MAN

Against
Darkness
and Other
Essays

W. T. Stace

University of Pittsburgh Press

 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-18694

"The Snobbishness of the Learned" Copyright © 1936 by The Atlantic

Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. Reprinted with permission.
"Have Nations Any Morals?" Copyright © 1945 by The Atlantic
Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. Reprinted with permisssion.
"Man Against Darkness" Copyright © 1948 by The Atlantic Monthly
Company, Boston, Mass. Reprinted with permission.
"British Colonialism" Copyright © 1954, Yale University Press. Re-
printed by permission of The Yale Review.

Copyright © i^S*], University of Pittsburgh Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant

from the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust

i

\
I

I
 Preface

The reader may be puzzled by the jump from the apparent

irreligion of the "Man Against Darkness," to some-
first essay,

thing which may fairly be called theism (of a sort) in "The

Philosophy of Mysticism." Twelve years elapsed between the
writing of the first and the second— an interval long enough
to be a partial explanation of a change of opinion. But this
is hardly enough. What happened in the interval to cause so

great a change? The answer is that the writer had mean-

while made a study of mysticism, of Christian, Hindu, Islamic,
Buddhist, and other mystics.
But one must not exaggerate the greatness of the change.
Merely the intellect and not the emotions were involved in
it. Nothing was altered in the writer's feelings about the

world or about religion. Some people have professed to de-

tect a certain religious element in "Man Against Darkness"
which, they said, hid itself behind a mask of anti-religion.
However that may be, neither at the time of the writing of the
first essay, nor of the second, nor at the present day, has the

writer ever become involved in the usual practices and feel-

ings of worship by means of which religious minds commonly
express their emotions. This is what I mean by saying that

the change was only intellectual.

Seven essays in this volume were given as public lectures.

The three on values were delivered at the University of Ne-
vii
 Preface

braska in 1930, "Imagery and Thought in Poetry" at Wheaton

College, Massachusetts in 1956, "Science and Ethics" at Lex-
ington, Kentucky, in 1964, and the two lectures on mysticism
at Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1961. "Snobbishness of
the Learned," "Have Nations Any Morals?," and "Man
Against Darkness" were published in the Atlantic in 1936,
1954, and 1948 respectively. "British Colonialism" appeared
in the Yale Review in 1954, "The Place of Philosophy in
Human Culture," "Science and the Physical World," and
"Science and Explanation" in Philosophy in 1954, and "Sur-
vival After Death" in The Crane Review in 1963.
I wish to thank the journals and institutions concerned, in-
cluding the trustees of the will of M. T. Garvin, for their kind
permission to use these articles in the present collection.

W. T. Stage

viii
 Contents

T \u U iLLti 1 ilLlit' IXoili'lUlL

Man Against Darkness 3
The Psychology of Mysticism 18

The Philosophy of Mysticism 37

Survival After Death 53

TT
11 Values
Values in General 67
Democratic Values 86
Why Do We Fail? 106

III Imagery and Thought in Poetry I2p

IV The Snobbishness of the Learned

V Political and International

Have Nations Any Morals? 159
British Colonialism 171

VI Philosophy and Science

The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture 187
Science and the Physical World 208
Science and Explanation 217
Science and Ethics 243

Index 261
Concerning Religion
 Man Against Darkness

The Catholic bishops of America once issued a statement in

which they said that the chaotic and bewildered state of the
modern world is due to man's loss of faith, his abandonment
of God and religion. I agree with this statement though I
do not accept the religious beliefs of most bishops. It is no
doubt an oversimplification to speak of the cause of so com-
plex a state of affairs as the tortured condition of the world
today. Its causes are doubtless multitudinous. Yet allowing
for some element of oversimplification, I say that the bishops'
assertion is substantially true.
M. Jean-Paul French existentialist philosopher,
Sartre, the
labels himself an Yet his views seem to me plainly to
atheist.
support the statement of the bishops. So long as there was
believed to be a God in the sky, he says, men could regard
him as the source of their moral ideals. The universe, created
and governed by a fatherly God, was a friendly habitation
for man. We could be sure that, however great the evil in
the world, good in the end would triumph and the forces of
evil would be routed. With the disappearance of God from
the sky all this has changed. Since the world is not ruled by
a spiritual being, but rather by blind forces, there cannot
be any moral or otherwise, in the universe outside
ideals,
us. Our must proceed only from our own
ideals, therefore,
minds; they are our own inventions. Thus the world which
surrounds us is nothing but an immense spiritual emptiness.

3
 Concerning Religion

It is a dead universe. We do not live in a universe which is on

the side of our values. It is completely indifferent to them.

Years ago Mr. Bertrand Russell, in his essay "A Free Man's
Worship," said much the same thing.

Such in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of mean-

ing, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such
a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.
. .Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent
.

matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to

lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of
darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the
lofty thoughts that ennoble ... to worship at the
his little day;
shrine his own hands have built; ... weary
to sustain alone, a
but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned
despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

It is true that Mr. Russell's personal attitude to the dis-

appearance of religion is quite different from either that of
M. Sartre or the bishops or myself. The
bishops think it a
calamity. So do I. M. "very distressing." And
Sartre finds it

he berates as shallow the attitude of those who think that

without God the world can go on just the same as before, as
if nothing had happened. This creates for mankind, he thinks,

a terrible crisis. And in this I agree with him. Mr. Russell,

on the other hand, seems to believe that religion has done
more harm than good in the Avorld, and that its disappear-
ance will be a blessing. But his picture of the world, and of
the modern mind, is the same as that of M. Sartre. He stresses
the purposelessness of the universe, the facts that man's ideals
are his own creations, that the universe outside him in no way
supports them, that man is alone and friendless in the world.
Mr. Russell notes that it is science which has produced this
situation. There is no doubt that this is correct. But the way
in which it has come about is not generally understood. There
is a popular belief that some particular scientific discoveries

or theories, such as the Darwinian theory of evolution, or the

4
 Man Against Darkness

views of geologists about the age of the earth, or a series of

such discoveries, have done the damage. It would be foolish
to deny that these discoveries have had a great effect in under-
mining religious dogmas. But this account does not at all go
to the root of the matter. Religion can probably outlive any
scientific discoveries which could be made. It can accommo-
date itself to them. The root cause of the decay of faith has
not been any particular discovery of science, but rather the
general spirit of science and certain basic assumptions upon
which modern science, from the seventeenth century on-
w^ards, has proceeded.
It was Galileo and Newton— notwithstanding that Newton
himself was a deeply religious man— w^ho destroyed the old
comfortable picture of a friendly universe governed by spiri-
tual values. And this was effected, not by Newton's discovery
of the law of gravitation nor by any of Galileo's brilliant in-
vestigations, but by the general picture of the world which
these men and others of their time made the basis of the
science, not only of their own day, but of all succeeding
generations down to the present. That is why the century
immediately follo^ving Newton, the eighteenth century, was
notoriously an age of religious skepticism. Skepticism did not
have to wait for the discoveries of Darwin and the geologists
in the nineteenth century. It flooded the world immediately
after the age of the rise of science. Neither the Copernican
hypothesis nor any of Newton's or Galileo's particular discov-
eries were the real causes. Relisiious faith mis^ht well have
accommodated itself to the new astronomy. The real turning
point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age
of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth cen-
tury turned their backs upon ^vhat used to be called ''final
causes." The final cause of a thing or event meant the purpose
which it w^as supposed to serve in the universe, its cosmic
purpose. What lay back of this was the presupposition that
there is a cosmic order or plan and that everything which

5
 Concerning Religion

exists could in the be explained in terms of its

last analysis
place in this cosmic plan, that in terms of its purpose.
is,

Plato and Aristotle believed this, and so did the whole me-
dieval Christian world. For instance, if it were true that the
sun and the moon were created and exist for the purpose of
giving light to man, then this fact would explain why the sun
and the moon exist. W^e might not be able to discover the
purpose of everything, but everything must have a purpose.
Belief in final causes thus amounted to a belief that the world
is governed by purposes, presumably the purposes of some

overruling mind. This belief was not the invention of Chris-

tianity. It was basic to the whole of Western civilization,
whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from
the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth
century.
The founders of modern science— for instance, Galileo,
Kepler, and Newton— were mostly pious men who did not
doubt God's purposes. Nevertheless they took the revolution-
ary step of consciously and deliberately expelling the idea of
purpose as controlling nature from their new science of na-
ture. They did this on the ground that inquiry into purposes
is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and

control of events. To predict an eclipse, what you have to

know is not its purpose but its causes. Hence science from the
seventeenth century onwards became exclusively an inquiry
into causes. The conception of purpose in the world was ig-
nored and frowned on. This, though silent and almost un-
noticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far
outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions
whose thunder has reverberated through the world.
For it came about in this way that for the past three hun-
dred years there has been growing up in men's minds, domi-
nated as they are by science, a new imaginative picture of
the world. The world, according to this new picture, is pur-

6
 Man Against Darkness

poseless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter

in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any
purpose, but by blind forces and laws. Nature in this view,
says Whitehead— to whose writings I am indebted in this part
of my essay— is "merely the hurrying of material, endlessly,
meaninglessly." You can draw a sharp line across the history
of Europe dividing it into two epochs of very unequal length.
The line passes through the lifetime of Galileo. European
man before Galileo— whether ancient pagan or more recent
Christian— thought of the world as controlled by plan and
purpose. After Galileo European man thinks of it as utterly
purposeless. This is the great revolution of which I spoke.
It is this which has killed religion. Religion could survive
the discoveries that the sun, not the earth, is the center; that
men are descended from simian ancestors; that the earth is
hundreds of millions of years old. These discoveries may
render out of date some of the details of older theological
dogmas, may force their restatement in new intellectual
frameworks. But they do not touch the essence of the religious
vision itself, which is is plan and purpose
the faith that there
in the world, that the world moral order, that in the end
is a
all things are for the best. This faith may express itself
through many different intellectual dogmas, those of Chris-
tianity, of Hinduism, of Islam. All and any of these intel-
lectual dogmas may be destroyed without destroying the
essential religious spirit. But that spirit cannot survive de-
struction of belief in a plan and purpose of the world, for that
is the very heart of it. Religion can get on with any sort of

astronomy, geology, biology, physics. But it cannot get on

with a purposeless and meaningless universe. If the scheme
of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man
is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all

effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still

pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and

7
 Concerning Religion

may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the
center. Hence the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless, spirit
of modern man.
The picture of a meaningless world, and a meaningless
human life, is, I think, the basic theme of much modern art

and literature. Certainly it is the basic theme of modern

philosophy. According to the most characteristic philosophies
of the modern period from Hume in the eighteenth century
to the so-called positivists of today, the world is just what it
is, and that is the end of all inquiry. There is no reason for its
being what Everything might just as well have been quite
it is.

different, and there would have been no reason for that either.
When you have stated what things are, what things the world
contains, there is nothing more which could be said, even by
an omniscient being. To ask any question about why things
are thus, or what purpose their being so serves, is to ask a
senseless question, because they serve no purpose at all. For
instance, there is for modern philosophy no such thing as the
ancient problem of evil. For this once famous question pre-
supposes that pain and misery, though they seem so inexpli-
cable and irrational to us, must ultimately subserve some
rational purpose, must have their places in the cosmic plan.
But this nonsense. There is no such overruling rationality
is

in the universe. Belief in the ultimate irrationality of every-

thing is the quintessence of what is called the modern mind.
It is true that, parallel with these philosophies which are
typical of the modern mind, preaching the meaninglessness
of the world, there has run a line of idealistic philosophies
whose contention is that the world is after all spiritual in na-
ture and that moral ideals and values are inherent in its
structure. But most of these idealisms were simply philosophi-
cal expressions of romanticism, which was itself no more than
an unsuccessful counterattack of the religious against the
scientific view of things. They perished, along with romanti-
cism in literature and art, about the beginning of the present
8
 Man Against Darkness

century, though of course they still have a few adherents. At

the bottom these idealistic systems of thought were rationali-
zations of man's wishful thinking. They were born of the
refusal of menadmit the cosmic darkness. They were com-
to
forting illusions within the warm glow of which the more
tender-minded intellectuals sought to shelter themselves from
the icy winds of the universe. They lasted a little while. But
they are shattered now, and we return once more to the vision
of a purposeless world.
Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the
ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values. If there is
a cosmic purpose, if there is in the nature of things a drive
towards goodness, then our moral systems will derive their
validity from this. But if our moral rules do not proceed from
something outside us in the nature of the universe— whether
we say it is God or simply the universe itself— then they must
be our own inventions. Thus it came to be believed that moral
rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dis-
likes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What
pleases one man, people, or culture displeases another. There-
fore morals are wholly relative. This obvious conclusion from
the idea of a purposeless world made its appearance in Europe
immediately after the rise of science, for instance in the phi-
losophy of Hobbes. Hobbes saw at once that if there is no
purpose in the world there are no values either. "Good and
evil," he writes, "are names that signify our appetites and
aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines
of men are different. Every man calleth that which pleas-
. . .

eth him, good; and that which displeaseth him, evil."

This doctrine of the relativity of morals, though it has re-
cently received an impetus from the studies of anthropolo-
gists, was thus really implicit in the whole scientific mentality.
It is disastrous for morals because it destroys their entire tra-
ditional foundation. That is why philosophers who see the
danger signals, froni the time at least of Kant, have been

9
 Concerning Religion

trying to give to morals a new foundation, that is, a secular

or non-religious foundation. This attempt may very well be
Such a foundation, independent of
intellectually successful.
the religious view of the world, might well be found. But
the question is whether it can ever be a practical success,
that is, whether apart from its logical validity and its influ-
ence with intellectuals, it can ever replace among the masses
of men the lost religious foundation. On that question hangs
perhaps the future of civilization. But meanwhile disaster is
overtaking us.
The widespread belief in "ethical relativity" among phi-
losophers, psychologists, ethnologists, and sociologists is the
theoretical counterpart of the repudiation of principle which
we see allaround us, especially in international affairs, the
field in which morals have always had the weakest foothold.
No one any longer effectively believes in moral principles ex-
cept as the private prejudices either of individual men or of
nations or cultures. This is the inevitable consequence of the
doctrine of ethical relativity, which in turn is the inevitable
consequence of believing in a purposeless world.
Another characteristic of our spiritual state is loss of belief
in the freedom of the will. This also is a fruit of the scientific
spirit, though not of any particular scientific discovery.
Science has been built up on the basis of determinism,
which is the belief that every event is completely determined
by a chain of causes and is therefore theoretically predictable
beforehand. It is true that recent physics seems to challenge
this. But so far as its practical consequences are concerned,
the damage has long ago been done. A man's actions, it was
argued, are as much events in the natural world as is an eclipse
of the sun. It follows that men's actions are as theoretically
predictable as an eclipse. But if it is certain now that John
Smith will murder Joseph Jones at 2:15 p.m. on January 1,
2000 A.D., what possible meaning can it have to say that when
that time comes John Smith will be free to choose whether

10
 Man Against Darkness

he will commit the murder or not? And if he is not free, how

can he be held responsible?
It is true that the whole of this argument can be shown by
a competent philosopher to be a tissue of fallacies— or at least
I claim that it can. But the point is that the analysis required

to show this is much too subtle to be understood by the aver-

age entirely unphilosophical man. Because of this, the argu-
ment against free will is generally swallowed whole by the
unphilosophical. Hence the thought that man is not free,
that he is the helpless plaything of forces over which he has
no control, has deeply penetrated the modern mind. We hear
of economic determinism, cultural determinism, historical
determinism. We are not responsible for what we do because
our glands control us, or because we are the products of en-
vironment or heredity. Not moral self-control, but the doctor,
the psychiatrist, the educationist, must save us from doing
eviL Pills and injections in the future are to do what Christ
and the prophets have failed to do. Of course I do not mean
to deny that doctors and educationists can and must help.
And I do not mean in any way to belittle their efforts. But I
do wish to draw attention to the weakening of moral controls,
the greater or less repudiation of personal responsibility
which, in the popular thinking of the day, result from these
tendencies of thought.
What, then, is to be done? Where are we to look for salva-
tion from the evils of our time? All the remedies I have seen
suggested so far are, in my opinion, useless. Let us look at
some of them.
Philosophers and intellectuals generally can, I believe,
genuinely do something to help. But it is extremely little.
What philosophers can do is to show that neither the relativity
of morals nor the denial of free will really follows from the
grounds which have been supposed to support them. They can
also try to discover a genuine secular basis for morals to replace
the religious basis which has disappeared. Some of us are

11
 Concerning Religion

trying to do these things. But in the first place philosophers

unfortunately are not agreed about these matters, and their
disputes are utterly confusing to the non-philosophers. And
in the second place their influence is practically negligible
because their analyses necessarily take place at a level on which
the masses are totally unable to follow them.
The bishops, of course, propose as remedy a return to belief
in God and in the doctrines of the Christian religion. Others
think that a new religion is what is needed. Those who make
these proposals fail to realize that the crisis in man's spiritual
condition is something unique in history for which there is
no sort of analogy in the past. They are thinking perhaps of
the collapse of the ancient Greek and Roman religions. The
vacuum then created was easily filled by Christianity, and it
might have been filled by Mithraism if Christianity had not
appeared. By analogy they think that Christianity might now
be replaced by a new religion, or even that Christianity itself,
if revivified, might bring back health to men's lives.

But I believe that there is no analogy at all between our

present state and that of the European peoples at the time of
the fall of paganism. Men had at that time lost their belief
only in particular dogmas, particular embodiments of the
religious view of the world. It had no doubt become incred-
ible that Zeus and the other gods were living on the top of
Mount Olympus. You could go to the top and find no trace
of them. But the imaginative picture of a world governed by
purpose, a world driving towards the good— which is the inner
spirit of religion— had at that time received no serious shock.
It had merely to re-embody itself in new dogmas, those of
Christianity or some other religion. Religion itself was not
dead in the world, only a particular form of it.
But now the situation is quite different. It is not merely
that particular dogmas, like that of the virgin birth, are un-
acceptable to the modern mind. That is true, but it constitutes
a very superficial diagnosis of the present situation of religion.

12
 Man Against Darkness

Modern skepticism is of a wholly different order from that

of the intellectuals of the ancient world. It has attacked and
destroyed not merely the outward forms of the religious spirit,
its particularized dogmas, but the very essence of that spirit

itself, belief in a meaningful and purposeful world. For the

founding of a new religion a new Jesus Christ or Buddha

would have to appear, in itself a most unlikely event and one
for which in any case we cannot afford to sit and wait. But
even if a new prophet and a new religion did appear, we may
predict that they would fail in the modern world. No one for
long would believe in them, for modern men have lost the
vision, basic to all religion, of an ordered plan and purpose
of the world. They have before their minds the picture of a
purposeless universe, and such a world-picture must be fatal
to any religion at all, not merely to Christianity.
We must not be misled by occasional appearances of a re-
vival of the religious spirit. Men, we are told, in their disgust
and disillusionment at the emptiness of their lives, are turn-
ing once more to religion, or are searching for a new message.
It may be so. We must expect such wistful yearnings of the
spirit. We must expect men to wish back again the light that
is gone, and to try to bring it back. But however they may

wish and try, the light will not shine again— not at least in the
civilization to which we belong.
Another remedy commonly proposed is that we should turn
to science itself, or the scientific spirit, for our salvation. Mr.
Russell and Professor Dewey both made this proposal, though
in somewhat different ways. Professor Dewey seemed to be-
lieve that discoveries in sociology, the application of scientific
method and political problems, will rescue us. This
to social
seems to me be utterly naive. It is not likely that science,
to
which is basically the cause of our spiritual troubles, is likely
also to produce the cure for them. Also it lies in the nature
of science that, though it can teach us the best means for
achieving our ends, it can never tell us what ends to pursue.

13
 Concerning Religion

It cannot give us any ideals. And our trouble is about ideals

and ends, not about the means for reaching them.
No civilization can live without ideals, or to put it in an-
other way, without a firm faith in moral ideas. Our ideals and
moral ideas have in the past been rooted in religion. But the
religious basis of our ideals has been undermined, and the
superstructure of ideals is plainly tottering. None of the com-
monly suggested remedies on examination seems likely to
succeed. It would therefore look as if the early death of our
civilization were inevitable.
Of course we know that it is perfectly possible for individual
men, very highly educated men, philosophers, scientists, in-
tellectuals in general, to live moral lives without any religious
convictions. But the question is whether a whole civilization,
a whole family of peoples, composed almost entirely of rela-
tively uneducated men and women, can do this. It follows,
of course, that if the vast majority of men as
we could make
highly educated as the very few are now, we might save the
situation. And we are already moving slowly in that direc-
tion through the techniques of mass education. But the criti-
cal question seems to concern the time-lag. Perhaps in a hun-
dred years most of the population will, at the present rate, be
sufficiently highly educated and civilized to combine high
ideals with an absence of religion. But long before we reach
any such our civilization may have come
stage, the collapse of
about. How are we through the intervening period?
to live
I am sure that the first thing we have to do is to face the

truth, however bleak it may be, and then next we have to

learn to live with it. Let me say a word about each of these
two points. What I am urging as regards the first is complete
honesty. Those who wish to resurrect Christian dogmas are
not, of course, consciously dishonest. But they have that kind
of unconscious dishonesty which consists in lulling oneself
with opiates and dreams. Those who talk of a new religion are
merely hoping for a new opiate. Both alike refuse to face the

14
 Man Against Darkness

truth that there is, in the universe outside man, no spiritual-

ity, no regard for values, no friend in the sky,no help or com-
fort for man of any sort. To be perfectly honest in the
admission of this fact, not to seek shelter in new or old illu-
sions, not to indulge in wishful dreams about this matter, this
is the first thing we shall have to do.

I do not urge this course out of any special regard for the
sanctity of truth in the abstract. It is not self-evident to me
that truth is the supreme value to which all else must be
sacrificed. Might not the discoverer of a truth which would be
fatal to mankind be justified in suppressing it, even in teach-
ing men a falsehood? Is truth more valuable than goodness
and beauty and happiness? To think so is to invent yet another
absolute, another religious delusion in which Truth with a
capital T is substituted for God. The reason why we must
now boldly and honestly face the truth that the universe is
non-spiritual and indifferent to goodness, beauty, happiness,
or truth is it would be wicked to suppress it, but
not that
simply that it is too late to do so, so that in the end we cannot
do anything else but face it. Yet we stand on the brink, dread-
ing the icy plunge. We need courage. We need honesty.
Now about the other point, the necessity of learning to
live with the truth. This means learning to live virtuously
and happily, or at least contentedly, without illusions. And
this is going to be extremely difficult because what we have
now begun dimly to perceive is that human life in the past,
or at least human happiness, has almost wholly depended
upon illusions. It has been said that man lives by truth, and
that the truth will make us free. Nearly the opposite seems to
me to be the case. Mankind has managed to live only by means
of and the truth may very well destroy us. If one were a
lies,

Bergsonian one might believe that nature deliberately puts

illusions into our souls in order to induce us to go on living.
The illusions by which men have lived seem to be of two
kinds. First, there is what one may perhaps call the Great Illu-

15
 Concerning Religion

sion— I mean the religious illusion that the universe is moral

and good, that it follows a wise and noble plan, that it is
gradually generating some supreme value, that goodness is
bound to triumph in it. Secondly, there is a whole host of
minor illusions on which human happiness nourishes itself.
How much of human happiness notoriously comes from the
illusions of the lover about his beloved? Then again we work
and strive because of the illusions connected with fame, glory,
power, or money. Banners of all kinds, flags, emblems, insig-
nia, ceremonials, and rituals are invariably symbols of some
illusion or other. The British Empire, the connection between
mother country and dominions, used to be partly kept going
by illusions surrounding the notion of kingship. Or think of
the vast amount of human happiness which is derived from
the illusion of supposing that if some nonsense syllable, such
as *'sir" or ''count" or "lord" is pronounced in conjunction
with our names, we belong to a superior order of people.
There is plenty of evidence that human happiness is almost
wholly based upon illusions of one kind or another. But the
scientific spirit, or the spirit of truth, is the enemy of illu-
sions and therefore the enemy of human happiness. That is
why it is going to be so difficult to live with the truth. There
is no reason why we should have to give up the host of minor

illusions which render life supportable. There is no reason

why the lover should be scientific about the loved one. Even
the illusions of fame and glory may persist. But without the
Great Illusion, the illusion of a good, kindly, and purpose-
ful universe, we shall have to learn to live. And to ask this
is really no more than to ask that we become genuinely civi-
lized beings and not merely sham civilized beings.
I can best explain the difference by a reminiscence. I re-

member a fellow student in my college days, an ardent Chris-

tian, who told me that if he did not believe in a future life, in
heaven and hell, he would rape, murder, steal, and be a drunk-
ard. That is what I call being a sham civilized being. On the

16
 Man Against Darkness

other hand, not only could a Huxley, a John Stuart Mill, a

David Hume, live great and fine lives without any religion,
but a great many others of us, quite obscure persons, can at
least live decent lives without it. To be genuinely civilized
means to be able to walk straightly and to live honorably
without the props and crutches of one or another of the
childish dreams which have so far supported men. That such
a life is likely to be ecstatically happy I will not claim. But
that it can be lived in quiet content, accepting resignedly what
cannot be helped, not expecting the impossible, and being
thankful for small mercies, this I would maintain. That it
will be difficult for men in general to learn this lesson I do not
deny. But that it will be impossible I would not admit since
so many have learned it already.
Man has not yet grown up. He is not adult. Like a child he
cries for the moon and lives in a world of fantasies. And the
race as a whole has perhaps reached the great crisis of its life.
Can it grow up as a race in the same sense as individual men
grow up? Can man put away childish things and adolescent
dreams? Can he grasp the real world as it actually is, stark
and bleak, without its romantic or religious halo, and still
retain his ideals, striving for great ends and noble achieve-
ments? If he can, all may yet be well. If he cannot, he will
probably sink back into the savagery and brutality from
which he came, taking a humble place once more among the
lower animals.

17
 The Psychology of Mysticism

Very few American psychologists have paid any attention to

the psychology of mysticism. William James, of course, stands
out as an exception. But that was a long time ago. There was
also Professor James H. Leuba, who wrote a book called The
Psychology of Religious Mysticism. J. B. Pratt's writings have
some importance, but he was primarily a philosopher, not a
psychologist.
This neglect of the subject probably has a number of
causes.I shall pick out only two for mention because they

happen to impinge upon the treatment I myself want to give

the matter. One is perhaps that the subject can hardly be
approached except by the method of introspection, which
psychologists wish to avoid. Another may be the failure of psy-
chologists to make a clear distinction between psychology and
philosophy. There certainly are states of mind which are or-
dinarily called mystical. To and analyze
describe, classify,
these states of mind should be work of the psychologist.
the
But another problem arises here which falls within the area
of philosophy and with which the psychologist should not
meddle. Mystics nearly always claim that in their mystical
experiences they are in touch with a transcendental realm of
reality. Is this claim true or false? Are mystical states purely
subjective; do they reveal anything about the nature of ob-
jective reality? This, I say, is a philosophical problem which

lies outside the science of psychology. Perhaps because psy-

18
 The Psychology of Mysticism

from their point of view, do not wish

chologists, quite rightly
to get mixed up with metaphysical or transcendental prob-
lems, or are at any rate skeptical about them, they steer clear
of mysticism altogether. But this is a pity. If they would deal
only with the psychology of mysticism and leave the philo-
sophical side of it alone, they could, I am sure, do valuable
work.
It is usually a good idea to bear in mind the distinction be-
tween philosophy and an empirical science such as psychology.
I once received a valuable lesson in this. A very distinguished

astronomer visited the Department of Philosophy in Prince-

ton and gave us a lecture entitled **An Astronomer's Philoso-
phy." We philosophers were delighted. And I in my en-
thusiasm offered to reciprocate by giving a lecture to the
astronomers which was to be entitled "A Philosopher's As-
tronomy." But this proposal was received by the astronomers
with marked coldness.
At this point I may be asked why, in these circumstances, I
now propose to write on the psychology of mysticism. Why
don't I, being a philosopher and not a psychologist, take my
own advice and stick to my own subject? My excuse is that
I only venture to write about the psychology of mysticism be-

cause no one else does it. When the professional psychologists

take the subject out of my amateur hands, then I will stop.
The other matter to be discussed was the method of intro-
spection, which psychologists do not like. Some psychologists
go so far as to say that there is no such thing as an inner con-
sciousness to be introspected. But this view is so absurd that
only very learned men can believe it. Hence many psycholo-
gists today think that consciousness exists but they say that
bodily behavior is publicly verifiable whereas the inner life
of consciousness is not. This distinction is rather dubious.
However, the psychologist is perfectly right in insisting
that introspective reports are very inferior to extrospective
reports in respect of reliability. They are right to concentrate

19
 Concerning Religion

on behavior rather than on inner conscious states whenever

possible. Apart from the question of verifiability there are
other good reasons for this, chief among which I think are
the following: It is far easier to give an exact and accurate
description of the pattern of a butterfly's wing than it is to
give an accurate description of one's inner feelings or mental
states. This has nothing to do with one's being public, the
other private. It is because inner mental events are dim, fleet-
ing, and evanescent, and also without the sharp and definite
boundaries Avhich external things have. Physical things may
remain unchanged for long periods of time. The same thing,
say a mountain, can be observed and reobserved an indefinite
number of times. But no mental state, no feeling, emotion,
or idea remains unchanged in a man's mind for more than
a few instants. Also the markings on a butterfly's wing or on
a leaf have sharp boundaries. But the mental life tends to be
blurred and smudgy, everything merging imperceptibly into
everything else. The external world is bright and vivid, the
mental world is dim and faint. Introspection is like describ-
ing objects which loom only vaguely and momentarily
through a fog and then disappear altogether. Above all, physi-
cal states can be measured, mental states cannot.
But these same considerations also show that introspection
should not be rejected altogether. And in the field of mysti-
cism no other method of study is possible. Hence it is foolish
to refuse to study a very important part of human life merely
because the only means of studying it are introspective. We
have in each case to use whatever methods of study are avail-
able. If the best methods cannot be used, then we have to
make use of methods which may be less good but are not
wholly worthless. We must agree then to study mysticism by
the method of introspection. And I will proceed to give an
account and analysis of the introspective reports which mystics
themselves have given.
There are at least two species of mystical consciousness.
20
 The Psychology of Mysticism

which the extrovertive and the introvertive, but in this

I call

essay can examine only one. I choose the introvertive type

I

because it is by far the more important.

William James wrote, "Our normal consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of con-
sciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of
screens, lie potential forms of consciousness entirely differ-
ent." James was thinking of the mystical consciousness, and
was right in stating that it is entirely different from ordinary
consciousness. Our ordinary consciousness may be compared
to a house with three stories. The ground floor consists of
physical sensations, colors, smells, sounds. The second floor
consists of images, pictures painted in the imagination. We
often think in pictures. Images, more vivid or more dim, are
continually floating through our minds. They are, in some
sense, mental copies of sensations or combinations of such
copies. They are, therefore, sensuous in character. The third
fioor of our normal consciousness is the intellect. It consists
of conceptual thoughts, abstract ideas, processes of reasoning,
and the like. The two lower floors are sensuous, the top floor
abstract and intellectual. We may therefore characterize our
normal consciousness as the sensory-intellectual consciousness.
When we say that the mystical consciousness is entirely dif-
ferent we mean quite literally. It is neither sensuous nor
this
intellectual. All three floors of our ordinary consciousness are
absent from it. In other words, there are in it no sensations,
no images, and no thoughts. I do not mean merely that it has
different kinds of sensations and thoughts. I believe there are
animals which see infra-red or ultra-violet colors. But these,
though they are sensations presumably quite different from
ours, are still sensations. But the mystical consciousness pos-

sesses no sensations at all, neither like nor unlike our normal

ones. And since it contains no sensations, neither can it con-
tain those mental copies of sensations which we call images,
and neither does it contain any conceptual thinking.
21
 Concerning Religion

For this reason too it must be pointed out that what are
called visions are not mystical experiences, for a vision is a
sensuous phenomenon consisting of imagery. For instance, a
vision of a man or woman will have color and shape, which
are sensuous characteristics. That visions are not mystical
experiences is recognized by all mystics. For example, St. John
of the Cross, the Spanish mystic of the sixteenth century,
means of images,
wTites about "discursive mental activity by
forms, and figures that are produced imaginatively ... as
happens for example when ^ve picture in our imagination
Christ crucified ... or our imagination sees God seated upon
a throne with great majesty." And he goes on to say, "Now
the soul must be emptied of all these imagined forms, figures
and images if it is to attain to the Divine Union."
So far all I have said is negative. The mystical consciousness
is not like the sensory-intellectual consciousness. It does not

contain sensations, images, or thoughts. Very shortly I shall

have to something positive about it, to say what it
try to say
is. But let me postpone this for a moment in order to ask

another question. How does a man set about getting rid of his
sensory-intellectual consciousness, this being the necessary
preliminary to the mystical consciousness? It does not matter
who or where the man is, whether he is a monk in a Catholic
monastery, or a Hindu monk, or a Zen Buddhist monk in
Japan, or anyone else. The process may differ in detail from
culture to culture, but certain basic features of it are nearly
always the same. The man must and fight to empty
struggle
his mind of all sensations, images,and thoughts, to get rid
of them entirely from his consciousness. This is an enormously
difficult task, in which a man can, as a rule, only succeed after
intensive training in mind-control over a long period of time.
It may take ten years in effort, or half a lifetime. It is true that
there are occasional cases of mystical consciousness which
seem to arise unsought and without effort. But in most cases,
years of effort are needed. Ordinary people have almost no
22
 The Psychology of Mysticism

control of their minds. Try the experiment of ridding your

consciousness of all images and thoughts. You will find that
unless you fall asleep you will keep on thinking about one
thing or another, and at least faint images will keep floating
in and out of your mind.
Since it is so difficult to stop completely the flow of sensa-
tions, images, and thoughts, many mystics adopt techniques
which are designed to reduce the stream of consciousness from
a broadly flowing river to the thinnest possible trickle. They
do this by concentrating their consciousness on one single
point or object to the exclusion of everything else. It does not
seem to matter ivhat thing you concentrate on. An easy thing
is the stream of one's own breath. This is the essence of what

are called breathing exercises. You breathe in a regular rhyth-

mic way, concentrate on that, and keep everything else out
of your consciousness. Another technique is to concentrate
on some short formula of words. You keep silently repeating
the words to yourself— any words will do, perhaps even non-
sense words— over and over again till the words lose all mean-
ing to you. It is necessary to get rid of all meaning, because
meaning is thought, and you have to get rid of thought. The
words have to become nothing more than a monotonous
sound-image, and this single monotonous sound-image must
occupy your whole consciousness. I don't know whether it is
true that in India Yogis sit and stare at their navels. But if
they do, we have merely another example of the same tech-
nique of concentration on a single thing.
What is the object of this process? It is well known that
consciousness, our ordinary consciousness, depends on con-
trast or difference. In order to retain your consciousness you
must have in it more than one thing, two at least, I suppose,
to be discriminated from one another and to keep the mind
actively in motion from one to the other. Therefore, if you
reduce your consciousness to one point, there is no contrast,
no distinction to discriminate, and therefore this last point

23
 Concerning Religion

of consciousness will also disappear, and therefore all con-

sciousness of the ordinary kind will disappear.
You would, of course, expect the result to be unconscious-
ness, perhaps sleep. But this, as those who have traveled this
road tell us, is not what happens. You have gotten rid of your
sensory-intellectual consciousness, but what happens then is
that another kind of consciousness emerges, the mystical
consciousness. Perhaps this mystical consciousness underlies
our ordinary consciousness all the time, so that when the
ordinary consciousness is peeled off, the mysictal conscious-
ness is revealed.
The
techniques of concentration on a single point or thing
willno doubt remind one of hypnosis, which can also be in-
duced by concentration on a single point. There is no doubt
a connection between hypnosis and the mystical conscious-
ness, but they nevertheless are not the same. In deep hypno-
sis is no consciousness. But the mystic can and does re-
there
member and describe his mystical consciousness after he has
returned to his ordinary consciousness; and it is certainly
nothing like what the hypnotized person might experience,
if he experiences anything. The outer symptoms may appear

the same but the inner consciousness is quite different.

This brings us back to the question of what the positive
characteristics of the mystical consciousness are. In trying to
say what they are, I will begin with an example, which is
found in one of the Upanishads. The Upanishads are docu-
ments which were composed by unknown Hindu mystics
somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 years ago. They are
among the supremely great spiritual documents of the world.
The following is from the Mandukya Upanishad: The mysti-
cal consciousness, it says, "is beyond the senses, beyond the
understanding. It is the pure unitary consciousness wherein
awareness of the world and of multiplicity is completely ob-
literated. It is ineffable peace. It is the Supreme good. It is
One without a second. It is the Self." I will now examine these
24
 The Psychology of Mysticism

sentences in detail. This consciousness, the Upanishad first

"beyond the senses"— in other words it is non-sensuous,

says, is
and there are no sensations or images in it. This we have
already seen. Next it says that it is "beyond the understand-
ing." The understanding means the intellect, the faculty of
concepts, or thoughts. So "beyond the understanding" means
that there are no thoughts or concepts in it. So these two
phrases mean only that it is totally different from the sensory-
intellectual consciousness. After this negative statement we
find some positive ones. The passage goes on— "It is the pure
unitary consciousness wherein awareness of the world and of
multiplicity has been completely obliterated. ... It is One

without a second." The words unitary and one mean, of

course, the same thing. What this sentence tells us is that
the mystical consciousness is a pure unity without any multi-
plicity in it. What has happened is this. The mind of any one

of us is which holds together a multiplicity of sensa-

a unity
tions, images, and thoughts. It is essential to note that in our
ordinary consciousness there is not only this multiplicity but
also the unity. Your consciousness is one single consciousness,
a unity in which are held together the multitude of your ideas,
sensations, images, and so on. There are, of course, abnormal
cases in which we find a dual or split consciousness, two con-
sciousnesses in the same body, but the normal consciousness
is single. Now what the passage we are discussing says is that

when you have expelled the multiplicity of sensations, images,

and thoughts, the pure unity will be left. This is also called
pure consciousness, the word pure meaning empty of contents.
All of this may be summed up by saying that the essence of
the mystical consciousness is an "undifferentiated unity." An

ordinary consciousness is a unity differentiated into a multi-

tude of images, ideas, and so on— in other words a multitude
of objects. Here, however, the multiplicity of ideas and ob-
jects has gone, and therefore the unity is now undifferen-
tiated. This is the essence of the mystical consciousness

25
 Concerning Religion

everywhere in the world, not only in the Upanishads, but in

Plotinus, in Christian mysticism, in Islamic mysticism,
and in
Buddhism. The phrase undifferentiated unity is useful but
it means no more than we said before. Our one consciousness

is usually differentiated into the multitude of particular con-

tents. When you get rid of these, the one consciousness, the
unity of it is, of course, undifferentiated.
But now we naturally ask the following question. What is

this new kind of consciousness conscious of? What are its

objects? We have gotten rid of all the ordinary contents of

consciousness, so if consciousness is still left what is it con-
scious of? Does some new object emerge in it? The answer is,

no. No new object emerges. The new consciousness just has

no object. It is completely empty. It is pure consciousness,
completely undifferentiated, completely empty of all objects.
Thus it is negative in the sense that it is empty, but positive
in the sense that it is consciousness, not unconsciousness.
This statement that you can have a consciousness which is
not conscious of anything at all is so completely paradoxi-
cal, so extraordinary, that I am sure the immediate normal,
healthy reaction of anyone hearing it for the first time is
likely to be disbelief. No such consciousness, empty of all
objects, can possibly exist— this is what will be said. This is
what I should certainly say myself if I were not aware of the
fact that the evidence of its existence is worldwide and over-
whelming. Evidence can be collected from everywhere—
Europe, Asia, America, from all ages, from all highly devel-
oped cultures, and the evidence is unanimous. It is obviously
impossible that I should in this essay be able to lay before you
all this vast amount of evidence so as to convince you. All I
can do is to give the testimony of a few persons picked from
different cultures, ages, and countries. I have already given
the evidence of the ancient Indian mystic incorporated in the
Upanishads. Let me now, as my second example, quote a
famous Christian mystic of the thirteenth century, Jan Van
26
 The Psychology of Mysticism

Ruysbroeck. This is what he wrote: "The God-seeing man"—

that is his phrase for the mystic— "his spirit is undifferentiated
and without distinction, and therefore he feels only the
unity." The very words are almost the same as those of the
Upanishads.
The same is true of Meister Eckhart, who was a contempo-
rary of Ruysbroeck but about thirty years older. Eckhart
writes that if you are to attain this experience, "you must
depart from the agents of the soul and their activities: mem-
ory, understanding, and will in all their diversifications. You
must leave them all: sense perception, imagination, and all
that you discover in the self." What he is saying in this passage
is that to attain the experience you have to "depart from," in

other words get rid of, all the activities of imagination, sense
perception, understanding or intellect, and so on. What will
be left? Eckhart's phrase for what is left is "God's undiffer-
entiated essence." Being a Christian, Eckhart interprets the
experience in terms of the concept of God.
My next witness will be Plotinus, the third-century Greco-
Roman mystic. He writes, "In this seeing we neither dis-
tinguish, nor are there two. The beholder has become the
unity, having no diversity either in relation to himself or
anything else." I have space for only one more witness, so
I will choose a man of our own time, well known to all-

Martin Buber. He writes this: "From my own unforgettable

experience I know well that there is a state in which ... we
experience an undivided unity .... this basic unity of my own
soul is . . beyond the reach of all the multiplicity it has
.

hitherto received from life."

But it could be suggested that, although we may think
that these witnesses sincerely believed what they said, they
might well have been mistaken. This, after all, is the great
danger of introspection. The inner life is dim and vague and
the best attempts to describe it may go astray. We
may be-
lieve that the mystics reduced the flow of sensations, images,

27

I
 Concerning Religion

and thoughts to the minimum possible. But we may think

there must have been at least faint images floating alDout in
their minds, perhaps so faint that they were not noticed.
There happens to be a little experimental evidence about
this. Professor Pierre Janet made a study of a modern mystic,
a woman named Madeleine, whom he was able to keep under
observation when she was in a condition of mystical trance.
He writes of her as follows: "Madeleine," he says, "supposes
that she does not breathe at all during her ecstasy, but if one
measures the respiration one finds it slight indeed, but suf-
ficiently normal. .Observations show us that sensation is
. .

also not suppressed. Madeleine perceives very well the

. . .

objects which I place in her hand she recognizes them,

. . .

and she hears and sees if she consents to open her eyes."
We must all welcome empirical evidence in the matter.
But I am afraid that in the present case the evidence is
wholly indecisive. The remarks about breathing are not rele-
vant because the issue is not whether Madeleine actually
breathed but whether she was conscious of breathing. The
fact that Madeleine is breathing, but is not aware of it, tends
rather to support the claim that sensation is obliterated from
consciousness than to disprove it. Then we have the observa-
tion that Madeleine hears and sees and recognizes objects put
in her hand, but this does not show that she is conscious of
these objects. The somnambulist avoids bumping against the
pieces of furniture amid which he walks, but
he really con- is

scious of them? In hypnosis a man must in some sense "hear"

the suggestions of the operator, but I do not know of any evi-
dence that he is conscious of them. When the trance is over
he acts on the hypnotist's suggestions apparently in the belief
that they emerge spontaneously out of his own consciousness.
He seems unaware that he ever heard them. Even in everyday
affairs in our normal waking states it would appear that in
some way we often act intelligently without the thought hav-
ing appeared in consciousness. This happens in the case of

28
 The Psychology of Mysticism

actions performed out of habit and as a result of practice.

All Professor Janet shows is that Madeleine recognizes objects,
but not that she is conscious of them. I hope it may someday
prove possible for the experimental psychologist to put the
introspective reports of the mystics to the test. But it has not
been done so far.
We must therefore fall back on the evidence of the intro-
spective mystics themselves. And I repeat that the volume of
this evidence overwhelming and comes from sources in
is

many different cultures, quite independently of one another.

For instance, the evidence of Eckhart is quite independent of
the evidence of the Upanishads, of which Eckhart presum-
ably had never heard.
What we have seen so far is that the mystical consciousness
is a completelyempty unity without any object or content.
But now at this point I think someone will say: Surely this
consciousness has an object, namely, what the mystic, rightly
or wrongly, calls God. Do not all mystics say that their ex-
perience is a direct and immediate consciousness of God? It
is true that some say this. Others say that the mystical con-

sciousness is not a consciousness of God, but that it is simply

identical with God. But there are atheistic or at least agnostic
mystics who do not believe in a Supreme Being at all and who
would never say that God is the object of their consciousness.
This is quite likely to be the case in our own modern. Western
civilization, where religious skepticism is rife, for the mystical
consciousness— the undifferentiated unity of empty conscious-
ness—may come to any human being, whatever he believes or
disbelieves. But, of course, the classical example of an athe-
istic or agnostic mystic is the Buddha. The Buddha was
perhaps the greatest mystic who ever lived in the world. But
he did not accept the belief in what we call God, and there-
fore we cannot say that God is the object of the Buddhist
mystical consciousness, although that consciousness is the same
undifferentiated unity, as that of the Christians. So I return to

29
 Concerning Religion

the statement that this consciousness is not a consciousness

of anything. It is completely empty of objects. It is true that
the Christian mystic sometimes says that this emptiness is
God, or the Godhead, and that the Buddhist mystic says that
it is what he calls Nirvana, which is a state of ultimate peace

and blessedness. But when the mystic says that his empty con-
sciousness is God, or is Nirvana, we must say that he is going
beyond the psychological description of his consciousness and
indulging in metaphysical interpretation and speculation.
The Buddhist I believe has the same experience as the Chris-
tian, but he gives it a different interpretation. Whether either
interpretation is correct is a philosophical, not a psychologi-
cal, question. So far as psychology is concerned we must re-
iterate that the experience is a pure, empty consciousness, an
undifferentiated unity, without objects, without internal mul-
tiplicity. That human beings do sometimes have this kind of
pure consciousness is simply deny a fact.
this To
fact is im-
possible unless you ignore the evidence. But the allegation
that the experience constitutes union with God is an opinion,
not a mere description of fact. It may be either true or not
true. In this essay I am discussing only the psychological facts.

But now, must turn to a second characteristic of the mysti-

I

cal consciousness which we have not so far mentioned. An

aspect of the experience is a feeling of what I will call the
dissolution of individuality. Each of us in our ordinary con-
sciousness thinks of himself as an individual person. use We
the word / to express this individuality. If we prefer to use
a Latin word, we perhaps call it the ego. Now in the intro-
vertive mystical consciousness the *T' is felt to disappear, to
dissolve, or fadeaway into the Infinite. This is so in all cul-
tures and I you some examples taken from cultures
will give
widely separated in space and time.
We may begin with a quite modern example. The English
poet Tennyson, from youth up, experienced frequent onsets
of mystical consciousness. He had not achieved this by any

30
 The Psychology of Mysticism

long training in Yogic or other exercises or techniques. It

came to him spontaneously, although he could induce it at
will by the simple process of repeating his own name to him-
self. Apparently this was an example of concentration on a

word or set of words, which I mentioned earlier. Tennyson's

account of the matter is as follows: "A kind of waking trance
—this for lack of a better word— I have frequently had, quite
up from boyhood, when I have been quite alone. All at . . .

once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of

individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade
away into boundless being, and this was not a confused state,
but the clearest, the surest of the sure, utterly beyond words
. .the loss of personality, (if so it were) seeming no extinction
.

but the only true life'' (my italics).

We see that the essence of this experience was that the
the individuality, was felt to fade away into ''boundless
being." We must notice also the paradoxical fact that, al-
though the "I" seems to disappear, this is not its extinction
but "the only true life." The paradox is that the 'T' experi-
ences its own disappearance so that, as it were, it ceases to be
"I" while yet somehow not being extinguished but remain-
ing "I." We shall find that this phase of the experience is
quite universal. And it is curious how the words fade away
or melt away or pass away keep reappearing in the descriptions
we gather from all over the world, which are for the most part
quite independent of one another, so that they are not to
be explained by copying. I will now give a number of other
examples.
We will begin with the Upanishads, which are surely far
away enough in space and time, and in culture characteristics,
from Tennyson. One of the Upanishads says: "As a lump of
salt thrown into the water melts away . . . even so the indi-
vidual soul, dissolved, is the Eternal. With the disappear-
. . .

ance of consciousness of the many, in divine illumination,

individuality disappears."

31
 Concerning Religion

Henry Suso, a Christian mystic of the thirteenth century,

"The spirit is set free from its individual properties.
says: . . .

