INTRODUCTION

THE RISE OF NATURALISM AND THE ECLIPSE OF FAITH

FAITH we shall here understand as belief that the ideals of personal life can be realized, a belief which is affirmed and acted upon in advance of proof from actual experience. Like all attempts to express in verbal formula a familiar mental state, this definition is somewhat arbitrary and will probably meet objection. To some it may seem to broaden unduly the province of faith; to others it will appear in just as unwarranted a way to restrict the range of faith's activity. A critic of the first class would undoubtedly assert that our definition so enlarged the meaning of faith as to make it identical with religion itself--and morality as well. For what, he would ask, is religion in essence but such an attitude of confidence in the

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ultimate reality, confidence, that is, that the real universe provides for the final satisfaction of personality. The truth of this assertion is freely admitted, but we refuse to find in it any objection to the conception of faith which we propose to adopt. For a philosophical study of the meaning and implications of faith proves it to be this very thing, the essence of morality and of religion as well. The second objection is of opposite tenor and will come from those who are unwilling to restrict the action of faith to the moral and religious spheres. Are not, they will ask, the confidence of the business man in the economic soundness and eventual prosperity of his country and that of the ambitious youth in his own powers to achieve professional success and renown genuine cases of faith. In so far as the confidence, in these two instances and many others that might be cited from different fields of conduct, is a sincere belief in the powers of personality to

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accomplish its purposes, they assuredly are. But in this instance, we should hold, they are but particular and partial expressions of that underlying confidence that the ends of self-conscious personality can be realized, which may rightfully claim recognition as the primary and fundamental faith.

If we thus conceive of faith as the confidence of human personality that the real world permits of its continued development and final satisfaction, it is obvious that we cannot with correctness contrast certain epochs or periods of human history as possessing faith with others as lacking it. Without some measure of confidence in the power of his own will to accomplish its proper purposes, man could not continue to exist at all; certainly no social order could survive and make its contribution to human civilization .. But the confidence in question may be more explicitly avowed and constantly reflected on in one age than in another. So in historic fact it was in the Middle Ages; hence not

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inappropriately the medieval period has been called the age of faith. The absorbing intellectual interest of this period was human salvation, the preservation of man's soul in its essence and integrity from all the corrupting and destroying influences of the material world. Such conservation of human personality, despaired of in the deepening gloom that attended the close of the ancient era, medieval thought confidently and joyfully believed had been secured through the divine plan of redemption. This divine redemptive plan became consequently the ceaseless preoccupation of men's minds in this period; it was for them the one end toward which the whole creation moved. With reference to this one end of man's salvation through the divine redemptive process, they interpreted all the facts of human experience. The one purpose of their thinking was to formulate, clearly and exhaustively, the Christian plan of salvation, and then to discover how the events of human history

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and the objects and creatures of the material world contributed as means to the furtherance of this sublime end. Thus in dealing with natural phenomena, it knew but one method of interpretation, the teleological: the existence of objects was explained by showing the moral or religious purpose they subserved. To undertake such a detailed description and classification of existing objects as constitutes the foundation of modern science, it had not the slightest inclination; it had little or no interest in the natural world for its own sake or in the relation of natural objects among themselves. Hence the thought of this period sought to explain the existence of objects, not by showing their natural causes, but by searching out the uses which they had for man, and particularly their value for man's spiritual edification. And when by no effort of the imagination it was possible to connect an object or event with the divine plan for human salvation, it was treated

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as a symbol, a divinely prepared lesson of spiritual truth. To the natural world apart from these supposed spiritual uses the medieval attitude was one of disdainful indifference: it was not worth the time and trouble required for its patient and thorough study. Little wonder that modern science has shown an, antagonism to such teleology so bitter and relentless as to seem, in this day of general toleration unreasonable! Teleology of this kind represents not merely a method different from, and opposed to, the causal investigation of nature; it represents the depreciation and denial of all natural science whatsoever. In the course of time, medieval thought developed a fairly complete world-view. This world-view was borrowed from several sources, its constituent features being selected because of their harmony with the ruling preconception of the period. Its cosmogony was derived from a literal interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis.

