The Feast of Reason

I

BERGSON said of miracles that they either are or are not. There is no middle course for miracles, as there is no middle course for facts. But the piquant feature of a miracle, the feature which sets it off from life’s more prosaic occurrences, is that one cannot tell whether it is or is not. One can assert that it is a miracle, and be told that it is a myth; one can deny that it is a miracle, and thereupon be told that he is a materialist. The world has never agreed on miracles, and probably never will.

The world has never agreed on philosophy. But with philosophy the case is more complex. A miracle is, or is not, a fact. The ideas of philosophy are neither so direct nor so mutually exclusive. Philosophy deals with truth; and facts are mere excrescences of truth. Facts are unchanging and, once established, unassailable. They may be linked together, or evolved one from the other, in a chain which, we say, is true. But a chain of facts cannot make up a truth, and truth is not composed of facts.

This is not to be sentimental, or to indulge in any such generality as ‘Truth is One,’ ‘Truth is Beauty.’ It is to distinguish between inert, unalterable facts and dynamic truth, to which facts sometimes have been steppingstones. A quality of truth is vitality, a nearness to human problems and the difficult life of all of us. The Garden of Eden story has become a question of fact or fiction; even if true, it is no longer a truth. It has no vital concern for any of us, no influence on our thought and action. We live quite regardless of the first man and woman and the origin of sin. This is the difference between truth and fact; and truth, not fact, is the shuttlecock of the philosophers. Philosophy is interested in fact only as it corroborates and gives body to truth.

Almost everyone has asked — or if he has not asked, he has wondered — just what is the use of philosophy. Why does man philosophize? He philosophizes because it is his nature to; he does it in the same careless spirit in which on a country walk he swishes off the heads of the chicory flowers, those ragged, blue-eyed children of the fields: he does it with the ease and abstraction he puts into whistling. It is of no more use and of no more harm than either of these: it is a diversion, a universal divertissement. It is a rest and a refreshing for us all. Ask not why man philosophizes, but ask if his philosophy can ever lead him to the truth. Then you will be meeting him on his own ground; you will be loading his gun when you think you are spiking it; you will be letting down the bars to his favorite field of speculation.

There is no reason why philosophy should not lead man to truth; what Bergson said of miracles cannot be said of philosophic truth. Here it is a question, not of fact or fiction, but of more or less. It is inconceivable that all thought has been utterly unsound. It is impossible. The field of thought is infinite; one can scarcely set foot in it without touching the hem of truth’s garment. The question is, not whether man can reach truth by philosophy, but whether he can know it when he sees it, and whether he can bring others to a recognition of it.

This would be a simpler task were it not for an almost universal preoccupation of the human mind. Man is so provincial in his outlook that he cannot help believing his own carefully reasoned conviction to be self-evident, insistently credible to all. Doubt in another seems affectation. The orthodox think atheism a shameless path into the limelight; skeptics think orthodoxy a cringing fear of thinking. Every philosopher believes that his method, if scrupulously observed, will lead every other philosopher to a triumphant place at his side. The casual reader is often taken in by some such specious claim. His only hope in reading philosophy is to read it all.

A little philosophy is a dangerous thing, far more dangerous than a little knowledge. Philosophy is not know - ledge, it is exploration; and a field half explored is a field not explored at all.

A little girl once opened, when the parental eye was closed, a book of ancient philosophy. She found therein these cryptic words, ‘God is a spheroid, homogeneous throughout.’ She was quite an intelligent little girl, and lost no time in looking up spheroid in the dictionary. She looked up homogeneous, too. But even then she could not understand how God could possibly be a body made up of similar parts having nearly the shape of a sphere. Everything she had ever known of God went to deny this. And when the parental eye was opened, it fell upon a little girl dissolved in tears and torn with doubts, a little girl whose world was upside down — as indeed any world would be which was presided over by a body made up of similar parts having nearly the shape of a sphere. She entirely forgot the great majority of men who have conceptions of God as different from that as her own originally had been, and quite as likely to be true.

There is nothing so misleading as a philosophic statement dissociated from the statements which lead up to it, color it, and substantiate it. A train of thought may be criticized on its own merit. A single, unsubstantiated idea repudiates analysis by becoming an epigram, with an epigram’s inviolable surface. And much more compelling than a dissociated philosophic assertion is a dissociated philosophic negation. However specious it may be, it is inherently more potent, possibly because assertion stimulates while negation inhibits thought.

