<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></SPAN>CHAPTER I<br/><br/> THE NATURE OF LIFE</h2>
<div class="blockquot"><p>(Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the bounds of
real truth as distinguished from phrases and self-deception.)</p>
</div>
<p>If I could, I would begin this book by telling you what Life is. But
unfortunately I do not know what Life is. The only consolation I can
find is in the fact that nobody else knows either.</p>
<p>We ask the churches, and they tell us that male and female created He
them, and put them in the Garden of Eden, and they would have been happy
had not Satan tempted them. But then you ask, who made Satan, and the
explanation grows vague. You ask, if God made Satan, and knew what Satan
was going to do, is it not the same as if God did it himself? So this
explanation of the origin of evil gets you no further than the Hindoo
picture of the world resting on the back of a tortoise, and the tortoise
on the head of a snake—and nothing said as to what the snake rests on.</p>
<p>Let us go to the scientist. I know a certain physiologist, perhaps the
greatest in the world, and his eager face rises before me, and I hear
his quick, impetuous voice declaring that he knows what Life is; he has
told it in several big volumes, and all I have to do is to read them.
Life is a tropism, caused by the presence of certain combinations of
chemicals; my friend knows this, because he has produced the thing in
his test-tubes. He is an exponent of a way of thought called Monism,
which finds the ultimate source of being in forms of energy manifesting
themselves as matter; he shows how all living things arise from that and
sink back into it.</p>
<p>But question this scientist more closely. What is this "matter" that you
are so sure of? How do you know it? Obviously, through sensations. You
never know matter itself, you only know its effects upon you, and you
assume that the matter must be there to cause the sensation. In other
words, "matter," which seems so real, turns out to be merely "a
permanent possibility of sensation." And suppose there were to be
sensations, caused, for example, by a sportive demon<SPAN name="vol_i_page_004" id="vol_i_page_004"></SPAN> who liked to make
fun of eminent physiologists—then there might be the appearance of
matter and nothing else; in other words, there might be mind, and
various states of mind. So we discover that the materialist, in the
philosophic sense, is making just as large an act of faith, is
pronouncing just as bold a dogma as any priest of any religion.</p>
<p>This is an old-time topic of disputation. Before Mother Eddy there was
Bishop Berkeley, and before Berkeley, there was Plato, and they and the
materialists disputed until their hearers cried in despair, "What is
Mind? No matter! What is Matter? Never mind!" But a century or two ago
in a town of Prussia there lived a little, dried-up professor of
philosophy, who sat himself down in his room and fixed his eyes on a
church steeple outside the window, and for years on end devoted himself
to examining the tools of thought with which the human mind is provided,
and deciding just what work and how much of it they are fitted to do. So
came the proof that our minds are incapable of reaching to or dealing
with any ultimate reality whatever, but can comprehend only
phenomena—that is to say, appearances—and their relations one with
another. The Koenigsberg professor proved this once for all time,
setting forth four propositions about ultimate reality, and proving them
by exact and irrefutable logic, and then proving by equally exact and
irrefutable logic their precise opposites and contraries. Anybody who
has read and comprehended the four "antinomies" of Immanuel Kant<SPAN name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></SPAN><SPAN href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</SPAN>
knows that metaphysics is as dead a subject as astrology, and that all
the complicated theories which the philosophers from Heraclitus to
Arthur Balfour have spun like spiders out of their inner consciousness,
have no more relation to reality than the intricacies of the game of
chess.</p>
<div class="footnote"><p><SPAN name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></SPAN><SPAN href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></SPAN> See Paulsen: "Life of Kant."</p>
</div>
<p>The writer is sorry to make this statement, because he spent a lot of
time reading these philosophers and acquainting himself with their
subtle theories. He learned a whole language of long words, and even the
special meanings which each philosopher or school of philosophers give
to them. When he had got through, he had learned, so far as metaphysics
is concerned, absolutely nothing, and had merely the job of clearing out
of his mind great masses of verbal cobwebs. It was not even good
intellectual training; the metaphysical method of thought is a <i>trap</i>.