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The world was created by God out of nothing in six literal days, designed by the divine will to be the home of man, and every other living thing was also separately created and likewise designed to serve him who bore God's image, Its astronomy was taken from the ancient system of Ptolemy. The earth was the center of the universe: the heavenly bodies, sun, moon, and stars, revolved round the earth, giving man the heat and light he needed by day and by night. The physics of Aristotle was admirably suited to complete this conception of the physical universe. The earth was the seat of imperfect motion, hence the scene of change and decay. Motion becomes less variable and more perfect as the spheres succeed one another until the outermost is reached, where motion is perfect and eternally the same. This outermost sphere is the heaven of heavens, the abode of deity. This world-scheme of the medieval mind, had two striking merits: it agreed both with the demands of man's

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spiritual welfare as he then understood them and also with the facts as they appeared to sense-perception. The modern world has largely lost that faith which possessed and inspired the medieval mind. Our loss of faith is to a considerable extent due to the fact that the advance of knowledge has compelled modern thought to abandon the medieval world-view. Modern science has given us in its place the universe of natural law, a universe in which it is far more difficult to find any provision for man's continued personal development and ultimate salvation. In the formation of the modern scientific world-view the first and perhaps the most important step was the discovery by Copernicus that the sun and not the earth was the center of the solar system, that the earth was, in fact, but one of a number of satellites, moving around the sun and revolving upon its own axis as well. We have become so familiar with these ideas, the very ABC of astronomical

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science, that we may altogether fail to appreciate their revolutionary import for human thought. We cannot understand why they aroused such a fury of opposition among churchmen, Catholic and Protestant alike. But when once we grasp the significance of the change which the Copernican astronomy wrought in man's conception of his world we no longer wonder that the Church combated it with such unrestrained violence, with such desperate earnestness; for the belief that man's salvation through the divinely appointed plan is the end for which the whole world exists seems to require as its logical consequence the further belief that the earth, the stage on which this tremendous drama of man's fall and redemption is enacted, is the center of the universe. Everything else, the whole choir of heaven, sun, moon, and stars, is reduced to the position of mere stage-setting, is made accessory and subsidiary to human concerns. But what a different position does modern astronomy assign to the earth

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in relation to the rest of the physical universe! It has not even the importance of a star; it is only a satellite of what Lafcadio Hearn calls a “tenth-rate yellow sun,” a sun like which there are countless others among the host of stars. Such then is the home of man, and the race of man itself but a swarm of living beings inhabiting the surface of such a planet as it swings on its orbit; his position in the universal system is thus one of utter insignificance. Ought we then to feel surprise when we read that in 1631 a Roman Catholic prelate declared: “The opinion of the earth's motion is of all heresies the most abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous; the immutability of the earth is thrice sacred; argument against the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the incarnation should be tolerated sooner than an argument that the earth moves”? The world of medieval thought was a world small enough for man to feel at home in. If not itself man's spiritual home, it

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was so arranged as to enable man to get his spiritual bearings: for was not heaven itself located at the outermost stellar sphere? The world of modern astronomy is a lonesome, an awesome, an inhuman sort of place where are furnaces of heat so intense that one faint breath would suffice to consume every living creature of earth, and frozen solitudes immeasurably vast through which go hurtling masses of matter able on collision to shatter our earth to dust. In such a universe, infinitely extended in space and time, man's life, the whole course of his history upon earth seems but the merest flicker destined to leave, even in the place of its occurrence, scarcely a trace.