In the same way, a single book of philosophy may be convincing when it is read by itself, and appear ridiculous against the background of the history of philosophy. Mr. Wells’s recent book. God the Invisible King, impresses quite differently the lay mind and the mind familiar with philosophy. The casual reader picks up Descartes’s Discourse on Method and finds him asserting that the man who follows his method of reasoning will attain the certainty that he has attained. The casual reader might believe this. But, as a matter of fact, a whole school of men followed the method of Descartes; they split up and they wrangled, they fell into disputes and schisms. They cast upon reason the stigma that has so often been cast upon faith, and showed, what has often before been shown, that theories as well as creeds can be promoters of dispute. Descartes’s great philosophical monument, ’I think, therefore I am,’ has become a mere schoolboy’s catchword for sophomores to startle freshmen with. It has a glitter, it is true, which fascinates the infant philosopher; but we no longer use it as a platform to build upon. It has disappeared from modern philosophy just as the soliloquy has disappeared from modern drama. They are both important solely as facts of history.

In a similar vein Kant says, in his preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, ‘I flatter myself that I have removed all those errors which have hitherto brought reason, whenever it was unassisted by experience, into conflict with itself.’ Kant flattered himself, indeed. He removed those errors to the satisfaction of himself, perhaps, but they still exist, to trip the average reasoner. Kant shouted his ‘Eureka!’ too soon. There is no such thing as pure reason — no more after Kant than before him. Reason is the same hundred-headed hydra it has always been, and every head snaps at every other head, and there is no end of error and no end of conflict.

Kant reasoned for himself, and for himself his reason is infallible. But it does not proselyte. That is one of reason’s failings: it is not contagious. Many have read Kant, and a few have understood him. The world has marveled at him, and a few have accepted. He teems with ideas, and we reject or accept them just as we should do if they had occurred to ourselves. It does not concern us that he has reasoned them; if our reason cannot corroborate his, we can only reject him. We might corroborate him, and yet reject him. It was a Harvard professor of philosophy who said, ‘A man may argue a thing from A to B, and from B to C, and from C to D — and then his whole being rises up and says, “Oh, pshaw!"'

Kant reasoned out a code of agnostic morality; but his code appeals no more and no less because he reasoned it than if it had sprung spontaneously from his heart. Rationalism, in the abstract, appeals to us all; but one man’s rationalism is another man’s butt. There is no such thing as ‘reasoning together.’ Reasoning is an individual performance. One may drag a man, by crossexamination and the laws of logic, into admitting something he does not believe; but he will not have been reasoning. A rationalized belief carries no more weight from man to man than an avowedly mystical belief—no, not as much.

Mysticism, because it is very close to poetry, weaves a kind of spell about the imagination. It is less trustworthy than reason; but it is true, in spite of this, that mysticism carries where reason halts. Take such an early mystic as Plotinus. His words still wing their way like swallows to our innermost spirit: ‘This, therefore, is the life of . . . divine and happy men, a liberation from all concerns of earth, a life unaccompanied with human pleasures, and a flight of the alone to the Alone.’

A flight of the alone to the Alone! The mere words themselves start one irresistibly upon his longing flight; they are telling and magnetic as nothing rational can ever be.

The rational is not the appealing. There may one day exist a philosopher who, knowing truth when he meets it, will be able to bring others to a recognition of it. All we can say now is, that his star has not yet risen. Kant, the greatest abstract reasoner up to date, could not, and none of his fellows can. They all know truth — truth as they know it; but they know conflicting truths. And even philosophic truth cannot contradict itself and still remain intact. To know philosophy is to mistrust it, and to cast about for something more stable — or at least more stabilizing.

Reason was never meant to take the plunge alone, not because it has difficulty in getting in, but because it has difficulty in getting out. It needs something to furnish equilibrium, something instinctive and quickening and spiritual, which we might, perhaps, call faith. The abstract is like a great Charybdis which has sucked in many a mind of promise, not to destroy, possibly, but to keep floundering. The idea that in setting foot upon the path of reason, we are ‘setting foot upon the path of sin,’is now quite out of date. Our faculties, it is generally conceded, were given us to use — but not to misuse. And Pure Reason — to borrow Kant’s paradoxical term — is much too pure to walk alone. When it does, it fails to arrive. Abstract reasoning, judged by the standards of modern efficiency, is either a recreation or a waste of time.

If philosophy had been, as science has been, a slow filling up of the scrolls of knowledge with items to which all the thinking world subscribed, and which some few of them reasoned about, we might fear its nihilisms and accept its negations. If philosophy had been content to proceed as the handmaid of science, confining itself to the work of adjusting old ideals to new discoveries, and preserving old optimism against new depressions, we should surely give it our uncompromising trust. If its history had been the history of a consistent endeavor to reconcile the good in religion with the new in science, instead of a disconcerted effort to unseat religion with the scientific wedge, there could be no quarrel between science and religion and none between religion and philosophy. And there should be none. In scientific investigation it is necessary to be free from religious bias; it is not necessary to be adrift from religious belief. But very few minds have been balanced enough to effect the one emancipation without effecting the other. In their scruple to avoid the stagnant sloughs of teleology, they have been drawn unresisting into the stultifying depths of agnosticism and doubt.

