“He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.”
Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella
or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not
forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly,
if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or
call it false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent
to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any
judgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Either accept this truth or
go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing
place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete
logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option
of this forced kind.
{4}
3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North
Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would
probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would
either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether
or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to
embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried
and failed. _Per contra_, the option is trivial when the opportunity
is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is
reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in
the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to
spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent.
But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for
his loss of time, no vital harm being done.
It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions
well in mind.
II.
The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion.
When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and
volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look
at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had
once said its say. Let us take the latter facts up first.
Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our
opinions being modifiable at will?
“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
Feeling his power, yet ignorant of the manner in which he shall express
it, he is, when compared with his sister, a being of no definite
contour. But this absence of prompt tendency in his brain to set into
particular modes is the very condition which insures that it shall
ultimately become so much more efficient than the woman's. The very
lack of preappointed trains of thought is the ground on which general
principles and heads of classification grow up; and the masculine brain
deals with new and complex matter indirectly by means of these, in a
manner which the feminine method of direct intuition, admirably and
rapidly as it performs within its limits, can vainly hope to cope with.
* * * * *
In looking back over the subject of reasoning, one feels how intimately
connected it is with conception; and one realizes more than ever the
deep reach of that principle of selection on which so much stress was
laid towards the close of Chapter IX. As the art of reading (after a
certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping, so the art of
being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The first effect on
the mind of growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to
be performed by a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive
'condensation' of thought. But in the psychological sense it is less a
condensation than a loss, a genuine dropping out and throwing overboard
of conscious content. Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker
sees the relations of his topics in such masses and so instantaneously
that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard to say
which grows the more perplexed, he or the pupil. In every university
there are admirable investigators who are notoriously bad lecturers.
The reason is that they never spontaneously see the subject in the
minute articulate way in which the student needs to have it offered
to his slow reception. They grope for the links, but the links do
not come. Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Mécanique
Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the
words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before
him.
“Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact”
The deepest thing in our {62} nature is 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 caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom 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 faint-hearted, 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."
[1] An Address to the Harvard Young Men's Christian Association.
Published in the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and
as a pocket volume by S. B. Weston, Philadelphia, 1896.
[2] Quoted by George E. Waring in his book on Tyrol. Compare A.
Bérard: Les Vaudois, Lyon, Storck, 1892.
{63}
THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY.[1]
I.
What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; and why
do they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply:
They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall
on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which
every one by nature carries about with him under his hat.
“Do every day or two something for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.”
How many
American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher, that they
should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their
unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still?
Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex
influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension,
over-motion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national
harm.
I beg you teachers to think a little seriously of this matter. Perhaps
you can help our rising generation of Americans toward the beginning of
a better set of personal ideals.[B]
[B] See the Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in
this volume.
* * * * *
To go back now to our general maxims, I may at last, as a fifth and
final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this: _Keep the
faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every
day._ That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do
every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so
that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not
unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is
like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does
him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But,
if the fire _does_ come, his having paid it will be his salvation from
ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of
concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in
unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks
around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the
blast.
* * * * *
I have been accused, when talking of the subject of habit, of making old
habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones, and particularly
anything like a sudden reform or conversion, would be made impossible by
my doctrine. Of course, this would suffice to condemn the latter; for
sudden conversions, however infrequent they may be, unquestionably do
occur. But there is no incompatibility between the general laws I have
laid down and the most startling sudden alterations in the way of
character.
“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”
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 {59} '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 have 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 such 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.
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
indeed _is_ the strenuous life,—without brass bands or uniforms or
hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees
the way in which wealth‐getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and
marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that
poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be “the transformation of
military courage,” and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in
need of.
Among us English‐speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty
need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be
poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and
save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant
with the money‐making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in
ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient
idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material
attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our
way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away
our life at any moment irresponsibly,—the more athletic trim, in short,
the moral fighting shape. When we of the so‐called better classes are
scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and
hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and
quake at the thought of having a child without a bank‐account and doomed
to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly
and irreligious a state of opinion.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to
ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But
wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the
desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of
cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of
conjunctures in which a wealth‐bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for
whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which
personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to
unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the
revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of
promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces;
yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit,
and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would
need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we
personally were contented with our poverty.
“Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.”
Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age, and since
to understand it contributes in no small measure to their feeling of
responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were able himself to
talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some such abstract terms as I
am now about to talk of it to you.
I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the
fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our
nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with
difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and
finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with
hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have (in Dr.
Carpenter's words) _grown_ to the way in which they have been exercised,
just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to
fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.
Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of Wellington
said, it is 'ten times nature,'--at any rate as regards its importance
in adult life; for the acquired habits of our training have by that time
inhibited or strangled most of the natural impulsive tendencies which
were originally there. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred
and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and
habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
Our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and
partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay,
even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so
fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions. To each
sort of impression we have an automatic, ready-made response. My very
words to you now are an example of what I mean; for having already
lectured upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a book, and read
the latter when in print, I find my tongue inevitably falling into its
old phrases and repeating almost literally what I said before.
So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped
creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. And since this,
under any circumstances, is what we always tend to become, it follows
first of all that the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into
the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him
throughout life.
“Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.”
Accumulate all the
possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put
yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make
engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case
allows; in short, envelope your resolution with every aid you know. This
will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to
break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day
during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not
occurring at all.
I remember long ago reading in an Austrian paper the advertisement of a
certain Rudolph Somebody, who promised fifty gulden reward to any one
who after that date should find him at the wine-shop of Ambrosius
So-and-so. 'This I do,' the advertisement continued, 'in consequence of
a promise which I have made my wife.' With such a wife, and such an
understanding of the way in which to start new habits, it would be safe
to stake one's money on Rudolph's ultimate success.
The second maxim is, _Never suffer an exception to occur till the new
habit is securely rooted in your life_. Each lapse is like the letting
fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up: a single
slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of
training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly
right. As Professor Bain says:--
"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the
intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to
be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary
above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every
gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right.
The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing
powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until
repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope
with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically
best career of mental progress."
A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: _Seize the very first
possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every
emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits
you aspire to gain.
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
Some of you may perhaps
be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever exaggeration
may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and I doubt myself
whether the exaggeration be very great), it is certain that the main
core of it is true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example,
or to the outward expression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment
in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. There is,
accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the
moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that
which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not
to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse
in time, for example, or if we only _don't_ strike the blow or rip out
with the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as
we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and
better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. Action
seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and
by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the
will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous
cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully,
and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such
conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that
occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we _were_ brave, use all our
will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of
fear. Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have
been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to
make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things.
One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of
heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental
demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins
our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas,
if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon
folds its tent like an Arab, and silently steals away.
“Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”
These
activities seem to hold fast to certain elements and, by emphasizing
them and dwelling on them, to make their associates the only ones which
are evoked. _This_ is the point at which an anti-mechanical psychology
must, if anywhere, make its stand in dealing with association.
Everything else is pretty certainly due to cerebral laws. My own opinion
on the question of active attention and spiritual spontaneity is
expressed elsewhere (see p. 237). But even though there be a mental
spontaneity, it can certainly not create ideas or summon them _ex
abrupto_. Its power is limited to _selecting_ amongst those which the
associative machinery introduces. If it can emphasize, reinforce, or
protract for half a second either one of these, it can do all that the
most eager advocate of free will need demand; for it then decides the
direction of the _next_ associations by making them hinge upon the
emphasized term; and determining in this wise the course of the man's
thinking, it also determines his acts.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE SENSE OF TIME.
=The sensible present has duration.= Let any one try, I will not say to
arrest, but to notice or attend to, the _present_ moment of time. One of
the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has
melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of
becoming. As a poet, quoted by Mr. Hodgson, says,
"Le moment où je parle est déjà loin de moi,"
and it is only as entering into the living and moving organization of a
much wider tract of time that the strict present is apprehended at all.