Soon after Copernicus made his startling discovery that the earth moves around the sun, Kepler discovered that the distribution and orbits of the planets agree with the forms and principles of geometry, showing that the path of planetary revolution is an ellipse and that the laws of planetary

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motion are based upon this figure. This remarkable demonstration that the physical world was ordered in definite quantitative relations served both to establish the Copernican astronomy and to add one more stone to the foundation of the modern mechanical world-view. In the seventeenth century Newton completed the work of Kepler by showing that the direction and velocity of planetary motion were instances of a still more fundamental quantitative uniformity which held of all motion of all bodies in the physical world. Thus it was the privilege of Newton, working in ground already prepared by Galileo, to complete the foundations of modern physics; for the verification of the gravitation formula that every particle or atom or body in the universe attracts every other with a force proportional to their masses taken conjointly, and inversely proportional to the square of their distances apart, meant that the mechanical laws which hold good on the surface of the

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earth were valid throughout the universe; that, in short, the physical universe was a huge machine. By the middle of the eighteenth century, attempts were being made to complete the mechanical world-system which had been so rapidly and securely established. To accomplish this it was necessary to explain the origin of the natural world by the same mechanical principles that were shown to control its operation, and to account for the birth and development of life and of mind in terms of mechanical causation. This the philosopher Kant attempted to do. Being desirous of proving that the divine interference which Newton believed was required to account for the origin of the world-machine could be dispensed with, Kant in an early work, The General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens (1755), tried to show that the origin of the physical universe could be explained according to mechanical law, and, to this end, formulated a theory of

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world-origin which anticipates in a remarkable fashion the essential features of the nebular hypothesis, later proposed by Laplace and generally adopted. In other works which also fall within the earlier period of his intellectual career, Kant endeavored to explain the origin, growth, and differentiation of living beings by natural causes, holding that all higher forms may be traced back to simpler elementary forms, and that present differences in species are due to the direct influence of changing external conditions, such as climate, food, etc. Not even man would he exempt from the mechanical system, but he proposed to account for his origin and development by the same natural causes. Kant's attempt thus to make mechanism universal proved to be premature, however; he himself abandoned it and withdrew to a more conservative position in later life. Overzealous partisans of natural science have attributed Kant's abandonment of his earlier evolutionism to the conservatism of

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advancing age reinforced by a reluctance to break completely with the traditional theology. But such charges are quite unjustified; the reasons which determined Kant thus to change his view were the very same which influenced great naturalists like Buffon in the closing decade of the eighteenth century to abandon all belief in organic evolution and hold fast to special creation. These reasons were furnished by the forms and structures of the living organism itself, as those were at that time being discovered and described through microscopical investigation and systematic research. Such scientific study served only to set in clearer light the marvelous adaptations characteristic of life and living creatures, adaptations of species to their environment, and of organs and structures to their function and use. To account for such beautifully contrived, for such finely adjusted structures, no natural cause sufficed; before them mechanism was dumb; outside the province of physical law they

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seemed destined to remain, as living witnesses to the contriving skill of divine intelligence. To such a compromise Kant finally came: the inorganic world he believed capable of thoroughgoing mechanical formulation, but the organic world, he thought, could he explained only in terms of creative purpose.

Nearly a century elapsed before Darwin, master-mind of the nineteenth century, as Kant was of the eighteenth, removed this last great obstacle to the extension of natural law by bringing the realm of life within the domain of physical causation. Darwin's achievement was twofold. In the first place, he assembled and arranged a mass of evidence, in cumulative effect fairly convincing, that the different forms of life now existent owe their origin not to so many creative acts of Deity but to a natural process of development. Secondly, he made the discovery, of which Kant despaired, of a natural cause or process able to account for the existence of

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those organic structures which, because plainly adapted as means to the fulfillment of an end, we are naturally disposed to refer to the work of a designing intelligence. Of these two achievements perhaps the second was the more notable; for, until a natural cause could be imagined and verified able to produce these purposive structures, human thought would be justified in holding to an exclusively teleological explanation of their origin. But, as we are aware, Darwin showed that, given the constant occurrence in living forms of minute variations that are inherited, then, in the struggle to exist which follows from the rapid rate of multiplication of such living beings, those variations which best fit the organism to live and prosper in its environment will be preserved· and transmitted, while all others will be eliminated. As the result of these causes, variations are accumulated along those lines which adapt the organism to exist and survive; thus, gradually, the complicated