It passes away into God. In this merging of itself in God, the

spirit passes away."
What Tennyson called "boundless being," Suso, being of
course a Christian, calls "God." Tennyson too I believe was
a Christian in some sense or other, but he probably speaks
only of "boundless being" because he is aware that "God" is
an interpretation and because he wishes to stick to psychologi-
cal description.
My next example is Meister Eckhart. There are in his writ-
ings large numbers of descriptions of the dissolution of in-
dividuality of which I here quote only one: "In this exalted
state," says Eckhart, "the soul has lost her proper self and is
flowing full-flood into the unity of the divine nature."
One finds many examples of the same aspect of the experi-
ence in the writings of Islamic mystics, or Sufis. For instance,
Al Junayd, who lived in the twelfth century, writes: "The
saint is submerged in the ocean of unity by passing away from
himself. He leaves behind his own feelings and actions as he
passes away into the life of God."
So far we have the testimony of Tennyson, and an ancient
Hindu of long pre-Christian times, of two Christian, and one
Islamic mystic. These are surely wide enough apart culturally.
But I will quote one more instance, this time from a present-
day Buddhist, the well-known authority on Zen Buddhism,
D. T. Suzuki. He is speaking of satori, which is the Zen word
for enlightenment or mystical consciousness. He says, "The
individual shell in which my personality is so solidly encased
explodes at the moment of satori. Not necessarily that I get
unified with a greater being than myself. But my individual-
ity, which I found rigidly held together and kept separate

from other individual existences, melts away into something

indescribable, something which is of a quite different order
from that which I am accustomed to."

38
 The Psychology of Mysticism

We may note Suzuki's remark that this does not necessarily

mean that "I get unified with a being greater than myself." I
presume he writes this in order to differentiate the non-
theisticBuddhist interpretation from the Christian interpre-
tation as "union with God." We see then that the feeling of
the dissolution of individuality is experienced by the mystics
of quite different cultures and ages.
A third characteristic of the mystical consciousness is that
it carries withextreme feelings of peace, blessedness, joy,
it

bliss, and so on. You can call this "euphoria" if you prefer

jargon words to English. But this adds nothing to what is

said by the ordinary English words peace, blessedness, joy,
and so on. In fact with the jargon word you obliterate the fine
distinctions of meaning which the English words carry. For
instance, peace and bliss are not identical, and blessedness is
differentfrom either of them because it carries religious over-
tones which are absent from the other two.
A fourth feature of the mystic's psychology is that it nearly
always includes an unshakable conviction that his experience
is not merely a subjective mental state, but that it is objective

in the sense that it constitutes a revelation of some transcen-

dental reality. He may call this reality God or Nirvana or
the Absolute, but the point is that no mystic will ever admit

that his experience merely a subjective state of his own

is

consciousness, and no more.

If the mystic is asked why he believes this, he will as a rule
have no reason in the sense of either argument or evidence to
offer. He will simply assert that he has a sense of assurance,
and that he knows, and is absolutely certain. It is possible that
one of the more philosophical mystics, such as Plotinus or
Meister Eckhart, might argue and give reasons, but this would
be only as a concession to their questioner, not because they
would feel the need of any reasons themselves. For their own
part they would rely on their own inner sense of certainty.
This feeling of conviction may in different cases be stronger

33
 Concerning Religion

or weaker, or at least more strongly expressed or less strongly.

Or the mystic may not trouble to put it in words at all. But it
is always present in his mind. Nor can it as a rule be shaken

even in after years, not evenmany years after the experience

has ceased. Once he has had the experience he will possess
throughout the rest of his life the solid conviction that the
experience was a revelation of reality. I believe there is no
case known of a mystic who ever came to doubt this. It might
be well to quote an example. R. M. Bucke, a Canadian physi-
cian contemporary with William James, had in his life only
one single mystical experience, which came to him unsought
and quite spontaneously around the age of thirty. He de-
scribes this experience and then says: *'The vision lasted a
few seconds and was gone, but the memory of it and the
sense of reality it left has remained during the quarter of a
century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision
showed was true. That conviction has never been lost." For
this conviction Bucke, who was a highly educated man and
himself a psychiatrist, gives no reason or evidence at all. He
simply feels that he knew it. This is a well-marked charac-
teristic of the psychology of the mystic.
Fifthly and finally, I think it is fair to note, under the head-
ing of psychology, the effects of the mystical experience on
human life and character. Experiences of trance of a non-
mystical kind, for example cataleptic trance, tend to be symp-
toms of mental disease. Such trances cannot possibly result
in any benefit, but rather tend towards the degeneration of
the sufferer. Hypnosis apparently does no one any harm but
neither does it do any good. Good actions or effects of one
kind or another may possibly result from suggestions fed into
a patient during hypnosis. But the state of hypnosis in itself
seems to be neither good nor bad.
The mystical consciousness, however, is remote from this
state of affairs. All the evidence is that, in the first place, the

34
 The Psychology of Mysticism

sense of peace and joy which is felt during the experience

may last foran indefinite time afterwards, and even through-
out life. The effects on character are not merely beneficial
but often are beneficial to the extent of revolutionizing the
life of the man. It is the universal testimony of those who
know, that mystical experience transforms human life often
from the squalid and mean to the noble and selfless. The
ennobling effects of a single mystical experience, which per-
haps lasted half a minute, may be felt throughout the rest of
a long life. Or again, a wretched and unhappy life, a life which
is felt to be without meaning and without purpose, may sud-

denly take on meaning and purpose. The mystic interprets his

experience as being a revelation of God, or of the Infinite, the
Eternal, and the Divine. We may or may not accept his claims
in this respect. So far as he believes himself to be experiencing
the divine being, the skeptic will no doubt regard him as
suffering from delusions. But this makes no difference. The
effect on his life is the same. We will behave as if he had in
fact had an experience of the Divine; he will behave as if he
had seen God. There is no trace of a diseased mind here. Nor
is it, as is sometimes charged against it, a mere device of es-

cape from the hard realities and duties of daily life. No doubt
it can be used as an escape, and sometimes has been. For in-

stance, Plotinus writes that the mystic life is "a liberation

from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in
the things of earth— a flight of the alone to the Alone." Again
the accusation which the Mahayana Buddhists made against
the Hinayana Buddhists, namely that they sought each his
own private Nirvana, not caring about the masses of men who
were left outside Nirvana— this amounted in fact to a charge
of escapism. Hence, the Mahayana Buddhists rejected this
view and created instead the idea of the bodhisattva, who
swore that he would not himself enter Nirvana until all other
men had achieved it. Plotinus and the Hinayana Buddhists

35
 Concerning Religion

are about the only historical instances I can think of where

the accusation of the mystical experience being nothing but
an escape could perhaps reasonably be charged.
Now let me sum up what we have found out about the
psychology of the mystic. We have not discussed the type of
mysticism which is called extrovertive, but only that which is
reached by introversion. In this state the mystic has expelled
all sensations, images, and conceptual thoughts from his
consciousness. He has reached the fundamental unity of
consciousness without its differentiations. Its psychological
essence, therefore, is an undifferentiated unity. This is accom-
panied by a feeling of the dissolution of individuality, the
melting away of the individual person into what he feels to
be the Infinite. There is a powerful feeling that this is the
revelation of a transcendental reality. The emotional color-
ing of the experience is a sense of blessedness and peace. And
finally the aftereffects are a certain serenity, achange of atti-
tude which may in certain cases amount complete transfor-
to a
mation of the personal life, a turning away from that which is
mean and evil towards that which is fine and noble. And these
aftereffects are not as a rule transient but may last indefinitely.

36
 The Philosophy of Mysticism

In the previous essay I distinguished between the psychology

of mysticism and the philosophy of mysticism. To the field

of psychology belongs the task of describing and analyzing the
mental processes of the mystic, leaving on one side the ques-
tion of whether those processes are purely subjective or ob-
jective; also, whether, that is to say, they indicate or reveal
the existence of anything in the real world outside the mystic's
mind; whether they are subjective like a dream, or objective
like our perception of the real world. This question arises
because mystics themselves always passionately affirm that in
their experience they have a revelation, or a direct perception
of God, or of Nirvana, or of the Absolute, or of some tran-
scendental and eternal existence or being. To try to decide
whether this claim, or any claim like it, is true is no part of
the function of psychology. Whose business, then, is it? The
mystic himself is likely to say that no one can pronounce on
this question except himself. He has within himself a sense of
absolute certainty that his experience is objective, that it is a
revelation of the Absolute and Ultimate Being, and that
neither the psychologist nor the philosopher can judge of
this. If the philosopher and the psychologist do not themselves
have the mystical experience what can they know about it?
Now it is all very fine for the mystic to talk in this way. But
what are the rest of us to do if we have no mystical experience
of our own? We surely have a right to try to make up our

37
 Concerning Religion

minds. The mystic or the prophet has a message for mankind.

He cannot expect us to accept it blindly without any attempt
to examine and test ^vhat he says. If we are to accept it, we
must have some sort of reason for doing so beyond the mystic's
own dogmatic statement. And this can only mean that we
must search out reasons for ourselves, even if the mystic re-
fuses to give us any. And if we then ask whose business it is
to do this, I think it is reasonable to say that, while any
human being has the right to make up his ow^n mind, it is
perhaps in a special sense the business of the philosopher.
This, then, is the question which I propose to discuss here.
Is the mystic's vision really, as he claims, the revelation of
some transcendental and eternal reality, or is it merely a
subjective illusion or hallucination? Even if we think it is
only subjective, however, this does not mean that it is some-
thing worthless, an unfortunate aberration of the mind to be
gotten rid of as a superstition. On the contrary, the mystical
consciousness is enormously beneficial; it is a way to health,
serenity, happiness, and peace of mind. It is not a diseased
state of mind. It is, we said, the way, or a way of salvation,
using the word salvation in a humanistic and non-superstitious
sense.
As I pointed out in the previous essay, on the psychology
of mysticism, the mystical consciousness reached by com-
is

pletely emptying the mind of all sensations, images, and

thoughts. What is left is the empty unity of consciousness,
which is an undifferentiated unity. It is nevertheless a posi-
tive state of consciousness although it is not a consciousness of
any objects. Another aspect of
it is that it includes the dis-

solution of individuality. The

individual experiences a sense
of infinite expansion; he feels that his individuality is melting
away into "boundless being," as Tennyson expressed it, so
that his own finite personality or individuality disappears and
is swallowed up in this greater being. A third aspect is
that there is in this experience a sense of profound bliss, peace,

38
 The Philosophy of Mysticism

serenity, blessedness. Fourthly, the effects of the experience

usually last through the rest of the man's life. Serenity and
peace and an increase of nobility and life-value may continue
to the end. Finally, he feels an unshakable conviction that his
experience was no dream, but an immediate apprehension of
the divine or of some eternal reality.
And now, after these preliminaries, let us try to face squarely
the question of objectivity. I will begin by examining further
the passage from the Upanishads quoted in the chapter above.
The mystical consciousness, it says, "is beyond the senses, be-
yond the understanding; it is the pure unitary consciousness
wherein awareness of the world and of multiplicity is com-
pletely obliterated. It is ineffable peace. It is the Supreme
good. It is One without a second. It is the Self." All of this was
discussed above except for one sentence, the last little sentence
of four words: "It is the Self." Now these four one-syllable
words are the key to the understanding of the problem before
us. "It is the Self." What is the "it" which is the Self? If we
read the passage we see that it refers to the mystical conscious-
ness. So we may say that, according to the Upanishads, the
mystical consciousness is the Self. What, however, is meant by
this? We can say if we like that self is another word for what
used to be called the soul. We may say this if we don't mind
using old-fashioned language. But just to use another word
does not help us much. For now we have to ask, "What is the
soul or self?"
The answer which the mystics have in mind is that the self
or the soul is simply the unity of consciousness as distinct from
the multiplicity of its contents or objects. The consciousness
of a normal man is a unity, it is one single consciousness, but
its many. At this moment I am aware of a multi-
objects are
tude of objects, chairs, windows, the human beings in front
of me, and so on. Now the unity of this consciousness, taken
by itself and apart from the multiplicity of its contents or
objects, is considered by the mystics to be what we mean when

39
 Concerning Religion

we speak of the self or the soul. The ego or "I" simply is this
unity. What then will happen when the mystic empties his
consciousness of the entire multiplicity of its objects, of all
sensations, images, and thoughts? What will be left is just the
bare unity which is the self or "I." After all, this is a quite
natural conclusion. Consider your own case as you sit there.
You call yourself "I" and this I is your self or soul. This self
of yours, which you call "I," holds within it the awareness of
many objects. You say, "I see the clock and the chairs and the
windows." Suppose you could, as the mystic does, empty your
mind, your self, of all its objects, what would be left? Surely
the I, the self itself. But what is left is nothing but an undif-
ferentiated unity. Therefore the undifferentiated unity is
the self. That is the meaning of the last sentence of our quo-
tation from the Upanishad. The mystical consciousness which
is the undifferentiated unity is identical with the soul or self.

This is exactly what the Upanishad says. To quote its words

once more, *'It is the pure unitary consciousness wherein . . .

multiplicity completely obliterated. ... It is the Self."

is

If we accept this conclusion we have taken one step in our

examination of the problem of objectivity. Now we must go
on to the second step, and it is of crucial importance. So far,
the self which we have reached in the mystical experience is
the finite self of this or that particular individual. It is the
ego of you or me or some But at this point
other individual.
the mystic of the Upanishads makes a sudden and tremendous
and almost incredible leap. He jumps straight from the finite
individual self to the universal self of the world, the cosmic
self,the infinite Self, Brahman, God. He says that when the
mystic has emptied himself of all objects, all sensations,
images, and thoughts, and reached his own self, then in reality
what he has reached is not merely his own self but the infinite
Self. He identifies his own self with the infinite. If this is true,
then of course the mystical consciousness is a revelation of the
universal or cosmic Self. We have been discussing this matter

40
 The Philosophy of Mysticism

in terms of Hindu The

Christian mystic however
mysticism.
makes same tremendous leap from his individual
exactly the
self to the universal Self of the world, which he calls God and
with which he believes his individual self to be "in union,"
as he expresses it.

Now suppose we why he thinks this, why he

ask the mystic
believes that his individual he reaches it in the mystical
self, as

consciousness, is identical with or in union with, the uni-

versal Self of the world. We shall find that he usually gives no
reason at all. He simply tells us that he knows it, he feels
absolutely certain of it within himself and he requires no
further reason, and can give us none. Nevertheless, I think we
can dig out for ourselves some of the reasons for this sense
of certainty.
You notice that I am distinguishing psychological causes
from logical reasons. The question we are asking just at the
moment not what arguments can be found for believing
is

what the mystic says, but what, as a matter of bare psycho-

logical fact, causes him to believe it. To give the causes of a
belief has no bearing on its truth. A psychosis may cause you
to believe that you are the emperor of the Sahara. But to give
valid logical reasons for a belief is to prove it true. At present
I am inquiring only into the psychological causes of the
mystic's belief that his individual self is identical with the

universal Self.
There are three such causes, I think. First, there is the ex-
perience of the dissolution of individuality, which I fully
described in the previous essay. We
remember Tennyson's
mystical experience. "Out of the intensity of the conscious-
ness of individuality," he says, "individuality itself seemed to
dissolve and fade away into boundless being." And we re-
member that Suzuki, the Buddhist mystic, says, "My indi-
viduality . . . explodes at the moment of satori and melts away
into something of quite a different order." And we remember
that Christian mystics have the same experience of what seems

41
 Concerning Religion

to them to be the melting away of the finite individuality into

the infinite.
Now I believe this experience is the primary psychological
cause of the leap from the individual self to the infinite Self.
The mystic might say— though he usually does not analyze his
state of mind— that he has reached union with
his belief that
the infinite being not a mere theory or opinion of his, but
is

something which he has actually experienced. We must al-

ways distinguish an experience of any kind, whether it is a
sense experience or a mystical experience, from the interpre-
tation which our intellect puts upon it. The experience itself
is certain and cannot be doubted. The intellect's interpre-

tation can always be doubted and is at most only a probable

opinion. For instance: Suppose three men are walking alone
in a dark forest at night. They see something glimmering
white through the trees. One may suppose it is a ghost, an-
other that it is a white rock, the third that it is a sheet hung
out on a clothesline. In this case the experience itself is just
a white glimmer. This is absolutely certain. It cannot be
doubted that they did experience a white glimmer. But they
make three different interpretations of it. All three interpre-
tations are mere opinions, and any or all of them may be false.
Now in just this same way the mystic feels that his loss of
individuality, its passing away into ''boundless being" or the
infinite, is what he actually experienced and is therefore as
certain as the white glimmer in our illustration. It is not his
opinion that his individuality melted away into "boundless
being." He experienced this fact. Therefore it is certain. This,
I think, is the main cause which explains his leap from the
individual self to the world Self.
It thus becomes clear why the mystic believes that his ex-
perience is not merely subjective. The skeptical critic says
that the mystic's experience, however inspiring, however
beautiful, however valuable it may be, is like a beautiful
dream, something which exists only in the mind of the mystic

42
 The Philosophy of Mysticism

and does not reveal anything outside him. But the mystic feels
that his experience is one which in itself, and apart from any
interpretation, transcends subjectivity. The experience, there-
fore, is a direct experience of the infinite and it is natural to

identify this infinite being with God. It is natural at any rate

for a theist who God. The Buddhist, who does not
believes in
believe in God, has the same experience and makes the same
leap to the infinite. But he calls this infinite existence Nir-
vana, not God, and Nirvana is not a self or a personal being,
but a transcendental plane of existence.
The second cause of the mystic's feeling of certainty that he
has received a transcendental revelation, is, I believe, that he
feels his experience to be outside space and outside time, and
therefore transcendent of the world which is in space and
time. His experience, he might explain— if he were sufficiently
vocal and philosophical— must necessarily be admitted to be
non-spatial and non-temporal. For space and time are differ-
entiated, space into points or positions, time into moments.
Space and time are, in fact, the very principles in terms of
which we differentiate all other things. For instance, two
billiard balls which are exactly alike are differentiated only
by the spatial distance between them. Therefore since the
mystical experience is undifferentiated it clearly has nothing

to do with space and time, but is non-spatial and non-temporal.

Ittherefore clearly transcends not only the subjectivity of the
individual but the whole world of nature. Since it is non-
temporal it is eternal. The mystic therefore believes that he
is experiencing the eternal, and in a theistic culture it
is natural to interpret the eternal as God. Accordingly Meister
Eckhart says, over and over again, that the experience is what
he calls ''the eternal now," in which there is neither past, nor
present, nor future.
There is a third reason for the mystic's belief that he is in

touch with a Divine reality. This consists in the feelings of

utter bliss, peace, blessedness— one may also have the feeling

43
 Concerning Religion

of sacredness or holiness— which invariably accompany the

experience. It is the peace which passeth
understanding. all
These then are the psychological factors which impel the
mystic to feel certain that he has received a revelation of a
transcendental reality, and has not been merely shut up in
his own subjectivity.
Now, although we must always carefully distinguish a psy-
chological cause from a logical reason, w^e must point out that
sometimes the two coincide so that the psychological cause
is also a logical reason. For instance, I believe that if the
three sides of a triangle are equal then its three angles must
also be equal. I believe this because it has been proven by
logic. And so far as I know there was never any psychological
process in my mind which made me believe this except the
logical proof. Or, again, believe that 3,472 plus 4,394 make
I

7,866. 1 believe this because I have added them and the arith-
metical process of addition constitutes logical proof. And in
this case too there is nothing which makes me believe this
except the proof. The logical proof is itself the psychological
cause of my belief.
It is therefore possible that the psychological factors which
make the mystic feel certain of the revelatory character of his
experience may also constitute logical arguments which we
should have to accept. And we have now to ask whether this
is so. The first question is whether the mystic's feeling of the

melting away of his individuality into the infinite is a good

logical argument for his belief in a revelation. Now, although
it isthe psychological cause of his feeling of certainty, I am
afraid it cannot by itself be considered a good logical reason
for it. The
mystic actually experiences the fading away of his
individuality into boundless being. But it must be pointed
out that no factor of any experience, when that experience is
considered by itself, can ever show that the experience is
objective. Proof of objectivity always involves comparison of
experiences and a fitting of them together in a consistent

44
 The Philosophy of Mysticism

pattern. What I experience

inwardly, however intensely I
feel it, may nevertheless be outwardly, unless I have
false
some reason which is drawn from other sources and is inde-
pendent of the experience itself. If this is obscure, let me give
a few instances of what I mean. I may in a state of extreme
giddiness have a feeling that I am falling through space. This
feeling might be so intense as to cause me to believe that I
am really falling when as a matter of fact I may be lying on
the ground. Mystical literature is full of examples of what is
called "levitation." St. Teresa of Avila when in a state of
ecstasy had a feeling that she was being ground lifted off the
and was floating unsupported in the air. She believed that
this was true. And although we hear of the same phenomenon
in India and elsewhere, you will perhaps agree with me in
thinking that no mystic ever does really leave the ground and
float unsupported in the air. We may also give the example
of dreaming. In a dream one may have the experience of fall-
ing off a cliff or flying through space. And note that this is
actually a part of the dream experience, and not an interpre-
tation. Nevertheless as we find out when we test it
it is false,

by reference our experience. In the same way

to the rest of
the fact that the mystic feels that he is melting away into in-
finity does not in itself prove that he is so. His experience
^vhich he thus describes may be only subjective although it
may be a fact that he does have the actual experience of melt-
ing away into the infinite and that this is not an interpretation.
For these reasons I fear we have to conclude that we have so
far failed to discover any valid reasons for believing in the
objectivity of his experience.
It if one exists, must be such
follows that a valid reason,
that, although of course it takes the mystic's inner feelings
into account and regards them as part of the evidence, it will
also subject these feelings to some sort of objective test by
checking them with factors which are outside and independent
of the experience. Suppose I have the experience of killing a

45
 Concerning Religion

lion.Outside observers testify that I was in bed all the time.

I conclude that it was a dream. But if they testified that they
too saw me kill this lion, I should conclude that I was awake
and that my experience of killing the lion was objective. The
question which therefore arises is this. Are there any argu-
ments for the objectivity of the mystic's experience which rely
not merely on his own inward experience but on independent
and outside checking? The answer is that there do exist such
arguments.
One such argument bases itself on the fact that mystics all
over the world, in all ages, countries, and cultures, say the
same thing, agree in their accounts of the mystical experience.
Thus one mystic's experience is supported by the evidence of
other mystics. For instance they all say, in one set of words or
another, that the core of their experience is an undifferenti-
ated unity, that it is spaceless and timeless, and that it brings

peace and blessedness. And there are various other points on

which they agree.
The argument then is that there could hardly be this unani-
mous testimony if it were not true. We are not here relying
on the internal characters of any one single experience. It is
true that we are not going outside the mystical experience alto-
gether. But we are going outside any individual experience
to compare it with all others. This is entirely parallel to going
outside one sense experience of killing a lion to the sense
experiences of other people who also see it. This argument
has frequently been appealed to as regards mystical experi-
ence. Even William James treated it with respect, though he
did not commit himself so far as to say that he was convinced
by it. I will quote a version of it which is found in R. M.
Bucke's book Cosmic Consciousness. According to him, the
only way one can know that any experience, even an ordinary
sense perception, is objective is that other persons have or
can have the same experience. Bucke's version of the argu-
ment we are considering runs as follows: "You know that the
46
 The Philosophy of Mysticism

treeis real and not an hallucination because all other persons

having the sense of sight also see it, while if it were an

. . .

hallucination it would be visible only to yourself. By the

same method of reasoning do we establish the objective reality
of the universe tallying cosmic consciousness. Each person
who has the faculty is made aware of essentially the same
facts."
We must now examine argument. The agreement of
this
mystics all over the world about the essentials of their experi-
ence is a most impressive fact and does, I think, prove some-
thing of great importance. But taken by itself it is not suf-
ficient to prove the objectivity of the experience. We can see
this at once if we note that there are illusions of sense which
are quite universal and which all normal humans will have if
they put themselves in the appropriate situation. For instance,
the mirage of water in the desert will be seen by all persons
who look in the right direction, yet the water, of course, is not
objective. Here is another simpler example. Anybody who
pushes his eye on one side with his finger will see everything
doubled. This is a universal experience of everyone. But this
doubling of things is not objective. It is an illusion. What
then is the important fact which the mystics' unanimity con-
cerning their experiences does prove? It does not prove that
the experience is objective. What it proves, I believe, is that
the capacity for mystical experience is universal among men
and is independent of country, or period, or culture. It points
to a common element in human nature but does not in itself
prove objectivity.
Perhaps we shall have more success if we try another line
of thought. The problem is one regarding the objectivity of
the experience. Would it not be wise if we began by asking
what are the criteria of the objectivity of any experience?
Bucke gave agreement of everyone in having the same ex-
perience as the criterion. But this, we have found, is not
enough. Let us begin again. Let us take a dream as a typical

47
 Concerning Religion

example of subjective experience, and a true perception, for

example my perception of this desk, as a typical example of an
objective experience. What is the difference? If we can answer
that question we shall thereby discover the criteria of ob-
jectivity. We may be inclined to say that the dream is only
subjective because it is private, whereas the true perception
is objective becauseit is public. But this is just what Bucke

saidand which proved to be incorrect or at least insufficient.

This is also what is meant by the misleading phrase "publicly
verifiable." A
mirage in the desert is publicly verifiable, yet
is subjective. do not doubt that being publicly verifiable is
I

part of the criterion and is very useful as a rough test. But

it is not the whole of the criterion. Something is missing. What

is it?

My belief is that this missing factor is what I will call order-

liness, by which I mean obedience to the laws of nature. The
ultimate criterion of objectivity is orderliness in this sense.
And the ultimate criterion of subjectivity, of dream, and hal-
lucination, and illusion, is disorderliness, disobedience to the
laws of nature. Let us take a few examples. Why is the desert
mirage of water subjective, although it is publicly verifiable?
Because when I walk right up to the spot where the water was
seen I find it disappears and there is only sand. It is contrary
to the laws of nature that water should disappear and turn
into sand. But if, when I walk up to what appears to be water,
I still see the water and can touch and drink it, and, if I can-

not find any breach of the laws of nature, I conclude that the
water is objective.
Another example. Suppose I dreamed
night that I was
last

in London. Then I suddenly bed in America.

find myself in
I conclude that my visit to London was a dream because other-

wise I should have to think that I had been in London one

moment and the next moment I was in America, and that I
had traveled from London to America instantaneously and
without crossing the ocean in a ship or plane. And this would
involve various breaches of the laws of nature.

48
 The Philosophy of Mysticism

In the end we think that an experience is objective if it

can be fitted into the natural order— the one order of events
past and future which constitute that regular sequence of
causes and effects we call nature If it cannot be so fitted into
the order of nature we call it subjective. Thus the criterion of
objectivity is order, and that of subjectivity is disorder.
Can the criterion of objectivity which we have discovered,
namely orderliness, be applied to mystical experience so as
to show it objective? In order that this might be so, it would

have to be the case that within the experience there are

orderly patterns of events. And this means that you must have
a multiplicity of events within it to constitute an objective
order. But within the mystical experience there is no multi-
plicity of events. There is no multiplicity at all, but only
unity. Therefore it follows that since the experience does not
exemplify the criteria of objectivity it is not objective.
But let not the skeptic too hastily exult. For now comes a
surprise.The very same criteria which show that mystical ex-
perience cannot be objective also show that it cannot be sub-
jective either. For what is the criterion of subjectivity? The
subjective, we showed, is the disorderly. It consists in ex-
periencing events which infringe the laws of nature. Now
mystical experience is not disorderly. Just as there is in it no
multiplicity of items to be orderly, so there is no multiplicity
of items to be disorderly. In a pure undifferentiated unity
there can be neither order nor disorder. And therefore that
experience can be neither subjective nor objective.
Now this conclusion, that mystical experience is neither
subjective nor objective, may seem extraordinary, but as a
matter of fact it is not at all surprising, and it is in fact what
the mystics themselves often say, as in the description of
mystical experience from the Mandukya Upanishad which I
quoted above. That very passage, which is given only in part,
contains also these words: "It is not subjective experience, nor
objective experience, nor experience intermediate between
the two." The composers of the Upanishads were, of course.

49
 Concerning Religion

Hindus. But same

^ve find Christian mystics saying exactly the
thing. Dionysius the Areopagite, the earliest, orone of the ear-
liest, of the Christian mystics— he lived somewhere around the

fifth century— says of the Supreme Being: *'It belongs neither

to the category of existence, nor to that of non-existence."
What this really means is simply this— the distinction be-
tween subjective and objective is a pragmatic one, a very
useful one in daily life, but it is not an ultimate distinction.
It does not apply to ultimate reality. A theist should not say,
properly speaking, that God— his name for ultimate reality-
is objective, or exists. God, he should say, transcends alto-

gether the common distinction between subjective and ob-

jective. He is neither. It means the same thing to say he is
neither existent nor non-existent. These terms, these distinc-
tions of objective and subjective, are valid within the finite
world but they apply only to finite things, not to the infinite.
The infinite is, as it were, greater than anything which is
merely subjective. Of course in common speech we speak, if
we are theists, of the existence of God. We also say that he is

a person, that he is good, and just, and loving. I am no

theologian. But I think most theologians would agree that all
these words we use of God cannot be literally true. St. Thomas
Aquinas supposed that they are only analogies of the truth.
Therefore when we say that the mystical experience is neither
objective nor subjective we are not saying anything so out-
rageous as might at first appear. I will use the word trans-
subjective to mean the status of mystical experience as being
neither subjective nor objective. I say we have given valid
reasons for believing that the mystical consciousness is trans-
subjective.
There is another way of expressing this truth. If we say that
God exists we cannot mean that he exists in the same sense as
acow or a mountain exists. To say of cows and mountains that
they exist, or are objective, is just another way of saying that
they are parts of the world of nature. Now a transcendent

50
 The Philosophy of Mysticism

reality ofany kind, whether it is conceived as God or Nirvana

or in any other way, cannot of course be a part of nature.
For to say that it is transcendent means that it transcends na-
ture. Therefore it cannot be said to exist in the way natural
objects exist. The category of the trans-subjective to which
we have decided that the ultimate reality must belong
not is

something less than existence. It is something greater than

existence. There is, therefore, a transcendental reality, al-
though the word is does not mean the same as the word
exist.
There is also another line of approach which leads to the
same conclusion. It depends upon the Leibnizian principle
of the identity of indiscernibles. Suppose that two persons,
A and B, expel all empirical content from their minds so as
to reach the unity of pure consciousness. We incline to say
that what we have left is two pure egos. But if these egos are
distinct and separate, there must be some principle of in-
dividuation which makes them two distinct beings. What is
the individuating principle or fact? There is, in the first
place, no difference of empirical content to distinguish A
from B, for both A and B have expelled all empirical con-
tent. Nor is there any spatial division, for we are here talking
about minds, not physical bodies. Mental phenomena do not
appear to occupy space. It makes no sense, for instance, to
ask whether my belief in God is to the left or right of my
belief in the existence of matter; nor whether my feeling of
anger is north or south of my feeling of joy. Nor, if we sup-
pose that A and B are simultaneously reaching the mystical
consciousness, can time be a differentiating principle. There
is in fact no difference whatever between pure ego A and pure

ego B. Therefore, by the principle of the identity of indis-

cernibles, they are in fact identical, and this conclusion may
be extended from these two individuals to all individuals in
the world. There are in the universe not a multitude of pure
egos, but only one. For the difference between one mind and

51
 Concerning Religion

another is solely a difference of content; and if we abstract

from the content, there is no difference. Hence there is ulti-

mately only one ego, which is in all men but above all indi-
viduals; it may reasonably be called a super-ego, or universal

Self,or God.
My conclusion then is that the mystics really have a direct
experience of something beyond the world of space and time,
something which has given rise to the world's religious, some-
thing which we may if we like call an infinite and eternal
Mind or Self, or, if the reader so desires, God.

52
 .

Survival After Death

Those who believe in the survival of the conscious person

after the death of his body have meet certain preliminary
to
objections and difficulties having to do with the physiological
connection of consciousness with the physical brain. Con-
sciousness in all known cases exists only in connection with
a brain and a nervous system. Moreover, the quality of con-
sciousness varies with the age and condition of the body. In
an infant body we find an infant consciousness. The maturing
of the body brings the maturing of consciousness, and with
old age the quality of consciousness declines with the decline
of the body. When an old man dies, what kind of conscious-
ness is supposed to survive? Is it his consciousness as it was
just before death, which may perhaps have become imbecile?
Or is it the consciousness of his mature middle age? Or is it

the infant mind that he had when he was a baby? The point
of these questions is not that we do not know the answers to
them. The point is that all possible answers are equally sense-
less. Suppose we suggest that it is the mature consciousness

which will survive because it is the best. Then will the old
man who dies suddenly revert to his middle years after death?
And will the infant who dies suddenly become mature? The
dependence of the mind on the body appears further in the
fact that an injury to the brain may produce a mental life
disordered or insane.
The theory of evolution also creates difficulties for the con-
53
 Concerning Religion

cept of survival. Human consciousness presumably evolved

out of animal consciousness. At what point in the continuous
development from trilobite to man was an immortal soul
suddenly introduced? Does man have an immortal existence,
but not pithecanthropus erectus} Was the miracle of the crea-
tion of an immortal soul suddenly performed when the first
man appeared on the planet? Does it even make sense to talk
about a first man in the light of modern biology? Plainly the
belief that men are immortal, but that the lower animals are
not, is a survival from pre-evolutionary times when man was
regarded as a special creation unrelated to "the beasts of the
field." The alternative to the view that men alone are im-
mortal, while other animals are not, is the view that all ani-
mals have immortal souls. Since it is impossible to draw the
line anyw^here, this will mean, I think, that lobsters, flies,

mosquitoes, centipedes, spiders, worms, fleas, bedbugs, beetles,

Tvasps, earwigs, and all the rest have immortal souls. This
seems difficult to believe.
These arguments against the survival of man after death
are merely probable and empirical, not certain, and are there-
fore theoretically capable of being rebutted by evidence on
the other side. We certainly ought to hear the other side.
Is there then any positive evidence in favor of survival? There
is, of course, the endless mass of statements of belief in sur-
vival to be found in the religious literatures of the different
world religions. But,with whatever reverent awe we may
rightly regard these scriptures, it has to be said that they
rarely or never produce any positive evidence which can be
weighed and evaluated. They rely on revelation and inspira-
tion. So far as I know, the only evidence which can be weighed
and found either strong or weak is in the area of psychical re-
search. Unfortunately, I have made no study of this evidence
so as to be able to give a first-hand opinion on it. There is a
great deal of uniformed prejudice against it. Like all preju-
dice, this should be rejected by rational men, and the

54
 Survival After Death

evidence should be studied with impartiality and without

presuppositions. Since I cannot offer an opinion myself, I can
only quote from one whom I regard as the most enlightened,
careful, and reliable philosopher who has made a lifelong
study of it. I refer to Professor C. D. Broad of Cambridge,
England. He tells us that, after excluding the numerous cases
of fraudulent mediumship, there remain cases where a sur-
viving person seems to take control of the medium's body and
to speak in his own characteristic voice and manner through
the medium's lips. Professor Broad thinks that this evidence
of survival is strong, but he refuses to rule out the possibility
that the phenomena may be explained in some other way
which is not at present known. Thus we are left in doubt at
the end.
Taking into account all these considerations regarding the
apparent dependence of consciousness on the physical brain,
the facts of evolution, and the evidence of psychical research,
I think it is fair to conclude that we do not know whether
survival and immortality are realities or not, and that, while
they cannot be proved, neither can they be ruled out by
science or philosophy. Since on the available evidence we
cannot decide definitely whether the human spirit is im-
mortal or not, I propose in the remainder of this essay to dis-
cuss what the different cultures and world religions have to
tell us about the nature of the life hereafter and the quality

of immortality. We do not know if what any of the world

religions say about this is true or not. But we shall find that
to examine, classify, and discuss their views will raise ques-
tions which are not without profit and interest.
The more important world religions may be regarded as
falling into two Western and the Eastern.
distinct groups, the
Under the head ofWestern religions I include Christianity,
Islam, and Judaism. And under the head of Eastern religions
I include Hinduism and Buddhism. This classification is no

doubt open to criticism on various grounds. It may be said.

55
 Concerning Religion

for example, that there is a sense in which all five religions

are in reality Eastern, and none of them Western, for Pales-

tine, where both Christianity and Judaism originated, be-
longs to the Middle East and not to the West. But we can
afford to ignore these objections. Whatever the experts on
geography may say, our classification will prove convenient
for our purposes, and that is its sufficient justification.
The chief difference between the Western and the Eastern
religions in regard to the life after death is that Hinduism
and Buddhism accept the doctrine of reincarnation, whereas
the Western religions do not. I have seen it stated that rein-
carnation, though not asserted by Christianity, is not repug-
nant to it and not heretical. This may be true. There may be
Christians who believe in reincarnation and can do so with-
out being declared heretics. But reincarnation is no part of
the essential creeds of any of the Western religions, whereas
it is essential both to Hinduism and Buddhism. The ordinary

belief of Westerners, if they believe in any afterlife at all,

is that after death the spirit of man becomes discarnate, be-

comes a disembodied soul. It is true that this is not the of-

ficial creed of Christendom. The Apostles' Creed confirms

belief in ''the resurrection of the body and the life everlast-

ing." And the Athanasian Creed states that men shall rise
again at the day of judgment "with their bodies." I doubt,
however, whether the belief that not only the soul, but the
body also, enjoys a future life is any longer effective among
any except a few fundamentalist theological sticklers. And I
suggest that most people in the West who believe in a future
life think they will be simply disembodied spirits.
There is another important difference between Eastern
and Western views of immortality. The Western religions
think that the personal identity of each individual will per-
sistforever. John Smith will be John Smith through all eter-
nity, and Bill Jones will be Bill Jones. They may of course
undergo development and no doubt improvement, or even

56
 Survival After Death

attain moral perfection, during the ages, but they will still
always remain the same identical persons. Eastern beliefs are
different. Both Hinduism and Buddhism maintain that the
individual retains his personal identity throughout all his
subsequent reincarnations, which may run through millions
of years, but in the end, after the last reincarnation, there
comes something like the dissolution and absorption of in-
dividuality in the infinite life of the universe.
There is really nothing more about Western views
to say
of immortality. They vague and im-
are, of course, essentially
precise, but so far as they can be captured in any one formula
they seem to suggest two things. First, the soul will be naked
and disembodied after death— although this is contrary, as we
noted, to the orthodox Christian creeds; and second, the in-
dividual will remain the same individual, will retain his
personal identity indefinitely into the future.
We may now turn to the views of the Oriental religions,
which cannot be summed up in any such simple terms as can
the Western creeds, with the result that we shall have to spend
the rest of this essay examining them.
We will begin with a discussion of reincarnation, which is
common to both Indian religions. Since they both assume that
between incarnations there is a lapse of time during which
the spirit is discarnate, we have all the same difficulties we
found in the theories of Western religions. And in addition
reincarnation is beset by special difficulties of its own. It al-
most inevitably involves belief in pre-existence. There is no
reason to suppose that this present life is our first incarnation.
But if we have already lived through many previous lives, we
naturally ask w^hen and how the series of our reincarnations
began. The Buddha when questioned about this gave the fol-
lowing answer: "This round of existence," he said, **is with-
out known starting point; and of beings who course and roll
along from birth to birth, blinded by ignorance and fettered
by desire, there is no beginning discernible." The question

57
 Concerning Religion

when and why we began to reincarnate then shows itself as

unanswerable. Perhaps, however, it is not fair to fasten this
as an objection to Hindu and Buddhist views, because West-
ern religions are equally incapable of answering questions
about the origination of our immortal souls.
The more serious difficulties about the theory of reincar-
nation turn upon the question of personal identity. The ques-
tion is: Does the personal identity of each individual persist
through all these innumerable reincarnations? The natural
answer is: Yes, for this is implied in the very word reincarna-
tion. If the word means anything, it must mean that I existed
in a former incarnation, and that the same 'T' exists again
in this present life, and in my next life, and in all future in-
carnations of me. And this is undoubtedly what the very
concept of reincarnation, as accepted both by Hinduism and
Buddhism, means. But the main difficulty in believing this
is that Tve do not remember our past lives. Suppose it is as-

serted that in my previous existence I was the philosopher

Descartes. am, of course, very much flattered by this identifi-
I

cation, but since I do not remember being Descartes I do not

see how my identity with him can be asserted or established.
One possible reply to this objection is that there exists
within each one of us something which we may call an ego,
or a self, or a soul, which persists and remains the same
throughout all changes of consciousness, and even where there
is complete loss of memory. It is true that my consciousness is

a flux of changing mental states. Sensations come and go, and

sodo thoughts, feelings, and volitions. But I remain the same
"I" throughout all these mental changes, although I do not
remember many of my past experiences. There have no doubt
been days and perhaps weeks in my life, all memory of which
has now been entirely blotted out. And yet I am now the
same person as I was during those days or weeks, because it
was the same ego or self which persisted through them all.
Personal identity, in this view, is located not in the stream of
consciousness itself but in a soul or ego which, as it were, lies

58
 Survival After Death

behind consciousness and, so to speak, owns it. If this is so,

we can easily believe that I am the same person throughout
all my reincarnations, although I do not remember any of

them. I think this view, or something like it, can be attributed

tomost Hindu thinkers.
Buddhism, however, presents a quite different view.
Buddha himself apparently, and certainly all the schools of
Buddhism, flatly and emphatically denied that there exists
any such thing as a soul, or a self, or an ego. Yet Buddhism
continues to believe in reincarnation. And Buddhism faces,
therefore, the interesting question: How can there be rein-
carnation without any soul to be reincarnated? It is wwth
examining the Buddhist views on these matters in some detail.
Let us begin by asking ^vhat is the reason given by Bud-
dhism for denying the existence of an ego, which most of us
in the West are perhaps inclined to take for granted. In the
first place the non-existence of an ego which persists through

the changes of consciousness follows from one of the basic

tenets of Buddhism, namely that everything in the universe
is constantly changing and that nothing is permanent. Like the

Greek philosopher Heraclitus, Buddha held that "all things

flow." There is nothing to be found in the world but flux, and
therefore there cannot be any such thing as an ego which
continues the same from one day to another, much less from
one incarnation to another. Indeed, so radical is the Buddhist
theory of flux that there cannot be, it says, any existence which
remains the same even from one moment to another. Here is
a quotation from one of the Buddhist scriptures: "Strictly
speaking, the duration of the life of a living being is exceed-
ingly brief, lasting only while a thought lasts. The life of
. . .

a living being lasts only for the period of one thought. As

soon as that thought has ceased, the being is said to have
ceased."
Buddhism
has also another argument for denying the ex-
an ego. In its essential logic it is the same as the
istence of
argument used in the eighteenth century by the Scottish phil-

59
 Concerning Religion

osopher David Hume. We shall understand it most easily if

we state it first in Hume's words, and then we can go on to
see that Buddha was saying the same thing in slightly differ-
ent terms. Hume put the argument as follows: ''When I
enter most intimately into what I call myself at any time, I
always stumble on some particular perception or other, of
heat or cold, love or hate, pleasure or pain. I never can catch
myself at any time, and can never observe anything but the
perceptions."
You can repeat Hume's psychological experiment if you
like.Look introspectively into your own mind. What do you
find? You find thoughts, sensations, emotions, wishes, etc.
These are all changing constantly. You cannot introspectively
discover anything else, anything permanent. You say, "I have
a color sensation." You can observe the color, but not the
"I." You say, "I think." You can observe your thought but
not the thinker. You cannot observe the so-called ego. You
therefore have no right to postulate its existence. That is
Hume's argument. Buddha used the same argument except
that the details of his psychology were different, and no doubt
more primitive. He lists five elements which make up the
human being. The first is the physical body, and the other
four are what we would call mental— sensations, perceptions,
predispositions, and consciousness. These are the only things
which we can observe in a human mind, says Buddha. We
cannot observe an ego, and we have no right to postulate
its existence.
should be noted that it makes no difference to the argu-
It
ment whether the account given of the observable contents
of the mind, either by Hume or Buddha, are correct or not.
Hume says we can observe only what he calls perceptions, by
which he means thoughts, sensations, emotions. Buddha says
we can observe only sensations, perceptions, predispositions,
and consciousness. What they both mean is that we can ob-
serve only the flux of mental states, never the unchanging ego.
Next we have to inquire how, according to Buddhism, this
60
 Survival After Death

can be made consistent with reincarnation. How can there

be reincarnation if there is no ego to be reincarnated? The
answer which we get in the Buddhist books is that although
there is nothing but a fleeting consciousness, it does consti-
tute a single continuous series of mental states, which can be
traced through our lives and also from one reincarnation to
another. A riveran example of a flux which constitutes a
is

single continuous series, or a fire which spreads from one

part of the country to another. In the same way the mental
states of each person constitute a single series, whether in this
reincarnation or the next.
We may well object that this account is not acceptable
unless memory is brought into it. It is memory which con-
stitutes your stream of consciousness, or mine, a single con-
tinuous series. Memory is the thread on which the successive
items of consciousness are strung. If I remembered being
Descartes, writing his books, and so forth, there would be a
continuity between my consciousness and his. But since I

remember none of his experiences, where is the continuity

between his consciousness and mine?
Buddhist philosophy admits this point. But it says that in
a sufficiently developed person there is memory of his past
reincarnations. The Buddha is said to have remembered his,
and so did many of his disciples. The reason you and I cannot
remember ours is that we are spiritually immature. We shall
all of us develop in spirituality as we proceed from one rein-

carnation to another, and someday we shall arrive at such an

exalted level that we shall remember our past lives. Perhaps
we shall not evolve to that level for several million years, but
a million years is but the winking of an eye.
But reincarnations, even if they continue over millions of
years, do not amount to immortality. We must now ask: What
have Hinduism and Buddhism to say about immortality
proper? Do they mean that our reincarnations will continue
forever? Is that their conception of immortality? The answer
is: No; they both believe that we shall someday, when we

61
 Concerning Religion

have evolved into perfect beings, pass beyond all reincarna-

tions into a true, blessed, and immortality. In the Hindu
final
view we shall be reabsorbed into the infinite being, Brahman,
from whence we and all the worlds originally came. Accord-
ing to Buddhism we shall pass into Nirvana. And what, we
must now ask, is Nirvana?
Let me quote part of a conversation which Buddha is said
to have had with a skeptic named Vaccha.

"Where," asks Vaccha, "will the saint exist who has attained to
mind?"
this deliverance of his
"Vaccha," replies the Buddha, "to say that the saint will exist
does not fit the case."
"Then does Buddha say that the saint will not exist after
death?" asks Vaccha.
"Vaccha," replies Buddha, "to say that the saint will not exist
does not fit the case."
Thereupon Vaccha becomes exasperated. Either the saint must
exist or not exist, he says.
And Buddha replies, "Enough, O Vaccha. Profound is this
doctrine, and not to be reached by mere reasoning."

