All such considerations will seem to many of you hopelessly general. You will have missed, thus far in my account, concrete instances to illustrate how what I have now called the reason actually works, how it is related to experience, how it helps us toward the broader view of things, how it makes the connections of life more obvious, how it raises our intuitions to higher levels. And unfortunately, since I have no time to discourse to you upon the science called Logic--the science part of whose proper duty it is to define the nature and the office of what I have now called the reason--I must indeed fail, in this brief summary, to give you any adequate account of what can be accomplished through the appeal to this source of insight. All that I shall try to do, on this occasion, is to mention{94}to you a very few instances, some of them relatively trivial, wherein, through reasoning processes, we actually get these larger intuitions on higher levels, these higher modes of grasping the unity of things. Having thus very imperfectly exemplified what I mean by the synthetic processes of reasoning, I shall be ready barely to suggest to you, as I close, how the reason can be, and is, a source of religious insight.
In some recent logical discussions, and in particular in my colleague Professor Hibben's text-book of logic, there has been used an example, trivial in itself, but in its own way typical--an example which is meant to show how there exists a mental process which is surely worthy of the name reasoning, and which is, nevertheless, no mere process of forming abstract ideas and no mere analysis of the meaning of assumed premises, although, of course, both abstraction and analysis have their subordinate places in this process. The reasoning involved in this example is of the very simplest sort. It is expressed in an old story which many of you will have heard.
According to this story, an aged ecclesiastic, garrulous and reminiscent, was once, in a social company, commenting upon the experiences that had come to him in his long and devoted life. Fully meaning to keep sacred the secrets of the confessional, the old man was nevertheless led to say: "Ah--it is strange, and sometimes terrible, what, in my profession, one may have to face and consider.{95}You must know, my friends, my very first penitent was--a murderer! I was appalled." The old priest had hardly spoken when the company was joined by an aged and prominent nobleman of the region, whom all present greeted with great respect. Saluting his priestly friend with no little reverence, the nobleman turned to the company and said, with calm unconsciousness: "You must know, my friends, in my youth I was the very first person whom my honored friend here ever confessed."
Now observe. The priest had not said who the murderer was. The nobleman in his contribution to the conversation had not confessed to the company the murder. He had not mentioned it in any way. And the priest had scrupulously avoided mentioning him. But all present drew at once the reasonable conclusion that, granting the correctness of the two assertions, the nobleman was a murderer. We, of course, must all agree in this conclusion. Now is this conclusion the result of a mere analysis of either of the two assertions made? And does the conclusion merely result from our power to form abstract ideas? Plainly, the conclusion is due to the power of all present to make a synthesis, or, as one sometimes says, to put two and two together. Plainly, whatever abstract ideas are here used, it is not these which constitute the main work of a reasonable being who views the situation in which the nobleman is placed by the whole sense of the conversation. Reason here discovers a novel fact which{96}neither the priest nor the nobleman had stated. This discovery is as much an experience as if it were the observation of an actual killing of one man by another. Only it is the discovery of the relations involved in a synthesis of meanings. This discovery is at once empirical (yes, in the broader sense of the word intuitive), and it is a discovery of a necessary connection. It is not due to mere analysis. It is not a bit of barren intellectualism. It is not an unpractical comment. It is a discovery that might wreck the nobleman's reputation, and that might more or less indirectly lead to his ultimate conviction upon a capital charge. Now, that is an example, trivial enough if viewed as a mere anecdote, but a typical example, of the synthetic and constructive use of reason as a source of insight.