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adaptations of living tissue, at which we marvel, take their rise. Of late years there has been some talk among scientists of the decline and even of the “death” of “Darwinism,” and from this some anxious spirits have derived consolation, thinking that it means the abandonment by science of the evolution theory. But when such statements are made by persons competent to judge, the Darwinism referred to is the view that natural selection is the all-sufficient cause of organic evolution. This latter was not even the view of Darwin himself, but of some of his followers, particularly those influenced by Wallace and Weismann. Darwin in later years came more and more to doubt the adequacy of natural selection to explain all the facts, and found himself assigning a constantly increasing importance to such other factors as use and disuse and the direct action of the environment. In a letter written late in life he confesses with characteristic candor to his chagrin over this

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fact because it diminished the credit due to natural selection, the factor which he had discovered and which was destined to be identified forever with his name. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the scientific world-view in its main outlines completed. The natural sciences, brought into correlation by the comprehensive principle of evolution, conceived of the universe as a system whose parts are determined not by an overruling intelligence but by resident forces which act and react with mechanical uniformity. As this world-view gained influence over men's minds and won increasing acceptance in intelligent circles of modern society, it weakened faith and threatened to destroy it altogether; for such a universe as evolutionary science depicted seemed itself to demonstrate the futility of faith. Belief that the ideals of personal life can be realized is rational only if such realization is a possibility. But man's personal development requires that he be able to

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choose his ideal, to plan the steps in its realization, to subject natural objects and forces to the achievement of his purpose, and finally to experience the satisfaction of its realization. This in its turn implies, on man's side, freedom, initiative, and personal permanence; on the side of nature, the capacity to respond to new forces and to enter into new relations. But how is this possible in a mechanically determined system? The same machinery which in its regular workings struck off the spark of man's soul must in a short time extinguish it, and that little corner of the universe which for a brief while knew man and his busy pretensions would know him no more. This effect of modern naturalism in destroying man's faith in his own personal ideals and his own spiritual destiny, Huxley describes in a passage become classic: “The consciousness of this great truth” (“ the extension of matter and causation and the concomitant banishment of spirit and spontaneity”) “weighs

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like a nightmare upon many of the best minds of these days. They watch what they conceive to be the progress of materialism in such fear and powerless anger as 'a savage feels when during an eclipse the great shadow creeps over the face of the sun. The advancing tide of matter threatens to drown their souls, the tightening grasp of law impedes their freedom.” Modern philosophy, however, has found new grounds for the faith which the advancing shadow of naturalism threatened totally to eclipse, and these grounds lie in the method and presuppositions of experimental science itself. It was then no accident that turned the attention of philosophers in modern times to the processes and problems of knowledge: the facts of epistemology were just the counterbalance needed to offset the sweeping conclusions of science and prepare the way for a truly synthetic view. These epistemological studies of early modern philosophers

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culminated in the epoch-making insight of the philosopher Kant which brought about what he liked to call a Copernican revolution in the science of knowledge. Now Kant was not only a student of philosophical problems; he was well versed in modern science and had given special attention to the Newtonian mechanics. Newton's system made a deep impression upon him: from its study he gained that insight which is fundamental to his system; for Kant was the first to apprehend in its real significance the fact that the sciences of mathematics and physics are not accumulations of sense-facts, but instead are genuine intellectual constructions, as truly creations of the mind of the scientist as a national policy or an epic poem are creations of the mind of statesman or poet. In order to bring out the importance of this fundamental insight of Kant's we must at this juncture advert to certain considerations which digress slightly from the main line of our thought.