The point is that Vaccha has been trying to understand

Nirvana by logic, whereas its nature cannot be grasped by
any kind of intellectual or conceptual thinking. To make a
long story short, what is required here is not the logical intel-
lect but mystical experience. Nirvana just is the mystical con-
sciousness. If we know what this is, we know what Nirvana is.
I want now to compare our Western conceptions of im-

mortality with these Eastern views. When we compare them,

or rather contrast them, what we find is this. The Western
concept of immortality may be defined as the continuous per-
sistence of the personal identity of each individual through
infinite future time. As we said before. Smith will always be
Smith, and Jones Jones forever. Moreover each will main-
tain his ordinary, everyday kind of consciousness, the kind of
consciousness with which we are all familiar in our everyday

62
 Survival After Death

lives. There is no mention of a mystical state of mind. But

according to Indian ideas, immortality will consist in the
eternity of the mystical consciousness.
But there is another very important contrast. Whereas in
theWest the personal identity of each individual is believed
to be immortal, in the Eastern mystical conception personal
identity disappears in Nirvana. This is because the dissolu-
tion of individuality is a prominent characteristic of the mysti-
cal consciousness even in the present life. This is true of the
mystics both of the East and of the West. This means that
when you from your normal consciousness into
pass suddenly
a mystical state, whatever religion you happen to profess,
whether it is Western or Eastern, when you have a mystical
experience, you necessarily have as part of it a feeling that
your individuality, your little personal finite self, is dissolv-
ing, fading away into something infinite.
Now it may seem that these statements contain a hidden
paradox. They say that in the mystical consciousness "I," this
finite "I," this individual person, disappears, fades away into
the Infinite, or into God, or into Nirvana. But this amounts
to saying that *T' experience disappearance, my own
my own
fading away. How can **I" experience this dissolution of my
individuality unless "I" continue to exist while I experience
it? I experience the disappearance of "I" and apparently I

am still when *T' have disappeared. This is the paradox.

there
All can do by way of resolving the paradox is to quote
I

again what the English poet Tennyson says about his own
mystical experiences, which he frequently had from the time
he was a boy. He uses these words in his description: "All at
once," he says, "as it were, out of the intensity of the conscious-
ness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve,
and fade away into boundless being, and this was not a con-
fused state, but the clearest of the clear, the loss of personality
(if so it were) seeming no extinction, hut the only true life."
You notice here two things. First Tennyson says that the

63
 Concerning Religion

loss ofindividuality is not its extinction. Somehow or other

"I" continue to exist and to experience my own loss of indi-
viduality. Secondly, he says that this seems to be "the only
true life." I suppose that by this rather curious phrase, **the
only true life," Tennyson means just about the same thing as
Oriental writers mean by the word Nirvana.
This then is what we have to say of Nirvana. Tennyson and
the others I have quoted each experienced, while still in the
body, a momentary glimpse of Nirvana, just as Buddha, while
still on earth, is declared by all the Buddhist books to have at-

tained Nirvana. And according to Indian conceptions a hu-

man being after many reincarnations may reach a stage of
spiritual development when he may pass finally into Nirvana,
never to return to this earth, never to inhabit another body.
It is natural for us who live in time to say that those who
have passed into eternity will live forever. For instance, if the
Buddha died in the sixth century B.C., we naturally say that
he passed into his final Nirvana then. He will have been in
Nirvana for about twenty-four centuries. But this is to de-
scribe the matter from our point of view because we are still
in time. Those who have finally passed into Nirvana will
know nothing of time, which for them no longer exists. And
while the West still thinks of immortality as continuance
through never-ending time, the Buddhist and the Hindu
thinks of it as timelessness.
I end by quoting a description of Nirvana said to have
will
been given by the Buddha to an assemblage of Buddhist
monks:
There is, monks, a plane where there is neither extension nor
motion, neither this world nor another, neither the sun nor the
moon. Here, monks, I say there is no coming or going or remain-
ing or deceasing or uprising, for this is itself without support,
without continuance, without mental object. And this, monks, is
itself the end of suffering.

64
 II

Values
 Values in General

What meant by the common English word wisdom} It is

is

difficult to define. Though it plainly has to do with the practi-

cal living of life, it is not on a par with the common practical
virtues, such as truthfulness, honesty, sobriety, or even justice.
For although the man who is truthful, honest, sober, and just
is certainly wise to be so, what we mean by the wise man goes
beyond these virtues. Wisdom is the characteristic of sages,
and being truthful, honest, and sober is not the same as being
a sage. Evidently wisdom, though concerned with practical
life, has in it some intellectual element, some element of

knowledge. Yet on the other hand it is not a branch of pure

knowledge like history, mathematics, science, or philosophy.
To attempt a rough definition, I will say that wisdom is
the knowledge of values, or more explicitly the knowledge of
the comparative values of the different ends, purposes, and
goals which men may pursue in life. The word knowledge
allows for the intellectual factor, and the emphasis on the
values of life allows for the practical factor.
It is important to realize that what
is implied here is the

notion of a scale of values. Wisdom is not merely the knowl-

edge of what is good or bad, right or wrong— as if all things
were painted either black or white. To know that honesty is
good and dishonesty bad is an elementary wisdom to which
most people attain and, for which the intellect and experience
of a sage are not required. The idea of a scale of values means

67
 Values

not merely that there are good and bad human purposes, but
that among the good ones there are shades of better and better
still, and among the bad ones shades of worse and worse still.

If all possible human purposes could be precisely evaluated,

placed in a scale which would show exactly which is higher or
lower than which, we should have an exact science of wisdom.
No such science is now, or ever will be, possible, for the
exactitude, precision, and measurement which science de-
mands are not possible in regard to values. Indeed all truly
human things, and this means all the most important things
in man's life, escape the net of scientific concepts, and the
attempt to apply scientific method to them produces only
pseudo-scientific jargon.
The impossibility of a science of comparative values is due
not only to the fact that the most valuable things cannot be
measured. It is due also to the complexity of life. We speak
of two different men having at different times the same pur-
poses, or doing the same actions. If this were true, if actions
and purposes repeated themselves constantly, we might come
to know by experience, with a fair degree of accuracy, where
they should be placed in a scale of values. But in fact no two
purposes or acts are ever the same; they are always altered
by the context of circumstances in which they arise. I perform
an action today and you might try to repeat it tomorrow. But
it would not be the same, because the circumstances in which

it was done would be different. Therefore your act would

have a different value, better or worse, than my act. The study

of values is in this respect like the study of history. Science can
deal only with the repeatable items of the universe, and be-
cause history never repeats itself there can never be a real
science of history. And because human situations never repeat
themselves, there cannot be a science of the values embedded
in them.
This is one of the facts which lend some plausibility to
the views of those who say that all values are relative. It

68
 Values in General

seems to mean that what is good for one man or one culture
may be bad, or less good, for another. It looks as if anybody's
valuations are as good as anybody else's. And if values were
all thus chaotic and relative, there could not be any knowl-
edge of them at all; that is to say there could not be any wis-
dom. But this cannot be the case. There certainly have been
wise men, universally recognized as such by the overwhelm-
ing consensus of men's intuitive appraisals. I think that all
the great moral teachers of the world— Buddha, Confucius,
Christ, the Hebrew prophets— have been essentially concerned
with this problem of a scale of values. What they spoke of
was not merely the values within their own cultures, much
less merely the values of individual men on particular occa-
sions. Their insights were not merely local or regional. It
cannot reasonably be denied that they said many things about
the values of human life which are profoundly important
and true for us now in America or for any men in any culture
which is ever likely to exist for many thousands of years to
come. When Socrates rebuked the Athenians for heaping up
the greatest amount of money and caring so little for what
he called "wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of
the soul," he was saying something about a scale of values,
about the superiority of "wisdom and truth and the greatest
improvement of the soul" to the pursuit of money, which was
valid not only for himself, not only for Greek culture, but
for all cultures everywhere— for Americans, and Chinese, and
Frenchmen, and Peruvians. Hence, while admitting that
values are bedeviled by relativity, we must find what are the
limits to it. And, while admitting that there cannot be a
science of values, we must refuse to admit that there can be
no knowledge of them at all. What knowledge, then, can
we have?
First of all, we must distinguish between particular value-
judgments and general value-judgments.
I mean by particular value-judgments those which only

69
 Values

claim to be true either about a single human being or about

a restrictednumber, those for instance in a particular culture
or country. I might say to one man, "Celibacy will be better
for you than marriage." To another I might say, "Marriage
will be better for you than celibacy." Again I might say,
"Monogamy is the best marriage system for America, but
polygamy may be better in a country where females greatly
outnumber males." These are particular value-judgments.
By general value-judgments I mean those which may claim
to be valid for mankind in general. I do not think that it is
sensible to claim that there are value-truths which are abso-
lute, in the sense ofbeing valid for every single human being.
I think we shall have to be content with general truths which
will be valid for all normal men in all normal cases. These
can very well be important guides in life.
NoTv when I talk about a scale of values, I mean a set of
general value-judgments telling us what things are better or
worse, higher or lower, in human life generally. For this is all
that we can discuss. We
cannot discuss particular cases with-
out kno^ving the particular individuals or cultures involved
and their particular circumstances. Socrates in speaking as he
did to the Athenians was evidently laying down principles
which he thought valid for human life in general. The same
is true of all the great moralists in all ages.

One most interesting and instructive attempts to set

of the
up a scale of general values was that made by Plato in the
eighth and ninth books of the Republic. Of course it could
be argued that this was meant to apply only to Greeks, but
I do not think this would be correct. Plato recognizes a

hierarchy of five kinds of value, one above the other. The

highest value, according to Plato, is knowledge. In this he
includes the knowledge of values, that is to say, wisdom. But
he also includes science and mathematics, though he regards
them as ancillary to wisdom. For him, then, the philosopher-
scientist is the highest kind of man. The second value in

70
 Values in General

Plato's scale is honor; and one may also use here such words

as ambition, reputation, prestige, position, fame, glory. The

military man is Plato's special example. The third value is
money, exemplified by the money-getter or the businessman.
Fourth comes the sort of life purpose which aims at pleasure,
counting all pleasures as of equal value. The corresponding
type is what we should call the man of pleasure, or perhaps
the sensualist. The last and lowest goal is that of the man
who, his entire life dominated completely by some single
sensuous pleasure or passion, aims at that and nothing else.
The drunkard, the drug addict, and the sex maniac are ex-
amples. Thus the main values of life in order of merit are
knowledge, honor, money, pleasure, and the satisfaction of
some single overpowering sensuous appetite.
Plato thinks that we can largely appraise or evaluate both
individual men and civilizations (or at least states) by this
scale. The question to ask in each case is: This being the ideal
scale, which of these five kinds of purpose does the man, or
the civilization, put at the top of his, or its, own scale of
values? Plato is not, of course, contending that all men, or
even all Greeks, actually accept his ideal scale. Different men
have, in fact, different scales of value. Thus the philosopher
and the scientist are those who put knowledge at the top. The
sensualist puts sensuous pleasure at the top. And you can
both classify and judge a man's or a society's real worth by dis-
covering which of these five values that man or society ranks
highest. Tell me, says Plato, what a man values most and I
will tell you what sort of man he is, and where he is to be
ranked in the true scale of values. For a man's philosophy of
life, or even his character, may be said to be identical with

his scale of values. The man whose main aim in life is money
—we know him by that fact, by the fact that in his actual life
(whatever he may say in theory) he places wealth highest in
his scale, above knowledge and learning, above honor and
prestige and fame, above mere sensuous pleasure, above every-

71
 Values

thing. We know the mainspring of his character and at least

roughly the things he will do. We also know, according to
Plato, his intrinsic worth as a man. He is inferior to the phi-
losopher, the scientist, the knowledge-seeker. He is inferior
to the seeker after glory. But he is superior to the sensualist
and the man of pleasure, and of course to the man dominated
by some evil passion such as drugs or drink.
Societies are to be judged in the same way. Athens, he
thinks, is the highest of his time because its dominant ideals
are intellectual— love of learning and knowledge. The military
state of Sparta, seeking honor and glory, but negligent of the
things of the mind, takes a lower but still a high place. Love
of money he attributes to the Phoenicians and Egyptians as
their dominant aim. I think Hitlerite Germany would have
been placed by Plato along with Sparta in the second category,
and I am afraid he might have classed America with its domi-
nant love of money in the third category, below Hitlerite
Germany and along with the Phoenicians and Egyptians, Vv^ho
in his opinion were barbarians. This is a dreadful thought.
Evidently Plato's scale has serious defects and omissions,
but also it contains important insights. I will mention first
some of its defects and omissions. It of course involves a vast
oversimplification. And it is in some respects very artificial.
First among its omissions we may note the total absence of any
reference to religious values. In the procession of the five
types of men, from the philosopher down to the drunkard and
the drug addict, where do the saint and the mystic come?
Nowhere. But is not the love of God even higher than the love
of knowledge? In view of the facts that Plato was himself a
man of profoundly religious feelings and that there is a defi-
nite mystical trend in his philosophy, this omission may seem
the more surprising. No doubt it is to be explained by the
characteristics of Greek religion. Plato thought very poorly
of the gods of Olympus and their doings. And his own deeper
religion probably appeared to him as a part of philosophy, so

72
 Values in General

that hewould see no need for a separate place for it in his scale.
Another omission is the absence of any reference to the
values of love, charity, compassion, sympathy, self-sacrifice.
But these values were, of course, to be emphasized afterwards
by Christianity.
A third serious omission is aesthetic value. The love of
power predominant human motive is also left out, but
as a
perhaps Plato would have associated it with honor and glory
in his second category.
From the defects I will pass to some of the valuable insights
in Plato's scheme. In spite of the artificiality and the over-
simplification, Plato's classification of human types is, I think,
very shrewd. If you try it on your friends, you will be sur-
prised how well most of them seem to fit into one or other of
his five compartments. For instance, the scholar who remains
a pure scholar presumably loves knowledge more than honor
or position. But the one who becomes a dean loves position
more than knowledge and is therefore inferior in the scale
of virtues. We
know them well, these human types: the in-
tellectual, the seeker after titles, position, and reputation, the
money-grubber, the sensualist, and the completely degraded
slave of some passion. Are these not the dominant motivations
of a vast majority of human beings— either knowledge, or
fame, or money, or pleasure— and may they not be rated per-
haps in something like that order of value?
Secondly, it is a really important insight that a man's phi-
losophy of life, and even his character, can be simply identi-
fied with the answer to the question, what does he in his
actual life, as distinct from what he says about himself, value
most? To ask that question is to brush aside inessentials and
camouflage and hypocrisy and to get to the root of what the
man really is.

I must comment on the knowledge

fact that Plato places
at the top of his scale as the supreme value of life. Of course
it is the intrinsic value of knowledge, knowledge for its own

73
 Values

sake, that he has in mind, not its usefulness as a means to other

ends.We shall probably think that Plato, being a Greek, over-
valued pure intellect. We should not agree that it is the high-
est conceivable value. Nevertheless we owe to Plato and the
Greeks in general the fact that we value knowledge for its
own sake at all, and that many of us do give it at least an hon-
ored place among our ideals. It is the ideal which is the life-
blood of universities, and it has also been the dominant mo-
tive of most scientific discoveries. It is certain that if we were
all practical minded, if there were never any people who out
of mere curiosity wanted to know things without caring at all
whether what they discovered had any practical applications
or not, there would never have been anything worth calling
science. There never has been any civilization which held this
ideal in high esteem except the Greeks and those who (like
ourselves) have inherited it from them. In India knowledge
was never sought except for the practical purpose of one's
personal salvation. The Chinese have always esteemed schol-
ars but apparently have not cultivated the right kind of pure
curiosity. Scholarship was valued mainly for social ends.
Hence these countries did not produce science. Only Greek-
minded civilizations, valuing pure knowledge, have produced
it. Other civilizations were too practical.

Though Plato may have over-rated this value, it is ques-

tionable whether we in America do not under-rate it, although
we do, as I have just been saying, give it a place. I think it is
less esteemed in America than in Europe; that is, Europeans
place it higher in their scale of values than we do. Einstein,
being asked by a student why he wanted to know about rela-
tivity, of what practical use this knowledge is, remarked that
no student in Europe would ever have asked such a question.
I believe most Americans think of science as technology, as

the producer of telephones and electric lights, and value it for

this almost entirely. And the most famous of American phi-
losophies, pragmatism, has for its message precisely the idea

74
 Values in General

that the only value of knowledge is instrumental and utili-

tarian. We are in danger of being too practical, of placing
pure knowledge too low in our scale of values, just as the
Greeks placed it too high. For if we think of it as only instru-
mental to material comforts and goods, this is in fact to place
material wealth, money as Plato would express it, above it in
our scale.
The second place in Plato's scale is given to honor or pres-
tige. When the Greeks at the Olympic games gave the victor
not money but a wreath of leaves, they were exhibiting the
fact that, in their scale of values, honor stood very high, higher
than money, in agreement with Plato's scheme. This also ap-
pears in our ideal of amateur sportsmanship. I think that
many foreign nations, such as the British, express the same
idea when they bestow titles. They reward high services to the
state by affixing a meaningless word to a man's name. The
whole point of a title is that it is worthless, commercially
speaking, like the Greek wreath of leaves. We speak of "emp-
ty" titles and affect to despise them accordingly. This is rather
foolish, because their emptiness of anything except honor is
precisely their merit. And if it is a fact that men in Britain
can be got to put out tremendous efforts in the public service
for the sake of a mere title, what this shows is that their scale
of values is in this respect like Plato's. They place honor above
money. The same is true of those Americans who, without
even a title and only for the sake of the honor itself, fill high
positions in the government when they could earn much
greater incomes in business. America was doubtless right in
abolishing titles because of their abuses. Yet the idea of a

titlewas in itself a good one. It symbolized the thought that

honor is a higher value than money. And in abolishing titles
America ran the risk of teaching its citizens to contend for
money rather than for honor.
Plato, it will be noticed, places the pursuit of wealth and
worldly possessions third in his list. It is inferior to knowledge

75
 Values

and honor but superior to the pursuit of mere pleasure. In his

comparatively low evaluation of material wealth, Plato is in
agreement with all the great moralists of the world. This has
become, in fact, a moral platitude. This means that almost
everyone agrees to it in theory, but of course it does not mean
that we act on it. Plato clearly recognizes the higher value of
the things of the mind and the spirit over the things of the
body and the senses. The things of the mind he places at the
top, while the lower three grades— wealth, pleasure, and
addiction to one dominant passion— have to do with material
and sensuous aims in a descending order of values. This also
may sound platitudinous, but it is important to realize that
the superiority of the things of the mind (spiritual things as
we callthem) over the things of the body is one of universal
moral intuitions of civilized mankind. It is not confined to
any one culture. It is Greek, but not merely Greek. It suffuses
all Christian culture. And it is not even confined to Western
civilizations. You will find it even more strongly stressed in
Hinduism and Buddhism, and I think you would find it in
the thought of Confucius and other Chinese seers, though my
ignorance of Chinese culture prevents me from quoting
sources. The exaggeration of this tendency is what is called
asceticism, which is neither Greek, nor Christian, nor Bud-
dhist, though it finds a place in some Hindu thought.
It must be understood that I am using these phrases, the
things of the mind or spirit and the things of the body,
merely as convenient labels. I do not mean to imply any
particular psychology or theory of human personality, such as
a dualism of body and mind. And I do not want to be told
by some learned and scientific person that the distinction be-
tween body and mind is an ancient superstition now happily
got rid of by our scientific age. For I do not believe that any
substantial part of the ancient wisdom of man will ever be
got rid of by any clever man tinkering in a psychological lab-
oratory. I am not talking metaphysics, or asserting, like

76
 Values in General

body and mind,

Descartes, that there are two different entities,
different in nature and substance, although this opinion too
may well have more truth in it than our modern enlighten-
ment is inclined to admit. The point is that I do not care
what opinion you hold about that. I do not care if you tell me
that the mind is made of atoms, or of movements of the legs or
larynx. It may be so. You can preach any sort of psychology
you like. You can be a materialist or a behaviorist. But even
so, you will have to distinguish, if you are to have any wisdom
or sense of values, between what I call, using these labels, the
things of the mind and the things of the body. All I am say-
ing is that art is not the same thing as eating and that science,
philosophy, and religion are not the same thing as having
sexual intercourse. And my point now is that according to the
unanimous agreement of all the world's wise men, including
Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Christ, Sankara, Confucius, Marcus
Aurelius, Epictetus, Isaiah, and the rest of the Hebrew
prophets, the former kind of things, which I am calling the
things of the mind, are nobler, higher, better— that is, higher

in the scale of values— than the kind of things which I

latter
am calling the things of the body. You can call this a platitude
if you like. But platitudes may be important truths which the

majority of men choose to ignore or despise.

Now you will quite rightly ask some questions
at this point
which very difficult to answer. How can one ever possibly
it is

"prove" that the things of the mind are "higher" than the
things of the body? How, for that matter, can one ever prove
that any one thing is higher or better than any other? Indeed,
quite apart from proving the truth of such assertions, one may
be asked the even more difficult question: What do such
words as higher and loiver mean? Is it not all a matter
of personal preference? What one man likes more he calls
better, and what he likes less he calls worse. And what pleases
one man is not the same as what pleases another. How can
anything be, in itself, intrinsically or objectively, higher or

77
 Values

lower than anything else? Here we come up again against the

old bugbear of relativity.
I shall say at once that I do not know for certain how to

answer these most embarrassing questions, although I have

some opinions about them. Suppose we consult Plato again.
We have to ask him two questions. First, what does he mean
by saying that knowledge is a higher purpose than honor,
honor than wealth, wealth than pleasure? And second, how
does he propose to prove that these statements are true?
As to the first point, one of the things that Plato meant (I
do not say it was the only thing) was that a value is "higher"
when it contributes more to human happiness, "lower" when
it contributes less. For instance, he means that the wise man,

the philosopher, the sage, the man who cultivates the things
of the mind, has in him a greater source of happiness than
the man whose chief ends are the pursuit of prestige or wealth
can ever find in those things. He means that the pursuit of
money, though he does not deny that it can give some real
satisfaction, will yield a man less return in dividends of happi-
ness than will the pursuit of knowledge, or even honor. He
means again that the life of mere pleasure and amusement, the
fourth in his scale, yields an even lower dividend of happiness
than does the pursuit of money. And finally he certainly thinks
that the life of the drunkard and the drug addict yields only
dividends of misery.
We may sum up all this by saying that the meaning of
"higher," in Plato, is "contributing more to human happi-
ness," and the meaning of "lower" is "contributing less." But in
the phrase human happiness, which I have foisted upon Plato
and which he did not himself use, there are ambiguities.
Whose happiness does Plato have in mind? Does he, in plac-
ing knowledge highest, mean that the philosopher-scientist
who pursues it obtains the best happiness for himself? Or
does he mean that he contributes most to the happiness of
other people? Well, so far as Plato's own argument went,

78
 Values in General

there is no doubt that he meant the former. He was think-

ing of the man's own happiness, not that of other people.

He meant that the knowledge-lover is himself a happier man
than the money-lover. But I think it is quite reasonable for us
to give, for our purposes, a broader meaning to Plato's lan-
guage than he did. And I rather think that he would approve
of this. So let us give this meaning to higher and lower values,
that they mean those values which respectively contribute
more or less happiness, in the first instance to the man who
cultivates them, but derivatively to the rest of the world.
In spite of the lapse of over two thousand years, I do not
think that anyone since Plato has given a better statement of
what could be meant by the terms higher and lower. Of course
there are plenty of philosophers who would disagree with all
this. Above all, there are plenty who have pointed out that
happiness is a terribly ambiguous, nebulous word. When you
try to analyze what is meant by happiness, you will find the
difficulties apparently insurmountable. I do not think that
any philosopher has ever given a satisfactory analysis of the
matter. And so it has come about that any professional phi-
losopher who nowadays talks of happiness as the chief end
of human endeavor, and as the measure of values, is apt to
be considered naive and looked at askance by his fellow pro-
fessionals. But it is a characteristic mistake of professional
philosophers to believe that concepts which are vague because
we do not know their exact analysis thereby lose their respec-
tability and ought to be kept out of discourse. Almost all our
concepts, including scientific concepts, are vague, and their
proper analysis is unknown, yet they are used with success.
For instance, a scientist can perfectly well discuss the cause
of a phenomenon, although no one knows exactly what the
word cause means. Therefore I shall spend no time on philo-
sophical technicalities about what happiness means. These
are no more than professional disputes of the philosophers.
In practical life we all know what we mean by being happy

79
 Values

or unhappy, or at least we know when we are happy and

when we are not. We know quite well what it means to work
for the happiness of other people. And if we had to wait be-
fore engaging in such activities until the professional philos-
ophers finished their analysis of what the word means, we
should wait forever and no social, humanitarian, or reform
work would ever be done.
Now I come to the second question we were to discuss.
Having given some sort of meaning, however vague, to the
terms higher and lower, how can we ever "prove" that any
one thing actually is higher or lower than another? And this
means how can we prove, for example, that the pursuit of
the things of the mind contributes more to human happiness
than the pursuit of the things of the body? Here we shall have
to desert Plato and try to find an answer of our own. For al-
though Plato was keenly alive to the problem and did attempt
several "proofs," they are all, in my opinion, fallacious.
I should say something like this. Civilized races have existed
on the earth for thousands of years. During this time many
billions of men have lived and died, each one pursuing a great
variety of purposes, ends, and goals, through which he hoped
and tried to achieve his own happiness, and sometimes, in
some cases, to improve the happiness of a few other people as
well. There is thus a vast store of experience in what we may
call the art of living, which means the art of trying to live
happily. Men have made countless mistakes, doing things
which they thought would bring them happiness but which
in fact brought unhappiness. Occasionally they made mistakes
of the opposite kind. That is, they felt impelled, through
some queer motive of pity or sympathy, to do things which
they thought would decrease their own happiness, such as
giving up something they badly wanted for themselves to
some less fortunate person who needed it more. And then,
perhaps to their surprise, they may have found that they them-
selves felt happier for having done so. Men gradually learned

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 Values in General

by all these mistakes. They accumulated over the centuries

this great store of experience, recorded aswere in the mem-
it

ory of the race.

It was found, of course, that the teachings of experience
gave different, and sometimes contradictory, answers. What
suited one person or nation or culture did not suit another.
A purpose or goal which seemed to add to the happiness of
some was the very thing which detracted from the happiness
of others, so that the thing which some called good others
called bad. Amid all this "relativity" it was very difficult to
generalize in any way, to state any truths about the art of
living which would be true for everybody, or even for the
majority of people. When you tried to generalize, to say, "This
sort of thing always produces happiness," you were sure to
find someone, or perhaps a whole body of people, of whom
this did not seem to be true. Nevertheless, a few rather weak
and shaky generalizations did gradually emerge, things which
could be said about the art of living and about human happi-
ness which, even if one could not be sure that they would
always be absolutely true of everybody, at all times and places,
in all cultures, would at least be so nearly true of everybody
everywhere that they could at least be taken as fairly good
guides to living for humanity at large. These generalizations
became moral precepts, standards of value, accepted value
judgments, more or less admitted scales of value. Plato's views
of the comparative values of the main human purposes are
really generalizations of this sort, and so are the insights of
all the other great moral geniuses of the world. And the only
"proof" that can be given of them is the accumulated experi-
ence of the human race. Thus, if it is said, for example, that
intellectual satisfactions are nobler and finer than bodily sat-
isfactions, this means that, however it may be in some excep-
tional cases, by and large they have been found to conduce
more to happiness; and the only possible proof that can be
given is that the accumulated experience of humanity, crystal-

81
 Values

lized in the sayings of its great men, has found that on the
whole it is so.

Several things follow from this account. First, general moral

truths will be extremely few. Humanity is so variable in its

make-up which can be said

that there are very few things
about men's happiness with any hope of their being anywhere
near universally true. Secondly, these few things are likely to
be extremely vague and flexible. Moral truths can indicate
only the best general attitudes and directions, never details.
You can say in general that men should be more unselfish
than they are, but if you try to say exactly how unselfish,
and even more if you try to say exactly in what ways they
should be unselfish, you run into the fact that different pre-
scriptions suit different people; in short you run into the area
of relativity. In this way we can now see the limits of relativ-
ity. In all matters of detail we shall have relativity. Monog-
amy may be the best marriage system in one place, polygamy
in another. But the relativist is mistaken if he says that there
are absolutely no value truths which are generally applicable
to humanity at large. Some few generalizations are possible.
And these constitute the limits of relativity. But even so the
generalizations will not be absolute. They will only be true
in such a vast majority of cases that a man,
if he disregards

them, does so at his peril.

As will be evident from my account, the evidence for the
truth of general value principles is of the sort which logicians
call inductive. But there is nothing that could possibly be
called "scientific" about them. They have been reached for
the most part intuitively and unconsciously, and certainly with
no scientific controls. When I called them weak and shaky
generalizations, I believe I said all there is to be said about
this, The point to fasten on, however, is that these generaliza-
tions, meager in themselves, weak in their logical grounds, are
all we have to go on in life. We are therefore foolish if we
disregard or despise them. They tell you, shall we say, that

82
 Values in General

too great a love of money

bad thing. Prove this, you say
is a
to me, or I can only say, "This has been
will not believe it. I

the general experience of mankind. Admittedly this proof is

weak. But give me a better proof if you can." And as to your
not believing it because the proof is so poor, what I will say to
you then is, "You choose to discard the only sort of guidance
we have about values. Very well, then, try something else.
Invent a new scale of values of your own. But in doing this
you are setting yourself up as a moral genius superior to
Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus Christ. And you are proposing
to rely solely on your own experience, the experience of one
single human being, and to ignore and contradict the experi-
ence of billions of human beings who lived before you. This
seems to me the height of folly."
My admissions that our moral knowledge is so small and
that its proofs are quite unscientific may prompt you to in-
quire whether we may not hope that by the application of
more scientific methods we may in the future acquire more,
and better grounded, ethical knowledge. In the past we have
relied on the unsifted and mostly unrecorded experience of
billions of undenominated human beings and on the hap-
hazard intuitions of a few moral geniuses. So long as men did
this in other areas of knowledge, they remained steeped in
ignorance and superstition. But when the techniques of
science were applied, the light dawned and knowledge in-
creased. Why
should not the same thing happen in regard
to moral knowledge?
I believe there are a great many people who think that

something of this sort may happen. They look in particular

to the infant sciences of psychology and sociology.
I am somewhat skeptical of this program, and I will try to

make the grounds of my skepticism clear. I am not at all sure

that, however little our knowledge of values may be, there
is very much more for us toknow. This may seem a very odd
statement. But I make it because, as I have already tried to
83
 Values

show, very few generalizations about the art of living— state-

ments, that is to say, which will be true of humanity at large-
are possible. And it is extremely likely that by now they are
practically all known. I may know Mr. Jones and his particu-
lar circumstances well. After carefully considering all the facts
I may give him a piece of advice. I may say to him, "Celibacy

is the best state of life for you." To another man, after study-

ing the facts of his case, I might say, "You would be happier
if you were married." Obviously I cannot generalize either

judgment. cannot say either that all men ought to be mar-

I

ried or that ought to be celibates. For the same reason I can-

all
not say either that all societies ought to be monogamous or
that all ought to be polygamous. I can say, I believe, that ha-
tred always produces unhappiness, and that affection and love
almost always produce happiness, and that this a valid truth
for all men. This is the very simple generalization on which
Christian morality is mostly founded. My point is that the
very few generalizations which are possible have probably
already been made. And if so, there will be none left for
science, which is essentially concerned with general principles
and laws, to discover; and when we come down to individual
cases, infected asthey are by relativity, science cannot operate.
As I said before, the knowledge of values is like the knowledge
of history. Neither can be a science, and for the same reasons
in each case. As history never repeats itself, so life situations,
which are the locus of values, never repeat themselves. There
can be only a very few generalizations about value for the
same reasons that there can be few, if any, general laws of
history.
After all, this only amounts to saying that it does not seem
very likely that anyone, by scientific techniques, will ever im-
prove on the Sermon on the Mount, that there is, on those
very general matters of which that sermon treats, not much
more to be said. The truths which it contains may have been
reached by the haphazard intuitions of a moral genius. But

84
 Values in General

I must say that I would sooner trust these than the pro-

nouncements of any psychology professor.

Does this mean that psychology and sociology cannot help
the human race in its problems of conduct? Far from it. I
am not at all sure what their functions can be here. But with
very great hesitation and diffidence I would make the fol-
lowing suggestions. We distinguished between general truths
about values and particular truths which have to do either
with individuals or restricted groups of individuals, not with
the whole human race. I think that in the area of general
truths, if there is anything more to be known— if, that is to
say, the ideals of a Buddha, or a Christ, could ever be replaced
by yet better or clearer ideals— such a revelation would have
to come from an inspired man, a saint, a mystic, a prophet,
and not from a scientific laboratory. But it may well be that
in the areas of the individual or the social group, in the mat-
ter of what I called particular truths about value, the psychol-
ogist and the sociologist may give important advice. This is
already being done in the matter of the individual. This is
the field of psychiatry and clinical psychology. The discovery,
within the framework of our general moral values, of what
particular purposes will bring the most satisfaction and men-
tal health to this or that individual is their special skill. All

such questions are concerned with particular value-truths.

Thus the techniques for ascertaining for what occupations—
that of doctor, lawyer, salesman, manual laborer— an individ-
ual is best fitted, plainly have to do with his values. They mean
that for this individual one aim should be placed higher in
his scale; while for another individual another, and perhaps
opposite, aim should be given top place. Whether the sociol-
ogist will ever be able to give similar advice to whole social
groups is a question for the future. There is no reason in the
nature of things why he should not.

85
 Democratic Values

In the previous essay I discussed values in general. In this one

I wish to come a little nearer to our actual daily thinking by

discussing the specific kind of values which we associate with

the word democracy. If we were asked what value or values in
particular we attribute to what we call the "democratic way
of life," the word most likely to spring to our lips at once
would be freedom. We certainly think it is a better thing to
be free than unfree— whatever this may mean. This is certainly
not the only value we associate with democracy, but it is per-
haps the most important.
Now before going on to discuss the values of democracy
in detail, I want to relate this topic to what I said earlier. We
distinguished between quite general value-principles, mean-
ing principles which we think to be valid, if not absolutely
for all human beings, at least for the great majority of men in
all ages, times, and cultures; we distinguished between these
general principles of value and value-judgments about par-
ticular cases. It might be the case, we saw, that a certain
thing, or purpose, or end, though not of universal value,
might be valuable to a particular people, or in a particular
age, or even to one particular person only. Polygamy might
be a good thing for a particular culture though it may not
be for us. That would be a value-judgment about a particular
culture. If we want examples of value-judgments which apply
only to an individual person, or a few persons, we find that
86
 Democratic Values

they abound. If you say to a man, "You are the kind of per-
son who would make a good doctor," you are suggesting to
him a purpose or goal which you think would be good in his
life, but you certainly do not mean that this is a purpose or a

goal for which everybody ought to aim. These are examples

of particular value-judgments. On the other hand, when Soc-
rates recommended that men should rate wisdom and knowl-
edge higher than money, this advice would appear to be
directed to human beings generally. It claims to be just as
true in modern France or America as it was in ancient Greece.
It is what I call a general value-judgment.
Under which of these two heads, general or particular,
should we class the values of democracy? I think our first im-
pulse is to reply that it is only a particular value. It is good
in some cultures and not in others. But I believe that on re-
flection we may come to the conclusion that this is the wrong
answer, that freedom and the other democratic values which
are associated with it are really universal in their scope, that
they are good for all men. They are human, and not merely
American, or Western European, values.
Of course I am aware that this is a debatable issue, and
that perhaps there are many people whom I shall not con-
vince. The question is a difficult one, and much depends on
it. For instance, on this issue depends whether we are right
to go around the world as we do trying to convert other peo-
ples to democracy, or whether we ought not rather leave them
to their own ideas of government. Is this a case of relativity,
or is there any universal human value involved here?
I will run over briefly the things which tend to make us

think that democracy is only a particular value. One is that

there may very likely be peoples in the world to whom de-
mocracy is not suited at present. There are still plenty of
primitive peoples for whom some kind of benevolent autoc-
racy may be the best form of government. But do we not
think, in all such cases, that these peoples would be better oflE

87
 Values

if they could be brought to that level of culture at which they

could become democratic? The British used to say a hundred

years ago, or even less, that Indians were incapable of democ-
racy. But then they always added that they were trying to
train them for democracy. These protestations may have been
open on the ground that the British in their ideas
to criticism
of leading the Indians on towards democracy were much too
slow, or even that they were insincere and hypocritical. I am
not concerned with the justice of these charges. The point is
that what was implicit in the British statements was the
thought that democracy would be just as much a good for the
inhabitants of India as for the inhabitants of Britain, but
that— according to British assertions— they were not mature
enough for it.
To deny that democracy is a general human value, to assert
that merely a particular value, on the ground that some
it is

peoples are not yet mature enough for it, is like denying that
philosophy and art and science are general human values on
the ground that infants and even older children are not yet
mature enough to understand them. I do not of course offer
Shakespeare to a five-year-old. I do not even expect the com-
mon values of honesty and truthfulness to be much appreci-
ated by a three-year-old. Yet I certainly believe that they are
universal human values, not limited to a particular time,
place, and culture. When we say that some value is universal,
when we say, for example, that universally the values of wis-
dom, art, religion, philosophy, and in general the things of
the mind, are "higher" than the values of sensuous pleasure,
we do not mean that every human being is actually now
ready to receive their benefits. Young
children are not. There
may be whole races which are not. Among ourselves
there are
plenty of people, perhaps indeed the majority, who are quite
incapable of appreciating Beethoven or Shakespeare or Ein-
stein. What we mean by saying that these are universal hu-
man values is that if any human being can be brought, trained,
88
 Democratic Values

educated, up to a level where he can appreciate these things,

then his life will be better, richer, happier, fuller of good
things than it would be if he remained always on the level of
understanding and appreciating nothing except the pleasures
of eating and drinking and sex.
If we apply this to the case of democracy, we see at once
that the mere fact that there are said to be peoples who are at
present incapable of democracy is not an argument against the
view that democracy is a universal human value. And we see
also that this belief that it is a universal human value is im-

plicit in thosevery judgments of ours which assert that some

peoples are not yet fitted for it. The British showed this when
they talked as they did about training the Indians for democ-
racy.We also showed it when we spoke of trying to educate
the Russians for democracy, and when we have said that per-
haps someday even the Chinese may see the light. Of course
it may be argued that we only want to change the Russians

and the Chinese for our own advantage, because the world
would then be undivided ideologically and there might be
peace. Undoubtedly there is truth in this. We have wanted
to convert the Russians and Chinese in order that our own
country may be safe. But that is certainly not the whole story.
And if it were, there would be no hope for the peace of the
world, for we could never successfully foist democracy on a
people for whom it would not be, and never could be, a good.
Our hope and our belief evidently is that if we could induce
these peoples to try democracy, they would some day find it
good, good for themselves, that is; just as when you try to in-
duce your philistine teenager to try reading Shakespeare, your
hope and your belief is that he will in the end find it good.
Nor is the fact that we are in great danger of trying to go
too fast in the process of trying to democratize the world any
argument against what I am saying. We probably are trying
to force democracy on new nations too fast. And this could
spell disaster. But we may also force Greek or mathematics

89
 Values

too fast upon our boy, which does not show that Greek or
mathematics are not good for him.
A second argument often used against our view is that many
cultures and peoples, though they may be quite mature
enough for democracy, nevertheless reject it on the ground
that they do not think it a good. My previous point was that,
if primitive and untutored peoples reject democratic values,

this does not refute the claim that they are nevertheless uni-
versal human values. But now the question is: Does not the
fact that there are fully developed and cultured peoples, like
the Chinese and Russians, who reject our values, refute our
claim? For we cannot in this case use the comparison with
children who are not sufficiently mature to appreciate Shake-
speare. These people are mature and still they reject our
values. To this our answer must be, I think, somewhat as
follows. When we say of something that it is a universal human
value, we do not mean that every human being, even every
mature human being, will agree with us. We are entirely
aware that whole cultures, even quite mature cultures, will
disagree. What we mean is that if these people could be in-
duced to try our way, they would themselves in the end
actually come to find it better and come to agree with us.
Of course we may be quite wrong in this. Our belief that
democracy is good may quite possibly be mistaken. The Rus-
sians may be quite right in their views. These are intellectual
possibilities. But what we mean by our belief that democracy
is a universal human good is not that all people now think it to

be so, but that if other people would try our way they would
find it good, even if they do not think so now. And it must be
noted that the Russians also think this of their system; they
think their system is a universal human good, as is shown by
the fact that they try to convert the whole world to it. They
know quite well that we think But they
their system bad.
nevertheless assert that it is a universal human
good, meaning
not that everyone agrees with them, but that everyone would

90
 Democratic Values

come to agree if they would give it a fair trial. Of course here

again, as with us, all sorts of other personal and selfish ends
are involved. Just as we want to convert them for the sake of
our own skins, so doubtless their motives are their own security
and no doubt also the lust for power and world dominion.
But I think we must also credit them with really believing
that their system is good and that we would find it so if we
tried it out.
Thus what I am at themoment asserting is not that de-
mocracy is a universal human value— although of course I
certainly believe that it is— but merely that, if it is a universal

human value, this not at all refuted by pointing out that

is

a whole culture, and a mature culture such as that of Russia,

does not think so. If the proposition, "Democratic freedom is
a universal human value," meant that all mature peoples agree
that it is, then this proposition would be refuted by merely
pointing out that there are mature peoples, such as the Rus-
sians and Chinese, who disagree with it. But if the meaning of
it is, on the contrary, that all peoples who, being educated up

to it, gave it a fair trial ivould find it good, then it is not refuted
by the existence of peoples like the Chinese or Russians.
It will be said that, in this case, our proposition is very
difficult to prove or verify since it only asserts that something
would be the case if certain conditions were fulfilled. To this
I agree. It is very difficult to prove. But I must point out that

exactly the same is true of any universal human values. For

instance the prophets and sages tell us that money is an end
inferior to, say, wisdom or knowledge, and that this is uni-
versally true of man. But this does not mean that everyone
thinks so. If everyone did think so, there would be no need
for the prophets and seers to be always pointing it out. It is
obvious that the greater part of the world does not believe it

today. And when the saint tells us that the religious life is the
only true happiness, and that this is true of all men, he does
not mean that all men know and believe this. He knows, on

91
 Values

the contrary, that practically no one believes it. What he

means is: Every man who really and truly tries it will find that
it is so. And certainly all propositions of this kind are very
difficult to prove. In the previous essay I discussed the nature
of this proof. And here, too, show that there are
I shall try to
good reasons on ^vhich we can base our opinion that demo-
cratic values are universal to human beings, not merely
regional, and this is not a mere prejudice based on nothing
but our personal predilections.
I have now explained what I mean by saying that the values

of democracy, whatever they may be, claim to be universal

human values and not merely particular values. This brings
the subject of democracy into line with our general subject,
for I did not wish in these essays to discuss what is good only
in particular times or countries or cultures or for particular
people, but w^hat is good for man at all times and in all places.
I hesitate to use the phrase the eternal verities because, to tell
the truth, do not think that anything, at any rate anything
I

human, is if you will allow for some

really quite eternal. Yet,
exaggeration inherent in the phrase, I think there is no harm
in my saying that I want to discuss some of those things which
used to be called eternal verities. And it is my belief that the
democratic way of life is an attempt to realize at least some of
these— though of course not all. Let us go on to discuss then,
what these verities, these values, which democracy aims to
realize, are.
First of all, I shall state what I understand democracy to be.
I think that in essence it means that our lives should be
governed by reason and not by force. The Greeks, who were
the inventors of democracy— however much their democracies
differed from ours— asked themselves this question: What is
the difference between men and brutes? And they answered:
The difference lies in the fact that men possess reason, which
the brutes do not. It is from the Greeks that we get the com-
mon, but now often decried, definition: Man is a rational

92
 Democratic Values

animal. The Greek idea was that men share with animals most
of their faculties, for example, sense perception, the appetites
of hunger, thirst, and sex, the basic emotions such as anger
and wherein man rises above the brute is that he is
fear; that
a rational being. Other differences of course there are. Man
alone has speech, lights fires, invents tools, wears clothes,
possesses moral ideas, creates works of art. Man also is the
only animal which laughs. But all these differences, even the
gift of laughter, will be found ultimately to depend upon the
fact that man alone, among all animals, possesses what we call
reason. Reason, the Greeks thought, is the divine element in
man. "Live in the light of reason" was the Greek message to
the world, just as "Live in the light of love" was the Christian
message. And those two messages are not incompatible, but
complementary. We can follow them both.
Before I go any further, I had better try to protect myself
against the volley of objections and protests which, even at
this stage, are certain to rain down upon me. My philosopher
friends will object that the word reason is utterly vague and
ambiguous. It has been used, and misused, in all sorts of ways.
I know some philosophers who are so sensitive about this that

they are allergic to any mention of reason at all and will show
signs of extreme anguish if you so much as use the word at
all in their presence. I am painfully aware of the ambiguities
of the word and the mischief that has been done by it in
philosophy. But I think that a sensible account of it can be
given. I must not go too deeply into this, because to do so
would lead us into philosophical technicalities, but I think
the essence of the matter can be put quite simply.
I think the essence of reason is the power of abstract

thought. If you think about this man, or this circular wheel,

you are thinking about concrete or individual things. But if
you think about man in general or circles in general, you are
thinking abstractly. That is why geometry is an abstract
subject. It never discusses this circle or this triangle, but always

93
 Values

the circle or the triangle in general, or, as we say, in the

abstract.
Now it is certain that animals do not possess this power
of abstract thought, but that men do. This is why animals
cannot speak, because words, apart from proper names, always
stand for abstract ideas. This is also why, although you can,
I expect, condition a dog to distinguish between a particular

circle and a particular triangle— to wag his tail, shall we say,

when he sees a circle bark when he sees a triangle, for
and to
there is no end to the wonderful things which modern experi-
mental psychologists can do— although you can teach the dog
to do this, the fact remains that you can never teach him
geometry. The reason is that to distinguish between this circle
here before your eyes and this triangle here before your eyes,
allyou require is the gift of physical vision. You require eyes,
nothing more. But to learn geometry, you must be capable
of abstract thought, and of this the dog is incapable. I do not
deny of course that the doctrine of evolution requires us to
suppose that abstract thinking has somehow or other de-
veloped out of potentialities in the animal mind. But it also
requires us to believe that animals with eyes have somehow
developed from animals which had no eyes. And just as we
have eyes now and other organisms do not, so too we have
reason now and the animals from which we developed it do
not.
I little doubt that all the other capacities which
have very
man and an animal lacks, such as speaking, lighting
possesses
fires, inventing tools, wearing clothes, possessing moral ideas,

and the like, can be shown to be the result of his capacity for
abstract thought. But to show this in any detail would require
us to become very technical. I will say only that "reasoning,"
in the sense of arguing, proving, passing from a set of premises
to a conclusion, depends entirely on the use of abstract
thought. And if these things are true, I think they justify my
statement that abstract thought is the essence of reason or in-

94
 Democratic Values

telligence.They also justify the Greek belief that it is essen-

tiallyreason which distinguishes us from the brutes, for all the
other important differences flow from this.
Another set of objections to all I am saying will come from
those who keep on telling us nowadays that man is not a
rational animal. Emphasis on irrationalism is a characteristic
mark of our age. We have had Freud, and the psychoanalysts,
and the pragmatists, and other voluntarists, all dinning into
our ears what a very irrational creature man is. What governs
man, they tell us, is passion, desire, the will, unconscious sex,
the Oedipus complex, and all that. Reason is nothing but a
cork tossed helplessly about on the top of the dark ocean of
desire. We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we are gov-
erned by reason.
I wall make an offer to these people who keep telling us

these things. Abraham said to the Lord, "If there be fifty

righteous people in Sodom, will you hold your hand and not
destroy the city?" And Jehovah agreed. Then Abraham, who
was a businessman, beat Jehovah down from fifty to forty, to
thirty, to twenty, and ultimately to only ten people. If there
were even ten righteous people in Sodom, God would not de-
stroy it. I should like to strike a similar bargain with the irra-
tionalists. If I admit that man is 95 per cent governed by these
dark unconscious forces: the Oedipus complex, the Electra
complex, the superiority complex, the inferiority complex,
and the whole complex of complexes; if I admit that man is
the whole frightful psychological mess that you say he is, will
you admit on your side that he is 5 per cent rational? No? Well,
will you give me 3 per cent? No? Well, will you give me even
1 per cent? You surely cannot refuse that. Well, if you give

me that, I will accept that bargain, and I will go on. I will re-
phrase my previous remarks as follows. When I define man
as a rational animal, I mean that he is 1 per cent rational, and
that the brutes are zero per cent. When I say that the Greeks
thought men ought to try to live more rationally, and that the

95
 Values

life of reason is the good life, and that I agree with this, then

I will claim that what I and the Greeks mean is that we ought
to try tobe 2 per cent rational. And when I say man's reason
isthe cause of his speech, his tool-making, his morals, his art,
and his civilization, I mean that this 1 per cent is the cause of
these things. Have I said enough about this kind of objection?
And can I no^v go on?
Well, the next point reason is what distinguishes
is this. If
us from the brutes, what
divine in man, then what is
if it is is

the proper life for man? Plato answered this question in the
Republic. The proper life for man is the life governed by the
highest part of man, his reason. Because the brute lacks reason
you can rule him only by force. But because man is a rational
being, the only government which is consistent with his nature
is that he be ruled by reason. This great insight of Plato's has

been, along with the Christian ideal of the rule of love, the
guiding light of Western civilization; and I say that it is the
essence of democratic philosophy, although it is true that
Plato himself did not at all understand democracy in this way.
Before I explain this further, let me add one more thought.
If it is true that reason is what raises man above the brute, and
if it is also true, as I affirm, that government by reason is the

essence of democracy, then we have here a proof of what I

alleged earlier— that the values of democracy are universal
human values, not merely particular values. For if man is a
rational animal, if reason is means that
of his essence, this
reason is a common element of means that all men
all men. It
are rational. It is true that there are insane people— freaks and
exceptions from the human rule— just as there are freaks and
exceptions born with three legs or none at all, instead of two.
But the existence of insane or otherwise totally irrational
people will not prevent me from saying that all men, that is
all normal men, are rational, and that rationality is of the
essence of man, any more than the existence of freaks with
three legs will prevent me from saying that two-leggedness is

96
 Democratic Values

an essential character of the human animal. Now if reason is a

universal human character and democracy is justified because
it is government by man's highest part, his reason, it will

follow that democracy is the ideal government for all men and
not merely for Americans, or Britishers, or Frenchmen. This
is the proof that the values of democracy are universal values.