Let me turn to another also at first sight seemingly trivial case. An English logician, De Morgan, long ago called attention to a form of reasoning which, up to his time, the logicians had unduly neglected. If you assume that "a horse is an animal," you can reasonably conclude that "the owner of a horse is the owner of an animal"; that "whoever loves a horse loves an animal," and so on indefinitely. In brief, as you at once see, from the one assertion, "A horse is an animal," there rationally follow a limitless number of possible inferences of the form: "Whatever is in any relation R to a horse is in that same relation R to an animal." Now you may indeed at first, as I just said,{97}imagine such reasonings to be comparatively trivial. Whether they prove to be so, however, depends wholly upon the objects in question, upon our own interests in these objects, and upon circumstances. They might be vastly important. From the assertion, "Mr. Taft is President of the United States," there follows, by this sort of reasoning, the assertion, "Whoever is a personal friend of Mr. Taft is a personal friend of the President of the United States." And such a conclusion some people might be very glad to have you draw. So, too, whoever is a member of Mr. Taft's family, or household, or club, or of the university whose degrees he holds, or whoever is a fellow-townsman, or fellow-countryman, or partisan, or opponent, or enemy of Mr. Taft, whoever agrees with what he says in his speeches, whoever plays golf with him, or whoever hopes or fears for his re-election, stands in just that relation, whatever it may be, to the President of the United States. And how important such rational inferences might appear for the comprehension of somebody's actual situation and prospects and acts depends upon the persons and the interests that may be in question. To some people just such inferences, at one moment or another, will not seem trivial, will be worth making, and will be anything but feats of barren intellectualism. That they are easy inferences to make is beside the mark. I have no time to ask you here to study with me the harder inferences upon topics that do not concern our main purpose. What I{98}need, however, is to illustrate to you that such reasoning processes go beyond mere analysis, and do involve a rational and articulate intuition of a novel aspect of experience. For I defy you to find by any mere analysis of the assertion, "Mr. Taft is President," the innumerable assertions about friends, about family, about speeches, and policies, and so on, which as a fact rationally follow, in the indicated way, from that first assertion. You find these new results by taking a broader view of the unity of experience. What, then, I need to have you see is that the reason which, even in its lightest deeds, can accomplish such syntheses, and which can lead to such ordered intuitions, and can be the endless source of such novelties, is not merely the reason of whose powers as a source of insight James gives so discouraging a picture.
Having thus barely illustrated the thesis that reason can be both productive of new insight and constructively synthetic in its grasp of wider ranges of experience than we could observe without it, let me add that, in the exact sciences, and in particular in mathematics, the reasoning process, using just such forms of synthesis as I have now illustrated, is constantly leading investigators to the most varied and novel discoveries. These discoveries are not due to mere analysis. They are reports of facts and the results of synthetic construction. As Mr. Charles Peirce loves to point out, the new discoveries made in mathematics, and by purely rational processes,{99}are so numerous that for each year a volume of many hundreds of closely printed pages is needed to give, with strictly technical brevity, even the barest outline of the contents of the papers containing the novel results of that one year's researches. In their union with other sciences, the mathematical researches constantly lead to still vaster ranges of novel discovery. Reason, then, is not merely barren, is not mainly concerned with unproductive analysis, but does enrich our survey of experience, of its unity and of its meaning.
Perhaps some of you may still object that, if I define reason in the terms suggested by these instances, there seems to be danger of making the word "reason" mean simply the same as the word "insight." For insight, as I defined it in my opening lecture, means a coherent view of many facts in some sort of unity. And in this case, as you may now say, why use two words at all? I reply that, in fact, all true insight is, to my mind, rational insight, upon one or another level of the development of our power to become rational beings. But you will remember that insight, as I defined it, also means knowledge which is intimate and manifold, as well as knowledge which views facts and relations in their unity. The words intuition and experience are often used to lay stress upon that aspect of our insight which either makes it intimate or else brings it into touch with many and various facts. And such usage is convenient. The word reason, as I have just{100}exemplified its more synthetic meaning, calls our attention precisely to that aspect of our better insight which is involved in our power to grasp many facts in theirunity, to see the coherence, the inter-relationship, the totality of a set of experiences. Now when insight reaches higher levels, these various aspects of our knowledge are never sundered. But as we grow toward higher insight, we know in part and prophesy in part and are child-like in so far as that which is perfect has not yet come.
In these, our imperfect stages of growth, sometimes our knowledge possesses intimacy, but still has to remain content, for the moment, with a more inarticulate grasp of deeper meanings. In such cases James's sort of intuition, or what is often called blind faith, is mainly in question. And this is indeed a stage on the way to insight. We feel unities but do not see them. Sometimes, however, as in much of our ordinary experience, the state of our minds is different; our knowledge revels in, or else contends with, the endless variety and multiplicity of the facts of life, and lacks a grasp of their unity. In that case our insight is often called "merely empirical." We have experience; and so far our knowledge prospers. But we neither feel vaguely nor see clearly the total sense of things. And in such cases our sight is too busy to give us time for higher insight. As the Germans say, we do not see the wood because of the trees.
In a third stage of partial insight we may stand{101}where, for instance, the masters of the exact sciences stand. We then grasp, with clearness, larger unities of controllable experience. We create objects, as the mathematicians create, in an ideal world of our own contemplation; and we then come to see that these ideal creations of ours do, indeed, reveal the eternal truth regarding a world of seemingly impersonal or superpersonal reality. We learn of this reality through the coherent synthesis of our ideal constructions. Our intuition is in this case at once empirical, articulate, and such as to survey the broad landscape of the genuine relations of things. But alas! in most such cases our objects, although they are indeed presented to our rational intuition, are often abstract enough in their seeming. They are objects such as numbers, and series, and ordered arrays of highly ideal entities. In such cases the reason does its typical work; but often the objects of our insight fail to meet the more intense needs of life.