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Every view or conception of the world, including, of course, the mechanical, which pretends to be universal in its scope, must furnish explanation for its own existence as a system of thought. For the human thinker and his thought are a part of the real world and one who would explain the universe in terms of mechanism must find mechanical causes and processes able to account for them both. Now if, for the moment, the graver difficulty be ignored of introducing consciousness into the system of physical energy, we may admit that we should have at least the semblance of a mechanical explanation of thinking if we could conceive of, say, scientific generalization as the accumulation of impressions of a certain kind, made upon the mind by a particular object or set of objects, event or sequence of events, which repeatedly stimulated the sense-organs. Thus we should have at least the suggestion of an explanation of thinking in terms of natural causation. Now, this is the

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way in which many persons, and frequently the scientific investigators themselves who are actively engaged in the process, tend to understand scientific induction. From the observation of similar instances and an accumulation of particular facts, the generalization is supposed to arise by a kind of natural law. Bacon, the reputed founder of the inductive method, may seem occasionally to give sanction to this view, but Galileo had a more adequate understanding of the process. The truth is that a scientific induction is a creation of active intelligence: the laws induced are not conscious reflections of the total effect of many external agencies working upon the sense-organs, they are in a true sense original constructions of the mind itself. Working on the basis of observed fact, the scientific investigator by the exercise of his constructive imagination formulates an hypothesis, and this he is able to do because of the power his mind possesses of projecting motions and

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conceiving relations in pure space, independent of actual observation. The hypothesis once constructed, the intelligence of the originator, guided by its intuitive grasp of the logic of space and of meaning, proceeds to deduce the particular consequences which will follow in fact if the hypothesis is true. In this fashion all the great inductions of modern science, those of Copernicus and Kepler, of Galileo and Newton and Darwin, have arisen; as such they are standing refutations of the mechanical conception of the universe. Kant rendered modern thought a high service, therefore, when he showed that the laws of natural science are intellectual constructions, that mathematics and physics in particular are not assemblages of facts but elaborately wrought-out conceptual systems. But, we are tempted at once to ask, do we not, when we thus speak of the laws of nature as constructions of imaginative intelligence, neglect their distinguishing feature, their outstanding

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characteristic? We are familiar with the products of the imagination in other fields. The novelist, for example, through the exercise of his imagination creates a group of characters, fills in every important detail of their appearance, dress, and situation, records every significant act and incident of their life histories, and all with such consistency and life likeness that we say his story is truer than fact. For all that, because the story is a work of imagination and not a narration of actual occurrences, we assign it to the realm of fiction rather than the domain of fact. On the other hand, is not the salient feature of a scientific law its standing as objective fact, in diametrical opposition to all that is subjective and fictitious? Does it not express a uniformity in the operation of real forces, an underlying uniformity and hence a basal fact? The question arises, then, how such a generalization, admittedly the creation of human intelligence, acquires the standing of objective fact. This

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was Kant's great problem. His solution was that such principles and products of our thinking gain objectivity from the work they do in making more orderly, more harmonious, more unified, the world of our common human experience. For, he held, the difference between the objective world and any realm of fiction or of fancy is that the elements of the former are so bound together in fixed order and relationship as to constitute one system, the same for all human minds. Kant's answer is undoubtedly true as far as it goes, profoundly and indubitably true. Many of the products of our thinking, generalizations of intelligence or constructions of the imagination as they may be called, do acquire the standing of objective fact in just this way: they agree with, and correlate, a number of different instances; they harmonize many discrepant and conflicting facts; they unify and reduce to system a mass of unrelated and hence bewildering data. This is what

