§ 1

Called to the honourable post of a Gifford Lecturer in this University of St. Andrews, I have, of course, studied the Trust Disposition and Settlement of the late Lord Gifford, or the portion of it relevant to the lecturers, and find myself able to correspond heartily with his intentions.

First, he intended the lectures delivered under his Trust Deed to have for their object “the promoting, advancing, teaching and diffusing the study of Natural Theology, in the widest sense of that term, in other words, the knowledge of God … the knowledge of His nature and attributes, the knowledge of the relations which men and the whole Universe bear to Him, the knowledge of the nature and foundation of Ethics and Morals, and of all the Obligations and Duties thence arising.”

Secondly, the lectures were to be the expression of the free individual opinion of the lecturer, whether his conclusions on the momentous subject, or group of subjects, assigned to him should turn out to be positive and constructive, or negative and destructive, or purely sceptical. He must speak as one bound by no formula or standard of belief as constraining either himself or his hearers. He must express simply the ideas or conclusions arrived at in the exercise of his own rational powers, and, of course, the arguments or motives which had led him to such ideas or conclusions, arguments or motives which might lead other individual minds along the same road to the same goal, whether of affirmation, denial or doubt. So I interpret in my own words Lord Gifford’s fourth and fifth requirements.

Thirdly, the lectures were to be “popular,” in the sense, I suppose, that the lecturer, dealing with a subject or group of subjects which is of vital importance for every man, and taking it for granted that those who listen to him would be fairly educated men and women, capable of following a philosophical train of thought, should at the same time avoid as much as possible the technical language which is commonly used among philosophical and theological experts, and should explain it where he is obliged to use it, taking nothing for granted but the average intelligence of the educated person. So I interpret Lord Gifford’s sixth requirement—the rest, which I have not noticed, concerning only details of arrangement and in no way the substance of the lectures.

But I must notice one desire expressed by Lord Gifford which, I am told, has been generally ignored—that, besides giving public lectures, the lecturer should also have personal contact with those who attend his lectures, so that they might have the opportunity to “heckle” him with their personal questionings. I heartily desire to correspond with the Founder’s intention in this respect.1

The above requirements, then, I can accept with a hearty goodwill. The subject—whether there be something eternal behind this changing universe of things and persons, whether and in what sense there be a God or gods, and, if there be, of what sort is the divine nature and what is man’s relation to it—is the fundamental problem of philosophy. I suppose it is unlikely that anyone who was asked for a description of your present lecturer would describe him as a philosopher. But if a “philosopher”—that is, a lover of wisdom—means a man whose spirit can find no rest unless he can gain and keep some “theory” or vision of the world of things and experiences, such as shall enable him to interpret its manifold phenomena as parts of one whole, and as expressive in some sort of one purpose, in which he himself is called to co-operate with will and intelligence—if that be the meaning of a philosopher, then, though defective knowledge and capacity may render me a poor specimen of the class, certainly I am a philosopher.

For though the vision or theory which I have gained or can hope to gain may be sadly imperfect—something seen “through a glass darkly” or “a scheme imperfectly comprehended”—yet I never could endure to desist from the philosophic quest. I never could tolerate with any degree of equanimity the idea of keeping the findings of different fields of thought or experience in separate mental compartments, paying no attention to their inconsistency.

Again, to pass to the second requirement described above, in that quest I could never endure to be otherwise than a free-thinker. I mean by that that whatever obligation I may have inherited or contracted to any traditional system of belief or thought, I could never allow it to blind me to anything which might seem to be truth, whatever its origin, or to shackle me so that I could not follow the light of reason whithersoever it should lead.

I say this of myself with trembling, for experience of life and of books leads one to feel how very difficult it is to be really a free-thinker. Orthodox theologians are supposed to be more especially liable to become the slaves of illegitimate prejudice—to be men whose eyes are blinded to unwelcome truths and who “reason in chains.” But, reading the books of men who have obviously rebelled against every kind of orthodoxy, I seem to see that even extreme reaction against established opinion affords no kind of security against prejudice. The rebels appear to find it at least as hard to recognize the strong points in the positions of their adversaries in debate as do the orthodox. But recognizing the difficulty, we must not give up the struggle to be fully open-eyed to the light from whatever source it comes, and we must, if we would be worthy of the name of lovers of wisdom, pledge ourselves solemnly and seriously to refuse no conclusion, however unpalatable, which on serious consideration appears to be true.