The person who thinks in absolutes<SPAN name="vol_i_page_005" id="vol_i_page_005"></SPAN> and ultimates is led to believe that
he has come to conclusions about reality, when as a matter of fact he
has merely proved what he wants to believe; if he had wanted to believe
the opposite, he could have proven that exactly as well—as his
opponents will at once demonstrate.</p>
<p>If you multiply two feet by two feet, the result represents a plain
surface, or figure of two dimensions. If you multiply two feet by two
feet by two feet, you have a solid, or figure of three dimensions—such
as the world in which we live and move. But now, suppose you multiply
two feet by two feet by two feet by two feet, what does that represent?
For ages the minds of mathematicians and philosophers have been tempted
by this fascinating problem of the "fourth dimension." They have worked
out by analogy what such a world would be like. If you went into this
"fourth dimension," you could turn yourself inside out, and come back to
our present world in that condition, and no one of your three-dimension
friends would be able to imagine how you had managed it, or to put you
back again the way you belonged. And in this, it seems to me, we have
the perfect analogy of metaphysical thinking. It is the "fourth
dimension" of the mind, and plays as much havoc with sound thinking as a
physical "fourth dimension" would play with—say, the prison system. A
man who takes up an absolute—God, immortality, the origin of being, a
first cause, free will, absolute right or wrong, infinite time or space,
final truth, original substance, the "thing in itself"—that man
disappears into a fourth dimension, and turns himself inside out or
upside down or hindside foremost, and comes back and exhibits himself in
triumph; then, when he is ready, he effects another disappearance, and
another change, and is back on earth an ordinary human being.</p>
<p>The world is full of schools of thought, theologians and metaphysicians
and professors of academic philosophy, transcendentalists and
theosophists and Christian Scientists, who perform such mental
monkey-shines continuously before our eyes. They prove what they please,
and the fact that no two of them prove the same thing makes clear to us
in the end that none of them has proved anything. The Christian
Scientist asserts that there is no such thing as matter, but that pain
is merely a delusion of mortal mind; he continues serene in this faith
until he runs into an automobile and sustains a compound<SPAN name="vol_i_page_006" id="vol_i_page_006"></SPAN> fracture of
the femur—whereupon he does exactly what any of the rest of us do, goes
to a competent surgeon and has the bone set. On the other hand, some
devoted young Socialists of my acquaintance have read Haeckel and
Dietzgen, and adopted the dogma that matter is the first cause, and that
all things have grown out of it and return to it; they have seen that
the brain decays after death, they declare that the soul is a function
of the brain—and because of such theories they deliberately reject the
most powerful modes of appeal whereby men can be swayed to faith in
human solidarity.</p>
<p>The best books I know for the sweeping out of metaphysical cobwebs are
"The Philosophy of Common Sense" and "The Creed of a Layman," by
Frederic Harrison, leader of the English Positivists, a school of
thought established by Auguste Comte. But even as I recommend these
books, I recall the dissatisfaction with which I left them; for it
appears that the Positivists have their dogmas like all the rest. Mr.
Harrison is not content to say that mankind has not the mental tools for
dealing with ultimate realities; he must needs prove that mankind never
will and never can have these tools, I look back upon the long process
of evolution and ask myself, What would an oyster think about
Positivism? What would be the opinion of, let us say, a young turnip on
the subject of Mr. Frederic Harrison's thesis? It may well be that the
difference between a turnip and Mr. Harrison is not so great as will be
the difference between Mr. Harrison and that super-race which some day
takes possession of the earth and of all the universe. It does not seem
to me good science or good sense to dogmatize about what this race will
know, or what will be its tools of thought. What does seem to me good
science and good sense is to take the tools which we now possess and use
them to their utmost capacity.</p>
<p>What is it that we know about life? We know a seemingly endless stream
of sensations which manifest themselves in certain ways, and seem to
inhere in what we call things and beings. We observe incessant change in
all these phenomena, and we examine these changes and discover their
ways. The ways seem to be invariable; so completely so that for
practical purposes we assume them to be invariable, and base all our
calculations and actions upon this assumption. Manifestly, we could not
live otherwise, and the spread of scientific knowledge<SPAN name="vol_i_page_007" id="vol_i_page_007"></SPAN> is the further
tracing out of such "laws"—that is to say, the ways of behaving of
existence—and the extending of our belief in their invariability to
wider and wider fields.</p>
<p>Once upon a time we were told that "the wind bloweth where it listeth."
