PUBLISHER’S
NOTE. THE address contained in this book was originally given before the Young
Men’s Christian Association of Harvard University, in May, 1895. It was
afterwards repeated before the Society for Ethical Culture of Philadelphia and
the School of Applied Ethics at Plymouth. It was printed in the International
Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and, the demand for it having been so
great, we are glad to have the permission of the author and of the management
of the Journal to republish it in more convenient form. The author desires us
to add that he owes his application of the quotation with which the address
closes, to Mr. W. M. Salter, who used it in a similar way in an article in the
Index for August 24, 1882. IS LIFE
WORTH LIVING? William
James WHEN Mr. Mallock’s book with this title appeared some fifteen years
ago, the jocose answer that “it depends on the liver” had great currency in the
newspapers. The answer that I propose to give to-night cannot be jocose. In the
words of one of Shakespeare's prologues, “I come no more to make you laugh;
things now, That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,” must be my theme. In the
deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of
things works sadly, and I know not what such an Association as yours intends
nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead
you from the surface-glamour of existence and for an hour at least to make you
heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and
excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further
explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention,
commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the
lonely depths for an hour together and see what answers in the last folds and
recesses of things our question may find. PART I With many
men the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism that
makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our
dear old Walt Whitman's works are the standing text-book of this kind of
optimism; the mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman’s veins that it
abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling. “To
breathe the air, how delicious! To speak, to walk, to
seize something by the hand! . . . To be this incredible
God I am! . . . O amazement of things,
even the least particle! O spirituality of
things! . . . I too carol the Sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting, I too throb to the
brain and beauty of the earth and of all the growths of the earth. . . I sing to the last the
equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless
finales of things, I say Nature continues
— glory continues, I praise with electric
voice. For I do not see one
imperfection in the universe, And I do not see one
cause or result lamentable at last.” So
Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his
happiness to tell: “How tell
what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted only and felt, with
no object of my felicity but the emotion of felicity itself. I rose with the
sun and I was happy; I went to walk and I was happy; I saw ‘Maman’
and I was happy; I left her and I was happy. I rambled through the woods and
over the vine-slopes, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I worked in
the garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and happiness
followed me everywhere; it was in no one assignable thing; it was all within
myself; it could not leave me for a single instant.” If moods like
this could be made permanent and constitutions like these universal, there
would never be any occasion for such discourses as the present one. No
philosopher would seek to prove articulately that life is worth living, for the
fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself and the problem disappear
in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a
reply. But we are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal;
and alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning life,
those of temperamental pessimism always exist and oppose to them a standing
refutation. In what is called circular insanity, phases of melancholy succeed
phases of mania, with no outward cause that we can discover, and often enough
to one and the same well person life will offer incarnate radiance to-day and
incarnate dreariness tomorrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older
medical books used to call the concoction of the humors. In the words of the
newspaper joke, "it depends on the liver." Rousseau's ill-balanced
constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days a prey
to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear. And some men seem
launched upon the world even from their birth with souls as incapable of
happiness as Walt Whitman's was of gloom, and they have left us their messages
in even more lasting verse than his — the exquisite Leopardi, for example, or
our own contemporary, James Thomson, in that pathetic book, The City of Dreadful Night, which I
think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty, simply
because men are afraid to quote its words — they are so gloomy and at the same
time so sincere. In one place the poet describes a congregation gathered to
listen to a preacher in a great unillumined cathedral
at night. The sermon is too long to quote, but it ends thus: “O Brothers of sad
lives! they are so brief; A few short years must
bring us all relief: Can
we not bear these years of laboring breath? But if you would not
this poor life fulfil, Lo, you are free to
end it when you will, Without
the fear of waking after death.— “The organ-like
vibrations of his voice, Thrilled
through the vaulted aisles and died away; The yearning of the
tones which bade rejoice Was