It is of course the case that every man’s opinions in science, theology or morals have owed in one way or another a vast deal to authority, whether it be the authority of home or class or nation, or of some church or organization, or of some individual, philosopher or poet or prophet—whether, I may add, the authority ultimately constrains him to obedience or drives him to rebellion. When Dr. A. N. Whitehead defines religion as “what the individual does with his own solitariness,”2 he is expressing, no doubt, a very important element in the higher kinds of religion, but as a definition it is a paradox, and indeed it is so one-sided as to be untrue. Religion is also—and probably, if you consider it as it appears in history, it is primarily—a social fact; and social influences have largely made the religion and morality of any man what they are. It is also true that, for a great number of us, the opinions on religion and morals which we have received from some kind of authority continue to be accepted just as they are, so long as they appear to work well and to satisfy the requirements of experience, without much consideration of their grounds. But certainly no one can put in any claim to share the philosophic spirit, unless for him the whole subject-matter, whether in religion or morality or in any other department of life—unless the whole subject-matter, received on whatever authority, has been sifted in his own experience and thought, and has passed from being merely a tradition received to become a reasoned conviction of his own mind. For myself I can profess that in all that I am to say in these lectures I shall be speaking nothing more nor less than my own reasoned convictions, without regard to any constraining authority, social, ecclesiastical, or individual.

As for Lord Gifford’s remaining requirement—that the lectures should be “popular”—I do resent and have always resented the tendency of philosophers and theologians to retire into some inner enclave, where they can talk a language intelligible only to themselves. For their subject—the meaning of the world we live in and the relation in which we stand to this meaning—is a subject of vital concern to all men, and those who profess to expound it ought at least to strive to express themselves in words which men and women of common intelligence can be expected to understand.

§ 2

My chosen subject, though it will be found to involve the whole topic of the nature of reality and the reason of man, is specially Moral Philosophy. My starting-point is to investigate the conception of the good life with its postulates, as mankind in general has understood it. For in any general review of mankind, especially where it has risen to any degree of civilization, we find this conception everywhere entertained. “The state,” says Aristotle, in a phrase which endures and finds almost universal assent, “comes into existence for the sake of life, but it exists for the sake of the good life.”3 As distinct from what the individual may find pleasant to his senses, or what he may find profitable to his acquisitive instinct, we find the sense of obligation, of duty, of responsibility and the distinction of right and wrong. The dominance in the modern world of the conception of evolution has led men to the hypothesis that this sense of duty is nothing else at bottom than “the herd instinct,4 so easily recognizable among animals, which subordinates the interest of the individual to that of the group, so that, according to this view, the undoubted authority of conscience is purely of social origin and requires to account for it no reference to any higher or supernatural power. But I propose, to start with at least, to leave aside this question of the biological or psychological origin of the sense of duty and simply to examine in some detail the idea of the good life, just as we might examine the idea of beauty as it is found in developed man; I am proposing to act on the fundamental Aristotelian principle, which nevertheless will require justification, that the true nature of anything is then first apparent when it is fully developed.

I have just set side by side the idea of the good and the idea of the beautiful.5 There are those, like Prof. Gilbert Murray, who—in his truly illuminating and noble book on the Classical Tradition—would identify the two. “I have never,” he says, “been able to see, though people have tried to point it out to me for forty years, any real difference between the moral and the æsthetic.”6 Now, the two are indeed certainly akin. They are both intuitions rather than conclusions from reasoning. Also, I should admit that among the Greeks they were held very close together, the good and the beautiful being almost identified in the idea of τò καλóν—though where Plato would banish the poets, whose work he yet acknowledges to be beautiful, from his ideal state, in the interests of virtue, and speaks of the long-standing quarrel between them and the philosophers,7 he is recognizing a broad distinction between the two ideas or kinds of men. Whatever authority, however, Murray may find for his identification, I feel sure we must reject it. Experience cries out against it. The great moral prophets and saints of history have not been especially æsthetic, and the great artists, the supreme experts in beauty, have not been in the main patterns of morality. For an individual to be wholly dominated by the sense of beauty is obviously not the same thing as to be on fire with the love of goodness. A nation also which is possessed with the idea of the good life, like the ancient people of Israel, may be deficient in the æsthetic sense. The two senses may no doubt be combined, but they are different and even very often antagonistic.

For our consideration, then, in these Lectures I propose the idea of the good life. I do so, first, because of the masterful intensity with which the supreme obligation of the good, of duty, as something quite distinct from the claim of pleasure or profit, or even the requirement of honour, has impressed itself upon the souls of the men whom the world has agreed to call the best. The founder of the philosophy of the Stoics, Zeno, would distinguish the “impressions” we receive by their intensity, holding that the most intense impressions have the most right to be considered representative of reality. There are some, he said, so intense that they “seize us by the hair of our head and drag us to consent.” Surely one of these is the impression of moral duty as absolute. Some of us would remember being deeply moved, when we began the study of Plato, by Socrates’ declaration8: “And this is the point in which, as I think, I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men, that, whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know; but I do know that injustice and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonourable, and I will never fear or avoid a possible good [such as death] rather than a certain evil [wrong-doing] … Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you.” This means that for Socrates moral convictions are stronger than speculative opinions; and though he may rank himself as singular in this respect, I think we should find the majority of men in agreement with him.