But of course it depends upon the assertion that democracy

is, as I said, government by reason. And this is what we now

have to show. We have to ask: Is government by reason the

essence of democracy?
Wehave two opposite possibilities of government— govern-
ment by force, which is the way to deal with animals, and
government by reason, which is the way to deal with men. The
former I am asserting is the way of totalitarianism or any auto-
cratic government. The latter is the way of democracy. In
order to see this let us ask ourselves what, in any state, is the
relation between the rulers and the ruled. In a totalitarian
state the rulers impose their will by force upon the ruled. In
a democracy the rulers, whether they be a president and con-
gress, or a parliament and prime minister, have to persuade
the people by rational argument that the measures they pro-
pose are the best. And if they cannot do this they have to get
out and make way for others who can. They have to use the
instrument of persuasion, not the instrument of force. That,
in bold outline, is what I mean by saying that democracy
simply means government by reason. Stalin or Hitler simply
compelled their subjects to do as they willed. Force was the
principle of their government. The President and Congress
do not compel us against our will. They have to persuade us
that the measures they propose are right. Persuasion is the
principle of democratic governments. They have to use ra-
tional means to persuade us as rational men.
I foresee an obvious criticism of this. It is true, you will say,

that a democratic government has to persuade its citizens,

but it is quite untrue that they persuade them by reason, by

97
 Values

rational arguments. It is notorious that our politicians almost

never appeal to reason. They appeal to the ignorance, the
prejudice, the self-interest of the electorate. Sometimes they
appeal to the basest passions. Sometimes they use unworthy
tricks and even deceit and lies and false promises to persuade
the people. And where is reason to be found in all this?
The charge, of course, is perfectly true. The facts are as
stated. But these facts do not show that I am wrong in saying
that the essence of the democratic ideal is government by
reason. What they show is that actual democracies fall far
short of the essential ideal of democracy, that they are not
what they ought to be, that they are not truly democratic.
They point to the abuses of democracy, not to the ideal of
democracy in which alone, of course, democratic values would
perfectly flower. And it is about democratic values that we
are talking, not about human failures to reach them. An ideal
democracy ^vould be a government in which the people and
the rulers "reasoned together," in which the rulers would have
to persuade the people by rational means that their policy
was good, and in which the people would refuse to be misled
by prejudice, passion, and ignorance. That is the real ideal
of democracy, not the mass of selfish grabbing, vote-catching,
and corruption which actual democracies unfortunately are.
We are accustomed to saying that there are some peoples who
are not yet fit for democracy. And we self-righteously plume
ourselves that we are not among them. The truth is that there
is no nation in the world yet fit for democracy, and perhaps

there never will be.

Democracy is an ideal, not a fact. But it is an ideal we can
strive for. The facts we are discussing— the corruption, the
greed, the base deceit, and lying, and false promises which are
found in existing democracies— these are the very facts which
are seized upon by our enemies in criticism of democracy.
Look, they say, how the self-styled democratic countries are
actually governed— by falsehood, ignorance, and shameless

98
 Democratic Values

greed. Is not better to be ruled by a man, or by a few men,

it

who who can

are above the necessity of sinking to these levels,
do what they know to be best without having to count the
votes of the base and foolish mob? It is a clever argument. But
it means the utter abandonment of the ideals of reason. And
the answer to it is that it is better to struggle upwards towards
the light of reason, badly as we do it, than to lower our stan-
dards and to admit once and for all that we are only animals
for whom the proper government is by force.
We do not usually think of rationality as the main value of
democracy. We think of freedom, equality, and individualism.
We shall find, however, that these really depend on the central
notion of rationality. They flow from it and are its corollaries.
Freedom, equality, and individualism are values only because
they are required by the rationality of man. Let us take them
in order and examine them. Then we shall find that this
is true.
First, freedom. What does it mean? The word, of course, is
very ambiguous, and the thing itself has been variously con-
ceived. cannot hope to distinguish all possible meanings or
I

to offer an accurate definition. But to get rid of at least one

ambiguity, I will say that I do not think that what we call
political freedom has anything at all to do with the contro-
versy about free will. I think that a determinist, who denies
the existence of what philosophers call free will, can perfectly
well believe in political freedom, for his point is merely that
all human actions are determined by causes, that there is no
such thing as an uncaused action. The believer in democratic
freedom need not deny this because his creed is, as I shall try
to show, merely that reason, not force, should govern men's
actions. In other words, what a man does should be caused by
the rational motives which proceed from within himself, not
by forces applied to him externally. It is true that there is
supposed to be a difficulty as to how reason can cause a man to
act, since it is said that only desires cause action. I will not go

99
 Values

into the technicalities of that matter. But there is no real

obvious that if a man is acting wildly and we
difficulty. It is
ask him to be "controlled by reason," what we mean is simply
that he ought to consider all the evidence, all the facts relevant
to his action, its consequences both to himself and to other
people, and not be led by some single blind passion or desire
which is in him. And it is obvious that in this sense there can-
not be any psychological difficulty in being 'controlled by
reason," since sensible people commonly are so controlled in
greater or less degree. Thus liberty as a political ideal has
nothing at all to do with free will in the metaphysical sense.
Next Tve have of course to follow the common practice in
distinguishing liberty from license. License means lawlessness,
doing whatever you please and being controlled by no law at
all. Liberty means being controlled by a law, but a law which

you impose on yourself, or which the people in a democracy

impose on themselves, and which is not merely imposed on
them by an alien or external force.
The essence of the matter seems to be that that man is free
who is able to decide for himself, by the use of his own reason,
what he should do. We may, if we like, define freedom simply
as acting from one's own internal motives, uncompelled by
any external force. We need not mention reason at all. In that
case an animal too is free in so far as he roams about uncon-
strained. But if we do this, we leave out the notions of free-
dom as a right and freedom as a value. You can, if you like,
allow very young children and insane people to do exactly
as they please without any external control. And they are
then no doubt in a sense "free." But they have not the right
to their freedom, nor is it a value. For the right of freedom
flows from rationality, and those who have not yet gained,
or have lost, rationality, do not have the right of freedom and
have to be controlled externally. It is only because, and if, I
am a rational being that I have a right to decide, by the use of
my own reason, what I shall do. And it is only if I do act ra-
lOO
 Democratic Values

tionally that myfreedom has any value. Thus the value we

call freedom an offshoot of man's rational nature.
is

We see the same thing in the ideals of freedom of speech,

press, assembly, religion, and the like. The freedoms of speech,
press, and assembly mean only the rights of people to use their
own reasoning powers to decide what they will think and say.
It is the same with freedom of religion. Why was it wrong to
imprison Galileo for believing that the earth revolves round
the sun? Why would it be wrong to burn someone alive for
denying the doctrine of the Trinity? Of course I know that
merely pragmatic and utilitarian reasons are commonly given.
We are more likely to reach truth, it is said, if everyone is free
to give his own version of it. Error is best refuted, not by
force, but by giving it free reign so that it will ultimately re-
fute itself. All this is perfectly true. But we may take higher
ground. The ultimate basis for denying to the state or the
church the power to coerce me in my religious beliefs is that I,
as a rational being, have the right to use my reason to decide
for myself.
If the right and value of democratic freedom flows from
the right and value of rationality, the same is true of demo-
cratic equality. What does such equality mean? It obviously
does not mean that all men are equally clever, good, or wise.
Equality of opportunity comes nearer the target but does not
quite hit it. Democratic equality means, I think, that every
rational being has, just because he is rational, a right, equally
with all others, to develop his capacities and potentialities
from within himself as he thinks best without external coer-
cion. External coercion need not take the form of actual
violence. It may be exercised by the pressure of public opin-
ion, by taboos, or simply by unreasonable customs. For in-
stance, if a man of great potential powers is prevented by
social barriers of caste or birth from realizing them, from be-
coming what he is capable of becoming, he is being coerced.
And this is the same thing as denying his equality with other
101
 Values

men. And this again is the same thing as denying his freedom.
For freedom and equality are ultimately the same thing, or
two aspects of the same thing. Freedom means the right to act
from my own internal resources, and not from compulsion, so
long as I do this rationally. And equality means that all men
equally have this right, and that they must not be deprived of
it by class and other social barriers.

Lastly we come to the democratic value of individualism.

This again is no more than another expression of the same

ideal of rationality. Itmeans the right to be myself, and not

to have other people's personalities forced upon me. It means
the right to develop my own individuality in whatever way
seems reasonable to me. This depends on my being reason-
able. An irrational being, for instance an insane person, has
no right to develop his insane individuality as he pleases. He
has to be coerced. Likewise children cannot be granted an
unlimited right of individualism. The tendency of modern
educational theory has been to grant them more and more the
right of individualism. And this may be a good thing. A child
is a potentially rational being,and rationality develops in
him he grows older. Therefore he ought to be given the
as
right of expressing his own individuality in exact proportion
to the rationality he has developed, no more and no less. It
is a matter of degree. Whether former educational theory

granted too little individualism to the child, and whether we

are now granting him the right amount or too much, I will
not try to determine. It may be added that when women were
formerly kept in control, it must have been on the theory that
they are less rational than men. And their present equality
with men must be based on the view that they are just as
rational as men. As to whether this is true or not, I shall
leave you to decide.
It follows that thereis a true and a false individualism.

That kind of individualism, sometimes called "rugged," which

consists in selfishly grabbing everything you can, trampling

102
 Democratic Values

on other people's rights, and destroying their happiness, is

the false kind, and is no part of democratic theory. For al-
though it asserts my own rights of individuality, it destroys
those of others. Individualism should rather be thought of as
a duty than as a right. It means the duty to recognize that all
men, and not merely I, are, as rational beings, entitled to
realize their personalities to the utmost. It means that the em-
phasis is on the other man's not on mine. The demo-
right,
cratic ideal of individualism is that every man and woman in
the community should develop his inner resources to their
most perfect flowering so as to contribute most to the richness
of the life of the whole community. And this is precisely what
is denied by that individualism which is merely a euphe-
false
mism for selfishness and anti-social behavior.
Thus these three concepts— freedom, equality, and individ-
ualism—are all based upon, or flow from, the central concept
of the rationality of man. It was not an accident that the
people whose philosophers defined man as the rational animal
and who insisted above all upon the value of reason, thought,
knowledge, learning, science, contemplation, and who in fact
coined and circulated these values for the Western world
down to our own times, were also the people whose statesmen
—corrupt demagogues though many of them were— invented
democracy. It is not an accident that those vast portions of
the globe which, however highly cultured in some respects
they may be, have not inherited the Greek tradition of the
supremacy of reason, have also never developed a democracy
of their own, never had any— except perhaps in village insti-
tutions—until it was brought to them from the West. That
democracy is an expression of the rational nature of man is
the basic philosophical justification of democracy. Its justifica-
tion is that it arises out of the very nature of man. Some people
think that the issue of totalitarianism or democracy is a mere
matter of taste, of whether a particular people or culture
happens to like the one or the other. I do not agree. I say

103
 Values

that democracy founded in the rational nature of man and

is

therefore the only government fit for men. Government by

is

force, totalitarian or merely autocratic, is a government

proper only to animals.
I will now summarize the rather long and intricate
briefly
argument of My main contention has been that
this essay.
the democratic values— freedom, equality, and individualism
—are universal human values, not particular values valid only
for our West European and American culture. On this ques-
tion depends the issue whether we have any right to try to
democratize other peoples, and also whether there is any
chance of our succeeding. In order to support this view we had
to discover what this proposition that "the democratic way of
life is universally a good for man, that is, for all men" means.

We saw that it does not mean that all men actually agree with
it. For if it did it would be refuted by the mere existence of

cultures which do not accept it. What it does mean is that

we believe all peoples would accept democracy as a good for
them on two conditions: (i) that they are sufficiently matured
in their civilization, and (2) that they would give it a proper
trial.
In this respect democratic values are like any other uni-
versal human values. If we say that love and charity are
universally goods for all men and that hate and enmity are
universally evils, we do not mean that all men accept this code
of morals. We mean that if they were mature enough, and if
they would give the Christian virtues of love and charity a
fair trial in their lives, they would find universally that they
would be happier people for doing so, far happier than those
who base their lives on hate and enmity. We
admitted that
propositions of this sort are very difficult to prove. But in the
case of democratic values we tried to show that we have good
reason for believing them to be universal in this sense by the
following argument. Democracy, we argued, is based on the
rational nature of man, which is universal. It is not based

104
 Democratic Values

upon, it is not an expression of, the cultural peculiarities of

certain peoples, such as Americans, British, or Frenchmen. It
expresses the essential nature of human kind, their rational
nature, which distinguishes them from the lower animals.
Animals can be governed only by force, which is the principle
of totalitarianism. But democracy is government by reason
and is therefore the only good government for all rational
beings. Also the characteristic values of the democratic way
of life— freedom, equality, and individualism— are likewise
only expressions of man's rational nature. The democratic
way of life is the good life for man because it grows out of the
nature of man. And this is not a mere particular, local, or
regional truth, but a universal truth about man as man. Ulti-
mately, to be human is to be rational, and to be rational is
to be democratic.

105
 Why Do We Fail?

In the first essay in this section on values I discussed general

or universal values with the emphasis mostly on those which
are of importance in the lives of individuals, the values of the
ends which individual men and women pursue, such as money,
honor, knowledge, or the pleasures of the senses. These are
questions of what we generally call moral values. In the
second I discussed certain values which, I tried to show, are

still universal human values but have to do with the lives of

men living in groupsand societies and states. These are gen-
erally called political and social values. There is no basic
difference between the two types. Values of any kind are uni-
versal if they are rooted in the nature of man as man, whereas
they are particular when they are rooted only in the idio-
syncrasies of individuals or cultures. Thus universal values,
whether moral or bottom the same in that
political, are at
they are those things, or those ends, which are good for human
beings everywhere. The division into moral and political has
merely to do with whether the emphasis is on the private
purposes pursued by individuals or on the purposes pursued
in common by the society as a whole.
What I should like to do here is to take a rapid survey of
some of the tendencies of our American culture as it exists
today and compare them with the conclusions reached earlier
about the things that are valuable in life, or more or less
valuable, and so to take stock of where our civilization stands

106
 Why Do We Fail?

on that ladder of values which, we may say, leads upwards

from the worse to the better things.
Naturally I cannot make a complete survey. I am afraid
thatI cannot even be systematic. All I can do here is to throw

out a few more or less disconnected and random remarks

about what I will call the state of our souls in this America
in this year of grace, 1967.
Also I not choose to dwell on those aspects of our
shall
civilizationon which we might reasonably congratulate our-
selves—and there are doubtless many— but rather on those of
which we have no cause to be proud. I believe it to be true
that America now stands as the greatest champion of human
freedom in the world. I believe it to be true that Americans,
both personally and as a nation, are great hearted and gener-
ous. But there are plenty of people who go around, in their
conversations, speeches, books, telling the world how great
and fineand noble we are, how America is the greatest nation
that ever appeared on the earth, how we are leading the world
to a brighter day, how idealistic we are. You can always be
popular and gather behind you a great following if you do
this. But I think it more healthy that, instead of bragging and
blowing our trumpets, we should look at some of the dark
places in our lives and se^ where we go astray. And of course
to do this is not likiely to be a popular way of proceeding.
For convenience, I will divide what I have to say under two
heads: political and moral. And I will begin with the political.
Some few conclusions, which are fairly obvious, follow
automatically from the considerations I adduced in the last
chapter. First we saw that the essence of the democratic ideal
isgovernment by reason, and this means that our rulers, in
persuading us to choose them and to approve the measures
they propose, ought only to use rational arguments and that
we on our side ought to listen to nothing except reason. But
in fact we obviously fall far short of this democratic ideal be-
cause our rulers, both during election periods and at other

107
 Values

times, seek to persuade us to their policies by low and un-

worthy appeals and to self-
to base emotions, to prejudices,
interest, instead of by rational considerations and rational
arguments. And we allow ourselves to be persuaded. This
makes us the target of criticisms which totalitarian rulers and
thinkers quite rightly level at us. They say that our vaunted
democracy is nothing much better than mob rule, that it is
the scene of a shameless race for high places and political
favors to be got by any means, honest or dishonest. It is ob-
vious that a wise ruler ought to propose policies and measures
for no other reason than that he believes they will be good
for the body politic; and if this would mean that he would
often have to do unpopular things, he ought not to care. He
ought to be ready to lose his office rather than do what he
knows to be bad for the state. How many such men of prin-
ciple are there in our government? There are, I believe, some,
but very few. But we take it for granted that even our best
politicians will propose steps and do things which are not in
themselves good or wise, simply because they will catch the
votes of this or that group— the farmers, the industrialists, the
Jews, the Negroes, the workers— and so get them into office
and keep them in office. I think it is no exaggeration to say
that in order to keep themselves in office many of our rulers
will not hesitate to ruin innocent men. We think this is all
quite natural and part of the game. We laugh at it rather
than condemn it. But this is because our political standards
are despicably low. All this stems from the fact that our
democracy, as our enemies say, is largely ruled by greed and
self-interest instead of by reason, from the fact that we allow
ourselves to be persuaded by appeals to passion and prejudice
instead of by reasoned considerations. The only remedy for
this that I know of— apart from a higher moral standard— is
a much higher level of general education. On the whole the
object of education is to teach men to use their reason, to
apply it to the affairs of life, and to act from it. I shall say no
108
 Why Do We Fail?

more about this because to urge a higher level of education

is tourge a platitude. And we are already pressing forward
along that road as best we can.
A second way in which we fall short of democratic ideals
is in our treatment of Jews, Negroes, and other unpopular

minorities. It is obvious that when we criticize the Russians

for their sins we ought first to think of the beam which is in
our own eye. It is obvious that when they attack us for our
undemocratic treatment of Negroes they are right, though
much of this discrimination is not open but hidden behind a
veil of hypocrisy. For instance, there are many institutions
and organizations which have no rule against Negroes on their
books, but everyone knows that a Negro will not get in, that
he will be rejected on one excuse or another. This matter of
undemocratic discrimination against Jews, Negroes, Indians,
and others requires no long explanation from me. Everyone
knows about it, though we conveniently forget it when we
brag about our great American democracy and when we ac-
cuse the Russians of being undemocratic. I will only say that
I place myself solidly on the side of those who think that our

way of treating these our brothers and fellowmen is a scandal,

a shame, and a national sin.
The third thing I want to say is that I do not think our
democracy has solved the problem of the proper balance
between individualism and discipline. The very word dis-
cipline jars in the ears of many. They think it is undemo-
cratic to be disciplined. This is a very grave error. Any society,
if it is efficiently to achieve its ends, whether they be the war-

like ends of a fascist state or the peaceful ends of a democratic

state, must have discipline. Perhaps if I substitute for the
unpopular word discipline another phrase which is less un-
popular, although it means exactly the same thing, I may
succeed in making my point better. Instead of discipline, then,
let us say "respect for law and order." This, I say, is neces-
sary for a democracy; but that it is not highly developed in

109
 Values

our American society is something which, I think, nearly

everyone admits.
I think you can see the absence of a proper sense of dis-

cipline operating from the very beginning of our lives. It

begins ^vith the nursery and continues through school. There
is insufficient discipline in our elementary schools and in our

homes. The same is true of universities. In the universities

students are encouraged to think, and they do think, that
they know better than their teachers what courses and what
books will be good for them. I have constantly had to com-
plain that I cannot introduce into a course of mine some book
which I know to be basic to the subject and essential to any-
one who wants to understand the subject, because the students
will consider it dull, as if their object were entertainment
rather than education.
This lack of a fundamental sense of discipline in our people
made itself evident in the armed services in and at the end
of World War II. Directly after the actual fighting was over,
discipline broke down. Everyone wanted to throw up the
job and run home. A naval officer during the war assured me
—he told me to keep it under my hat then, but I think most
people know it now— that there were no fighting services in
the world so given to looting as the American. Also women
abroad, in countries where there were large bodies of Ameri-
can troops, were far more frightened of them than they were
of the soldiers of any other nationality, except perhaps the
Russians and the Japanese. Several years ago three American
sailors were nearly lynched in Cuba for wantonly insulting a
Cuban national hero when drunk. Murder, rape, and looting
are the terrible fruit which grow from the tree of indiscipline
planted in childhood years.
Why is all this? Of course it has historical causes. We can
speak of the survival of the frontier spirit and give other such
excuses. But there is, so to speak, also a philosophical reason.
All this happens because from the very beginning of our

no
 1

Why Do We Fail?

from our days in the nursery, we are brought up largely

lives,
on philosophy which resents any sort of control as
a false
undemocratic. There is among us a false understanding of
the democratic ideal of individualism. True individualism, as
I said,does not mean that everyone does what he likes without
restraint. It does not mean "rugged" individualism. It does not
mean that every man seizes what he can for himself and the
devil take the hindmost. This false conception of individual-
ism is what leads to indiscipline and lawlessness. True indi-
vidualism means that every individual's rights are to be
respected, because every individual is a rational being en-
titled to respect as such. That is the democratic ideal. And this
will lead, in a true democracy, to a genuine discipline— that
is, self-discipline— and therefore to a deep respect for law and

order.
Now there is much more might be said about our
that
political values, or lack of values. We
boast that our constitu-
tion is the best in the world. But it is very far from perfect.
It is full of abuses. The machinery of the senate and congress
is old, and it creaks. I should say it needs a thorough over-

hauling. One need only mention the device of filibustering,

which is a device by which a few bad or greedy or self-inter-
ested men can undemocratically obstruct the will of the ma-
jority, and which is a national scandal. But I will leave these
matters to the constitutional lawyers and political philoso-
phers, and will pass to a consideration of that other branch
of universal values which we called moral as distinguished
from political, and will try to see how our society stands in
regard to them.
In a previous chapter I discussed the idea of a scale of
values, and in particular I drew attention to Plato's insight
that men and societies could be approximately classified by
the things that they value most, by the things that they placed
at the top of their scale of values. Approximately speaking, a
man's philosophy of life and his way of life are identical with
1 1
 Values

the answer to the question: What purposes does he place at

the top of his scale of values? Does he value money most, or
pleasure, or learning, or perhaps the love of God? The truly
religious man is he who thinks the love of God more im-
portant to him than wealth
or prestige or even science and
learning, and who shows
that this is really so by acting on his
belief, so that although he may perhaps value these other
things too and want to have them, he will at once throw them
overboard, if it is necessary, in pursuit of his highest objec-
tive. The sensualist is he who thinks sensual pleasure better
than anything and who acts accordingly. Consider the
else
man who inherits a fortune and wastes it on women and drink
and gambling and becomes a pauper, although he might have
remained rich. We may say that such a man places the pleas-
ures and excitements of the senses higher in his scale of values
than money, not to mention that he places them higher than
the values of religion, or learning, or prestige. That he places
pleasure at the top and all these other things, including
money, below it, is his scale of values, his philosophy of life.
And this philosophy of life determines his actual way of life.
Likewise there are men who seek power above all things and
make it their chief end. And this determines their scale of
values, their practical philosophy of life.

Now if we want to know in this way what a man's scale of

values is, we must look at what he does, not what he says.
at
If a man says that what he values most in life is the love of
God, but we see that though he pays lip-service to religious or
moral values, in he plainly pursues money as his chief
his life
end, then we may philosophy of life,
fairly say that, in his
money and not the love of God is put at the top of his scale
of values. For on the whole men act as they believe and believe
as they act. Of course there are exceptions to this. There is

the man who earnestly, truly, and sincerely sets before him-
self a high aim but in his life falls far below it. The spirit is
willing but the flesh is weak. But such disparities between

112
 Why Do We Fail?

belief and action usually end one of two ways. Either the
in
man will gradually bring his actions up to somewhere near his
high aims, or he will gradually lose his ideals and lower them
to suit his actions. For a permanent disparity between belief
and action means a painful inward conflict of the man with
himself, which he will always seek to heal in the one way or
the other. Thus we can generally judge a man's beliefs by his
acts.
One other general remark I must make before I begin to
apply these principles to our own civilization. It follows more
or less obviously from what I have said that when there is
something wrong with a personality, when it is warped or
distorted, this fact can very often be traced to a wrong philos-
ophy of life. His scale of values is wrong. Of course this is
not always true. Personality defects may come from all sorts
of causes. But at least a common cause is a mistaken view of
life. And this mistaken philosophy may always be expressed in

Plato's language. The man is putting higher a value which is

really lower, and lower a value which is really higher. There-
fore your scale of values, or a nation's scale of values, is one of
the most important things about it. And a good psychiatrist,
I am sure, will always have this in mind. He will aim first at
giving those whom he treats true beliefs about what is impor-
tant in life and what is not. It may be the case that some
psychiatrists try to build on the false beliefs already in the
man's mind, or, worse still, to inject false beliefs which they
think will temporarily prop up the man's morale. If so, they
are doing bad work, which will never last.
Now what about our national scale of values, if one may
speak of such a thing? What sort of a scale is it? We know
that Oriental peoples and especially Indians always accuse the
West in general, but America in particular, of what they call
materialism. Mr. Vincent Sheean in his book. Lead Kindly
Light, which he wrot€ after a visit to India during which he
was present at the assassination of Mr. Gandhi, repeated this

"3
 Values

charge of materialism against us. He even said that the ma-

terialism of the West is the main cause of its constant wars,
and that the only road to peace our philosophy in
is to alter
this respect. These are not words which we can afford to neg-
lect, if we really want peace, if we really want an end of those
holocausts in which our sons are blown to pieces. So we want
to know whether this charge of materialism against us is true
or false.
what does materialism mean? It does not, when
First of all,
it is made an
accusation against us, have anything to do with
what is technically called materialism by writers on philos-
ophy. This philosophic materialism is the belief that every-
thing in the world is made of matter, that there are no
non-material things, that everything, including our thoughts
and minds, is really composed of material atoms. What we are
accused of has nothing to do with any such scientific or meta-
physical hypothesis. It has to do with our scale of values. And
I think can give a fairly good rough definition of it. A
I

materialist, in this moral sense, is a man who places money and

material things generally at the top of his scale of values. To
use our old phrase from the earlier essay, he puts the things of
the body above the things of the spirit. Or to use once again
the phrase of Socrates, materialism means "heaping up the
greatest amount of money and not caring about wisdom and
truth and the greatest improvement of the soul."
Now we might try todefend ourselves by saying that this
charge of materialism is true of the masses of men everywhere
and not especially truer of the West than of the East. This
would be a poor defense, since it would consist in saying only
that other people are as bad as we are. But apart from that, I
am afraid we cannot say even that this defense is true. If we
look at India, from whence in particular the accusation pro-
ceeds, we shall not find it to be true. The Indian scale of
values has never been at all like ours. On the whole it is true
to say that in India the love of God has always been put

114
 Why Do We Fail?

above the love of material things. India is a civilization based

on religion, while ours is a civilization based on wealth. Of
course I know that such generalizations as this are always
suspect. And rightly. It is difficult to say even what they mean,
not to mention the question of how to prove them true. Do we
mean, when we make such statements, that a majority of the
population in India, say more than 50 per cent, care more for
religion than for material goods, and that in the United States
the state of affairs is the reverse? This seems, to say the least,
a very crude interpretation to give to the kind of thing we are
saying. It not so easy, so simple as that. Yet even this crude
is

meaning is not wholly wide of the mark.

One way of judging the main values of a civilization is to
look at its great men and especially at the men whom it most
admires. To know what kind of man a nation most admires
will give us a key to the things it thinks valuable. Another
way is to look at its fruits, to ask what notable things it has
contributed to the world. For instance, it seems fair to say
that the Greeks placed the things of the mind and spirit, such
as philosophy, science, mathematics, and art, very high in their
scale of values, much higher than most other peoples have
ever done, and certainly much higher than we in America do
now. For art and science and philosophy are the most notable
things they contributed to the world. And their great men
were mostly artists, poets, philosophers, and scientists. We
might still try to argue that this tells us only about their ex-
tremely few great men, the very cream of Greek society, and
that we learn nothing from it about the values of those vast
masses of Greek humanity who just lived and married and had
children and died, leaving no record, so that we know nothing
of them. That Sophocles and Aeschylus and Euripides were
great poets shows only, we might say, that Sophocles and
Aeschylus and Euripides were great poets. It shows nothing
at all about the struggling masses of hundreds of thousands
of contemporary Greeks whose names are not even known.

115
 Values

But I do not think this is at all true. The great men of a nation
on the whole are men representative of the nation. They are
of one blood and stock with the masses from whom they
spring, and the values cherished in the whole society, both by
leaders and by the obscure, are likely to be fundamentally
similar. On the whole a nation will tend to produce what it
admires most, and what it does not admire will not flourish
in it.

In India it is certainly true that the kind of man its vast

population has always admired most is the saint, the religious
man. And this fact lets us at once into the secret of its scale of
values. Also any historian could easily show that most Indian
institutions, including those of which we are inclined to dis-
approve, such as caste, have a religious basis. I cannot of course
go into that. I am only trying to say what I mean, and how I
would try to show, if I had time, that India is not materialistic
in the way they say we are, and that Indian culture does
actually place spiritual values, not material values, at the top
of its scale.

It may well be retorted that we certainly do not want to

be like India with its grinding poverty, its oppression of the
poor, its absence of all democratic values (until recently), its
caste system, its gross superstitions, its diseases, its attitudes of
pessimism, resignation, and stagnation. But this is really be-
side the point. We do not want to copy the bad things of India,
but we might want to copy the good things. Even for what
we in the West choose to call bad things, there might be much
to be said. It is by no means certain (to me at least) that
resignation and pessimism are attitudes inferior to blind
energism, the itch to keep altering things, and the shallow
optimism of a chimerical ideal of progress. And as regards the
poverty of India, perhaps it comes as much from a religious

spiritwhich prefers spiritual to material goods as it does from

the inefficiency and ignorance to which we attribute it. But
the main point is that whatever we may think about these

116
 Why Do We Fail?

matters, the Indian scale of values which places the love of

God at the top of the scale and the love of material things
much lower down is perhaps something from which we might
learn.
Allthis, however, shows only that India is not materialistic.
It does not show that we are! Is the charge true, then, that
Western and American civilization in
civilization generally,
some of those fea-
particular, are materialistic? Let us look at
tures of our civilization from which its basic attitudes and
assumptions can be deduced. Consider for example our atti-
tude toward socialism. Whether or not a socialistic organiza-
tion of society would in the end be wise, its motive at least is
humanitarian. It argues that a system of completely free enter-
prise actually residts in an unjust distribution of wealth— in
excessive wealth for a few and extreme poverty for the many.
Its object is to correct this by a system which, it believes, would
insure a juster distribution. Thus its essential aim is social
justice. We
cannot quarrel with this aim; we can only doubt
the wisdom of the means. I am not arguing here either for or
against socialism. It is open to doubt whether the measures it
proposes, the national ownership of the means of production,
actually tend to produce the justice which it desires. I do not
propose to discuss that issue. I want to draw attention to an-
other aspect of the matter. One of the great arguments against
socialism, perhaps I might say the main argument, is that it
would stifle the incentive to produce, and so decrease the total
production of wealth in the community. Let us assume that
this is correct.
Under socialism the community would produce less wealth
than does under a system of free enterprise. Whether this
it

is true or not I do not know. But for the purposes of argu-

ment, let us assume that it is true. Does this show that social-
ism would be a bad policy to adopt? Not unless you make
another assumption, which is that the sole end of the eco-
nomic system is to amass the greatest possible amount of
117
 Values

wealth, regardless of whether it is justly distributed or not.

The might quite reasonably reply that he admits that
socialist
less wealth would be produced, because of loss of incentive,
but that there would be greater justice in its distribution.
Which do you prefer, he might ask— a society vastly rich but
with economic injustice rampant, or a poorer society, having
no more than enough for its needs, but with economic justice
spread everywhere through it? You see that the question being
asked is: \V^hich do you place higher in your scale of values,
wealth or justice?
Now I think it would be unfair to say that those who con-
demn socialism on the ground that it will result in a loss of
wealth do not care at all about a just distribution. No doubt
they would argue that a system of free enterprise does more
to insure justice than a socialistic system would. Such an argu-
ment smells rather unpleasantly of a thing that goes by the
name of laissez faire. But what I want to draw attention to is

not that. It is rather that this whole side of the question is

commonly ignored. It tends to be taken for granted that the

supreme end of the economic system is the amassing by the
society of the vastest possible amount of wealth, other con-
siderations such as those of justice being either forgotten or
at bestregarded as subsidiary. If I were to urge that it might
be better for us if we were a relatively poor nation, say like
Sweden, I should be thought hopelessly unpractical. But this
emphasis on the mere amount of wealth, with very much less
emphasis on its just distribution, is an indication that we in
our hearts, whatever words may be on our lips, place wealth
above justice in our scale of values.
There are other signs that the mere amassing of vast quan-
tities of wealth, irrespective of the justice of its distribution,
is the sole thing most of us think about in our economic rea-
sonings. The total figures of trade, of imports and exports,
the total national income— these are the things which always
figure in the charts, tables, statistics that are published. And
these are the figures that are quoted as being the criterion of

118
 Why Do We Fail?

our prosperity. Statistics tending to show how much we make

are blazoned abroad in newspapers, books, government re-
turns; but statistics tending to show how justly the wealth is

distributed are not in evidence.

But there are countries in the world which are small and
not very rich and not at all powerful, where wealth is not
worshiped as the sole end— little, comparatively unimportant
countries, one might perhaps say (one might give the Scandi-
navian countries as examples); where men are content with
what we should think small incomes; where very few people
have refrigerators, cars, radios, television; where peace, quiet,
home life, the thought and reading of leisure hours still form
the substance of the life of the people, rather than the feverish
rush after money which obtains here, and which leaves no time
for the older and simpler and better patterns of living. Our
scale of values, I say without hesitation, is inferior to these,
because it is more materialistic.
We see the same thing in that phrase which is so constantly
on our lips— the standard of living. It is assumed by all our
newspapers, by our senators and congressmen, by everyone we
meet in the street, that the glory of America is its standard of
living, which is higher than in any other country in the world.
It is assumed that the supreme end of all policy must be to
keep up or increase this standard of living at all costs. It is
taken for granted that anything which would lower it is ipso
facto bad. But what is the standard of living? If it meant the
genuine standards of a good life, wisdom and knowledge and
loving care for human happiness, we should indeed be fortu-
nate if our country had the highest standard of living in the
world. We should be right to insist that this must be the
supreme end of all our efforts. But nothing of the sort is in
our minds. In our national philosophy the "standard of liv-
ing" means a radio, a car, a refrigerator, a television set for
everybody. These material ends are what we mean by "the
good life."
And where does this materialistic philosophy lead us? I

119
 Values

think Mr. Vincent Sheean was quite right in saying that it

leads us into wars. Plato said more than 2,000 years ago that
wars are caused by greed and especially by the desire for
luxury. And this is still true. I do not deny that there may be,
and indeed frequently are, idealistic motives involved in wars.
I do not deny that the late great wars were fought largely on

moral issues. But the point is that these moral issues them-
selves would not arise if it were not for human greed. We take
as our sole end the amassing of the greatest amount of wealth.
Another nation does the same thing. This leads to a head-on
conflict. Of course, one or the other side is the aggressor in the
sense that one side is more ready to proceed to actual violence
than the other is. Aggression is then denounced and becomes
a moral issue. Questions of justice also arise and become
genuine moral issues. But the root cause of all this is greed
and a materialistic philosophy. It is as if two men, each seek-
ing nothing but his own aggrandizement, should both covet
the same thing. Conflict arises. The one
is a more violent and

aggressive character than the other,more selfish perhaps, more

ready to trample on the other's rights, more ready to trample
on justice. There will be moral issues here too mixed up with
who is to get the coveted wealth.
the basic issue as to
Plato notes in particular that it is the desire for luxury
which causes wars. Men, of course, must have their material
needs satisfied. They must have food and clothing and houses
and other simple necessities. These are what Plato calls
"necessary wants." And so long as men are content with these
there need be no wars. Under the head of luxuries, or what
he calls ''unnecessary wants," Plato lists couches and tables
and viands and fragrant oils and perfumes and courtesans
and the damsels of Corinth. That is no doubt rather amusing.
And there is no reason why we should limit our desires to the
barest necessities, the simplest food, a suit of rough clothes,
and a roof. We might want to delete some items from Plato's
list of luxuries and add others. I should say that we must add

refrigerators, cars, radios, and television, and that your

120
 Why Do We Fail?

insistence and mine that we must have these things is a

powerful cause of war. We may differ as to where we should
draw the line between a reasonably comfortable life and a
luxurious one, between necessary and unnecessary wants.
British courts of law used to draw distinctions, saying, for
example, that though one pair of trousers would do for most
of us, ten pairs of trousers were to be regarded as necessary
for an Oxford man. But the higher we draw the line between
reasonable needs and luxuries, the greater our peril. For Plato
is right in his basic insight that it is the desire for luxury which

is a prime cause of war. And this means that our insatiable

desires for automobiles and television and radios and fine

houses and the latest electrical gadgets, in short everything we
include in our national worship of what we call the highest
standard of living in the world, is a prime cause of war. We
think that we shall be able to abolish or control wars if we
invent a suitable organization of the nations of the world,
the League of Nations, the United Nations, or perhaps a world
government. I do not wish to underestimate the value of such
institutions. I am all in favor of them. But I do not believe
that we war by mechanical arrangements of
shall get rid of
this sort, so long as the basic cause of wars, our materialistic
philosophy, remains.
Let us now look at another remarkable phenomenon of
our societies which is symptomatic of our materialism— I mean
the enormous growth of advertising. Advertisement has a
legitimate place and value in the social organism. Its value
consists in the fact that it provides information as to what
products are available on the market and where they can be
got. If I wanted a razor or a can of soup and did not know
who made and sold these things, I should be much at a loss.
But this is the sole legitimate function of advertising. When
it goes beyond this, it becomes parasitic on society, a useless,
valueless, and positively harmful activity, a sign of disease,
a cancer in the social body.
That the business of advertising as it actually exists in our

121
 Values

midst is largely the art of skillful lying, I think it hardly

necessary to do not deny that there is some more or
insist. I
less honest advertising, and it may be a fact that some of our
best business firms try to keep their advertisements within the
bounds of truth. But I believe that this sense of truth in ad-
vertising, though it exists, is very much the lesser portion.
Most advertisers care nothing about it. You advertise a sum-
mer resort. You exaggerate its charms, and you say nothing
about its disadvantages. That is, you lie. You include pictures
or photographs skillfully done so as to make the gardens or
the buildings look larger or more splendid than they are. You
lie again. Or you and say that it is the
advertise a toothpaste
best on the market, that it whitens your teeth better than any
other. This must be a lie, because you have not tried all other
toothpastes and formed an impartial judgment as to which
is the best. Possibly this does not mislead anyone very much,

so that it may be said that no harm is done. But that it does

not mislead only means that you are such a notorious liar that
no one believes you. And as to its doing no harm, that is quite
untrue. The harm of it is not only that you have become a liar,
but that the sense of truthfulness and honesty in the whole
community is undermined and largely destroyed. The result
is a low standard of business ethics.

Am I demanding an absurdly high and impracticable

standard of truth and honesty? By no means. For there are
plenty of people still who live by the old standards of honor.
Sometimes they are called "gentlemen," though unfortunately
this word has become mixed up with low ideas of snobbishness.
But a gentleman once meant, and still means for many, a man

who low moral standards, who is proud that

will not stoop to
his fathers before him never did a shady or dishonorable
thing, who is determined to pass on that tradition to his sons.
There are plenty of people still who would rather their sons
were poor than that they should make money by helping in
the business of concocting dishonest advertisements.

122
 Why Do We Fail?

But it is not in fact this matter of the untruthfulness of

most advertising that is the worst thing about it. There is a
much worse evil connected with it. It is that advertising
creates wants in people which did not exist before, perfectly
unnecessary wants. This is, in fact, one of the main purposes
of advertising. You invent a gadget or a new food product.
Sometimes, of course, you may have invented something for
which there is a real need, and then you are a public bene-
factor. But in a vast majority of cases there is no real benefit
to society in your product. There may be in fact no desire
for it. So you get to work to create a demand by an advertising
campaign, by dinning into the ears of the public how much
better it will be if it uses your product. Then when people
get accustomed to using it, an artificially fostered desire for
it grows up. In this way the number and variety of human
wants is constantly being increased. In this way the demand
for luxurious living grows. And since the demand for luxuries
is a main cause of war, it follows that the art of advertisement

has its own measure of responsibility for war.

And the chief evil of all this is that, whereas the best re-
ceipt for human happiness lies in keeping the number of your
wants small, so that you are easily satisfied, this advertising
process does the exact opposite. It constantly increases the
number of your wants,makes it constantly harder for you to
be and harder for you to be happy. Happiness lies
satisfied,
in the adjustment of what you have to what you want, the
equilibrium between the two. So long as you have few wants,
equilibrium is easy and men can be happy. But in our age,
our civilization, the monstrous accumulation of human wants,
largely caused by advertising, is a destroyer of happiness.
I will cite one other evidence of our materialism. When

we wanted to know what the Greeks valued most, what their

philosophy of life, their scale of values, was, we looked at the
writings of their philosophers. In the great philosophers of a
people can always be found an expression of the soul of that

123
 Values

people. The same fundamental attitudes to the world and

to lifeappear in different forms in the art, the literature, and
the philosophical systems of a culture. In art and literature
they appear in concrete sensuous forms; in philosophy they
appear in the form of abstract thought. Thus for instance the
philosophy of Plato is the Greek spirit, the Greek sense of life,
put in abstract form.
Where then are the great philosophies or philosophers of
America? Undoubtedly America's characteristic philosophy
is pragmatism, and its greatest representative was John Dewey.

What does this philosophy tell us about the values of life? We

know what Plato thought. He ranged human values in an
order— wisdom and knowledge, honor or prestige, money or
material goods, pleasure. In general it was his essential mes-
sage that the things of the spirit are higher than material
things, the things of the body. And this has always been the
burden of the teaching of all the great prophets, saints, and
What then is pragmatism's scale of values?
sages of the world.
I do not want to make a charge of materialism against those

academic philosophers, such as John Dewey, who are the pro-

fessional exponents of pragmatism. It is very difficult to say
whether such an accusation would be true.^ But I will simply
ask the question: Why is it that pragmatism makes the enor-
mous appeal to the people of America which it undoubtedly
does make? Why has it become, in some sense, the popular phi-
losophy of America? I have myself no doubt of the answer. It
is because, rightly or wrongly, the public sees in pragmatism

a justification of its own materialistic values. Pragmatism, or

instrumentalism, as Professor Dewey called it, teaches that all
thinking— and this will include science, philosophy, and, in
general, the things of the mind— is in the end only instru-
mental to, and justified by, its practical utility. Science and

1 Professor Warner Fite wrote, "American pragmatism is disposed to . . .

hold that spiritual needs are only bread and butter needs disguised" (The
Living Mind, p. 97).

124
 Why Do We Fail?

philosophy, and the things of the mind generally, are not ends
in themselves, as the Greeks thought, but means to practical
utility. You can see at once how this can be interpreted (I
will say "twisted," if my professional philosophical friends
prefer it) For practical utility means
as justifying materialism.
for most people the acquisition of material goods, material
comforts, the things of the body. If pragmatism is interpreted
in this way, it means in the end that spiritual and intellectual
things are of no value in themselves, but only as they minister
to material ends. This means that material ends are placed
higher in the scale of values than spiritual ends. And this is
the definition of materialism. Thus the vast popularity of
pragmatism becomes evidence of a fundamental materialism
in the minds of the American people.
We in America pride ourselves on being what we call "prac-
tical." As a philosophy of life, pragmatism is nothing but the
apotheosis of the practical. But what is meant in the popular
mind by being "practical"? (We
will not ask what profes-
sional pragmatists mean by
Nothing, I think, is meant ex-
it.)

cept being materialistic, valuing above everything material

things and the satisfaction of purely material needs. When
the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount are called unpractical,
as they sometimes are, what is meant except that they exalt
spiritual things and set wealth and worldly power low in the
scale of values? When an artist, driven on by his vision of
beauty and content to live on crusts of bread, is called an un-
practical person, what is meant except that he values his vision
above material comfort? I am persuaded that the word prac-
tical, as it is commonly used among us, simply means materi-

alistic. And the mere fact that we in America regard ourselves

as especially practical people simply indicates that we are ma-
terialistic people. The businessman is the practical man par
excellence because it is his essential function to cater to ma-
terial wants. The artist, the thinker, the philosopher, the
saint, and the man of learning are not practical. They are

125
 Values

tolerated by the practical man partly because they provide

what are in his view unimportant but harmless activities to
occupy men's leisure time, forms of amusement, and partly
because he sees that, in various indirect ways, they can be
made to minister to what he regards as the important, that
is the material, things. Science, above all, he values in this

way. It aids industry and provides material comforts. But for

science itself simply as a form of knowledge, as ministering
to the hunger of the mind, he has no use at all. Science, art,
and philosophy are really so much nonsense, except in so far
as they help in various ways to subserve material ends. And
if he does not say that the love of God is nonsense too, that
is only because he is too cowardly.
For these reasons when I see it written or hear it said that
ours is the greatest civilization in the history of the world,
that Tve are themost wonderful people, when I hear of mod-
ern progress and the progressive character of Western culture,
I cannot help but wondering. I think not only of ancient

Greece but even of poor benighted India, with all its poverty
and bodily disease and its so-called stagnation, but with its
heart set on God. And the words of the poet keep ringing in
my ears:

For frantic boast and foolish word

Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!
All that have been saying is, of course, very unpractical.
I

But then I am by profession an unpractical man. It may be

that these things of which I have spoken are in some sense
inevitable, that we cannot now turn back along the road of
materialism down which we long ago started— although I re-
fuse to believe that it is too late. But I know that it is the road
which leads to war rather than to peace, to darkness rather
than to light.

126
 Ill

Imagery and Thought in Poetry

 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

I WANT to discuss here the roles of imagery and of thought in

poetry, and what
especially their relation to the element of
we may rather vaguely call feeling or emotion. There
no is

doubt that every poem, and indeed every work of art, must
be intended to evoke in those to whom it is addressed some
kind of feelings or emotions. These may range all the way
from the quiet feelings of pleasure which can be aroused by
a blend of colors or a musical-sounding pattern of words to
the violent emotions of pity and terror excited by a tragedy.
In addition to feelings, most poems also contain imagery
and thoughts or ideas. I think that everyone knows what is
meant by imagery. It means mental images seen by the mind's
eye. But I ought to give a word of explanation about what I
mean by the words thought and idea, which I am using here
synonymously with one another. I use them to mean abstract
or conceptual ideas or thoughts. Thoughts in this sense are
usually expressed in propositions. If someone says, "It is a
good thing to be well educated," or "Life is not worth liv-
ing," these sentences express thoughts or ideas of one kind or
another. In what are called philosophical poems, the philos-
ophy they express is the thought content. Some poems have
expounded scientific ideas; for instance, Lucretius explained
the atomic theory of matter in his famous poem.
The main contention of this essay will be that imagery and
thought should never appear in poetry for their own sakes;
that they can properly exist in a poem only because they min-

129
 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

ister to the excitement of feelings or emotions. Their func-

tion is be carriers of emotion or feeling. They are only
to
means to that end, not ends in themselves.
Let us, by looking at an example, see how imagery works as
a carrier of feelings. Consider the following line taken from
one of the poems of James Elroy Flecker, who is now perhaps
hardly read at all, and belongs to that lost generation of poets
who flourished about the time of the first world war. Here is
the line: "The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the
serpent-haunted sea." It does not matter what the context of
this line is. We may simply consider the mental picture which
it calls up. Possibly a luminous dragon-green is a beautiful

shade of color. But it is not for that reason alone that the poet
paints this picture in the imagination. The imagery is not
introduced for its own sake, for its beauty of color, but because
it evokes dim feelings of the eerie and uncanny. It seems to

stir in us vague half-conscious race memories of the fears and

forebodings of our prehistoric ancestors who peopled the
world with ghosts and monsters. This is done by the deft use
of verbal and mental associations. For instance, the epithet
"serpent-haunted" suggests something akin to the ghostly, be-
cause of the association of the word "haunted" with ghosts. It
is true that we may say of a drunkard that he haunts the tav-

ern, but hauntings are more usually carried out by ghosts, so

that an association has been set up. If the poet had used the
prosaic epithet "serpent-inhabited," the vague fear of the su-
pernatural would not have been activated.
Notice also the cunning use of the expression "dragon-
green." Ostensibly it is nothing but the name of a color, a
particular shade of green. But if the poet only wished to in-
dulge, like the abstract painter, in the beauty of a pure color,
he might just as well have introduced some other shade, for
instance, "emerald-green." But, of course, "emerald-green"
would have ruined the effect of this line. For, as the poet has
written it, the mention of dragons has the effect of depositing

130
 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

in our consciousness a faint penumbral image of those crea-

tures, which reinforces the feelings of the eerie and uncanny
which the line as a whole evokes.
In this case the feelings were simple and easy to analyze,
and we could even give them labels, such as "eerie" feelings
and feelings of the "uncanny." But this is seldom true. Poets,
instead of harping on old and familiar feelings, which already
have ready-made labels in our language, more often create
new feelings for which there are no words. And these feelings
may be so subtle and evasive as to elude altogether the clumsy
machinery of conceptual analysis. Who, for example, can an-
alyze or name the feeling-tones evoked by the tremendously
powerful image in W. B. Yeats's line which reads: "That
dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea." If one is asked what
feeling this line evokes, one can only repeat over again the
line itself, and say: ''That feeling."
I turn now from the consideration of imagery to the dis-

cussion of the function of thought or ideas in poetry. And

first of all, one should notice that a poem need not necessar-

ily contain any thought at all— in the sense in which I am

using the word thought, namely, as meaning abstract or gen-
eral ideas. And much of the best poetry contains only imagery
and no thought. For the essence of the poem is its emotional
effect. And imagery alone can produce emotion, without the
aid of thought. Here, for instance, are some lines of a poem
by Ezra Pound under the title "Taking Leave of a Friend."
Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them;
Here ive must make separation
And go through a thousand miles of dead grass . . .

