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KV
AUTHOR:
PAGET, VIOLET
TITLE:
VITAL LIES.
PLACE:
LONDON
DATE:
1912
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
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[Paget, Violetj 1856i935.
raSi ^ w'x'!"'^''' r'^^ '^"^^ ^^"^^*^^« ^^ recent obscu-
K YnVwl^T ^'^ f^""^^-^ - London, J. Lane;
Mew York, John Lane company; [etc., etc.] 1912
2v. m*
$3.00
Humanism. misunderstood. The rehabilitation of obscurity.
1. Truth. 2. Pragmatism. i. Title.
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VITAL LIES
^.'-i^ -r r^ii!rrrs(*i'''if-*?f«s«f^ -«,-.— -^---v-«i-.*. .
IVORKS BT THE SAME AUTHOR
HORTUS VIT^, Or, THE HANGING
GARDENS
THE ENCHANTED WOODS
THE SPIRIT OF ROME
HAUNTINGS: FANTASTIC STORIES
THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER
POPE JACYNTH AND OTHER FAN-
TASTIC TALES
GENIUS LOCI : NOTES ON PLACES
LIMBO, AND OTHER ESSAYS, to
WHICH IS ADDED ARIADNE IN
MANTUA
LAURUS NOBILIS: CHAPTERS ON
ART AND LIFE
RENAISSANCE, FANCIES AND
STUDIES
THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY
ALTHEA: DIALOGUES ON ASPIRA-
TIONS AND DUTIES
VANITAS : POLITE STORIES, includ-
iNG A FRIVOLOUS CONVERSA-
TION
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
VITAL LIES
STUDIES OF SOME
VARIETIES OF RECENT
OBSCURANTISM » » €S
BT
VERNON LEE
'1 ?yi)
VOL. I
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN MCMXII
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How then may we devise one of those falsehoods in
the hour of need, I said, which we lately spoke of— just
one royal lie [yevycuoy rt iv yj/evSofiivovs] which may
deceiTe the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate
the rest of the city ?
Plato, Republic, iii. 414
(Jowett's Translation).
Relling. I'm fostering the vital lie in him.
Gregirs. Vital lie ? Is that what you said ?
Helling. Yes— I said vital lie— for illusion, you know,
is the stimulating principle.
Ibsen, The Wild Duck.
V. I
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TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND
GIOVANNI VAILATI
WHO, BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE, EXPLAINED
THE INCOMPATIBILITY BETWEEN
" WILLING TO BELIEVE"
AND
"MAKING ONE'S IDEAS CLEAR"
I
A
n
PREFACE
SCIENCE is for ever invalidating some part of
its statements, because it is for ever perfecting
their whole ; and reason, as it develops, takes
its own self as subject for its criticism, asking, with
Berkeley, Hume and Kant, and now with the Prag-
matism of Peirce : What can we know ? or rather,
How do we know ? Encouraged by, and taking advan-
tage of this, the minds reluctantly shaken in their
rehgious habits, are la3ring about them for excuses to
disbeheve whatever has made them unbeUevers. They
allege reason's criticism of its own nature and methods
to discredit reason's conclusions. They argue that if
reUgion is made by man it must be worth re-making.
Philological exegesis, anthropological study of myths
and institutions, psychology and metaphysical analysis,
and all the sciences which have undermined what
used to be called religious truths, are now invoked to
re-instate some portion of them in the garb of
desirable and valuable errors.
Some of these thinkers, unable to maintain that the
ideas which they chng to are true, put their backs to the
wall and explain that their value is symboHc, mythical,
in short, dependent upon their being partially false.
vii
f I
^1
Another group — or the same group at another moment
— refuse to forgo the compelling power, or at least
the reassuring sound, of the word true; and these
apply their logic to re-defining truth in such a way
as to include edifying and efficacious fallacy and
falsehood.
It is to both these groups, and any cross-groups
derived from them, that I venture to apply the name
of Obscurantists, because they employ, they increase,
and, for emotional and sometimes aesthetic reasons,
they prefer, a certain amount of darkness, or at
all events, a convenient, a reposeful, a suggestive
intellectual penumbra.
Moreover, these thinkers have attached themselves,
without exception, to the philosophical school which
makes Life the central and ultimate and paramount
mystery. Hence I take the Uberty of symbohzing
the various vague creeds (clung to by themselves, or
recommended for the use of others) of these intellectual
Obscurantists in the formula given by Ibsen's Doctor
RelUng, and caUing them, and these studios of them,
" Vital lies."
»
March 1912.
N
THEMATIC TABLE OF
CONTENTS
VOL. I
FIRST PART
THEORETICAL OBSCURANTISM
CHAPTER I
THE TWO PRAGMATISMS
Distinguishes the Pragmatism intended to "make our
ideas clear " from the Pragmatism intended to justify the
"will to believe."
PAQS
7
CHAPTER II
WHAT IS TBUTH?
50
Deals with the "will to believe" or "what it would
be better to believe," distinguishing such obscurantist
Pragmatism.
CHAPTER III
THE TRUTHS OF MYSTICISM
Shows what sort of ideas are considered " better to
believe " and recommended to our " will to believe,*'
91
•iujh
Vital Lies
CHAPTER IV
FRUITS FOR LIFE . • • *
Shows that obscurantism turns to profit not the truth
of ideas, but their power of determining action.
SECOND PART
APPLIED OBSCURANTISM
CHAPTER I
FATHER TYRRELL AND MODERNISM
Shows the " will to beUeve " in its most candid and
respectable form, the believer being hoodwinked by his
own imperfectly recognized desires and habits.
VOL. II
CHAPTER II
MR CRAWLEY AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL APOLOGETICS
Shows the man of science recommending, as racially
beneficial, boUefs of which he has himself demonstrated
the origin in the superstitions of primitive man.
CHAPTER III
MONSIEUR SOREL AND THE SYNDICALIST MYTH
Shows the philosophical and practical Moralist pro-
claiming that only a myth, because it can never be
realized, is productive of a sufficient increment of virtue.
FAOR
145
161
61
Vital Lies
THIRD PART
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER I
TRUE IN SO FAR AS MISUNDERSTOOD
CHAPTER II
THE REHABILITATION OF OBSCURITY
CHAPTER III
HUMANISM
XI
PAOB
121
149
186
/
I PART I
'^ / THEORETICAL PRAGMATISM
•nnMamHMMi
)
\
\ \
i
INTRODUCTION TO PART I
FIRST of aU let me explain that the whole of
this first half of the present book was written-
indeed, some of it was ahreadv in type (for the
North American Review)~betoK the death of the late
Professor WiUiam James. And of this I am glad (even
though I wince at the ungraciousness of a posthumous
attack), because the recent loss of a man so genial in
the German as weU as the English sense of the word so
impulsively, generously appreciative and creative, wo'uld
have made it utterly impossible for me to discuss his
works (if indeed at all !) in the tone I have adopted
Now this tone is the only one in which such highly
personal and personally self-contradictory improvisa-
tions could be discussed without absurdity, at least
by a reader who, hke myself, was fuU of mixed and
warrmg admiration and aversion for their most mixed
and warring ideas.
Similarly. I want it to be thoroughly understood
that m deahng with the work of the late Professor
James I am attacking and condemning only that " WiU-
to-Beheve " element with which this very suggestive
and dehghtful thinker has, in my opinion, alloyed, de-
based, diminished so much of his own inteUectual wealth
Vital Lies
It has been pointed out to me that this inferior, and,
I think, worthless admixture in Professor James's
work was due to a certain lack of grip and continuity
and order which was the drawback of the spon-
taneity and impulsive appreciativeness, the passionate
hmnanness, of his mind. Of course a greater grip and
continuity and order, a greater hardness (to use his
favourite expression) would have saved him from the
** Will-to-Beheve " (both as a formulated theory and as
an insidious mental practice), even as a better state
of health may defend you from infection which is, as
people say, in the air. But the infection, the microbe,
is not the same thing as the patient's congenital
weakness and momentary being below par. And so,
although his naturally discontinuous, diffluent thought
and his more and more tentative and hurried exposition
and expression undoubtedly destined Professor James
to become the most illustrious victim of this intellectual
epidemic, and also one of its chief centres of infection,
the " Will-to-BeUeve " virus would have existed and
made havoc in latter-day thought if Professor James had
not been there to give it its name and to display, even
in his own person, its various distinctive phases. Now
it is merely because this " Will-to-BeUeve " philosophy
is nowadays rife on every side that I am dealing with
Professor James ; and I am deahng with him, as already
remarked, only in so far as the chief exponent and the
chief example of this particular intellectual tendency.
Introduction to Part I 5
Furthermore, I wish to premise that it is also because
of the value of that part of Pragmatism which Pro-
fessor James (and also Doctor Schiller) took over from
Mr. C. S. Peirce, that it seems to me necessary to airaign
Pragmatism as a whole for the adoption of that alien
and hostile element of " Will-to-Believe " with which
these, the two chief theoretical Pragmatists, have con-
fused and corrupted it. It is only when we have done
with the Pragmatism of James and Schiller that we
can duly value and put to use the Pragmatism of
Peirce. And by Pragmatism of Peirce I mean, in this
connection, a great deal which has been added to it
by James and Schiller, inasmuch as disciples and
legitimate successors of Peirce, but which both James
and Schiller have turned into an unusable confusion
by this admixture of their principle of "Will-to
Beheve" with Peirce's principle for "making our
ideas clear."
Finally, and before entering on this examination,
I would on no account omit to acknowledge all the
help in clearing up my own ideas upon this subject
which I have received from the writings and the con-
versation of the late Giovanni Vailati, and from those
of his collaborator and editor, Mario Calderoni.
Maiano, neab Florencb,
March 1912.
The posthumous volume of " Sorittl di Giovamil Vailati"
(Florence, Leipzig, 1911) contains all the many papers originally
Vital Lies
published in Mind, in the Monist, in the Bevue du Mots, in the
Journal of Philosophij, in the Leonardo, in the Rivista di Psicologia
Applicata, etc., wherein Giovanni VailatI discussed the formula
and method of Ch. S. Peirce and their various applications and
misapplications.
The "how to make our ideas clear" side of Pragmatism is
further represented in articles in the Leonardo (1904-6) by Mario
Calderoni ; and in M. Calderoni's " Disarmonie Economiche e
Disarmonie Morali " (Florence, Lumachi, 1906), in " La Provision
dans la th^orie de la Connaissance " {Rev. de Met. et de Morale,
1907), and in " I'Arbitrario " {Rivista di Psicologia Applicata,
March-April 1910, May-June 1910, September-October 1910), by
Vailati and Calderoni.
Giovanni Vailati was born in Lombardy hi 1863, and died at
Rome in 1909.
CHAPTER I
THE TWO PRAGMATISMS
** . . . The first part of the essay, however, is occupied with
showing that, if Truth consists in satisfaction, it cannot be any
actual satisfaction, but must be the satisfaction which wovld
ultimately be found if the inquiry were pushed to its ultimate
and indefeasible issue. This, I beg to point out, is a very difiFerent
position from that of Mr Schiller and the Pragmatists of to-day . . . .
Their avowedly undefinable position, if it be not capable of logical
characterization, seems to me to be characterized by an angry
hatred of strict logic, and even some disposition to rate any exact
thought which interferes with their doctrines as all humbug. . . .
It seems to me a pity they should allow a philosophy so instinct
with life to become infected with seeds of death in such notions as
that of the unreality of all ideas of infinity and that of the mutability
of truth, and in such confusions of thought as that of active willing
(willing to control thought, to doubt, and to weigh reasons) with
willing not to exert the will (willing to believe)." — Charles S.
Peirce, Hibbert Journal, Vol. II., No. 1 (October 1908), pp.
Ill, 112.
IN the following pages I shall try, in vulgar parlance,
to show up what is nowadays being rather pressed
upon our acceptance than offered for our inspec-
tion, under the ambiguous name of " Pragmatism." I
would therefore premise that I am by no means attack-
ing all the ideas connected with the doctrine so called,
nor even the bulk thereof. The pecuHarity of Prag-
■^ra
matism is (as I hope to demonstrate) its tactics of
advancing untenable propositions and faUing back
upon received ones ; its shuflling the principle which
IS hard to accept in a handful of principles we have
willingly accepted ; its medium-hke device (for only
successive metaphors can illustrate habits so Protean)
of shpping a hand out of the seemingly unbroken circle
of concatenated thought, in order to produce aU manner
of new and desirable manifestations. And, for this
reason, two-thirds of aU that Pragmatists adduce is
not only a re-statement— sometimes a really improved
and enlarged re-statement-of their opponents' views,
but embodies, most admirably stated, the very argu-
ments those opponents have used against them.
Indeed, as we shaU see, the name of Pragmatism
18 now taken by a doctrine which the inventor of
that name, the much-quoted and Httle-read Charles
Sanders Peirce, forestalled only to denounce and
demoKsh.
The result of aU this is that I wish to premise that I
am attacking, not certain books, with two-thirds of
whose contents I concur; stiU less certain writers
from whose analytic talent (in the case of Mr F. C
Schiller), from whose wide-sweeping genius (in the
case of Professor W. James) I have derived so much
advantage ; least of all, the whole mass of doctrine
labeUed Pragmatism. I am attacking the views
which put Pragmatism and Pragmatists in opposition
1
H
The Two Pragmatis ms 9
to every other existing or conceivable philosophy.
Or, rather, I am attacking a particular temperament
which, imported into philosophy from wholly different
fields of thought, tests truth by the standards of worldlv
practicaHty, of moral edification, and of religious senti-
ment, and thereby passes off as true what may be
merely useful or inspiriting delusions, merely practi-
cally serviceable, emotionally satisfying, or morally
commendable figments.
For, at the bottom of this kind of Pragmatism,
which the more illustrious of its two promoters has
associated with the expression " Will-to-BeUeve " i
^^ * Professor James SQems anxious to withdraw the expression
I' will-to-believe "—telling us (" Pragmatism," page 258) that he
"unluckily" gave that name to an essay of which the critics
(presumably the present writer in a "Fortnightly" article, re-
printed in " Gospels of Anarchy ") neglected the meaning in order
to " pounce down on the title." Professor James, in the same
place, now defines the subject of that essay as the "Right-to-
BeUeve." " Right-to-believe," in plain English, usually means
the existence of an intellectual alternative, i.e. : "In the face of
So-and-so's evidence, I have the right to believe that what hap-
pened was this." Or else the absence of coercion by the State :
" in this country, people have the right to believe as they choose " ;
i.e. differences of opinion are tolerated by the laws and customs.
What Professor James argued for in that " Will- to- Believe " essay
was the expediency, the occasional personal or moral advantage
(exemplified by the courage of men who believe they can r^ist
brigands, and the difference in our conduct due to religious belief)
of accepting a hypothesis on other than intellectual grounds. Of
these he wrote (" WiU-to-Believe," page 9) : " It is only our dead
hypotheses that our willing nature is unable to bring to life again.
. . . When I say ' willing nature,' I do not mean only such de-
liberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot
^B!
■"»««««'»~^
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lO
Vital Lies
-at the bottom of "WiU-to-Believe" Pragmatism
there exist the psychological recognition of the in-
evitable presence, and the morahst's recognition of the
occasional utiUty, of ideas, of opinions, of beUefs, which
have not passed muster as true ; the recognition that
conduct is frequently based, and can sometimes be
based with advantage, on what has not yet been
tested as true, on what has not stood the test of truth,
or what it is only wished should be true-viz., hypo-
theses, assumptions, misconceptions, misstatements,
ambiguities, delusions and deceptions, a large proportion
of which appears inevitable and perhaps indispensable
in the Hfe of the individual and of the race. The
recognition and partial rehabilitation of this particular
not-true element would show the superior acumen and
superior sincerity of modem psychology and of modem
ethics. Indeed, the progress of mental science and of
utiHtarian morals might culminate in some bolder
Nietzsche proclaiming that tmth is by no means
the one thing requisite ; that hfe has been rendered
now escape from. I mean aU such factors of belief aa fear and
hope, prejudice and paaeion, imitation and partisanship, the
circumpr^ure of our caste and set." This " wiUing nature " is
presumably what Professor James referred to in his title " WiU-
h^^:^. ^:;^.^ '^^ °^^ ^^°«^ °^*^^ ^^ ^ subsequent
books IS the addition of " truth " as weU as " belief " being de-
pendent on such action of our " willing nature." I consider it fair
to contmue to designate his particular kind of Pragmatism by
that ex- title of his. " Will-to-BeUeve." which I always'take in the
sense of willmg nature " as defined in the above paLge
The Two P ragmatisms 1 1
liveable, and morahty itself floated or ballasted only
by a fortunate output of figment.
But the " Will-to-Believe " Pragmatists are not
bolder than Nietzsche. They are, on the contrary
(as persons concerned with practicality should be),
most remarkably attached to consequences, to work-
able systems and moral edification ; and, for the benefit
of these, they are most conspicuously careful of not
coming into open collision with established prejudices.
Now, while triUh is by no means always necessary for
advantageous and commendable practice, untruth or
non-truth (under any of its varieties and synonyms
furnished forth by the invaluable Roget) happens to
be hampered by a tiresome and paradoxical peculiarity :
its utiUty, nine times out of ten, depends upon hiding
its own status and keeping up the credit of trath. \ A
hope is not a hope, a fear is not a fear, once either is
recognized as unfounded. An ambiguity is acceptable
only if it is accepted in one of its ambiguous meanings.
A delusion is delusive only so long as it is not known
to be one. A mistake can be built upon only so long
as it is not suspected ; and that consoling, encouraging,
sometimes salutary and edifying figment which Ibsen
christened " Vital Lie " can be fife-enhancing or fife-
saving only when it is mistaken for a ** Vital Tmth.'v
The psychologists and morafists who, under the name
of Pragmatists, are teaching the unavoidable presence
and the practical benefits of a " Will-to-Befieve," have
12
Vital Lies
I'
therefore veUed in judicious silence the disconcerting,
the dangerous, the inunoral fact that error, delusion
and deception, when bom of human needs and pur-
poses, are occasionaUy efficacious in directing human
decisions, in regulating human conduct, and in maldng
human life possible. The Pragmatists have refused
to proclaim the value of what is possibly not true, and
they have appUed themselves to identifying thM which
possesses value with truth itself. This they have done
by laying hold of a philosophical principle to which its
earliest formulator, Mr Charles Sanders Peirce, had
given the name of " Pragmatism " ; and by converting
this pnnciple, by endless moves revoked whenever
detected, mto the very thing which that proto-Prag-
matist had invented Pragmatism to expose, disprove
confute and reduce for ever to silence.
Let us foUow this process, and in so doing obtain, not
merely a knowledge of the chief peculiarities of " WiU-
to-Beheve " Pragmatism, but an insight also into the
Will-to-Beheve," the Pragmatistic, temper of mind
and methods.
II
Professor James heralds his exposition of the prag-
matic pnnciple by telling us that, although only f ormu-
lated by Mr Peirce in the article entitled " How to
Make Things Clear," it has been tacitly applied by
The Two Pragmatisms 13
the chief masters of British thought. He writes
(" Varieties of Religious Experience," page 443) :
" The guiding principle of British philosophy has in
fact been that every difference must make a difference,
every theoretical difference issue in a practical difference,
and [that] the best method of discussing points of
theory is to begin by ascertaining what practical differ-
ence would result from one alternative or the other
being true. What is the particular truth in question
known as ? In what facts does it result ? What is
its cash- value in terms of particular experience ? This
is the characteristic English way of taking up a ques-
tion. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the
question of personal identity : * What you mean by it
is just your chain of particular memories,' says he.
That is the only verifiable part of its signifi,cance. All
further ideas about it, such as the oneness or the many-
ness of the spiritual substance on which it is based are,
therefore, void of intelligible meaning, and propositions
touching such ideas may be indifferently affirmed or
denied. So Berkeley with his * Matter.' The cash-
value of matter is our physical sensations. That is
what it is known as, all that we concretely verify of its
conception. That, therefore, is the whole meaning of
the term ' Matter ' ; any other pretended meaning is
mere wind of words. Hume does the same thing with
Causation. It is known as habitual antecedence, and
as tending on our part to look for something definite
H
Vital Lies
to come. Apart from this practical meaning it has
no significance whatever, and books about it may be
committed to the flames, says Hume."