Of course, any such general statement needs qualification. There are in all civilizations a great many people who appear to have no clear ideal of life. I remember seeing, scratched upon the pavement of the Roman city of Timgad in Algeria by some ancient lounger, the words “Venari, lavari, ludere, ridere occ est vivere,”9 and though the precise occupations or amusements to be enumerated would vary in different states of civilization or different classes of society, the same apparent absence of anything worthy to be called an ideal of life is everywhere found in a great number of individuals. It is also of course lamentably true that men may sophisticate their consciences so as to profess, and even believe themselves, to be following some noble ideal, while their underlying motive is self-interest or vanity. The light that is in them has become darkness. It is true again that, instead of seeking to form moral convictions of their own, most men are content to live by the standard of public opinion; and that public opinion is constantly in the wrong, and the social tradition of a community may be corrupt and corrupting is undeniable.

Once more, in modification of the idea of moral certitude, it must be admitted that even for the best men there remains a region of moral problems, where different duties seem to collide, which are fairly insoluble. But when all these considerations are allowed their full force, and the variety of actual moral standards among individuals and nations and epochs is fully kept in view, it still, I contend, remains true that the honest, candid man of all nations and civilizations can more easily and securely arrive at certitude as to what he ought to do, and can more easily and securely distinguish the trustworthy moral guide from the clever sophist, than he can arrive at certitude by abstract argument or distinguish false from true in the region of philosophy.

Again, if you pass from thinking of the individual to thinking of societies of men, there is more reliance to be put on their moral ideals than on almost any other part of their heritage; and more value is to be attached to these ideals than to the arguments by which they are traditionally defended. For the moral ideals professed by a nation, even when notoriously the majority of its members fall very far short of them or hardly attempt to follow them, probably represent the convictions of the best minds which have been at work among them; and moral, like æsthetic, ideals are felt, rather than reasoned, and are mostly derived from some prophetic teacher.10

For this reason, then, I set myself to examine the range and nature of this masterful conviction of the claim of the good among the great teachers of men and their followers.

Secondly, I do so because I cannot but think that this is the best way to restore respect for philosophy. It can hardly be denied—it is acknowledged by our philosophers themselves11—that while intelligent mankind pays the highest respect to science, which indeed it cannot but do, considering what science has accomplished in the last hundred years, and even though the respect paid to it has recently been deeply tinged both with dismay and bewilderment, yet it pays very little attention to the philosophers, such as it would pay if their speculations “mattered” to the practical man. And the chaotic condition of philosophy goes far to justify this attitude. It was a like scepticism about the value of current philosophizing which led to Socrates’ successful attempt to bring philosophy down from the clouds into the common life of man and to lead it to become moral philosophy—the enquiry into the good life and into its grounds. That is a subject in which every decent man must be profoundly interested and one on which he starts with a great deal of knowledge based on experience and a more or less trained faculty of judgment. Thus moral philosophy can be made truly human and popular and is the best introduction to metaphysical thinking. Moreover, in a democratic and journalistic age, where everything is being put to the vote and judged by majorities, it is an extraordinarily valuable study, because it teaches us, in the most forcible way imaginable, that the great issues are not decided by majorities—that it is small minorities, who seemed to their contemporaries to be fighting a desperate battle with their backs against the wall, who again and again have won the day in the later judgment and common sense of mankind.

Thirdly, there is surely a very special reason why we give a first place in importance to moral philosophy in the present age. We may be very clever to-day, and we may have a right to denounce as misleaders, or to ignore, the prophets and teachers of the Victorian age. Speaking as a person who was well advanced in years when the great queen died, I do not feel that the current indictment of the Victorians is unjust, at least in some respects. But the thought of the present age, if it is full of curiosity and of variety, is also full of confusion; and the confusion is nowhere so noticeable as in respect of morality. The prophets of the Victorian age were in no respect more short-sighted than in their constant assurances that agnosticism in respect of theology would not undermine the Christian moral standard. There were those who even then lifted their voices to express grave doubt of this assurance; and certainly none of the Victorian assumptions has been found more unwarrantable. To-day, at least as conspicuously as orthodox theology, the accepted moral standard of Christian tradition is being assailed with contempt, with ridicule, and with indignant argument—not only the morality of sex, but also the whole idea of self-denial and the service of the weak by the strong. The current popular literature is demanding above all things free individual self-expression, unshackled by parental or ecclesiastical authority or by considerations of humility or charity.