Our horses neigh to each other as we are departing.

There is no abstract or general idea here embodied in this

imagery. There is simply the vivid picture, and the human
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episode of the parting of friends. And it is moving and

beautiful.
But although thought is not a necessary element in poetry,
as a matter of fact, much poetry does contain thought. And
therefore we now have to ask the question: What is the place
and function of thought in those poems which contain it?
Wefind that just as imagery does not appear in poetry for
its own sake, but only as a carrier of emotions, so also the
same holds true of thought. Thought per se has no place and
no right in poetry. The function of thought in poetry is to
excite feelings, and it is a means to that end. The intellectual
interest in ideas as such is foreign to art, though it is the life-
blood of science and philosophy. It is only the emotional in-
terest of ideas, their moving character, if they have any, which
can be the substance of poetry. The question for us therefore
is how thought evokes emotion. There are, I think, two main

principles which govern this matter.

The first principle is that thought cannot appear naked in
a poem. It has to be clothed in imagery, and it only produces
its emotional effect indirectly by means of the imagery. To

say this is the same as to say that thought, which in its own
nature is cannot appear in poetry as abstract but
abstract,
has to be individualized and concretized by imagery. It is the
nature of every work of art to be individual, concrete, and
sensuous. Abstractions as such cannot be made the subject of
art because they do not excite emotions. Emotion apparently
precipitates itself only on the particular or individual. Ab-
stractions are, by their nature, arid and lacking in warmth.
Mathematical propositions are perhaps the most abstract of
all possible thoughts, and ordinary mortals cannot become
emotional about a quadratic equation— although I cannot
venture to be sure that the same is true of pure mathema-
ticians. Likewise purely scientific or philosophical statements
are abstract and cannot, as such, make poetry. However great
a poet Lucretius may have been, it is difficult to believe that

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those parts of his poem which merely expound the atomic

theory of matter, and the different shapes and sizes of atoms,
can be genuine poetry.
The first few lines of T. S. Eliot's poem Burnt Norton—
the first of the Four Quartets— Yea.d as follows:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If alltime is eternally present,
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
I do not think is poetry at all. It is an abstract philosophi-
this
cal statement about abstract time. It is nothing but versified
philosophy. If it were not written in meter, or rather in rhyth-
mical lines, it might have been taken from a chapter on the
problem of time in a philosophy textbook.
But I will quote the very next lines in the poem, those im-
mediately following the ones above. You will notice that
there comes a sudden change in them.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage ivhichwe did not take
Toivards the door ive never opened
Into the rose-garden.

This is genuine poetry, because the thought here is not pre-

sented in the abstract, but clothed in imagery. The images of

the footfalls echoing in memory, the passage we never took,
the door we never opened, the rose-garden grip us and move
us. And from then on there are no more thin and pale ab-
stractions in this poem, but it moves confidently in the con-
creteworld of images, with the result that in spite of the poor
beginning we have a noble poem.

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 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

There is another passage in the Four Quartets which em-

bodies thoughts about time. But fine poetry is achieved be-
cause this thought content, these ideas about time, are em-
bedded in a mental picture of a fog at sea and the sound of
a bell buoy.

Under the oppression of the silent fog

The tolling bell
Measures time, not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than the time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future . . .

Philosophy, like science and mathematics, is, of course, con-

cerned with abstract ideas and theories. Therefore a philo-
sophical theory as such cannot be made into a poem, unless
it is presented in the guise of sensuous imagery. Could one,

for example, make poetry out of what philosophers know as

the theory of absolute idealism, which was preached by meta-
physicians like Hegel and Bradley? Consider the following
sentence which I have invented although it might have been
written by Hegel or Bradley: "The Absolute Reality is a con-
crete, timeless, changeless unity which, however, appears as a
flux of multiple events in the phenomenal world of space and
time." That is a piece of detestable jargon, of course. But
could the thought content of it be put into poetry? Well,
Shelley managed something very like it, in some famous, in-
deed hackneyed, lines. This is his version:
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome

of many-colored glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

What the metaphysician calls the Absolute Reality appears

here as "the white radiance of Eternity." And what the phi-

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losopher calls "the multiplicity of the phenomenal world of

space and time" becomes in Shelley "a dome of many-colored
glass." The abstract thought is imbedded in imagery, and the
whole is suffused with exalted emotion.
The second principle regarding thought in poetry arises
from the fact that the thought contents of a good poem do
not necessarily have to be true, and do not even have to be
believed to be true either by the poet or his audience. For a
poem aims at evoking feelings, and the thought content is only
subsidiary and is a carrier of feelings. What is essential to the
thought of a poem is not that it should be true but that it
should be moving. And it is a fact that an idea can be moving,
or evocative of feelings, whether it is true or false, believed or
not believed. Some thoughts are pleasant, others unpleasant,
whether true or not. We can be transported by imaginary de-
lights, saddened by imaginary woes. The thought content of
Shelley's lines just quoted is the philosophy, or at least a part
of the philosophy, of absolute idealism. Most philosophers
now think that philosophy to be and perhaps it is. But
false,
Shelley's lines are just as moving whether it is true or false.
And he would be a very dull critic who should say, "I think
Shelley's lines are poor poetry because I disagree with its
ideas." In the same way we do not have to believe in the idea
of Fate in the ancient Greek tragedians to be profoundly
moved by their tragedies.
A prize was once awarded to Ezra Pound for some poems
of his which were said to be an expression of fascist ideas.
There was quite an outcry. I pass no judgment upon the aes-
thetic merit of these particular poems, and I do not know
whether on aesthetic grounds they deserved the prize or not.
But I think the judges were quite right to act upon the prin-
ciple that although the fascist ideas of the poetry might be
judged by us to be false, and even detestable, that would not
alter the fact that the poetry was great poetry— if on aesthetic
grounds it was so.

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 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

Let me quote a couple of stanzas from Swinburne's poem

"The Garden of Proserpine."

From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may he
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Then star nor sun shall waken

Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
The thought content of this is very simple. It is merely the
denial of any life after death. Let us suppose that you and I
are firm believers in a future life, and consequently we be-
lieve that what this poem is saying is false. Yet we can recog-
nize this as fine poetry and can take delight in it. And we show
ourselves to be mere philistines if we criticize it adversely
because we disagree with its philosophical beliefs.
Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam is a perfect gold mine of ex-
amples of what I am saying. Nearly every quatrain in it ex-
presses ideas which probably a majority of us would reject as
false. But notwithstanding this, we think it admirable poetry.
In general its thought content may be roughly described as
the philosophy of materialistic hedonism. Idealism and reli-
gion are frauds. There is nothing but the dead world of mat-
ter, mechanism, and force. Consequently, the only values of
life are the ephemeral pleasures of the senses, of wine and

136
 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

women and song. The chief message of this poem is summed

up in the line "Drink, for once dead you never shall return."
Probably none of us believes this philosophy of life to be
true. But the stupidest thing you can say about a poem is that
you disagree with its ideas. Nor should the fact that you may
perhaps be a firm believer in the efficacy of prayer make any
the less moving to you Omar's cry:

And that inverted howl we call the sky,

Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die.
Lift not thy hands to it for help—for it

Rolls impotently on as thou or I.

Nor if you happen to be a firm believer in free will should

you for that reason think any the less highly of the poetry of
this quatrain:

With Earth's first clay they did the Last Man's knead,
And then of the last harvest sowed the seed:
Yea, the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.
—in which the philosophy of determinism and the absolute
denial of free will are asserted.
But what I have just been saying— that the thought content
of a poem need not be true, or even believed to be true— will
now have to be toned down and modified somewhat. For you
may well object that if there is no sense in which poetry yields
truth, if it is not in any way an expression of any insight about
the nature of things, if it is indifferent whether it expresses
wisdom or folly— does this not reduce it to an idle plaything,
at most a mere decoration of life, not to be considered seri-
ously? And such an objection must give us pause, for it seems
to indicate that something has been left out in what we have
been saying. And this, I think, is really true. Something has
been left out, and we must try to say what it is that is lacking
in our account so far.
Poetry, I shall say, is always revelatory of truth. But the

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 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

truth it reveals is indirect. The poem may make statements

about the universe, about the non-human world, about moun-
tains or stars or trees, or about God, or about free will, or
about anything else whatever. These statements need not be
true about mountains or trees or God. But they should al-
ways reveal some truth about human nature, about what
people call "the secrets of the human heart." If Wordsworth
writes about the mountains, his poem does not really tell us
anything about mountains— we had better go to the geologist
if that is what we want— but it tells us, in the first instance,

about his own feeling for mountains; but secondarily, and

more importantly, about feelings which we, as human beings,
can all share in if we are sensitive enough, and which the
poem can communicate to us even if we never felt those feel-
ings before. Perhaps it may be true that Wordsworth created a
new feeling about mountains. But he nevertheless succeeded
in evoking this feeling in his readers. This he could not have
done if they had not already possessed the potentiality of
these feelings. In this sense the feeling which Wordsworth
created was a universal human feeling, even if no one ever
had that feeling before him; and he was revealing a truth not
merely about his own heart, but about the human heart.
This will not only be true of the older poetry but also of
the poetry of the twentieth century. There is much talk now-
adays about the private meanings of poetry, about the private
languages, words, images, metaphors, which a poet may use
and which are supposed to be comprehensible only to him-
self. But there is a great deal of confusion about this whole

notion of privacy. It is no more than a matter of degree. Does

it mean private to one person only, namely the poet? Or does

it perhaps mean private to a very small elite? If the thought,

the feeling, the imagery, of a poem were private in the ab-

solute sense that no other human being could ever possibly
be taught to share them, then the poet would be, to that ex-
tent, not a human being at all, but some sort of a monster;

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 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

and no one could be induced to publish or read his poems.

At least it must be possible to communicate with an elite.
And I should say that what can be communicated to an elite
must be something which it would be possible for all human
beings to share if their sensitivities could be developed in the
highest degree. And, in this sense, even the poet who most
prides himself on the privacy of his poems is in fact revealing
some truth about human nature in general, or, as we said,
about the human heart, and not only about his own heart.
Ezra Pound wrote a poem in which he said:

Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young,

and from the intolerant.
Move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light
And take your wounds from it gladly.

This appeal for an elite, and for poetry written for an elite,
is perfectly legitimate, and is, in fact, admirable. It is, after
all, nothing but a demand that poetry should appeal to the
highest possible aesthetic sensitivity, and that it reach the

highest possible poetic standards. But

does not prevent
this
it from being an appeal to universal human nature in the

sense which I have explained. The ideal that poetry should

appeal to an elite and the demand that it be universally hu-
man are not incompatible.
I said that poetry reveals truth about the human spirit,

even though it purports to tell us about mountains or stars.

How does this apply to Omar's quatrain about the uselessness
of lifting your hands in prayer to the impotently rolling sky;
or to Swinburne's lines about the eternal night which follows
on death? What truths about human nature do these poems
reveal? For certainly, just as Wordsworth is not revealing
truth about mountains, but rather about human feelings,
so Omar and Swinburne are not giving information about
whether prayer is efficacious or whether there is a life after

139
 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

death; but rather about the feelings of human beings. The

point is that, whether or not prayer is efficacious, it is at any
rate a human thing that a man should look up at the sky and
wonder whether after all there is anyone who hears and listens
to his cries. And it is a human thing that men
should question
whether after all there is anything but darkness beyond the
grave. And may come from one who is either torn and
there
tormented by these thoughts, or who is gladly receptive of
them, or who entertains any other feeling-attitude towards
them— there may come perhaps a cry of despair, perhaps an
expression of bitterness, perhaps of bravado, perhaps of resig-
nation, perhaps of serenity, calmness, and peace in the face
of the inevitable, or perhaps of thankfulness and relief that
the troubles of life will someday have an end and that
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

My point is that these are universal possibilities of human

feeling, in which we ought all to be able to share, whether
we happen to believe in the efficacy of prayer and the survival
of the soul after death or not. If you are so completely im-
prisoned in your own beliefs that you are incapable of enter-
taining, even in imagination, the opposite beliefs, incapable
of sympathetically entering into the feelings which they en-
gender in those who hold them, then there is something not
completely human about you; and there is something about
the human spirit which you have not understood. And it is
this something which these particular poets are revealing to
us, if we are capable of receiving their revelation. The con-
verse of this case is you should happen to be a
also true. If
religious skeptic, an agnostic shall we say, and if, being that,
you are so narrow in your denials, so imprisoned in your skep-
tical dogmas, that you cannot imaginatively entertain and
sympathetically represent to yourself that hunger for God
which is the life of the mystic and the saint, then there is
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 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

about you, something not fully human, and there are

too,
secrets of the human heart which you also have not under-
stood. Thus the old adage "Nothing that is human will I
consider foreign to me" is an important principle for poetry
and for art generally. The proper study of poetry is man, not
mountains, or theology, or any other non-human thing.
The kind of poetry of which this is most obviously true
is, of course, drama. Hamlet and Polonius, Lear and Cor-

delia and Regan, Macbeth and Macduff, Othello and lago

and Desdemona, may, in the course of their speeches, tell us
a good deal about their beliefs and their ideas and their phi-
losophies of life. It is of no importance to us whether these
beliefs and ideas are true or not. If Shakespeare is revealing
truths to us, only truths about human nature.
it is

But it may be thought that this is not true of lyric poetry.

Here, it is often implied, the poet is only telling us about his
own personal ideas and feelings. This is a mistake, a mistake
which is part of the cause of the confused talk about privacy
in poetry to which I referred earlier. Of course the lyric poet
is telling us, in the first instance, about his own inner thoughts

and images and feelings. And in this sense, what he says is

private. But if he has any audience at all, even if it is an elite
which is limited to a mutual admiration society of two or
three persons, then it must be that the poet is revealing truths
about the feelings and images and thoughts of these other
two or three persons. And this will be true even if the poet has
to create, or rather evoke, in those two or three individuals,
feelings and thoughts which they never actually entertained
before, but which had merely lain dormant in them. And, if
you admit this, then in the end you will not be able to deny
that even this most exclusive lyric poet, who thinks he is con-
fining himself to an audience of two or three, has in reality
the whole human race for his possible audience and for his
subject matter. He is -expressing feelings which are possibili-
ties for all men if they can be brought to a sufficiently high

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 Imagery and Thought in Poetry

level of sensitivity,and which are therefore in some sense or

other latent in all men, waiting to be evoked. And therefore,
the lyric poet too, and not only the dramatic poet, is reveal-
ing truths, not merely about himself, but about the whole of
humanity.

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 IV
The Snobbishness of the Learned
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

There is a story told of a very well-known living writer who

produced a popular book on a branch of modern science-

one of the best books of its kind now in print. He is said to
have submitted his manuscript for criticism to a fellow expert,
who, having read it, tossed it back contemptuously, saying,
"You understand thoroughly the subject on which you are
writing, and I have no adverse criticisms to offer. But why do
you waste your time writing stuff of this sort?" The story is
quite possibly apocryphal. But that such a story can be passed
round, and gain credence, illustrates very forcibly the fact that
there is among learned men a widespread tendency to look
down upon popular writing as something not worthy of their
serious consideration, as something to be despised and dis-
couraged.
On the face of it, this would seem to be an extraordinary
attitude. That the discoveries made by men of science and the
world conceptions of philosophers should be made as widely
known as possible would be, one might expect, their especial
desire. And how else can this be done, if not by translating
their thought from the technical jargon in which it is apt to
be expressed into plain English which the world can under-
stand? How else can it be done, in fact, if not by the labors of
the popular writer? It would seem obvious that the wide-
spread dissemination of knowledge already attained is of at
least equal importance with the discovery of new knowledge.

145
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

For what, in the end, is the value of knowledge? His acqui-

sition of knowledge is, to the expert, often an end in itself.
He may be uninterested in its subsequent influence on the
world. And it is quite right, and even necessary, that there
should be men who take this point of view. The advance of
knowledge mostly depends upon such men. But the matter,
after all, cannot end there. To many others, discovery is of
value because of the practical benefits which it confers upon
mankind, as when pure science is applied to the extermina-
tion of disease or the invention of useful implements. But I
would suggest that the supreme value of knowledge lies not
in the thrill which its discovery gives to the small band of
experts, nor even in its practical usefulness, but in the en-
largement and ennoblement of the human mind in general
of which it is the cause.
Of the human mind in general. That means the minds, not
of a few experts, but of the multitudes of civilized humanity.
This has certainly been the case with the greatest discoveries
of science. They have revolutionized human conceptions of
the universe, given men at large a vaster sweep of mind; and
it is this which has constituted their chief importance. The

greatness of the Copernican hypothesis lay neither in its

purely theoretical value for the scientist nor in the better
application of astronomy to navigation or other practical af-
fairs to which it may have contributed, but in the fact that it
gave to mankind some conception of the immensity of the
universe in which we live, and that it destroyed forever the
petty views, the insolence, the self-conceit inevitably con-
nected with the belief that the whole creation exists for, and
revolves around, man.
This is why the Copernican theory constituted a revolution
in human thought. This is why it is so vastly more important
than, shall we say, the discovery of a new variety of ant, or of
a new theorem in mathematics. Exactly similar remarks might
be made about the theory of evolution. That too obtains its

146
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

importance neither from its theoretical nor from its immedi-

ately practical bearings, but from its influence upon man's
general conceptions of the world. Thus what makes the differ-
ence between an important and a trivial scientific or philo-
sophical discovery is precisely the influence which it exerts
upon mankind in general, notupon the minds of a few learned
men. And that why, in philosophy, however interesting such
is

a subject as symbolic logic may be to a few experts, it sinks

into triviality beside the world conceptions of a Plato or a
Kant. It is in itself a mere intellectual plaything, nothing of
real importance, though it may become of importance if it
can be applied to the solution of the great problems of phi-
losophy. And it will be noted that it is precisely this trivial
kind of subject which cannot be popularized.
In truth it matters little what the doctors of science or the
doctors of philosophy think, believe, or say among themselves
in their cloisters. What humanity thinks and believes— that
is what matters. And the true function of the cloistered few is
precisely to be the intellectual leaders of humanity and to
guide the thought of mankind to higher levels. This function
can only be carried out if someone, either they themselves or
others, will translate their thought from technical language
into the language of the market place. The best and the ablest
discoverers and thinkers often possess both the ability and the
desire to do this themselves. (It is worth noting that Einstein
wrote a popular book on relativity.) Or if their talents are not
of the kind required for successful popular writing, it can be
done by men who make a special business of spreading the best
knowledge of their age. This type of popularizer is the liaison
officer between the world's thinkers and mankind at large.
Thus it appears that the function of the popular writer is pro-
foundly important and responsible.
It is related that the soul of a dead man was conducted by
Saint Peter on a tour of inspection of the Heavenly City. After
seeing all the marvelous glories of the Lord, and the millions

147
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

of white-clad worshiping souls, he was shown by his guide a

little curtained-off enclosure in which half a dozen people

were praying, cut off from all the rest of the multitude. These,
he was told, were the Plymouth Brethren, who believed them-
selves to be the only people in Heaven. Those experts who
look down upon popularization, and who would, if they could,
make all knowledge the exclusive property of a little coterie
of intellectuals, show a spirit identical with that of the poor
souls in the story.
But, it will be said, much, if not most, of what learned men

think and discover cannot be made intelligible to the masses.

This is, on the whole, untrue. The big conceptions, the im-
portant results of science and philosophy, can be communi-
cated to the layman. What cannot be communicated is, as a
rule, the detailed processes of discovery and argumentation
which have led to those results.Every educated person now
understands the main conceptions involved in the Copernican
and Darwinian hypotheses, although the proofs and details
may be a sealed book to the majority.
In a tube of anti-typhoid serum there are so many millions
of dead bacteria. The methods by which the number is count-
ed or calculated may remain a mystery to the layman. But the
fact that there are these many can be understood by a child.
The same principle holds true even in those sciences which
seem to most of us too hopelessly mathematical. The results
reached can usually be disentangled from their mathematical
formulation and set forth by themselves. This is not true, of
course, of pure mathematics itself, but only of those physical
sciences which use mathematics as a mere instrument to reach
their conclusions. And this is, after all, what one would ex-
pect. For mathematics is not itself knowledge at all. It is an
instrument for obtaining knowledge. The actuary makes use
of higher mathematics which no one except the expert can
follow. But the resulting knowledge which he obtains is in-
telligible to everyone. The astronomer uses mathematics to

148
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

calculate an eclipse, but none

is required to understand his

final prediction. And not fundamentally different with

it is

relativity. To think otherwise is like supposing that one can-

not appreciate the scenery of Niagara Falls without under-
standing the mechanism of the railway locomotive w^hich
conveys one there.
Mathematics, said a famous writer, is a science of which the
meanest intellect is capable. The statement by no means re-
flects, as one might be inclined to think, the mere partisan

prejudice of a one-sided and narrow intelligence. There is a

real truth in it. It is obviously false if it is understood to mean
that a stupid man can be a good mathematician. For plainly
it is only a very clever man indeed who can be first-class in

any other, subject. But his intellect may neverthe-

this, as in
less be,and indeed is, mean if he is incapable of doing any-
thing with it except juggling with symbols— however cleverly
he may do this. For mathematics, as I said before, is not knowl-
edge, but only an instrument for obtaining knowledge. A
Newton or an Einstein uses mathematics to help him reach
out to great and grand conceptions of the universe. This em-
ployment of mathematics as an instrument of general culture
is the work of noble, and not of mean, intellects. But in so far
as it cares for nothing save its own internal affairs, is without
effect upon general culture,mere manipulation of symbols
is a
for their own sakes, it certainly can be cultivated, and success-
fully cultivated, by mean minds— that is, by minds which know
nothing of, and care nothing for, what is really great in hu-
man culture.
because mathematics is a means, and not an end, that
It is
a purely mathematical education is a bad education— or,
rather, no education at all. For the true purpose of education
is to teach men what things in life are genuinely valuable.

That is, it is concerned with ends. Therefore education ought

not to concentrate upon means. They are a secondary matter.
The true order is to learn first what to aim at, and then only
149
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

^vhat are the instrumentalities by which we may attain our

ends. Mathematics, accordingly, should be part of a subse-
quent technical training. Thus the now old-fashioned pref-
erence for a classical— which really meant a humanistic— over
a mathematical education, although it may have degenerated

into a prejudice or even a pig-headed obscurantism, was orig-

inally rooted in a true insight.
The impression that philosophical and scientific ideas can-
not be explained in plain language to plain people is also in
large measure due to the fact that philosophers and men of
science have not, as a rule, the wit to do it. It is due, in plain
terms, to the stupidity of the learned men, not to the stupidity
of humanity. They and adroitness
lack the mental flexibility
Avhich are required they are to come out of their hiding
if

places in the laboratory and the library and make themselves

intelligible in the big world of men. They can speak only one
language, the language of cast-iron technical formulas. Change
the language, take away from them their technical terms and
symbols, and they no longer know where they are. They are
like those inferior boxers who can only box according to the
rules and are nonplused by anyone who disregards them and
fights as the light of nature teaches him. They lack too that
human sympathy with simple people which is also essential
if the teachings of science and philosophy are to be made

available to the many. They cannot move with ease in the

world of men. And these too are the reasons why erudite men,
great figures in their own secluded world, are so often ob-
served to behave like buffaloes in society.
The contemptuous attitude toward popular writing so
often affected by learned men is, then, nothing but an un-
warranted prejudice. And it may not be uninteresting to
inquire into its psychological motivation. May I be allowed
to recommend to the reader that, whenever in this human
world he finds a totally unreasonable opinion adopted by
large bodies of people, he make a practice of looking, not for

150
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

reasons, but for motives. He will thus save himself much time
which might otherwise be wasted in searching for rationality
where none exists.
Why, then, do so many workers in intellectual fields look
askance at any attempt to make the results of their labors in-
telligible to the world at large? It is true that some apparently
plausible reasons may be urged. Popular writers tend to de-
velop certain characteristic faults. Cheap cleverness not in-
frequently mars their writings. And they are apt to slur over
difficult and profound conceptions, and to substitute super-
ficialities—because they have not the gift of being both simple
and profound at the same time. Thus a writer on Aristotle,
who wished to make easy for his readers that philosopher's
teleological conception of the cause of motion, wrote that in
Aristotle'sview "'tis love, 'tis love that makes the world go
round." But a moment's thought should be sufficient to con-
vince one that these facts afford no basis whatever for a general
contempt of popular writing. Popular writers may often be
cheap and shallow. But to entertain a prejudice against popu-
lar writing because some popular writers are bad is like con-
demning all books because of the existence of certain inferior
authors.
The real ground which popular writing
for the disfavor in
is held among expertsbe found elsewhere. It is rooted in
is to
class prejudice. The learned think themselves superior to the
common herd. They are a priestly caste imbued with the
snobbishness that is characteristic of caste systems. Their
learning is the mark of their superiority. It must be kept with-
in the limits of their own class. And the means by which this
is accomplished consists in a learned language of long words

and technical terms. Anyone who translates knowledge from

the technical into the popular language disregarding the
is

rules of caste, and is thus taboo. Technical terms, long words,

learned-sounding phrases are the means by which second-rate
intellectuals "inflate their egos" and feed their sense of su-

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 The Snobbishness of the Learned

periority to the multitude. If an idea can be expressed in two

ways, one of which involves a barbarous technical jargon
while the other needs nothing but a few simple words of one
syllable which everyone can understand, this kind of person
definitely prefers the barbarous technical jargon. He wishes
to be thought, and above all to think himself, a person who
understands profound and difficult things which common
folk cannot comprehend. He wishes to feel himself cleverer
than other people. The long words and clumsy phrases with
which he encumbers the simplest thought are the badges of
his class superiority. And as this kind of person is always in
a majority in any large assembly of intellectuals, a definite
prejudice against popular writing is engendered.
The poorer a man's intellectual equipment, the more does
he revel in technicalities. A man with a wealth of valuable
ideas is anxious to communicate those ideas and will naturally
tend to choose for that purpose the simplest language he can
find. But a man whose intellectuality is a sham, and who has
in truth nothing to communicate, endeavors to conceal his
emptiness by an outward show of learning. The more unin-
telligible his language, the more profound will he appear to
himself and (he hopes) to others. He fails to see that the love
of long words and technical terms is in fact nothing but a
symptom of his mental infirmity. It
is a kind of intellectual

disease. And
perhaps those who suffer from this disease would
like to have a technical term for their own malady. I will
therefore make them a present of a new long word. I will
christen their disease macronomatamania.
It is true that a few really great men, such as Immanuel
Kant, have seemed to revel unnecessarily in technicalities. But
let not all the macronomatamaniacs of the world attempt to
shelter themselves under Kant's umbrella. Kant was great in
spite of his obscure language, not because of it. And one
does not become great by aping the weaknesses of a great man.
It is true, too, that technical terms are a necessity. In many
branches of knowledge one cannot do without them. This is

152
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

especially true in science. And it is true (but in a much lesser

degree) in philosophy. About their use in science I will say
nothing at all. Even regarding their use in philosophy I will
not attempt in this place to say what their legitimate functions
are, nor legislate as to where they should be used and where
avoided. For that would be itself a technical inquiry, not
suitable to this essay. I will, however, set down what I regard
as an elementary first principle of a good style in philosophical
writing. It is this: Never use a technical term when a simple
non-technical ivord or phrase will equally well express your
meaning. And I would add as a gloss: Cultivate in yourself a
dislike and suspicion of all learned-sounding words and tech-
nical terms, a habit of regarding them not as fine things, but
at best as necessary evils. This will come easily to anyone
naturally endowed with a hatred of humbug, and also to any-
one with an artistic sense of the beauty and value of words;
and the result of it will be that, whenever a technical term
springs to the writer's mind, he will instinctively cast about to
see whether he cannot replace it by plain English. Sometimes
it will happen that he cannot do so without prejudice to his

meaning. But often it will happen that he can.

I think that these principles should be applied not only to

popular writing in the usual sense, but to all philosophical

writing of whatever sort, even that which is written by experts
for experts. For the use of a good style and of plain decent
English will always facilitate the communication of meaning,
to whomsoever it is addressed. And if anyone asks for an ex-
ample of a good philosophical style, of the kind I have in
mind, I would point to the writings of Bertrand Russell as
showing the best philosophical style of recent times. Russell,
of course, uses technical terms, plenty of them; but never, I
think, where they could reasonably have been avoided.
A technical term as such is, anywhere and everywhere, a
barbarism, an eyesore, an offense to the soul, a thing to be
shuddered at and avoided. Macronomatamaniacs, therefore,
are not only to be suspected of emptiness, but also to be

153
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

accused of lack of taste. When a man uses a hideous jumble

of technical terms where he could use plain English words,
he writes himself down as a person without the sense of the
beauty and dignity of langauge. After all, the issue is a simple
one. Do you wish to communicate thought? Or are you im-
pelled by some other motive— to appear clever, to boost your-
self up as a highbrow, to impress the simple-minded with your
superiority, or what not? If you write an article or a book,
your sole motive ought to be to communicate what you con-
ceive to be truth to as many people as possible. If a writer is
governed by this motive, it is inevitable that he will express
himself in the simplest language which he can possibly find.
And if, in addition to this sincerity, he has also some sense of
the beauty of language, he will choose short, sharp, simple,
expressive words in preference to long, uncouth, and clumsy
ones. He will not, for example, write "ratiocination" when all
he means is "reasoning," nor "dianoetic" when the word "in-
tellectual" would do just as well.
Unfortunately, however, to communicate ideas is by no
means the most usual motive for writing books. And if a man
writes because he thinks himself a superior person, and wishes
to impose this same delusion upon other people, he tends to
make his style as obscure and difficult as possible. He hopes
that his obscurity will be mistaken for profundity. He will
write, if he can, in a learned language instead of a simple one.
He will prefer big words to little ones, and a barbarous tech-
nical jargon to plain English. And the American custom of
forcing university professors to "produce" (that is, to write
books), and of practically making their promotion in their
profession depend upon their doing so, is responsible for no
little evil in this matter. Not only does it result in the publi-
cation of floods of inferior books, which the world would be
much better without; not only does it compel men who have
no taste for writing, and no gift for it, to waste their time writ-
ing bad books when, if left alone, they might have made
admirable and even great teachers; but it also demoralizes

154
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

style, and develops macronomatamaniacs. For the man who

has nothing to say worthy of publication is encouraged, almost

compelled, to conceal his lack under a smoke screen of techni-

calities and obscure verbiage. He has to convince his univer-
sity superiors of his intellectuality; and since he cannot do
this by the inner worth of his thought, he must do it by putting
out a spurious and pretentious conglomeration of learned-
sounding words.
How easily this succeeds, how easily the world (including
the learned world) is gulled by long words, the following inci-
dent may serve to illustrate. Years ago, in a certain university,
there flourished a "Philosophical Society," in which the ten-
dency to read papers couched in obscure and unintelligible
language became rampant. A brilliant Irishman, wishing to
prick the bubble, read before the society a paper called "The
Spirit of the Age." In this paper there was not a single para-
graph, not a single sentence even, which possessed, or was
intended by the author to possess, the faintest glimmer of
meaning. It was full of long words, of loud-mouthed phrases,
of swelling periods. It sounded magnificent; it meant nothing.
The society listened to it in rapt attention. Not one of the
members perceived that the society was being fooled; and a
long and learned discussion followed, in which not one of the
members admitted that he had not understood the paper. A
man may write whole books of what is either totally mean-
ingless or palpably false, and may secure by doing so a wide
reputation, provided only that he uses long enough words.
For example, the thought that there is no such thing as
thought is self-contradictory nonsense. But if a man wraps up
this same nonsense in a learned-sounding hocus-pocus about
reflex arcs and conditioned reflexes, if he talks enough about
neurons and the neural processes, and if he interlards his
whole discourse with the technical terms of physiology, he
may become the founder of a school of psychology, and stands
a good chance of earning an enormous salary.
But to come back to popular writing and its place in the

155
 The Snobbishness of the Learned

world of learning. I would contend for two positions. First,

the works of the pure popularizer— the man who has nothing
of his own to say but who popularizes other people's thoughts
—is of the utmost importance. So far from being despised, he
ought to be regarded as performing an absolutely vital func-
tion in the intellectual progress of mankind. And it is per-
fectly possible for him to be popular without being either
shallow or cheap. Secondly, I would urge that, in a sense, all
writing, even of the most original, learned, and abstruse kinds,
should aim at being popular as far as possible. That such writ-
ing can always be made entirely suitable for the general reader
is not for a moment contended. But the writer can at least

aim at using technical terms as sparingly as possible, at avoid-

ing unnecessary jargon, at expressing himself as simply and
clearly as he can— even as beautifully as the nature of his
subject permits. He can surely avoid giving the reader the
feeling that he positively likes ugly words, that he revels in
unintelligibilities, that he dotes on gibberish. Most readers
will be grateful to him if they feel that he is at least trying to
make some meaning clear to them, and not merely to stun,
intimidate, and befuddle them with his cleverness. His writ-
ing will be popular in the only sense— and in the best sense-
in which this can be demanded of him.
Nearly all the great philosophers of the English tradition
have been in this sense popular writers, though I am afraid
that the same cannot be said of the Germans. The style of
Locke is lucid, if pedestrian; of both Berkeley and Hume
beautiful in the extreme; of Mill clear and simple, though
undistinguished and marred by some affectations; of Spencer
perfectly lucid in spite of the ''hurdy-gurdy monotony of him."
William James, the greatest of American philosophers, had
an absolute genius for graphic, telling, and brilliant English
phrases. And of living writers, as I have already said, Russell's
style is the best, and is a standing example of the fact that
philosophy, and original philosophy too, can be written in
plain English with an absolute minimum of technical terms.

156
 V
Political and International
 Have Nations Any Morals?

International morality may seem a figment of the imagina-

tion. It is bad enough to talk morals to the individual man in
connection with his individual affairs. Tell the businessman
that he ought to behave with Christian unselfishness towards
his competitors and you are likely to appear intolerably smug
or perhaps merely irrelevant and absurd. There is a story—
perhaps it is quite apocryphal— that Carl Frederick Taeusch,
Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard, was introduced to
Samuel Alexander, the English philosopher, who was very
deaf. The introducer said, "This is Professor Taeusch, Profes-
sor of Business Ethics at Harvard." Alexander said, "What?"
The introducer shouted, "Professor of Business Ethics at Har-
vard." "It's no use," said Alexander. "I can't hear. It sounds
"
to me just like Trofessor of Business Ethics at Harvard.'
Alexander thought, evidently, that "business ethics" is a con-
tradiction in terms.
Well, if talking morals at the private individual often seems
irrelevant or smug, how much more would this seem to be
true if one were to talk morals at the nations. Would there be
any sense in saying to the nations: "You ought to behave to
one another like Christian saints?" How childishly unrealistic
that sounds. Is it not an axiom that nations, in their dealings
with one another, are guided and must be guided solely by
considerations of national self-interest? And if so, what room
is there here for talk about moral principles? Now it has

159
 Political and International

always struck me that there is a curious contradiction at this

point in our international thinking. On the one hand, we
keep repeating glibly this saying that states in their interna-
tional actions are and must be governed exclusively by na-
This idea is not only popular: it reaches
tional self-interest.
the highest circles of our government. Once— a long time
ago— a British Minister, Oliver Lyttelton, actually had the ef-
frontery to accuse America of entering the second world war
not wholly out of self-interest, but partly out of a generous
feeling of sympathy for those nations, including the British,
who had been attacked by the Nazis! He suggested that this
American attitude and the actions which resulted from it had
been partly responsible for Japan's decision to attack America.
Secretary Cordell Hull was furious. He thundered from Wash-
ington that America had no such motives. American action
and the American attitude had been entirely correct; that is,
America had been motivated exclusively by considerations of
self-defense— which is to say, self-interest. The British gov-
ernment, pursuing its policy of appeasing America, thereupon
compelled Oliver Lyttelton abjectly to apologize. Thus this
slogan about national self-interest is a fixed part of our inter-
national thinking.
But, on the other hand, we also talk loudly about morals
in international affairs. Did we not say that there were moral
issues involved in the war? Did we not claim that we were
fighting for justice? Do we not say that Nazism was the re-
pudiation of international justice, of international morals?
Do we not say that we want to establish an international order
based on law and justice, and not on the law of the jungle?
Also we high-mindedly disapprove of imperialism, and we
used to lecture the British about keeping their promises to
the Indians in India or to the Jews in Palestine. But why in
the world should we disapprove of imperialism? And why in
the world should the British keep their promises? There is
implied in these attitudes a belief that moral principles ought
to have some place in national actions.
160
 Have Nations Any Morals?

Again, there actually exists a body of rules and principles

called ''international law," and some nations sometimes ob-
serve some of its provisions. But this international law is
hardly law at all in the sense in which acts of Congress are laws.
For acts of Congress are enforceable by sanctions. Congress
does not merely exhort you to pay your income tax. It tells
you that if you don't, something extremely unpleasant will
happen to you. The some way of en-
existence of a sanction, of
forcing a law, is is no way
part of the essence of law. But there
of enforcing international law except the crude way of re-
prisals. Therefore, international law is not in the full sense
law, although it is true that courts adjudicate on it. What is

it, then? It is mainly moral exhortation. It is a body of moral

principles which civilized nations have agreed that they ought

to follow, and which some of them do follow in some respects.
The theory that nations must act exclusively from national
self-interest is identical with the theory that in international
affairs the law of the jungle should prevail. It was, incidentally,
Hitler's theory. That does not necessarily make it wrong, but
what I am pointing out is the utter muddle-headedness of our
American thinking, which believes two flatly contradictory
principles.
The
atomic bomb, besides having exploded Japanese cities,
may possibly explodesome of our incredibly foolish notions.
We think that nations ought not to be moral— for this is the
plain meaning of our chatter about self-interest as the only
proper motive of nations. Well, we had better change our
opinion and change it fast. Otherwise there may be no nations
left to have any self-interest. I propose to show that this
opinion is false— that not only ought nations to be moved by
moral forces, but in point of fact they are moved by them
already.
Let us take what would seem to be the hardest case,
first

that of the Germans in the two world wars. Moral forces, we

might say did not operate in their international actions in any
way. But I think this is a mistaken view. Hitler in Mein Kampf
161
 Political and International

says repeatedly that force of arms will succeed only if it is

inspired by some ideal. People will not fight, he says— or at

least will not fight successfully— unless they believe that they
are fighting for some great idea, for some ideal, for some just
cause.They will not fight for merely selfish and material ends.
Hitler was a much better psychologist that some of our states-
men. He knew that he could not make the German people
fightsimply out of self-interest. If he had said to them simply,
''Bymeans of a vast spilling of our blood we can conquer the
earth and make everyone on earth slave for us. And then we
shall all be twice as rich as we are now. We shall all eat twice
as much. And those who now can drink only beer will all be
able to drink champagne," not a German would have fol-
lowed him. He had, on the contrary, to impregnate the Ger-
man mind with a moral, ideal, and even mystical creed. He
had to invent something like a new Weltanschauung, even
a new religion. He had to persuade the German people that
they ^vere called on to sacrifice their blood for a noble cause.
You will say, of course, that Hitler's ideas were in fact not
moral but diabolical, that his Weltanschauung was false, that
the ideals he fostered were in fact profoundly immoral. But
I do not think this is correct. It may have been a false morality

that animated the German people, but it was a morality.

It was certainly not mere self-interest. It contained the ideas of
nobility and heroism— and these, however distorted their ap-
plication, are moral ideas. The point is that Hitler had to
make the Germans believe they were struggling towards a
higher world morality— however hideously false that morality
may in fact have been.
Now let us take another case, that of England during the
first world war. In 1914 when the Germans invaded Belgium,

British national self-interest was involved. It was contrary to

British interests that the powerful German nation should con-
trol the Channel ports and the Continental shores opposite
Britain. Also it would destroy the balance of power. But Sir

162
 Have Nations Any Morals?

Edward Grey put the matter to the British nation mainly

(though not exclusively) as a moral issue. Germany was break-
ing her solemn promises and was oppressing a little nation
whose neutrality Britain as well as Germany was pledged to
defend. Why did Sir Edward Grey put it thus? Because he
knew, as Hitler knew later, that a nation will not be moved
to the supreme effort of war by mere material self-interest,
but only when the people themselves inspired by a moral
feel
purpose. At this point the cynic, who knows all the answers,
will say, "It is evident that the real cause of Britain's going
to warin 1914 was self-interest, and Sir Edward Grey knew
this, but had to delude the British into believing they had a
moral cause, just as later Hitler had to delude the Germans."
I think this is cheap cynicism for two reasons.

In the first place it is an open question how far the leaders

of a self-respecting nation ever deliberately delude the nation
and invent moral issues in which they do not believe. I should
say that Sir Edward Grey probably himself believed both
that it was Britain's self-interest to go to war and that it was
her moral duty to do so, but that he w^as a good enough
psychologist to know that he must play up the moral issue
rather than the self-interest. I think he believed in the moral
justice of the British cause as much as anyone else and that
he was perfectly sincere in his insistence upon this. And even
Hitler, I should say, at the time he wrote Mein Kampf, be-
lieved in his so-called higher German morality. In the second
place, even if I am wrong about this, even if we represent the
leaders of nations, including Sir Edward Grey, and Hitler,
and perhaps Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a pack of
cynical hypocrites who in their hearts believed in nothing but
selfishness between nations, but deluded their people with
talk of moral ideas— even if we believe this, I say, it does not
in any way lessen the force of my argument. Rather, it
strengthens it. For it is an admission that the nations, the
peoples of the world, are moved by moral ideas and moral

163
 Political and International

forces, that moral ideals do enter into the motivation of their

actions in regard to each other. It is therefore utterly false to
say that the motives of international action are purely those
of self-interest.And this assertion will remain true even if we
hold that the moral forces acting in these peoples are merely
used by their leaders to steer the nations into those courses
which the leaders think they should, from their national self-
interest, follow. Moral ideas are not only relevant to the inter-
national scene but are profoundly powerful in it.
There used to be, among economists, an absurd abstraction
called "the economic man." The economic man was gov-
erned solely by considerations of profit and loss— that is, by
self-interest. His mind was nothing but a calculating machine.
It added up the probable profits and losses of a proposed
action, and if the calculation showed a balance of profit to
himself, he acted. If not, not. And no consideration other
than profit and loss moved him in the slightest degree. Econo-
mists have now given up the idea of the economic man. It
involved a fantastic oversimplification of human nature.
Human beings are simply not like that. No businessman, even
the most hardheaded, is a mere calculating machine of profit
and All sorts of other motives, some generous, some un-
loss.

generous, some indifferent, irrelevant, or merely whimsical,

enter in. Evenhe allows his liking for a friend to deflect his
if

action by a hair's breadth— to make him contented, for ex-

ample, with a profit of only a thousand dollars where he might
have made a thousand dollars and fifty cents by ruining his
friend— even this trivial deflection of his action by a slight
feeling of generosity to a friend takes him out of the class of
purely economic men, since it means that his action is in some
degree motivated by moral impulses— for generosity and
friendship are moral impulses.
Now this absurd abstraction of the economic man, long
out of date in economics, pops up again in our international
thinking in the form of the doctrine that foreign policy is

164
 Have Nations Any Morals?

and ought to be governed only by national self-interest. This

is just as much an oversimplification of the psychology of
nations as the economic man was of the psychology of indi-
viduals,and it is the same oversimplification. The motives of
nations, as of individual men, are extraordinarily mixed and
complicated, and somewhere in the mixture you will always
find moral ideas working. The element of truth in the current
belief that nations have no morals seems to me to be this: the
level of morals as practiced by individual human beings be-
tween themselves is relatively high; the level of morals as
practiced by nations between themselves is deplorably low.
There is such a thing as international morality. That is to say,
moral forces do operate on the international plane. But the
standard of morals as between nations is much lower than the
standard of morals practiced by decent people towards each
other in the sphere of individual action. It is this fact which
gives rise to statements that moral ideas do not apply to nations
at all, and that nations act purely from self-interest. These
statements are to be explained simply as exaggerations. We
see the deplorably low level of international morality, and
then we make wild statements denying altogether its existence
or even its possibility.
Why is there this vast difference between the ethical stan-
dards of individuals and the ethical standards of states? There
are several reasons. One is the mere fact that other nations are
at a distance from us. We
cannot easily wrong a person on our
doorstep, where we what we do, but we can
see the results of
more with indifference, or even brutality, when the
easily act
victims are thousands of miles away and we do not see the
results of our actions. But the reason which is more relevant
to my topic is the following: Individuals act within a com-
munity of individuals, the state; but nations do not act within
a community of nations. There is no world-state or super-state.
The morality of individuals is embodied in institutions, of
which the chief is the state, but which also include all sorts
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 Political and International

of other institutions, such as the family, the churches, the

universities, schools, unions, societies of all kinds, even social
clubs. The morality of the individual is at every point created
for him, upheld, inspired, supported by the whole social
organism of which he forms a part. His morality is objectified
But there is no nation of nations, no state
in these institutions.
of states,no institution in which international morality can
organize and objectify itself. Therefore, international mo-
rality inevitably remains at a low level, because it lacks the
necessary organs and instruments by which to realize itself.
Several consequences follow. First, the low level of inter-
national morals is not due to any inherent non-moral char-
acter of the nation or the state as such. It is not because in

the nature of things the state super-moral or sub-moral or

is

outside morality, or that morality does not apply to it. Men

collected into a nation have the same moral feelings and
moral natures as do the individuals who compose the collec-
tion. But as nations they lack the institutions, especially the
institution of a great overall state, in which their moral na-
tures can express and objectify themselves. Second, you can-
not have a very high level of international morality until
you do have a world-state. And in the peace after a war it is
foolish to expect ideal solutions. But the general problem of
the control and government of human beings everywhere, even
within an organized community, is to leaven the vast inert
bulk of human indifference and even wickedness with that
bare modicum of morality and justice which it will stand.
That is why the law of a country always lags behind the moral
sense of its best citizens. It cannot enforce the highest stan-
dards of its best citizens, but only the much lower standards
which practically all its citizens, even those who are most
undeveloped morally, will support. If it tries to aim higher
than that, the law is flouted and breaks down. How much
more true will this be in the international sphere, where there
is no government to enforce any law. To be more specific, if

166
 Have Nations Any Morals?

you try to force on a country like Russia some law or principle

which that country is not ready to accept, then that country
will flout your law and your principle. And the result will be
not merely that law breaks down in that instance, but that all
respect for law is gone, and that it breaks down everywhere
all over the world. And then your entire peace breaks down.
As to the world-state, without which I say you can never
get a high level of international morality, I have no doubt
that it will someday come. It is in the direct line of human
evolution. Smaller wholes coalesce into larger wholes. There
are unicellular organisms. Then single cells coalesce into
multicellular organisms. Individual multicellular organisms
coalesce into families, families into tribes, tribes into nations.
The evolutionary process would not naturally stop till it ends
in the organization of all men into a single society. But that
is way off. Perhaps in five hundred years, perhaps even
a long
in a hundred years, we might have a world-state. At any rate,
it is no use writing of what may happen in a remote future.