Throughout this quotation we are shown the prag-
matic method applied to ascertain the contents of a
thought as a prehminary to testing that thought's
truth. Professor James represents Locke and Berkeley
and Hume as refusing to discuss severally Human
Identity, Matter and Causation, except in so far as
each of these words can be translated into terms of
experience. Pragmatism is being employed, as the
title of Mr Peirce's famous article has it, "to make
our ideas clear." The expression "practical differ-
ence " means in this connection difference in the facts y
in the experience, implied in the definition : so when we
say that the concept " match," imphes the property
of igniting, cceteris paribus, on friction with a specified
surface, we verify whether a certain object is a match
by rubbing it, cceteris paribus, against such a surface
and watching whether it does or does not ignite.
" Practical difference " refers to our real or imagined
experiment ; and the " cash-value in terms of experi-
ence " means the translation of an abstract statement
into such inferred results as will by their happening
or not happening declare whether that abstract state-
ment is in the particular relation to objective reahty
which we designate as truth. The pragmatic method,
as Professor James represents it as practised by these
The Two Pragmatisms 15
philosophical worthies, is based upon the recognition
that the idea of a thing implies qiuilities in the thing,
and that the qmlities of a thing are a convenient name
given to our prevision of how that thing will, under
specified circumstances, act. The practical difference
referred to is a difference in the mode of proceeding
of the thing discussed ; whether or not there ensues a
practical difference in the action of ourselves or other
folk, in the action of any except that particular discussed
thing, is a totally separate question. The " Pragmatic
Principle," as exemplified in Professor James's account
of its application by Locke, Berkeley and Hume, is,
therefore, neither more nor less than the formula of
scientific thinking, in contradistinction to such dis-
cussion of mere meaningless words as has been not
unfairly reproached to " metaphysics." Thus under-
stood, the " Pragmatic Principle " of Mr Peirce, the
formula of " cash- value in experience," would, no
doubt, have interested the philosophers already men-
tioned, and those others, particularly the Mills and
Bain, whom Professor James enumerates as having
been pragmatists without knowing it. It would have
interested also that most suggestive and genial man
of science, the writer of William James's great
** Psychology " and of so many invaluable obiter
dicta even in the works intended to convert us to the
" Will-to-Believe." But when it comes to that
particular Professor William James who has dis-
1..V
i6
Vital Lies
tinguished himself by the invention of the ** WiU-to-
BeUeve," there seems no reason for his feeling par-
ticularly attracted, but rather (as we shall see later
on) for his being particularly alienated, by the " Prag-
matic Principle" and the "Cash-value in terms of
experience " when interpreted in the above manner.
For the Pragmatic Principle and, more particularly,
its cash-value formulation are open also to another
interpretation.
" Practical difference " may also be taken as mean-
ing difference in the actions or habits of human beings,
difference such as concerns practical persons in contra-
distinction to thinkers and investigators— for instance,
educators and legislators, bent upon directly furthering
prosperity and good behaviour. Or, in other words,
" practical difference " may be taken in the sense of
implying such practice as is no longer the test of an
opinion, but the application of an opinion once ac-
cepted, whether previously tested or not. The two
meanings of " Practical Difference " are in continual
interconmiunication, since everybody must admit
that " practical difference " implying safe and desirable
decisions about conduct, often follows upon the recog-
nition of such "practical difference" between ideas
as we have previously spoken of ; nay, that though
some of our practical differences in conduct happen
to be due to our not knowing the practical differences
between what is and what is not true, as when (so Pro-
>
The Two Pragmatisms 17
fessor James often urges) we wager, we take risks in
which the gain is great and the loss trifling ; yet the
majority of our practical decisions are undoubtedly
founded upon ourselves or some one else having
** made ideas clear " and tested suppositions by actual
or supposed experiment. Indeed, the two meanings of
" practical difference " are in such close proximity
that the thought of even the maker dear of our ideas,
of even Mr Peirce himself, has occasionally wavered
between the two.
Since, in that very article " How to Make Our Ideas
Clear," we come upon the following ambiguous develop-
ments of that ambiguous expression " practical " :
" To develop its meaning we have . . . simply to
determine : what habits it produces ; for what a thing
means is simply what habits it involves " (page 292).
" What, then, is belief ? ... it involves the estab-
lishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say, for
short, a habit " (page 291).
" The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit,
and different beUefs are distinguished by the different
modes of action to which they give rise " (page 291).
" There is no distinction of meaning so fine as
to consist in anything but a possible difference of
practice " (page 293).
It is this ambiguity in Mr Peirce's words, if not in
his thought, which probably commended the " Prag-
matic Principle " to Professor James.
B
i8
Vital Lies
III
It is the object of the following pages,i not to discuss
the intrinsic merits of the "Pragmatic Principle,"
but to expose the "development or transmogrifica-
tion " of the Pragmatism of " How to Make Our Ideas
Clear" into the Pragmatism of the Will-to-BeUeve
and of the Making of Truth. And, while doing this,
1 The above had already been written when Mr Peirce published
the following passage in an article in the Hibbert Journal
(October 1908) :
" In 1871, in a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
I used to preach this principle as a sort of logical gospel, repre-
senting the unformulated method followed by Berkeley, and in
conversation about it I called it ' Pragmatism.' In December
1877 and January 1878 I set forth the doctrine in the Popidar
Science Monthly ; and the two parts of my essay were printed in
French in the Revue Philosophique, vols. vi. and vii. Of course,
the doctrine attracted no particular attention, for, as I had remarked
in my opening sentence, very few people care for logic. But in
1897 Professor James remodelled the matter, and transmogrified
it into a doctrine of philosophy, some parts of which I highly
approved, while other and more prominent parts I regarded, and
still regard, as opposed to sound logic. About the time Professor
Papirie [sic, query Papini, V. L.] discovered, to the delight of the
Pragmatist school, that this doctrine was incapable of definition,
which would certainly seem to distinguish it from every other
doctrine in whatever branch of science, I was coming to the con-
clusion that my poor little maxim should be called by another
name ; and accordingly, in April 1905, I renamed it ' Prag-
maticism.* I had never before dignified it by any name in print,
except that, at Professor Baldwin's request, I wrote a definition
of it for his ' Dictionary of Psychology and Philosophy.' I did
not insert the word in the ' Century Dictionary,' though I had
charge of the philosophical definitions of that work ; for I have a
perhaps exaggerated dislike of riclame."
The Two Pragmatisms 19
we shall incidentally afford the reader an example of
the apphcation of the Pragmatic method itself. Like
Locke asking the meaning of "Human Identity,"
hke Berkeley asking the meaning of "Matter,"
like Hume asking the meaning of " Causation," we
humble people will, in our turn, ask the meaning of
"Practical Difference," and test it by examining
whether the attitude toward opinion and truth taken
up by Mr Peirce is the same attitude as that taken
up toward opinion and truih by Professor James
and Mr Schiller; or whether the difference in the
resulting attitude does not prove a corresponding
difference between the " Pragmatic Principle " as in-
tended by Mr Peirce, and the " Pragmatic Principle "
as employed by Mr. Peirce's ostensible disciples :
*' Consider what effects, which might conceivably
have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our
conception to have. Then our conception of these
effects [itaUcs mine] is the whole of our conception of
the object^ " A figment is the product of somebody's
imagination ; it has such characters as his thought
impresses upon it (A). That whose characters are
independent of how you or I think [itaUcs mine] is an
external reahty." (A) " Thus we may define the real
as that whose characters are independent of what any-
body may think them to be.'' (B) " These minds do not
seem to beUeve that disputation is ever to cease ; they
seem to think that the opinion which is natural for one
20
Vital Lies
if
man is not so for another, and that belief will conse-
quently never be settled. In contenting themselves
with fixing their own opinion by a method which would
lead another man to a different result, (A) they betray
their feeble hold of the conception of what trvth is. On
ihe other hand, all the followers of science are fuUy
persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only
pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to every
question to which they can be appUed, . . . Different
minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but
the progress of investigation carries them hy a force
outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion.
(A) This activity of thought hy which we are carried, not
where we wish, but to a fore-ordained goal, is like the
operation of destiny. No modification of the point of
view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no
natural bent of mind, can enable a man to escape the
predestinate opinion. This great law is embodied in
the conception of truth and reaUty.
(A) " The opinion which is fated to be ultimately
agreed to hy all who investigate is what is meant hy truth,
and the object represented in this opinion is the real.
(A) That is the way I would explain reaUty." " But
it may be said that this view is opposed to the abstract
definition which I have given of reahty, inasmuch as
it makes the character of the real to depend on what
is ultimately thought about them. But the answer
to this is that, on the other hand, reahty is independent,
The Two Pragmat isms 2 1
not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what
you or I or any finite number of men may think about
it ; and that, on the other hand, though the object of
the final opinion depends on what that opinion is, yet
(B) what that opinion is does not depend on what you
or I or any man thinks." (C) " Our perversity and
that of others may indefinitely postpone the settlement
of opinion ; it might even conceivably cause an arbitrary
proposition to be universally accepted as long as the
human race should last. Yet even that would not
change the nature of the behef which could alone be
the result of investigation carried suificiently far ; and
if, after the extinction of our race, another should arise
with faculties and dispositions for investigation, that
true opinion must be the one which they would ulti-
mately come to. Truth crushed to earth shall rise
again, and the opinion which would -finally result from
investigation does not depend on how anybody may
actually think " [itaUcs mine]. " A person who arbi-
trarily chooses the proposition he will adopt can use
the word ' truth ' only to emphasize the expression of
his determination to hold to his choice." ^
These quotations from "How to Make Our Ideas
Clear " (to which might be added others from the essays
constituting the first and third instalments of the series,
* C. S. Peirce, " Illustration of the Logic of Science : II. How to
Make Our Ideas Clear" {Popular Science MonOdy, New York,
Appleton & Co., No. Ixix., January 1878, pp. 286 to 302).
f I
22
Vital Lies
" Illustrations of the Logic of Science ") display Mr
Peirce's attitude of mind regarding the relations of
" truth " with what Professor James calls our " wiUing
nature " — and which it is convenient to call by his
essay title, " Will-to-BeUeve." The following quota-
tions display the attitude on this subject of the two
chief philosophers who have accepted Mr Peirce's
principle and name of Pragmatism. I letter both sets
of quotations, in order to faciUtate the comparison
between them.
Schiller : " Studies in Humanism," page 18 :
(B) " Two men, therefore, with different fortunes,
histories and temperaments, (mght not to arrive at the
same metaphysic . . . each should react individiuilly
on the food for thought which his personal life affords,
and the resulting differences ought not to be set aside
as void of ultimate significance." (ItaUcs in the
original.)
Schiller : " Axioms as Postulates— Personal Ideal-
ism," page 59 :
(A) "What we have seen to be untrue, viz., that
there is an objective world given independently of us
and constraining us to recognize it."
Schiller : " Studies in Humanism," page 189 :
(A) " He (the Pragmatist) thinks that the coercive-
ness of ' fact ' has been enormously exaggerated by
a iti Mf s' ssmMs a u
The Two Pragmatisms 23
failure to observe that it is never sheer coercion but
always mitigated by his acceptance."
Schiller : " Studies in Humanism," page 208 :
(A) (Pragmatic truth) " is fluid, not rigid, temporal
and temporary, not eternal and everlasting ; chosen,
not inevitable ; born of passion and sprung (like Aphro-
dite) from a foaming sea of desires, not ' dispassionate '
nor * purely intellectual ' ; incomplete, not perfect ;
faUible, not inerrant ; absorbed in the attaining of
what is not yet achieved ; purposive and strugghng
towards ends."
Schiller : ** Axioms as Postulates — Personal Ideal-
ism," page 120 :
(B) " What are these mechanical explanations
which have so successfully occupied the fertile field of
science ? They are devices of our own . . . ideals
conceived by our intelligence to which we are coaxing
reahty to approximate.'
jj
Schiller : " Studies in Humanism," page 12 :
(C) "... The human reason is ever gloriously
human ... it mercifully interposes an impenetrable
veil between us and any truth or reahty which is wholly
alien to our nature.''*
WiUiam James : " Pragmatism," page 273 :
(B) " On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any
" ■i i ! »PjlgJ- " "J!i;!!lLa
Nt
¥ I
r
24
Vital Lies
hypothesis if consequences useful to hfe flow from it.
Universal conceptions . . . have indeed no meaning
and no reality if they have no use. But if they have
any use, they have that amount of meaning, and the
meaning will be true if the use squares well with Ufe's
other uses."
WiUiam James : " Pragmatism," page 76 :
(B) " But in this world . . . certain ideas are not
only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as support-
ing other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also
helpful in hfe's practical struggles. If there be any
hfe that it is really better we should lead, and if there
be any idea which, beheved in, would help us to lead
that hfe, then it would be really heUer for us [itahcs sic]
to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it inci-
dentally clashed with other, greater vital benefits. (Itahcs
9ic.)
(B) "What would be better for us to beheve !
This sounds very like a definition of truth. [Itahcs mine. ]
It comes very near to saying what we ought [itahcs sic]
to beheve ! And in that definition none of you would
find any oddity. Ought we ever not to beheve what
it is better for us to beheve ? And can we then keep
the notion of what is better for us and what is true for us
[itahcs mine] permanently apart ? Pragmatism says
no, and I fully agree with her ! "
Wilham James : " Pragmatism," page 204 :
J !
^?
The Two Pragmatisms 25
(A) '* You can say of it either that : it is useful
because it is true ; or that it is true because it is useful.
True is the name for whatever starts the verification
process ; ^ useful is the name for its completed function
in experience."
Wilham James : " Pragmatism," page 73 :
(B) " If theological ideas prove to have a value for
concrete hfe, they will be true, for Pragmatism, in the
sense that they are good for so much."
Wilham James : " Pragmatism," page 299 :
(A) " On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of
God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word,
it is true."
(B) " Now, whatever its residual difficulties may
be, experience shows that it certainly does work and
that the problem is ... to determine it so that it will
combine with all the other working truths."
Wilham James : " Pragmatism," page 200 :
(B) " Pragmatism asks its usual question : Grant
an idea or a behef to be true, it says, what concrete
^C. S. Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Qear," page 289:
"... the action of thought is excited by the irritation of doubt
and ceases when belief is attained ; so that production of belief
is the sole function of thought." This shows that for Peirce dovbt
" is the name of what starts the verification process " — truth what
ends that process when it has been properiy carried through.
Note Professor James's Implying that we know truih before em-
barking on the process of ascertaining it !
The Two Pragmatisms 27
ij
ii
U
difference wiU its being true make in any one's actual
life ? "
Schiller : " Humanism," page 260 et seq. :
(B) " In the end the world is human experience,
and a world which we neither did or could experience
would not be one we need argue or trouble about,
" What would be our attitude towards the world in
which the ultimate significance of our ideals was denied
... and in which the hope of happiness was nothing
but a delusion ? "
SchiUer : " Humanism," page 199 et seq. :
(B) " Knowledge is power, because we decUne to
recognize as knowledge whatever does not satisfy our
lust for power."
" It foUows that ultimate reahty must be absolutely
satisfactory."
(A) " There is a serious faUacy in the notion that
the pursuit of truth could reveal a chamber of horrors
in the innermost shrine (B) If this were true
we should decKne to beheve it and to accept it as true.
And even if we could be forced to the admission that
the pursuit of truth necessarily and inevitably brought
us face to face with some unbearable atrocity
[C] as soon as the pursuit of truth was generally recog-
nized to be practicaUy noxious, we should simply give
(C)J*If its misguided votaries persisted in their
M
diabolical pursuit of truth regardless of the conse-
quences, they would be stamped out as the Indian
Government has stamped out the Thugs. . . . The
thing has happened over and over again. All through
the Middle Ages most branches of knowledge were
under black suspicion as hostile to human welfare.
They languished accordingly."
Schiller : " Axioms as Postulates— Personal Ideal-
ism," page 122 :
(B) " There is no intelligibility without conformity
to human nature, and human nature is teleological.
... A world which can be * fully explained,' but only
in mechanical or barely intellectual terms, is not fully
intelligible, is not fully explained.
" An intelligent reader may perhaps gather . . .
why the personality of God should be esteemed an
indispensable postulate. Is immortaUty a postulate ?
At present we are too profoundly ignorant as to what
men actually desire in the matter, and why and how
to decide what they ought to desire."
WiUiam James : " Pragmatism," concluding sen-
tence :
(B) " Between the two extremes, of crude natural-
ism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism
on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty
of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism,
is exactly what you require."
28
Vital Lies
I
1 1
IV
Such, then, is the attitude towards Truth and the
WiU-to-BeUeve of Mr C. S. Peirce, and such the atti-
tude of Messrs James and SchiUer. Applying in this
case that selfsame method for " making our ideas
clear » which bids us test the meaning of an idea by
the results of that possible meaning, we see that the
Pragmatic Principle involved by Messrs James and
Schiller must differ from the Pragmatic Principle
formulated by Mr Peirce, inasmuch as the consequences
not only deducible but actuaUy deduced from the one
are in flagrant contradiction with the consequences
deduced from the other. The contradiction amounts
to this, that while Mr Peirce makes trvth into an
inteUectual imperative which sooner or later imposes
Itself (or would impose itself but for human " per-
versity ») on (ypiwUm, Messrs James and Schiller
(besides constantly confusing " Truth " with its ob-
jective correlate - Reahty ») calmly identify trvlh
with belief, and belief with (xpinion, and they test truth
(which is itself beUef's and opinion's standard) by the
beneficial or agreeable, the useful consequences due to
holding a given behef or opinion. The contradiction
between the two attitudes toward truth can be practi-
caMy tested by substituting the word " opinion » for
the word " truth " in the quotations severally from
i>
i.,
*i ft
5i
The Two Pragmatisms 29
Mr Peirce and from his self-styled disciples. In the
quotations from Mr Peirce, this substitution results
in nonsense : no one could mean that " opinion " [in
original "truth"] "is that whose characters are
independent of what anybody may think them to be,"
nor that " opinion " [" truth "] " is the fore-ordained
conclusion of scientific investigation if pushed far
enough " ; nor that " opinion " [" truth "] " is pro-
duced by a force outside of ourselves and similar to
destiny"; still less that "opinion" ["truth"]
" crushed to earth shall rise again independent of what
any one thinks," even if it have to await the coming
of another race of human beings ; least of all, that
we may expect unanimity of " opinion " [" truth "]
from individuals starting with different bias, character,
and methods. It is obvious, therefore, that, when
Mr Peirce speaks of truth, he does not mean the same
thing as opinixm.
But if we perform this little experiment upon the
quotations from Messrs James and Schiller, we shall
find ourselves in front of a totally different " practical
result."
So far from turning the sentences into nonsense, the
substitution of "opinion" for "truth" will make
them not only clear and reasonable, but frequently
truistic and platitudinous : two individuals may, in-
deed, be expected to arrive at opinions as different as
their lives and fortunes. Acceptance of an opinion is
r
30
Vital Lies
The Two Pragmatisms 3 1
%
\
certainly different from coercion by fact. Opinion
may, indeed, be " chosen,not inevitable " ; " temporary,
not eternal " ; " fluid, not rigid " ; " passionate,
not unbiassed " ; nor could anything be more appro-
priate than Mr Schiller's simile of opinion rising, hke
Aphrodite, " out of a foaming sea of desire." We can
all think of cases when human reason's "glorious
humanness " has interposed a veil, merciful or other-
wise, between mankind and opinions " aHen to its
nature " ; and history does show (as Mr Peirce remarks
in the first of his articles on the " Logic of Science ")
no end of violent repressions of opinions which were
deemed dangerous or odious. Professor James would
be not less logical, but a deal more so, if he said that
it is opinion which " starts the verification-process " ;
more logical, because that verification-process results
in a tryth which sometimes dispels an opinion. People
much less subtle than IVIr Schiller have talked of
"making up their minds," or "making themselves
an opinion " ; and no one, subtle or not, would deny
that many opinions are purposive. And, finally, this
very fluid, temporal, temporary, individual, biassed,
passionate, human-made (even officially made) thing
opinion, can be arranged, tested, accepted, welcomed,
scouted, anathematized, on the score of being or not
being useful, beneficent, conducive to fife. For in-
stance, basing ourselves on Lafcadio Heam, we might
quite admit that the opinions summed up under
'
\
the title " Ancestor- Worship " had been (to quote
Professor James's rather commercial phrase of recom-
mendation) " exactly what was required " by the
former inhabitants of Japan ; but few of us would be
ready to describe those " Ancestor-worship " opinions
as " independent of what any one thought," and " fore-
ordained to be ultimately arrived at by investigators
despite all individual and temporary bias," as Mr
Peirce describes trtUh. For, so far from opinion being
identifiable with truth, it frequently happens that an
opinion may be extremely efficacious, practically and
morally, and yet on the contrary, false.