But a great many serious people, who are by no means puritans, or persons distinguished for conservative orthodoxy, cannot but view the enthronement of free individual self-expression as an object of worship with the deepest dread. There is no doubt a sense in which “to save one’s own soul,” which, however understood, must be the aim of everyone, may be translated “to obtain for oneself free self-expression”; but we feel that if this translation is to be justified, it must also be recognized that the self or soul, with all its multifarious ambitions and desires, as it is found at starting in all varieties of human beings, needs a great deal of chastisement and reconstruction before it can be safely set free.12 It must die to live, as even Goethe acknowledged. Thus there are a great number of not specially conservative people who are seriously alarmed to-day at the moral outlook not only in this country. Surely, then, the needs of the moment suggest to would-be philosophers, distressed that their labours meet with so little attention from practical men, that they should devote themselves specially to the line of research and reflection along which not only notable distinction, but the attention and respect of common men, have been won in the past both in Scotland and England, as by Joseph Butler, and the glory of Germany who was by race a Scot, Immanuel Kant—the line of moral philosophy. James Martineau, Hastings Rashdall, and Dr. Sorley, who is still with us, are more recent examples. For we can depend upon it that moral standards, if they are to maintain themselves, imperatively need justification to the reason. They cannot survive as an unreasoned emotion or feeling.13 In other words, the study of the good life as it has been preached and lived requires also anxious search into the validity of its presuppositions.

§ 3

My subject, then, is to be Moral Philosophy—the philosophy of the good life; and my next step must be to explain the course of the argument which I intend to follow in these lectures, for whatever measure of originality a man may have consists largely in his approach to his subject or the perspective in which he sees it. So Montaigne and Pascal rightly defend themselves against the charge of not being original because they are found to borrow the thoughts and expressions of others. The old thought, they said in self-defence, may have gained a quite new meaning by being set in a new context and development.14 “Qu’on ne dise pas que je n’ai rien dit de nouveau: la disposition des matières est nouvelle; quand on joue à la paume, c’est une même balle dont joue l’un et l’autre, mais l’un la place mieux.” So Lessing in his Kleine Schriften says: “The manner in which one comes to a matter is as valuable and even as instructive as the matter itself.” In this sense every honest thinker has some measure of originality. In my own case, then, the philosophy which commands my respect is that which has least the character of being abstract or a priori, and which is most deeply rooted and most securely verified in the actual experience of mankind. I propose therefore to take my stand first of all upon the ground of the moral consciousness of men as shown in history. Everywhere mankind appears—even the rudest tribes—as having some sort of standard of a good life—the life which is approved and which binds man to his fellows, or conversely a life the obligations of which he cannot ignore without falling under obloquy and punishment. As has already been said,15 it has been often supposed that the moral sense has its roots in this herd instinct—that it is at bottom purely social, simply akin to what is to be found among the higher animals. But I am not proposing at present to consider its origin, only its most notable developments.

Thus in very early history we find that the idea of the good life is developed, perhaps for the first time on very distinct lines, in the teaching of the Iranian prophet Zarathustra: we find it taking other expressions in India and in the remoter East, as later in Arabia under the teaching of Muhammad. We are by tradition much more familiar with its very rich development in the poets and philosophers of Greece; and on a strikingly different basis in the history of Israel and in the teaching of Jesus Christ. These developments occur quite independently of one another, save that what we find in the world of Islam may be described as an out-growth of Judaism, though on very distinctive lines; and that which is most intimately bound up with European history, the teaching of Jesus Christ and of the Christian Church, is professedly based upon the foundations of Israel.

All these expressions of the conception of the good life for man will be passed under careful review. In almost all of them we shall find that they have outgrown the merely social sanction, in which the sense of moral obligation is commonly found to originate, in two directions. First, that the obligation of the individual to obey the tribal law has passed into the wider and deeper conception of the individual soul as holding within itself the witness to its own value and end—a value and end which it is its highest duty to realize in itself and to respect in other men, and which are something much more than an obligation to obey the tribe. Secondly, that the sense of moral obligation has carried man above himself and found its sanction and its aim in the relation of man to the divine being; though to this last tendency we shall find at least in original Buddhism a marked exception.