Thus, then, inarticulate intuitions, ordinary or sometimes more scientific observations of the details of life, and mathematical reasonings concerning the unity and the connections of highly ideal objects such as numbers, come to stand in our experience as more or less sharply sundered grades of imperfect insight. Thus we naturally come to view the typical achievements of our reason as a thing apart, and the rational or exact sciences as remote both from the intuitive faith of the little ones and from{102}the wealthy experience of the men of common-sense and of the men of natural science. As a fact, all these stages of insight are hints of what the Supreme Court meant when it appealed to the "rule of reason." True insight, if fulfilled, would be empirical, for it would face facts; intuitive, for it would survey them and grasp them, and be intimate with them; rational, for it would view them in their unity.
Our lengthy effort to define the work and the place of the reason has brought us to the threshold of an appreciation of its relation to the religious insight which we are seeking.
In looking for salvation, we discover that our task is defined for us by those aspects of individual and social experience upon which our two previous lectures have dwelt. We have learned from the study of these two sorts of experience that, whatever else we need for our salvation, one of our needs is to come into touch with a life that in its unity, in its meaning, in its perfection, is vastly superior to our present human type of life. And so the question has presented itself: Have we any evidence that such a superhuman type of life is a real fact in the world? The mystics, and many of the faithful, answer this question by saying: "Yes. We have such evidence. It is the assurance that we get through intuition, through feeling, through the light revealed to us{103}in certain moments when thought ceases, and the proud intellect is dumb, and when the divine speaks quite directly to the passive and humbled soul." Now when we calmly consider the evidence of such moments of inarticulate conviction, they strongly impress upon us what we have called the religious paradox. Faith, and the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on first admitting that we are naturally blind and helpless and ignorant, and worthless to know, of ourselves, any saving truth; and upon nevertheless insisting that we are quite capable of one very lofty type of knowledge--that we are capable, namely, of knowing God's voice when we hear it, of distinguishing a divine revelation from all other reports, of being sure, despite all our worthless ignorance, that the divine higher life which seems to speak to us in our moments of intuition is what it declares itself to be. If, then, there is a pride of intellect, does there not seem to be an equal pride of faith, an equal pretentiousness involved in undertaking to judge that certain of our least articulate intuitions are infallible? Surely here is a genuine problem, and it is a problem for the reason. We know that men differ in faith. We know that one man's intuition regarding the way of salvation may seem to another man to be a mere delusion, a deceitful dream. We know, from the reports of religious experience, that at times even the saints of greatest renown have doubted whether some of their most persuasive visions of the{104}divine were not, after all, due to the cunning deceit of an enemy of souls whom they more or less superstitiously feared. We know that to common-sense, despite its interest in salvation, the reports of the mystics and of the faithful have often appeared to be but the tale of private and vain imaginings. It is fair to ask what are the criteria whereby the true spiritual gifts, the genuine revelations, are to be distinguished. And this, I insist, is a question for the reason, for that aspect of our nature which has to do with forming estimates of wholes rather than of fragments--estimates of life in its entirety rather than of this or that feeling or moment of ecstasy in its isolation.
If, hereupon, without for the moment attempting to discuss how others, as, for instance, James himself, deal with the problem of the reasonable estimate of the value of our religious intuitions, I sketch for you my own opinion as to how reason does throw light upon the religious paradox, I must again emphasise a matter that I mentioned in my opening lecture and that is much neglected. Religious faith does, indeed, involve a seemingly paradoxical attempt to transcend the admitted ignorance of the needy human being, to admit that of himself this being knows almost nothing about the way of salvation, and nevertheless to insist that he is able to recognise his Deliverer's voice as the voice of a real master of life when he hears that voice, or--apart from metaphor--that he is able to be sure what revelation of a divine life, not{105}his own, is the true one when he happens to get it. But religion is not alone in this paradoxical pride of humility. Science and common-sense alike involve a similar admission of the depths of our human fallibility and ignorance, on the one hand, and an analogous assurance that, despite this our fragmentariness of experience, despite our liability to be deceived, we nevertheless can recognise truth when experience once has not wholly verified it, but has sufficiently helped us to get it. For, as individuals, we are constantly confident beyond what our present experience, taken by itself, clearly reveals to us. We, for instance, trust our individual memory in the single case, while admitting its pervasive fallibility in general. We persistently view ourselves as in reasonably close touch with the general and common results of human experience, even at the moment when we have to admit how little we know about the mind or the experience of any one fellow-man, even our nearest friend. We say that some of our opinions, for instance, are warranted by the common-sense of mankind. That is, we pretend once for all to know a good deal about what the common experience of mankind is. And yet, if we look closer, we see that we do not directly see or experience the genuine inner life of any one of mankind except the private self which each one of us regards as his own, while, if we still further consider the matter, we can readily observe how little each one of us really knows even about himself. When{106}we appeal then to what we call common-sense, we pretend to know what it is that, as we say, the mind of mankind finds to be true. But if we are asked to estimate the real state of mind of any individual man, how mysterious that state is! In brief, the paradox of feeling confidence in our own judgment, even while regarding all human opinion as profoundly fallible, is not merely a religious paradox, but also pervades our whole social and personal and even our scientific types of opinion. Not to have what is called a reasonable confidence in our own individual opinions is the mark of a weakling. But usually, if our personal opinions relate to important matters, they bring us into more or less serious conflict with at least some of the opinions of other men. Conflict is one mark that your opinions are worth having. When the conflict arises, we are usually led to consider how fallible other men are. They are fallible, we say, because they are human. How little any poor man knows! Yes, but if this principle holds true, how doubtful are my own opinions! Yet if I fill my mind with that reflection, to the exclusion of all other reasonable considerations, I condemn myself not to mere fallibility, but to certain failure.
