Collected Essays and Reviews

The recent reading and re-reading of all of James’ known writings have impressed two things very deeply on my mind. First, there was one and only one James from the beginning to the end. With all of his versatility and openmindedness he remained unconsciously loyal to certain fundamental convictions. It is even permissible to say that there is one germinal idea from which his whole thought grew, provided we do not overlook the even more important fact that his thought did grow. This germinal idea is the idea of the essentially active and interested character of the human mind. Second, I have been impressed as never before by James’ extraordinary intellectual chivalry and hospitality, the reflection of his peculiar social genius. He was a man quick to reach to the heart of another man, quick to praise, quick to esteem the gifts of others, even when, as sometimes happened, no one else esteemed them at all. This gratitude which James felt so genuinely-and manifested with so much kindliness was not infrequently the foundation in others of their sustaining self-respect. Beginning with the older generation of his father and teachers, and ending with the younger generation of his children and students, his life was a continuous succession of marvellous human discoveries. As it was with his personal intercourse, so it was in his relations with those whom he knew more remotely or only through their writings. Most of these discoveries he has published to the world, in his prefaces and citations, or in those remarkable memorial addresses which have been reprinted in the Memories and Studies and which few men have known so well how to write.

MORE P R O B LEMS ! W H Y should we read them if they are not our problems, but only Mr. Lewes’s? Of all forms of earthly worry, the metaphysical worry seems the most gratuitous. If it lands us in permanently skeptical conclusions, it is worse than superfluous; and if (as is almost always the case with non-skeptical systems) it simply ends by “indorsing” common-sense, and reinstating us in the possession of our old feelings, motives, and duties, we may fairly ask if it was worth while to go so far round in order simply to return to our starting-point and be put back into the old harness. Is not the primal state of philosophic innocence, since the practical difference is nil, as good as the state of reflective enlightenment? And need we, provided we can stay at home and take the world for granted, undergo the fatigues of a campaign with such uncomfortable spirits as the present author, merely for the sake of coming to our own again, with nothing gained but the pride of having accompanied his expedition? So we may ask. But is the pride nothing? Consciousness is the only measure of utility, and even if no philosophy could ever alter a man’s motives in life, — which is untrue, — that it should add to their conscious completeness is enough to make thousands take upon themselves its burden of perplexities. We like the sense of companionship with better and more eager intelligences than our own, and that increment of self-respect which we all experience in passing from an instinctive to a reflective state, and adopting a belief which hitherto we simply underwent.

Whether the position be that of a citizen properly filled with Nationalbewusstsein, of a competitor in the egoistic struggle for existence, of a subject of the Categorical Imperative, or of a Moment in the Weltprozess, is all one — we find everywhere that same cold-blooded self- corroboration and merging of the personal deed in universal considerations which, more than material spoliation and Draconian discipline, exasperated the French during the late invasion, and have made them call the Germans “hypocrites” ever since. Perhaps as striking an illustration of this overweening tendency to theorize as can be found is afforded by the popular German school of pessimistic philosophy, of which Professor Pfleiderer’s pamphlet is the latest and one of the ablest criticisms. In other countries, aristocratic misanthropes, dyspeptic pleasure-seekers, and unappreciated geniuses have existed, and their utterances never passed beyond the sphere of splenetic or pathetic individuality.

But here begins the divergence. The aristocratic master has no hopes of the human or any other race as a whole, and his nirvana is restricted to the few who are ascetics and saints. In the witty words of Pfleiderer, the battle- cry with which he plunges into life’s fray and rallies his followers about him is the well-known “sauve qui peut.” The pupil, on the contrary, equipped with a Berlin education and imbued with notions of evolution and progress which to Schopenhauer (who wrote before Darwin) were profoundly distasteful, provides for a collective salvation, based on no less a performance than a unanimous resolve on the part of all sentient beings, penetrated at last through and through with tedium vitœ, and despair of gaining anything by fighting it out on the line of existence — to stop, and back out of it, when this world will cease at any rate.

However different a philosophy one may hold from his, however one may deem that the lack of emotional bias which left him contented with the mere principle of parsimony as a criterion of universal truth was really due to a defect in the active or impulsive part of his mental nature, one must value none the less his formulæ. For as yet philosophy has celebrated hardly any stable achievements. The labors of philosophers have, however, been confined to deepening enormously the philosophic consciousness, and revealing more and more minutely and fully the import of metaphysical problems. In this preliminary task ontologists and phenomenalists, mechanists and teleologists, must join friendly hands, for each has been indispensable to the work of the other, and the only foe of either is the common foe of both — namely, the practical, conventionally thinking man, to whom, as has been said, nothing has true seriousness but personal interests, and whose dry earnestness in those is only excelled by that of the brute, which takes everything for granted and never laughs.

So that whichever plan one adopts, one’s state is the result of other facts than pure receptivity of intelligence. The entire nature of the man, intellectual, affective, and volitional, is (whether avowedly or not) exhibited in the theoretic attitude he takes in such a question as this. And this leads M. Renouvier to a most vigorous and original discussion of the ultimate grounds of certitude, of belief in general, from which he returns to make his decision about this particular point. All yard- stick criteria of certitude have failed. Mr. Spencer’s “inconceivability of the opposite” breaks down from the practical impossibility of unanimity in any given case. When the Philosopher of Evolution says we ought to find the opposite of his First Principles inconceivable and dubs us “pseudo” thinkers if we do not, he simply begs the question and appeals to the authority of his personal insight as against ours.