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occurs in the every-day life of all of us. Suppose that I enter my classroom one morning and instead of the order, neatness, and warmth which I expected to find, am disconcerted to feel a rushing draft of cold air, to see a jagged hole in an upper window-pane, and to observe muddy footprints on the floor. For the moment, I stand perplexed, trying to imagine some explanation. Then I remember that I saw some boys engaged in a ball game just outside the window on the previous afternoon, and wonder if their ball did the damage. I notice that the window broken is on the side of the room toward their playground, that the hole in the glass is about the size a ball would make, and that the mud or dust upon the floor is such as they would leave if they had entered and searched the room for their ball. I thereupon accept my hypothesis as true in fact, and do so because it agrees with and correlates all the data present to my senses. When I adopt such an hypothesis as

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truth, moreover, it does not remain something distinct from and added to the empirical facts; it merges with and becomes part of these facts. The broken window now becomes the window broken by the ball, and the muddy footmarks the footmarks of the boys. Thus do fact and theory merge in the constitution of our real world. In exactly the same way are many scientific postulates verified: they are accepted as true because, better than any other beliefs, they agree with the many variant and apparently conflicting facts in a certain field, and reduce them to order and system. On this ground the theory of evolution has been accepted by scientists: it was Darwin's achievement to have assembled the facts and then to have shown that the evolutionary hypothesis was the only generalization sufficiently comprehensive to correlate them all. Kant then discovered one of the ways in which our intellectual constructions are verified and given standing as facts. But

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this was, after all, but one method of verification and hence furnished only a partial solution or the problem. And when a partial truth is taken for the whole, in any field, the outcome is bound to be serious error. This is what occurred in the development or Kant's philosophy, and particularly in the thought or his immediate successors or the German idealistic school. Kant made it plain that the laws of natural science are hypotheses which owe their objective reality to the work they do-but this work, as he thought, was wholly intellectual, the organization or the data of experience into an ideal, a conceptual, system. Now his followers Fichte, Schelling, and particularly Hegel, went on, as they believed, to develop the logical implications or his standpoint. Since the work or thought is thus to organize the data of experience, the ultimate aim or all thinking, or Truth, is necessarily a completed intellectual system, a system or ideas which shall comprehend and make

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place for every detail or experience. Since, furthermore, our thought gains objectivity according as it furthers the organization of conscious experience, it follows, so these thinkers maintained, that a completed intellectual synthesis, such as we understand Truth to be, is also identical with the fullest, the most complete Reality. Now, it is obvious that such an ideal unity has been achieved in no human experience, and if we believe, as the successors or Kant did believe, that the existence or such a completely organized experience is implied in the efforts or our intelligence to organize the data of our experience, we must suppose that it takes the form or a superhuman experience, an Absolute Thought, in which all the details or our conscious lives, fragmentary and conflicting as they appear to be, are comprehended and reconciled. And, as by the exercise of our thought we continue to unify and systematize the details of our limited experience, in an increasing degree we

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participate in the Absolute Experience and share its perfect reality. In this way Kant's theory of knowledge was transformed into an intellectualistic philosophy. For it is plainly a consequence of this reasoning that man as a finite being attains fuller reality not by endeavor of action to transform the actual conditions of his existence, but by effort of thought to see things as they are, all comprehended and reconciled within the one absolute system. This position, once taken, has further consequences repugnant to our moral consciousness consequences which led finally to the rejection of absolute idealism and, unfortunately, to the partial discrediting of the Kantian principles underlying it. If reality attaches only to that which is embraced within the unity of the Absolute Experience, what becomes of the inconsistencies, the discordant and conflicting features of our human experience? They must be regarded as apparent, not real, as illusions

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due to our imperfect understanding, certain to disappear when we attain the larger vision. The difficulties in such a view come home to us with special force in two vitally important connections. In the first place, the independence and initiative of individual human wills seem to violate that perfected unity of the absolute thought and to produce persistent opposition and open conflict in the world or real fact. Secondly, evil seems to be rooted in a radical maladjustment in the nature of things. Now, the absolute idealist, if true to his principle, is bound to regard both human freedom and the different forms of evil as illusory and unreal: in so far as the human individual attains reality, he is merged in the Absolute Experience, and to such a one, who sees things as they are, all that appears to be evil proves to be a means to a larger good. Such a view discourages effort and belittles moral struggle; it is repugnant to the conscience of the modern world.