It is the proper métier of philosophy to wait upon facts. Science investigates, philosophy generalizes. Darwin was both philosopher and scientist: it was in the former character that he scrutinized the ape, in the latter that he formulated his idea of Evolution. The philosopher has another function in the field of science — to prepare the way for the scientist, as Copernicus did in assuming that the movements of the heavenly bodies were merely a heavenly mirage — that it was the spectator who looped the loop, and not the sun; as Mendelieff did in positing what must have seemed to him, at first, almost a fantastic table of elements.

If philosophy had ‘known her place,’she would be a power in the world. But she has dabbled too long in abstruse questions to which no complete and certain answer can be found. She has devoted too much time to wondering how man gets his conception of the outside world and whether his ideas are innate or acquired. As philosophy now stands, a confused mass of theories and contradictions, a lurking pitfall for great minds to be entrapped in, it cannot be regarded as very much more than a universal divertissement.

It is easy to explode the syllogism, the typical formula of reasoning in the abstract. The syllogism is handy for exposition and analysis, but not at all a method of progressive thought. We could not make a syllogism unless we knew the facts. ‘All men are mortal,’we may say; ‘Socrates is a man.’ This is the pith, really the entirety, of the syllogism. It is our reason now which tells us that Socrates is mortal. But we have already known that, and said it less succinctly; we get no added knowledge by repeating it. In the same way, if we know two sides and the included angle of a triangle, our reason can supply the other side. But it is supplying nothing new. We cannot reason in the abstract and be sure that we are right, unless we know our subject in totality.

II

Much has been sung in reason’s praise; but even those who have called it the highest human faculty must grant that it is neither more nor less than human. The lower animals have not this gift, and God does not need it. He cannot be thought to reason, since He is the possessor of all truth. So here is another of reason’s shortcomings: we cannot reason unless we possess a complete knowledge of our subject; and, possessing it, we do not need to reason. A further indication that abstract reasoning is either a recreation or a waste of time!

We cannot reason in boundlessness. As Lucretius himself said, that great rationalist, ‘You can think of yourself as standing on the borders of infinity and casting a javelin beyond them.’ Hobbes spoke of the uselessness of trying ‘to measure our conception of the infinite with a finite yardstick like the reason.’ Mathematically speaking, infinity has been losing more and more of its infinite meaning. Mathematicians have had to clear it of its meaning of illimitability, and consider it as a goal — a really attainable object; otherwise they cannot handle it. Thus infinity has come to signify a quantity which ‘admits of a unique and reciprocal (oneto-one) correspondence between itself and one of its parts ’¹ — whatever that may mean. But it means something determined, and as finite as infinity can be.

We cannot reason in boundlessness, and we cannot reason in the things of the spirit. As the infinite engulfs the reason, so the spiritual rejects it, by a sort of centrifugal force. The human reason cannot compass the thought of God any more than it can compass the thought of infinity. It plays with the thought of infinity; but it falls away crippled from the thought of God. The reason can dispense with God entirely, and has done so again and again. The most devout among us can rationally conceive a time when the world shall be only a ball of smoky fire, spinning uncertainly upon a tottering axis; when the life thereupon shall be but myriads of whirling cinders; when God shall be no more. But we cannot so conceive the infinite; we cannot really think of the illimitable as limited; we cannot rationally conceive a time when the mathematical verities shall be dead. Three straight lines between two points are inconceivable. The thought of a whole exceeding the sum of all its parts will never be thought. The explanation of this is clear: these and other mathematical laws were discovered through unaided human reason, and unaided human reason, having once set them up, can never destroy them. The human reason has never been able to grasp the thought of God, and hence it can quite readily dispense with Him. But He is none the less real for that, and none the more.

The reason can so comfortably dispose of God because the reason is not the fountain source of God. Man did not first perceive Him through the reason. He perceived Him through the spirit, more tempered by longing, more intuitive than reason, and even more human than that. The spirit, once having truly known Him, can never dispense with Him. And let the idea of God take a hold upon the reason, let the reason really become saturated with it, let a man be able to reason to his own complete certainty the reality of a personal deity, and he will no more be able to waive it than the mathematician is able to waive the fundamental axioms. It will be, like them, a part of his integrity.