It is, in fact, an altogether ideal abstraction, not only never realized
in sense, but probably never even conceived of by those unaccustomed to
philosophic meditation. Reflection leads us to the conclusion that it
_must_ exist, but that it _does_ exist can never be a fact of our
immediate experience. The only fact of our immediate experience is what
has been well called 'the specious' present, a sort of saddle-back of
time with a certain length of its own, on which we sit perched, and from
which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of
our perception of time is a _duration_, with a bow and a stern, as it
were--a rearward-and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this
_duration-block_ that the relation of _succession_ of one end to the
other is perceived.
“No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good ones sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, ones character may retain entirely unaffected for the better.”
As Professor Bain says:--
"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the
intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to
be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary
above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every
gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right.
The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing
powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until
repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope
with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically
best career of mental progress."
A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: _Seize the very first
possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every
emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits
you aspire to gain._ It is not in the moment of their forming, but in
the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and
aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain.
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter
how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of
every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely
unaffected for the better. With good intentions, hell proverbially is
paved. This is an obvious consequence of the principles I have laid
down. A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, 'is a completely fashioned
will'; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of
tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the
principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes
effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency
with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their
use. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate
without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it
works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from
taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type
of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and
dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility, but
never does a concrete manly deed.
This leads to a fourth maxim.
“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision”
So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped
creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. And since this,
under any circumstances, is what we always tend to become, it follows
first of all that the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into
the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him
throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of
which behavior consists.
To quote my earlier book directly, the great thing in all education is
to _make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy_. It is to
fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the
interest of the fund. _For this we must make automatic and habitual, as
early as possible, as many useful actions as we can_, and as carefully
guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be
disadvantageous. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand
over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers
of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more
miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but
indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of
every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the
beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional
deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or
regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as
practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such
daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my hearers, let him begin
this very hour to set the matter right.
In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some
admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from the
treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the
leaving off of an old one, we must take care to _launch ourselves with
as strong and decided an initiative as possible_. Accumulate all the
possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put
yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make
engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case
allows; in short, envelope your resolution with every aid you know.
“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.”
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 {59} '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 have 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 such 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.
“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task”
We
have founded a similar society here within the year,--some of us thought
that the publications of the London society deserved at least to be
treated as if worthy of experimental disproof,--and although work
advances very slowly owing to the small amount of disposable time on the
part of the members, who are all very busy men, we have already stumbled
on some rather inexplicable facts out of which something may come. It is
a field in which the sources of deception are extremely numerous. But I
believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature
which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon
are _impossible_.
My teaching is much the same as it was--a little better in quality, I
hope. I enjoy very much a new philosophic colleague, Josiah Royce, from
California, who is just thirty years old and a perfect little Socrates
for wisdom and humor. I still try to write a little psychology, but it
is exceedingly slow work. No sooner do I get interested than bang! goes
my sleep, and I have to stop a week or ten days, during which my ideas
get all cold again. Nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an
uncompleted task.... I try to spend two hours a day in a laboratory for
psycho-physics which I started last year, but of which I fear the
_fruits_ will be slow in ripening, as my experimental aptitude is but
small. But I am convinced that one must guard in some such way as that
against the growing tendency to _subjectivism_ in one's thinking, as
life goes on. I am hypnotizing, on a large scale, the students, and have
hit one or two rather pretty unpublished things of which some day I hope
I may send you an account.... Ever faithfully yours,
WM. JAMES.
* * * * *
When the American Society for Psychical Research was organized in Boston
in the autumn of 1884, Thomas Davidson wrote to comment on its apparent
anti-spiritual bias. In the following reply, dated February 1, 1885, but
more easily understood if inserted here out of its chronological place,
James defined the society's conception of its function. In so doing he
described his own attitude toward psychical research quite exactly:--
"As for any 'antispiritual bias' of our Society, no theoretic basis, or
_bias_ of any sort whatever, so far as I can make out, exists in it.
“If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.”
In the light of all such facts one may well believe that the total
impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil's condition,
as indicated by his general temper and manner, by the listlessness or
alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which his school work is
done, will be of much more value than those unreal experimental tests,
those pedantic elementary measurements of fatigue, memory, association,
and attention, etc., which are urged upon us as the only basis of a
genuinely scientific pedagogy. Such measurements can give us useful
information only when we combine them with observations made without
brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual,
by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling
for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.
Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the discovery of
his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind. What tells in life
is the whole mind working together, and the deficiencies of any one
faculty can be compensated by the efforts of the rest. You can be an
artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition
with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the
subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will
almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if
you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you
will be good. Only you must, then, _really_ wish these things, and wish
them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other
incompatible things just as strongly.
One of the most important discoveries of the 'scientific' sort that have
recently been made in psychology is that of Mr. Galton and others
concerning the great variations among individuals in the type of their
imagination. Every one is now familiar with the fact that human beings
vary enormously in the brilliancy, completeness, definiteness, and
extent of their visual images. These are singularly perfect in a large
number of individuals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly to
exist. The same is true of the auditory and motor images, and probably
of those of every kind; and the recent discovery of distinct brain-areas
for the various orders of sensation would seem to provide a physical
basis for such variations and discrepancies.
“All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.”
The subtlest forms of suffering
known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to
these results.
And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and
everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. “There is indeed one
element in human destiny,” Robert Louis Stevenson writes, “that not
blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we
are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.”(71) And our
nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians
should have held it to be essential, and thought that only through the
personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the deeper sense of
life’s significance is reached?(72)
But this is only the first stage of the world‐sickness. Make the human
being’s sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little farther over
the misery‐threshold, and the good quality of the successful moments
themselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All natural goods
perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and
health and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust and
disappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back of
everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all‐encompassing
blackness:—
“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under
the Sun? I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and
behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. For that which
befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so
dieth the other; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust
again.... The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a
reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love and
their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any
more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the Sun....
Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes
to behold the Sun: but if a man live many years and rejoice in
them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they
shall be many.
“Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.”
In Paul Bourget's report
for this year we find numerous cases, of which this is a type; Jeanne
Chaix, eldest of six children; mother insane, father chronically ill.
Jeanne, with no money but her wages at a pasteboard-box factory,
directs the household, brings up the children, and successfully
maintains the family of eight, which thus subsists, morally as well as
materially, by the sole force of her valiant will. In some of these
French cases charity to outsiders is added to the inner family burden;
or helpless relatives, young or old, are adopted, as if the strength
were inexhaustible and ample for every appeal. Details are too long to
quote here; but human nature, responding to the call of duty, appears
nowhere sublimer than in the person of these humble heroines of family
life.
Turning from more chronic to acuter proofs of human nature's reserves
of power, we find that the stimuli that carry us over the usually
effective dam are most often the classic emotional ones, love, anger,
crowd-contagion or despair. Despair lames most people, but it wakes
others fully up. Every siege or shipwreck or polar expedition brings
out some hero who keeps the whole company in heart. Last year there
was a terrible colliery explosion at Courrieres in France. Two hundred
corpses, if I remember rightly, were exhumed. After twenty days of
excavation, the rescuers heard a voice. "_Me voici_," said the first
man unearthed. He proved to be a collier named Nemy, who had taken
command of thirteen others in the darkness, disciplined them and
cheered them, and brought them out alive. Hardly any of them could see
or speak or walk when brought into the day. Five days later, a
different type of vital endurance was unexpectedly unburied in the
person of one Berton who, isolated from any but dead companions, had
been able to sleep away most of his time.
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far
stronger creature than was supposed. Cromwell's and Grant's careers
are the stock examples of how war will wake a man up. I owe to
Professor C.
“A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.”
Turning from more chronic to acuter proofs of human nature's reserves
of power, we find that the stimuli that carry us over the usually
effective dam are most often the classic emotional ones, love, anger,
crowd-contagion or despair. Despair lames most people, but it wakes
others fully up. Every siege or shipwreck or polar expedition brings
out some hero who keeps the whole company in heart. Last year there
was a terrible colliery explosion at Courrieres in France. Two hundred
corpses, if I remember rightly, were exhumed. After twenty days of
excavation, the rescuers heard a voice. "_Me voici_," said the first
man unearthed. He proved to be a collier named Nemy, who had taken
command of thirteen others in the darkness, disciplined them and
cheered them, and brought them out alive. Hardly any of them could see
or speak or walk when brought into the day. Five days later, a
different type of vital endurance was unexpectedly unburied in the
person of one Berton who, isolated from any but dead companions, had
been able to sleep away most of his time.