sad and tender as a requiem lay: Our shadowy
congregation rested still As brooding on that
‘End it when you will.’ “Our shadowy
congregation rested still, As
musing on that message we had heard And brooding on that ‘End
it when you will’; Perchance
awaiting yet some other word; When keen as lightning
through a muffled sky Sprang forth a shrill
and lamentable cry:— “ ‘The man speaks sooth, alas! the man speaks sooth. We
have no personal life beyond the grave; There is no God; Fate
knows nor wrath nor ruth: Can
I find here the comfort which I crave? “ ‘In all eternity I had one chance, One
few years’ term of gracious human life: The splendors of the
intellect's advance, The
sweetness of the home with babes and wife; “ ‘The social pleasures with their genial
wit; The
fascination of the worlds of art; The glories of the
worlds of nature lit By
large imagination's glowing heart; “ ‘The rapture of mere being, full of
health; The careless childhood and the ardent youth. The
strenuous manhood winning various wealth. The
reverend age serene with life's long truth: “ ‘All the sublime prerogatives of Man; The
storied memories of the times of old, The patient tracking
of the world's great plan Through sequences and changes myriadfold. “ ‘This chance was never offered me before;
For
me the infinite past is blank and dumb: This chance recurreth never, nevermore; Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come. “ ‘And this sole chance was frustrate from
my birth, A
mockery, a delusion; and my breath Of noble human life
upon this earth So
racks me that I sigh for senseless death. “ ‘My wine of life is poison mixed with
gall, My
noonday passes in a nightmare dream, I worse than lose the
years which are my all: What
can console me for the loss supreme? “ ‘Speak not of comfort where no comfort is.
Speak
not at all: can words make foul things fair? Our life's a cheat,
our death a black abyss: Hush,
and be mute envisaging despair.—‘ “This vehement voice
came from the northern aisle Rapid
and shrill to its abrupt harsh close; And none gave answer
for a certain while, For
words must shrink from these most wordless woes; At last the pulpit
speaker simply said. With humid eyes and
thoughtful, drooping head,— “ ‘My Brother, my poor
Brothers, it is thus: This life holds
nothing good for us. But
it ends soon and nevermore can be; And we knew nothing of
it ere our birth. And shall know nothing
when consigned to earth; I
ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.” “It ends
soon and nevermore can be,” “Lo, you are free to end it when you will,” — these
verses flow truthfully from the melancholy Thomson's pen, and are in truth a
consolation for all to whom, as to him, the world is far more like a steady den
of fear than a continual fountain of delight. That life is not worth living the
whole army of suicides declare, — an army whose
roll-call, like the famous evening drum-beat of the British army, follows the
sun round the world and never terminates. We, too, as we sit here in our comfort,
must “ponder these things” also, for we are of one substance with these
suicides, and their life is the life we share. The plainest intellectual
integrity, nay, more, the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget
their case. “If
suddenly,” says Mr. Ruskin, “in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a London dinner-party, the walls of
the chamber were parted, and through their gap the nearest human beings who
were famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the company feasting
and fancy free—if, pale from death, horrible in destitution, broken by despair,
body by body they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every
guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them—would only a
passing glance, a passing thought, be vouchsafed to them? Yet the actual facts,
the real relation of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the
intervention of the house-wall between the table and the sickbed—by the few
feet of ground (how few!) which are, indeed, all that separate the merriment
from the misery.” PART II. To come
immediately to the heart of my theme, then, what I propose is to imagine
ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal who is on such terms with life that
the only comfort left him is to brood on the assurance “You may end it when you
will.” What reasons can we plead that may render such a brother (or sister)
willing to take up the burden again? Ordinary Christians, reasoning with
would-be suicides, have little to offer them beyond the usual negative “thou
shalt not.” God alone is master of life and death, they say, and it is a
blasphemous act to anticipate his absolving hand. But can we find nothing
richer or more positive than this, no reflections to urge whereby the suicide
may actually see, and in all sad seriousness feel, that in spite of adverse
appearances even for him life is worth living still? There are suicides and
suicides — in the United States about three thousand
of them every year — and I must frankly confess that with perhaps the majority
of these my suggestions are impotent to deal. Where suicide is the result of
insanity or sudden frenzied impulse, reflection is impotent to arrest its
headway; and cases like these belong to the ultimate mystery of evil concerning
which I can only offer considerations tending towards religious patience at the
end of this hour. My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my words
are to deal only with that metaphysical tedium
vitae which is peculiar to reflecting men. Most of you are devoted for good
or ill to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy, and have
already felt in your own persons the scepticism and
unreality that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed.