The paradox is universal. It pervades all forms and activities of human inquiry. That is the first synthetic observation of the reason, when it surveys the field of human opinion. Everywhere we live by undertaking to transcend in opinion what the{107}evidence before us, at any one moment, directly and infallibly warrants. But is it rational to do this? And if so,whyis it rational?
The answer is that while there is much irrational presumption and overconfidence in our human world, there is also a perfectly rational principle which warrants certain forms and methods of thus transcending in our opinions the immediately presented evidence of the moment when we judge. This principle is as universal as it is generally neglected. Rightly understood, it simply transforms for you your whole view of the real universe in which you live.
An opinion of yours may be true or false. But when you form an opinion, what are you trying to do? You are trying to anticipate, in some fashion, what a wider view, a larger experience of your present situation, a fuller insight into your present ideas, and into what they mean, would show you, if you now had that wider view and larger experience. Such an effort to anticipate what the wider view would even now show, if you were possessed of that view, involves both what are usually called theoretical interests and what pragmatists, such as James himself, have often characterised as practical interests. One can express the matter by saying, that you are trying, through your opinions, to predict what a larger insight, if it were present to you, would show or would find, that is, would experience. You can also say that you are trying to define what{108}a fuller apprehension and a fairer estimate of your present purposes, and intentions, and interests, and deeds, and of their outcome, and of their place in life, would bring before your vision. In brief (whether you lay more stress upon deeds and their outcome, or upon experiences and their contents), any expression of opinion, made at any time, is an appeal of the self of the moment to the verdict, to the estimate, to the experience of a larger and better informed insight, in the light of which the self of the moment proposes to be judged. The special criteria by which your momentary opinion is tested, at the time when you form that opinion, vary endlessly with your mood and your training and your feelings, and with the topics and tasks in which you happen to be interested. But the universal form in which any opinion comes to your consciousness, and gets its definition for your own mind, is this form of an appeal to an insight that is superior in grasp, in unity, in coherence, in reasonableness to your momentary insight.
Now you can indeed say: "When I form and express an opinion, I appeal from my present experiences to some wider insight that I viewas if it werepossible. My opinion asserts thatif I werepermitted to see what I just now do not directly experience, I should find the facts to be so and so." But no such account of the matter is quite complete. Everything that you regard as possible has to be conceived as somehow based upon what you regard{109}as actual. And so, in fact, your opinions are always appeals to some form of wider or larger or deeper or richer insight that, in the act of appealing to it, you regard as a present or as a past or as a future reality--in brief, as a live and perfectly concrete insight to whose verdict you appeal. Philosophers often express this by saying that all opinions are nothing but efforts to formulate the real contents of experience. This view I accept.
So then, as I insist, whatever your opinions, your expression of them is an appeal to some wider insight that you regard as real, and that you view as a live insight which comprehends your ideas, and which sees how they are related to genuine experience. This, I affirm, is the universal form which all opinion takes. A true opinion is true, because in fact it expresses what the wider insight confirms. A false opinion is false, because it is refuted by the light of this same wider view. Apart from such a confirmation or refutation in the light of such a larger view, the very concepts of truth and error, as applied to opinions which are not wholly confirmed or set aside by the instantaneous evidence of the moment when the opinions are formed or uttered, have no meaning. True is the judgment that is confirmed by the larger view to which it appeals. False is the assertion that is not thus confirmed.Upon such a conception the very ideas of truth and error depend. Without such a conception truth and error have no sense. If such a conception is not itself{110}a true view of our situation, that is, if there is no wider insight, our opinions have neither truth nor error, and are all of them alike merely meaningless. When you are ignorant, you are ignorant of what the wider view makes clear to its own insight. If you blunder or are deluded, your blunder is due to a defective apprehension which the wider view confirms. And thus, whether you are ignorant or blundering, wise or foolish, whether the truth or the falsity of your present opinion is supposed to be actual, one actuality is equally and rationally presupposed, as the actuality to which all your opinions refer, and in the light of which they possess sense.This is the actuality of some wider insight with reference to which your own opinion gets its truth or its falsity.