Let us consider merely the decade or so which lies directly

in front of us.
The problem of the immediate future is: Admitting that
we cannot yet have a world-state, and that a very high level of
international morals is impossible without it, how, in these
circumstances, can we gradually raise the level of international
morals? I think that there are just three principles we should
try to apply.
The first principle is that we should, as a nation, place
ourselves always on the side of justice, in every dispute, and
endeavor by our example to influence others to do the same.
In general, the American people already instinctively do this.
The practical difficulty, of course, is to know which is the
side of justice. And here we are often likely, through igno-
rance of complicated about remote countries, to
sets of facts
go astray. But even if in the particular case we may be partly
ignorant or even mistaken about a situation, the fact that we

167
 Political and International

stand for just solutions in general will exercise a great weight.

For instance, in the matter of India. We
placed ourselves on
the side of freedom for the Indians. The British replied that
they were as anxious for Indian freedom as we were, but that
we did not understand the complexity of the problem. This
charge was in general true. We
are most of us woefully
ignorant of even the most elementary facts of the extraordi-
narily complex Indian situation. But even though we under-
estimated the immense problem which India presented to the
British, and thereby in our words and thoughts often did some
injustice to our British friends, yet the fact that we stood for
Indian freedom put the pressure in the right direction. It
tended to force the British to solve those problems which
otherwise they, even if we grant their good intentions, might
have given up as insoluble. Keeping up this pressure, even
sometimes in rather an ignorant way, helped towards solution
of these problems.
The second principle is that we should try to persuade na-
tions that national self-interest is in the long run best served
by international justice and morality rather than by the law
of the jungle. Perhaps we need to preach this more to our-
selves than to other people, certainly as much. It is the failure
to understand this principle which produces isolationism. I
do not mean to suggest that one can attain the highest stand-
ard of morals by basing morality on self-interest. It is not true
that they always coincide. The world's moral giants and teach-
ers, the saints, the martyrs, the moral heroes, to whom we look
up as the best of our kind, were never made merely by taking
a long view of their own interests. The cynical opinion that
the good man is merely more clever at advancing his own in-
terests than the bad man, but that they both aim exclusively
at their own interests, is psychologically false. But, then, we
are not hoping at present to produce a world of heroically
moral nations. We
are trying to inject a bare minimum of
morality into the international chaos. And at that low level

168
 Have Nations Any Morals?

of morals at which we are compelled to operate, it is roughly

true that intelligent self-interestand decent behavior coin-
cide. For example, you do produce a relatively decent level
of business ethics by getting businessmen to see that honesty
is the best policy. The same will be true in the international

sphere.
The third principle is that we should support all interna-
tional organizations which tend towards common action and
the submergence of individual national interests in a larger
whole. But here we find ourselves involved in a difficulty
which something like a vicious circle. The reason we can-
is

not attain a high level of international morality is that there

is no world-state. But, then, the reason we cannot at present

achieve a world-state is that our level of international moral-

ity is so low. This is the first half of the circle. I will say a
word about the second. Why can we not have a world-state
now? The League of Nations was not a world-state, but it was
a move in that direction. The reason why the League of Na-
tions broke down was not that its instrument or its machinery
was faulty. It was a very good instrument; it was very good
machinery. It broke down partly because it was not supported
by the great powers, and partly because even those powers
which did join it were not willing to back it to the extent of
risking what they believed to be their individual national in-
terests for the sake of the interests of the community of na-
tions. To be they would not enforce the necessary
specific,
sanctions in the cases of Manchuria and Ethiopia because
they did not see that their own interests were immediately
involved. But morality, if it means anything, means the merg-
ing of your individual interests in the interests of the com-
munity. So it comes to this: the League broke down because
the level of international morals was so low.
What, then, are we to do to get out of this circle? We can't
have a high level of morals until we get a world-state. And
we c^n't have a world-state till we get a higher level of morals.
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 Political and International

There is nothing we can do in these circumstances except try

to get rid of old habits of thought. We are still, all of us,
everywhere in the world, in the grip of old habits of thought,
carried over from the day when the nations were relatively
independent or self-dependent, into an age in which they
have become, whether they like it or not, interdependent.
Our habit is to think in national terms only, whereas we have
to learn to think in international terms. The practical prob-
lem not to explain this idea— any child can understand it;
is,

it is not even to get people to believe the idea— most of us

believe it now; it is to get our own people, and the peoples of

the world, so soaked with this idea that they naturally and in-
stinctively act from it— that acting from it goes with the grain
of their minds, not against the grain. The achievement of this
result almost involves implanting a new instinct, and is a
problem of education, of conditioning.
Immediately after the first use of the atomic bomb. Presi-
dent Truman warned the Japanese that they had still time
to save themselves, but that the time was short. He might as
well have addressed these words to the American, or any other,
nation. How long have we been living in a fool's paradise,
imagining that we can shape our world policy by nothing save
our own narrow interests conceived as independent of the in-
terests of other nations? In the next war, if we allow one to
come, we may be "vaporized" en masse by rockets fired from
a distance of thousands of miles, almost before we know that
we are at war. There is only one way out. We have to learn
the lesson that nations, deserting their petty ideas of sov-
ereignty, prestige, national self-interest, must combine to act
together for the common good of humanity— which is the
meaning of acting morally. There is still time to learn this
lesson. But the time is short.

170
 British Colonialism

On the wall in the office of a certain British administrator in

the tropics there used to hang a notice to the public which
read: "There's no reason for it. It's just our policy." What a
brilliant summation of the absence of any political philos-
ophy in the British— and also of British arrogance! It may be
true that in some sense the British are past masters in the arts
of diplomacy and government. But they are so by instinct, and
not by any rational understanding. As D. W. Brogan has said,
they do not, like the French and the Americans, regard poli-
tics as a rational science.
Ceylon, which was formerly an autocratically governed
crown colony and has now evolved, after a series of remark-
able political experiments covering a quarter of a century,
into an independent, self-governing dominion within the
commonwealth, provides an interesting case history of Brit-
ish colonial methods. While methods and policies have nat-
urally differed in details in different colonies, there is a cer-
tain characteristic and common stamp and pattern to
British
them all. Ceylon was always considered the leading crown
colony. There British methods had been worked out to their
highest development, and an examination of them will dis-
close in its greatest clearness the main tendencies of British
colonial rule. To find these characteristic marks of the Brit-
ishbrand of colonialism we have to look, not at the recent
developments which culminated in independence, but at how

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 Political and International

things were done there before those developments began, that

is to say, before about 1920. We
have to examine how the
British acted when
they ruled the colony autocratically.
In 1796 the maritime provinces of the island were taken
from the Dutch, and in 1815 the mountainous interior, still
ruled by Sinhalese kings, was by treaty ceded to the British.
The first fact to note is that they exercised an absolute rule
for a century thereafter, and that during that century no po-
liticaladvance whatever was recorded. The details of the con-
stitution of the government changed from time to time, but
the general autocratic pattern was always the same. In 1910
when I landed there as a junior civil servant the setup was as
follows: The country was ruled by a British governor. He had
as cabinet an executive council whose function was purely
advisory. It was composed of British civil servants who, of
course, drew their salaries from the governor's treasury and
were in no way independent. There was also a small legisla-
tive council to pass the necessary statutes. A majority of its

members were who were bound always to vote

British officials
according to the governor's orders. A minority of the members
were not officials, usually natives of the country, who were
supposed to represent the various native communities. They
were appointed by the governor, but could vote as they liked.
But even if the unofficial minority voted solidly against a
government measure— a rare circumstance because they were
divided by mutual jealousies— it was always automatically out-
voted by the official majority. Thus the governor completely
controlled the legislature and could pass any measure he
wished. He was, of course, subject to the orders of the Secre-
tary of State for the Colonies in London, who would no
doubt stop any legislation he considered unwise or unjust.
This government, though autocratic, was not otherwise evil
or oppressive. On the contrary, it was well intentioned and
its spirit was benevolent. The governor himself, and the army

of British civil servants who worked the actual machinery of

172
 British Colonialism

government, were usually good men— according to their lights.

They were highly educated, among the best that Oxford and
Cambridge and the other British universities could produce.
They were just, and as humane as such men usually are.
They were incorruptible. They were impelled nearly always
by a remarkably high sense of duty, and they conceived their
first duty to be the safeguarding of the interests of the native

inhabitants, not those of the British businessmen, traders, and

tea or rubber planters who made their living in the island.
Not infrequently they found themselves called upon to pro-
tect their native subjects against the rapacity of some of the
less enlightened of the British business communities. And
they did so unostentatiously and as a matter of course. These
were some of their virtues. Of their defects I shall speak later,
remarking here only that they sprang mainly from narrow-
ness and lack of imagination.
It should throw light on the spirit of British governmental
methods, both in the colonies and in the home country, to
consider what type of men were selected for the civil services,
how they were selected, and especially what kind of education
or training they were expected to have. Entrance to the senior
civil services, that is to say those of Britain itself, India, Cey-
lon, Malaya, and Hong Kong, was exclusively by competitive
examination. The examination was so stiff that none below the
highest grades of university honors men, or men of equivalent
intellectual caliber, could hope to be selected. Thus first-class
brains and a first-class education were insisted upon.
What was most remarkable about this examination was that
it was quite unnecessary for a candidate to have made any
study of political theory, of government, or of any subject
which could have the slightest direct bearing on his future
career. He could include political science among his subjects
for the examination if he were so minded, but it was not a
compulsory subject. In fact there were no compulsory subjects
at all. There was a long list of subjects, about thirty if I re-

173
 Political and International

member rightly, and the candidate could select at his pleasure

any of these up to a certain total of possible marks. They in-
cluded Latin, Greek, various modern languages, half a dozen
natural sciences, mathematics, history, literature, the arts,
philosophy, political science, economics, English law, Roman
law, and so on. These subjects were not all equally weighted.
For instance, in my time, both classics and mathematics count-
ed four times as heavily as either political science or econom-
ics. Philosophy counted twice as heavily as either of the latter.

This shows what little importance was attached to directly vo-

cational studies in government or connected subjects. So long
as the candidates were of first-class intellectual ability and
were highly educated, it did not matter what they were edu-
cated in. As a rule, and unless they happened to have chosen
political science as one of their subjects of examination, they
began their lifework of governing men with no knowledge
whatever, either theoretical or practical, of the art or science
of government. There was some exception to this in the case
of men going to India who, after they had passed the exami-
nation, were given some months' training in Indian affairs
before they took ship. No such training was given to men
going to Ceylon, Malaya, and Hong Kong. They were shipped
to their colonies to begin work immediately after passing the
examination.
How would these men learn the principles of government?
They would learn them on the job itself, working themselves
into the daily routine of the government offices to which they
were assigned, watching their superiors work— they would
themselves be given almost no responsibility to start with—
picking things up as they went along. As my own case was, I
believe, quite typical, I will recount it. My education had
been in philosophy and literature. I landed in Ceylon, my
head full of the Absolute, with occasional thoughts about
Shelley and Keats. Thus equipped I was dropped suddenly
and unceremoniously into the main administrative office of
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 British Colonialism

the government agent (provincial governor) of one of the nine

provinces of Ceylon. I was ordered to check the account books
daily— though 1 had no previous knowledge of what account
books looked like, or even what they were for. I was given
hundreds of gun licenses, cart licenses, opium licenses to sign.
The licensees had been approved by a junior slightly higher
up than myself. I had likewise to sign routine letters which
had been drafted by my superiors. I was supposed to read the
letters and learn from them. They were about drains, taxes,
irrigation channels, rice fields, harbor dues, sales of land,
land disputes, rents, building permits, licenses of various
kinds, waterworks, the town electric lights, burial grounds,
appointments of headmen, the building and maintenance of
roads and bridges, sanitation, prosecutions of offenders, po-
lice matters, civil service discipline— the list could be pro-
longed indefinitely. No one in the office had time to explain
to me any of these mysteries, and I could find nothing about
them in Shelley or the books on the Absolute. I learned the
hard way, picking up tiny crumbs of knowledge here and
there. But one did, of course, learn in the end.
These British methods are by no means as foolish as they
perhaps sound. Mr. George Kennan, in the pages of The At-
lantic, once insisted that as a preparation for statesmanship
and diplomatic work college courses in the techniques of gov-
ernment are of no great value. What is above all needed in
those who are to engage in political or diplomatic work is

that sympathetic understanding of human beings and human

values which is nourished by the study of history, literature,

art, music, religion— in short, by a broad humanistic educa-

tion. Political techniques are only tools. Skill in the use of
these tools can be learned afterwards, or at any time. They
require nothing more than a certain mental dexterity. What
matters is the humane and understanding spirit of the man
who uses them. And to produce this should be the aim of the
prior education of the statesman. With all this I agree most

175
 Political and International

heartily. And one may perhaps claim that it is the English

theory of how to educate statesmen. In saying this, I am far
from meaning to attribute to my countrymen any abstract
theorizing on the matter. As usual they have reached their
procedures by instinct and practical experience. But Mr.
Kennan's theory is the one by which they could justify their
procedures if they were interested in a theoretical basis for
them— which, characteristically, they are not.
What sort of government, then, was handed out in the
colonies by these civil servants trained— or, if you prefer it,

untrained— in the manner described? I have said that it was

of good intention, benevolent, just, incorruptible, and ruled
by a high sense of duty to the native populations. But what
more? What actual benefits did they confer? What good did
they do? And wherein did they fail? It may be taken for
granted that they provided for material progress. They made
roads and railways. They built hospitals and trained doctors
to man them. They introduced improved methods of agri-
culture. We may pass over these things with a bare mention,
and ask what they did in the sphere of the more intangible
values. Above all, what did they do, here in their colonies, to
advance human freedom and human spiritual rights?
The brief answer is that they gave to the subject peoples no
political freedom at all (until after the first world war), but
that of personal freedom they gave generously and up to the
maximum. By political freedom I mean self-government, and
by personal freedom I mean freedom of thought, speech, as-
sembly, the press, and religion. If we think in terms of politi-
cal abstractions and cliches, without keeping the concrete evi-
dence in view, we are too apt to suppose that freedom is one
and undivided, and that where there is no political freedom
there can be no personal freedom either. British colonial prac-
tice provides a striking and complete refutation of any such
airy generalization. Though the government of Ceylon was
wholly autocratic, the personal freedoms were as absolute and

176
 British Colonialism

complete under it as they are in England or the United States.

Freedom of the press was established in India in 1835. And in
Ceylon newspapers owned and edited by members of the in-
digenous population could and did criticize the government
as severely, even as abusively, as they pleased. No one thought
of raising a finger against them, and censorship was unheard
of— except, of course, during the war. Meetings could be held
to denounce anybody or anything— though I do not remember
that this was often done because there was no occasion for it.
That there was, for Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims,
complete freedom of worship goes without saying. And the
rights of each religion were scrupulously protected by the
government. On one occasion the congregation of a Roman
Catholic church threatened violence if a projected Hindu pro-
cession, carrying their god to the temple, should pass along
the highroad on which the Catholic church fronted. The gov-
ernor at the time. Sir Hugh Clifford, was himself a Catholic.
But he sent troops to the scene to enforce the right of the
King's Hindu subjects to use the King's highway for their
lawful procession.
Ho^v far the right of free speech was carried may be judged
from the following incident. A disgruntled Englishman, out
of work and perhaps half out of his mind, appeared suddenly
on a rubber estate and began preaching some brand of com-
munism to the hundreds of ignorant and illiterate estate labor-
ers. The white superintendent of the estate, fearing serious
trouble from his labor force, had the man apprehended by the
police; and the Governor, purporting to act under emer-
gency regulations still in force after the war, ordered his de-

portation from the colony. But on a writ of habeas corpus the

Chief Justice ruled that his arrest and deportation were ille-
gal—he having done nothing but exercise his right of free
speech— and ordered his release. The man, as it happened, was
an Englishman. But the court's ruling would certainly have
been the same if he had been a native of the country. It is at

177
 Political and International

least arguable that the rights of free thought and speech were
more respected— that citizens had less to fear from speaking
their minds— under that autocratic government than is the
case in the democratic United States of today.
The fact that the British, in the last decades of their Indian
empire, imprisoned so many fighters for independence and
political freedom cannot be quoted as evidence that they failed
to respect the personal freedoms of thought and speech. For as
the title "civil disobedience" which Gandhi adopted for his
movement itself attests, these imprisonments were for the
intentional breaking of positive laws— for example, the law
against private persons' distilling salt out of sea water—and
not at the government or expressing opin-
all for criticizing
ions which the government did not like. Private persons pos-
sessed the right of free speech and were not imprisoned for
exercising it. This is not to say that the British acted wisely
or well in imprisoning all these people, but that is another
question which it is not necessary to discuss here.
Lord Acton's famous observation that all power tends to
corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,
though, of course, it has its truth and its value, has become a
cliche. I cannot see that the absolute power of the British in
Ceylon for a century, or in their other crown colonies for
longer or shorter periods, ever corrupted their belief in the
personal freedoms, not only for themselves, but also for those
whom they governed; nor can I see that it corrupted their
colonial governments in any other way, although those gov-
ernments had their serious faults, some account of which I
shall shortly give. The British no doubt committed the origi-
nal sin of subjecting other peoples to their rule. But it is surely
a remarkable thing that they carried their Magna Carta with
them to the ends of the earth, planting and watering the seeds
of personal freedom in places, all over the world, where they
had never existed before.
Wherein did the British mainly fail? That they subjected
178
 British Colonialism

foreign peoples to their rule was, we should now all hold, an

evil thing, though it is thoughtless not to remember that the
strong moral objections which now move us against colonial-
ism hardly existed in world opinion during the periods when
most of the British Empire was built up. It is only as of yester-
day that ideals of national self-determination have come to be
generally recognized and to operate powerfully in world af-
fairs. And it is idle to judge actions of a century ago by stan-
dards which were not recognized when they were performed.
On the other hand, I cannot join in the common chorus of
praise of the British for their supposed generous withdrawal
from India and their other possessions. It would be hopelessly
sentimental to suppose that as soon as it came to be realized
that the subjection of foreign peoples is a moral evil, the Brit-
ish immediately repented and out of sheer righteousness gave
up India and Ceylon. The history of the last half-century
shows plainly that the British government never gives any-
thing up out of mere generosity, but that, on the contrary, it
hangs grimly on to whatever it holds, deaf to all entreaties,
until forced out. The treatment of the Irish in the twenties of
this century shows this, and so does the long battle against
Gandhi and the other Indian aspirants to freedom. I do not
mean that the British people are, or have been in the recent
past, unmoved by ethical considerations in regard to their em-
pire. But it is only very slowly that an international con-
science is aroused, especially in the governments as distin-
guished from the peoples; and power politics are still far more
powerful in the world than moral scruples. And this is true
not only of the British, but also of other great nations.
But apart from the fundamental wrong of colonialism,
wherein, we must ask, did the British mainly fail in their
colonial governments? Ceylon again may be taken as a typi-
cal case. Their main faults there were lack of vision and arro-
gance. Of arrogance we need say little. The facts are too well
known. Arrogant behavior in the colonies was, of course.
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 Political and International

mixed up with the color bar, a phenomenon not peculiar to

the British, as we in America know only too well. It showed
itself in social rather than political relations. Officially and
legally in Ceylon the colored subjects and the white rulers
were on a par. Equality before the law was rigidly enforced.
And even in receptions, so far as these could be viewed
official
as social rather than political occasions, equality was respected.
Thus at a state dinner party given by the Governor, promi-
nent native inhabitants would be invited and would sit side
by side with the white guests, and social amenities as be-
tween colored and whites would be in general respected. But
it was quite othenvise in private homes and clubs. In private

relations the British— apart from missionaries, theosophists,

cranks, and occasional individuals who had "gone native"—
never mixed with their subject peoples. They behaved al-
ways as a ruling race openly contemptuous of the people they
governed.
I turn to the other, less well-known fault of British colonial

rule: its lack of imaginative vision. While they pressed forward

in all matters of material progress, engineering projects, agri-
culture, and the like, they did not aim at political progress, but
always only at preserving the status quo. They had no sense of
mission. It is true that statesmen in England had, even in the
early decades of the nineteenth century, expressed liberal
views as to the ultimate aims of British rule in India. There
is no reason to doubt their sincerity. And they had behind

them a large body of British public opinion. But the words

they uttered had little effect on the practical goings-on in the
subject territories. They never actually inspired the day-to-day
work of the Indian or colonial governors, or of the civil ser-
vants who worked under them. In practice the "gradualness"
of the process of political education meant that the achieve-
ment of its nominal goal of self-government would never
come. Going slowly meant never moving at all. These colored
peoples, it was said, were not yet fit for self-government. When

180
 British Colonialism

would they be fit? "Some day, but not for quite a long time"

might have been the official answer. "Never" was the answer
which worked practically in the actions of the rulers. Every
demand for the littlest step forward was resisted and fought
to the last ditch, or granted in the most niggardly and ungen-
erous fashion only when it became practically impossible to
hold out against it any longer.
The civil services worked only in a blind routine. Prece-
dent, what had been done before, became the binding rule
for what was to be done now or in the future. The ideal was
only "efficiency." Efficiency means doing the same things over
and over again but doing them with great skill. It does not
mean advance. It simply keeps the old machinery running
smoothly and without jolts. That the British colonial civil
services were enormously efficient, far more efficient than their
native successors are ever likely to be, is past all doubt.

I have spoken of the manner in which young civil servants,

at the beginning of their careers, were taught their jobs-
dumped into government offices, told to sign papers, to watch
their superiors at work, to pick up the know-how of govern-
ment as best they could. But this "picking it up" only meant
learning the precedents, acquiring the routine skills. The
sheer quantity of activity, of things going on, in these offices
was immense. But what it all aimed at, what higher policy was
supposed to direct it— of such things we never heard. Why
were we Britishers here at all, ruling a foreign people? That
question, of course, no one ever asked. Our being here was
just a fact, handed down from the past, a fact which had to be
accepted like the existence of the sun and the moon. But any-
how, being here, what were we supposed to be accomplishing,
either for ourselves, the British rulers, or for our subjects? At
what star were we to aim? Efficiency, of course. That meant
going round in circles without wobbling and without tripping
up. Beyond that, what? Was there any goal, any policy, any
directing vision of future ends? Certainly if any young man

181
 Political and International

just beginning his lifework had raised such questions in the

office,had asked them of his superiors, he would have been
quickly squelched, taught his manners, and put in his place.
It may be said that youngsters have to learn first only to obey,
leaving the higher wisdom to their betters. But did these bet-
tersever give thought to these questions, or attempt genuinely
to give a real forward direction to our activities? If they did,
they kept it very darkly to themselves.
Why have the British civil services acquired, as they cer-
tainly have, so high a reputation, in America and perhaps else-
where in the ^vorld? I think mainly because of their three
virtues— efficiency, incorruptibility, and justice. What effi-
ciency means has just been explained; and about incorrupti-
bility nothing need be said. But a word about justice. In Cey-
lon in my time "British justice" was proverbial. The phrase
was constantly on the lips of the lawyers, nearly all of whom
were natives of the country, who frequented the law courts.
And outside the courts, in the political arena, too, the words
were often reiterated. If the government did anything un-
popular, or contrary to what the people thought to be right,
the cry would be "this is not British justice." Thus the belief
that British rule was fundamentally a reign of justice was no
legend invented by the British themselves. They would have
taken it for granted as something hardly worth mentioning. It
was put into circulation by the subject peoples themselves,
who knew well enough that they had never experienced any-
thing like it under their own rulers before the British came.
In itself this was something fine and noble. And I should be
the last to wish to depreciate it. But it must be pointed out that
justice, like efficiency, is quite consistent with standing still,
making no advance, having no goal, no policy, no imagination,
and no vision. For justice— unless the word is used in some
very wide sense as practically equivalent to all virtue— means
only administering the existing laws and institutions with
strict impartiality and without respect of persons. It does not

182
 British Colonialism

include the effort to make better laws and institutions. It does

not imply the aspiration for a better future, the leading up-
wards and onwards to self-government, or greater freedom, or
any other higher goal. Thus it is a virtue which a government
that thinks only of routine and the status quo may perfectly
well possess. And it was thus that the British colonial adminis-
trations possessed it.

Perhaps it will all this is inconsistent with the

be said that
theory stated earlier in this paper that the public servant
should be given a broad humanistic education in preference
to a vocational training in political technique. For the evi-
dence—it will be suggested— shows that such an education
does not in fact produce the sympathetic understanding and
breadth of vision which the theory says it should produce. But
to argue thus would be something like the error of those
Athenians who blamed the faults of Alcibiades on the educa-
tion he had received from Socrates. Education can only make
the best of whatever human material it has to act on. No edu-
cation could hope to impart high wisdom and imaginative
vision to the hundreds and thousands of more or less average
—though doubtless clever and highly educated— human beings
who must necessarily compose the civil service of a large coun-
try or empire. In any case it would be absurd to claim that a
vocational training in political techniques would do better
in this respect.
But neither is anything I have said meant to suggest that
some other colonial administration— say the French, the Ger-
man, or the Dutch— has been more enlightened, sympathetic,
or imaginative than the British. The opposite may well be
true. Very likely the defects of British colonial rule were de-
fects which appear wherever one race autocratically rules an-
other. They sprang neither from wrong education nor from
any special deficiency of British character, but from the uni-
versal human fact that no one people can ever understand a
foreign people well enough to govern them in a truly enlight-

183
 Political and International

ened way. The lesson to be learned is not that the British are
especially lacking in vision, nor yet that their educational
theory is mistaken, but simply that the most enlightened colo-
nialism is always and necessarily unenlightened.
I have described British colonialism as it was when it was

at its zenith. At the present time it is dying and, indeed, nearly

dead. The beginning of its more or less rapid decline may be
dated about 1918, the year in which the first world war ended.
There was some growth of the national spirit in subject
peoples before that. But the ideal yearning for the self-deter-
mination of all peoples, the recognition of the moral rights of
small nations, were born out of the agonies of that war. They
caused a ferment which, beginning in the West, rapidly spread
all over the world. The Asian peoples caught the infection.
The "awakening of the East" began. The independence of
countries like India and Ceylon did not, of course, come sud-
denly, even then— but very slowly and step by painful step.
We need not trace those steps here. Enough that those coun-
tries are now independent, and that others, still under the
yoke, seem likely in the near future to achieve the same goal.

184
 VI
Philosophy and Science

I
 The Place of Philosophy
in Human Culture

I THINK there is scarcelyany academic subject regarding which

there exists so much general misapprehension as philosophy.
If I were to introduce myself to the readers of almost any news-
paper as a professor of chemistry, or of classics, or of music,
most of them would have a fairly good general idea of the na-
ture of my subject. But if I were to introduce myself as a pro-
fessor of philosophy, I suspect that many of them would
vaguely associate my subject with theosophy, or palmistry, or
occultism. Very few would have any notion of what philos-
ophy really is. Even in a university, even among the learned
themselves, it would be true to say, I think, that while the
nature of such subjects as mathematics, classics, geology, is
pretty well understood in a general way even by those who
are not specialists in them, the nature of philosophy is not. If
highly educated people do not mix it up with palmistry or
occultism, they are at any rate apt to regard philosophy as hazy,
high-flown talk, or as a kind of quibbling disputatiousness,
or as the asking of vast, vague, and probably unanswerable
questions about the universe.
So long as one does not trouble oneself about precisely ac-
curate definitions, there is no great difficulty in describing,
roughly at least, most other subjects; in saying at any rate
what they are about. Biology is about living organisms. As-
187
 Philosophy and Science

tronomy is about the heavenly bodies. Physics is about light,

heat, sound, and so on. The universe, man's total environ-
ment, has been cut up, more or less arbitrarily, into sections;
and each science takes one section for its province. Botanists
take the plants, zoologists the animals, astronomers the stars.
Thus it comes about that, in spite of difficulties here and there
about boundaries, these sciences are on the whole fairly easy
to describe, at least in a popular way.
But the difficulty in describing the nature of philosophy
arises precisely from the fact that there is no one section of the
universe which is more especially its province than any other.
This is not indeed true of "linguistic" developments. But here
I shall be discussing the place of philosophy over the ages, not

merely at the present day. It does not, as most of the other

sciences do, peg out a claim to some comparatively small area
and leave all the rest untouched. It is true, in a sense, that there
is nothing anywhere in the universe with which philosophy is

not concerned, and that the whole universe is its subject. Yet
it has its own special content. And this is a kind of paradox.

On the one hand, philosophy is clearly distinguished, by its

own special content, from all other subjects. On the other
hand, it overlaps them all. Clearly, then, philosophy is in some
way peculiar as regards its relation to other branches of knowl-
edge. What is this relation? What is the place of philosophy
in the general scheme of human knowledge? I think it is
obvious that this question will have to be answered before
one can say what is the place of philosophy in education or in
culture generally. Therefore I make no apology for beginning
by considering the relation of philosophy to other branches
of knowledge.
One theory on this subject is that the special function of
philosophy is to co-ordinate the other branches of knowledge,
to knit together the sciences into a single whole; to treat them
in much the same way as a central government treats the sev-
eral departments which come under it— except, of course, that

188
 The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture

philosophy has no special authority. This, I think, or some-

thing like it, was Herbert Spencer's conception of the business
of philosophy.
I do not think this at all a satisfactory view. It is out of

date now, and no living philosopher would be likely to accept

it. So I do not propose to discuss it at length. I will give only

one reason for rejecting it— one among many which might be
given— namely that it finds no place for many of the problems
which have always been regarded as essentially philosophical.
Take, for example, the problem whether the material world
is in any way dependent for its existence upon mind. That it is

so dependent has often been asserted in the past by idealistic

philosophers, and has, during this century, been asserted by
some astronomers and scientists who were also amateur phi-
losophers. This problem, which is certainly one of the most
central and important of all philosophical problems, has no
connection at all with the question how the sciences ought to
be co-ordinated. It would therefore be excluded from phi-
losophy by the suggested definition. This definition, there-
fore, cannot be satisfactory.
Another idea, more common in recent times, is this. It is
said that philosophy has for its subject matter all those prob-
lems which have not yet been appropriated by any of the
special sciences. Human knowledge is like a tree, with a trunk
and many branches. The trunk, the parent stem, is, or was,
philosophy. The branches are the special sciences. All knowl-
edge was originally included in philosophy. But as knowledge
has grown, it has differentiated itself. When the knowledge
of any particular section of the universe became sufficiently
advanced to stand alone, it separated itself from the parent
stem and became a separate subject. There are still a certain
number of subjects and problems regarding which our knowl-
edge is so vague and rudimentary that they have not yet or-
ganized themselves into special sciences. This residue of
problems not yet taken over by any science is what we call

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 Philosophy and Science

philosophy at the present day. I ^vill call this view of the

nature of philosophy the "trunk-and-branch view."
The evidence for this view is as follows. It is an historical
fact that knowledge has grown much in the way described.
Modern science has its roots historically in ancient Greece.
The Greeks were the firstpeople in the world to develop the
scientific attitude. They were the first people to ask such
questions as: What are the sun and the stars made of? What
size are they? How far a^vay are they from the earth? You may
remember, as a picturesque piece of early astronomy, the
assertion of Anaxagoras that the sun is a red-hot stone, larger
than the Peloponnese— a statement which got Anaxagoras into
serious trouble with the orthodox Greeks, who regarded the
sun as a god. The Greeks were also the first people who studied
animals and plants in at all a scientific way. They were the
first genuinely theoretical mathematicians. They were the

first people to speculate as to whether the many different kinds

of matter may not be ultimately reducible to a single kind of

matter. They were the originators of the atomic theory, the
theory that matter is ultimately composed of minute, hard,
indivisible particles without color, taste, or smell.
But the Greeks, or at any rate the early Greeks, did not
distinguish between science and philosophy. The problems
of the constitution of matter, the nature of the sun and stars,
the properties of the triangle, were regarded by them as philo-
sophical problems, and were not separated from such purely
metaphysical problems as that concerning the nature of God.
The scientist and the philosopher were in those days one and
the same person. Aristotle, the philosopher, was the founder
of the science of biology. Pure mathematics was mostly studied
and advanced in the philosophical schools of such men as
Pythagoras and Plato. Thus philosophy in those days was prac-
tically synonymous with all human culture. Consequently,
it was the parent stem out of which grew all branches of

knowledge. It was only later, when the body of knowledge in-

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 The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture

creased beyond the point at which one man could master it

all, that specialization took place. The
study of the stars broke
off from the parent stem and became the special science of
astronomy. And so with the other sciences.
It is commonly added that we can to some extent see the
same sort of process going on even now. It is only in the last
or sixty years that psychology has established itself as an
fifty

independent science. It was, until then, included in philos-

ophy. And following out this idea, I understand that Professor
Samuel Alexander thought there are signs that aesthetics is
shortly about to separate itself from philosophy and become
an independent science.
Now of course no one can dispute the historical facts just
referred to. But for my part I do not think that this trunk-and-
branch theory of the nature of philosophy and of its relation
to other subjects is any more satisfactory than the view which
we previously rejected. It implies that philosophy has no real
content of its own. Philosophy is merely that which is one
day going to be science, but which is not yet scientific enough.
It is rudimentary science. And philosophy therefore has no
real content distinct from what is, or ought to be, science. But
in my view philosophy has a content of its own, quite distinct
from anything that is, or ever could be, science.
I do not doubt that many problems, which were never

properly speaking philosophical problems at all, have in the

past been wrongly jumbled up with philosophy, and that these
have gradually been sorted out and assigned to their proper
spheres. That is all that the supposed historical evidence really
proves. And no doubt psychology is a case in point. But I
believe that there is a certain core of philosophical problems
which are in their nature philosophical, and not scientific,
and which will therefore never be handed over to the special
sciences, and will always remain what they are— philosophy
proper.
As examples I would give all problems regarding the nature

191
 Philosophy and Science

of what we call values— mor2^. values, artistic values, and so on.

I think that these can never, however far knowledge advances,
become the subject matter of science, or be dealt with by the
methods which science adopts in other fields. I cannot here
enter into a full justification of this statement, because it de-
pends essentially upon the view one takes of the function of
science and the nature of scientific methods. But I will say
that, as I see it, the sole business of science is to describe facts
and events, to tell us what happens, what has happened, what
will happen. I do not think it is at all the business of science
to estimate the value of what happens, to say what ought to
happen, or to say that one event is better than another. All
such questions of value fall, in my opinion, within the sphere
of philosophy.
The example, tells us that organic species
biologist, for
have evolved. Man
descended from ape-like ancestors, and
is

originally from creatures which can scarcely be distinguished

from little lumps of moving slime. That is an account of
actual facts and events, of what has actually happened on the
planet. It is the business of the evolutionary biologist to dis-
cover and piece together these facts and events, and to give,
if possible, a complete description of them. And when he has

done that, his task is finished.

But now suppose I begin to ask, as regards evolution, such
questions as the following: Is the change from protozoon to
man a change for the better} Is it an advance} Is a man in any
way a higher being than a protozoon, or a higher being than
a dog? Or has the process of change, traced out by the biolo-
gist, been merely a process of change from one indifferent
thing to another? Or— another possibility— is this whole con-
ception of better and worse, of higher and lower, as applied
to evolution, a misconception, an illusion? Are these merely
human values, which have no application to affairs outside
human society, no application at any rate to events on the
cosmic scale? Is it altogether false, or meaningless, to apply

192
 The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture

conceptions of value to the non-human universe? Or what is

the truth of this matter?
Such questions of value, I say, fall outside the sphere of
biology. They belong to philosophy. And they will always
belong to philosophy, and will never, at any time in the future,
come to belong to biology, or to any other science, as the
trunk-and-branch theory would have us believe. Or at least
this must be so if what I said just now about the function and
nature of science is true, namely that the sole function of
science is to describe what happens, and that it is in no way
concerned with the valuation of what happens.
Of course an individual biologist may very well have
opinions on these questions. And his opinions may very well
be interesting and important, although he must, if his opinion
is to be of any real value, take into account many considera-

tions besides his bare biological facts, considerations with

which biology cannot supply him, but with which philosophy
can. But however that may be, the important point is that,
in having such opinions, he has really ceased to be a pure
biologist and has become a philosopher.
I have given the problem of values as an example of a prob-

lem which belongs, and must always belong, to philosophy,

in order to show that the trunk-and-branch theory of phi-
losophy, which implies that philosophy has no content of its
own, cannot be true. But I do not mean to imply that the
problem of values is the sole content of philosophy. I do not
mean to say that the relation between philosophy and the
sciences is that science deals with what happens, philosophy
with the valuation of what happens. That would be far too
simple a division of labor. And philosophy has many problems
of its own, which are not scientific, yet which are not in any
sense problems of valuation. And I will try now to indicate
what, in myopinion, the special nature of philosophy is, and
what its relations to the sciences are.
The view which I advocate may best be described by say-
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 Philosophy and Science

ing that, in my opinion, philosophy is concerned with the

search for ultimate principles, the attempt to push all knowl-
edge back to its ultimate grounds, to answer ultimate ques-
tions; and that
it is distinguished both from the sciences and

from other branches of knowledge by this fact. I would,

all
in short, define philosophy as the knowledge of ultimate
principles.
Of course you will say, and quite rightly, that this is a very
vague definition. For what is the meaning of the word ultimate
here? I certainly think it ought to be defined. And I think
perhaps it could be defined by a process of careful logical
analysis. But I think I can better convey to you something of
what I mean when I speak of ultimate principles and ques-
tions if I give you a few examples than if I attempt the difficult
logical feat of defining ultimate.
You you take almost any subject of human dis-
will find, if

course—whether a scientific subject or any other— that it

it is

leads back, upon reflection, to problems and questionings of

a very fundamental character, problems and questionings
which are not usually considered at all by those who specialize
in that subject. These problems constitute, I should say, the
special content of philosophy.
Suppose you take what are generally considered the first
principles of any branch of knowledge. If you work forward
from those principles, taking them as ultimate, you will find
yourself moving among the particular details of that branch
of knowledge. For example, if you take the axioms of geometry
(any geometry) as your first principles and work forward
from them, you will find yourself among the detailed theo-
rems of that geometry. But if you reflect upon these so-called
first principles of any subject, you will generally find that they

are not really ultimate at all, that it is possible to go backward

from them, instead of forward, and to ask upon what more
ultimate principles they themselves rest. You may, for ex-
ample, ask yourself what is the basis of the axioms of geometry.

194
 The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture

Are they a priori laws of the human mind? Or are they laws
gathered by observation from experience like most of the
ordinary laws of nature? Or are they arbitrary assumptions
based upon nothing but convenience? Or what are they, and
on what depends their right to be the first principles of ge-
ometry? When you proceed backward in that way from what
you had hitherto considered to be first principles, and when
you search for the more ultimate principles on which these
depend, then you are in the realm of philosophy.
What I have just said is not only true of mathematics. I say
that it is true of any branch of human knowledge. And I will
take as further examples the specific spheres of morality, art,
and science. In the sphere of morality, we commonly say that
some actions are right, others wrong. Most people take it for
granted that there is some distinction between right and
wrong, and that they know pretty well what is meant by
those words. And if they discuss moral problems, it is usually
some detailed question about the particular application of
moral principles which they discuss. Was a man, in a given
set of circumstances, right or wrong in what he did? Is suicide
ever justifiable? Would a doctor ever be right to administer
a deadly drug to a patient suffering from an incurable dis-
ease and undergoing ceaseless physical torture? These are the
kinds of questions which practical moralists generally dis-
cuss, and if we had good answers to them all it might be said
that we possessed a complete body of moral knowledge.
But now suppose that instead of working forward from
moral principles to their detailed application in life, I try to
work backward. Suppose I raise questions about the founda-
tion of these principles themselves. Suppose I ask: What is
the foundation of moral principles? Is it true, for example,
that right actions are merely those which tend to produce
among human beings generally a balance of pleasure and hap-
piness over pain and unhappiness? Or is morality founded
upon biological considerations, so that right actions are simply

195
 Philosophy and Science

those which tend towards the preservation of the species? Or

have moral principles some profounder, less obvious basis
than these ideas would suggest? These, I think, would be
questions of that very fundamental and ultimate kind which
I should call philosophical.

Exactly similar questions arise from reflection upon the

sphere of art. In the moral world we have the antithesis of the
good and the evil. In the artistic world we have the antithesis
of the beautiful and the ugly, or perhaps, of the artistic and
inartistic. These conceptions are commonly taken for granted,
just as are the conceptions of right and wrong. What are usu-
ally discussed are questions of their detailed application. Is
this picture genuinely artistic or not? Or is it more artistic
than that picture? Is this poem successful or not? Is a certain
musical composer justified in introducing into his work dis-
cords and other innovations which would have shocked his
predecessors? The attempts to answer questions of this kind
constitute the branch of knowledge that we call criticism.
But now suppose that, instead of moving forward from the
principles of art to their detailed application, we move back-
ward towards theirmore ultimate foundations. Suppose we
raise questions about the nature and validity of the concep-
tions of the artistic and the inartistic themselves. Suppose we
ask; what is the nature of the artistic as such? What is that
quality which may be shared in common by a picture, a
statue, or a poem, and which makes each of them what we
call artistic? What is art? What are its ultimate criteria and
foundations? These again would be questions of that funda-
mental and ultimate kind which no art critic or artist as such
ever asks, and which I should call philosophical.
Turning now to the sphere of science, there are, I think, all
sorts of ultimate questions to which science leads back, but
which the such does not usually consider at all.
scientist as
There is, for example, the question of the nature and justifi-
cation of mathematical axioms, to which I have already re-
ferred. Again, science is, or has been in the past, very largely

196
 The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture

concerned with the causes of phenomena. What is the cause

of the movements of the planets, of the evolution of species,
of ocean tides, of eclipses, of the pointing of a comet's tail
away from the sun? And so on.
These are all questions of the detailed application of the
principle of causality. But suppose I ask about the principle
of causality itself? What, in the first place, is its proper analy-
sis and definition? And then, upon what grounds have I the

right to assume that the same causes must always necessarily

give rise to the same effects? In that case, it seems to me, I am
asking very fundamental and ultimate questions, and I should
call these questions philosophical.
Or, to take a very different example. Professor P. W. Bridg-
man, in his book on The Logic of Modern Physics, wrote
regarding science, "The nature of our thinking mechanism
essentially colours any picture we can form of nature." There
is nothing new in the suggestion that the world as we know it

is to a greater or less extent determined by the structure of our

own minds. That is an opinion which has frequently been held

by many philosophers. The only novelty is perhaps that it
should now be a physicist who makes the suggestion. But ob-
viously this raises very fundamental and ultimate questions re-
garding the relation of our minds and our knowing processes
to the world. The sciences profess to give us knowledge of the
world. But we may raise the more ultimate question: What is
knowledge? Is our knowledge of the world a sort of photo-
graph, or mirror image, or picture, of the world as it actually
is? This is what most people used to think. But if all our

knowledge is colored by the structure of our minds, it seems

obvious that it is not a true picture of the world at all. And it
becomes a profoundly difficult question what the relation of
our knowledge to reality actually is. And that, I should say, is
a very fundamental and ultimate question which belongs to
philosophy, and which no specialized science ever considers.
Some of the central problems of philosophy, too, are
reached by going backward, not from science, art, morals, or

197
 Philosophy and Science

mathematics, but from the everyday knowledge of common

sense. But I think I have now given enough examples to illus-
trate my general contention, which is that philosophy has
for its subject matter the ultimate principles upon which all
other branches of knowledge are based; and that all other
branches of knowledge necessarily lead back to, and end in,
philosophy, if one reflects upon their grounds. No matter what
subject you study, no matter through what gateway you enter
the kingdom of knowledge, philosophy looms in the back-
ground. If this view is accepted, you will see that it explains
the paradox which I mentioned at the beginning of this lec-
ture. Philosophy has its own special content, these ultimate
problems. And yet it is concerned with the whole universe and
is entwined with every other subject, because whatever sec-

tion of the universe your special science takes as its province,

that section, and the knowledge of it, give rise to philosophi-
cal problems.
Now that we have decided what place philosophy holds in
the general scheme of human knowledge, it ought not to be

proper place in education. But first of

difficult to discover its
all, let me deal shortly with a preliminary criticism which is

sometimes made. Philosophy, it is said, is an unpractical study.

Science yields practical, tangible, results— the telephone, the
steam engine, the electric motor. Philosophy yields none, and
it has no influence on life. It is, so to speak, all talk.
Perhaps need hardly point out that, as is obvious, uni-
I

versity subjects fall roughly into two classes, those which are
of immediate practical utility, such as chemistry and geology,
and those which are not. These latter, which have no imme-
diate cash value, include not only philosophy, but also all
literature, the classical languages, and the fine arts, not to
mention such a subject as religion. These so-called unpracti-
cal subjects contain most of what is finest and noblest in
human life, because they are concerned not with the produc-
tion of material wealth but with the advancement of the
wealth of the mind.

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 The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture

Nor is it true that philosophy has no influence on life. It

would be easy to show that, evenpreparation for practical

as a
life, philosophy has its value, since it sharpens the wits, exer-

cises the reasoning powers, destroys prejudices, and develops

the habit of considering all questions with an open mind. I
have seen it stated in print (by a so-called practical person,
not a philosopher) that the second world war was ultimately
traceable to the pernicious influence of the philosophy of
Hegel. I do not myself agree with that opinion. It is, I think,
an absurd caricature of the truth. But it shows that men do
dimly perceive what an immense practical influence the
philosophical conceptions of a people, or even of an individ-
ual, may exert. And it would be a fascinating study to follow
out this line of thought, to show to what extent the wise and
the foolish actions of mankind have ultimately depended
upon what are, in the last analysis, philosophical opinions.
But I must leave that field of discussion untouched. I must
return to my proper subject, which is the place of philosophy
in education.
By education here I do not mean the special training re-
quired to make a man a competent doctor, engineer, or
lawyer, however important that may be. By education I mean
the process of raising human personality to the highest level
which it is capable of attaining, the process of developing all
that is finest and noblest in it, the process of turning out first-
human beings.
class
And if education is taken in this sense, it is not difficult to
show that philosophy is an essential part of it, and that with-
out some tincture of philosophy a man is an imperfect human
being. For it follows from what I have already said that philos-
ophy is an essential part of all human culture. If philosophy
is, as I have tried to show, nothing more than an attempt to

throw knowledge back upon its ultimate principles; to think

out the most fundamental and ultimate problems which are
raised by morals, by religion, by science, by art, and by com-
mon sense; is it not obvious that any perfect human culture
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 Philosophy and Science

cannot exclude it? Philosophy is nothing but the most funda-

mental kind of thinking which a man can do in any branch
of study. It lies at the basis of every other subject. It is bound
up with all human culture and is therefore an integral part
of any complete education.
It is a mistake to think of the different branches of knowl-
edge and culture as if they existed in watertight compart-
ments, completely independent and isolated from one another.
They are, after all, products of one and the same human spirit,
and a sufficiently keen insight will detect one and the same
human life unfolding itself in them all. Every age has its own
peculiar attitude towards the problems which man's environ-
ment presents, its own peculiar attitude towards the world.
This attitude of any age is sometimes called the spirit of the
age. The spirit of an age expresses itself in a diversity of dif-
ferent forms, in the forms of its art, its literature, its religion,
its science, its politics, and These dif-
finally its philosophy.
ferent forms will usually be found to have the same essential
content. That is to say, the philosophy of an age will be found
to express in philosophical form the same attitude towards the
world which is expressed in other forms in its literature, its
art, its science. It is one and the same life which, in a plant,
puts itself forth in the different flowers and branches. And
literature, art, science, religion, philosophy are the flowers
of the human spirit. Consequently I would say that the philos-

ophy of an age crystallizes in its most abstract form the essen-

tial thought and culture of that age, and is therefore a key
to the understanding of that age. Let us give a few examples
of this.
It is almost a platitude to say that in Greece the philosophy
of the Sophists merely crystallized in abstract terms the same
tendencies of thought as were everywhere making themselves
apparent in the political life of the time, in the dramas of
Euripides, and elsewhere. What, again, is the famous Repub-
lic of Plato but an expression in abstract philosophical form

of that ideal of a balanced and harmonious personality which

200
 The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture

contained the essence of the Greek attitude towards life? An-

other example is to be found in the American philosophy
known as pragmatism. The essence of this philosophy con-
sists in its subordination of all the higher human activities,

such as knowledge, art, and religion, to purely practical ends.