This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career. Too
much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as
too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope,
at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare
or suicidal view of life. But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still
further reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the melancholy
and Weltschmerz bred of reflection
that I now proceed to speak. Let me say
immediately that my final appeal is to nothing more recondite than religious
faith. So far as my argument is to be destructive, it will consist in nothing
more than the sweeping away of certain views that often keep the springs of
religious faith compressed; and so far as it is to be constructive it will
consist in holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to
let loose these springs in a normal, natural way. Pessimism is essentially a
religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable it consists
in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no normal religious reply.
Now there
are two stages of recovery from this disease, two different levels upon which
one may emerge from the midnight view to the daylight view of things, and I
must treat of them in turn. The second stage is the more complete and joyous,
and it corresponds to the freer exercise of religious trust and fancy. There
are, as is well known, persons who are naturally very free in this regard,
others who are not at all so. There are persons, for instance, whom we find
indulging to their heart's content in prospects of immortality, and there are
others who experience the greatest difficulty in making such a notion seem real
to themselves at all. These latter persons are tied to their senses, restricted
to their natural experience; and many of them moreover feel a sort of
intellectual loyalty to what they call “hard facts,” which is positively
shocked by the easy excursions into the unseen that they witness other people
make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds of either class may, however, be
intensely religious. They may equally desire atonement, harmony,
reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and communion with the total soul of things.
But the craving, when the mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as
science now reveals them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds
optimism when it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to another
and a better world. That is why
I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. The nightmare view of life
has plenty of organic sources, but its great reflective source in these days,
and at all times, has been the contradiction between the phenomena of Nature
and the craving of the heart to believe that behind Nature there is a spirit
whose expression Nature is. What philosophers call “natural theology” has been
one way of appeasing this craving. That poetry of nature in which our English
literature is so rich has been another way. Now suppose a mind of the latter of
our two classes, whose imagination is pent in consequently, and who takes its
facts " hard;" suppose it, moreover, to feel strongly the craving for
communion, and yet to realize how desperately difficult it is to construe the
scientific order of Nature either theologically or poetically, and what result
can there be but inner discord and contradiction? Now this inner discord
(merely as discord) can be relieved in either of two ways. The longing to read
the facts religiously may cease, and leave the bare facts by themselves. Or
supplementary facts may be discovered or believed in, which permit the
religious reading to go on. And these two ways of relief are the two stages of
recovery, the two levels of escape from pessimism, to which I made allusion a
moment ago, and which what follows will, I trust, make more
clear. PART III.
Starting
then with Nature, we naturally tend, if we have the religious craving, to say
with Marcus Aurelius, “O Universe, what thou wishest
I wish.” Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made heaven and
earth, and looking on them saw that they were good. Yet, on more intimate
acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be brought by
us into any intelligible unity at all. Every phenomena that we would praise
there exists cheek by jowl with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its
religious effect upon the mind. Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life
and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually
steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of
an awful Power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together
meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, a sinister, a nightmare view
of life, and its peculiar unheimlichkeit or poisonousness lies expressly in our
holding two things together which cannot possibly agree, — in our clinging on
the one hand to the demand that there shall be a living spirit of the whole,
and, on the other, to the belief that the course of nature must be such a
spirit's adequate manifestation and expression. It is in the contradiction
between the supposed being of a spirit that encompasses and owns us and with
which we ought to have some communion, and the character of such a spirit as
revealed by the visible world's course, that this particular death-in-life
paradox and this melancholy-breeding puzzle reside. Carlyle expresses the
result in that chapter of his immortal Sartor
Resartus entitled “The Everlasting No.” “I
lived,” writes poor Teufelsdröckh, “in a continual
indefinite pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not
what: it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath
would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless Jaws of a
devouring Monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured.” This is the
first stage of speculative melancholy. No brute can have this sort of melancholy, no man that is irreligious can become its prey.