Now, it is exactly because opinim, while possessing
all the characteristics attributed by Messrs James and
Schiller to truth, by no means always answers to Mr
Peirce's definition of truth, that we must set our face
against the identification, even against the partial
confusion of opinion with truth : the two words must
be kept separate because they answer to separate, to
occasionally overiapping but by no means equivalent,
notions. And the tendencies leading to this identi-
fication of truth and opinion, leading to this testing
truth by practical, moral, extrinsic value, are tendencies
requiring to be checked, not because they exist in dis-
32
Vital Lies
The Two Pragmatisms 33
'M'
tinguished thinkers like Messrs James and Schiller,
but because they exist in all of us, and are such that
all philosophy is not too much to keep them in order.
The " WiU-to-BeKeve," the " Consent of our WiUing
Nature," the " Purposive Making of Truth " are labels
for human instincts as universal as the instincts bidding
us seek pleasure, repose, and advantage wherever they
can be got, and without consideration for the pleasure,
the repose, the advantage of other beings. Most of
our thoughts, and probably the whole of our faculty
for thinking, have arisen at the bidding of an interested
purpose, of a self-seeking will ; and this accounts for
many of the absurdities that have been thought, and
perhaps for most of the vices of our methods of think-
ing. But, thanks to the pressure of universal and
averaged purposes and interests upon individuals,
thanks to the conflict of opinions, of purposively made
trvihs and of beliefs which are willed, there has been
evolved in our thinking nature an automatic check, a
counteracting force, to those interested motives and
emotional preferences without which there would
have been no thinking faculty at all. That check is
the particular conception defined by Mr Peirce as
truth. That counteracting force is constituted by the
taste, the passion, the instinctive and imperious re-
spect for truth, which plays in our intellectual hfe the
part played in our individual and social hfe bv the
instincts of justice and chastity. In the same way
I
that our hfe as human beings would be laid waste with-
out these other two great altruistic instincts, so also,
were it not for the passion for truth, our intellectual hfe
would have been perpetually jeopardized by the natural
tendency to beheve (or pretend to beUeve) what-
soever appeals to individual or momentary interests
and preferences. Mankind has always wanted, perhaps
always required, and certainly always made itself, a
stock of delusions and sophisms, of vital lies or of white
lies. Every human being's thought, consciously or un-
consciously, tends to accommodate itself to some wish,
some use, some habit. Every opinion tends to identify
itself with truth. The Will-to-Beheve, the Purposive
Making of Truth, are unceasingly at work. This is the
reason why we have no use for the kind of Pragmatism
which teaches the testing of truth by its utihty, the
identification of truth with opinion, which preaches
this universal and ineradicable vice of all our thinking
as a self-righteous, a self-assertive virtue.
VI
At this point of my proceedings against what has
usurped the name of Pragmatism, but what I would
rather describe as the pragmatistic temperament in
philosophy, it is quite natural that the reader should
interrupt with the perhaps indignant suggestion that
ii
34
Vital Lies
I must be grossly misunderstanding, if not misrepre-
senting, my adversaries.
If, as I hope, he has himself read some of the books
under accusation, he will point out with perfect justice
that quite one half of their contents is in absolute
contradiction with my summing up, and in absolute
agreement with Mr Peirce's and everyone else's defini-
tion of truth. And if, on the other hand, the reader pos-
sesses no first-hand acquaintance with the incriminated
writings, he will be even less able to believe my asser-
tion that the philosophers calling themselves Pragma-
tists should persistently and consistently deduce from
Mr Peirce's principle a doctrine so flagrantly in opposi-
tion to his own, and should claim as their remoter
intellectual progenitors (Pragamatists, we are told,
before Pragmatism) philosophers so extraordinarily
imlike themselves as Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Mill.
Now this fact, which seems incredible to the reader,
is the hicy the gravamen of the whole question of
Pragmatism, and the chief reason for suspecting and
discountenancing the self-styled pragmatistic attitude,
and, I might add, complexion of mind. The bad
business about Messrs James's and Schiller's contra-
dictory additions to the Pragmatism of Mr Peirce, is
precisely that the principles thus inserted by them
into the original formula of Pragmatism are neither
consistently applied nor persistently maintained, but
flicker in and out of existence with perfect intermittence
The Two Pragma tisms 3 5
and inconsistency. That Truth which is fltiid not
rigidy temporary and individual, that truth which is
whit it would he good to heUeve, that truth which has
been got by an act of vohtion and choice, occasionallv
by a wager, that goddess of Mr Schiller's, risen not out
of the old-fashioned well, hut, like Aphrodite, out of a
foaming sea of desires, thal^ brand new and at the same
time comfortingly old-fashioned sort of truth (" a
new name for some old ways of thinking "),i is
never invoked in connection with any notion of which
we are already certain, nor applied to any problem
upon which certainty seems proximately forthcoming.
The will to beUeve, even the right to believe, is
indeed invoked in the obscure problems of the relation
between body and soul ; ^ but we are not referred to it
for solutions of the problems of chemistry or physics.
Still less are we recommended to apply to the disputes
of Lamarckians and neo-Darwinians that test of
suitability to public morals or private consolation
which we are earnestly pressed to bring to bear upon
the tenets of optimistic theism and the hypotheses of
mediumistic spiritualism. We are recommended to
beUeve as we choose only in the cases where rational
beUef cannot yet exist, and cheered onwards to make
up our mind only where our judgment is necessarily
* " A new name for some old ways of thinking.'
Professor James's volume " Pragmatism."
• W. James, " Human Immortality," p. 39^e< seq.
Subtitle of
36
Vital Lies
suspended. Wherever it is controlled by observation,
experiment, calculation, or any of the ordinary methods
for attaining truth. Pragmatism drops into what
Mr Schiller describes as its original humility,^ it
shrinks into being once more Mr Peirce's method
" for making our ideas clear '* — it curtseys a welcome
to unanswerable facts, to indisputable generalizations,
and recites the " humble " formula in which, as we
are told. Professor Peirce summed up the practice of
British philosophers from Locke to Mill and Bain.
But on one or two points where science decUnes or
delays to answer ; in fact, where truth in Mr Peirce's
sense does not close the door in the Pragmatist's face,
then Pragmatism reveals herself the real " Aphrodite
born of the foaming sea of desires," and goddess-Uke
creates truths which are conformable to the " ideals,"
the " hope of happiness," the *' what it would be better
to beheve," the " vital hope of mankind," the " what
is exactly what you require " of her high priests James
and Schiller. Incessu patet dea. To the sceptic, the
scoffer, to the reader in hopeless confusion of mind.
Pragmatism is at last revealed in aU her miraculous
and beneficent glory.
1 Schiller, " Pragmatism and Pseudo- Pragmatism," in Mind,
p. 390: "... if pragmatist epistemology is more revolutionary,
it is also more systematic and adequate tlian its humble beginnings
in Dr Peirce's magazine article appeared to portend.
The Two Pragmatisms 37
VII
I began this paper by stating that my chief reason
for faUing foul of Will-to-BeUeve Pragmatism is because
it exemphfies an intellectual temperament which, even
while examining into the nature and uses of Truth,
indulges in continual ambiguities, revokes of state-
ments, quibbles and distortions of meaning, in such
tentative disingenuousness as is not easily detected by
others and perhaps not easily suspected by oneself.
Of such dupUcity there luckily presented itself to my
hand an initial example whose detection, hke that of
some medium's sleight of hand, was calculated to arouse
in my reader's mind a justified state of distrust. That
initial disingenuousness which I have already dealt with
is the adoption of the name and employment of the intel-
lectual credit of a logical method — Mr Peirce's method
for " making our ideas clear " — which, as I have shown
by a comparison between the conclusions of Mr Peirce
and those of his self-styled disciples, is utterly incom-
patible with the pretensions of a " Will-to-Beheve " or
the " purposive " " Making of Truth."
This chapter being insufficient for the intricate pro-
cesses of showing up any other of these philosophical
conjurors' feats of logical skill, I shall devote its remain-
ing pages to mere further arousing of the reader's
suspiciousness, first by the exhibition of some of these
38
Vital Lies
Pragmatists' choicest self-advertisements and ** testi-
monials " ; and then by the discovery of the cat which
lurks at the bottom of these Pragmatists' very hetero-
genous bag-full.
Of the testimonial to Will-to-Beheve Pragmatism
extracted by the initial parade of Mr Peirce's " Prin-
ciple " and the subsequent hiding of Mr Peirce's con-
clusions, we have re-valued the value by apphcation
of the Peirce method to quotations from Messrs James
and Schiller compared with quotations from Mr Peirce
himself. The already quoted account of Pragmatism
in Professor James's " Varieties of ReUgious Experi-
ence " (p. 443) contains another " testimonial " in
favour of the doctrine. The reader will remember that
the Pragmatistic method is here described as being
impUcit in the philosophy of the chief British philo-
sophers and illustrated by the proceedings of Locke,
of Berkeley and of Hume ; while Brown, Dugald
Stewart, the Mills and James Bain are further adduced
more briefly as having practised the method later to be
called " Pragmatic " by Mr Peirce. But Professor
James does not add that these philosophical worthies,
three of whom at least, Hume, Mill and Bain, were
rationahfatic stalwarts, employed the pragmatic method
merely in the Peircean sense of defining and verifying
ideas by reference to possible experience ; and that,
even like Mr Peirce himself, they never employed it in
the James-Schiller sense of " Willing to Beheve " or
The Two Pragmatisms 39
"Making Truth" in obedience to life's needs and
ideals. And by this display of one half of the facts
and omission of the other half of them. Professor James
produces on the reader's mind the impression that the
doctrine of Right-to-BeHeve, or Will-to-BeUeve, which
he has foisted upon Mr Peirce's Pragmatism, is not
only identical with it, but has been acted upon, long
before it was ever given a name or formula, by the very
philosophers who notoriously did most against those
practically useful theological and mystical assumptions
which they denounced as preferred, desired, " chosen,"
in fact, as " willed " beUefs. The lay pubhc, the public
hungry for " religious experiences " like those to whose
advantages Professor James has devoted so many
pages, are therefore comfortably able to say : '* You
know the Will-to-Believe was the philosophic method
not only of that great Mr Peirce who invented
Pragmatism, but also of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the
Mills, Professor Bain and all the people who we thought
were sceptics and rationalists, it is the characteristimlly
British Philosophy.'^
After identifying his views as characteristically
British (not made in Germany, he is careful to point out,
although as historical fact Kant, with his " Practical
Reason," did encourage the Will-to-Believe) Professor
James renders them further attractive to an American
or English audience by comparison with Protestantism.
Pragmatism, he tells us, impHes an alteration in the
40
Vital Lies
" seat of authority " ; he and his WiU-to-Bdieveists are
like the Reformers; their " ultra-rationalist " opponents
are the Papists. Thus Reason is made to play the part
of mediaeval ecclesiastical dogmatism, and the Will-to-
BeUeve falls into the gallant attitude of sixteenth-
century free thought ; ^ and (by a mere juxtaposition of
things and quahties not necessarily connected) the
impression is left in the reader that Will-to-Believe
Pragmatism being a philosophical heresy, the orthodox
philosophy of rationalism must on the contrary be
dogmatic, unscientific, illiberal and stick in the mud,
while Will-to-Behevism is not only scientific and pro-
gressive, but also, like the Protestantism which went to
the rack and the stake, eminently scrupulous and
courageous.
And since we are upon the subject of fine gallant
attitudes, let me point out the self-advertisement which
treats belief due to ivilUng as a risk which the believer
<i88umes, then turn the risk run (or rather as we shall
see, not run, for the odds are supposed favourable)
into an adventure, and the adventure into something
bold and dashing with which to shame poor rationalists
who won't join in it. While in reahty there is no
* " It will be an alteration in the seat of authority that reminds
one almost of the protestant reformation. And as, to papal minds.
Protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and con-
fusion, such, no doubt, will Pragmatism often seem to ultra-
rationalist minds in philosophy. ... I venture to think that
philosophic Protestantism will compass a not dissimilar prosperity,"
" Pragmatism," p. 123.
The Two Pragmatisms 41
avda<yUy (Mr Schiller's favourite virtue), nothing
adventurous (Professor James's pet quality) in
wagering, hke Pascal^ against the beUef which, if
true, means only annihilation, but if false, eternal
torment ; and for the belief which, if false, meant
only the same annihilation, but if true, a possible
eternity of happiness. Pascal, at least, declared
roundly that such a choice was a matter of
prudence ; but Messrs Schiller and James cheer it on
as something strenuous and adventurous and thus
advertise their doctrines as possessing, besides other
agreeable quahties, the further attraction of a spice
of heroism.
VIII
The Pragmatists' advertisement of panaceas and
show of " testimonials " by no means stops here. The
volume of essays entitled *' The Will-to-BeUeve "
is dedicated to Charles S. Peirce in terms which imply
that the inventor of Pragmatism acquiesced in those
very methods of *' fixing behef " by " what one chooses
to think " against which he had, as we have seen,
* Professor James's treatment of Pascal's " Wager " is character-
istic. For after quoting it (" Will-to-Believe," p. 5) as an example
(with its mass hearings and " cela vous abetira ") of what he does
not recommend, he proceeds on pp. 26-28 of the same book to
encourage us to adopt our belief for exactly analogous prudential
considerations.
dMi
42
Vital Lie?
especially directed his attacks. And simi^rly the
volume " Pragmatism " is dedicated to' the memory
of John Stuart Mill, a philosopher whom Professor
James had previously treated ^ with conspicuous
grudgingness, and even made responsible ("Will-to-
Ifeheve," pp. 128 and 228) in company with Bain and
Spencer, for the dry and ungenerous philosophical
temper of his day, responsible also, this time in com-
pany with Bentham, Cobden and Bright, for what
Professor James sneers at as England's " drifting raft "
pohcy. One wonders why Professor James's " fancy "
should " hke to picture Stuart Mill as our leader if
he were ahve to-day," until one recollects that the
theological apologists of^more picturesque centuries
loved to quote Hebrew and Pagan worthies, and if
possible the demons and false prophets themselves, in
support of articles of faith— Tes^e David mm Sibylla,
as the hymn says about the Last Judgment. One is
even more reminded of the heaven-inspired artifices
of pious exorcists, when one finds a Will-to-Beheve
argument backed by a still more obdurate rationahstic
demon : by W. K. CUfford, even in that very essay
against teaching unproved dogmas to which a large por-
tion of Professor James's Will-to-Bdieve is an avowed
counterblast. *' I can, of course," writes Professor
» " To the memory of John Stiiart Mill, from whom I first learned
the pragmatic openness of mind, and whom my fancy likes to
picture as our leader, were he alive to-day."
.1
I
The Two Pragmatisms 43
James (*^ Varieties of Kehgious Experience," p. 518-19)
" put myself in the sectarian scientific attitude, and
imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of
scientific law and objects may be all ; but whenever
I do this, I hear that inward monitor, of whom W. K.
Clifford once wrote, whispering the word ' Bosh.' "
What W. K. Clifford's monitor whispered " fiddle-
sticks " about was in reahty the hypothesis of a catas-
trophic origin of organic matter, and that, as remarked,
in a paper ("Essays," ii, p. 335) directed against
the teaching of those very dogmas which Professor
James commends as true in the sense of desirable. But
the incorporation, without a syllable to this effect, of
CHfford's phrase into an argument against agnosticism
associates the famous arch-agnostic's name with Will-
to-Believe apologetics : " Even Clifford, you know,
said that something inside him whispered bosh to the
materialistic hypothesis " must be the average reader's
impression ; an impression which a master of psy-
chology, a remarkably acute morahst, and a first-class
craftsman of words should surely have foreseen and
prevented.
IX
But even if there were no testimonials from adver-
saries, Pragmatism would never lack for advertisement.
We have seen how Professor James compares it to
4
44
Vital Lies
Protestantism ; Mr Schiller traces the heresy so far
back as Protogoras, and shows us Plato himself busy
mahgning it (" Studies in Humanism," p. 32 et seq.).
We have noticed also both these Pragmatists' insistence
on the strenuous earnestness, the adventurous courage
of those who dare to Will-to-BeUeve what they want to
beUeve, who are spirited enough to Make Truth, which
is truth for them, instead of waiting to jfind out what is
truth on its own account. Professor James goes a step
further : he compares the Pragmatist to a humbler but
more indispensable hero, the watchful, disinterested, in-
trepid bobby. Here is the passage, instructive in many
ways. Listen to " Human Immortahty," pp. 39-40 :
" And whether we care or not for inmiortaUty in itself,
we ought, as mere critics doing police duty among the
vagaries of mankind to insist on the illogicaUty of a
denial. . . . How much more ought we to ir^sist, as lovers
of truth, when the denial is that of such a vital hope of
mankind." I have ventured to itahcize because I
desire to call attention to that " how much more,"
and to speculate on its meaning. We are, the reader
sees, already critics doing 'police service^ and apparently
also lovers of truth. Is Professor James urging us to
be even more critical than we should otherwise be
because one of the two views under examination is of
vital importance ? This seems reasonable enough.
But then follows the clause " how much more'' Is
our love of truth to incline us to even greater love of
I
The Two Pragmatisms 45
truth because of the vital importance of one of the
two alternatives ? Or are we, lovers of truth, to let
our love of truth be biassed in favour of a vital hope
of mankind? Or are we to love truth even more
fervently than before (for that establishes us in
the love of truth before these proceedings began)
because there is a particular vital hope which, although
it may be false, may also happen to be true ? I will
not use my Right-to-Bdieve in deciding which of these
possible meanings is the one intended by Professor
James. I will not even (not being a Pragmatist)
wager that Professor James must have decided between
these meanings himself. I will remain in crass agnostic
uncertainty, and reflect that it may be with Professor
James, as with Protagoras himself, the extraordinary
value and suggestiveness of whose famous dictum re-
sides, as we are told by Mr Schiller in " the concise-
ness which has led to these divergent interpretations "
(" Studies in Humanism," p. 32 et seq.). One thing
remains, however, certain even to the most stiffnecked
rationalist : these Pragmatists may be trusted when
they describe themselves as lovers of truth. For have
they not told us that truth is individual, temporary,
fluid, horn of a sea of desires (besides being, like Aphro-
dite, presumably attractive), in short, something
which is accepted, which is chosen, and even which is
made by ourselves (Schiller, " Studies in Humanism,"
p. 208).
46
Vital Lies
i
^1
If the Pragmatism of Messrs James and Schiller
were Uke that of Mr Peirce, merely a method for
"making our ideas clear," its promulgation would
undeniably further the philosophic training of the
pubHc and increase the scientific discipUne of philo-
sophers ; but useful although such philosophic training
and scientific disciphne might be, it would scarcely
produce propaganda whose persuasive enthusiasm
recalls the prospectus of a personaUy conducted hoKday
trip: "With the right guides such ascents (into
metaphysics) are safe," writes Mr SchiUer ; "we
shall return refreshed from our excursion." StiU
less, perhaps, would mere additional clearness in our
ideas be pressed upon our acceptance in the " Do you
reaUy know what you are in want of ? " style which
we associate with typewriters, encyclopedias, patent
foods and similar boons to mankind. We are not
accustomed to have what Mr Peirce caUed the Logic
of Science presented in words hke those of Professor
James : " You may find that what I take the Uberty
of caUing the Pragmatistic or mehoristic type ... is
exactly what you require."
But once we understand that we are no longer talking
about the Logic of Science, and once we recognize the
fundamental distinction between the « humble " Prag-
The Two Pragmatisms 47
matism of Mr Peirce and the " more revolutionary
and adequate " Pragmatism of Messrs James and
Schiller, we shall take in why these philosophers are
so passionately anxious that we should try their
panacea. That panacea is not intended to " make
our ideas clear " ; it is calculated to teach us to Will-
to-Believe and to Make Truth. The Pragmatism of Mr
Peirce is a formula of the " Logic of Science." The
Pragmatism of Messrs W. James and Schiller is, so
far as it possesses any originality, a method of apolo-
getics, a not always strictly grammatical new Grammar
of Assent. When we complete the quotation from
Professor James's Pragmatism, we find that what he
recommends to us in his farewell flourish of self-adver-
tisement is the Pragmatistic type . . . not merely
of Philosophy, but of Theism. And similarly the
postulate which Mr Schiller shows us as not yet evolving
into an axiom is the postulate of individual survival
after death. " Is immortality a postulate ? " he
writes," ... at present we are too profoundly
ignorant as to what men actually desire in the matter,
and why and how to decide what they ought to
desire. Hence, pending the publication of a statistical
inquijy undertaken by the American Branch of the
Society for Psychical Research, profitable discussions
of this question must be postponed." ^
^ Schiller, " Axioms as Postulates — Personal Idealism," p. 122.