When we have finished our review of the actual developments among mankind of moral practice and theory—which must necessarily be a rather protracted survey—it will become our business to analyse out as carefully as possible the intellectual presuppositions of these various types of morality which have actually prevailed, and to consider whether they are intellectually justifiable—whether they belong to the realm of reality or of myth—whether they can be brought into harmony to-day with the postulates of human experience in other departments of human experience, with art, with science, with history—and can thus make a fresh claim to the allegiance of mankind at large. For, if practical moral certainty is to survive, it must become an intellectual apprehension also and be found consistent with the whole body of knowledge. This is obviously a wide-ranging enquiry which I can only hope to attempt in respect of its main lines, and with the help of the consideration which will have emerged that (with the exception of Buddhism) there is up to a certain point a very remarkable agreement in principle among all the prophets and teachers of the good life, whom we shall have examined, with regard to the realities which they postulate behind the visible world of nature and man.

Since the origin of Christianity, or perhaps I should say since the first spread of Islam, there does not appear to have arisen any great teacher who has proclaimed a new moral way for man so as to command any wide or permanent allegiance; but we shall of course have to take account of notable rebellions against all the moral standards appealing to ancient authority in different lands, and among these what will be most vividly in our eyes will be the rebellions in modern Europe against the Christian moral tradition. These rebellions are of two kinds. There are the rebels against the actual moral standard of Christianity, such as were Voltaire and Rousseau, and Goethe in a milder form, and in a much more revolutionary form Nietzsche and a good many contemporary writers. And there are the rebels who, claiming to retain the traditional moral standard in practice, believe that this can be done while placing it on a quite new basis of intellectual presupposition—such as are to be found among materialists, positivists and agnostics, and also among idealists.

But before embarking on this formidable enquiry into facts and principles, I want to say a word concerning the relation of philosophy to experience in general and to moral and religious experience in particular.16

§ 4

Philosophy is a comparatively late-comer into human history. Mankind had accumulated a vast store of experience and verified in a rough-and-ready way, or rejected as worthless, a great number of instinctive assumptions and conjectures before the philosopher appears upon the scene. It had moved out in three directions.

1. Impelled, first of all, by the instinct of self-preservation, both individual and tribal, it had moved out towards nature, including under that name all its living breeds, to appropriate its resources and to defend itself against the perils which threatened it.17 In this process it had accumulated a vast store of experience and had reached instinctively a number of general notions, such as the notion of a prevailing order in nature which makes it relatively trustworthy, and concurrently the notion that there were among natural phenomena some which could not be reckoned upon or accounted for, and must be attributed to the arbitrary wills of spirits good or bad. Leaving the latter class of notion aside for the moment, we find ourselves tracing the development of civilization, with the various kinds of utilitarian science and the earlier forms of the æsthetic arts; for the same instinctive pressure led man to find in nature not only the satisfaction of his demand for the sustenance of his physical life, but also the response to a hunger for beauty. The philosopher therefore when he comes upon the scene finds the minds of men preoccupied with convictions about the solidity, reality and normal orderliness of nature, and also with the conception of beauty and, we may add, of truth, as things to be desired in and for themselves. There is mixed up in these convictions a vast amount of gross mistake, of which the “wise man” may fairly easily demonstrate the futility and gradually dispossess the minds of his contemporaries. But the underlying assumptions remain solidly established, as verified in constant experience.
2. And all this time primitive man has been moving out towards his fellow-men. He had inherited from his animal ancestors a group instinct which led him to live for his group and sacrifice himself for it. Thus he distinguishes men from animals, and deals with them differently by the use of language as a vehicle of his thoughts and intentions. Potentially they all seem to have common interests, and the area of friendliness or fellowship extends, and within each unit of human action organization takes place. Thus we trace the development of human society based upon certain postulates about human nature which experience suggested and has verified—without which human society could not go on—such as freedom, duty and responsibility, and a widening sense of brotherhood among men.
3. Meanwhile, man is also found in history (or in the discoveries which tell us something certain about prehistoric man) to be moving out in another direction—towards God or gods. The unaccountable features in the proceedings of nature suggested no doubt the activity of spirits good and bad whose wills might be influenced, like the wills of men, by gifts and persuasions; and dead ancestors presented themselves in dreams and visitations, and inspired both terror and the hope of protection. The origins of religion are of course obscure,18 but the enormous development of religion is apparent wherever the remains of an early civilization are discovered by the antiquarian, as well as when historical records or memories begin to appear. Everywhere we find man’s greatest efforts and skill devoted to the building of temples, and the proper ordering of sacrifice and worship, while the priesthoods, which are supposed to possess the knowledge of the ways of the gods and to interpret them to men, are held in the highest honour. The question whether the amount of mere error which appears in the early traditions of religion is greater or grosser than appears in primitive ideas concerning nature and man need not here delay us. At any rate, the amount of gross error was immense.