It is the sick shudder of the frustrated religious demand, and not the mere
necessary outcome of animal experience. Teufelsdröckh
himself could have made shift to face the general chaos and bedevilment of this
world's experiences very well were he not the victim of an originally unlimited
trust and affection towards them. If he might meet them piecemeal, with no
suspicion of any whole expressing itself in them, shunning the bitter parts and
husbanding the sweet ones, as the occasion served, and as (to use a vulgar
phrase) he struck it fat or lean, he could have zigzagged fairly towards an
easy end, and felt no obligation to make the air vocal with his lamentations.
The mood of levity, of “I don't care,” is for this world’s ills a sovereign and
practical anaesthetic. But no! something deep down in
Teufelsdröckh and in the rest of us tells us that
there is a spirit in things to which
we owe allegiance and for whose sake we must keep up the serious mood, and so
the inner fever and discord also are kept up — for Nature taken on her visible
surface reveals no such spirit, and beyond the facts of Nature we are at the
present stage of our inquiry not supposing ourselves to look. Now, I do
not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that this real and genuine
discord seems to me to carry with it the inevitable bankruptcy of natural
religion naively and simply taken. There were times when Leibnitzes
with their heads buried in monstrous wigs could compose Theodicies, and when
stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves in the
heart and the round ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a “Moral and
Intelligent Contriver of the World.” But those times are past; and we of the
nineteenth century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical
philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship
unreservedly any god of whose character she can be an adequate expression.
Truly all we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less so
all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, ―
a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe. To such a
harlot we owe no allegiance; with her as a whole we can establish no moral
communion; and we are free in our dealings with her several parts to obey or
destroy, and to follow no law but that of prudence in coming to terms with such
of her particular features as will help us to our private ends. If there be a
divine Spirit of the universe, Nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be
its ultimate word to man. Either
there is no spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed
there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible
nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning
resides in a supplementary unseen or other
world. I cannot
help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain
(though it may seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that the
naturalistic superstition, the worship of the god of nature simply taken as
such should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educated mind. In fact, if I
am to express my personal opinion unreservedly, I should say (in spite of its
sounding blasphemous at first to certain ears) that the initial step towards
getting into healthy ultimate relations with the universe is the act of
rebellion against the idea that such a God exists. Such rebellion essentially
is that which in the chapter quoted a while ago Carlyle goes on to describe:
― “’Wherefore,
like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling?
Despicable biped! ... Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever
it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample
Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will
meet it and defy it!’ And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire
over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever. . . . “Thus had
the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being,
of my ME; and then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God-created
majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important
transaction in life, may that same Indignation and
Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No
had said: ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine;’ to
which my whole Me now made answer: ‘I am not thine,
but Free, and forever hate thee!’ From that hour," Teufelsdröckh-Carlyle
adds, “I began to be a man.” And our
poor friend, James Thomson, similarly writes: ― “Who is most wretched
in this dolorous place? I
think myself; yet I would rather be My
miserable self than He, than He Who formed such
creatures to his own disgrace. The vilest thing must
be less vile than Thou From
whom it had its being, God and Lord! Creator
of all woe and sin! abhorred, Malignant and
implacable! I vow That not for all Thy
power furled and unfurled, For
all the temples to Thy glory built. Would
I assume the ignominious guilt Of having made such
men in such a world." We are
familiar enough in this community with the spectacle of persons exulting in
their emancipation from belief in the God of their ancestral Calvinism, ―
him who made the garden and the serpent and preappointed
the eternal fires of hell. Some of them have found humaner
Gods to worship, others are simply converts from all
theology; but both alike they assure us that to have got rid of the
sophistication of thinking they could feel any reverence or duty towards that
impossible idol gave a tremendous happiness to their souls. Now, to make an
idol of the spirit of nature, and worship it, also leads to sophistication; and
in souls that are religious and would also be scientific, the sophistication
breeds a philosophical melancholy from which the first natural step of escape
is the denial of the idol; and with the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of
positive joyousness may remain, there comes also the downfall of the whimpering
and cowering mood. With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for
their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer so
spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance as soon as
the mind attacks the instances of it singly and ceases to worry about their
derivation from the “one and only Power.” Here, then,
on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic superstition, the would-be
suicide may already get encouraging answers to his question about the worth of
life. There are in most men instinctive springs of vitality that respond healthily
when the burden of metaphysical and infinite responsibility rolls off. The
certainty that you now may step out
of life whenever you please, and that to do so is not blasphemous or monstrous,
is itself an immense relief. The thought of suicide is now no longer a guilty
challenge and obsession. “This little life is
all we must endure. The grave's most holy
peace is ever sure,” ― says
Thomson; adding, “I ponder these thoughts, and they comfort me.” Meanwhile we
can always stand it for twenty-four hours longer, if only to see what
to-morrow’s newspaper will contain or what the next postman will bring. But far
deeper forces than this mere vital curiosity are arousable,
even in the pessimistically-tending mind; for where the loving and admiring
impulses are dead, the hating and fighting impulses will still respond to fit
appeals. This evil which we feel so deeply is something which we can also help
to overthrow, for its sources, now that no “Substance” or “Spirit” is behind
them, are finite, and we can deal with each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a
remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love
of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The sovereign
source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and
inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the
captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the
pessimistic utterances in our Bibles come. Germany, when she lay trampled
beneath the hoofs of Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic
and idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French
‘milliards’ were distributed after 1871 did pessimism overrun the country in
the shape in which we see it there today. The history of our own race is one
long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with fighting ills. Or take the Waldenses, of whom I lately have been reading, as examples
of what strong men will endure. In 1485, a papal bull of Innocent VIII enjoined
their extermination. It absolved those who should take up the cross against
them from all ecclesiastical pains and penalties, released them from any oath,
legitimized their title to all property which they might have illegally acquired, and promised remission of sins to all who should
kill the heretics. “There is
no town in Piedmont,” says a Vaudois writer, “where some of our brethren have
not been put to death. Jordan Terbano was burnt alive
at Susa; Hippo-hte Rossiero
at Turin; Michael Goneto, an octogenarian, at Sarcena; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di Meano;
Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle,
had his entrails torn from his living body at Turin; Peter Geymarali
of Bobbio in like manner had his entrails taken out
in Luzerne, and a fierce cat thrust in their place to torture him further;
Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia; Magdalena
Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni;
Susanna Michelini was bound hand and foot and left to
perish of cold and hunger on the snow at Sarcena; Bartolomeo
Fache, gashed with sabres,
had the wounds filled up with quicklime, and perished thus in agony at Fenile; Daniel Michelini had his
tongue torn out at Bobbo for having praised God; James Baridari
perished covered with sulphurous matches which had
been forced into his flesh under the nails, between the fingers, in the
nostrils, in the lips, and all over the body and then lighted; Daniel Rovelli had his mouth filled with gunpowder which, being lighted,
blew his head to pieces; . . . Sara Rostignol was
slit open from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish on the road between
Eyral and Luzerna; Anna Charbonnier was impaled, and carried thus on a pike from
San Giovanni to La Torre.” (Quoted by George E. Waring in his book on Tyrol. ) Und dergleichen mehr! In 1630, the plague swept away one-half of the Vaudois population,
including fifteen of their seventeen pastors. The places of these were supplied
from Geneva and Dauphiny, and the whole Vaudois
people learned French in order to follow their services. More than once their
number fell by unremitting persecution from the normal standard of twenty-five
thousand to about four thousand. In 1686, the Duke of Savoy ordered the three
thousand that remained to give up their faith or leave the country. Refusing,
they fought the French and Piedmontese armies till
only eighty of their fighting men remained alive or uncaptured, when they gave
up and were sent in a body to Switzerland. But in 1689, encouraged by William
of Orange and led by one of their pastor-captains, between eight hundred and
nine hundred of them returned to capture their old
homes again. They fought their way to Bobi, reduced
to four hundred men in the first half year, and met every force sent against
them until at last the Duke of Savoy, giving up his alliance with that abomination
of desolation, Louis XIV, restored them to comparative freedom, ― since
which time they have increased and multiplied in their barren Alpine valleys to
this day. What are
our woes and sufferance compared with these? Does not the recital of such a
fight so obstinately waged against such odds fill us with resolution against
our petty powers of darkness, machine politicians, spoilsmen,
and the rest? Life is worth living, no matter what it bring,
if only such combats may be carried to successful terminations and one's heel
set on the tyrant's throat. To the suicide, then, in his supposed world of
multifarious and immoral Nature, you can appeal ― and appeal in the name
of the very evils that make his heart sick there ― to wait and see his part of the battle out. And the
consent to live on, which you ask of him under these circumstances, is not the