Lest the reader should imagine from this that the American
'I
•I
In short, "the practical differences" which we
find in the concluding chapters of Messrs W.
James and Schiller's various volumes, but which
the humbUr Pragmatism of Mr Peirce by no
means leads to, seems to be the acceptance, in
consideration of beneficial results, of the trvth of
some variety of theology; or, in default of such
or perhaps m addition thereunto, of the truth of
some mediumistic kind of "spirituahsm." And even
readers disinchned to beUeve what suits their own
preferences, may, I think, accept the hypothesis
I'^^f M ' f •^•^- ^ «"*"« *^ ^""^^ ''^'^'^<^ of the State of the
S^lf ^^r^'* r ^ '^' demand-for-immortality postuladon Mr
l^mains a me,, p^t^ate without devel^l^llTso ^^ W
edge : forgettmg that, if postulates are merely to make kZ«uZl
to.,.ead of coaling nature into acquiescence wifh ouT^h^ as ^r
Schiller had previously led us to expect we onX tTkT' ^
satMed (moraUy and emotiouaUy. e";: ' ifTetn ^ edge S
turn out contrary to the postulate ,• for knowledge that^Tcan^ot
ge what-we. want would, by this new definition, be InowW«
quite as much as knowledge that we-could-get-what^^e-want It
seems, therefore, to be left to our Wm i, kJi: ""*' "'^•*™- «
Mr SchiUer meaks : ^M-lo-MKyc to choose whether
It *,1,L'!!!ii P^P'*""" "*« immortality sufficiently to postulate
m^X^ ^ , '■"'"' "''"''*' "■«" " '"""ortaUty orCt o1
pelpLXSlrtX '■"""''""'^ ™««'-- - P--- t
The Two Pragmatisms 49
that this particular Pragmatism differs from that
of Mr Peirce in being (to use Mr SchiUer's favourite
words) "genetically explicable" by the mystic
union of scientific Psychology with Psychical Re-
search.
\
D
It •'*
CHAPTER II
WHAT IS TRUTH?
WHAT is truth? asked Pilate, implying
thereby that there was no such thing.
And he went on to wash his hands of
practical responsibilities.
The Pragmatists raise Pilate's question, but they
are, unlike him, essentially ethical, efficient, and
responsible. What they wash their hands of is intel-
lectual consequences, and they answer : " Examine the
practical results."
But of course not without reservations ; for practical
persons do not give themselves away, and morahty is
a matter of moderation and juste milieu. So, after
telling us (" Pragmatism," page 204) that '' you can say
of it [an opinion]. . . either thai ' it is useful because it
is true ' or that * U is true because it is useful ' — both
these 'phrases mean exactly the same thing "—Professor
WiUiam James explains that this self-same meaning of
the two phrases is, " that here is an idea that gets fulfilled
and can be verified. True is the name for whatever idea
What is Truth?
5j_
starts the venficaiion-process, useful is the name for its
completed function in experience."
This sentence has the pleasant cogency of aU sym-
metrical things, for there is an esthetic will to believe,
which the Pragmatists do not indeed discuss but
occa^ionaUy appeal to. Truth is utihty, utiHty is
truth. It is almost Keats's famous formula. But
Keats, being a poet, is satisfied with one lyric assertion.
A philosopher never merely asserts ; he refers to another
assertion. The identity of " truth " and " usefulness "
IS explained by Professor James by each of these terms
bemg m the same relation to a third term-namely,
"verification-process." The same relation? Pro-
fessor James says that when we say of an opinion that
" It IS useful because it is true," or " true because it is
useful," " both these phrases mean exactly the same thing,
namely that here is an idea that gets fulfilled and can be
verified." There can be no mistake : the identity of
meaning rests upon identical relation to the verifica-
tion-process. There buzzes through our mind a re-
assuring reminiscence of the Euclidean formula:
" thmgs which are equal to the same thing," etc.
But is identity of relation the same as identity of
quahty ? If two men are exactly like a third, they
must be exactly like each other ; but if two men are
m exactly the same relation to a third-say in the
relation of a friend, or pupil, or enemy-are they hke
each other m everything else ? Are only such ideaa
52
Vital Lies
as are useful liable to be fulfilled and verified in the same
sense as ideas that are true ? No one would take the
trouble to verify an idea he thought useless. Useless
in what sense ? Useless to his health, his purse, his
reputation, his hope of heaven ? What cavilHng !
exclaims the Pragmatist. Why of course not any of
these utilities : useless, of course, to— to — to . . . use-
less in the sense of intellectually unsatisfactory ; well,
useless because, you know, ideas aren't useful, really
useful, except when they are true.
Anti-Pragmatist. Ah, of course as a Pragmatist
you have a belief in the usefulness of truth and only
truth, such as we — I am not sure what you would
call us — have not attained to, for we have heard not
only of the Noble Lies which Plato allowed the
Guardians of his Republic, but also of the Vital Lies
of the doctor in Ibsen's play ; and we even incline
to think, with certain modernists and anthropologists,
that a vehicle of mistakes or Ues may have been neces-
sary for the progress of sundry useful institutions and
standards ; nay, even with M. Georges Sorel, that
for the highest social purposes you can get use
out of a myth just because it cannot be verified or
fulfiUed.
Pragmatist. That's neither here nor there. Except
in one Uttle reference, evidently ironical, of Mr Schiller's,
Pragmatism does not concern itself with Ues. It is a
new mode of defining truth. And I suppose you will
What is Truth?
53
not push your cavilling to the length of denying that
truth is useful ?
Anti-Pragmatist. I think, Socrates, that truth is
useful on the whole, though not in every individual
case. And that is compensated by the fact that even
in the individual case useful lies would not be useful
if they were not mistaken for truths.
Pragmatist. Exactly! For the peculiarity of
Pragmatism, and what distinguishes it from intel-
lectualism, is that it enormously widens the field of
agreement ; it really does see truth everywhere.
Anti-Pragmatist. Well now, to return to this
" verification-process," in which Professor James sees
the identification of truth and usefulness.
Pragmatist. I beg your pardon. Professor James
never says that truth and usefulness are identical. He
says that to say that an opinion " is useful because it is
true " and an opinion " is true because it is useful "
are phrases meaning exactly the same thing.
Anti-Pragmatist. Well ! I should have said that
they are phrases having the same shape, like " a rug
made out of a tiger " and " a tiger made out of a rug."
But— teU me : do you really think that " an opinion
is useful because it is true " means exactly the same as
" an opinion is true because it is useful " ?
Pragmatist. Of course they don't mean the same
thing in the general sense. That's evident and left to
the intelligence of the reader. Pragmatism always
54
Vital Lies
What is Truth?
55
counts upon the intelligence of the reader — no, not on
his intelligence, rather upon his intuition. You re-
member how splendidly Bergson has defined intuition
as originating in action.
Anti-Pragmatist. Why, I thought he said that
it was inteUigence which was a mere rough and ready
instrument of action. . . .
Pragmatist. Exactly. Action's negative correlate.
WeU, Pragmatism always counts upon the reader's
intuition or intelligence, whichever he happens to
have. Probably, as you say, on his intelligence,
because Pragmatism wastes no time in defining but
makes straight for action.
Anti-Pragmatist. But I thought intelligence did
define. . . .
Pragmatist. Did I say intelligence ? Of course
I meant intelligence in the sense of intuition. Bergson
is naturally with us Pragmatists, he is & Pragmatist ;
only you must leave off defining his meaning and merely
apply it in order to recognize his Pragmatism. Prag-
matism makes straight for appUcation.
Anti-Pragmatist. And anything can become a
Pragmatistic truth if appUed by a Pragmatist ?
Pragmatist. Ha ! That's good, that's very good !
You are a Pragmatist at heart, everybody is a Prag-
matist at heart — at least, if not an Anti-Pragmatist,
and perhaps most of all then ! All the same, I must
tell you that you were misquoting Professor James
I
most grossly. What Professor James does say is that
utihty and truth are, as you yourself correctly para-
phrased it the moment before, the same with regard
to the verification-process. Look ! here it is : " True
is the name for whatever idea starts the verification-
process, useful is the name for its completed function
in experience."
Anti-Pragmatist (rather overcome). But — is " com-
pleting " an idea's function in experience the same as
** starting " the verification-process ?
Pragmatist. Of course. Don't we constantly see
the completion of one function overlapping the starting
of another function ? And isn't overlapping occupy-
ing the same space, having therefore a quaUty of
sameness ? But test by application : can anyone
deny that, coeteris paribus, and in the long run, true
opinions will be found to be useful, and of course, vice
versa, useful opinions will be found (coeteris farihuSy
naturally !) to be true ? Surely, truth is, in a great
many cases — whenever it isn't the contrary — very
useful.
Anti-Pragmatist. But — haven't we known that all
along ?
Pragmatist (triumphant). Of course you have !
" A new name for some old ways of thinking " *
— that's what's so splendid in Pragmatism. But then,
nobody before had completed the identification ; nobody
1 Subtitle of Professor James's " Pragmatism."
56
Vital Lies
What is Truth?
57
had shown that the single case could be made to in-
clude all the cases ; no one had understood, or rather
thoroughly applied (for application is the pragmatic
test), what is meant by the formulas, " in the long run "
and " caeteris paribus." Besides, no other philosophy
had seen how it all hinges on the verification-process.
Really, putting modesty aside, I think one may say
that it takes Pragmatism to say that truth is what
starts the verification-process.
(ExU Pragmatist, exulting.)
II
The Verification-Process— the words keep haunting
my mind Uke a solenm phrase of music. I sympathize
vaguely with my Pragmatist friend's jubilation. If
the form of that dictum of Professor James is sym-
metrical and gracious, its substance— the Verification-
Process— is massive and reassuring. Verification-
Process. Yes, of course. If we want to know whether
an opinion is true, it is a good plan, according to Charles
S. Peirce, to think out the consequences implied in
the statement, and try whether those consequences
tally. You can tread with all your might on a real
pearl without its being crushed, but you can't do the
same by a Roman pearl. If, therefore, you reduce
your pearl to a mush by your stampings, you have
I
*^
appUed practice to an opinion, and you have — with
intellectual joy but perhaps a Uttle human annoyance
at the loss both of the pearl and of your hopes — gone
successfully through the Verification-Process. What-
ever the truth may be, this much is true. The Verifica-
tion-Process is, therefore, the one at whose completion
we find that we have (or have not) an opinion which is
true. This Uttle Verification-Process (our example of
the Roman pearl) has therefore proved Professor
James's opinion about Verification-Processes and truth
to be itself a truth, a remarkable truth. But stay —
something has gone wrong somewhere. Somehow or
other, that doesn't seem to have been Professor James's
opinion. What luas Professor James's opinion ? Ah,
here it is : " True is the name for whatever idea starts the
Verification-Process." But what starts the Verifica-
Process — say in the case of the real pearl and the false
one — is the desire to get at the truth, the lack of truth,
the doubt. The truth then was at the end of the
Verification-Process ; it was its result. But that's not
what ought to have resulted from our Uttle private
Verification-Process : if Professor James's dictum was
true, truth ought to have been at the beginning of
the Verification-Process. Perhaps truth was indepen-
dent of the Verification-Process ! These matters are
puzzUng, and in our desire to verify this Verifica-
tion-Process business, we may have been forget-
ting what the real pearl was to do and the false
58
Vital Lies
What is Truth ?
59
one. Perhaps it was the real pearl which was to be
crushed.
Collecting my thoughts, I seek once more for clearer
understanding of that sentence. I will let alone that
troublesome first half-sentence, "True is the name
for whatever idea starts the Verification- Process;' and
proceed to the second, which will probably make
everything plain : " useful is the name for its completed
function in experience:' There arises a trifling gram-
matical doubt : what is the noun behind the pronoun
its " ? " True is the name for whatever idea starts the
Verification-Process ; useful is the name fcyr its com-
pleted function in experience:' Ought we to read,
"useful is the name for whatever-starts-the- Verifica-
tion-Process's completed function in experience"?
This seems a httle heavy for so fine a styUst. I think
we ought to read, " useful is the name for whatever-
has-been-named-true's (shall we say truth's?) com-
pleted function in experience." Or shaU we go back
to the previous sentence in search of a nominative to
that " is," and read, " true is the name of whatever
idea starts the Verification-Process, useful is the name
for its [the idea's] completed function in experience " ?
Evidently. One must not expect verbal pedantry
from a great writer. Besides, see how true it is that
with patience and sympathy one will always, as St
Catherine of Siena remarked, find the sweet reasonable
soul of people, and also of people's sentences. I do
I
not, however, yet grasp fully the meaning of " com-
pleted function in experience."
" Does " experience " mean experiment ? In that
case we should be back at the— I beg its pardon, but
it has given a lot of trouble — the beneficent Verification-
Process. Of course the function, particularly the com-
pleted fimction, of an idea, is likely to be useful in the
Verification-Process ; indeed, an idea, even an idea's
function, would seem more than merely useful, actually
indispensable in an experiment. But this would come
to meaning that while truth is what sets us examin-
ing whether it is true, utility is what comes out as the
result of that inquiry : truth would have started the
Verification-Process, and utility have completed it.
This seems clear, as clear almost as Professor James's
way of putting the thing — in fact, amazingly like it ;
so true is it that it is difficult for cold criticism to
improve upon the expression of a great thought, since
expression and thought are apt to bubble up together
in the master-mind.
Utility would have completed the Verification-
Process started by truth. We seem to have arrived
at the conclusion that a useful idea is an idea which
we try to verify.
But when the Pragmatist decides to accept the ideas
(let us say) of free-will and of a pluralistic universe
because, like Professor James, he thinks them useful,
can that Pragmatist be correctly described as ** starting
4
6o
Vital Lies
What is Truth ?
61
the Verification-Process'*! I should have thought
that he was stopping it off, as much as the possessor
of a doubtful pearl who forbears from stamping on it
in his desire, shall we say in Pragmatistic phrase to
get its " cash-value." ^
III
The Assimilation op Truth
*' PragmcUism,'' says Professor James, "asks the
usual question.**
I hope to have shown in my introductory chapters
that there are two Pragmatisms and two Questions,
the difference between the two Pragmatisms— namely,
Mr Peirce's and Professor James's— consisting exactly
in the different question which each is really asking,
and the different answer, also, which each is furnish-
ing. But in the comedy of errors of Will-to-BeUeve
philosophy, the two Pragmatisms run in and out hke
twins of similar aspect but different sex and character ;
they dance yas seals in rapid alternation— is that the
boy or the girl ? is there a boy and a girl ?— disappear-
ing just as we think we know one apart ; nay, occa-
sionally and even pretty often, they furnish the
^^ » W. James, " Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 443 ;
" What is its cash value In terms of particular experience ? "
bewildering spectacle of a whirhng metamorphosis
where both are present only to seem one.
" Pragmatism asks its usual question." Quick,
snatch at the question and see which Pragmatism.
" Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete
difference will its being true make in anyone's O/Ctual
life?** Which Pragmatism is this? The Will-to-
Beheve, of course ; for note the expression, " any one*8
actual life.** But it is not every " concrete difference,"
or even abstract difference, in the hfe of somebody,
since it is in the somebody's thought ? Is not a
chemical experiment in the chemist's life, and its
upshot even more so, speUing as it does the success or
defeat of a supposition ? Need this quotation mean
anything beyond the rule that a difference in opinion
must mean a difference in the facts about which that
opinion is held and a difference in the facts due to this
difference? This is Peircean Pragmatism, pure and
simple. And note the next sentence : " How will the
truth be realized ? ** Could anything be more thinly
intellectual, more disterested, nay, disembodied than
that?
" What experiences will be different from those which
would obtain if the belief were false ? ** Experiences —
why, of course, intellectual experiences, or experi-
ences looked upon from the intellectual standpoint ;
every experiment is such an experience, and every
scientific investigation, from Abbot Mendel sowing
62
Vital Lies
his peas to Signer Boni digging up the Roman Forum,
means nothing save the watching for differences and
resemblances in experience. Moreover, the summing
up of the sentence makes our certainty only more cer-
tain. " What, in short, is the trutVs cash-value in
experiential terms ? " This is pure Peircean Pragma-
tism — in fact, perhaps purer than Peirce's Peircean
Pragmatism, since that word " cash- value " is merely
a more appeaUng way of saying equivalent ; for a
theory can be doled out to us not in the abstract
promissory cheque but in so many httle facts, which,
like sovereigns or shilUngs, we can turn round, and
spin, and test, and count in easily managed heaps of
four or five, and each of which can itself, like the
sovereigns or shiUings, have its own " cash- value."
There is absolutely no reason why cash-value in ex-
periential terms should suggest any valuing of ideas
for what amounts of pleasure or profit or safety or
edification there may attach to them.
And now comes the last sentence : " True ideas are
those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and
verify. False ideas are those that we cannot"
Let us seek for the cash-value of these words by
trying what other words they will exchange for.
" VaUdate," " Corroborate " ; so far we have mere
augmentations of " verify." Now, to " verify " means
(I am quoting Samuel Johnson) to " justify against
a charge of falsehood ; to confirm ; to prove true."
What is Truth?
63
In fact, this new statement means nothing more re-
condite than that true ideas are those which, with the
reinforcing appHed by " corroborate " and perhaps
by " validate," we can prove true. A true thing is
one which has been found to be true. It seems a
little thin, and undoubtedly old-fashioned ; yet, why
should we expect that an adjective made to designate
one particular quaUty should be translatable into
another adjective made to designate another quahty ?
Near, that which is not far ; far, that which is not
near ; true, that which is not false.
" Pragm<jtism . . . sees the answer : ' True ideas are
those that we can validate, corroborate, and verify,^ " —
verify, prove to be true. And a very good answer,
surely !
But in my analysis of this definition of truth there
is a word which I have purposely left out. The word
— and it comes first, overwhelmed by the succeeding
wave of " proving to be true " — that word is " assimi-
late." This is an addition to the statement that a
true idea is what we can prove (and double prove :
** vaUdate," and triple prove : " corroborate ") true.
" Assimilate " (I again refer to Johnson) has in English
two meanings : first, ** to bring to a Ukeness or re-
semblance " ; and second, " to turn to its own nature
by digestion." Neither of these two meanings brings
" assimilate " under the heading of " proving true."
Hence, as I have just remarked, the statement that
64
Vital Lies
" true ideas are those which can be proved true,"
is being added to by the information that true ideas
are those which can be assimilated either in the sense
(a) of being brought to a hkeness or resemblance, or
(6) of being turned to its own nature by digestion.
Indeed, it seems a pity that, in sunmiing up of the
pragmatistic answer. Professor James should not have
isolated and insisted upon this addition to the usual
and tautological answer to " What is truth ? " Now
it remains to find out in which of these two Johnsonian
senses, or in what other sense, unsuspected by the
eighteenth century, Professor James intends his reader
to understand that word " assimilate."
While hunting for a quotation which may settle
this question, my own mind sets to idling round
that word " assimilate." And, as I cannot get any
forwarder by thinking in what way assimilation is a
test of truth, I go on to the negative side of the matter.
I quite agree with Professor James that false ideas
cannot be vahdated, corroborated, and verified— in
other words, that false ideas cannot be proved true.
But assimilated— can a false idea not be assimilated ?
I have spent my Ufe under the impression (subject to
correction or the Verification-Process, of course) that
a large part of the world's business, ever since the
beginning, had been the assimilation, in both the
Johnsonian meanings, of ideas that were subsequently
neither vahdated nor verified, although I am sorry
What is Truth?
65
to find they were often corroborated on account of
a practical cash-value. Joshua must have assimi-
lated a wrong idea about the sun before he fell to
stopping it, and this wrong idea seems to have been
corroborated both by the Jews of his immediate
entourage and by the theologians salaried for teaching
Bible miracles. Indeed, the thorough assimilation of
that particular astronomic fallacy is proved by GaUleo's
imprisonment for having said that it was a fallacy.
The cash-value of that particular astronomical idea
was in this case dissimilar to GaUleo and to his judges.
IV
Practical Guidance
" True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate,
corroborate, and verify. ^^ We must hold on to this
word " assimilate," since it evidently contains the
addition made by the Pragmatism of Professor James
and Mr Schiller not merely to the Peircean Pragma-
tism which made our ideas clear, but to the old irre-
fragable, tautological answer : " True ideas are those
that we can . . . validate, corroborate, and verify " —
or, in less philosophical Enghsh, " true ideas are those
which can be proved to be true."
Let us therefore try to discover in what " assimila-
66
Vital Lies
tion " consists, and with what a true idea must assimi-
late in order to be true.