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far
stronger creature than was supposed. Cromwell's and Grant's careers
are the stock examples of how war will wake a man up. I owe to
Professor C. E. Norton, my colleague, the permission to print part of a
private letter from Colonel Baird-Smith written shortly after the six
weeks' siege of Delhi, in 1857, for the victorious issue of which that
excellent officer was chiefly to be thanked. He writes as follows:
". . . My poor wife had some reason to think that war and disease
between them had left very little of a husband to take under nursing
when she got him again. An attack of camp-scurvy had filled my mouth
with sores, shaken every joint in my body, and covered me all over with
sores and livid spots, so that I was marvellously unlovely to look
upon. A smart knock on the ankle-joint from the splinter of a shell
that burst in my face, in itself a mere _bagatelle_ of a wound, had
been of necessity neglected under the pressing and incessant calls upon
me, and had grown worse and worse till the whole foot below the ankle
became a black mass and seemed to threaten mortification.
“We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.”
If we proceeded on that method, we might say with perfect
legitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice upon his
door-step and cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteen
at the table, died because of that ominous feast. I know, in fact, one
such instance; and I might, if I chose, contend with perfect logical
propriety that the slip on the ice was no real accident. "There are no
accidents," I might say, "for science. The whole history of the world
converged to produce that slip. If anything had been left out, the
slip would not have occurred just there and then. To say it would is
to deny the relations of cause and effect throughout the universe. The
real cause of the death was not the slip, _but the conditions which
engendered the slip_,--and among them his having sat at a table, six
months previous, one among thirteen. _That_ is truly the reason why he
died within the year."
It will soon be seen whose arguments I am, in form, reproducing here.
I would fain lay down the truth without polemics or recrimination. But
unfortunately we never fully grasp the import of any true statement
until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement
would be. The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark
background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture. And
the error which I am going to use as a foil to set off what seems to me
the truth of my own statements is contained in the philosophy of Mr.
Herbert Spencer and {218} his disciples. Our problem is, What are the
causes that make communities change from generation to
generation,--that make the England of Queen Anne so different from the
England of Elizabeth, the Harvard College of to-day so different from
that of thirty years ago?
I shall reply to this problem, The difference is due to the accumulated
influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and
their decisions. The Spencerian school replies, The changes are
irrespective of persons, and independent of individual control. They
are due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physical
geography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer
relations; to everything, in fact, except the Grants and the Bismarcks,
the Joneses and the Smiths.
“We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.”
All such qualities sink
to the status of 'habits' between their times of exercise; and similarly
truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their
intervals of rest from their verifying activities. But those activities
are the root of the whole matter, and the condition of there being any
habit to exist in the intervals.
'The true,' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of
our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of
our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the
long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all
the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther experiences
equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of BOILING
OVER, and making us correct our present formulas.
The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever
alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all
our temporary truths will some day converge. It runs on all fours with
the perfectly wise man, and with the absolutely complete experience;
and, if these ideals are ever realized, they will all be realized
together. Meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can
get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood. Ptolemaic
astronomy, euclidean space, aristotelian logic, scholastic metaphysics,
were expedient for centuries, but human experience has boiled over
those limits, and we now call these things only relatively true, or true
within those borders of experience. 'Absolutely' they are false; for we
know that those limits were casual, and might have been transcended by
past theorists just as they are by present thinkers.
When new experiences lead to retrospective judgments, using the past
tense, what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho no past thinker
had been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we
understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the world's
previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors
in them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the
story.
This regulative notion of a potential better truth to be established
later, possibly to be established some day absolutely, and having powers
of retroactive legislation, turns its face, like all pragmatist
notions, towards concreteness of fact, and towards the future.