But we witness also developments of morality and religion which are confessedly noble and pure—which almost everyone would acclaim to be on the highest level of human thought and achievement—and these developments carry with them the conception of the good life for man as involving his relation to God, as much as his relation to his fellow-men. We are not yet considering whether the occupation of mankind with religion is a rational occupation at all, or whether the conception of the good life must really be held to involve his fellowship with God. We are only noting that in fact man’s development has been in three and not two directions—towards nature, towards man and towards God—and that his instinctive movements in these three directions have received such confirmation in experience as that when the philosophers begin to appear upon the scene they have found already in possession among mankind certain apparently ineradicable convictions about nature, about man and also about the divine being, with which the philosophers have been compelled to deal, and which in fact they are found to have dealt with in many different ways. But while there are innumerable differences among the philosophers in their attitude towards common experience, there is one difference which tends to divide them into two classes, and it is this difference to which I wish to call attention and on which I must dare to express a personal judgment. The difference I am referring to is that between the predominantly a priori or abstract philosophers and those predominantly experiential or a posteriori.19

The East, especially India, is the home of the a priori thinking in a pre-eminent sense. It is there that we find that common experience, fundamentally derived through the senses, is most readily depreciated as delusion. But even if we confine ourselves to Europe, and to the main stream of philosophy which had its roots in Greek thinking, we still find the two types of philosophers in constant evidence and antagonism. If, leaving aside the child-like attempts of the early physicists to find the unitary principle in nature, we make our beginning with Socrates, we shall find him starting simply from one part of man’s experience, his notion of the good to be pursued by man, and seeking to find some fundamental definition of virtue or the virtues by a sceptical analysis of common conceptions. He works on the solid basis of common experience. On the product of this analysis we find Plato rising higher and higher into the region of first principles and finally appearing (as in the Timæus) with a markedly dogmatic and a priori construction, but at the same time refusing to lose his hold on common experience. Aristotle is, we should agree, markedly experientialist on the whole and distrustful of the a priori. The Neo-Platonists, on the other hand, with whom Greek philosophy reaches its climax, are in the opposite extreme. When that extraordinary product of the dark ages, John the Scot (which designation you must, I fear, recognize as meaning John the Irishman, rather than an early philosophical product of your own country20)—when that remarkable product of the ninth century gave to the Catholic world his all-embracing philosophy it was a thorough-going Neo-Platonism, barely interspersed with deferential allusions to the Christian Scriptures, embodying the a priori method in its extremest form, that is, exhibiting a thorough confidence in the power of the human reason to develop the universal scheme of things out of its own self-contained intuitions with the slenderest equipment of actual knowledge. The great schoolmen, such as St. Thomas Aquinas or Raymond Lull, exhibit a very much greater deference alike to the restrictive authority of Aristotle and to the dogmatic requirements of the Church. But there still remains in their vast products of thought what seems to us a naïve belief in the capacity of the human mind to perceive a priori what must have been, and to determine what therefore is the case, without any critical examination of the facts.

In recent philosophical estimates these mediæval lords of thought have been, after centuries of contempt, restored to their thrones. This fresh appreciation of their merits is due not only to a recognition of the vast bulk of their achievement, and of their enormous influence on European thought in their period, but also to the perception of the vast addition which they made to the power of the human mind to construct a precise and complicated train of argument, to estimate exactly what it implies and what it does not, what it excludes and what it does not. Their vast enrichment of the furniture of the human intellect passed to the sons of the Renaissance who were most inclined to scoff at them. For the reaction against their method was violent. Dr. A. N. Whitehead describes the later scholasticism as “an unbridled rationalism,” “an orgy of rationalism.” Surely it is true that the scholastic thinking and reasoning whether from received dogmas or a priori principles was almost entirely “unbridled” either by any criticism of their sources or by any considerable experimental knowledge of what the ascertainable facts of the universe actually are.

Thus, the first dawn of historical criticism and scientific exploration brought the scholastic fabric into discredit and contempt. All the stress comes to be laid on criticism and experiment. Knowledge is specialized into departments. The unity of knowledge disappears in the process of infinite subdivision. In some quarters the very suggestion of a universal theory of things brings a man into contempt. A very acute Cambridge man of the last generation—Henry Sidgwick—used to say that if a man is to obtain ungrudging recognition in a modern university he had better know nothing outside his own subject. It could hardly be denied that the real advances in knowledge since the Renaissance have been due to the inexorable determination on the part of our scientific men and our historians to repudiate a priori judgments and to study with minutest analysis the actual facts. Nevertheless, the a priori dogmatic spirit has not been killed and cannot be killed. Hegel has been an enormous influence in the modern world, and Hegel’s vision of history as the manifestation of spirit in the threefold moments of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, was an intellectual construction which, while no doubt it represents something in actual experience, also largely forced the facts, in violation of their natural meaning, into conformity with an a priori assumption.