Unluckily for this inquiry, that word " assimilate "
has been withdrawn from circulation ; I cannot find
it again in Professor James's text, and am obliged to
himt about for some other expression which may
determine its cash-value, if not in experience, at all
events in intention. The nearest approach I can find
is " to agree " ; " our ideas agree with reality.''^ Here
is what Professor James tells us about such agreement
(** Pragmatism," page 212) : "To' agree ' in the widest
sense with a reality can only mean to be guided either
straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to he put
into such working touch with it as to handle either it or
something connected with it better than if we disagreed.
Better either intellectually or practically ! . . . To copy
a reality is, indeed, one very important way of agreeing
with it, but it is far from being essential. The essential
thing is the process of being guided. Any ideal that
helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually y
with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn't
entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact,
and adapts our life to the reality's whole setting, will
agree sufificiently to meet the requirement. It unll hold
true of thai reality. ''
** Assimilation," the assimilation which was one of
the tests of whether an idea is true, is presumably the
same thing as this " agreement urith reality,'' which is
,/
-.^
What is Truth?
67
itself not merely a " copying of reality " but such
" guidance " as " adapts our life to the reality's whole
setting." "Life" is a large order. Shall we try
narrowing down the possible meaning to that part of
our Ufe which wants to know about this reaUty ?
Evidently not ; for that portion of our Hfe is already
provided for under Professor James's rubric of " hand-
ling reality intellectually," a rubric to which he adds and
opposes (by means of the conjunction " or ") another
rubric of handhng reality " practically " ; moreover,
it has been dismissed as " one very important way of
agreeing with it [reality], but it is far from being essential."
" The essential thing," he continues, " is . . . being
guided." Guided, guided indeed "intellectually," he
tells us — rather unnecessarily, since the intellectual
guidance could guide us only to the " copying of reality "
he has already dealt with before we came to the guidance
at all. But also guide us " practically "...
"Practically." For if the intellectual guidance
leading to " correct copying of reality " can obviously
not be what the guided-to copying of reality is itself
not allowed to be — namely, the " essential thing "
why, then we are thrown back upon the other half of
the " guiding "—that, namely, which, duly separated
off by its " or," is " practical."
But, just as we were obUged to ask what was " assimi-
lation " ; what was " agreement with reality " ; and what
— whether the whole or only one side — ^was meant by
68
Vital Lies
" our lifej" which was to be " adapted to reality " ; so
we have now to ask ourselves, what is " practical " ?
(All these inquiries in order to refine and enrich that
poor, tautological " truth is what can be proved true^
Surely no one can complain that Pragmatism dis-
likes taking intellectual trouble !)
Once more, however, Professor James has not thought
it necessary — why should he ? — to define exactly what
he means by " practical." He uses that word again
and again, but leaves the meaning to his reader's
intelhgence. My own — perhaps inadequate to the
task — suggests that " practical " may possibly mean
** expedient." For a few pages further on (" Prag-
matism," page 222), I find, itaUcized in the text :
" ' The truCy' to put it very hrieflyj is only the expedient
in the way of our thinking, just as ' the right ' is only
the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in
almost any fashion ; and expedient in the long run and
on the whole, of course ; for what meets expediently all
the experience in sight won't necessarily meet all farther
experiences equally satisfactorily.^*
Quite true. The reahty of the universe will eventu-
ally turn and rend an idea which is ** expedient " only
in a hmited sense — " expedient " for one person, time,
class, or purpose — and hurl the rest of humanity, or
abstraction humanity, most violently back upon the
" true " (shall we say the real true ?) and the univer-
■ally and eternally expedient. Despite the contrary
What is Truth?
69
teachings of M. Bergson, who holds that practicaUty
is at loggerheads with a knowledge of reahties, I agree
with Professor James that such ultimate reprisals of
reaUty are exceedingly probable. But for the time
being, the " expedient " — the really, eventually, com-
pletely expedient — remains quite as difficult of defini-
tion as the true. Indeed, perhaps more so ; for we
can hope to prove that a few ideas are true ; whereas
doctors may differ as to what is expedient in the long
run and on the whole, particularly with the encyclo-
paedic addition, " in almost any fashion."
Let us, therefore, in our search for the pragmatistic
addition to " Truth is what can be proved true," turn
back to an earUer part of Professor James's volume,
that volume called " Pragmatism, a New Name for
Some Old Ways of Thinking," and dedicated to the
memory of John Stuart Mill, " from whom I [that is,
Professor Jamesl first learned the pragmatic openness
of mind, and whom my [Professor James's] fancy likes
to picture as our leader — were he alive to-day " :
" Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually
supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate
with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself
to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite,
assignable reasons. Surely you must admit this, that
if there were no good for life in true ideas, or if the know-
ledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false
ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that
70
Vital Lies
What is Truth?
71
truth is divine and predotis, and its pursuit a duiy, could
never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world
like thatf our duty would he to shun truth, rather.^*
{" Pragmatism," p. 75.)
Vital Benefits
That dedication has returned to my mind in connec-
tion with this quotation, because in it and similar
passages. Pragmatism puts forward its claim to be
" an old way of thinking," and gets consecrated as
utiKtarianism, sub invocatione J. S. Mill.
That truth is " good," meaning thereby " useful,"
for life, is indeed the utihtarian explanation for the
" current notion that truth is divine and precious, and
its pursuit a duty," because being " good for life,"
life of the individual or hfe of the race, is the utilitarian
explanation of all habitual standards of value ; and
more than ever since utihtarianism has been fortified
by the evolutional conception that the survival of the
races best fitted for life imphes the survival of the
habits and standards most useful to Ufe. From the
utilitarian standpoint, " good for life " explains why
we cultivate righteousness, beauty, health, wealth,
and, in the present case, why we cultivate truth.
Utihtarianism goes further : just as it explains in
?
\
what manner righteousness, health, wealth (and
attempts to explain, as yet not very successfully,
how beauty) are each and all " good for life," so it
explains also the particular service which truth renders
that master-exploiter. Life. Truth is good or useful
for hfe, because hfe impUes a constant adaptation to
really existing circumstances, and because such adapta-
tion is more easy and complete when the people who
do the adapting believe those circumstances to be
what they are rather than what they are not ; to
have a true opinion of anything is to save that overdue
knowledge of reahty which spells successively surprise,
waste of effort, failurej ruin. That is why truth is
useful for hfe, and, being useful, ought to be culti-
vated. So far we have learned that it is good for
life to beheve in opinions which are true. We still
require to learn what information is added by Professor
James's variation on this utihtarian formula, namely,
" tru^ is the name of whatever proves itself to he good
in the way of helief, and good too, for definite, assignable
reasons."
This formula requires interpretation, for it can be
interpreted in two ways, according to the reference
of the words " good in the way of behef." " Good
in the way of beUef " may mean either : first, that
the content, of a given opinion, its subject matter,
is such that behef in that opinion will have good
results ; or, second, that the content, the subject
{
mAV.nrV3S'''^"-rr:r:f»'^
72
Vital Lies
What is Truth?
matter of an opinion, is in a peculiar relation, called
truth, to something independent of that opinion,
namely, reahty ; and that being in this truthful relation
to reahty, the holding of this opinion is hkely to have
good results. The difference between the two inter-
pretations depends upon whether the good results
are expected from the content of the opinion, or from
the fact of the opinion being correct ; and the difference
can be tested practically by asking. Why ? Thus : it is
good to beheve that water tends to regain its level.
Why is it good to beheve this ? Because the behef
is true, and holding it will enable us to deal better
with water than holding the contrary behef, which
is false. On the other hand ; it is good to beheve
that wicked people will be punished in hell. Why is it
good to beheve this ? Because it makes people less
inchned to be wicked.
Again : it was good for primitive man to beheve in
the regularity of the seasons, and of day and night.
Why was it good ? Because, being true, this behef
enabled savages to take precautions against wild
beasts and famine and cold, and consequently to
remain ahve. But : it was good for primitive man
to beheve that dead ancestors required to be fed and
honoured. Why was it good? Because it induced
savages to bring up their offspring instead of letting
it perish. But although it was useful to hold that
opinion, the opinion was false.
k
}
\
i
/
73
Now it seems evident that Professor James cannot
mean that " true " can ever be the name for an
opinion which is false. We must therefore discard
our first interpretation, the interpretation according
to which the utihty to be inquired about resides in
the content of the opinion, independent of its truth,
and fall back upon the second interpretation, according
to which the utihty in question resides not in the
content of the opinion as such, but in the fact that
this content happens to be true. " True," therefore,
we may paraphrase, is the name for " whatever is
good in the way of behef because it is true." This is
irrefutable, but somewhat jejune. Professor James's
contribution to the subject must therefore he in the
qualifying half -sentence, " and good, too, for definite,
assignable reasons. ^^
Well, to say that an opinion is true because it is
good for us on account of its truth, is a definite reason,
but scarcely an assignable one. There must be more
than that in Professor James's thought ; and so, of
course, there is. Continuing that page, I come to this :
'* // there he any life that it is really better we should
lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would
help iw to lead that life, then it would be really better for
U8 to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it
incidentally clashed with other greater vital benefits. ^^
Can this be the " definite, assignable " reason for
finding an opinion good to beheve and therefore true ?
4
74
Vital Lies
What is Truth?
75
Be of good cheer ; Pragmatism is sprung from utili-
tarianism, and is fertile in useful opinions. " Unless,''
writes Professor James, carefully reiterating his own
statement, " unless the belief incidentally clashes with
some other vital benefit.'' "Now [it is always Pro-
fessor James speaking], in real life what vital benefits
is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with ?
What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other
beliefs when these prove incompatible with the first
ones ? "
Let me try and foUow : Here is a vitally beneficial
belief. It clashes with another vitally beneficial
behef, and is therefore proved not to be good in the
way of behef— that is, not to be true. Was the vitally
beneficial behef not truly vitaUy beneficial ? Or was
it only less vitaUy beneficial than the one which it
clashed with ? Or-this is a different supposition-
was the vitaUy beneficial behef which succumbed
in the clashing reaUy as vitally beneficial as the
vitaUy beneficial behef which got the better in
the clashing, and did it succumb in the clashing, be-
cause the other vitaUy beneficial opinion, although
not more vitaUy beneficial than itself, was also true ?
But then, being true would no longer be the same
as being vitaUy beneficial. Ah, here I have it.
The vitaUy beneficial behef is true when it does
not clash with another vitaUy beneficial behef.
With another behef which is vitaUy beneficial because
V
it is true? No— and yes, for Professor James has
told us that useful because it is true and true
because it is useful have the same meaning. In the
present case, however, not so much vitaUy beneficial
because it is true, but rather true because it is vitaUy
beneficial.
Anyhow, if a vitaUy beneficial behef does not clash
with another vitaUy beneficial behef, either or both
(for we must not make too sure) of the vitaUy beneficial
behefs may be true. That is simple enough. But
suppose two vitaUy beneficial behefs do clash ; which
is the reaUy vitaUy beneficial one of the two ? The
one, evidently, which gets the better in the clashing.
But why wiU it get the better in the clashing ? Because
— why because it is true, and the true is the vitaUy
beneficial.
But how about that matter of ancestor cultus ? I
mean the behef (typical of many sinular ones, of
which more anon) that deceased parents and guardians
required to be fed and honoured by survivors, a behef
most beneficial to our remote forebears and ourselves
by inducing primeval persons to cumber themselves
with otherwise embarrassing offspring ? ShaU we say
that as that opinion was not true it could not have
been beneficial (and set out to prove that it was never
held or never useful) ? Or shaU we say that if it was
beneficial it was, in so far . . .
76
Vital Lies
What is Truth ?
n
VI
At this juncture it happened very luckily that my
Pragmatist friend came in to teU me that reflection
had convinced him that I was akeady a Pragmatist
without knowing it. So, feeling my mind giving
way under this logical strain, I read the quotations to
him and begged him to settle the difficulty. " With
the greatest pleasure in the world," he answered, and
began as foUows : " You see," he said, " ancestor
worship perhaps never reaUy existed at aU— I can
lend you a very revolutionary book against it by an
Austrian Jew. Oh, no, pray don't think that I mean
to deny the existence of ancestor worship. Not in
the least-only it may aU be a mistake. One advan-
age of Pragmatism, as you will soon find out, is that
as the young Florentine Papini said (and Professor
James thought it so first-rate that he repeated it
verbatim). Pragmatism is a corridor with rooms off
It where people are saying prayers to different gods
and wntmg treatises against one another. But to
ret^ to your difficulty. Supposing ancestor worship
to have existed (and perhaps it hasn't), you may be
sure that it was beneficial only so long as it was held
and it was held so long as did not clash with some
other beneficial behef. Not the most virulent Anti-
Pragmatist could pretend that a behef can be beneficial
I
if it is not held ! The whole matter (goes on my
Pragmatist) pivots upon the fact of not clashing with
other truths : so long as a truth — a beneficial truth,
of course — does not clash with other truths — that is
to say with other beneficial, that is to say true, behefs
—why, so long it is a truth. And when it has been
knocked into cocked hats by another truth in the
clash we have been speaking of— why, it ceases to be
altogether and therefore ceases to be a truth. Can
something be true if it has ceased to be ? "
Anti-Pragmatist. Do you mean (a sudden Ught
dawning in my mind) that a dead truth becomes a
living falsehood or error ?
Pragmatist. Good ! as Polonius says, that
" Uving falsehood or error " is good, though it is
perhaps pushing things a httle far; that belief of
ancestor cultus, for instance, is evidently false. No
one can say that it isn't as dead as a door-nail, and
quite useless in modern fife.
Anti-Pragmatist. But then— do truths die ?
Pragmatist. Let me answer you in the words of
Professor James : " the greatest enemy of any one of
our truths may he the rest of our truths. "^^
But my Pragmatist, having gone away, as usual
exulting, after contributing thus much to my under-
standing of the very pragmatistic answer to " What is
truth ? ", returned the very next minute and added
this further information.
fl
ii
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Vital Lies
Pragmatist. Don't imagine from what I have been
saying that pragmatistic truths are always each other's
enemies. Quite the contrary ; one of the chief merits
of Pragmatism (all that matter of Signor Papini's
corridor ought to prove it) is precisely that it saves
such a lot of all that destructive clashing of truths.
Truths which would hit up against each other in any
other philosophical system, all live quite peaceably
side by side in Pragmatism, because of its great principle
of 80-far-forth.
Anti-Pragmatist. " So-far-forth ? "
Pragmatist. What, hadn't you grasped the
principle of " true-in-so-far-forth " ? It's Hke rules
of precedence; it decides what place a truth is to
occupy, and, as in precedence, there's room for all
truths— only it's better than ordinary rules of pre-
cedence, because the place need not necessarily be
the same, so that the truth which goes in first to
dinner in your house, may sit below the salt in mine,
and all quite peaceably and poHtely. You really
must study that principle of "so-far-forth." You
will find it discussed in James's "Pragmatism" at
page 73 and thereabouts, for it comes in, of course,
pretty often. I can scarcely imagine how you can
have missed it. And once you've grasped it thoroughly,
you will have the key to all your difficulties about
truths clashing and being enemies and so forth; in
fact—for that's what's so splendid about Pragmatism—
i
What is Truth?
79
you will probably recognize that you have thought
it all along yourself, hke Milton's Fallen Angels, who
recognized that they would all have invented artillery
as soon as Satan had once invented it. Meanwhile,
I will go home and mark you some passages in another
book of Professor James's — just to see the importance
of it all " for knowledge," as he says. I don't see the
book here upon your table — so I'll send it. It's the
" Varieties of Religious Experience."
Anti-Pragmatist (a Ught dawning). Oh, is that
perhaps the " experience " in which we must seek for
the " cash-value " of truth ?
While waiting for my friend the Pragmatist to bring
his copy of the " Varieties of Rehgious Experience, " I
set to turning over the pages of Professor James's
" Pragmatism," wondering whether I should be able
to recover, among all those definitions of truth, a
sentence which was knocking at the door of my
memory, of which that title, " Rehgious Experience,'*
had somehow evoked a vague shadow. And by the
greatest good luck, there it stood on the very page
(namely 73) at which I opened the book :
" Now pragmatism, devoted though she be to facts,
has no such materiahstic bias. . . . If theological
ideas prove to hive a value for concrete life, they will he
true for Pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so
much.'''*
As if foreseeing their immense value, not merely
1 ;
Pi
8o
Vital Lies
in helping me to define truth, but in guiding me among
the Varieties of ReUgious Experience, Professor James
has actually underlined that sentence himself.
VII
Sub Invocatione
John Stuart Mill
Improving upon my Pragmatist's advice, I decided
to put off my inquiry into the principle of true-in-so-
far- forth until I could find it illLstrated in that other
book of Professor James's, a book, I should add, which
I had read with very great admiration and enjoyment
a few years back, but before I had turned my thoughts
to Pragmatism.
While waiting, therefore, for his copy of the "Varieties
of Religious Experience," and for whatever notes he
might obligingly add to it, I refreshed my somewhat
wearied mind by going to the window and gazing
blankly at the starry heavens, whose direct influence
upon births, deaths, and marriages, had been one
of those truths which, after practically guiding man-
kind for many centuries, had eventually gone under
in a clash, with what we at present call the truths
of astronomy.
While thus idling I found my mind haunted, as
What is Truth?
8i
one is haunted by musical phrases, by that dedica-
tion of " Pragmatism " to John Stuart Mill, who had
taught Professor James the " Pragmatic openness of
mind.^^
John Stuart Mill (thus idled my thoughts) was
not only a utihtarian, but also an economist.
And, being an economist, I can imagine him applying
to the question : " Why do we prize truth," the
economic formula of supply and demand, in the
following fashion :
The fact that we prize truth and try to tempt people
to pursue it, shows that the demand for it is greater
than the supply. We may risk the supposition that
the soil in which it can be cultivated is Hmited, and
that the cultivation involves some hardship ; also
that there are perhaps special causes of chmate and so
forth which threaten its successful production. At
all events, it would seem certain, judging by the high
estimation it is held in, that truth is not one of those
commodities like plain sewing or Hterature (see
John Stuart Mill's " PoHtical Economy ") which are
notoriously produced by any person without special
endowment or training, and therefore glut the
market.
Nor is this all— it is the Economist speaking in my
imagination — the insufficient supply of truth com-
pared with the great demand for it, makes it extremely
probable that, like other necessaries of human existence
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Vital Lies
wliich are similarly economically situated, truth will
tend to be adulterated and fraudulently imitated.
Adulteration consists in adding to a certain amount
a greater or lesser amount of fallacy or of nonsense.
Falsification, I take it, is the apphcation to given
opinions of labels or names such as lead people to
suppose that they are identical with other opinions
which have passed muster or enjoy a good reputation.
VIII
True-in-so-far-forth
When, however, the next morning had come without
the promised volume making its appearance, I yielded
to curiosity on the subject of true-in-so-far-forth, and
turned to the pages of " Pragmatism " which had been
pointed out to me, and in which I did indeed, as my
Pragmatist had assured me, find some very interest-
ing elucidations of Professor James's phrase : " A
value for concrete life^
It was in the midst of a long discussion of the Absolute
of Transcendental Ideahsm, a form of philosophy which
Professor James seems to find almost as dull as I am
ashamed to confess I do myself. The sentence my
eye fell upon was a perfect instance of that concihating
rule of precedence which my Pragmatist had said I
should find in the principle of true-in-so-far-forth.
What is Truth?
83
For this is what I read about that (to Professor James
and my humble self) singularly uninviting. Absolute :
*' First I called it rmtjestic, and said it yielded religious
comfort to a cUiss of minds . . , In so far . . .'' (Here
was the principle !) " In so far as it affords such com-
fort . , . ii performs a concrete function. As a good
Pragmatist, I myself ought to call the Absolute ' true in so
far forth ' then ; and I unhesitatingly now do so. But
what does true-in-so-far-forth mean in this case ? What
do believers in the Absolute mean by saying that their
belief affords them comfort ? They mean that since, in
the Absolute, finite evil is ' overruled ' already, we may,
therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it
were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust
its outcome, and without sin, dismiss our fear and drop
the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they
mean that we hive a right ever and anon to take a moral
holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that
its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of
our business.''^
Let us grasp this much : Professor James is investi-
gating the concrete function of this idea of the Absolute.
But instead of beginning his inquiry with the sentence :
" What do beUevers in the Absolute mean by saying
that their behef affords them comfort ? " he leads off
with " WTiat does ' true-in-so-far-forth ' mean in this
case ? " thus identifying truth once more, not only
with concrete function, but with " giving comfort,"
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Vital Lies
so that there remains the result : An idea which gives
comfort is true so-far-forth.