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Thus a check was given to the growth of a new humanism existing in germ in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a humanism which sees the laws of natural science in their true character as working hypotheses, as plans for human action accepted on faith and tested by the help they give man in enlarging the sphere of his conscious control. Kant himself assisted in concealing these humanistic implications of his thought when he made the test of these working principles exclusively intellectual. This led his successors finally to conceive of them as principles resident in the world for thought to discover rather than as tools or instruments employed by man's will in its effort to control and transform the world, tested by the aid they supply in this undertaking, and replaced by other principles when these prove more efficient. To conceive of the laws of nature as uniformities of relation required to maintain the coherence and completeness of the Absolute

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Thought is to substitute for a physical, a logical, determinism, just as fatal to man's freedom and opportunity for personal development as the most thoroughgoing materialism. Further knowledge, both of the interdependence of thought and action and of scientific methods of verification, was required before the momentous consequences of Kant's Copernican change of position in philosophy could be rightly understood and appreciated. Nearly a century elapsed before this knowledge had been gained, and it remained for an American school of philosophy to prove conclusively that all belief, in science as well as in religion, depended upon practice for its verification. The genius of William James, co-operating with the incisive thought of John Dewey, developed a doctrine well known as Pragmatism, which is destined to stand as a permanent contribution to the solution of philosophic problems. Two facts deeply impressed the minds of these original

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pragmatists and suggested their famous doctrine: the discovery by genetic psychology that in organic evolution intelligence has been developed as an aid to action, a means of adjustment, and the general recognition by working scientists that their so-called laws are not transcriptions of reality but man-made instruments whose use is to correlate old facts and lead to new ones. These and other facts seemed to the founders of pragmatism to justify the general conclusion that the test or truth is always success in practice, that those ideas are true which, when acted upon, lead us to the results we expect and desire. Other verification than this, they maintained, there is none: there is no significant difference for thought which does not make a difference in action. A practical difficulty, a situation to which no habitual response is adequate, furnishes the occasion for thought; the solution of this difficulty constitutes its validation. For this doctrine that all thought takes the

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form of belief, which looks forward to the results of action to be verified, the pragmatists round ample confirmation in all the leading departments of human experience: in the ordinary conduct of daily life, in religious faith, in scientific procedure. The truth of my belief that this road leads to the lake is ascertained by walking down it and observing where it comes out. The truth of my belief that this fabric is fast color is round out when, on wearing it, I expose it to the sun and rain. In religion, whose hypotheses are not subject to the usual tests of experience, beliefs are tested by their effects (primarily emotional) upon the mind of the believer: do they give him the hope and courage to struggle on in pursuit of his ideals, or the resignation and fortitude required to enable him to endure his trials and disappointments? By their “fruits,” not by their “roots” we should know them, said James of religious beliefs. In science the true theory is the theory which enables

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the investigator to predict what will happen when, under laboratory conditions, natural processes are allowed to take their course. The belief that water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen is verified when in the chemical laboratory a combination of these elements in this proportion is observed to result in the familiar substance.

The doctrine of pragmatism made an instant appeal to popular intelligence--in particular to minds which were seeking a new basis for religious faith in the world of modern science. The popular vogue of pragmatism was largely due to the simplicity, the clearness, and the practicality of its cardinal principle, presenting such a striking contrast to the labored argument and technical subtlety of traditional metaphysics. But, as the case is bound to be with apparently simple, sun-clear, and open air philosophies, when pragmatism was interpreted, amended, and elaborated to meet a flood of hostile criticism it became

