged in wrecking and undoing. It is still as of old, making History, making it in the old fashion with the old ends in view and by the exercise of its old familiar powers. And if in this tragic scene or episode we cannot still read the features of Progress, our theory is a baseless dream, and we can frame no valid or 'right' ideal of action. For except to an environment known to be still, because always, the work and self-expression of a spirit akin to, and indeed identical with our own, and except as knowing ourselves to be still, because always, in all our ways of working its vehicles and instruments, we can neither define nor realize any ideals of action at all. This war is not an accident, nor an outburst of subterranean natural forces, but the act and deed of human will, and being so it cannot be merely evil.
What, then, can we read not into, but out of, the tragic spectacle now being enacted, not merely before but in, through, and by us? Unless we have all along been mistaken, the victims of mere delusion and error, here, too, there has been and still is Progress. Primarily and principally what is taking place, is a tremendous revelation of the potencies which in our nature—in that which makes us men—have escaped our notice and therefore, because unseen or ignored, working in the dark, have not yet been drawn upon and utilized. There has been and still is going on, an enormous increase of self-knowledge. At first sight this seems wholly an opening up of undreamt-of evil. Side by side there has come to us a parallel revelation of undreamt-of good. I must bear witness to my conviction that we are beholding a tremendous inrush or uprush of good into man and his world. But what I wish to dwell upon is the growing and ever-confirmedrevelation of an intimate relation or connexion between the two which is the very spring of Progress, viz. that the supply of good is not only adequate and more than adequate to the utmost demand made upon it, in the combating of the evil, and that for this reason, that while on the one hand the evil that impedes or counter-works the good is itself of spiritual origin, its existence and power is conditioned by the law that it must evoke and stimulate the very power which it attempts to crush and defeat. This is, as I have said, the now discovered and known spring of Progress both within and without us, that whatsoever is evil, evil just because it is enacted and does not merely occur, passes within the reach of knowledge and understanding, and in the measure that it passes into the light, not merely loses its sting and its force, but is convertible and converted into a strengthening condition of that which in its first appearance it seemed merely to thwart. Even regress is seen to be a necessary incident in progress, and the seasons which we call periods of decadence to be occasions in which the spirit progresses in secret, recruiting itself not by idleness or rest, but genuinely refreshing and recreating itself.