" My belief in the Absolute" goes on Professor James,
" based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of
my other beliefs. Grant that it may be true in giving
me a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I conceive it —
arut let me speak now confidentially j as it were, and merely
in my own private person — it clashes with other truths
of mine whose benefits I hate to give up on its account.
It happens to be associated with a kind of logic of which
I am the enemy , I find that it entangles me in meta-
physical paradoxes that are inacceptable, etc., etc. Bui
as I have enough trouble in life already without adding
these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally give up
the Absolute. If I could restrict my notion of the Absolute
to its bare holiday giving value, it wouldnH clash with
my beliefs. But we cannot easily thus restrict our hypo-
thesis. They carry supernumerary features, and these it
is that dash so."
Now let me see whether I follow :
The other truth which restricted the so-far-forth
truth of the Absolute of Transcendental Idealism is
not merely negative in action, it does not merely con-
sist in other " clashing truths." That truth which
80-far-forths the truth of the Absolute, partly consists
in the greater attractiveness and practical advantage
of a particular scheme of the Universe which Pro-
fessor James commends to oui favourable notice
What is Truth ?
8S
(" exactly what you require," " Pragmatism," p. 301)
in all of his pragmatistic volumes. ^
Let me see again whether I have really grasped the
meaning of that Umiting quahfication " so-far-forth."
A thing being true-so-far-forth means that it may be
untrue in some particular different from the one under
examination, for instance : " Your statement that
last Wednesday was a rainy day is true in so far forth
as there was rain from eight to twelve ; the same
statement was untrue in so far forth that on that
same Wednesday there was no rain from twelve to
eight." Let us apply this analogy to Professor James's
explanation of that Umiting so-far-forth which he put
to the truth of the idea of the Absolute of Transcen-
dental Ideahsm. As the truth of Wednesday having
been a rainy day was restricted by the truth of no
* Professor James reverts to this so-far-forth truth of the
" melioristic " or " pluralistic " view compared with that of the
Absolute" on p. 295.
" May not religious optimism be too idyllic ? Mv^t all be saved ?
Is no price to be paid in the vx)rk of salvation ? Is the last word
sweet ? Is all ' yes, yes ' in the Universe ? Doesn't the fact of
' No ' stand at the very core of life, etc. ? I cannot speak officially
as a Pragmatist here ; all I can say is that my own Pragmatism
offers no objection to my taking sides with this more moralistic
view, and giving up the claim of total reconciliation. The possi-
bility of this is involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat
pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end, it is our faith and
not our logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of
any pretended logic to veto my own faith. I find myself willing
to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, with-
out therefore backing out and crying ' no play.' "
86
Vital Lies
rain having fallen after twelve o'clock, so the truth
of the "Absolute" is restricted (" so-far-forthed ")
by the *' benefits '* which Professor James derives
from certain other truths of an incompatible
nature.
Here, therefore, we have two "truths," of which
one restricts (so-far-forths) and the other is restricted
(so-far-forthed). The so-far-forthing truth is the one
labelled Pluralistic Universe, the so-far-forthed is the
one labelled the Absolute ; both are true in-so-far-
forth they bring comfort ; only the greater truths
bring, of course, more comfort. But the matter of
80-far-forth by no means ends here. One of these
truths, the so-far-forthed truth labelled " the Absolute "
inspires reliance upon . . . well, on the " Absolute," ;
the other truth, the so-far-forthing, labelled " Plural-
istic Universe " inspires reliance on oneself. Now
observe how this compUcates the nice question of the
precedence (as the fact of intermarriage with royalty
does that of earls and dukes) of these undoubted but
by no means equal Truths ! . . . For whereas leUance
on something else — on the already existing perfection
of the Absolute, or the Justice of Predestination — ^has
a tendency to leave people where it finds them, or
even to make them fatalistic, dull, and generally
indifferent and quiescent, in fact, to impair their
faculties ; confidence in themselves has been known
to have marvellous effects in curing hysteria, jumping
What is Truth?
87
f
■
crevasses, doing unlikely things of all sorts — in short,
self-reUance, we all know, is half the battle.
Nay, more — for the truth labelled Pluralistic Uni-
verse is surely only the truer for not being restricted
or so-far-forthed by the useful, comforting, and so-far-
iorth-true doctrine of orthodox Christianity ; nay,
more — there are cases where reliance on something
not oneself actually tends to reaUze its own contents ;
at least in a negative manner : thus our belief in
Christ's power of saving souls is absolutely indis-
pensable (according to Catholics) to His willingness
to save us if we do our part. I fear somehow that
this further argument in favour of the greater truths
of " a Pluralistic Universe " will not commend it
either to those who believe in Catholicism or those
who beUeve in a Pluralistic Universe. So I drop it
and revert to my simple summing up, which is this :
If we add to the " truth in so far forth as comfort "
the " truth in so far forth a^ concrete functions of making
people self-reliant and venturesome and strenuous " we
shall find that, although " The Absolute " is true, it is
a good deal, even a great deal, less true in so-far-forth
than a PluraHstic Universe.
I wondered whether I had now at last mastered the
principle of true-in-so-far-forth sufficiently to use it as
a guide in the volume on the " Varieties of Religious
Experiences," which my friend the Pragmatist had
meanwhile sent me. So, to make assurance doubly
88
Vital Lies
What is Truth?
89
sure, I turned back to page 73 of " Pragmatism " and
copied out, for my own future guidance, the following
paragraph : —
"Now, Pragmatism, devoted though she he to facts,
his no such m^Uerialistic bias as ordinary empiricism
labours under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever
to the realising of abstractions, so long as you get about
among particulars with their aid and they actually carry
you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those
which our minds and our experiences work out together,
she has no a priori prejudices against theology. If
theological ideas prove to have a value for con-
crete hfe, they will be true for Pragmatism, in the
sense of being good for so much. For how much
more they are true will depend upon their relations
to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged."
Almost as if foreseeing their inmiense value in
steering me among the "Varieties of Religious Ex-
periences," Professor James has actually taken the
trouble to underUne the first two sentences of the
above passage.
IX
A httle while back, my last day in Rome, I went
for a few minutes into St Peter's. It was hung with
crimson and smelt (that wonderful vast atmosphere
such that no crowds can exhaust or defile it!)
#
7
ii
deUcious of incense. There had been some papal
ceremony ; people in hired veils and dress-clothes
were going out, women, also, wearing the Franciscan
Third Order's smock and cape in curious combination
with modern hats. And before the Chapel of the
Sacrament a whole flock of little girls in white veils
knelt down, looking hke a swarm of pigeons, and
reminding one at the same time of an Eastern market-
place. A woman, with a child at her breast, kissed
the toe of the bronze St Peter, and another child
whom she dragged along roared to be lifted up and
kiss it too. The curtains of the apse and cupola let
in an apricot-coloured light, and all the gold shone,
and the inscriptions twice or thrice a man's height
gUttered forth — gigantic advertisements of the unique
quahty of the rehgion of which Jesus was sole inventor
and Peter (" Tu es Petrus et super banc petram," etc.)
sole certified retail agent. As I read these words
the Pragmatistic formula came to my mind, *' True
in so far forth."
True, certainly, if we measure truth by yards of
masonry, tons of marble, and hundredweights of
gilding, and all the human feeling and wiUing required
to move and spend it all. The building of such a
church is surely a fine pragmatistic object-lesson !
But looking round St Peter's one realizes also how
totally such considerations have nothing to do with
Truth. Or more properly, one reahzes that the true
90
Vital Lies
fact for which St Peter's and all built on it C et super
hanc sedificabo," etc.) stands, is this: that where
mistakes, fallacies, and Ues are more comforting and
profitable than truth as such, St Peter's— material or
spiritual— will be built, ornamented, and guarded,
and truth be left outside to starve, when it is
not hurried out of existence by more active methods,
as that day when, from the great church's steps, you
might have seen the flame-reddened smoke of Bruno's
faggots. " So-far-forth-true."
But here, I suppose, the so-far-forthness stops, and
the truths of Cathohcism would come into clashing
coUision with other truths— good not only "for so
much," but '* good for so much more " in the eyes of
Professor James.
\
*\
CHAPTER III
THE TRUTHS OF MYSTICISM
I DO not feel sure who had put that marker into
the " Varieties of ReHgious Experience," and
it is of httle consequence whether it was myself
or my Pragmatist, or, indeed, whether such a Pragmatist
ever existed outside my fancy. Suffice it that the
sUp was inserted at page 413, and that on it was written
" Professor James's examination of the message of
mysticism from the point of view of " true-in-so-far-
forth."
The examination in question, which I should like to
analyse from the point of view of true-without any
so-far-forth, begins with the following remarks : —
" To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing
hut suggestion and . . . hypnotic states^ on an intel-
lectual basis of superstition^ and a corporeal one of de-
generation and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological
conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the
cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for
knowledge of the cor^sdousness which they induce.''''
91
92
Vital Lies
The value for knowledge, writes Professor James.
And so far as knowledge is concerned, I agree with
him : a pathological condition may or might be such
as to favour the acquisition of certain sorts of facts,
or the analysis of certain others, or the recognition,
let us say the divination, of certain relations, of what
we call laws. The question depends upon what meaning
we attach to the word pathological. It is quite conceiv-
able that the hyperacuity of a given faculty may co-
incide with a bad complexion of body, or even, by
defrauding more ordinary functions, lead to bodily
deterioration and death ; and may we go so far as to
imagine (psychiatry of the Lombroso-Mobius, etc., kind
has surely developed our imagination in such matters !)
that hyperacuity of a given sort may produce some
particular organic poison, or, if you prefer, may re-
quire as a lubricant, so to speak, some secretion which
poisons the rest of the organism. In all these cases
we may say that the hyperacuity is pathological,
meaning thereby that it causes or coincides with
conditions destructive to health, individual or social.
And nevertheless that hyperacuity may attain to
knowledge which is genuine and valuable, indeed
valuable enough to make the cultivation of such
pathological conditions not only legitimate but praise-
worthy. Lombroso has told us that genitis (and even
such modest approximation thereto as he found
registered in the biographical dictionaries whence he
■ra^^
The Truths of Mystic ism 93
culled so many " facts ") is conditioned by epileptic
and even less pleasing habits of body ; yet Lombroso
himself did not deny that such epilepsy-bom genius
(let us say his own) sees through many millstones
impenetrable to less " pathological " analysis and
inference. We may therefore agree with Professor
James that the pathological stigmata of mystics do
not necessarily mihtate against their possession of
modes of knowing incompatible with normal life ;
Professor James's comparison of the mystic's condi-
tion with that produced by alcohol or ether making
the notion quite intelligible and workaday.
This being granted, we will continue where we left
off:
" To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states we
must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk,
but inquire into their fruits for . . . {for life.'')
Exactly ! I exclaimed to myself. And perhaps I
was excusable in overlooking or misreading that last
word, and thinking that we were still talking of the
value for knowledge which, in the earUer part of his
sentence. Professor James had so judiciously dis-
entangled from the possible physiological morbidness
of those mystical states. Excusable or not, I con-
tinued the chapter, pencil in hand, still bent upon that
value for knowledge which, as Professor James had
remarked in the previous sentence, could not be judged
by mere reference to the pathological state of saintly
1 1
! n
94
Vital Lies
it
<t
persons. Such being the case, I was rather surprised
at coming immediately upon several solid pages of
quotations from the chief Spanish mystics ; and still
more surprised at Professor James's summing up of
the evidence they contained. " Resolution to amend,"
Unworidliness " — such were some of his headings-
Patience," ** Gentleness," "Enthusiasm," "Hero-
ism," " Indomitable spirit and energy," " The develop-
ment of oneself into a most powerful practical human
machine " (he was talking of Ignatius Loyola).
Very fine things, no doubt ; but why should the
enumeration of such moral quaUties shed more Ught
upon the value for knowledge of those mystical con-
ditions," than the "superficial medical talk" about
their possible pathological origin, which Professor
James had dismissed as irrelevant? In another
minute, however, I found him returning to that ques-
tion. " Mystical conditions,'' he writes (page 415) in
the sentence immediately following a quotation from
Saint Teresa, " mystical conditions may, therefore,
render the soul more energetic in the lines which their
irispiration favours. But this could be reckoned an
advantage only in case the inspiration were a true one."
(I snatch up my pencil and underline. Here we are
at the value for knowledge !)
"... were a true one."
" // the inspiration u^ere erroneous, the energy uxmld
he aU the more mistaken and misbegotten " —
K
The Truths of Mysticism 95
" be all the more mistaken ..."
My mind is, so to speak (and to speak in the language
of mystical conditions) transfixed and irradiated by
that little phrase " all the more.'^ . . , AU the more
. . . but if it would, under certain circumstances
{i.e. the erroneousness of the inspiration), be more mis-
taken and misbegotten, then this mystically increased
energy must already have been mistaken and mis-
begotten, even if the inspiration had not been
erroneous : how can anything be more mistaken —
let alone misbegotten — than if it were not mistaken
at all ? All the more ? And with that word comes
the remembrance of an axiom in a famous treatise
of logic. " It is easy," said Alice, " to have more than
nothing." It must similarly be easy to be " all the more
mistaken " than not to be mistaken at all.
In the present case it is / who have been mistaken,
mistaken in supposing that Professor James would
waste his time in enouncing anything so crassly obvi-
ous as that the value for knowledge cf the energy
devoted to its service depended upon whether, so to
speak, the knowledge was knowledge. Still less
would he have thought it necessary to repeat the
truism over again. No ; this is not a valuation of
mystical conditions for knowledge ; or rather it is,
but it is something more. In the Ught of the prag-
matistic definition of truth, I may add, that being
something more than a valuation for knowledge, it
»
96
Vital Lies
is all the more a valuation for knowledge. That
mysterious " all the more " has, as I remarked, pierced
through my thick truistic thought and flooded it with
comprehension : Professor James is reckoning up all
the advantages resulting from that " increment "
spiritual energy produced by mystical conditions,
upon whatever Unes (and not merely hues of know-
ledge) which the inspiration favours. What makes
me certain is the therefore with which he begins the
passage. "Mystical conditions may therefore"—
follow that therefore backwards and what do we
find? Why, the catalogue (with abundant samples
pinned into it) of all the various virtues and practical
excellences which the mystics attributed to their
mystical conditions. " The lines which their inspiration
favours " are therefore (and on account of a therefore)
no mere hnes, of knowledge, but lines also, indeed
chiefly, of moral improvement and disinterested, yet
sagacious, conduct. And, so far from enouncing a
truism, here is Professor James deciding, and repeat-
ing his decision, that if the inspiration alleged in the
mystical condition happened to be erroneous, all
these virtues, all this practical sagacity, all this spiritual
energy would be mistaken and misbegotten.
The Truths of Mysticism 97
II
I beUeve that in Witch Trials a distinction was
sometimes found necessary between an inspiraiion
true in the sense of truly coming from its alleged author,
and an inspiration tru£ in the sense of conveying true
information, and Professor James's dealings with
mediums have perhaps resulted in similar distinctions
between the truth of the facts purporting to he conveyed
by spirits and the truth of those facts having been con-
veyed by spirits. But as we are dealing with revelations
which are supposed to come, not from devils or the
low-class deceased, but from the Well Head of Truth
and from Veracity personified, I think we may identify
truth of the information conveyed by mystix^ inspiration,
with truth about the origin of that inspiration. And we
thus get the following paraphrase of Professor James's
sentence : Whatever value, for other concerns than
knowledge, there may be in the increment to spiritual
energy induced by mystical conditions, their value for
knowledge depends entirely upon whether the in-
spiration alleged by those mystical states, and the
items communicated by that inspiration, happen or
not to be what the mystic alleges that they are. And,
as regards the energy, which the mystical conditions
have increased, why, that increase of energy will be
of value to knowledge, in case the inspiration be true.
98
Vital Lies
ii
and of detriment to knowledge in case the inspiration
be false. But Professor James does not seem satisfied
with this theory that if the inspiration is erroneous,
the increase of spiritual energy put to its service
cannot be " reckoned an advantage " to knowledge.
"If the inspiration were erroneous," he concludes
vehemently, " the energy would be aU the more mis-
taken and misbegotten." More mistaken? More
misbegotten ? Is that not saying a Httle too much ?
Ill
Well, Pragmatists are specialists in Truth ; and of
course speciahsts are apt to become puristic and over-
exclusive. Not being a Pragmatist I should not
have made so sure that aU those virtues inventorized
above, and a great many more with which this volume
deals, must have been "mistaken and misbegotten"
(let alone " all the more mistaken and misbegotten ")
in the event of their inspiration being not " true "
at all, but thoroughly " mistaken."
The inspiration both of Moses (if there was a Moses !)
and of Jesus, are to my thinking quite " mistaken,"
yet I would never venture to assert that the Com-
mandments and the Sermon on the Mount were " mis-
begotten." Or indeed otherwise than incalculably
valuable for human edification and conduct. History
The Truths of Mysticism 99
strikes me as showing many examples of fortunate
fallacies and beneficent misapprehensions, and I
have noticed more than once in private fife the en-
nobUng influence of friends and teachers whose nobihty
was mostly of our own imagining. Indeed this very
volume will show that I am inchned to accept that
view of modem anthropological sociology (especially
Mr Ernest Crawley's), according to which the most
foolish and basest mythological muddles of our savage
forefathers helped not only to suggest and sanction
enduring moral rules, but also to evolve and estabhsh
habitual deference to unscrutinized moral standards.
Nay more, as my Reader will learn still further on,
I think there is a partial scientific truth in Monsieur
Georges Sorel's theory, that sweeping moral results
are best obtained by myths, just because it is a myth's
essence never to come true. But then, you see, I do
not hold with Professor James's and Mr Schiller's
Pragmatism that we can test truth by asking our-
selves "what it would be better to beheve." And
among the truths which, because they are true, I am
willing to look in the face despite their being perhaps
not very good to beheve or at least to proclaim, is
precisely this truth : that fallacies, mistakes, nay
falsehoods, may sometimes have remarkably hfe-
preserving and life-improving effects, in other words
that there exists, alongside of vital truths^ a by no
means neghgible category of vital lies.
lOO
Vital Lies
So much for me. On the contrary a Pragmatist is,
as already hinted, a speciaKst in truth, and his rather
professional exclusivism has no use either for Plato's
Noble ^ Ues or for Ibsen's Vital ones. The question
which busies him is. What is Truth ? Quite consonantly
with this, and after those difficult sentences making
the value of mystical energy dependent upon the
truth of mystical inspiration, we immediately find
Professor James concluding his paragraph :
" And 80 we stand once more before that problem of
truth which confronted us at the end of the lectures on
saintliness. You will remember that we turned to
mysticism jyrecisely to get some light on truth.^^
Having thus put aside, a Httle too rigorously (/
think), those fruits for life whose value depends upon
their not being " misbegotten " by ** mistaken "
inspiration. Professor James is at last attacking the
question of the " value for knowledge of the conscious-
ness which they (i.e., the mystical states) produce."
IV
" In spite of this repudiation of articulate self-
description," begins this inquiry (" Varieties of Rehgious
Experience," p. 415), *' mystical states in general assert
a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is possible to give
» Republic III. Jowett translates " Royal."
«
The Truths of Mysticism l oi
the outcome of the majority of them in terms that
point in definite philosophical directions. One of
these directions is optimism, and the other is monism."
Now let me grasp that : the value to knowledge, of
mystical states, would therefore be due to these mystical
states adding certain items to what we hitherto know,
to wit the facts (or facts leading to the facts) that the
universe is all for the best (optimism), or that the universe,
perhaps with its Creator thrown in, is one (monism).
Now we have indeed got at last to value for knowledge !
And ten minutes, even of careful attention, are surely
not too much to bestow upon facts, and the mystical
conditions requisite for the ascertaining of such facts,
which point so distinctly to the real regime of the
universe.
We will therefore continue, where we left off,
with Professor James's summing up of the testimony
of Mystics on this question :
" We pass into mystical states from out of an ordinary
consciousness as from a smallness into a vastness, arid
at the same time as from an unrest to a rest."