sophistical “resignation” which devotees of cowering religions preach. It is
not resignation in the sense of licking a despotic deity's hand. It is, on the
contrary, a resignation based on manliness and pride. So long as your would-be
suicide leaves an evil of his own unremedied, so long
he has strictly no concern with evil in the abstract and at large. The
submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the
world, your apparent acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction
that evil at large is none of your business
until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and
settled up. A challenge of this sort, with proper designation of detail, is one
that need only be made to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not
decayed, and your reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face
life with a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very
penetrating thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent
beasts have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their
lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together here in
comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our relation to the
Universe in a more solemn light. “Does not,” as a young Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, “the acceptance of a
happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?” Are we not bound to do
some self-denying service with our lives in return for all those lives upon
which ours are built? To hear this question is to answer it in only one
possible way, if one have a normally constituted
heart! Thus, then,
we see that mere instinctive curiosity, pugnacity, and honor may make life on a
purely naturalistic basis seem worth living from day to day to men who have
cast away all metaphysics in order to get rid of hypochondria, but who are
resolved to owe nothing as yet to religion and its more positive gifts. A poor
halfway stage, some of you may be inclined to say; but at least you must grant
it to be an honest stage; and no man should dare to speak meanly of these
instincts which are our nature's best equipment, and to which religion herself
must in the last resort address her own peculiar
appeals. PART IV And now, in
turning to what religion may have to say to the question, I come to what is the
soul of my discourse. Religion has meant many things in human history, but when
from now onward I use the word I mean to use it in the supernaturalist
sense, as declaring that the so-called order of nature that constitutes this
world’s experience is only one portion of the total Universe, and that there
stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world of which we now know
nothing positive, but in its relation to which the true significance of our
present mundane life consists. A man's religious faith (whatever more special
items of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially his faith in the
existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural
order may be found explained. In the more developed religions this world has
always been regarded as the mere scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more
eternal world, and affirmed to be a sphere of education, trial, or redemption.
One must in some fashion die to this world before one can enter into life
eternal. The notion that this physical world of wind and water, where the sun
rises and the moon sets, is absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed at and
established thing, is one that we find only in very early religions, such as
that of the most primitive Jews. It is this natural religion (primitive still
in spite of the fact that poets and men of science whose goodwill exceeds their
perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our contemporary ears)
that, as I said a while ago, has suffered definitive bankruptcy in the opinion
of a circle of persons, amongst whom I must count myself, and who are growing
more numerous every day. For such persons the physical order of nature, taken
simply as Science knows it, cannot be held to reveal any one
harmonious spiritual intent. It is mere weather, as Chauncey Wright called it, doing and undoing without
end. Now I wish
to make you feel, if I can in the short remainder of this hour, that we have a
right to believe that the physical order is only a partial order; we have a right
to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only
thereby life may seem to us better worth living again. But as such a trust will
seem to some of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say
a word or two to weaken the veto which you may consider that Science opposes to
our act. There is
included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which
can only admit facts that are actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the
entity called “science” is the idol. Fondness for the word “scientist” is one
of the notes by which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing
any opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it “unscientific.” It must be
granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made such glorious
leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our knowledge of Nature so
enormously both in general and in detail; men of science, moreover, have as a
class displayed such admirable virtues, that it is no wonder if the worshippers
of Science lose their head. In this very University, accordingly, I have heard
more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have
already been found by Science, and that the future has only the details of the
picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will
suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of
scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively
advancing any part of Science can make a mistake so crude. Think how many
absolutely new scientific conceptions have arisen in our own generation, how
many new problems have been formulated that were never thought of before, and
then cast an eye upon the brevity of Science’s career.