But now we are quite certain that there are causes for the blowing of
the wind, and when our researches have been carried far enough, we shall
be able to account for and to predict every smallest breath of air. Once
we were told that dreams came from a supernatural world; but now we are
beginning to analyze dreams, and to explain what they come from and what
they mean. Perhaps we still find human nature a bewildering and
unaccountable thing; but some day we shall know enough of man's body and
his mind, his past and his present, to be able to explain human nature
and to produce it at will, precisely as today we produce certain
reactions in our test-tubes, and do it so invariably that the most
cautious financier will invest tens of millions of dollars in a process,
and never once reflect that he is putting too much trust in the
permanence of nature.</p>
<p>In many departments of thought great specialists are now working,
experimenting and observing by the methods of science. If in the course
of this book we speak of "certainty," we mean, of course, not the
"absolute" certainty of any metaphysical dogma, but the practical
certainty of everyday common sense; the certainty we feel that eating
food will satisfy our hunger, and that tomorrow, as today, two and two
will continue to make four.<SPAN name="vol_i_page_008" id="vol_i_page_008"></SPAN></p>
<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></SPAN>CHAPTER II<br/><br/> THE NATURE OF FAITH</h2>
<div class="blockquot"><p>(Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and what we know
intuitively; what is implied in the process of thinking, and
without which no thought could be.)</p>
</div>
<p>The primary fact that we know about life is growth. Herbert Spencer has
defined this growth, or evolution, in a string of long words which may
be summed up to mean: the process whereby a number of things which are
simple and like one another become different parts of one thing which is
complex. If we observe this process in ourselves, and the symptoms of it
in others, we discover that when it is proceeding successfully, it is
accompanied by a sensation of satisfaction which we call happiness or
pleasure; also that when it is thwarted or repressed, it is accompanied
by a different sensation which we call pain. Subtle metaphysicians, both
inside the churches and out, have set themselves to the task of proving
that there must be some other object of life than the continuance of
these sensations of pleasure which accompany successful growth. They
have proven to their own satisfaction that morality will collapse and
human progress come to an end unless we can find some other motive,
something more permanent and more stimulating, something "higher," as
they phrase it. All I can say is that I gave reverent attention to the
arguments of these moralists and theologians, and that for many years I
believed their doctrines; but I believe them no longer.</p>
<p>I interpret the purpose of life to be the continuous unfoldment of its
powers, its growth into higher forms—that is to say, forms more complex
and subtly contrived, capable of more intense and enduring kinds of that
satisfaction which is nature's warrant of life. If you wish to take up
this statement and argue about it, please wait until you have read the
chapter "Nature and Man," and noted my distinction between instinctive
life and rational life. For men, the word "growth" does not mean <i>any</i>
growth, <i>all</i> growth, blind and indiscriminate growth. It does not mean
growth for the tubercle bacillus, nor growth for the anopheles mosquito,
nor growth for the<SPAN name="vol_i_page_009" id="vol_i_page_009"></SPAN> house-fly, the spider and the louse. Neither do we
mean that the purpose of man's own life is <i>any</i> pleasure, <i>all</i>
pleasure, blind and indiscriminate pleasure; the pleasure of alcohol,
the pleasure of cannibalism, the pleasure of the modern form of
cannibalism which we call "making money." We have survived in the
struggle for existence by the cooperative and social use of our powers
of judgment; and our judgment is that which selects among forms of
growth, which gives preference to wheat and corn over weeds, and to
self-control and honesty over treachery and greed.</p>
<p>So when we say that the purpose of life is happiness, we do not mean to
turn mankind loose at a hog-trough; we mean that our duty as thinkers is
to watch life, to test it, to pick and choose among the many forms it
offers, and to say: This kind of growth is more permanent and full of
promise, it is more fertile, more deeply satisfactory; therefore, we