How does this testify to the truth of optimism and
monism ? Why, very simply : the mystic's everyday
consciousness is exchanged for an unusual one ; the
unusual one being distinguished by vastness ; now,
as the everyday consciousness is notoriously con-
cerned with only a small portion of the universe, the
unusual (that is the mystical) consciousness being
,
I02
Vital Lies
different, is probably concerned with something
different ; and being further differentiated by a sense
of vastness, it is possible that this vastness may be
due to the passage from concern with a small part
of the universe to concern with a larger part of the
universe ; for is not everyday consciousness itself
Uable to a similar sense of change from small to large
when we pass, let us say, from a small room to a less
small, from a narrow view to a wider ? If, therefore,
the mystic in his unusual state feels that he is in the
presence of something larger than in his everyday
state, may he not suppose (what in fact the mystic
does suppose) that there must be some larger reaUty
to account for this change ? Therefore (i.e., by this
chain of reasoning) the mystic has come in contact
with some unusual and larger reahty. And since it is
larger, why should it not be largest ? But this is only
a part of the matter : the mystic, we are told in Pro-
fessor James's other half sentence, experiences not
only a change from the small to the large, but at the
same time from " an unrest to a rest." The conclusion
is that if the sense of largeness (as compared to previous
smallness) has been produced in the mystic by his
passage from the presence of a small (everyday) portion
of the universe to the presence of a larger part of the
universe, and moreover if this larger is not only larger,
but largest, not only different from the everyday
fragment, but different inasmuch as the whole, why,
The Truths of Mysticism 103
then, this transition from the part to the whole (since
we have admitted it to be the whole) is a transition
from the unsatisfactory milieu productive of unrest
to the satisfactory milieu productive of rest ; in other
words the larger, which is the same as the largest,
which is the same as the whole, which is the same as
the universe, is satisfactory to the mystic, which is the
same as good : hence, concludes the mystic (or Pro-
fessor James arguing for the mystic, or more precisely
still your humble servant going pedestrially through the
steps of argument which Professor James has bounded
across) ; hence, says the mystic, or the " mystic
consciousness " sunmied up in Professor James's
passage, the testimony of mystic states is in favour of
the universe being one, and of that one being good,
in other words in favour of monism and optimism.
So far, so good. Or rather not good enough (I
mean of course not the One, the Universe, but the
mystical testimony in favour of the Oneness and the
Goodness). For this testimony has consisted mainly of
inferences, and of inferences which there is no reason
why anyone except the mystic should either make or
accept : first, the inference that because the mystical
state is unusual it must put us into the presence of
items which are unattainable in the everyday, v^ual
consciousness ; second, that these unusual and un-
attainable items, being accompanied by a sense of a
certain change of magnitude, must be items concerning
\.
I04
Vital Lies
a LARGER portion of the whole ; thirdly, that this
sense of something larger must refer to the universe ;
fourthly, that this sense of something hrger must
be a sense of something largest ; fifthly, not merely
largest to the possibihties of feehng of the particular
mystic [as for instance a given volume of sound or a
given extent of view may be the largest to the possi-
bilities of feehng of an everyday person], but largest
in se and as such, in other words the Whole. While,
on the other hand, we have a sixth inference that the
accompanying sense of restfulness after unrest refers
to this passage from a smaller to a larger which is the
largest, which is the whole ; and a seventh inference, that
the sense of restfulness to the mystic must coincide
with the absolute goodness in se (as distinguished
from comparative goodness to the mystic's appre-
hension) of this Whole. Here we have seven inferences,
or rather seven propositions which, while they may
be true, may also be false ; seven inferences without
one single reason for their acceptance except the
mystic's opinion and the opinion of the persons who
agree with his opinion. It is as if the mystic repeated
seven times over : "I know that the universe is Oney
and I know that the One is satisfactory." All that
such reiteration would tell us is that the mystic is
convinced of this fact, or really, more strictly, that
the mystic is stating it. So far as our knowledge goes,
we have learned only the mystic's view of the oneness
^
r
h
\\ ;
I
The Truths of Mysticism 105
and the satisfactoriness ; we have learned not about
the universe, but about the mystic's (and the mystic's
sponsors' and abettors') chain of seven inferences.
But this is of course not all : the mystical evidence
(otherwise it would not be evidence) contains facts,
facts which have been connected by those numerous
acts of inference. So far these facts are : first, that
the mystic feels himself in an unusual state of conscious-
ness ; second, that the mystic feels a change " as
from a smallness into a vastness " ; and third, " as
from an unrest to a rest." Having made a note
of these, let us proceed with Professor James's enumera-
tion of the other items with which mystical states can
enrich knowledge. I will return back, so as to show the
progression from one fact or order of facts, to another :
" We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary
consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a
smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from
an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying
states. [This is a repetition of the contents of the
previous sentence, with the addition of reconciliation
which is a cause of rest.] " They appeal to the yes-
function more than to the no-function in us. In them
the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes
the account. Their very denial of every adjective you
may propose as applicable to the uUitnate truth . . .
though it seems on the surface to be a no-function — is
a denial made on behalf of a deeper yes."
h
io6
Vital Lies
I was on the point of summing up the value to know-
ledge of the foregoing statements ; but Professor
James has done it himself a few pages (p. 425) later :
" The fact is," he writes, " that the mystical feeling
of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific
intellectual contents whatever of its own. It is capable
of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished
by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided
only they can find a place in their framework for its
peculiar emotional mood."
Therefore, whatever truth may be found in the
works of the mystics, it would (according to the
foregoing quotation) either be independent of their
mysticism and imported from elsewhere, or else
this mystical truth (for Professor James uses this ex-
pression, p. 420) would have to be of a kind different
from what truth usually is, inasmuch as it would
be truth " with no specific intellectual contents what-
ever of its own." What this other kind of truth
may be, we are told pretty expUcitly in the following
passage : —
" In mystical literature such self -contradictory phrases
as ' dazzling obscurity,^ ' whispering silence,'' * teeming
desert ' are continually met vnth. They prove that not
conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element
^%
•1^
\j
f\
V^
The Truths of Mysticism 107
through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.
Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than
musical compositions." And having quoted a passage
from H. P. Blavatsky's " Voice of the Silence," he em-
phasizes the above remark by the addition (p. 421) ;
" These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you
receive them, probably stir chords within you which
music and language touch in common. Music gives us
ontological messages which non-musical criticism is
unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolish-
ness in minding them."
But not music only, as is shown in a further pas-
sage of great subtlety and beauty (p. 383) : " Most
of us can remember the strangely moving power of
passages in certain poems read when we were young —
irrational doorways as they were, through which the
mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life,
stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words
have now, perhaps, become mere poUshed surfaces to
us ; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant
only in proportion as they fetch these vagus vistas of
a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting,
yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to
the eternal inner message of the arts according as we
have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility."
A,
f
1 08
Vital Lies
VI
The existence of a life continuous with our own.''
I am the last person in the world to deny that Art
(and Music is here the typical art) does deal with a
life continuous with our own, since my explanation ^
of Art's importance for the individual and the race
is precisely that it satisfies our craving for continuing
our own sense of living beyond the limits of our own life.
All the satisfactions which Art does not merely share
with other branches of experience, pleasures of sen-
suous stimulation, of logical and purposive fitness, or
of fulfilled expectation, aU the kinds of satisfaction' by
which Art distinguishes itself from what is not Art,
arise (according to my school of psychological esthetics)
precisely from Man's imaginatively projecting hfe hke
his own beyond his own hfe's Kmits, and thereby
attaining a wider, more vivid, and more harmonious
sense of hving than is habituaUy afforded by his prac-
tical deaUngs with reahty. Art, therefore, deals in a
sense far more Uteral than Professor James perhaps
ever thought of, with a life continuous with our own.
But Art deals with such a life continuous with our own
beyond our own Hfe's real hmits ; makes it, makes an
enlargement, a continuity, a harmony of our hfe;
' Cf. " Beauty and Ugliness," by Vernon Lee and C. Anstruther
Inomson. John Lane, 1912.
\
((
The Truths of Mysticism 109
makes it, observe, not discovers it. And makes it be-
cause we want it. But Art does not bring us a message
from or about something already existing independent
of ourselves : nay, just because no such world of life
continu^ous with our own sends us a message, a testi-
mony, of its independent existence, does Art set about
making one to satisfy the heart's desire. Religion
works for that satisfaction ; but in so far ReUgion is
two-thirds unconscious Art ; nor would Religion have
survived its earUest stages of utiUtarian magic based
on blunders, had not it enlisted Art in its service, and,
what is more, done Art's own duty : making us, by
personification of moral standards and metaphysical
postulates, a universe to suit the heart's desire.
But there is a difference between ReHgion and Art :
namely, that Art never pretends the desired world
of continuous and more perfect life to have an in-
dependent existence, to be anjrthing except a fabric of
human making ; whereas, on the contrary, the very
first postulate of every creed has precisely been and is
that ReHgion does not itself make, fabricate, invent
anything, but merely brings us tidings of the already
and independently existing. Art has never laid
claim to any message save from the soul of man to
the soul of man, the message that man's own powers
have answered to man's own needs and wishes. But
ReUgion has asserted its message to be what Pro-
fessor James calls " ontological." Art says to man :
11
I
I lO
Vital Lies
ll
" Behold this structure ; it is fair, and it is I that
made it for thy service and joy " But ReUgion takes
into its mouth the words of knowledge, sajdng : " Re-
cognise and beUeve : this image is faithful ; it is
important, because it tells of something which exists
for and in itself ; and fair or foul, useless or serviceable,
I have done nothing but make it such that thy eye
could see it : the original exists, I have not tampered
with it." Or briefly : " This is a message, and the
message is irwe."
True. Here we are back again at " What is Truth ? "
And, returning to the great Arch-Pragmatist James
(as distinguished from the humble Proto-Pragmatist
Peirce !) and his discussion of the value for knowledge
of mystical conditions, we had better forget none of
the Pragmatistic tests— such as " True-in-so-far-forth,'"'
and " what would be better to beUeve."
VII
Going on to page 427 of the " Varieties of ReUgious
Experience," we come to the following passage, of which
I desire my reader to appreciate not only the contents,
but the original and suggestive connection, or rather
disconnection, of the sentences. " Once more then,
I repeat that non-mystics are under no obligation to
acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority
\p
The Truths of Mysticism 1 1 1
conferred on them by their intrinsic nature. Yet, I
repeat once more, the existence of mystical states abso-
lutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states
to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may
believe. As a rule, mystical states merely add a super-
sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of
consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of
love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which
facts already objectively before us fall into new expres-
siveness and make a new connection with our active life.
They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny any-
thing that our senses have immediately seized.^ It is
the rationalistic critic who plays the part of denier in the
controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there
never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not
truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more
enveloping point of view. It must always remain an
open question whether mystical states may not possibly
be such superior points of view, windows through which
the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive
world.'^
First, let me see whether I understand the initial
statement that although " non-mystics are under no
obhgation to acknowledge in mystical states a superior
authority, etc. It means that although people who
* They sometimes add subjective audita bt visa to the facts, but
as these are usually interpreted as transmundane, they oblige no
alteration in the facts of sense.
\i-
I 12
Vital Lies
The Truths of Mysticism 1 1 3
do not believe in the testimony of mystical states
need not (to which one might add a substratum of
cannot) be made to beUeve in them, yet those who do
believe in this testimony need not (and cannot) be
argued out of that beUef. This looks hke a drawn
battle, an insoluble controversy, an agreement to
disagree to all Eternity ; and to disagree, moreover,
about an ontological message and its truth or false-
hood—that is to say, about a statement concerning not
the preference of the parties involved for monism and
optimism or the contrary, or the comparative suitable-
ness thereof to their requirements, but concerning
the question whether the universe is or is not monisti-
caUy or optimistically arranged, altogether independent
of what any mystic's or non-mystic's preferences would
like it to be.
And first, let me make a note of Professor James's
statement (vide supra) that " as a rule mystical states "
..." do not contradict these facts " {i.e. facts ah-eady
objectively before us), or " deny anything that our
senses have immediately seized "—which taUies with
the statement two sentences back that "as a rule
mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to
the ordinary outward data of consciousness.'' In this
manner, therefore, mystical states neither contradict
facts of ordinary consciousness nor add other facts to
them. Facts remain just where and how they were :
it is the interpretation of these facts which changes :
(** mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning")
Mystical states, neither contradicting nor adding to
facts, are therefore reduced, or promoted, to being
** points of view " — and the quotation ends : " It
must always remain an open question whether mystiml
states may not possibly he such superior points of view"
Therefore not " points of view " only, but " points of
view " which may be " superior" Now, what is a
** superior " point of view ? The next half sentence
tells us " it is a window through which the mind looks
out upon a more extensive and inclusive world." This
possible superiority of the mystic point of view may
therefore consist in its telling us more facts (a more
extensive world). But this seems scarcely compatible
with the previous remark about the facts objectively
before us not being contradicted nor added to. And
indeed we have been told that " as a rule mystical
states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary
outward data of consciousness." The superiority of
the mystical " point of view " over the non-mystical
" point of view " must, therefore, be sought not so
much in that extensiveness of what is seen, but rather
in the inclusiveness with which Professor James couples
and quaUfies it in that phrase " through which the
mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive
world." The superiority of the mystic point of view
is, therefore, largely (if not solely) a question of its
greater inclusiveness — by which is meant, I suppose,
I ■■
\d
114
Vital Lies
a greater correlation or co-ordination in the various
seen details, one item being included or enclosed in the
other. This would be consonant with other portions
of the quoted text, Uke " mystical states merely add a
supersensuous meaning '''* and the indisputable taut-
ology that " there can never he a state of facts to
which new meanings may not truthfully he added,
provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of
view." In this way, a man who has ascended to a
fourteenth-floor window may take in the fact that
what seen from the ground floor seemed a number of
small, isolated ponds, are in reahty the continuous
meanders of a single river. Can this illustration be
correct ? My mind misgives me ; for Professor
James has told us that mystic testimony does not
usually alter already existing objective facts, still
less contradict them, whereas our ascent to the top of
the tower has not only added a fact to the objectively
existing one, but even replaced an apparent objective
fact (namely, the ponds) by a really objective fact,
to wit, the existence of a winding river, the reality of
whose continuous meanders can be tested by boating
along them.
But, after all, is not optimism or monism also the
postulation of a fact ? Does it not mean that the
Universe is one, or that it is all for the hest ? And is
not the oneness of the Universe, supposing it tp exist,
or the aU-for-the-hestness of the Universe, an objective
The Truths of Mysticism 115
fact ; if it is a fact at all ? For an objective fact surely
means a fact about something which is not its own
perception or inference ; and if monism or optimism
was only a subjective fact, that would mean that the
fact under consideration was the existence of an
opinion, perception, or inference that the Universe is
one, or is all for the hest, but not the existence of such a
universe : if monism or optisism was only a subjective
fact, some one who, so to speak, went to see what the
universe was really Hke (as we might go and look into
that river-pond question), or somebody who made
plans involving that view of the Universe (hke our
plan of boating down the meandering river, which we
could not execute if the river turned out to be a lot
of ponds), such a person might find that the only fact
in the whole business was not objective but subjective,
to wit, that some other person had thought that the
Universe was monistically or optimistically arranged.
Of course the pecuUarity of this whole business is that
only the mystics think that they have been to look
how the Universe is arranged, and that the non-
mystics cannot therefore give an equally definite report,
and are, as Professor James remarks, reduced to the
poor position of merely denying that the mystics
have gone anywhere, except, perhaps, out of their
right mind. This being the case, " non-mystics are
under no obligation to acknowledge in mystic states a
superior authority conferred on them hy their intrinsic
J
ii6
Vital Lies
nature,'' and Professor James adds : " Yet, I repeat
it, the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows
the pretension of non-mystical states to he the sole and
ultimate dictators of what we may believe."
VIII
{Parenthetical)
" Superficial Medical Talk " (" Varieties," p. 413)
You must not think that Professor James came to
that conclusion on any mere abstract, still less, a
jmori grounds. Finding, as we have seen, that the
mere examination of mystical writings did not decide
whether the Mystics had really travelled beyond the
Flaming Bounds of Time and Space, he collected the
evidence of other persons who had seemingly made
a similar excursion, not on the Seraph-wings of con-
templation, but, as the other poet says, charioted by
Bacchus and his pards. " The sway of alcohol over
mankind," writes Professor James (" Varieties," p. 387),
" is unquestionably due to the power to stimulate the
mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed
to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober
hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no ;
drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. ... It
brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the
The Truths of Mysticism 117
radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with
truth." The Bacchus charioting the psychological
experimenter was, however, usually not the classic God
of the Grape, but (as befits the modem and scientific
character of Pragmatism) Dionysus Anaestheticus,
he whose votive fumes hang about surgeries and who
may be heard babble from the dentist's dreaded chair.
Thus, the chapter I have just quoted contains several
accounts of what various persons (including the late
J. A. Symonds) experienced under chloroform and
other anaesthetics ; also a long and very serious
notice of a rare American book entitled " The
Anaesthetic-Eevelation and the Gist of Philosophy."
But Professor James had not been satisfied with
information obtained at second-hand ; he submitted
his own self to poisoning by nitrous oxide gas,
and pubUshed a verbatim record of his utterances
when under its Bacchic influence. As the book in
which I am studying the Truths of Mysticism contains
no quotation from this document, I have copied out
the following sample from Professor James's earUer
volume, entitled the Will-to- Believe (p. 296), the better
to appreciate his statement that " Drunkenness brings
its votary from the chill periphery of things to their
radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with
truth."
"What's mistake but a kind of take? What's
nausea but a kind of ausea? Sober, drunk,— 'unk,
ii8
Vital Lies
astonislimeiit. Everything can become the subject of
criticism. How criticize without something to criticize ?
Agreement — Disagreement ! Emotion — motion ! ! !
. . . Reconciliation of opposite — sober, drunk, all the
game !
" Good and evil reconciled in a laugh ! It escapes,
it escapes ! But — what escapes, what escapes ?
Emphasis, Emphasis — there must be some emphasis in
order for there to be a phasis . . . Incoherent, coherent
. . . same. And it fades ! And it's infinite ! And
it's infinite ! If it wasn't going, why should you hold
on to it ? . . . Extreme, extreme, extreme ! Within
the extensity that ' extreme ' contains, is contained the
* extreme ' of intensity.
" Something, and other than that thing ! . . . There
is a reconciliation. Reconciliation — econciliation !
By God, how that hurts ! By God, how it doesn't
hurt ! Reconciliation of two extremes. By George,
nothing but othing ! That sounds like nonsense, but
it is pure onsense ! Thought deeper than Speech —
Medical School ; divinity school. School ! School !
Oh my God, oh God, oh God ! "
The chief addition brought by this document to
the knowledge of mystic states would probably con-
sist in the resemblance of these utterances to a column
of Roget's well-named " Thesaurus of English Words
and Phrases," and at the same time to the exercises
of a person fumbling for rhjrmes, alhterations, sym-
1
mm
c
I
The Truths of Mysticism 119
metrical syllables and such-like material of poetical
expression. If the reader thereof had contracted (per-
haps in the study of Professor James' own Principles
of Psychology) a taste for " superficial medical talk "
—this sceptic might add that something of the sort
would probably result if the speech-centres were ex-
cited to the exclusion of everything else. And if the
sceptic had passed beyond that stage to the experi-
ments and hypotheses of some of Professor James's
more recent psychological successors, he might add
that these particular utterances, and the analogous
ones (abundantly represented in the " Varieties of
ReUgious Experience") from bona- fide mystics both
rehgious and poetical, would furnish valuable evidence
for the theory (held, for instance, by the school of
Titchener) that our intellectual operations employ a
framework, so to speak, of motor-images or, if you
prefer, of senses of activity and its modalities. Such
a reader would point out that these inner activities
are extraordinarily well represented in this quotation :
there is connecting, weighing, comparing, finding equiva-
lents, rejecting, accepting (particularly that yes-saying
which Professor James finds characteristic of mysti-
cism) with all the prepositions and conjunctions, the
ands, huts, in-order-thafs, must he's, etc., which are
their grammatical signs ; there is a constant naming
of the acts we are most conscious of in think-
ing : thoughts are reconciled, they are held on to,
I20
Vital Lies
they are pursued, and (alas, how characteristic !)
thoughts escape. Even in that treasury just referred
to, of " English Words and Phrases — Classified and
Arranged so as to Facihtate the Expression of Ideas —
And assist in — Literary Composition " it would be
impossible to find a more varied collection of every-
thing necessary for the above purposes.
But the sceptic, being only a sceptic, would note
that in all this exhibition of the necessaries and access-
ories of thinking, there is an important omission :
there is not anything thought about. Indeed, the
sceptic might apply to this interesting pageful one
of its own happiest phrases : "By George, nothing
but othing ! "
That is the sceptic's hopeless attitude. It is not
Professor James's. This is what he says about these
same experiences under nitrous oxide gas : " Looking
back on my own experiences, they all converge towards
a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some
metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is in-
variably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the
world, whose contradictions and conflict make all our
difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity."