It judges them all by their cash value. Thus it perfectly reflects
the predominantly commercial spirit and civilization of the
American people.
Turning to modern Europe, I would draw your attention

to the fact that during the nineteenth century the essential

content of philosophy was identical with the essential content
of literature and poetry. In philosophy it took the form of
idealism, in poetry of romanticism. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century there came in literature that great out-
burst of romantic poetry which is connected with such names
as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats. At the very same mo-
ment there dawned in Germany the great age of philosophical
idealism, and this idealism rose to its greatest heights in the
system of Hegel. Hegelian idealism expressed in general the
same human attitude to the world as did the romantic poets.
The system of Hegel was nothing but a vast elaboration of the
idea that the finite world in space and time, the world of
nature, is not ultimately real, is but a shadow, an appear-
ance, beneath which lies a deeper, a divine, reality. But this
idea is also the very indwelling life of poetic romanticism.
The spirit of romanticism is epitomized in Wordsworth's
famous lines in which he speaks of
a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

Wordsworth's reverence for nature is no sentimental vaporing

about crocuses and cowslips, but is based upon this belief that
nature is at once the veil and the revealer of a deeper divine

201
 Philosophy and Science

reality. His vision of the world is the same as Hegel's vision.

And this vision Wordsworth transmitted throughout the

poetry of the nineteenth century. It inspires in varying de-
grees the work of all the romantic poets, Shelley, Keats, Ten-
nyson, Browning, and even such an apparently positivistic
and anti-religious poet as Swinburne. It finally dies out, I
should say, in the early work of the Irish poet, W. B. Yeats, and
has now been replaced by a very different attitude.
Parallel, in the nineteenth century, to the stream of ro-
manticism which takes departure from Wordsworth, there
its

flows the stream of philosophical idealism which has its source

in Hegel. It passes over from Germany to England, inspiring
the ^vork of such men as Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet. It
passes over to America in the work of Royce and many others.
And in them, I should say, it finally dies out as an original and
creative force— notwithstanding that it still finds admirers and
imitators— to be replaced, once more, by a very different spirit.
What is this very different spirit which has now made its
appearance both in literature and philosophy? Well, the
present age is neither idealistic nor romanticist. There has
been a violent rebellion against all that. Romanticism is now
set do^vn as sentimentalism. And the present age is above all
anti-sentimental. The repudiation of romanticism arises ulti-
mately from the fact that the vision of a deeper reality behind
the appearance of the world has been lost. The finite things
in time and space, the moving masses of matter, the life of
animals and plants and men on the planet, these things, which
for Wordsworth and Hegel were mere appearances, are now
proclaimed as the only realities. There is nothing behind
them, supporting them. They are real in their own right. This
is the essential message which is proclaimed by the most char-

acteristic philosophical school of the present day, or perhaps

I should say, of the recent past, the school of the realists. The

universe of the realist can be obtained by taking the universe

of the idealist, cutting away the inner spiritual essence which

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 The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture

lies behind and leaving only the outward appearance, a

it,

sort of lifeless mask, which is now declared to be the only

reality. There is no "something far more deeply interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns." There are merely
the setting suns and the clouds, and these are composed of
oxygen, hydrogen, and what not.
And is it not exactly the same spirit which informs a great
deal of current literature? It is no longer the business of lit-
erary art to reveal "the light which never was on sea or land."
It is now an affair of surfaces and externals. Its message is
that a man's life consists of an endless procession of externali-
ties—of smoke and grime, of the streets and the mud in the
and houses and money and clothes and hats,
streets, of offices
of sights and sounds, of pleasures and pains— succeeding each
other in a kind of bewildering nightmare. These are the
realities, the millions of disconnected experiences of a drab
and uninspired life. There is, beneath and beyond them, no

indwelling spirit to transform them from the sordid to the

sublime. So says the literary realist. And this is what his
brother the philosophical realist is saying too.
In this contention between the spirit of the last age and the
spirit of the more recent past I am not now taking sides. The
realist may be right for all I know. My point is not that the
romantic spirit was better than the anti-romantic, or vice
versa. I am only concerned to point out that the philosophy of
an age on the one hand, and the literature and art of the age
on the other, usually express in different forms the essential
attitude of that age towards the world, and therefore that
their content is the same. And my thesis is, you see, simply
that philosophy is an organic part of human culture, one of the
natural modes of expression of the human spirit, not some-
thing utterly remote and cut off from other branches of knowl-
edge and from the affairs of ordinary life, the idle plaything
of a few pedants and recluses.
For not only does the essential thought of each age express

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itself inphilosophy. It expresses itself there, I should say, in

itspurest form. For whereas in literature and in art you will
find the tendencies of the age expressed diffusely, mixed up
with all sorts of unessentials, in a chaotic jumble, in philos-
ophy you it crystallized out, reduced to its funda-
will find
mental principles. It is hardly too much to say that philosophy
is the master key to human culture; and that in the last
resort no full understanding of the great movements of the
human spirit— that is to say, no full understanding of life
itself— is possible without philosophy. And if that is so, can
it be any longer doubted the the role of philosophy in educa-

tion is vital?
But there occurs a doubt mind. It is a common
to one's
reproach against philosophy that nothing but an arena
it is

of disagreements. Compare philosophy, it is said, with any

of the w^ell-established sciences. Among scientists, of course,
there are disagreements. But each of the sciences neverthe-
less presents us with a large and growing body of established
truths. The moreover, do not remain stationary.
sciences,
They advance triumphantly from discovery to discovery.
Now if you turn your eyes from science to philosophy, what
a pitiful spectacle meets your gaze! Philosophers cannot agree
even upon the most elementary principles of their subject.
They are divided into numerous hostile camps. Philosophy
is nothing but a haphazard jumble of contradictory opinions.

There must be something wrong with a subject which has

always been, and still is, in such a pass. That is the sort of on-
slaught which the unhappy philosopher has to meet from his
friends the scientists. What reply can he make? I cannot, in
the brief space now left to me, deal as fully with this subject
as I should like to. I can, in fact, give only the bare headings
of what I think would be the adequate reply.
One might, of course, point out that the disagreements of
philosophers are often greatly exaggerated; that if one were
to draw up a list of matters on which practically all philos-

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 The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture

ophers agree, the list would probably be surprisingly long;

that the development of philosophy, as of other branches of

knowledge, has not been chaotic, but orderly, a well-defined
evolution; and that philosophers themselves naturally discuss
the points on which they disagree, and are silent on those
upon which they agree, thus giving an appearance of greater
disagreement than actually exists. There would be some truth
in all these contentions. But such a line of defense would, I
think, be rather a case of special pleading. One has to admit
roundly that there is far more disagreement among philoso-
phers than there is among the men of science. What other
reply can we make?
Firstly, it is somewhat oddly overlooked by those who make

this criticism of philosophy that philosophy is not alone in this

matter. It is true that there is a remarkably large measure of
agreement in the purely physical sciences. But in the spheres
of art, religion, morals, politics, economics, there is, I should
say, as much disagreement as there is in philosophy. If philos-
ophers are divided into idealists and realists, into rationalists
and empiricists, are not political thinkers divided into con-
servatives and revolutionaries, communists and fascists, re-
publicans and monarchists? Do they not dispute regarding
every possible political principle in theory, and every pos-
sible political decision in practice? Are not American econo-
mists divided into various schools? Is not the religious world
divided into Christians, Muslims, Buddhists? In moral ques-
tions is there not constant and violent dispute as to whether
a man in given circumstances ought to have done this or that?
Now what would you think of anyone who should argue
that, because there is so much disagreement in the spheres
of politics, art, religion, economics, morals, therefore politics,
art, religion, economics, morals are unimportant subjects the
study of which ought not to be encouraged? Is it not obvious
that, in spite of the disagreements, perhaps because of the
disagreements, these are just the most important subjects in

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 Philosophy and Science

the world, the subjects which ought above all to be studied

by a man who wishes to be a first-class human being? Why,
then, should philosophy be selected for special reprimand
because of its disagreements?
But that answer, perhaps, does not satisfy. It consists, you
may say,only in the blackening of other subjects, not in the
whitening of philosophy. And it does not go to the root of
the matter. Let us leave politics, economics, and so on, to
fight their own battles. Let us speak of philosophy alone, and
face the issue. Why should there be so many disagreements
among philosophers, if their subject is really in a sound and
healthy condition? I suggest that the answer is, in essence, as
follows. There is a special reason why physical scientists are
able to present a more or less united front. They are dealing
always with ponderables, with crass matter, in other words
with things which can be measured and weighed. Moreover,
they are dealing nearly always with the quantitative aspects
of matter, and the questions regarding matter which they
seek to answer are mostly questions which can be definitely
settled by operations of measuring and weighing. These op-
erations can be fairly easily and accurately performed. And
the result is that scientific problems can for the most part be
definitely solved.
But philosophy deals mostly with imponderables, which
cannot be measured and weighed, and the questions which
philosophers ask cannot be settled by yardsticks and balances.
Take any of the great questions with which philosophers have
been concerned. Is the world ultimately a product of mind,
or is it mindless mechanism? Is there a cosmic purpose, or is
there not? Is the world finally rational, or is there an irre-
ducible element of irrationality in it? What is the significance
of the presence of evil in the universe? What is the essence of
morality? Is there a single absolute moral law or is there not?
What is the ultimate nature and foundation of art, and of
the sense of the beautiful? Can any reasonable person expect

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 The Place of Philosophy in Human Culture

slick answers to these questions as if they were sums in arith-

metic? Can they be answered by means of operations with
foot-rules and chemical retorts? Is it not obvious that there
will always be room for differences of opinion on such matters?
And can we expect more than that we should know what the
best minds, who have given their lives to these problems,
think, notwithstanding that, among them too, there may, and
indeed must be, different views?
Philosophy is deeply rooted in human life. It reflects, as I
have tried to show, the essential attitudes of ages and of civili-
zations to the world. And it is little short of idiotic to expect
that these attitudes will not show wide cleavages and diver-
gencies. But this does mean that men's attitudes to the world,
and the philosophies which express them, are not among the
deepest concerns of human culture.
Therefore I cannot hold out the hope that tomorrow, or in
five years, or in fifty years, all philosophers will agree. Only a
simpleton will entertain such a hope. And only a shallow
understanding will condemn philosophy because of this.
In any case, all this about the disagreements of philosophers
is, for me, merely a side issue. My main contention is that

philosophy is an integral part of human culture, and whether

that culture is divided within itself or not, the study of it
necessitates philosophy. Whether we like it or not, we cannot
escape philosophy; because, on whatever road of knowledge
we travel, philosophy lies in wait for us with its questions.

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 Science and the Physical World

So far as I know about electrons, protons,

scientists still talk
neutrons, and so on. We
never directly perceive these, hence
if we ask how we know of their existence the only possible

answer seems to be that they are an inference from what we

do directly perceive. What sort of an inference? Apparently a
causal inference. The atomic entities in some way impinge
upon the sense of the animal organism and cause that organ-
ism to perceive the familiar world of tables, chairs, and the
rest.
But not clear that such a concept of causation, however
is it

interpreted, is invalid? The only reason we have for believing

in the law of causation is that we observe certain regularities

or sequences. We observe that, in certain conditions, A is
always followed by B. We call A the cause, B the effect. And
the sequence A-B becomes a causal law. It follows that all
observed causal sequences are between sensed objects in the
familiar world of perception, and that all known causal laws
apply solely to the world of sense and not to anything beyond
or behind it. And this in turn means that we have not got, and
never could have, one jot of evidence for believing that the
law of causation can be applied outside the realm of percep-
tion, or that that realm can have any causes (such as the sup-
posed physical objects) which are not themselves perceived.
Put the same thing in another way. Suppose there is an

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 Science and the Physical World

observed sequence A B C, represented by the vertical lines

in the diagram below.

4.

The observer X sees, and can see, nothing except things in the
familiar world of perception. What
right has he, and what
reason has he, to assert causes of A, B, and C, such as a\ h\
c', which he can never observe, behind the perceived world?

He has no right, because the law of causation on which he is

relying has never been observed to operate outside the series
of perceptions, and he can have, therefore, no evidence that
it does so. he has no reason because the phenomenon C
And
is sufficiently accounted for by the cause B, B by A, and so on.

It is unnecessary and superfluous to introduce a second cause

h' for B, c' for C, and so forth. To give two causes for each

phenomenon, one in one world and one in another, is un-

necessary, and perhaps even self-contradictory.
Is it denied, then, it will be asked, that the star causes light
waves, that the waves cause retinal changes, that these cause
changes in the optic nerve, which in turn causes movements
in the brain cells, and so on? No, it is not denied. But the
observed causes and effects are all in the world of perception.
And no sequences of sense-data can possibly justify going out-
side that world. If you admit that we never observe anything
except sensed objects and their relations, regularities, and
sequences, then it is obvious that we are completely shut in

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 Philosophy and Science

by our sensations and can never get outside them. Not only
causal relations, but all other observed relations, upon which
any kind of inferences might be founded, will lead only to
further sensible objects and their relations. No inference,
therefore, can pass from what is sensible to what is not sensible.
The fact is that atoms are not inferences from sensations.
No one denies, of course, that a vast amount of perfectly valid
inferential reasoning takes place in the physical theory of
the atom. But itwill not be found to be in any strict logical
sense inference from sense-data to atoms. An hypothesis is set
up, and the inferential processes are concerned with the ap-
plication of the hypothesis, that is, with the prediction by
its aid of further possible sensations and with its own internal
consistency.
That atomsare not inferences from sensations means, of
course, thatfrom the existence of sensations we cannot validly
infer the existence of atoms. And this means that we cannot
have any reason at all to believe that they exist. And that is
why I propose to argue that they do not exist— or at any rate
that no one could know it if they did, and that we have ab-
solutely no evidence of their existence.
What status have they, then? Is it meant that they are false
and worthless, merely untrue? Certainly not. No one sup-
poses that the entries in the nautical almanac "exist" any-
where except on the pages of that book and in the brains of
its compilers and readers. Yet they are *'true," inasmuch as

they enable us to predict certain sensations, namely, the posi-

tions and times of certain perceived objects which we call the
stars. And so the formulae of the atomic theory are true in
the same sense, and perform a similar function.
I suggest that they are nothing but shorthand formulae, in-

geniously worked out by the human mind, to enable it to

predict experience, i.e. to predict what sensations will be
its

given to By "predict" here I do not mean to refer solely

it.

to the future. To calculate that there was an eclipse of the

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 Science and the Physical World

sun visible in Asia Minor in the year 585 b.c. is, in the sense
in which I am using the term, to predict.
In order to see more clearly what is meant, let us apply the
same idea to another case, that of gravitation. Newton formu-
lated a law of gravitation in terms of "forces." It was supposed
that this law— which was nothing but a mathematical formula
—governed the operation of these existent forces. Nowadays it
is no longer believed that these forces exist at all. And yet

the law can be applied just as well without them to the pre-
diction of astronomical phenomena. It is a matter of no im-
portance to the scientific man whether the forces exist or
not. That may be said to be a purely philosophical question.
And I think the philosopher should pronounce them fictions.
But that would not make the law useless or untrue. If it
could still be used to predict phenomena, it would be just as
true as it was.
It is true that fault is now found with Newton's law, and
that another law, that of Einstein, hasbeen substituted for it.
And sometimes supposed that the reason for this is that
it is

forces are no longer believed in. But this is not the case.
Whether forces exist or not simply does not matter. What
matters is the discovery that Newton's law does not enable
us accurately to predict certain astronomical facts such as the
exact position of the planet Mercury. Therefore another for-
mula, that of Einstein, has been substituted for it which
permits correct predictions. This new law, as it happens, is a
formula in terms of geometry. It is pure mathematics and
nothing else. It does not contain anything about forces. In its
pure form it does not even contain, so I am informed, any-
thing about "humps and hills in space-time." And it does not
matter whether any such humps and hills exist. It is truer than
Newton's law, not because it substitutes humps and hills for
forces, but solely because it is a more accurate formula of
prediction.
Not only may it be said that forces do not exist. It may with
211
 Philosophy and Science

equal truth be said that "gravitation" does not exist. Gravita-

tion is not a "thing," but a mathematical formula, which exists
only in the heads of mathematicians. And as a mathematical
formula cannot cause a body to fall, so gravitation cannot
cause a body to fall. Ordinary language misleads us here. We
speak of the law "of" gravitation, and suppose that this law
"applies to" the heavenly bodies. We are thereby misled into
supposing that there are two things, namely, the gravitation
and the heavenly bodies, and that one of these things, the grav-
itation, causes changes in the other. In reality nothing exists
except the moving bodies. And neither Newton's law nor Ein-
stein's law is, strictly speaking, a law of gravitation. They are
both laws of moving bodies, that is to say, formulae which tell
us how these bodies will move.
Now, just as in the past "forces" were foisted into Newton's
law (by himself, be it said), so now certain popularizers of
relativity foisted "humps and hills in space-time" into Ein-
stein's law. Wehear that the reason why the planets move in
curved courses is that they cannot go through these humps
and hills, but have to go round them! The planets just get
"shoved about," not by forces, but by the humps and hills!
But these humps and hills are pure metaphors. And anyone
who takes them for "existences" gets asked awkward ques-
tions as to what "curved space" is curved "in."
It is not irrelevant to our topic to consider why human
beings invent these metaphysical monsters of forces and bumps
in space-time. The reason is that they have never emancipated
themselves from the absurd idea that science "explains"
things. They were not content to have laws which merely told
them that the planets will, as a matter of fact, move in such
and such ways. They wanted to know "why" the planets move
in those ways. So Newton replied, "Forces." "Oh," said hu-
manity, "that explains it. We understand forces. We feel them
every time someone pushes or pulls us." Thus the movements
were supposed to be "explained" by entities familiar because
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 Science and the Physical World

analogous to the muscular sensations which human beings

feel. The humps and hills were introduced for exactly the
same reason. They seem so familiar. If there is a bump in the
billiard table, the rolling billiard ball is diverted from a
straight to a curved course. Just the same with the planets.
"Oh, I see!" says humanity, "that's quite simple. That ex-
plains everything."
But properly formulated, never "explain"
scientific laws,
anything. They simplystate, in an abbreviated and general-
ized form, what happens. No scientist, and in my opinion no
philosopher, knows why anything happens, or can "explain"
anything. Scientific laws do nothing except state the brute
fact that "when A happens, B always happens too." And laws
of this kind obviously enable us to predict. If certain scientists
substituted humps and hills for forces, then they have just
substituted one superstition for another. For my part I do
not believe that science has done this, though some scientists
may have. For scientists, after all, are human beings with the
same craving for "explanations" as other people.
I think that atoms are in exactly the same position as forces

and the humps and hills of space-time. In reality the mathe-

matical formulae which are the scientific ways of stating the
atomic theory are simply formulae for calculating what sensa-
tions will appear in given conditions. But just as the weakness
of the human mind demanded that there should correspond
to the formula of gravitation a real "thing" which could be
called "gravitation itself" or "force," so the same weakness
demands that there should be a real thing corresponding to
the atomic formulae, and this real thing is called the atom.
In reality the atoms no more cause sensations than gravita-
tion causes apples to. fall. The only causes of sensations are
other sensations. And the relation of atoms to sensations to
be felt is not the relation of cause to effect, but the relation of
a mathematical formula to the facts and happenings which it
enables the mathematician to calculate.

213
 Philosophy and Science

Some writers have said that the physical world hasno color,
no sound, no no smell. It has no spatiality. Probably it
taste,
has not even number. We must not suppose that it is in any
way like our world, or that we can understand it by attribu-
ting to it the characters of our world. Why not carry this
progress to its logical conclusion? Why not give up the idea
that it has even the character of "existence" which our famil-
iar world has? We have given up smell, color, taste. We have
given up even space and shape. We have given up number.
Surely, after all that, mere existence is but a little thing to
give up. No? Then is it that the idea of existence conveys "a
sort of halo"? I suspect so. The "existence" of atoms is but
the expiring ghost of the pellet and billiard-ball atoms of our
forefathers. They, of course, had size, shape, weight, hardness.
These have gone. But thinkers still cling to their existence,
just as their fathers clung to the existence of forces, and for
the same reason. Their reason is not in the slightest that sci-
ence has any use for the existent atom. But the imagination
has. It seems somehow to explain things, to make them homely
and familiar.
It will not be out of place to give one more example to
show how common fictitious existences are in science, and
how little it matters whether they really exist or not. This
example has no strange and annoying talk of "bent spaces"
about it. One of the foundations of physics is, or used to be,
the law of the conservation of energy. I do not know how far,
if at all, this has been affected by the theory that matter some-

times turns into energy. But that does not affect the lesson it
has for us. The law or used to state, that the amount
states,
of energy in the universe always constant, that energy is
is

never either created or destroyed. This was highly convenient,

but it seemed to have obvious exceptions. If you throw a
stone up into the air, you are told that it exerts in its fall the
same amount of energy which it took to throw it up. But
suppose it does not fall. Suppose it lodges on the roof of your

214
 Science and the Physical World

house and stays there. What has happened to the energy which
you can nowhere perceive as being exerted? It seems to have
disappeared out of the universe. No, says the scientist, it still
exists as potential energy. Now what does this blessed word
"potential"— which is thus brought in to save the situation-
mean as applied to energy? It means, of course, that the energy
does not exist in any of its regular "forms," heat, light, elec-
tricity, etc. But this is merely negative. What positive mean-
ing has the term? Strictly speaking, none whatever. Either the
energy exists or it does not exist. There is no realm of the
"potential" half-way between existence and non-existence.
And the existence of energy can only consist in its being ex-
erted. If the energy is not being exerted, then it is not energy
and does not exist. Energy can no more exist without energiz-
ing than heat can exist without being hot. The "potential"
existence of the energy is, then, a fiction. The actual empiri-
cally verifiable facts are that if a certain quantity of energy e
exists in the universeand then disappears out of the universe
(as happens when the stone lodges on the roof), the same
amount of energy e will always reappear, begin to exist again,
in certain known conditions. That is the fact which the law
of the conservation of energy actually expresses. And the fic-

tion of potential energy introduced simply because it is

is

convenient and makes the equations easier to work. They

could be worked quite well without it, but would be slightly
more complicated. In either case the function of the law is the
same. Its object is to apprise us that if in certain conditions we
have certain perceptions (throwing up the stone), then in
certain other conditions we shall get certain other perceptions
(heat, light, stone hitting skull, or other such). But there will
always be a temptation to hypostatize the potential energy as
an "existence," and to believe that it is a "cause" which "ex-
plains" the phenomena.
views which I have been expressing are followed out,
If the
they will lead to the conclusion that, strictly speaking, nothing

215
 Philosophy and Science

exists except sensations (and the minds which perceive them).

The rest is mental construction or fiction. But this does not
mean that the conception of a star or the conception of an
electron are worthless or untrue. Their truth and value con-
sist in their capacity for helping us to organize our experience
and predict our sensations.

216
 Science and Explanation

My subject here falls within that branch of philosophy which

is commonly called the philosophy of science. And it is in-
tended, among other things, to illustrate, by the particular case
of science, the suggestion which I made in an earlier chapter
that all subjects, scientific, literary, moral, if you examine

their first principles, will lead you back into philosophy.

Perhaps I ought to begin, however, by apologizing for talk-
ing about science at all. In these days it is a perilous thing for
the layman to do. There are some philosophers, I believe,
who can claim to possess a fairly expert knowledge of some
one or other of the sciences. But I, assuredly, am not one of
them. But by way of an excuse I would plead that science,
after all, is but one of many forms of human intellectual en-
deavor, and that as such must have its special place and its
it

special function in the general economy of human culture.

My purpose in this essay is simply to inquire what the special
function of science is. And that problem, the problem of the
function of science, is not itself, I submit, a scientific problem.

For to which of the particular sciences can it possibly belong?

It is not a biological problem, or a geographical problem, or
a chemical problem. There is no science which claims it. You
must stand outside science to investigate it. And it is, I should
say, a philosophical problem.
I suppose I shall be allowed to say, at any rate, that science
deals in some way with nature, with things that happen in
nature, with events, with phenomena. Now when anything

217
 Philosophy and Science

happens in nature, there are two questions regarding it which

human beings are prone to ask. The first is: What happened?
The second is: Why did it happen? We may distinguish these
two questions by calling the first the question of the "what,"
the second the question of the "why." To give a very simple
example. Suppose a child who has observed for the first
time in his life the freezing of a pond. He may ask, "What has
happened?" In reply he will be told that when the thermom-
eter falls to below zero centigrade, the previously liquid water
turns solid, its volume increases by roughly one-eighth, and
so on. He may also perhaps be told something about the
molecular processes involved. But in all such information he
is being given simply a description of what happens. The

answer to the question "what?" is always necessarily a descrip-

tion, and nothing but a description.
But the child may frame his question in a different way.
Instead of asking what has happened to the water, he may ask,
''Why does water freeze?" And if his teacher is a very unsophis-
ticated scientist, he may reply that water freezes because the
temperature falls below zero centigrade, and because, when
that happens, the molecules do so and so. Here, apparently,
the child is being given, not a mere description of what hap-
pens, but a reason why it happens, or in other words an
explanation. Thus the question "what?" asks simply for a
description of events. The question "why?" asks for an expla-
nation of them.
Now the essence of my thesis is simply this— that the func-
tion of science answer the question "what?" but never the
is to
question "why?" In other words, its function is simply to de-
scribe phenomena, never to explain them. But it is also part
of my thesis that from the earliest times scientists have as a
matter of fact attempted not only to describe phenomena, but
also to explain them; and that this false striving after explana-
tions has led science astray in the past, and that it may very pos-
sibly lead it astray again in the present and in the future, if the

2l8
 Science and Explanation

situation is not watched. And what I am going to do is to try to

justify these statements.
Science arose in the beginning out of ordinary human curi-
osity, the curiosity ofordinary, ignorant men. But the two
questions, "What happens?" and "Why does it happen?" are
the natural questions which ordinary human curiosity always
puts. This simple psychological fact has to a large extent gov-
erned the development of science. It accounts for the fact that
science from the beginning has always attempted to answer
both these questions. And although the demand for explana-
tion is, scientifically speaking, an illegitimate demand, science
has never quite freed itself from the idea of explanation which
it has inherited from its ancestry in naive human curiosity.

If one leaves out of account certain tentative beginnings in

Babylonia and Egypt, science proper may be said to have be-
gun its career in ancient Greece. And the greatest of the Greek
scientistswas Aristotle. It is extremely instructive to note how
Aristotle set about dealing with natural phenomena. When
anything came into existence, whether it was an oak tree, or a
hen's egg, or a flash of lightning, Aristotle thought that there
were four principles which must be used in attempting to
understand it. You must ascertain, he said, the material cause
of the thing, its efficient cause, its final cause, and its formal
cause. With formal causes I am not here concerned, and I will
say nothing about them. Roughly speaking, and neglecting
fine metaphysical points, the other three principles may be
described as follows. The material cause of a thing was the
matter of which it was made. The efficient cause was the pre-
ceding events or phenomena which brought the thing into
being— that is to say, what we should now call simply the
cause. The final cause of a thing was the purpose which it
served in the universe. Thus one might say that in order fully
to understand anything one had, for Aristotle, to know three
things about it, what it was made of, what its cause was, and
what purpose it served in the world.

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 Philosophy and Science

The first two of these principles, you will see, answered the
question "what?" They met the demand for description and
nothing else. What is it made of? If you answer that it is made
of wood or iron, you are obviously describing it. What is its
cause? That is, what other phenomena invariably precede it,
or lead up to it? If you answer that question, you are describ-
ing not the phenomenon itself, but the one that went before
it. You are describing the series of phenomena of which this

phenomenon is a member.
But the third which Aristotle called the final
principle,
cause, was intended to answer the question "why?" and to give
not a description, but an explanation. What does the word
why mean? Well, it is ambiguous, and has several meanings.
But one of the commonest interprets it in terms of purpose.
We say to a man, "What did you do?," which is a form of the
question, "What happened?" And when he has told us what
he did, we ask, "Why did you do it?" And by that we mean,
"What was your purpose?" And Aristotle thought that we
could question nature in the same way. After we had ascer-
tained what nature does, we could then go on to ask why
nature does it. The answer, in the case of any particular phe-
nomenon, was the final cause of that phenomenon, the pur-
pose which it served in the cosmos. So that in Greece, the
country in which science originated, the conception of the
function of science which was entertained by its most distin-
guished representative was that this function included both
the description and the explanation of phenomena.
Throughout the Middle Ages, I should say, Aristotle's con-
ception of science held the field more or less unchanged. But
when you come to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century, to the age of Galileo and Newton, you find a sudden
change. Most of the conceptions of Aristotle are attacked. And
among these the conception of final causes. Aristotle was ac-
cused, among other sins, of having introduced into science the
futile and fatal idea of final causes, that is to say, the concep-
tion of purpose. The modern scientific era began with the

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 Science and Explanation

firm determination to banish final causes altogether from

was not in the future to probe into the cosmic
science. Science
purpose of anything.
It was not that the seventeenth-century scientists were dis-
posed to deny the existence of purposes in nature. They were
most of them religious men who believed that the world is
governed by God's purposes. But they supposed that these
purposes were beyond the reach of science. They might fall
within the sphere of religion, or perhaps of philosophy. But
science, in pursuing the will o' the wisp of purpose, had been
led into a wilderness, had failed to make useful discoveries,
and would continue do so. Its business was to discover the
to
facts, to describe the facts, and to leave all ulterior questions
of purpose out of account. So the point which I am trying to
make is this. The seventeenth century in effect rejected the
Aristotelian conception of science as concerned both with de-
scription and explanation, and declared that the proper func-
tion of science is description alone. And it is under this banner
that modern science has marched forward ever since.
Scientific laws, I should
explain nothing. Science never
say,
can explain even the simplest event. At this statement someone
may be inclined to cavil. "Surely," it will be said, "modern
science does attempt to explain things, and does, moreover,
succeed. Surely the germ theory explains many diseases. Surely
the law of gravitation explains the movement of the planets.
Surely the theory of evolution explains the appearance of new
species on the planet." And so on. It is worthwhile to consider
this.
Let us take a very simple case. Suppose that a savage from
Central Africa, who has never seen ice, is brought to this coun-
try, and is astonished to find water turning solid in the winter.
How do you "explain" this to him? You tell him— assuming
that he is capable of understanding you— that it is a law of
nature that when the temperature falls below zero centi-
grade, and when certain other conditions are fulfilled, water
turns solid. That is your explanation. In consists in reducing

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 Philosophy and Science

this particular event, happening here and now, to an example

of a general la^v of nature. But what is a law of nature? Instead
of telling the savage that in this particular case the tempera-
ture fell belo^v zero, and that the water then froze, you tell
him that in all cases, whenever the temperature falls below
zero, water always freezes. You are simply telling him what
always happens. Your explanation of a particular phenome-
non by reducing it to a general law merely consists in saying
that this phenomenon, which is happening now, is an example
of what always happens. A scientific law, in fact, is nothing but
a description of what always happens. It does nothing towards
explaining why it happens.
But, it will be objected, this is merely elementary. The
scientist does not merely say that at a certain temperature
water freezes. He explains the phenomenon by means of mo-
lecular processes. He explains that, when the temperature
reaches zero, then the molecules do so and so, and the water
becomes solid. But what is this, once more, beyond mere de-
scription? When the temperature reaches zero, then the mole-
cules do so and so. That just tells us what the molecules do,
what happens, not why it happens. And however far you go
with your molecular, your atomic, or your sub-atomic pro-
cessess, it will always be just the same. Always you will have
description, and never explanation.
Is it different, to take another example, with the law of grav-
itation? Why does an unsupported stone fall to the ground?
On the Newtonian view it is because all particles attract one
another with a certain force. But what does this mean? It
means only that all particles tend to fall together. This hap-
pens here because it always happens everywhere. Newton's
law of gravitation, like every other law, simply states what al-
ways happens. It gives no reason why. Nor would it make the
slightest difference if we substitute Einstein's law for New-
ton's. We should only be substituting one law for another.
And a law, as such, simply states what always happens.
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 Science and Explanation

Now I this point someone may ex-

can well imagine that at
claim, "Well, what on earth do you want? The laws of nature
tell you what happens. What else do you want to know? You

seem to want to know also why things happen. What do you

mean by why?" I hasten to say that I personally do not want
the scientist to tell me anything except what happens. I do
not want him to tell me why it happens. In fact, my whole
contention is that he should confine himself strictly to tell-
ing me what happens, and that when he tries to tell me why
it happens he is deserting the proper function of science.

But I will come to that later. Meanwhile let us attend to the

last question which was put to me: What do you mean by the
question "why?"
As we have seen, human curiosity always has asked the ques-
tion "why?" as well as the question "what?" And now the
problem seems to be what is it that ordinary human curiosity
wants to know when it asks the question "why?" What kind of
information does it expect in reply to this question? Think-
ing over this problem, I have come to the conclusion that the
question "why?" does not really express a desire for informa-
tion at all. It expresses a feeling. It does not proceed from the
intellect, but from the emotions. It indicates simply that men
want to be made to feel at home in the universe. They want
to escape from the sense of loneliness, the sense of strangeness
and unfamiliarity, the sense even of hostility, which the uni-
verse is apt to inspire. For the lonely, the strange, the un-
familiar are terrifying. At this point we tap the psychological
source of that desire for explanation which has always haunted
the human mind, and which has dogged the footsteps of sci-
ence. The whole conception of explanation has its roots here.
To explain a thing means, I believe, to exhibit it as friendly to
ourselves, or at least, as not menacing. When a strange, sur-
prising, hitherto unknown phenomenon occurs in nature,
when some totally new experience comes upon us, we want to
know that this strange new thing is not going to be a menace
223
 Philosophy and Science

to us, not going to be disastrous to us. When by some in-

is

tellectual process we have become assured of this, we feel that

the phenomenon has been explained. That, I believe, is the
meaning of explanation, and of the question "why?"
But historically this demand of our emotional nature has
satisfied itself in two quite distinct ways, and this fact has given
rise to two quite distinct types of explanation. The first way
of satisfaction has lain in developing the belief that the world
is rational, purposive. We ourselves are purposive beings. Our

actions are governed by purposes. If we could extend this con-

ception to the universe at large, if we could suppose that what-
ever happens in the universe happens because of some
purpose, and especially if the purpose were something to our
advantage, we should certainly feel more at home in the world.
We should feel that the universe is like ourselves, and perhaps
even that it is on our side. It would cease then to be strange,
terrifying, and incomprehensible. If we could show the pur-
pose which a phenomenon serves in the universe, the phe-
nomenon would then be explained. This was the significance
of Aristotle's final causes. And this is one kind of explanation.
Explanation by means of purposes is out of date for science.
It was definitely banished from science in the seventeenth
century. I do not mean by this to affirm that there is in fact
no cosmic purpose in the universe; or that this is the view of
science. The universe may, for all I know, be governed by pur-
pose. And any science which denies that the world is purpos-
ive, is, in my opinion, stupid and dogmatic. But science has
long ago decided that the question of purpose lies outside its
scope. Perhaps it is a question for philosophy, or perhaps for
religion. I do not discuss that here.^ My only point is that this
kind of explanation no longer finds a place in science.

1 But see the "Note on the Concept of Explanation" at the end of this
chapter.

224
 Science and Explanation

But there is a second type of explanation, which depends

psychologically upon another way of making ourselves at home
with things. It depends upon the psychological commonplace
that familiarity breeds contempt. If anything in the universe
appears strange, extraordinary, or menacing, then we try to
show that it is after all something quite familiar and ordinary.
When an utterly new experience comes upon us, threatening
us, we try to show that it is after all only an old friend in a
new disguise. It thereupon loses its terrors for us. From this
psychological root grows the second type of explanation, which
consists simply in reducing the strange to the familiar, the un-
known known. And my contention will be that, al-
to the
though science has emancipated itself from the first kind of
explanation, it has not yet completely emancipated itself from
the second.
Is not this what is at the bottom of the common idea that
the phenomena of nature are explained by the laivs of nature?
We supposed our African savage to be astonished at the freez-
ing of water. As we saw, you explain this to him by showing
that it is nothing unique, but merely an example of what al-
ways happens. It is, in other words, nothing strange. It is quite
familiar. When you have made him understand this, he feels
satisfied that you have explained the matter. And not only the
African savage. We all of us feel the same. Which shows that
what we mean by explanation is simply the showing that the
phenomenon in question is not strange, but familiar, that it
is something that always happens.

It follows that this idea of explanation is quite arbitrary and

unscientific, quite personal and subjective. For what is strange
to one person may be quite familiar to another. Hence what
explains a phenomenon to me may not explain it to you.^ And
I think you will agree with me that it cannot be the function

of science to supply various different individuals with the vari-

2 I owe this point to P. W. Bridgman's The Logic of Modern Physics.

225
 Philosophy and Science

ous different kinds of emotions which will make each of them

feel at home in the ^vorld. In other words, the function of sci-
ence is not explanation at all.
But evidence that the idea of explanation has not altogether
been dropped from the sciences is found in our linguistic
habits, in the ordinary turns of phrase used alike by the lay-
man and the scientist. Nothing is commoner than to hear the
question, "What is the scientific explanation of this or that
phenomenon?" Nothing is commoner than to hear the ques-
tion "why?" put to the scientist, and answered by him. Why
do the planets move in ellipses? Why has the mammoth be-
come extinct? And wherever the word why is used instead of
the word what, you know that our old mental habit still holds
sway, that the old craving for explanation, for making the
world seem homely and familiar, instead of strange and alarm-
ing, is still alive.
But perhaps you will think that this is a mere verbal mat-
ter, a matter of words which does not affect the substance of
science. Perhaps it may be a slight terminological inaccuracy

to say that the law of gravitation "explains" the movements of

the planets. We ought, no doubt, to use some other word. But
this is a matter of no importance to anyone except grammati-
cal purists and philosophical hair-splitters. It has never mis-
led science.
I am afraid that such a view cannot be maintained. I am
afraid that the false idea of explanation has misled science in
the past. And with great deference I venture to suggest that
it may possibly be misleading science now, and may continue
to do so in the future. I will try to give a few examples to
show this.
You will remember the common idea that a thing cannot
act, or produce an effect, at a distance from the place where
it is. Action at a distance, it used to be said, is an impossibility.

That maxim has played a great part in the history of thought,

yet it is a pure a priori dogma, without the slightest founda-

226
 Science and Explanation

tion in evidence. To settle whether it is true or not ought al-

ways to have been a matter of observation or experiment, and
nothing else. If it were found, as a matter of observed fact,
that an event X, happening in one part of the universe, was
invariably followed by another event 7 at a distance of a mil-
lion miles, and if there were no empirical evidence of anything
happening in between, then it should have been declared, on
the basis of such evidence, that X was the cause of Y, or in
other words that X acted at a distance.
But what actually happened was that a priori dogmas were
allowed to intervene. The question was not settled upon the
evidence, but by supposed considerations of pure reason. It
was supposed to be incomprehensible that anything should
act at a distance. And, therefore, it was declared to be im-
possible.
Now what is supposed incomprehensibility? Examine
this
it carefully, for profoundly instructive in the ways of hu-
it is

man thought. You think that if an event here, say the blow of a
hammer, is followed by another event here, say a blue flash,
as may happen in an explosion, then this is quite comprehen-
sible, and you will call the two events cause and effect. But
suppose it is alleged that the blow of the hammer here is fol-
lowed by a blue flash a million miles away, with nothing hap-
pening in between, then you say this is incomprehensible. I
want to know what you mean by "incomprehensible."
In the first, you do not mean "logically self-contradictory."
For there is no logical contradiction in a blow here being fol-
lowed by a blue flash a million miles away. The proposition,
"a blow occurred here," is obviously not contradicted by the
proposition, "a blue flash occurred a million miles away."
I will suggest a second possible meaning. The only way in

which science ever understands any phenomenon consists in

describing it accurately and in detail. The freezing of water
is understood, so far as science can understand it, when all the

molecular and other processes involved have been described.

227
 Philosophy and Science

Therefore a thing is "comprehensible" for science if it can

be described. And it would be "incomprehensible" if, for some
reason, it could not be described. But now, there is nothing
difficult to describe in a blow of a hammer here followed by a
blue flash a million miles away. It is just as easy to describe as
the blo^v of a hammer here followed by a blue flash here. The
only difference between the two cases consists in the inter-
vening distance in the first case. And all you have to do is to
insert that fact in your description. The one, therefore, is as
scientifically comprehensible as the other. This, therefore, can-
not be your meaning. Or, at any rate, action at a distance is
not incomprehensible in this, the only scientifically legiti-
mate sense.
By a process of elimination I arrive at the following conclu-
sion. What you really mean bythe word incomprehensible is
simply "unfamiliar." Man in his ordinary avocations of life
has been accustomed for hundreds of thousands of years to
what we may call action at one place. It is the ordinary type
of action. We have seen one thing hitting another and this
other thing bouncing off. All man's ordinary, everyday ex-
perience has been of action at one place. Such action is abso-
lutely familiar. And it seems to need no explanation. So when
man suddenly comes across a case of apparent action at a
distance, such as gravitation, it seems astonishing. He declares
it to be incomprehensible and impossible. And he demands

that the appearance of it be explained. And by explanation

of it he means that it be shown to be really a case of action at
one place after all. Then it will become comprehensible, be-
cause it will seem familiar.
As against this it may be urged that gravitational action at
a distance, as in the case of the stone falling to the ground, has
always been familiar to mankind, quite as familiar as the
bumping and hitting of things against one another. I reply
that this was not thought of, by prescientificman, as action at
a distance. It was not realized that the earth causes the stone
to fall. The cause of the stone falling was supposed to be its

228
 Science and Explanation

own weight, which was a property of the stone itself. It was

therefore the stone that acted, and

was an example of ac-
this
tion at one place. It was only when science introduced the
idea of gravitational attraction of one body by a distant body
that man for the first time had the experience of action at a
distance.
The demand of the average human consciousness for an
explanation of gravitation actually set science to work. It re-
sulted in the immense amount of time and labor devoted by
scientists of an earlier generation in attempts to explain gravi-
tation, that is, to reduce it to a case of action at one place, by
means of such hypotheses as that space is full of flying particles
which, by beating upon the unprotected sides of bodies, tend-
ed to drive them together.
These attempts, then, and the a priori dogma which led to
them, namely, that action at a distance is impossible, were
actual examples of how science has been influenced by the
false idea that its function is explanation.
The same idea is at the bottom of the view that for the prop-
agation of light through space a medium is necessary. I am not
here concerned with the question whether there actually is or
is not such a medium as the ether of space. That is a matter for

the experts. But what I am concerned to say is that whether

there is or is not such a medium is a pure question of evidence.
It must not be decided by a priori dogmas. And the suggestion
that, apart from any actual empirical evidence of the existence
of ether, it must necessarily exist because it is inconceivable
that light should travel across space without a medium is
simply a deduction from the a priori dogma that action at a
distance is impossible. There is nothing a priori impossible
in the suggestion that certain events in the sun have here on
the earth, or on any other distant object, the effects which we
attribute to light, without anything, either particles or waves,
traveling across the intervening distance.^ Such a view may, of

3 This suggestion, too, I owe to Professor Bridgman.

229
 Philosophy and Science

course, be wrong, and I do not say that there is anything to

recommend But if anyone thinks it a priori impossible, it
it.

must be because he supposes that cause and effect cannot jump

across a distance, but must be propagated from point to point,
or in other words that action at a distance is impossible. And
this view we have shown to have its roots in the false concept
of explanation.
If experts hold, on the basis of positive evidence, that light
is propagated through a medium, then that conclusion must
be accepted. But if they hold this view merely on the basis of
the supposed impossibility of causal action jumping over a
distance of space, then we should have a case of science being
misled by the false idea that its function is explanation.
All questions of fact ought to be decided solely upon the
basis of evidence without the intrusion of a priori dogmas.
One might lay down the principle that nothing that is actually
observed to happen in nature, nothing for which there is the
warrant of experience, ought to be declared impossible on the
ground of any supposed a priori law. And I would call this
the principle of radical empiricism. The phrase radical em-
piricism I have, of course, stolen from William James. But
James used it in a different meaning.
But to return to the concept of explanation. One may find,
I think, another example of its unfortunate influence in New-

ton's law of gravitation. Newton introduced into this law the

concept of "force." The present tendency, I believe, is to dis-
miss gravitational force as a fiction. Now quite apart from any
questions raised by the work of Einstein, it appears that New-
ton could perfectly well have stated his law without introduc-
ing the concept of force at all. He could have stated it in terms
of empirically verifiable factors, such as velocities, masses, and
distances. Why then did Newton introduce the concept of
force, which was unnecessary even for his own law? What was
his motive in so doing?
The motive, I think, was the ordinary human craving for
230
 Science and Explanation

explanation, for an answer to the question "why?" If Newton

had simply stated the relations between the masses, distances,
and velocities of moving particles without any mention of
forces, he would have given a perfectly good description of
what happens and therefore a perfectly good law of gravita-
tion, so far as the data available in his time allowed. But it
would have appeared a mystery simply to say that, as a matter
of brute fact, particles move in such and such ways and with
such and such velocities, and that that was an end of the mat-
ter. People would have asked, "Why does this happen? Why
do particles move in this way? Why do they move at all?" New-
ton obviously asked himself these questions, was puzzled by
them, and thought he ought to give some reason. And he an-
swered, "Particles move because of forces." And this seemed
to explain the mystery because the conception of force is de-
rived from our everyday, familiar sensations of stress and
strain in our muscles. The explanation consisted in reducing
the strange and unfamiliar motions of the heavenly bodies to
the ordinary experiences of pushing and pulling of our daily
life. Thus the otiose concept of force was introduced because

Newton was not satisfied with a law which should simply de-
scribe what happens, but erroneously thought that the law
should also explain why it happens.
The theory of gravitation, however, has been revolutionized
in recent years. The concept of force is no longer the center of
it. Einstein's law is not stated in terms of forces, but in terms

of geometry. We might suppose, then, that the objectionable

features of illusory explanations by means of fictitious entities
such as forces would have disappeared. Let us see whether this
is so.

I do not profess to understand the mathematics of relativity.