choose this, and sanction the kind of pleasure which it brings. Other
kinds we decide are temporary and delusive; therefore we put in jail
anyone who sells alcoholic drink, and we refuse to invite to our home
people who are lewd, and some day we shall not permit our children to
attend moving picture shows in which the modern form of cannibalism is
glorified.</p>
<p>The reader, no doubt, has been taught a distinction between "science"
and "faith." He is saying now, "You believe that everything is to be
determined by human reason? You reject all faith?" I answer, No; I am
not rejecting faith; I am merely refusing to apply it to objects with
which it has nothing to do. You do not take it as a matter of faith that
a package of sugar weighs a pound; you put it on the scales and find
out—in other words, you make it a matter of experiment. But all the
creeds of all the religious sects are full of pronouncements which are
no more matters of faith than the question of the weighing of sugar. Is
pork a wholesome article of food or is it not? All Christians will
readily acknowledge that this is a matter to be determined by the
microscope and other devices of experimental science; but then some Jew
rises in the meeting and puts the question: Is dancing injurious to the
character? And immediately all members of the Methodist Episcopal Church
vote to close the discussion.</p>
<p>What is faith? Faith is the instinct which underlies all being, assuring
us that life is worth while and honest, a thing to be trusted; in other
words, it is the certainty that successful<SPAN name="vol_i_page_010" id="vol_i_page_010"></SPAN> growth always is and always
will be accompanied by pleasure. The most skeptical scientist in the
world, even my friend the physiologist who proves that life is nothing
but a tropism, and can be produced by mixing chemicals in
test-tubes—this eager friend is one of the most faithful men I know. He
is burning up with the faith that knowledge is worth possessing, and
also that it is possible of attainment. With what boundless scorn would
he receive any suggestion to the contrary—for example, the idea that
life might be a series of sensations which some sportive demon is
producing for the torment of man! More than that, this friend is burning
up with the certainty that knowledge can be spread, that his fellow men
will receive it and apply it, and that it will make them happy when they
do. Why else does he write his learned books in defense of the
materialist philosophy?</p>
<p>And that same faith which animates the great monist animates likewise
every child who toddles off to school, and every chicken which emerges
from an egg, and every blade of grass which thrusts its head above the
ground. Not every chicken survives, of course, and all the blades of
grass wither in the fall; nevertheless, the seeds of grass are spread,
and chickens make food for philosophers, and the great process of life
continues to manifest its faith. In the end the life process produces
man, who, as we shall presently see, takes it up, and judges it, and
makes it over to suit himself.</p>
<p>You will note from this that I am what is called an optimist; whereas
some of the great philosophers of the world have called themselves
pessimists. But I notice with a smile that these are often the men who
work hardest of all to spread their ideas, and thus testify to the
worthwhileness of truth and the perfectibility of mankind. There has
come to be a saying among settlement workers and physicians, who are
familiar with poverty and its effects upon life, that there are no bad
babies and good babies, there are only sick babies and well babies. In
the same way, I would say there are no pessimists and optimists, there
are only mentally sick people and mentally well people. Everywhere
throughout life, both animal and vegetable, health means happiness, and
gives abundant evidence of that fact. All healthy life is satisfactory
to itself; when it develops reason, it tries to find out why, and this
is yet another testimony to the fact that having power and using it is
pleasant. When I was in college the professor would<SPAN name="vol_i_page_011" id="vol_i_page_011"></SPAN> propound the old
question: "Would you rather be a happy pig or an unhappy philosopher?"
My answer always was: "I would rather be a happy philosopher." The
professor replied: "Perhaps that is not possible." But I said: "I will
prove that it is!"<SPAN name="vol_i_page_012" id="vol_i_page_012"></SPAN></p>
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