To this wider insight, to this always presupposed vision of experience as it is, of the facts as they are, you are always appealing. Your every act of assertion displays the genuineness of the appeal and exemplifies the absolute rational necessity of asserting that the appeal is made to an insight that is itself real.
Frequently you do, indeed, call this insight merely the common-sense of mankind. But, strange to say, this common-sense of mankind is always and inevitably conceived by you in terms that distinguish it from the fleeting momentary views of any or of all merely individual men. Men--if I may judge them by my own case, and by what I hear other{111}men confess--men, when taken merely as individuals, always live from moment to moment in a flickering way, normally confident, indeed, but clearly seeing at any one instant very little at a time. They are narrow in the span of the more direct insight. They grasp data bit by bit, and comprehend, in their instantaneous flashes of insight, only little scraps and tiny bundles of ideas. I who now speak to you cannot hold clearly and momentarily before my mind at once even all of the meaning that I try to express in two or three of my successive sentences. I live looking before and after, and pining for what is not, and grasping after unity; and I find each moment crumbling as it flies; and each thought and each sentence of my discourse drops into momentary forgetfulness so soon as I have carefully built up its passing structure. In our life all thus flows. We fly from one flash of insight to another.
But nevertheless our opinions, so we say, reflect sometimes the common-sense of mankind. They conform to the verdict of humanity. But who amongst us ever goes beyond thus confidently holding that he reflects the common-sense of mankind? Who amongst us personally and individually experiences, at any moment, the confirmation said to be given by the verdict of humanity? The verdict of humanity? What man ever finds immediately presented to his own personal insight that totality of data upon which this verdict is said to depend?{112}The common-sense of mankind? What mortal man is there who ever finds incorporated in his flickering, fleeting, crumbling, narrow moments of personal experience the calm and secure insight which this common-sense of mankind, or of enlightened mankind, is said to possess?
No, the common-sense of mankind is, for us all, a sort of super-individual insight, to which we appeal without ourselves fully possessing it. This "common"-sense of mankind is just the sensewhich no man of us all ever individually possesses. For us all it is, indeed, something superhuman. We spend part of our busy little lives in somewhat pretentiously undertaking to report its dicta. But it is simply one of the countless forms in which we conceive the wider insight to be incorporated.The true rational warrant for this confidence of ours lies in the fact that whatever else is real, some form of such a wider insight, some essentially super-individual and superhuman insight is real. For unless it is real our opinions, including any opinion that we may have that doubts or questions or denies its reality, are all equally meaningless. Thus even when we appeal to common-sense we really appeal to a genuine but super-human insight.
Let us not here spend time, however, upon analysing this or that special form in which we are accustomed, for one special purpose or another, to conceive the wider insight. What is clear is that we constantly, and in every opinion, in every confession of{113}ignorance appeal to such an insight. That such an insight is real, must be presupposed even in order to assert that our present opinions are errors. What interests us most at this point is, however, this, that whatever else the whole real universe is, the real universe exists only in case it is the object, and the very being, of such an insight, of such an inclusive experience, of such a view of what is. For, when you hold any opinions whatever about the real world, or about any of its contents, characters, or values, your opinions are either true or false, and are true or false by virtue of their actual conformity to the live insight which experiences what makes them true or false, and which thereforeipso factoexperiences what the real world is. If there is no such world-possessing insight, then, once more, your opinions about the world are neither true nor false. Or, otherwise stated, if there is no such inclusive insight there is no world. To the real world, then, this insight which comprehends the world, and which knows whatever is true to be true, and whatever is false about the world to be false--to the real world this insight, I say, belongs. And the whole world belongs to it and is its object and essence. Whatever is real is real for that insight, and is in its experience, and exists as its possession, and as its well-known and well-comprehended content, and as its image and expression and meaning.