It began with Galileo just three hundred years ago. Four thinkers since
Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had
seen achieved, might have passed the torch of Science into our hands as we sit
here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller
than the present one, an audience of some five or six score people, if each
person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the
black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to
tell their tale. Is it credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth
overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the
Universe will really prove to be when adequately understood? No! our Science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain: that the world of our
present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose
residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea. Agnostic
positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically in the most cordial
terms, but insists that we must not turn it to any practical use. We have no
right, this doctrine tells us, to dream dreams, or suppose anything about the
unseen part of the universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are
pleased to call our highest interests. We must always wait for sensible
evidence for our beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame
no hypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position in abstracto.
If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish
according to what the unseen world contained, a philosophic neutrality and
refusal to believe either one way or the other would be his wisest cue. But,
unfortunately, neutrality is not only inwardly difficult,
it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are
practical and vital. This is because, as the psychologists tell us, belief and
doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for
example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. If, for instance, we refuse to
believe that the room is getting cold, we must leave the windows open and light
no fire just as if it still were warm. If I refuse to believe that you are
worthy of my confidence, I must keep you uninformed of all my secrets just as
if you were unworthy of the same. And
similarly if, as the agnostics tell me, I must not believe that the world is
divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively
as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as
if it were not so, or in an unmoral
and irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when
inaction is a kind of action and must count as action, and when not to be for
is to be practically against. And in all such cases strict and consistent
neutrality is an unattainable thing. And after
all, isn’t this duty of neutrality where only our inner interests would lead us
to believe, the most ridiculous of commands? Isn't it sheer dogmatic folly to
say that our inner interests can have no real connection with the forces that
the hidden world may contain? In other cases divinations based on inner
interests have proved prophetic enough. Take Science herself! Without an
imperious inner demand on our part for ideal, logical, and mathematical
harmonies, we should never have attained to proving that such harmonies lie
hidden between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world.
Hardly a law has been established in Science, hardly a fact ascertained, that
was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner
need. Whence such needs come from we do not know — we find them in us, and
biological psychology so far only classes them with Darwin's “accidental
variations.” But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a
sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and
authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of
causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of many
generations has so proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one
be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the
visible universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible universe is
there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious
demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what
is, not what is not; and the agnostic “thou shalt not believe without coercive
sensible evidence” is simply an expression (free to any one
to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind. Now, when I
speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I mean by “trusting”? Is
the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible world and to
anathematize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? Certainly not!
Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and
heresies withal; they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious
demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the
invisible world which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature that
men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single
dogma or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate
but a mere sign or vision, the external staging of a many-storied universe, in
which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal; this bare assurance
is to such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary
presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane. Destroy this
inner assurance, vague as it is, however, and all the light and radiance of
existence is extinguished for these persons at a stroke. Often enough the
wild-eyed look at life —the suicidal mood ― will then set in. And now the
application comes directly home to you and me. Probably to almost every one of
us here the most adverse life would seem well worth living, if we only could be
certain that our bravery and patience
with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in an
unseen spiritual world. But granting we are not certain, does it then follow
that a bare trust in such a world is a fool's paradise and lubberland,
or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free to indulge? Well,
we are free to trust at our own risks anything that is not impossible and that
can bring analogies to bear in its behalf. That the world of
physics is probably not absolute, all the converging multitude of arguments
that make in favor of idealism tend to prove. And that our whole
physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being
that we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us
by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are
in our human life but not of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events
whose inner meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their
intelligence, events in which they themselves often play the cardinal part. My
terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father demands damages. The
dog may be present at every step of the negotiations, and see the money paid
without an inkling of what it all means, without a suspicion that it has
anything to do with him. And he never
can know in his natural dog’s life. Or take another case which used greatly to
impress me in my medical-student days. Consider a poor dog whom
they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped on a board and shrieking
at his executioners, and to his own dark consciousness
is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single redeeming ray in the