Most readers would dislike to admit without coercion that a law was adequate which obliged them to erase from literature (if by literature were meant anything worthy of the title of “mental product”) all works except treatises on natural science, history, and statistics. Let us examine the reason that Mr. Spencer appears to consider coercive. It is this: That, since every process grows more and more complicated as it develops, more swarmed over by incidental and derivative conditions which disguise and adulterate its original simplicity, the only way to discover its true and essential form is to trace it back to its earliest beginning. There it will appear in its genuine character pure and undefiled. Religious, aesthetic, and ethical judgments, having grown up in the course of evolution, by means that we can very plausibly divine, of course may be stripped off from the main stem of intelligence and leave that undisturbed. With a similar intent Mr. Tylor says: “Whatever throws light on the origin of a conception throws light on its validity.” Thus, then, there is no resource but to appeal to the polyp, or whatever shows us the form of evolution just before intelligence, and what that, and only what that, contains will be the root and heart of the matter.

The slag-heap is too big — it abstracts more energy than it contributes to the ends of the machine; and every serious evolutionist ought resolutely to bend his attention henceforward to the reduction in number and amount of these outlying interests, and the diversion of the energy they absorb into purely prudential channels. Here, then, is our dilemma: One man may say that the law of mental development is dominated solely by the principle of conservation; another, that richness is the criterion of mental evolution; a third, that pure cognition of the actual is the essence of worthy thinking — but who shall pretend to decide which is right? The umpire would have to bring a standard of his own upon the scene, which would be just as subjective and personal as the standards used by the contestants. And yet some standard there must be, if we are to attempt to define in any way the worth of different mental manifestations.

As this is not an ethical but a psychological essay, it is quite sufficient for our purposes to lay it down as an empirical fact that we strive to formulate rationally a tangled mass of fact by a propensity as natural and invincible as that which makes us exchange a hard high stool for an arm- chair or prefer travelling by railroad to riding in a springless cart. Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency of our thought, produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes Being vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. But so long as mutually obstructive elements are involved in the conception, the pent-up irritated mind recoiling on its present consciousness will criticise it, worry over it, and never cease in its attempts to discover some new mode of formulation which may give it escape from the irrationality of its actual ideas. Now mental ease and freedom may be obtained in various ways.

But if the emotion is nothing but the feeling of the reflex bodily effects of what we call its “object,” effects due to the connate adaptation of the nervous system to that object, we seem immediately faced by this objection: most of the objects of civilised men’s emotions are things to which it would be preposterous to suppose their nervous systems connately adapted. Most occasions of shame and many insults are purely conventional, and vary with the social environment. The same is true of many matters of dread and of desire, and of many occasions of melancholy and regret. In these cases, at least, it would seem that the ideas of shame, desire, regret, etc., must first have been attached by education and association to these conventional objects before the bodily changes could possibly be awakened. And if, in these cases the bodily changes follow the ideas, instead of giving rise to them, why not then in all cases?

Of course in the majority of emotions, this test is inapplicable; for many of the manifestations are in organs over which we have no volitional control. Still, within the limits in which it can be verified, experience fully corroborates this test. Every one knows how panic is increased by flight, and how the giving way to the symptoms of grief or anger increases those passions themselves. Each fit of sobbing makes the sorrow more acute, and calls forth another fit stronger still, until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with the apparent exhaustion of the machinery. In rage, it is notorious how we “work ourselves up” to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression. Refuse to express a passion, and it dies. Count ten before venting your anger, and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers. There is no more valuable precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: if we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first instance coldbloodedly, go through the outward motions of those contrary dispositions we prefer to cultivate. The reward of persistency will infallibly come, in the fading out of the sullenness or depression, and the advent of real cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw!

But surely the systematic theologians are the closet-naturalists of the Deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid’s sense. Their orthodox deduction of God’s attributes is nothing but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary- adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word “God” by a logical machine of wood and brass as well as by a man of flesh and blood. The attributes which I have quoted have absolutely nothing to do with religion, for religion is a living practical affair. Other parts, indeed, of God’s traditional description do have practical connection with life, and have owed all their historic importance to that fact. His omniscience, for example, and his justice. With the one he sees us in the dark, with the other he rewards and punishes what he sees. So do his ubiquity and eternity and unalterability appeal to our confidence, and his goodness banish our fears.

The question then presents itself: In what shape is it most reasonable to suppose that the will thus postulated is actually there? And here again there are various pneumatological possibilities, which must be considered first in abstract form. Thus the will to communicate may come either from permanent entities, or from an entity that arises for the occasion. R. H.’s spirit would be a permanent entity; and inferior parasitic spirits (“daimons,” elementals, or whatever their traditional names might be) would be permanent entities. An improvised entity might be a limited process of consciousness arising in the cosmic reservoir of earth’s memories, when certain conditions favoring systematized activity in particular tracts thereof were fulfilled. The conditions in that case might be conceived after the analogy of what happens when two poles of different potential are created in a mass of matter, and cause a current of electricity, or what not, to pass through an intervening tract of space until then the seat of rest.

Fechner in his Zend-Avesta and elsewhere assumes that mental and physical life run parallel, all memory-processes being, according to him, co- ordinated with material processes. If an act of yours is to be consciously remembered hereafter, it must leave traces on the material universe such that when the traced parts of the said universe systematically enter into activity together the act is consciously recalled. During your life the traces are mainly in your brain; but after your death, since your brain is gone, they exist in the shape of all the records of your actions which the outer world stores up as the effects, immediate or remote, thereof, the cosmos being in some degree, however slight, made structurally different by every act of ours that takes place in it.