All this I say, as you may note, not because I hold in high esteem any of our private human{114}opinions, but only because,except in the light of such an all-seeing comprehension of facts as they are, our individual opinions about the world cannot even be false. For opinion, in all its fleeting blindness and in its human chaos of caprices, is ceaselessly an appeal to the judge, to the seer, to the standard experience, to the knower of facts as they are, to the wider view, to the decisive insight. And opinions about reality in its wholeness, about the world, about the all, are appeals to the all-judging insight, to the all-seeing view, to the knowledge and experience that grasps the totality of facts, to the widest outlook, to the deepest insight, to the absolute rational decision. If this be so, then an opinion to the effect that there exists no such widest and deepest insight, and no such final view, is itself just such an appeal to the final insight, simply because it is an opinion about reality. To assert then that there is no largest view, no final insight, no experience that is absolute, is to assert that the largest view observes that there is no largest view, that the final insight sees that there is no such insight, that the ultimate experience is aware that there is no ultimate experience. And such an assertion is indeed a self-contradiction.
This, I assert, is the only rational way of stating the nature of opinion, of truth or error, and consequently of reality. This is the synthesis which reason inevitably accomplishes whenever it rightly views the nature and the implications of even our most flickering and erroneous and uncertain{115}opinions. We can err about what you will. But if we err, we simply come short of the insight to which we are aiming to conform, and in the light of which our ideas get absolutely all of their meaning. In every error, in every blunder, in all our darkness, in all our ignorance, we are still in touch with the eternal insight. We are always seeking to know even as we are known.
I have sought in this sketch to vindicate the general rights of rational insight as against mere momentary or fragmentary intuition. I have also tried to show you what synthesis of reason gives us a genuinely religious insight.
"My first penitent," said the priest of our story, "was a murderer." "And I," said the nobleman, "was this priest's first penitent."
"I am ignorant of the vast and mysterious real world"--thus says our sense of human fallibility and weakness when we are first awakened to our need of rational guidance. The saying is true. The mystery is appalling. "I am ignorant of the real world." Yes; but reason, reflecting upon the nature and the essential meaning of opinion, of truth, of error, and of ignorance, points out to us this thesis: "That of which I am ignorant is that about which I can err. But error is failure to conform my momentary opinion to the very insight which I mean and to which I am all the while appealing. Error is failure to conform to the inclusive insight which{116}overarches my errors with the heaven of its rational clearness. Error is failure to grasp the very light which shines in my darkness, even while my darkness comprehends it not. That of which I am ignorant is then essentially the object of a super-human and divine insight."
"I am ignorant of the world. To be ignorant is to fail to grasp the object of the all-inclusive and divine insight." That is the expression of our situation. Reason easily makes the fitting synthesis when it considers the priest and the nobleman. I ask you to make the analogous synthesis regarding the world and the divine insight. This synthesis here takes form in concluding that the world is the object of an all-inclusive and divine insight, which is thus the supreme reality.
I have but sketched for you the contribution of reason to our quest. This contribution will seem to many of you too abstract and too contemplative to meet vital religious needs. In fact, what I have said will mean little to you unless you come to see how it can be translated into an adequate expression in our active life. To this task of such a further interpretation of the mission of the reason as a guide of life my next lecture shall be devoted.
{117}
{118}
{119}
I could not discuss, in my last lecture, the office of the reason as a source of religious insight without sketching for you what insight I personally regard as the most important result of the right use of reason. This sketch was of course, in my own mind, a part of an extended body of philosophical doctrine. It does not lie within the intent of these lectures to present a system of philosophy. I ought, nevertheless, to begin this lecture by saying a few words about the relation of my last discussion to certain religious and philosophical opinions of which you have all heard, and by indicating why it has seemed to me worth while to call your attention to the mere hint of a philosophy with which the last discussion closed. Having thus indicated the setting in which I want you to see the brief exposition of a general theory which I find to be indispensable for our main purpose, I shall devote the rest of this lecture to the task of connecting the insight which reason gives to us with the main purpose of our inquiry, namely, with the undertaking to know the nature and the way of salvation. Reason is of importance in so{120}far as what it shows us enables us to direct our will and to come into closer touch with truths which are not only theoretical, but also practical.
We shall therefore discuss at some length the relation of our rational knowledge to our active life, and the relation of our rational will to the world in which we are to work out our salvation if we can.
The nature and the teachings of the human reason have interested philosophers from very nearly the beginning of philosophical inquiry. What I told you about the subject in our former discussion reports a decidedly modern version of a very old opinion--an opinion which has been repeatedly examined, revised, assailed, and defended. Let me say a word as to its history.
Plato held that, through our reason, we are able to rise beyond the world of sense and to hold communion with a realm of ideally significant and eternal being. What Plato really meant by his ideal realm, and in what sense the world of what Plato called the eternal realities, the forms or ideas, could be, as Plato held it to be, a divine world, in its worth and dignity, later philosophy repeatedly attempted to grasp.