In the world of to-day the a priori spirit is certainly not dead. In many brilliant histories written by Nationalists or Catholics or Modernists we cannot fail to recognize an a priori conception of what “must have been,” prevailing over any candid examination of the facts. Meanwhile the men of science have been giving violent shocks to those who hoped that they had been imbibing the “assured results” of physical investigation. Mathematical physicists have been proclaiming that there is to be found at the very basis of nature a region of indeterminism. The ultimate elements of what we used to believe to be atoms appear to be acting not according to invariable laws, but with something like arbitrary choice. We may only speak of their average behaviour. The intelligent public cannot understand the argument of the mathematicians, but the outcome of their bewildering conclusions has given a shock to the state of mind which used to think itself scientific. “Anything may happen in a world which is fundamentally indeterminate.”

Once more there is apparent among us a rather widespread revolt from the intellectual traditions of Europe—a revolt which is set to maintain the superiority of Indian subjectivism over European belief in objective reality. This sort of subjectivism is deeply fostered by the dubious suggestions of contemporary psychology. And this widespread subjectivism in our present intellectual society leaves a great many “intelligent” men and women the prey to any a priori theorist who attracts their fancy.21

This somewhat chaotic condition of the contemporary mind is, no doubt, largely due to the deep disturbance, and disillusionment as to established standards and ideas, wrought by the experience of the war in the mind of Europe. The intellectual disturbance may be only temporary. The chaos may yield to a renewed cosmos. Meanwhile one who still believes that the Western tradition of civilization, science, morality and religion rests on secure foundations and is capable of renewal may hope to get a hearing, like anyone else. To me, then, it seems that the philosophy which is capable of ministering to this renewal is that which keeps closest to experience—the prolonged experience of our race whether nature-ward, man-ward or godward. No doubt this experience, as vulgarly interpreted, has proved to be full of illusions, and progress has frequently passed into deterioration and collapse. It is the function of the philosopher to rectify the interpretation of experience, and of the statesman and prophet to point the way of secure advance. But an experience which has so richly justified the instinctive belief in human progressiveness, and has so fully vindicated the potential glory of human life, in spite of widespread vice, in spite of actual retrogressions, cannot fundamentally be based on illusion. And the spirit of indiscriminate revolt can hardly fail to lose out of the tradition elements which are of incalculable value for the making or the redemption of mankind. I proceed, then, to my review of the historical conceptions of the good life. They at least deserve our respectful consideration.

It must of course be admitted that if a student to-day reads in succession the works of a number of contemporary or almost contemporary philosophers—surrendering himself to each in turn before he seeks to estimate the ultimate value of his speculations—he will be impelled towards a final scepticism, because he will find the conclusions, confidently presented to him for acceptance, so different and irreconcilable. But to acquiesce in the sceptical attitude which is content to find all views interesting, while abandoning the attempt to reach a conclusion or conviction of one’s own, is to abandon the very aim of reason, which is the conviction of truth; and my contention is that the supreme test of truth among theories is the capacity which each theory in turn exhibits, or fails to exhibit, upon mature consideration to interpret the experience of mankind, as well its moral and religious experience as also every other kind of abiding experience.22

“Philosophy,” says Dr. F. R. Tennant, “is unavoidably a matter of individual predilection, as its whole history reveals, save on the one condition that it sets out from and abides by fact or objective datum, and not from ready-made abstractions in which individual predilection is already involved.”23

APPENDED NOTE TO CHAPTER I?

THE TRINITY OF VALUES—GOODNESS, BEAUTY, TRUTH

Frequent mention is made in these lectures of the idea of a trinity of values—which plays a great part in recent literature. The contention is that these are ideals of which the human mind is specially susceptible, but which it does not create. They are in some sense objective. The human soul appreciates them as real elements in the world which it comes to know—as real as other experienced things. It is further contended that such values presuppose an intelligent mind revealed in nature—a personal spirit of goodness, beauty and truth. They are different aspects of the mind or character of God. Thus, as existing in God, or as appreciated by the human mind, they are not separate entities. All the same it is contended that, as appreciated in the human soul, we are bound to distinguish them, not as if there existed distinguishable faculties in our souls corresponding to those different ideas, but because different souls are specially susceptible of one or the other—as men are specially saints or artists or philosophers, or have such dispositions as that they tend to rate most highly virtue or beauty or truth. But we are not to imagine that they can be sharply divided, or that we shall not find that they inevitably overlap. No man wishes to be good without feeling also that vice is ugly and is out of harmony with the truth. You may find an artist, like Benvenuto Cellini, who appears to describe himself as altogether destitute of moral sensitiveness, but this is probably an exaggeration, due to an eccentric sort of vanity.