But when those who do understand it attempt to enlighten the

darkness of us others, we find them using some such language
as the following. Space-time, they say, is curved or bent round
the sun and other massive bodies. Its geometry is non-Eucli-

231
 Philosophy and Science

dean. One must conceive, then, that space-time has, as it were,

hills and valleys in it. Because of these hills and valleys the
planets cannot run in straight lines. They have to run round
about. This explains the curvature of their orbits.
This, of course, is merely the sort of language used by popu-
larizers, and I dare say it may make some sensitive mathema-
ticians shudder. But it must be remembered that some of these
popularizers are themselves experts, and they are presumably
responsible for the language they use. It seems a fair conclu-
sion that they suppose that such language, though popular, is
not wholly false. They think that, in some sense, space-time
really is bent and that this curvature explains the curved mo-
tions of the planets.
When the plain man hears such language he is apt, if he is
courageous enough to open his mouth at all, to express his
puzzled bewilderment somewhat as follows. "I can under-
stand," he may say, "the idea of a bent stick, or a bent material
object of any sort. The stick is bent in space. But how can
space-time itself be bent? What is there to be bent? And what
is it bent in} And if space-time is bent, and so finite, what is

outside it?" I do not know what the expert says in reply to this
no-doubt crude talk. And I will not pursue the dialogue
further. But the whole situation suggests certain reflections
to me.
I suspect that there something wrong here, and that the
is

root of the trouble liesonce more in the baneful influence of

the false idea that scientific laws ought to explain phenomena.
Is not the true position this? Einstein's law, in its strict, that
is, its mathematical, form, contains nothing about hills and

valleys and bumps in space-time. It contains nothing but

mathematical formulae. These formulae are simply a general-
ized geometrical description of the curves which might be
followed by all possible gravitating bodies. They do not ex-
plain anything at all. They are simply a description of certain
curves.
Suppose you draw on the blackboard a certain curve, say,

232
 Science and Explanation

an ellipse. A simple geometrical equation will describe that

ellipse. Such an equation would not, of course, explain why a
particle, which happened to be traveling in that ellipse, was
doing so. It would simply describe the curve. Now suppose
you draw on the board a number of other ellipses of varying
eccentricities. You can get a generalized mathematical formula
which will describe not one of the ellipses, but all of them.
Once again this formula will not explain why a number of
particles which happen to be traveling on these paths, are so
traveling. It will be simply a generalized description of all the
curves. Suppose, finally, you draw on the board a number of
other curves, circles, parabolas, and so on, in addition to the
ellipses. You can still get a more generalized formula which
will describe them. I believe that Einstein's law of gravitation

isnothing but such a formula, only it describes not merely a

few ellipses and circles, but every possible path of every pos-
sible gravitating body. It does not explain their movements. It
merely describes them.
No doubt it is the case that, in order to reach this vastly gen-
eralized and complicated description, it has been necessary
to introduce time as a fourth co-ordinate, and to make use of
non-Euclidean geometry. But that does not alter the principle.
The non-Euclidean geometry was not introduced to explain
anything, but simply for purposes of description. And it was
rendered necessary only because of the variety and complica-
tion of the curves which had to be described. You might imag-
ine a universe in which all possible gravitating bodies moved
in circles. In such a universe the simple equation of the circle
would be the law of gravitation, and neither time as a fourth
co-ordinate, nor non-Euclidean geometry, would be necessary.
We are usually told that Einstein's law is a description of
the curvature of space-time. This, I am convinced, is abso-
lutely meaningless. It is absolutely meaningless to say that
space, or space-time, are either curved or straight, that they are
either non-Euclidean or Euclidean. A stick may be bent or
straight in space. But the space in which it lies is neither. It

233
 Philosophy and Science

is usually assumed that space had hitherto been regarded as

Euclidean, and that this was quite easy to understand, but

that A\ ith the advent of Einstein we have to think of space as
non-Euclidean. Now the essence of my present contention is
that it was quite as meaningless to say that space is Euclidean
as to say that it is "bent." It is only things in space which can
be described in either of these ways. Space itself is absolutely
amorphous. It has no shape; and therefore no geometry. And
if we now ask, "What is it, then, that in Einstein's law is de-
scribed by the formulae of a four-dimensional non-Euclidean
geometry?," I answer that it is the curves followed by gravi-
tating bodies. The law is not a description of space-time, but
a generalized description of certain curves.
But the common way of looking at the matter supposes that
space-time is itself curved and that this curvature causes the

planets to move as they do. There are supposed to be, as it

were, t^\ o distinct facts, first the curvature of space-time, and
then, secondly, the resulting orbits of the planets. These two
are separated, and the first, the curvature, is then supposed to
be the cause of the second, the planetary motions.
Now if I were to say that the cause of this table being square
is that it occupies a square piece of space, you would rightly

think such a statement nonsense. You cannot separate the

space from the table which occupies it, attribute a shape to this
pure space, and say that this is the cause of the table being
square. You cannot in point of fact attribute any shape at all
to pure space. It is tables and chairs, material things in space,
which have shape. In just the same way, I think, it is nonsense
to speak of space-time itself as being either Euclidean or non-
Euclidean, apart from the things which are in it. And it is just
as meaningless to say that the hills and valleys in space-time
cause the planets to move in curved courses as it would be to
say that the square shape of the space which this table occupies
causes the table to be square. But because this is not realized,
the illusory idea of causal explanation slips in. Space-time it-
self issupposed to have hills and valleys in it, and these are

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 Science and Explanation

supposed to thrust the planets out of their straight courses.

As if the hill or the valley were all there waiting in space-time
before the planet comes to it.
What is this but the old idea of pushing and pulling? Only
instead of the planets being pulled by forces, as they were for
Newton, they are no^v being pushed by coming up against the
sides of hills in space-time, just as the billiard ball is pushed
out of the straight by an unevenness in the surface of the table.
What, then, is it which has misled so many writers on rela-
tivity? What is the psychological cause of the mental confu-
sion which I have just been trying to clear up. I answer that
the root cause of all this confused thinking is the craving for
explanation, the desire to try to show that Einstein's law, not
merely describes, but explains the phenomena.
Of course formulae in non-Euclidean geometry may cor-
rectly describe the motion of the planets. But I suggest that
the curvature of space-time is just as fictitious as the forces
of Newton. And it has been foisted into discussions of rela-
tivity for precisely thesame reason as forces were foisted into
Newton's law. Forces were supposed to explain why bodies
move as they do. They explained these motions by appealing
to familiar sensations of muscular strain. And now the hills
and bumps in space-time are introduced for an identical rea-
son. They make the phenomena seem familiar by comparing
them to what happens when I go round a hill instead of
through it. Einstein's law, as a pure mathematical formula,
explains nothing. It simply says, "This is what happens. Bodies
move in such-and-such curves." But inevitably the human
mind asks, "Why do they move in these curves?" There is, of
course, no answer to this question. It is meaningless. But just
as Newton was puzzled by it in regard to his law, and answered,
"Oh, it is because of forces," so now modern writers, equally
puzzled by the question "why?" in regard to Einstein's law,
say, "Oh, it is because the planets are pushed about by the
curvature of space-time." This too, like the forces, seems fa-
miliar and easy to understand. It seems to explain the phe-

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 Philosophy and Science

nomena, that is, to make them familiar, until one realizes that
the whole idea of scientific explanation is a bogus idea.
And though it is true that this talk about hills and valleys
in space-time is a mere popular mode of expression, still I am
not convinced that men of science, in their talk of "expand-
ing universes" and "exploding universes," do not take it at
least half-seriously, some of them perhaps quite seriously. I
am not convinced that their own thought is not infected by
it. And if so, I do not know what misguidance of science may

not follow. And if there is a misguidance, then it will be due

to the fact that science has not even yet completely emanci-
pated itself from the belief that its function is to explain
phenomena.
I am not suggesting that the scientific theories of expanding
and exploding universes are false. That, again, is a matter for
the experts, not for the philosophers. No doubt these theories
can be interpreted so as to be true. And I dare say their pure
mathematical expression is true, just as is Einstein's law of
gravitation. They doubtless describe admirably the known
facts about the motions of distant nebulae and other astro-
nomical entities. But if they are interpreted to mean that space
itself, or space-time itself, is a sort of round ball which is get-

ting bigger and bigger in the middle of nothingness, with

nothing, not even empty space, outside it, then I am certain
that it becomes perfectly meaningless. And I do think that
there is grave danger that, not only the minds of the general
public, but the minds of scientists themselves, may be misled.
I do not know whether I have succeeded in convincing you

of anything. But what I have been trying to prove to you is

simply this: that such questions as "What are the exact func-
tions of science? What precisely is its business? What is it
trying to do? What ought it try to do? What are its bound-
aries?" are important questions for the scientist himself. Be-
cause, they are wrongly answered, or if, as more often
if

happens, they are not considered at all, then science may be

seriously misled in its own field. Such questions are usually

236
 Science and Explanation

regarded as belonging to the philosophy of science, and are

studied by philosophers to the best of their ability. Perhaps
it is a pity that scientists themselves do not usually investigate

them, because they might study them so much the more ef-
fectually.The important thing, however, is that they should
be studied.

Note on the Concept of Explanation

The reader may ask whether explanation, if it is not the

business of science, is the business of philosophy. Should we,
in other words, admit that there is such a thing as explanation,
that it is a meaningful concept, even though science is not the
place for it? Or should weon the contrary, that the whole
say,
idea of explanation is illusory, wherever it is found, whether
in science or philosophy? Obviously this is much the same as
asking whether in the last resort the universe is rational or ir-
rational. If there is no such thing as explanation at all, then
all we can say is that the world is as it is, and that things hap-

pen as they do, that that is the end of the matter, and that
there is in the last analysis no rhyme or reason for anything.
Equally obviously, this is the vastest question that the human
mind can ask, and one which it is ridiculous to treat in a foot-
note! Nevertheless, since the question is bound to frame itself
in the mind of the reader, I think it is better at least to indi-
cate my personal attitude to it in however brief and unsatis-
factory a way.
I have mentioned only two types of explanation. One is
teleological explanation, or explanation by means of purposes.
The other is explanation by familiarity. There is, however, a
third type of explanation which I have not thought it necessary
to mention in an essay devoted exclusively to science, because
this third type of explanation has never been used in science
and has made its appearance only in the writings of philos-
ophers. I will now say something about this.
The question "why?" may mean "for what purpose?" If so
237
 Philosophy and Science

interpreted it gives rise to teleological explanation. Or it may

indicate simply a desire to have the unfamiliar reduced to the
familiar, and this gives rise to the second type of explanation.
But "why?" may be a request for a logi-
thirdly, the question
cal reason or ground. Thus the logical reason for any proposi-
tion is that prior proposition which implies it and by means
of which it is proved. If A—B, and B—C, then A — C. And the
facts that A—B, and B=C, may be given as the logical reason
why A^C. In this sense, too, the axiom of parallels (in Eucli-
dean geometry) may be given as the reason why the three
angles of a triangle are equal to tw^o right angles.
If the question "why?" is interpreted in this sense, then we
get the third or logical type of explanation. To explain a fact
will then mean
to give a logical reason for which the fact fol-
lows. If the world could be logically deduced from some first
principle, if the relation of the ultimate reality to the world
could be exhibited, not as the relation of cause to effect, but
as the relation of logical antecedent to logical consequent,
then the world would be so far, in this sense, "explained."
This idea makes its appearance in the philosophy of Spinoza,
in most modern idealism, but most clearly of all in the philos-
ophy of Hegel. Suppose that the universe consists of the things
A, B, C, D, . etc. If one could show that A logically implies
. .

B, while B logically implies C, and so on throughout the

whole universe, then everything in the universe might be
said to be explained. B exists because A exists, and A is the
logical reason for B. The whole universe would be rational,
i.e., logical. Hegel attempted to deduce the main features of

the universe (categories) from one another in this way.* To

give an example: He tried to show that the idea of being logi-
cally implies the idea of becoming (change). If this were
valid, would explain why the universe is everywhere char-
it

acterized by impermanence and flux. For if being logically

4 That this was Hegel's intention has recently been denied by some critics.

I cannot discuss this question here.

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 Science and Explanation

implies becoming, then any being whatever, from an atom to

a nebula, must necessarily be in a state of becoming, or flux.
And Hegel attempted to carry out this kind of explanation
for all the features of the universe.
To this it may be objected that the first term in the series,
A, must itself be an unexplained mystery, since there is no
prior term by which it can be explained. And this means that
the whole series is really a mystery, and nothing is, in the end,
explained. Hegel attempted to meet this difficulty by think-
ing of the universe as a closed system, which we may symbolize
by a circle. The beginning and the end meet. The first term,
A, explains all the others until we come to the last term, Z.
Here the circle returns upon itself, for Z logically implies A.
Thus there is no unexplained term, no ultimate mystery. The
universe is a closed system of which every term really implies
every other term, so that the whole system is self-explanatory.
It is right to mention that Hegel's own philosophy is an at-
tempt to blend together both the teleological and the logical
types of explanation.
From the point of view of motivation, logical explanation
may be grouped with teleological explanation, since the mo-
tive of both is to show that the universe is rational, and there-
fore like ourselves. For the word "rational" means either
logical or purposive. A man is said to be rational if he is logical,
and he is also called rational if his conduct is governed by
intelligent purpose. Thus the three types of explanation may
be arranged as follows:

Explanation

Explanation by showing that Explanation by

the world is rational familiarity

Logical explanation Teleological explanation

239
 Philosophy and Science

As to the question whether any sort of explanation is ever

possible or whether in the last resort all explanation, even in
philosophy, is as illusory as we have
seen it to be in science,
the position seems to me
be as follows. Explanation by
to
familiarity is totally worthless both in science and philosophy
for the reasons given above. The other two kinds of explana-
tion fall outside science, and have their place in philosophy,
if anywhere. Have they, then, any real place even in philos-

ophy? Opinions differ about this.

(1) Teleological Explanation. We may feel vaguely that
the universe is driving towards something, and we may en-
visage this as goodness, beauty, or what not. And there may
in all this be groping towards some truth. But mere
a real
feelings, even though they may vaguely indicate something
true, do not constitute knowledge. And as far as any real or
definite knowledge regarding the cosmic purpose is concerned,
we may well think, with Omar, that
The revelations of devout and learned,
Who rose before us and as prophets burned,
Are all but stories which, aiuoke from sleep,
They told their comrades and to sleep returned.

And not unlikely that philosophy will conclude, as did

it is

science in the seventeenth century, that "divine purposes"

are beyond human comprehension, and will turn to more
profitable fields of study where something can be accom-
plished. At any rate, no philosophy so far has had the least
success in the teleological explanation of anything.
(2) Logical Explanation. This
position is even more hope-
less than in the case of teleological explanation. For all I
know, everything in the universe may logically imply every-
thing else. But no one has ever shown that it is so. Hegel's
philosophy is the only attempt ever made on the grand scale,
and it was, in my opinion, completely unsuccessful. And this
is also, I think, the general opinion at the present day.

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 Science and Explanation

Hence the prospects of philosophical explanation do not

appear to be rosy. Theoretically philosophy might still per-
haps, in spite of past failures, aim at explanation. But in prac-
tice I should say that the philosopher, like the scientist, has
never succeeded in explaining a single solitary fact.
Has philosophy, then, a descriptive function, like science,
to which it can turn and do useful work? The answer is that
it has. In fact, much of the best philosophical work, both in

the past and at the present time, has been purely descriptive.
This has always been true, for example, of the British em-
pirical tradition. But philosophy will be descriptive of prin-
ciples more general in character than those which form the
subject matter of science. For example, to give a description
of particular causal laws is the business of particular sciences.
But to give a description or definition of the principle of
causality as such is one part of the business of philosophy. Is
the essence of causality properly described as simply invari-
able sequence? Or should the ideas of necessity, compulsion,
force be included in the description?^ These are the kinds of
questions, I think, to which philosophy can attempt an answer
with some hope of success, and without condemning itself to
that futility which seems always to attend upon its efforts at
"explanation." Medieval science stagnated for centuries until
the seventeenth-century scientists made an end of attempts to
pursue final causes. Is not the stagnation and futility which
have always been charged against philosophy probably due
to the fact that philosophy still hankers after explanations?
Hence if any philosopher wishes to include explanation
among the functions of philosophy, I should not entirely
warn him off the ground. There is just the faint possibility
that he may be right and that he might succeed. For if ex-
planation is possible at all, it certainly is the business of philos-

5 This example will make it evident to philosophical readers that what I

have here called the "descriptive" function of philosophy is much the same
as what many philosophers call "analysis."

241
 Philosophy and Science

ophy and not of science. But I should unquestionably regard

his enterprise with the same sorrowful tolerance as that with
which one views any other forlorn hope. Thus while making
a polite bow to the possibility that there may be such a thing
as explanation, I should personally advocate a philosophy
which excludes explanation from its objectives. I should advo-
cate a reform in philosophy similar to that which occurred
when science in the seventeenth century turned its back upon
final causes. Only in such a reform, I believe, lies the possibil-
ity of advance.

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 Science and Ethics

The relation between modern science and ethics may be

treated either systematically, as a presently existing problem
which awaits solution, or historically. For the historian of
ideas, the questions are: What influence has modern science
actually had on ethics, and how, and when? It is these latter
problems which I wish to discuss here. We must first decide
what we mean by modern. When did modern science begin
and who were its founders? One possible view is that it had
its beginning in what is sometimes called the scientific revolu-

tion of the seventeenth century. Newton was born in the

same year in which Galileo died, 1642, and everything which
has been accomplished since that era may be called modern
science. But a physicist to whom I recently posed the question
of when modern science began replied that it began with Ein-
stein and Niels Bohr, that is to say, with the theory of relativ-
ity and the discovery of electrons and protons. Both answers
are, of course, correct. It is only a question of what you choose
to mean by the word modern. But for my purposes I shall
count the seventeenth century as the time of the beginning
of modern science. More recent physics, especially Heisen-
berg's so-called principle of indeterminacy, have indeed raised
problems in the sphere of ethics which I shall briefly discuss.
But the supremely important, indeed revolutionary, effects
of science on ethics came in the earlier time beginning in the
seventeenth century.

243
 Philosophy and Science

A word should also be said about what we should take the

word ethics to stand for here. It may be used either as apply-
ing to actual human conduct, as when we inquire whether
someone's conduct was ethical or unethical. Or it may mean
the philosophical theory of the nature and foundations of
morality. And it is in this latter sense that I shall understand
it our purposes in this essay.
for
Perhaps we can now safely formulate our problem. Let us
put it this way: What influence has science had, in the period
from the time of Newton and Galileo down to the present day,
upon the philosophical theory of ethics? I shall arrange my dis-
cussion of this subject under the following three heads:
(i) Science and the Subjectivity of Morals, (2) Science and the
Relativity of Morals, and (3) Science and the Freedom of the
Will.

Science and the Subjectivity of Morals

Before the rise of modern science European thinkers be-

lieved, for the most part, in the objectivity of the moral law.
The influence of science has been to destroy this theory and
to introduce its opposite, the theory of ethical subjectivism.

The theory of moral objectivism maintained that moral laws

are not a purely human creation, having their seat and origin
in the human mind, but that they have a non-human source,
either in the mind of God or, according to some versions, in
the fundamental structure of the external world, like the
laws of gravitation. The influence of science has been to
undermine this view and to substitute the view that morals
are subjective, having their seat and origin in the human mind
and not in the external universe. I do not mean, of course,
that this is the official view of science. Pure science, as such,
has nothing to say on this question, which is philosophical,
and not scientific, in its nature. And individual scientists may
take this view or they may not. But in general, intellectuals

?44
 Science and Ethics

before the rise of science believed in ethical objectivism,

whereas now they generally believe in ethical subjectivism.
And it is which has caused this change.
science
Historically, there have been two versions of ethical ob-
jectivism. There is the theistic version. According to this the
moral law originates in the mind of God and is imposed on
man by the command of God. This is the view which we find
in the two theistic religions which have spread over the West-
ern world, Judaism and Christianity. But there is also a
non-theistic version which is found in the religions which
originated in India, Hinduism and Buddhism. This Eastern
version appears in what is called the law of Karma. This is
the law of nature that says every man receives in the long run
precisely what he deserves in the way of reward or punish-
ment. This is bound up with belief in reincarnation. Suppose
a child is born crippled or diseased. Christianity and Judaism
provide no morally acceptable explanation of this. It is an
inexplicable injustice. But according to the Indian religions,
it is a punishment for some sin committed in a previous in-

carnation. Usually— though there are exceptions— Oriental

thinkers believe that this law of Karma is not imposed by God,
or the gods, but is a law of nature, to which indeed the gods
themselves may be subject. It is an impersonal part of the
structure of the universe.
In many cultures the idea of an objective moral law is con-
nected with the belief in a world-purpose, a plan of things
towards which the world-process is working. Right and wrong
in human conduct may then be defined in terms of that pur-
pose. That action is right which tends to harmonize with the
world-purpose, that action is wrong which works against it.
In such a philosophy it may be possible to explain events by
reference to their purposes. This leads to the distinction be-
tween two kinds of explanation, which philosophers have
labeled teleological and mechanical. Teleological explana-
tion means explanation in terms of purpose, mechanical ex-

245
 Philosophy and Science

planation is in terms of causes. Suppose we see a man climbing

a hill, and suppose we ask for an explanation of this phenom-
enon. Two quite different kinds of explanation may be given,
both of which may be true at the same time. We may say
that he is climbing the hill in order to enjoy the view from
the top. This would be a teleological explanation, explana-
tion in terms of purpose. But a physiologist might say, with
equal truth, that the man's climbing can be explained by its
causes. Some external stimulus caused a release of energy
stored in the man's nervous system, and this caused muscular
movements in the man's legs, and those caused his ascent of
the hill. This would be an example of mechanical explanation.
Before the rise of modern science, men usually believed that
teleological, as well as mechanical, explanations could be
given, not only of the movements of men and animals, but of
all events and processes in nature. They thought this because
they believed in a world-purpose of some kind. Plato for in-
stance, in one of his dialogues, represents Socrates as reproach-
ing the philosopher Anaxagoras on the ground that he denied
that the motions of the heavenly bodies, sun, earth, moon,
and stars are controlled by mind and purpose and taught that
they are the result of nothing but mechanical forces.
In the modern world both of the two connected beliefs,
namely the objectivity of the moral law and the purposive
character of the world-process, have, except in the minds of a
few religious men, ceased to exercise any influence. They are
ignored, even if they are not actually denied. And this change
in men's minds, it may reasonably be asserted, has been one
There is an often-
of the results of the influence of science.
quoted passage in an essay by Bertrand Russell in which he
says:

Such in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of mean-

ing, is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such
a world, if anywhere, our ideals must henceforward find a home.
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the
246
 Science and Ethics

end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes
and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of acci-
dental collocations of atoms . these things
. . are so nearly
. . .

certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

It is easy to illustrate the emphasis placed by science on

mechanical explanation. Newton himself was a highly re-
ligious man who certainly believed in divine purposes. Yet
the comparison betw^een Newton's solar system and a clock
is an obvious example of mechanical explanation. When once

a clock is wound up it runs itself, because it is provided with

its own force in the spring. The spring which runs the solar

system is gravitation. The planets resemble wheels. The solar

system is a great cosmic clock, which all man-made clocks
imitate. Napoleon asked La Place whether God, as creator,
was not required at the beginning, to make and start off the
world-clock. Not at all, said La Place, the nebular hypothesis
explains the beginning of the world. God seemed to him just
an unnecessary hypothesis.
Not only can the world as a whole be thought of as a ma-
chine, but all its smaller parts, including human and animal
organisms, can be considered machines. According to Thomas
Hobbes, who was a contemporary of Galileo, the heart is the
spring of the human machine, the nerves are so many strings,
the joints are wheels. David Hume, in the eighteenth cen-
tury, wrote: "Look around You will find it noth-
the world.
ing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite
number of lesser machines." This kind of thinking was never
heard of before the rise of science and was a direct product of
science.
Of course mechanism is not inconsistent with purpose. A
clock is machine but it has the purpose of telling the time.
a
But although science need not deny purposes in nature and,
so far as I know, does not deny them, it tends to ignore them,
because the conception of them is useless for any scientific
purpose. One of the main functions of science is concerned

247
 Philosophy and Science

with prediction. But to predict an event a knowledge of its

causes is necessary. A knowledge of its purposes will not help.
It might be true that in the divine plan of the world the
purpose of rain is to make plants and animals live and grow.
But this will not enable a meteorologist to predict the weather.
It might be true that the purposes of the sun and moon are
to enable men to see and find their way in the world by day
and by night. But this will not enable an astronomer to pre-
dict an eclipse. Only a knowledge of causes makes prediction
possible.
The enormous importance thus given by science to the con-
cept of mechanism has simply crowded the concept of teleol-
ogy from men's minds. The tremendous success of Newtonian
science dazzled the human mind. Throughout the middle ages
men talked of purposes, gave teleological explanations of
eclipses, rainbows, earthquakes, and got scientifically nowhere.
The new science came with its mechanical explanations and
all seemed to become luminous and clear. No wonder men
forgot the idea of purposes in nature, so thatwe have as an
end result the sort of world-view described in the passage I
quoted from Russell. The result of this world-view is that
the moral law, which is tied up with the idea of purpose, is
now conceived as not objective, but subjective, a creation of
the human mind.

Science and the Relativity of Morals

The theory that morals are the creation of the human mind
tends to lead on to the theory that they are relative to differ-
ences in the minds of different human beings. Thus arose
the theory of ethical relativity, the view that all moral codes
and standards are relative either to individual persons, so
that they vary from person to person, or to societies and cul-
tures, so that they vary from culture to culture. Relativity to
individual persons was the first view put forward in the mod-

248
 Science and Ethics

ern period. It was formulated first by Hobbes, who wrote:

"Every man calleth that which pleaseth him good, and that
which displeaseth him evil; insomuch that because every man
differeth from another in constitution, they differ from one
another concerning the common distinctions between good
and evil." This is a very crude kind of moral relativity. It
makes each individual his own standard of what is right and
wrong. A thief or murderer could justify his crimes by saying
simply that since they please him they are good. Since this
obviously will not do, the more sophisticated forms of ethical
relativism which we find advocated in our day make right
and wrong relative not to individual persons, but to civili-
zations, cultures, or large social groups. The Japanese may
have one moral code, the Chinese another, the Hindus a third,
and Christian nations a fourth. This was the concept put for-
ward by Edward Westermarck in his book Ethical Relativity.
It was he, I think, who originally coined this phrase.
There seems to be a popular belief that it was the anthro-
pologists of the present age who originated, or at least proved,
the truth of ethical relativity. This of course is quite absurd.
All that the anthropologists have done is to dig out a large
number of examples of varieties of ethical standards, espe-
cially among more or less remote peoples such as the Mela-
nesian islanders. But the general principle has been known
at least since the time of Herodotus, who recorded in his
writings the many different sets of moral beliefs and customs
which he found in his travels even in the restricted area of the
ancient world. Plato, too, knew quite well that the moral
standards of "barbarians" differed from those of the Hellenes.
But I must register a protest against some of the extravagant
conclusions of modern ethical relativists. The proposition
"morals are relative" is systematically ambiguous. It may
mean only that moral ideas and beliefs vary in different cul-
tures. This is an indisputable fact. Or it may mean that moral
truth varies. This I cannot accept. I am making the distinc-

249
 Philosophy and Science

tion between what is thought to be right and what is right.

Iam asserting that moral opinions are variable, but that moral
truth is not. I am prepared to admit that the burning alive of
witches was believed to be ethically right five hundred years
ago. But I deny that it was right. It was just as cruel and wicked
then as it is now. The only difference was that our ancestors
did not believe or know this. I am making exactly the same
distinction as there between saying that men long ago
is

believed that the earth was flat, but that the truth was then,

as no^v, that the earth was a globe. The earth has not changed
its shape from flat to round, nor has burning people alive

changed its ethical complexion from right to wrong. On both

subjects it is only man's ideas that have changed.
The usual reply to this is that the two cases, the shape of
the earth and moral values, are not analogous, because state-
ments about the earth's shape can be verified, proved, or dis-
proved, but statements about moral values cannot. Suppose
we want to say that Japanese moral ideas are truer and better
than those of Australian aborigines. How could we verify this
unless we have a common standard by which to measure their
relative values? And there is, it is said, no such standard. I
cannot accept this view, and I believe that a common standard
exists, but before discussing that question it may be worth-
while first to look at some consequences we should have to
accept if we deny the existence of any common standard.
First, if there is no common standard then all propositions
which purport to compare the ethical codes of different social
groups with one another in respect of their relative value, to
say that one group's ethical standard is higher or lower, better
or worse, than another, will be not false, but meaningless.
Most of us would tend to feel that Christian or Jewish moral
ideals are higher than those of Australian aborigines, and that
the ethics of Confucius are superior to those of the Papuans
of New Guinea. Perhaps these examples may be not well
chosen. But we do habitually compare one civilization with
another and believe the sets of ethical ideas to be found in

250
 Science and Ethics

them to be some better, some worse. The fact that such judg-
ments may often be superficial or erroneous is irrelevant. The
question at issue is whether any such judgments have any
meaning. We habitually assume that they have. But if there is
no common standard all such judgments will be meaningless.
This in turn implies that the whole notion of progress as
applied to ethical ideals is a delusion. If there is no common
standard to judge by, it will make no sense to say, for example,
that the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount register an
advance on what went before or that the ideal of the love be-
tween all men is better than that of a tooth for a tooth and
a claw for a claw. Such statements cannot be true or false.
They yield no information, but presumably give expression
to nothing but our egotism and self-conceit. We think our
ideals better than those of savages, simply because they are
ours. The savage has just as much right to think that his are
better,on the ground And Jesus Christ can
that they are his.
only have been led to absurd belief that his gospel
his quite
of love was better than what went before it by his personal
vanity. All he was actually doing was wasting his time by
changing Tweedledum to Tweedledee.
I am saying that propositions attributing higher or lower

worth to the moral codes of different races or ages are im-

possible without a common standard which is applicable uni-
versally to the whole human race. But now the question arises
whether, if we deny such a universal standard, we can even
make judgments of better and worse about individual human
beings. Does it make any sense to say that President Lincoln
was a better man than some criminal or moral imbecile of his
own time and country, or that Jesus was a better man than
Judas Iscariot? By what standards are we judging? If there is
no universal human standard, what smaller areas are to be
adopted as the loci of different standards? Where are we to
draw the lines of demarcation? We can split up humanity,
though somewhat arbitrarily, into races, races into nations,
nations into tribes, tribes into families, families into individ-

251
 Philosophy and Science

uals. But where do we draw the moral boundaries? Shall we

say that each "social group" has its own moral code? But how
does one ever fix the boundaries of the group? Does the Amer-
ican nation constitute a single group having a single moral
standard? Or does the standard of what I ought to do change
continuously as I cross the continent in a railway train and
pass from one state into another? Perhaps every town and
village has its own peculiar standard. We may go by the
saying, "In Rome do as Rome does." But can we stop there?
Within the village are numerous cliques, each having its own
set of ideas. Why should not each of these claim to be bound
only by its own and peculiar moral standards? And if
special
it comes to that, why should not the gangsters of New York or

Chicago claim to constitute a social group having its own

morality which can perhaps be defined by Valachi's phrase,
"You live by the knife or the gun, and you die by the knife
or the gun." Of course we can say that the nation will not
tolerate this. But that is irrelevant to the logic of the matter.
If there is no common standard these intolerable consequences
inevitably follow.
But ifwe admit the logic of all this, the question is then
forced upon us: Where or what is the universal standard by
which ethical ideals are to be measured? I think we can only
say that it is human happiness. I have to plead guilty to being

something like an old-fashioned utilitarian. I am suggesting

that the ethical ideals of the Sermon on the Mount, if we all
actually followed and lived up to them, would lead to a gen-
erally higher level ofhuman happiness, while the codes of
behavior accepted by cannibals and savage tribes lead to mis-
ery or at least to lesser degrees of happiness.
At point someone may ask: How do you propose to
this
define this vagueword happiness} Most of the attempts made
by philosophers have proved disastrous failures. If you say,
as John Stuart Mill suggested, that a man's happiness means
the sum of his pleasures, you will have to explain how it
comes about that the happiest men are often those who can
252
 Science and Ethics

afford very few pleasures, those who are forced to lead the
simple life, while the man often far from happy.
of pleasure is

I admit this difficulty, but can only say that, within limits
and with exceptions, we most of us know when we are happy,
and we certainly know when we are unhappy, and that there-
fore we know well enough in practice what happiness is. It is
a delusion to suppose that you do not know the meaning of a
word unless you can define it. The test of whether we under-
stand the meaning of a word is whether we use it correctly
and do not misapply it.
It may be objected that happiness cannot serve as a com-
mon standard because happiness itself is relative and variable.
One man's happiness may be another person's misery. To this
we must reply that sources of happiness must be divided into
two kinds, those which vary with different people and those
which are roughly the same for all men. For example, different
occupations suit different people. One man is happy as an
engineer, another as a politician, and they would be miserable
if they had to exchange roles. But there are other conditions

of happiness which are the same for most men— for all men
except perhaps a few eccentrics. To give a few examples: Good
health, the absence of physical pain and mental worry, the
possession of at least a certain minimum of worldly goods are,
for most men, necessary preconditions of happiness. Those
who say that the good man is happy on the rack are, as Aris-
totle observed, talking nonsense. If a man is in these physical
matters sufficiently well situated, it is probable that the next
most important essential is that all his powers, both of body
and mind, should have opportunity for regular expression
and exercise. A reasonable amount of amusement, relaxation,
and pleasure is also necessary. And a main source of human
happiness lies in the affection of friends and in the love for
one another of the members of a family. All these in general
are common human goods. True, there are differences be-
tween men even in these fundamentals of life. Some men have
more need of one thing, others of another. But we must not

253
 Philosophy and Science

exaggerate these differences. And if, instead of saying in ab-

stractlanguage that morality is what leads to "the greatest
happiness of the greatest number," we say that the supreme
end of morality is to see that as many men as possible in the
world have health, a sufficiency of material goods, opportunity
for the proper exercise of their faculties, a measure of relaxa-
tion and leisure, a home, a family, and friends— we shall cer-
tainly not be advocating either a false or an ignoble view of
morality.
To sum up what has been said under this head of science
and ethical relativity:
1 . The rise of modern science has caused a general collapse
of moral objectivism and a general acceptance of the view
that moral rules and ideals have their foundation in human
nature and not in the external universe.
2. This led to a widespread belief in the relativity of moral

codes.
3. We
accepted this as correct provided we admit the dis-
tinction between what men think right and what really is
right, and apply the relativity principle only to the former.
4. This implies that there must be a common standard in
terms of which ethical codes are to be evaluated, and this
common standard we found in the concept of human happi-
ness.
5. To the objection that happiness itself is relative and
variable we
indicated that there are certain conditions of
happiness which are universal, and it is on these that a uni-
versal ethical code must be based.
I now pass on to our third heading.

Science and the Freedom of the Will

The third matter for discussion is the charge that science

implies determinism, which is inconsistent with free will,
and is therefore destructive of the concept of moral responsi-
bility, which rests upon the assumption of free will.

254
 Science and Ethics

natural to suppose that scientific method and the sci-

It is
entificview of the world imply determinism. Science assumes
the universality of natural law and especially the law of causa-
tion, the law that every event in nature is wholly determined
by natural causes and is therefore theoretically predictable in
the sense that it could be predicted if we knew all the causes.
A human action is an event in nature just as much as an
eclipse of the sun is, and it is therefore theoretically predict-
able beforehand. If so, what room is there for free will, which
means that I can choose between two courses of action and
am not compelled to adopt either.
Some men of science forty or fifty years ago, for example
Eddington, suggested that the solution of this puzzle lay in
something like Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy. The
human mind, like the electron, suggested Eddington, may be
not wholly subject to determinism and may therefore be free.
The difficulty of this— or rather one of its difficulties— seems
to be that Heisenberg's principle applies to sub-microscopic
entities but not to large objects such as the human body. The
principle may imply that the laws of nature are statistical
only, but for all practical purposes determinism will still hold
in the world of large objects. For instance, though the motions
of a single electron may be unpredictable, the motions of large
objects such as planets consisting of billions of electrons will
be predictable. No astronomer calculating the motions and
positions of the planets would consider it a possibility that
the earth might suddenly jump out of its orbit into the orbit
of Mars owing to the principle of indeterminacy.
Ifwe admit this then we shall have to conclude that the
principle of indeterminacy has no real bearing on the problem
of free will. Free will should not be analyzed as meaning inde-
terminacy of the will. We shall have to explain it, I suggest,
asmeaning determination of the will by motives within the
minds of the agents. It will mean psychological determinism.
An act is called free if its immediate cause is a psychological
state in the mind of the agent. It is called unfree if its immedi-

255
 Philosophy and Science

ate causes are all external to the agent.Both free and unfree
acts are determined by causes and are theoretically predict-
able, but they differ in the kinds of causes from which they
proceed. The causes of my free actions are my own desires.
The causes of my unfree acts lie outside me. Let me illustrate.
Suppose a man being tried for murder signs a confession
while in police custody. In court the judge asks him whether
he signed it of his own free will or because the police tortured
him. He replies that he signed it of his own free will because
his conscience compelled him to do so. We see here that his
act is accounted freely done if it is caused by a state of mind
in himself, namely his conscience. But if it had been caused
by an external agent, police torture, it would not be con-
sidered free. There are no doubt puzzling cases in which it is
difficult to apply this criterion of free will. But it may be pos-
sible to defend the general principle notwithstanding.
Now suppose that in the case imagined there had been a
philosopher, or a philosophically minded scientist, on the
jury. He might have argued that the whole question of
whether the confession was caused by the prisoner's conscience
or by police pressure was irrelevant, because in either case
his confession was determined by causes and could not there-
fore be a case of free will. The judge and the rest of the jury
would rightly conclude that the philosopher must be making
some sort of a mistake. He must have been using the phrase
"free will" in some peculiar way of his own which is not the
way in which common-sense people like the judge and the
other jurors usually use it. In the English language free will
is the phrase we apply to cases where a man acts from his own

inner motives. That is what the phrase free will means in cor-
rect English. The philosopher's mistake simply consists in
using bad English, or a jargon of his own.
Moral responsibility is not only compatible with deter-
minism, it actually requires it. The assumption on which
punishment and reward are based is that human behavior is
256
 Science and Ethics

causally determined by motives, so that itcan be influenced

by inflicting pain or its no determinism
opposite. If there were
of human beings at all, their actions would be unpredictable
and capricious, and therefore irresponsible. I think therefore
that science can be acquitted of the charge that it makes free
will, and therefore moral responsibility, impossible.

257
Index
I

I
 Index

Abstract thought, 93-94 40; non-theistic ethical objectivism

Abstractions: and poetry, 132 in, 245; and reincarnation, 56-62;
Advertising: as materialistic symptom, scale of values of, 76
121-23 Buddhists, 35
Al Junayd, 32 "Burnt Norton" (Eliot), 133
Alexander, Samuel, 159, 191
Americans: scale of values of, 74, 75 Causality, principle of, 197, 219, 220-
Anaxagoras, 190, 246 21, 241
Anthropology: and ethical relativity, Causation, concept of, 208-10, 255
249 Causes, cosmic, 6, 219, 220-21
Apostles' Creed, 56 Ceylon: British administration in,
Aquinas, St.Thomas, 50 171-84
Aristotle, 6, 190, 219, 220, 253 Christianity: and immortality, 56-57;
Armed services: discipline in, 110 theistic ethical objectivism in, 245
Asceticism, 76 Civil services, British, 182; examina-
Assembly: freedom of, 101 tions for, 173-74
Athanasian Creed, 56 Clifford, Sir Hugh, 177
Atlantic, The (Kennan), 175 Colonialism, British, 171-84
Common standard: in ethics, 250
Berkeley, George, 156 Consciousness: mystical, 20-21, 22-
Bodhisattva, the, 35 24, 25-36, 39, 62-63; physical basis
Bohr, Niels, 243 of, 53; sensory-intellectual, 21
Bosanquet, Bernard, 202 Copcrnican hypothesis, 146
Bradley, Francis Herbert, 202 Cosmic Consciousness (Bucke), 46
Bridgman, Percy Williams, 197
Britains: scale of values of, 75 Death, survival after, 53-64
Broad, C. D., 55 Democracy: abuses of, 97-98, 107-09;
Brogan, D. W., 171 equality as a value of, 101-02, 104,
Browning, Robert, 202 105; freedom as a value of, 99-101,
Buber, Martin, 27 104, 105; as government by reason,
Bucke, R. M., 34, 46, 47 92-97, 98-99; as human value, 89-
Buddha, 29; denial of ego by, 60; 92; individualism as a value of, 102-
and Nirvana, 62, 64; and reincar- 03, 104, 105; persuasion as tool of,
nation, 57, 59, 61 97; values of, 86-105
Buddhism: and mysticism, 35-36, 39- Descartes, Ren^, 77

261
 Index

Description: as role of science, 218 Formal cause, 219

Determinism, 10-11; psychological, Four Quartets (Eliot), 133-34
255-57; and science, 254-55 free will, 10-11; and political free-
Dewey, John, 13, 124 dom, 99, 100; and science, 254-57
Dionysius the Areopagite, 50 Freedom, 86; of assembly, 101; as
Discipline, 109-11; as respect for law democratic value, 99-101, 104, 105;
and order, 109 vs. license, 100; political, 99; of the
Drama: as poetry, 141 press, 101, 177; of religion, 101, 177;
of speech, 101, 177

Eckhardt, Meister, 27, 29, 32, 33, 43

Economic man, the, 164-65 Galilei, Galileo, 5, 6, 220, 243
Eddington, Arthur Stanley, 255 Garden of Proserpine, The (Swin-
Education: philosophical content of, burne), 136
199-200 Gautama Buddha. See Buddha
Efficient cause, 219 General value-judgments, 69, 70, 87
Ego, the: denial of by Buddhism, 59- Germany: morality vs. self-interest
60 under Hitler, 161-62
Einstein, Albert, 74, 147, 211, 230, 231, Gravitation, law of, 211, 222, 229, 230
234 Great Illusion, the, 15-16
Eliot,T. S., 133-34 Greece, ancient: beginnings of science
Emotion: and poetry, 129 in, 219, 220; philosophy in, 200-

Energy, 214-15 01; scale of values in, 115-16, 123-

England: morality vs. self-interest in 24; scientific attitude in, 190-91
W.W. I. 162-63 Green, Thomas Hill, 202
Equality as democratic value, 101- Grey, Sir Edward, 162-63
02. 104, 105
Ethical Relativity (Westermarck), 249 Happiness, human, 78-80; as ethical
Ethical relativity, theory of, 248 criterion, 252-53
Ethical subjectivism, theory of, 244, Hegel, G. W. F., 201, 202, 238, 239
245 Heisenberg, Werner, 243, 255
Ethics: and science, 243-57 Heraclitus, 59
Euripides, 200 Herodotus, 249
Evil, problem of, 8 Hinayana Buddhists, 33-36
Evolution, theory of, 146-47 Hinduism: non-theistic ethical ob-
Explanation: by familiarity, 225, 237, jectivism in, 245; and reincarnation,
240; logical, 240; mechanical, 245- 56-62; scale of values of, 76
46, 247-48; and philosophy, 241-42; Hitler, Adolf, 161-62, 163
and science, 217-42; teleological, Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 247, 249
224, 237, 240, 245-46 Hull, Cordell, 160
Hume David, 8, 17, 60, 156, 247
Familiarity: as basis of explanation,
Huxley, Thomas H., 17
Hypnosis: and mystical consciousness,
225, 237, 240
Feeling: and poetry, 129 24
Final cause, 219, 220-21
Fite, Warner, i24n Identity of indiscernibles, principle
Flecker, James Elroy, 130 of, 51
Flux: in Buddhist thought, 59 Illusions: role of, 15-16
Forces, in science, 211-13, 230, 231 Imagery: in poetry, 129-31

262
 1

Index

Immortality: Buddhism on, 6i-6q; Macronomotamania, 152

Christianity on, 56-57; Hinduism Mahayana Buddhists, 35
on, 61-62; as mystical consciousness, Mandukya Upanishad, 24-25, 49
62-63 Material cause, 219
Incomprehensibility: in science, 227- Materialism as moral value, 113-26
28 Mathematics, 149-50
Indeterminancy, principle of, 243, 255 Mechanical explanation, 245-46, 247-
India: and international justice, 168; 48
scale of values in, 114-15, 116-17 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 161-62
Individualism: as democratic value, Memory: and reincarnation, 61
102-03, 104, 105; vs. discipline, 109, Middle Ages: science in, 220
1 1 Mill, John Stuart, 17, 156, 252
International law, i6i Minorities: treatment of the U.S., 109
International morality, 159-70 Moral objectivism, theory of, 244
Instrumentalism: as materialistic phi- Moral principles, 9
losophy, 124-26 Morality, international, 159-70
Introspection: in mysticism, 18, 19, Morals: relativity of, and science, 248-
20, 27 54; subjectivity of, and science, 244-
48
Mystical consciousness, 20-21, 22-24,
James, William, 18, 21, 46, 156, 230
25, 30-36, 39; and hypnosis, 24; as
Janet, Pierre, 28-29
immortality, 62-63
Judaism: theistic ethical objectivism
Mysticism: and objectivity, 39-52; phi-
in, 245
losophy of, 37-52; psychology of,
Justice: as basis of international mo-
18-36
rality, 167-68

National self-determination, 179

Kant, Immanuel, 9, 152 National self-interest, 169-70
Karma, law of, 245 Natural laws: as criteria of objectiv-
Keats, John, 202 ity, 48-49
Kennan, George, 175, 176 Newton, Isaac, 5, 6, 211, 212, 220, 230,
Kepler, Johannes, 6 231, 243, 247
Nirvana, 30, 35, 43, 62, 64
Laplace, Pierre Simon de, 247 Non-Euclidean space, 234
Laws of nature: as criteria of objec- Non-theistic ethical objectivism, 245
48-49
tivity,
Lead Kindly Lis,ht (Sheean), 113 Objectivism, ethical, 245
League of Nations, 169 Objectivity: of mystical experiences,
Leuba, James H., 18 tests for, 39-52
Levitation, 45 Omar Khayyam, 136-37
Liberty. See Freedom
License: vs. freedom, 100- Particular value-judgments, 69-70, 87
Locke, John, 156 Personal identity: and reincarnation,
Logic of Modern Physics, The (Bridg- 58
man), 197 Persuasion: as tool of democracy, 97
Logical explanation, 240 Philosophy: content of, 191-98; dis-
Lucretius, 129, 132-33 agreements in, 204-07; and educa-
Luxury: as cause of war, 120-21, 123 tion, 198-200; and explanation,
Lyttelton, Oliver, 160 241-42; and human culture, 187-

263
 1

Index

207; and mysticism, 37-52; and St. Teresa of Avila, 45

other branches of knowledge, 188- St. Thomas Aquinas, 50
91; role of, 11-12 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 4
Physical world: and science, 208-16 Satori, 32
Plato, 6, 96, 124, 190, 200, 246, 249; Science: description in, 218; and de-
on luxury as cause of war, 120-21, terminism, 254-55; and ethics, 243-
123; scale of values of, 70-80, 111- 57; and explanation, 217-42; forces
12 in, 211-13, 230, 231; and free will,
Plotinus, 27, 33, 35 254-57; function of, 217-18; in-
Poetry: imagery and thought in, 129- comprehensibility in, 227-28; in
42 Middle Ages, 220; and the physical
Popularizers: role of, 147, 156 world, 208-16; prediction in, 210-
Pound, Ezra, 131, 135, 139 11, 248; and relativity of morals,
Pragamatism, 74-75, 201; as materi- 248-54; scientific law, 222; and sub-
alistic philosophy, 124-26 jectivity of morals, 244-48
Pratt, J. B., 18 Scientific spirit: role of, 13-14, 16
Prediction in science, 210-11, 248 Self, the: and mystical consciousness,
Pre-existence: and reincarnation, 57 39' 40
Press, the: freedom of, 101, 177 Self-determination, national, 179
Principles, ultimate: as content of Self-interest, national,160-70
philosophy, 194-98 Sensory-intellectual consciousness, 21
Psychological determinism, 255-57 Sheean, Vincent, 113-14, 120
Psychology: and mysticism, 18-36; as Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 134, 135, 202
offshoot of philosophy, 191 Skepticism, 5, 13
Purpose, cosmic, 5-6, 7, 219, 221, 224 Socialism: U.S. attitude toward, 117-
Pythagoras, 190 18
Socrates, 69, 70, 87, 114, 246
Radical empiricism, 230 Sophists, 200
Rationality. See Reason Space, non-Euclidean, 234
Realism (philosophical), 202-03 Space-time, curved, 231-36
Reason: as basis of democracy, 92- Speech: freedom of, 101, 177
97' 98-99. »03' 107 Spencer, Herbert, 156, 189
Reincarnation, 56-62; and Law of Spinoza, Baruch, 238
Karma, 245 Standard of living: as moral value,
Relativity, theory of, 231-36 1
1
9-2
Relativity of morals: and science, 248- Subjectivity of morals: and science,

54 244-48
Religion: freedom of, 101, 177; and Sufis, 32
life after death, 56-64; role of, 12; Survival after death, 53-64
void left by loss of in modern world, Suso, Henry, 32
3-17 Suzuki, D. T., 32-33, 41
Republic, The (Plato), 70, 200 Swinburne, Algernon C., 136, 202
Romanticism, 201-02
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 163 "Taking Leave of a Friend" (Pound),
Royce, Josiah, 202 131
Russell, Bertrand, 4, 13, 153, 156, 246- Taeusch, Carl Frederick, 159
47 Teleological explanation, 224, 237,
Ruysbroeck, Jan Van, 26-27 240, 245-46
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 30-31, 32,
St. John of the Cross, 22 41, 63-64, 202

264
 Index

Theistic ethical objectivism, 245 17; materialism, 113-26; moral, 111-

Thought: in poetry, 131--42 26; national scale of, 113-17; politi-
Totalitarianism: as government by cal, 107-11; relativity of, 68-69, 78,
force, 97 82; scale of, 67-68, 70-82; standard
Transsubjectivity: of mystical con- of living as, 119-21; U.S. scale of,
sciousness, 50-51 117-26; universal, 106; Western
Truman, Harry S., 170 scale of, 117-26
Visions: and mysticism, 22
Undifferentiated unity: as mystical
consciousness, 25-26, 36, 40 Westermarck, Edward, 249
Ultimate principles: as content of Western civilization: scale of values
philosophy, 194-98 in, 117-26
United States: scale of values in, 117- Why?, meaning of, 220, 223-24, 238
26 Wilson, Woodrow, 163
Upanishads, 24-25, 31, 39, 40, 49 Wisdom, 67
Wordsworth William, 138, 201-02
Value-judgments, 86-87 World-state: and international mo-
Values, 9, 67-85; ancient Greek scale rality, 169-70
of, 115-16, 123-24; as content of
philosophy, 192-93; democratic, 86- Yeats, W. B., 131, 202
105; Indian scale of, 114-15, 116-

265