The results of such philosophical thinking have deeply affected the history of religion and still influence the religious interest of all of you. One{121}version of that philosophical tradition whose origin is in the thought of Plato--a late version, and also one greatly transformed by motives of which Plato had known in his day nothing, is the familiar version to which, in the last lecture, I in passing alluded--the prologue to our Fourth Gospel. You will all agree that this prologue attempts to state a religious insight. The relation of this New Testament view of the world of the reason to the doctrine which still later came to be formulated by the theologians of the Christian Church I have here not time to discuss. It is enough now to say that an opinion according to which our articulate reason, as well as the more inarticulate intuition of faith, has some sort of access to the world of the "Logos," and some sort of participation in a genuine apprehension of the divine life, has come to form part of the religion in which you all have been trained. In so far, then, it is surely right to say that the reason, as the philosophers have defined it, has been an actual source of religious opinion and experience.
In modern times, and especially since Kant, philosophy has been led to see the older doctrines of the human reason, and of its knowledge of the divine, from various decidedly novel points of view. The sketch of a theory of the reason as a source of insight, which I gave, was influenced by Kant's famous teaching about the nature and unity of human experience. Kant stated this theory as the doctrine that all our human knowledge involves an{122}interpretation of the data of our senses in the light of what he called the "unity of apperception." In less technical terms, Kant's meaning is that all facts of which a human experience can obtain knowledge are known to us as the possible objects of an insight which we conceive to be virtually one, as the insight of our own truly knowing Self, and as the insight without reference to which no opinion of ours has any sense whatever. This one cognitive Self is, according to Kant, the conceived virtual subject or possessor of all that we view as our experience. And this presupposed unity is the condition of all our knowledge.
But Kant's doctrine, as he stated it, is in many ways problematic and dissatisfying. The form of philosophical idealism which I myself defend goes in certain respects far beyond Kant's position. The "one experience," in which, according to him, we find a place for any fact which we conceive as knowable at all, is defined by Kant as a virtual insight, not, so to speak, a live and concrete consciousness. He regards it also as purely human, as a knowledge of appearances--not of any ultimate realities. The form of philosophical idealism which, at the last time, I outlined depends, however, upon simply universalising, and rendering live and concrete, Kant's conception of the Self, of the united experience, to which we appeal, and in the light of which our opinions get all their sense--all their character and value as true or as false opinions.{123}This one Self, this unity of experience, to which we always appeal, cannot consistently be viewed by us as merely our own individual or private self, or as merely human; and its insight cannot rationally be interpreted merely as an insight into what is apparent, that is into what is not really real. Nor can it be viewed merely as something virtual--a possible unity of experience, to which we would appeal if we could. In my opinion it must be conceived as more live and real and concrete and conscious and genuine than are any of our passing moments of fleeting human experience. It must be viewed as an actual and inclusive and divinely rational knowledge of all facts in their unity. And the very nature of facts, their very being as facts, must be determined by their presence as objects in the experience of this world-embracing insight. This was the philosophical theory that I sketched in my former lecture. This is my view of what reason teaches.
Now this thesis, this somewhat remote descendant of the Platonic doctrine of the function of reason, this modern version of the concept of the "Logos" as the light that "shineth in the darkness" of our ordinary human experience, this revision and transformation of the Kantian theory of knowledge, has, by virtue of the long history of the doctrine in question, and by virtue of the difficult considerations upon which, as a philosophical thesis, it rests, a highly technical character. This technical aspect of the teaching in question forbids, in these lectures.{124}any adequate exposition, or criticism, or defence of its problems and of its merits as a basis for a system of philosophy. And you will surely not find unnatural the fact that a study of the function of the reason should indeed involve such technical and complex issues. I mention these issues only to say at once how and how far, in the present lectures, we are concerned with them.
We are seeking a way of salvation. And in these discussions we are mainly concerned with the sources of insight into what that way is. I am not attempting to work out, in your presence, a systematic philosophy. Why, then, have I introduced this mere sketch of philosophical idealism into our inevitably crowded programme? I answer: I have done so because I have wanted to illustrate the office of reason by telling you in my own way how I view the matter. The reason is, in fact, a source of religious insight to many people who do not reflect upon its deliverances as philosophers seek to reflect, and who may not agree with me in what little I have time to expound of my own philosophical opinions. My effort has been to tell in philosophical terms what such people really mean.