I have been asked what I mean by truth as a “value” of which we are sensitive, and of which we feel the obligation. I mean that to be fully human we must recognize the duty of knowing things as they really are—of subjecting our desires and fancies to reality, as experience reveals it to us. Curiosity—the pure desire to know—is an essential quality of the human spirit as it develops; and this is accompanied by the recognition that to refuse knowledge, even in the supposed interest of edification, is a kind of rebellion against God. Saints have sometimes disparaged the pure love of truth for its own sake—like St. Bernard—but to do so is to repudiate one of the most distinctive excellencies of the rational nature.

• 1.

  The lectures as they stand in print have been a good deal altered from what was originally spoken (at least in detail) as a result in part of such personal contacts.

• 2.

  Religion in the Making, p. 6.

• 3.

  Pol., i, 2.

• 4.

  Prof. G. Elliot Smith (History of Man, p. 255) declares that the evidence concerning primitive man “reveals no trace of the assembling of any ‘herd’ other than the family group, either for self-defence or any other purpose.” “The primal horde … is fiction pure and simple. ‘The Herd Instinct’ belongs to the same category of misleading speculations.” This question I leave to the anthropologists.

• 5.

  On the trinity of values—goodness, beauty and truth—see App. Note, p. 30.

• 6.

  He is following Shelley in this identification. Cl. Trad. in Poetry, p. 259.

• 7.

  Rep., x, 607.

• 8.

  Apology, 29.

• 9.

  To hunt, to bathe, to gamble, to laugh, that is to live.

• 10.

  There is a noticeable phrase in Plato’s Republic (382 E), where Adeimantus is represented as assenting to Socrates’ dogmatic statement of God’s essential goodness as something which becomes evident to him when Socrates asserts it. “So I myself think, now you say so.” This represents the average human attitude towards the great moral prophets of mankind. Ordinary men accept their teaching as true, in virtue of a responsive assent of their own consciences, though by themselves they would never have thought of it.

• 11.

  See, e.g., Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis, pp. 278, 281; cf. pp. 34, 286: “Most people regard philosophy as the acme of futility, the abstraction of abstractions.” … “The philosophers have lost touch with the people so egregiously that it is hardly worth while insisting on the point … All alike are asking what use they are in the world.” Cf. A. N. White-head, Process and Reality, p. 218: “The combined influence of these allied errors has been to reduce philosophy to a negligible influence in the formation of contemporary modes of thought.”

• 12.

  See below, pp. 221 f.

• 13.

  See Rashdall, Is Conscience an Emotion?, p. 5.

• 14.

  See Brunschvigg’s Pensées de Bl. Pascal, vol. i, pp. 33-4.

• 15.

  See above, p. 7, and note.

• 16.

  What follows is substantially a repetition of what I have said elsewhere, but I thought such repetition could not be avoided.

• 17.

  “Since man first acquired the ability to examine the conditions of his existence, his first occupation has always been the conscious search for the means of safeguarding his own life.”—Prof. Elliot Smith, Human History, p. 24.

• 18.

  I cannot but think that Prof. Elliot Smith’s account of its origin is a great deal too simple to be at all plausible. “Simple explanations,” says Dr. A. N. Whitehead truly, “are to be sought but distrusted.”

• 19.

  Any epistemology, i.e. any attempt to analyse experience or knowledge, must recognize in it some sort of synthesis between what is derived from sensations, over which the mind has no control, and the action of the mind upon sensations. Of what kind the synthesis is, and how the difference between real knowledge and erroneous opinion is to be explained, has been one main problem of European philosophy since Plato’s day. But I am not at present concerned with this problem. I am simply contrasting two classes of philosophers exhibiting two opposite mental characteristics.

• 20.

  His theory was condemned at the Council of Valence as merely so much “Scots porridge.”

• 21.

  This “modern” state of mind is described vividly, if with some exaggeration, thus: “Humanity has in fact revolted against the tidy, cast-iron, orderly, rational idea of the universe presented to it by the older science. Such an idea it has found insufferably dull, prosaic and uninspiring. Men and women have reacted against it by asserting their freedom, and by giving vent to their hunger for irrationality, for adventure, and for disorder. Humanity has indulged in the bizarre in art, in free-verse in poetry, in revolutionism in politics. People are more interested in primitive instincts than in rationality.” This quotation is made from a paper by H. N. Baker contributed to an Australian journal.

• 22.

  I have attempted, in an appended note, p. 313, to distinguish the appeal to religious experience which I believe to be justified from one which makes itself heard to-day but which cannot be justified.

• 23.

  Miracle and its Philosophical Presuppositions, p. 88.