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as complicated and abstruse as any highly wrought product of the philosopher's study. Two of the criticisms directed against the pragmatist doctrine have especial interest for us: one concerns the fields in which ideas “work”; the other has to do with the character of the result which gives verification to our ideas when they are acted upon. With reference to the first point critics at once maintained, and the pragmatists acknowledged the force of their argument, that ideas work intellectually as well as in the field of action. One of the leading functions of ideas is to correlate other ideas; beliefs and conceptions are accepted as true because they reduce to order and system many previous judgments which, as they stand, are not merely different but contradictory. On these grounds, as we have seen in reviewing Kant's theory, many of the generalizations of natural science are adopted as true. In its original statement, indeed, pragmatism tended to be as one-sided in its

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emphasis upon the adjustment of acts as the Kantian theory was in its preoccupation with intellectual synthesis. Upon the second point, hostile criticism maintained that the outcome which was supposed by pragmatism to establish the truth of the belief which guided the action could not be the pleasure or satisfaction or the individual agent, nor even his material comfort and prosperity; for these results are frequently obtained by individuals who are acting upon beliefs generally admitted to be false, while conversely many an idea which the experience of humanity proves to be true has brought to the individual who acted under its guidance only disappointment and poverty and misery. Many persons, for instance, have achieved material prosperity, have accumulated fortunes, by acting upon the belief that every man has his price and that one must outwit his fellows if he does not wish to have them outwit him--but such results do not prove the truth of the

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belief in question. No, the true idea is the idea which works “in the long run,” and when we take the long run into consideration we have to acknowledge the underlying identity of all human interests and say that truth belongs to those beliefs which, when taken for guides of action, contribute to the ultimate good of humanity. This pragmatists have been loath to admit, but it is impossible to see how, if they do not, their theory of knowledge escapes individualism and subjectivism. Unless amended in some such way, it is little better than the teachings of the ancient Sophists; it makes such beliefs true as the individual finds it advantageous to hold. It is evident, therefore, that if practical success be adopted as the criterion of truth, practice cannot be understood as meaning mere outward action, the adjustment of the living individual to his natural environment. It must be interpreted in a larger sense as identical with

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all voluntary action, all purposive activity. If it is thus understood there is no conceivable ground for excluding the fields of thought and emotion from its territory: surely both intellectual and aesthetic activity may he purposive, voluntary; truth and beauty may he ends sought by will, as well as prosperity and efficiency. It must be identified with the satisfaction of human personality in its universal aspect. It means the realization of the personal capacities of every human individual, means the fullest personal development of humanity. To such a pragmatism as this the ethical idealist should have no objection: to be sure, it subordinates truth to the ultimate moral purpose of the world, but such purpose the idealist takes to be the ground of all existence whatsoever. This new humanism which modern philosophy offers us, able to restore our confidence in the powers of personality so badly shaken by the great wave of

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naturalism which followed the extension of the scientific world-view, is thus a synthesis of critical idealism and pragmatism. It recognizes will as fundamental to human personality, as the root of human activity, the source of human progress. Thought, then, is a particular expression, a specialized function of will. All ideas are originally programs of action which look forward to conduct for fulfillment and realization. Hence all beliefs are originally postulates, and faith is prior to fact; for ideas must first be adopted and acted upon before they can be established as facts. The fields of conduct in which ideas are thus tested are those of thought itself, of action, and of feeling; in these three departments of his life, intellectual, technical, and aesthetic, man is pursuing his personal ideals and, through the outcome of this activity, is receiving the judgment of reality upon his beliefs. The result which certifies the truth of a belief is the same in these three fields of

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practice-extension of the sphere of man's conscious control, enlargement of the content of his personal life.

Such is the view which underlies the interpretation of human progress to be given in these lectures. The types of belief, or forms of faith, both scientific and religious, which characterize each of the main stages in man's social evolution will be considered in their relations of dependence and development. Thus we shall permit the course of progress itself to speak concerning the validity of the great determining beliefs of human history. But before beginning this survey, we must pause for a brief consideration of the nature and workings of the human will, the source of mans personal power, and of his social progress.