In such people reason very often shows itself indirectly and concretely, by its fruits, through their deeds, through their purpose, in a word, through their will. We shall ere long see how this can be and is the case. Reason is present in such lives and inspires them. A genuine relation to some{125}spirit of all truth, a perfectly sincere touch with an articulate and universal insight, a translation of the lesson and the meaning of the synthetic reason into a definite practical postulate that life shall be and is an essentially reasonable and therefore an essentially divine enterprise--such I find to be the essence of the religious insight of many serious minds. Beside the earnest devotion of such people to the business which life assigns to them, the mere theories of a philosopher may seem shadowy enough. And if such people comment upon what they hear of my philosophy by saying that they do not understand it, and doubt whether they agree with it, I am not on that account at all disposed to complain of them, or to assert that reason is to them no source of religious insight. I take pleasure, however, in observing that, in my opinion, they agree with my doctrine in the concrete, and express it in their religious life far better than I can express it in my technical terms, however much these people may fail to grasp what my terms mean or to accept my formulations. The best expression of your reason is your life, if you live as one enlightened from above ought to live. You are not obliged to accept a technical formula in order to embody the spirit of that formula in your daily work. I know many men who are far more the servants and ministers of the true rational insight than, in my present human life, I shall ever succeed in becoming, and who, nevertheless, either are impatient of every{126}philosophical theory, or, if philosophically trained, are opposed to me in my philosophy.
Nevertheless, I need to express, in my own way, what is the insight that is really at the heart of the lives of just such people. What I am first interested in emphasising is of course this, that, in my opinion, my interpretation of the insight of which reason is the source, actually expresses one important aspect of the spirit in which those live whom I regard as the true servants of the divine reason. But my interest in the matter does not cease here. I can, of course, express my opinions only in the terms that appeal to me. But whatever you think of my formulas, I am very anxious to have you see that, as the life of such people convincingly shows, reason has been, and is, a source of religious insight to them, and that our philosophical differences relate simply to the way in which we formulate our interpretation of the meaning of this source.
Reason has been such a source of insight. That is true as an historical fact. If you can find anything in the Platonic dialogues which appeals to you as involving an insight that has religious value, you must recognise this truth. It is a mere matter of history that Christian doctrine as it has come down to us is, in one aspect, profoundly affected by Plato's influence. The myth of the men in the cave, in the "Platonic Republic," the myth in Plato's "Phaedrus," which tells about the banishment of the soul from its heavenly life and from its intercourse with the{127}ideal world, and which interprets all our loftier human loves as a longing of the soul for its divine home land--these myths are allegories which Plato intended to illustrate his own view of what reason teaches us. These myths express in figurative speech a philosophy that actually affects to-day your own religious interests. For instance, this philosophy influences your traditional conception of God, and your ideas about the immortal life of the soul. And if the prologue of the Fourth Gospel seems to you to contain any truth, your religious ideas are again moulded by a form of ancient philosophy which dealt with the nature and with the insight of the reason. My own sketch of modern philosophy is but a reinterpretation of the very truth which that ancient doctrine attempted to portray. Historically, then, some of your religious opinions are actually due to the work of the reason. My philosophy simply tries to interpret to you this work.
And reason not only has been, but now is, such a source of insight. And this is the case whenever you try to apply the "rule of reason" to any problem of your life, and hereby gain a confidence that, by being as reasonable and fair as you can, you are learning to conform your life to the view which, as you suppose, an all-wise God takes of its meaning. My philosophy simply tries to tell you why you have a right to hold that an all-wise being is real.
I am anxious, I say, to have such facts about the{128}office of reason recognised, whatever you may think of my philosophy. And this is my purpose when I use my philosophy merely to illustrate the office of reason. For indispensable as individual religious experience is, in all the capriciousness of its feelings--indispensable also as social religious experience is, with all its insistence upon human love and also upon human religious convention--the synthetic use of the reason, that is, the systematic effort "to see life steadily and see it whole," is also indispensable. The recent efforts to make light of the work of reason--efforts to which, at the last lecture, I directed your attention, would tend, if taken by themselves, to result in basing religion upon an inarticulate occultism, upon a sort of psychical research that would regard whatever witch may peep and mutter, whatever mystic may be unable to tell what he means, whatever dumb cry of the soul may remain stubbornly inarticulate, as amorepromising religious guide than is any form of serious and far-seeing devotion to the wider insight, which ought to survey life and to light our path.
Let my own appeal to philosophy, then, even if you do not agree with my formulas, stand as my protest against occultism and against the exclusive devotion to the inarticulate sources of religious insight. That I also prize the perfectly indispensable office of the more child-like intuitions, when they occupy their true place, you already know from my first two lectures. We cannot in our present life{129}do without these child-like intuitions. We cannot be just to them without aiming to live beyond them and to put away childish things.