whole business; and yet all these diabolical-seeming events are usually
controlled by human intentions with which, if his poor benighted mind could
only be made to catch a glimpse of them, all that is heroic in him would
religiously acquiesce. Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and
man are to be bought by them. It is genuinely a process of redemption. Lying on
his back on the board there he is performing a function incalculably higher
than any prosperous canine life admits of; and yet, of the whole performance,
this function is the one portion that must remain absolutely beyond his ken. Now turn
from this to the life of man. In the dog’s life we see the world invisible to
him because we live in both worlds. In human life, although we only see our
world, and his within it, yet encompassing both these worlds a still wider
world may be there as unseen by us as our world is by him; and to believe in
that world may be the most essential
function that our lives in this world have to perform. But “may be! may be!” one now hears the
positivist contemptuously exclaim; “what use can a scientific life have for
maybes?” Well, I reply, the “scientific” life itself has much to do with
maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as man
stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital
function may be said to be to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a
deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service,
not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or
text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from
one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand
in an uncertified result is the only
thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are
climbing a mountain and have worked yourself into a position from which the
only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make
it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and
think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long
that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment
of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an
enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs,
for only by the belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall
indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you
shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two
possible universes true by your trust or mistrust, both universes having been
only maybes in this particular,
before you contributed your act. Now, it appears to me that the question
whether life is worth living is subject to conditions logically much like
these. It does, indeed, depend on you the liver. If you surrender to the
nightmare view and crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed
made a picture totally black. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true beyond
a doubt, so far as your world goes. Your mistrust of life has removed whatever
worth your own enduring existence might have given to it; and now, throughout
the whole sphere of possible influence of that existence, the mistrust has
proved itself to have had divining power. But suppose, on the other hand, that
instead of giving way to the nightmare view you cling to it that this world is
not the ultimatum. Suppose you find
yourself a very well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of ― “Zeal,
and the virtue to exist by faith As soldiers live by
courage; as, by strength Of heart,
the sailor fights with roaring seas.” Suppose,
however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity
proves to be their match, and that you find a more wonderful joy than any
passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in the larger whole. Have you not
now made life worth living on these terms? What sort of a thing would life
really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought
fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope? Please remember
that optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own
reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts of the
whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition. They may even be
the decisive elements in determining the definition. A large mass can have its
unstable equilibrium overturned by the addition of a feather's weight. A long
phrase may have its sense reversed by the addition of the three letters n-o-t. This life is worth living, we can say, since
it is what we make it, from the moral point of view, and we are determined
to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a
success. Now, in
this description of faiths that verify themselves I have assumed that our faith
in an invisible order is what inspires those efforts and that patience of ours
that make this visible order good for moral men. Our faith in the seen world’s
goodness (goodness now meaning fitness for successful moral and religious life)
has verified itself by leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our
faith in the unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows? Once more
it is a case of maybe. And once more maybes are the essence of the situation.
I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may
not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the
religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase
of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat
and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this.
If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for
the Universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals
from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels
like a real fight; as if there were something really wild in the Universe which
we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are
needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and
fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The
deepest thing in our nature in this Binnenleben (as a German doctor lately has called it), this
dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses
and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through
the cracks and crannies of subterranean caverns the earth’s bosom exudes its
waters, which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular
depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take
their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of
things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract
statements and scientific arguments ― the veto, for example, which the
strict positivist pronounces upon our faith ― sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not
finished facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to quote
my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society, “as the essence
of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is
to believe that the possibility exists.” These,
then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will
help create the fact. The “scientific proof” that you are right may not be
clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of
Being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the
faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will
represent them, may then turn to the fainthearted, who here decline to go on,
with words like those with which Henry IV. greeted the
tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained:
“Hang yourself, brave Crillon ! we fought at Arques, and you were not there.” |