Now I, as the average mortal, care very little for the mathematical verities. There is a beauty in them, a kind of steadfastness, which I should be sorry to see dispelled. But I could sustain with a light heart the necessity of changing my entire conception of mathematics. I could soon and easily accustom myself to calling a triangle a quadrilateral — not calling it that, merely, but having it be a quadrilateral, having a triangle assume incontrovertibly the properties of a quadrilateral. I cannot reason it out; I cannot actually conceive of such a thing; but if it were to be proved to-morrow, I should be quite used to it by next week. And so, I believe, would most of us. But such a state of flux would drive a mathematician mad. It would bring down his gray hairs in sorrow to the grave. He has a love for these things; they are part of him; deprive him of these, and you deprive him of sanity. Most of us, that is, can reason God into smoke without offending the reason, because the reason has not comprehended God; and most of us could dispense with mathematics without hurting the spirit, because mathematics has no part in the spirit. But what the reason has appropriated she cannot bear to be deprived of: and what the spirit has made her own is necessary to her life.

‘Our age is the . . . age of criticism,’ said Kant; ‘religion, on the strength of its sanctity, and law, on the strength of its majesty, try to withdraw themselves from it; but by so doing they arouse just suspicions, and cannot claim that sincere respect which reason pays to those only who have been able to withstand its free and open examination.’

This is becoming less and less true in the case of the law; the tendency is to weigh and rationalize every phase of it. And quite rightly: for what is the law, if it be not the expression of man’s reason? The tendency, too, is to rationalize religion. Up to a certain point, or rather, of a certain kind, this rationalization is good. We must be sure of our religion; we must at least be sure that it is our religion. Sincerity insists on this. But we possess the indisputable right to see where we are going, to measure the losses which an unguarded, untrustworthy process is inflicting on us. We are under no compulsion, from within or without, to toss into the jaws of an idol the faith that is ours. Apply the test of reason we must, to winnow out the wheat. But to rationalize our faith in the usual sense of the word, is to use a steam-roller on a bed of mignonette. It has been called ‘digging the grave of faith with the tools of reason,’ digging a grave in the very foundations of our faith, so that the whole beautiful superstructure, which has nothing to do with tools, which is made without hands, is undermined.

We cannot know the truth; we can only believe it. As Saint Anselm said, ‘I do not understand in order to believe; I believe in order to understand.’ We are of necessity like men cast into a boundless, unknown sea, and, like them, we can use this vast unknown to rest upon or to sink in. We can, by relaxing, make it bear us up; or, by struggling against it, cause it to engulf us. Faith is relaxation — it is resiliency. Faith is light and peace and a quiet heart, a cup of cold water to a thirsting throat. When faith expires, there expires too that power to rebound from misfortune, to rebuild out of ruin.

Faiths last, and reasons fail. With all their incongruities, it is the things of the spirit which have stood the test of time. Through nineteen centuries the unauthenticated story of a miracle has held people most irrationally. It is a story which completely staggers the reason; but no reasoned theory has a record to compare with this. No reasoned theory will ever have such a record. No reasoned theory in its original potency has ever outlasted the lifetime of the reasoner.

Faith is not so much believing as the ability to believe; many a man has faith who has no creed. And if, in this larger sense, he have not faith, God help him!

There was a story of the Comrade in White — a miraculous figure seen at Nancy, in the Argonne, at Soissons, at Ypres, in the Valley of the Somme. He ministered to the wounded, healed the broken heart, and helped the dying man to peace. Although he was constantly shot at, he marvelously went unscathed. There is no virtue in believing this story. It would, perhaps, be superstitious to believe it; perhaps it would be gullible — and we hate to be gullible. But to be unable to believe this story, to have so chilled the spirit that we cannot believe it, speaks a spiritual torpor quite as poisonous as any intellectual torpor could be.

Your reason can never tell you whether such a story is true or false. It may tell you that you cannot believe it; but in that case the fault may lie with the story and it may lie with you. Your reason cannot tell you which. Your reason can never differentiate between cunningly devised fables and the truth. We have set the reason to keep watch over the senses, and it would be a wise precaution to set faith to keep watch over the reason. There is one thing which we can confidently assert — anything taught us by faith alone is nearer the vital truth than anything taught us by reason alone. It is sure to have at least the element of truth that the human heart reaches out to it.

The feast of reason is nothing but a barmecide feast, a sort of soufflé, if you like, of a fine consistency and flavor, and a pretty thing to toy with, but a frothy sort of diet for a hungry man. It is a pabulum which bulks large enough in the mouth, but mysteriously vanishes when you coax it to nourish you. Worse than that. It has the inherent property, which life, which the mere passage of time can quicken, of becoming ashes on the tongue.