Yes ; but what was meUed ? The troubles, not
what caused them ; the contradictions and conflicts
felt by the speaker, not the reaUties which had set
them up. Even as when anaesthetics are used for less
metaphysico-mystic purposes, the pain is aboKshed,
H
i/.
The Truths of Mysti cism 121
melted away ; but the surgeon's knife and the Umb are
not melted away; nor the relations between knife
and hmb which we sum up by saying that the one has
cut o£E the other ; so also in this case the displeasure
caused by the universe and its arrangements is blotted
out from that particular soul, but the universe itself
goes on wagging just the same. Moreover, even in
this drugged consciousness the universe with its
" opposite " are not thought of as " melted into
unity " ; the universe, whether as present experience
or stored-up images, is simply not thought of at all.
The thinker, the subject, is absorbed in his own feel-
ings ; the thought-of, the non-ego, the object, has
ceased to trouble because it has ceased to be present
in consciousness, banished from that " radiant core "
to what Professor James has called (in his fine descrip-
tion of the drunken man's mental condition) " the
chill periphery of things." We have been shown the
scheme of a comphcated drama of thinking and feel-
ing : entries and exits, the gestures, the facial ex-
pression and tones of voice, all the stage business of
escaping and holding on, of separation and reconciha-
tion, the agony and the blessed rehef (" By God, how
that hurts ! by God, how it doesn't hurt ! ") ; but we
have not been shown the dramatis personce nor the
scenery and properties. The how is all there, but the
what is missing ; the what on which depends the why ;
the what and the why which, however, infinitesimally
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Vital Lies
i
scrappy, may have some " value for krowledge.'*
Of course the sceptic may also say that in this case
the what (which governs the why) the sample of the
universe whereof all this is a message (like the leaf
in the dove's bill) is simply a well-known chemical
substance called nitrous oxide gas, taken in com-
bination with certain less-known substances called
the brain, the nerves, and the viscera. In this sense
the ancBSthetic revelation would indeed be a revelation
from the core, that is to say, from the drugged
person's — how shall I call it ? — inside. And, with the
casual candour of Pragmatism, Professor James seems,
in another part of the same volume (p. 512) himself to
entertain this view. " Let me then propose as an
hypothesis," he says, " that whatever it may be on its
farther side, the ' more ' with which in religious experi-
ence we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the
sub-conscious continuation of our conscious life." Now
if the Conscious is what is usually called the Mind ;
and if the sub-conscious is what we know or guess
to exist below (or behind) the Mind, then the sub-
conscious, so far as it is not merely a vaguer, an
unfocussed part of consciousness, can only be what
such Psychology as Professor James (with its elaborate
brain and nerve anatomy, its cerebral localization, and
its theory of the visceral and vaso-motor nature of
emotion) teaches us to recognize below or behind mind,
namely, the Body, or, more correctly, the bodily pro-
i%
<\
The Truths of Mysticism 123
cesses. And this view (whether right or wrong) is
logically borne out by the fact that Professor James
has studied the mystic consciousness in direct con-
nection (as we have just seen) with fumes and drams
which have been poured, not metaphorically into the
soul, but hterally, and by the respiratory and ali-
mentary channels, into the body. On this definition
of the sub-conscious — and Professor James of the
famous " Lange- James " hypothesis cannot logically
have any other — the invasion (as he is going to call it)
from the suh-conscioits would mean that by alcohohc,
anaesthetic or " organic " poisoning of the organs
which normally keep our microcosm connected with
the macrocosm, the mind would be emptied of its
normal supply of sensations and memories and left
open to invasions of facts usually hidden or merged
into vagueness, or even (as Siegmund Freud supposes in
the case of dreams) suppressed in the lucid condition.
The periphery of things, as Professor James calls it,
would no longer shed its chilly influence on the mystic
any more than on the drunkard ; his consciousness
would be flooded with the knowledge of his own bodily
self ; and, if he had the use of speech, he would talk, as
Professor James did under nitrous oxide gas, solely of
the doings and feelings of that if not exactly radiant, at
all events highly irradiating, and all-else obliterating
core.
The above is the only way in which I can understand
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Vital Lies
The Truths of Mysticism 125
Professor James introduction into this examination
of religious mysticism, of the " invasions of the sub-
conscious " ; and what is more significant, of the
action of alcohoUc and anaesthetic intoxication, which
can be mentioned in this connection only if we suppose
(what the "superficial medical talk" does suppose)
that some equivalent auto-intoxication may be pro-
duced by the bad habit of body and the bad bodily
habits of hona-fide rehgious mystics.
But whether or not Professor James intended to
convey this connection of the sub-conscious with the
bodily substratum so abnormally treated in all these
cases ; one thing is clear and undeniable : Professor
James considers the sub-conscious wheresoever it re-
sideth, as part and parcel of ourselves. For, as you
will see in the following quotation, he speaks of its
" invasions " as " taking on an objective appearance,''
which these invasions would not require to do if they
were invasions from outside us, and in so far already
objective and provided with an objective appearance.
" Starting thus," he continues on that page, 512),
" with a recognized psychological fact {i.e. the existence
of a ' sub-conscious continuation of our conscious life ')
we seem to preserve a contact with ' science ' which the
ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theo-
logian's contention that the religious man is moved by
an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the
peculiarities of invasions from the sub-conscious region
4
i
to take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the
subject an external control. In the religious life the
control is felt as ' higher ' ; but since in our own
hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our
hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union
with the power beyond us is a sense of something,
not merely apparent, but literally true."
In other words, the theologian who thinks that the
Mystical Kevelation comes from God (" an External
Power ") and Professor James who thinks that the
Mystical Revelation comes from our own subconscious-
ness ^ plus occasional anaesthesia or auto-intoxication,
are both thinking the same thing. And that same
thing which one is referring to the " Chill periphery "
and the other to the " Radiant core "—that same thing
is " not only apparently but literally true."
But as for us sceptics we can only stand more or less
1 Perhaps it may enlighten this question of sub-consciousness if
I quote from a recent article {Revue Philosophique, May 1910) by
Monsieur P. Janet, one of the men who first and most completely
studied the phenomena summed up under that misleading name :
"L'examen de certaine troubles mentaux nous a permis de
montrer que certains phenomenes psychologiques etaient
parfaitement reels, mais que les sujets, par suite d'un trouble
dans la formation de leur perception personnelle, ne rattachaient
pas cesf aits k leur personnaUte, n'en prenaient pas conscience. J'ai
appele ces faits des phenomenes sub-conscients. Beacoup de philo-
sophes en ont tir6 cette conclusion bizarre, qu'il y avail au-
dessom de la conscience normale un rnonde mysf&ieux et tout puissant
de pensdes profondes, et ils font jouer A ces pensies latentes un rdle
merveiUeux:' I think that Professor James is one of these " philo-
sophers."
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126
Vital Lies
respectfully aside ; and, if we are wise, meditate over
another most pregnant verse of the nitrous-oxide
message :
" Something, and other than that thing . . .
There is a reconcihation.
Reconcihation.
E-concihation . . .
Reconcihation of Two Extremes."
IX
Fortunately Professor James's book is written not
only for mystics, but also for non-mystics. And as
these, he has told us, " are under no obhgation to
acknowledge in mystic states a superior authority
conferred on them by their intrinsic nature," he has
discussed mystical states and their value for knowledge
from the point of view of mere pragmation, of that
philosophy which was invented by Mr Ch. S. Peirce
with the sole and express object of helping us ** to
make our ideas clear."
So let us ask Professor James to make our ideas
rather clearer than (owing to our sceptical bias) they
were left by the last quotations in the last chapter.
You will remember the reference to the ontological
messages of music and the other arts ? Well, that is
most satisfactorily connected with what Professor
James tells us (page 427) about the mystical states
The Truths of Mysticism 127
giving "excitements, like the emotions of love or
ambition, gifts to our spirits by means of which
facts already objectively before us fall into a new
expressiveness.'
Like the emotion of love ! That likeness has led,
on the part of a whole school of sceptics (amongst
others, that most interesting critic, Dr Leuba) to a
deal of discussion which Professor James, out of
reverence either for ReUgion or for Mrs Grundy, has
passed over in austere but not quite scientific silence.
It is not, therefore, with any such indelicate analogies
to the connection between mystical states and drunken-
ness and anaesthesia that I am going to distress my
Anglo-Saxon readers. We will deal with the com-
parison between mystical excitement and the emotion
of love, not on the plane of any possible common (Lange-
James) bodily origin, but simply on that of their being,
as Professor James calls them both " gifts to our
spirit, by means of which facts already objectively
before us fall into new expressiveness."
And, in order to understand the working of this
obscure and rare gift to the spirit, namely mystical
excitement, and the manner in which it conjures
already existing facts into new expressiveness, I will
examine the similar working of that other excitement
to which Professor James has compared it, the
emotion of love. Behold, I am doing so.
No one will deny that the emotion of love produces
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128
Vital Lies
<
an alteration in one's view of most things. In the
first place, it fills the consciousness with one matter,
which not only extrudes many others from the focus
of attention, but which becomes, by a law repeatedly
formulated by psychologists, the centre of synthesis,
or, in common language, the chief interest to which
everything is referred : everything reminds the lover
of his mistress, the stars are hke her eyes, or they are
looked at by her eyes ; flowers are Uke her breath, or
they may, Hke poor Gretchen's Daisy, bear some
" loves me— loves me not " message about her ; more-
over, places and persons take on a meaning connected
with this love ; even letters of the alphabet or dates
in the almanac becoming consecrate to its sole
service. How much doth calf love gloat over a name,
and how, even to the love of those far older than
calves, the fact of sharing a not uncommon name
with the beloved, may lend grace to every woman
called Mary, or every man called Jones ! The whole
subject has been studied, and more pathologically
than it should be— for there is nothing pathological
whatever about it— under the name of the symbolism
or fetichism of lovers. In this way does the emotion
of love make lovers see many things invisible to those
who do not love, and imagine they see sundry others
which are not there to see at all ; and here we may
employ advantageously an adjective furnished us by
Professor James himself, nay, two adjectives, meaning
The Truths of Mysticism 129
much the same thing (" a more envehping point of
view — a more inclusive world "), and sum up our re-
marks by saying that the person in a state of love-
excitement envelopes all things thinkable in a net of
ideas connected with his passion ; and that, corre-
sponding thereunto, the world perceived and reasoned
about by the lover is a world included in his love, all
the rest being, ipso facto^ excluded. Neither is this
all : that excitement of love consists, very largely,
in cravings, and hence in expectations ; and the lover
becomes not only subtle in foreseeing all chances of
meeting the beloved, but, owing to his attention being
closed to most other things, he is perpetually thrown
into agitated hopes and fears, and not only missing no
slightest reference to his love in other person's con-
versation, but finding such references where there are
none ; nay, as the poets tell us, in the rustle of the
leaves, the babble of the stream, and the mocking
voice of the echo. The whole visible, audible, sensible,
thinkable world has taken on for him a new express-
iveness, that is to say, that the lover finds in it all what
he finds above all in the music made very often by men
who were not thinking of love at all, and invariably
by men who were not thinking of his love, the expression
of his emotion. And here we are, back in the presence
of music and poetry and all art, to whose function, as
Professor James has reminded us, we should be deaf
were we incapable of an interpretative activity which
II
I30
Vital Lies
he points out as the rudimentary form, the simplest
element, of the mystical state. Back also at my
remark that Art never pretends to give us ontological
messages, but merely constructs an imaginary world
wherein we can hve, we and our heart's desire.
We are also back at the consideration of the mystical
states — the better understanding of whose ** gift to our
spirit " Professor James has compared, and thereby
enabled us to compare, with the gift to our spirit due
to the excitement of the emotion of love. And as
regards the gifts to the spirit of this lattei state of
excitement, I think we may wind up that, what-
ever heightening of vitaUty, developing of the soul's
powers of hoping, striving, and enduring, whatever
unintended replenishing and harmonising of our whole
nature the lover's emotion may bring as a gift to the
spirit, the lover's state of emotional excitement will
indeed lead him to see and infer very different things
from those visible and inferable by the man who is
not in love ; but that this emotional excitement of
love will also prevent the lover from seeing and infer-
ring just as many other things which the everyday
individual does happen to see and infer ; in short,
that the lover sees both more correctly and more
incorrectly as a result of his emotion, so that, in the
long run, we are obhged to confirm some of his state <
ments and invahdate others by a comparison with
those of the man who is not in love, and whose spirit
I
The Truths of Mysticism 131
has not, at that moment, received the gifts of inter-
pretation and misinterpretation which emotional ex-
citement and its attendant mono-ideism bring to us.
This would be a case (remembering Professor James's
remark in "Pragmatism") of "one triUh having
no worse enemy than another truth " ; the in-so-far-
forth truth of the man in love having to run the gauntlet
of the (not necessarily in-so-far-forth) truth of the man
rhot in love ; with the frequent curious result that the
truth obtained through a " Gift to the Spirit," to wit,
amorous excitement, might be absolutely worsted in
the encounter.
But what if all Truths, at least all Truths Which-
It-Might-Be-Better-to-BeUeve, should turn out to be
born of Gifts to the Spirit, of Passions and Excitements 1
The base-born truths, bent only on work-a-day drop-
ping into their lawful place, would (like mediae val
commoners and serfs) be shut out from the tournament,
where theological and mystical truths (to which Pro-
fessor James adds truths of patriotism and politics),
would riot undisturbed in the fine fratricidal fight of
peers and seigneurs. Or, rather, even as the Iliad is
the war of gods and goddesses behind their human
heroic children, so the contest between the various
hostile tmths-in-so-far forth would really be the
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132
Vital Lies
battle between various Gifts to the Spiiit, Passions
and Intuitions eternally at loggerheads, and dragging
the Truths by them engendered into the ever-raging,
ever-renewed epic fray. Human Belief would thus
truly be what Pragtnatists speak of with such pride
and pleasure : a risk, an adventure, occasionally as in
the case of that proto-Pragmatist Pascal, admitting
of a most unsporting piece of betting.
Well! Professor James does really countenance
this view, namely, that these various Truths-which-
it-would-be-better-to-beUeve, are engendered by Pas-
sions and not by anything more humdrum and
reasonable. The very word engendered is suppUed by
him. For this is what we read on page 436 of the
" Varieties of Religious Experience " : "I beheve, in
fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field
of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love,
or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of
the wider affairs of hfe in which our passions or our
mystical intuitions fix our beUef beforehand. It finds
arguments for our conviction; for, indeed, it has
to find them. It ampHfies it and defines it, and
lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever
engenders it."
Oh, Galuppi Baldasaaro, this is very sad to find !
I can hardly misconceive you ; it would prove me d«af and
blind ...
But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy
mind • t •
,
I
The Truths of Mysticism 133
For the meaning in this case would surely be that
the Gift to the Spirit in no way secures for its
possessors that under and more inclusive view of facts
of which these gifted people feel so uncommonly
cocksure. For remark that Professor James does
not confine his denial of being reason-engendered to
the state of believing and being convinced, but apphes
that genealogical indictment to the idea believed, the
idea about which one is convinced. He tells us that
reason while incapable of engendering such belief and
conviction, does nevertheless amplify and define it.
Now reason, logical or illogical, can no more amplify
and define the state of believing and being convinced
than you can widen (amplify) or restrict (define) the
state of carrying a load ; just as what can be widened
or restricted is the load itself, so also what can be
amplified or defined is the not beheving or being
convinced, but the idea which is the object of that
belief and that conviction. It is, therefore, the idea
which patriots, politicians, and religious persons believe
in and are convirtced about which, according to Pro-
fessor James, is " hardly ever engendered by logical
reason." Hence the patriotic, poHtical, or religious
ideas, are presumably engendered by our Passions,
the plain name which Professor James here gives to
what he elsewhere calls Gifts to our Spirit. This does,
indeed, appear to be Professor James's view of the
case ; he writes quite unmistakeably about the '' wider
134
Vital Lies
affairs of life in which our passions or our mystical
intuitions fix our belief heforehand.^^
" Fix our belief beforehand"— V^eH^ how does the
fixing by passion exclude the prehminary engendering
by something else, even by logical reason ? For you
must have something to fix before you can fix it, and
that something — ^in this case an idea, a thought of, a
supposed fact — has been previously produced. Now,
do passions, even of politicians and divines, produce
ideas, engender them ? And when we say that these
passions can fix our behefs, do we mean anything
except that they can fix, or rather direct, our attention ?
Passions can make us look in one quarter rather than
another ; more particularly they can make us overlook,
chin in the air, eyes on the clouds, the items in which
they scent no interest. But, however much we may
thus avoid the ideas which do not suit those passions,
I do not see how, by such fixing and directing of the
attention, we engender the ideas that do. Something
else is required for that. Take the case of Pascal's
mystic experience, when he inferred that the state of
sudden well-being, of euphoria, and the sensation of
blinding Hght, were causally connected with the fact
(which his mind had been bent on for months) of divine
grace. Did his passion engender either those items or
even connect them ?
(That would be a bad business for the wider and more
inclusive view of facts claimed for the mystics.) Or
^
The Truths of Mysticism 135
rather, let us keep our hands ofE the mystics, and knock
about a trivial example of that other analogous Gift to
the Spirit, namely, the lover's. The lover's passion
fixes his belief : it directs his attention to the fact that
the beloved wears a particular costume, it directs his
attention away from the equally existing fact that a
cap and apron can be transferred from one wearer to
another. From the fact passionately fixed upon thus,
namely, that Susanna (in the " Marriage of Figaro ")
wore that apron and cap at 11 a.m., he infers that the
person wearing that apron and cap at 11 p.m. must
also be the fascinating soubrette, and it just happens
to be his own neglected, nay, forgotten Countess !
The Count's passion has certainly fixed his behef , and
fixed it wrongly. But was it the passion which en-
gendered the idea thus wrongly fixed upon by that over-
passionate personage of comedy ?
Indeed, it seems to me (even in the face of so great
a psychologist as Professor James) that great as is the
power of passion, its tyranny can choose and decide,
accept and reject, destroy to an unUmited extent,
but it cannot create. Above all it cannot engender
an idea. That is done by something else, by a humble
wedded couple, rather left out in the cold by latter day
philosophers : that faithful fertile pair called Fact and
Thought, or, more grandiosely, the Order of Things and
the Constitution of Mind.
There has been some rather slovenly thinking of late
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Vital Lies
(perhaps not without passionate pride in its own
slovenliness !) about this supposed production of
" beUefs " and ** conditions " by " Passion," until we
have got to a kind of intellectual parthenogenesis,
where that great mother of ideas (who was once, in Dr
Schiller's pragmatistic mythology, no less than Aphro-
dite ^ in person) sits in mysterious state, and the devoted
foster-father Reason attends ready to introduce Wise
Men from the East or to organize some hurried flight
into Egypt.
XI
Perhaps Passion, albeit not that of the theologian
or poHtician, has, in the meanwhile, been misdirecting
my logical reason, and fostering, if not engendering, an
entirely wrong idea of what Professor James is talking
about. For, in my summing up of Professor James's
harsh dismissal of the mystical increment of energy and
viitvie {mistaken and misbegotten he actually called it!) in
the cases where their ** inspiration" proves "erroneous,"
I have been utterly forgetting his previous decision
that " If theological ideas prove to have a value for
concrete life they will be true for Pragmatism." Now
this completely saves the situation : the Energy and
* Schiller, " Studies in Humanism," p. 208 " (Pragmatic truths),
born of passion and sprung, like Aphrodite, from a foaming sea of
desire."
The Truths of Mysticism 137
Virtue being in themselves good, their inspiration wiU
(for Pragmatism) be tme ; true is the reverse of errone-
ous, so the energy and virtue sprung from inspiration
which is not erroneous could not possibly be mistaken
and misbegotten. It is the neatest, possible logical
circle, and not a vicious, but a virtuous one !
That hangs together with what I read in Professor
James's other book (" Pragmatism," p. 273) about
universal conceptions : " If they have any use they have
that amount of meaning. And that meaning will be
true if the uses square with life's other uses." And in
the same bpok, p. 75 : "If there be any life that is really
better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if
believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would
be better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed,
belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital
benefits."
As I re-read these quotations I am overwhelmed by a
suspicion : is it possible that in my slow and halting
(although of course, rather passioruUe than logically
rational) attempt to follow every step of Professor
James's discussion of the mystical states and their value
for knowledge (instead of swinging along pragmatically
on a " therefore," a " because," a " then " to the full
intention of the passage), is it possible that I have left
anything out ?
Good Heavens, yes. For, turning back to p. 247 of
the *' Varieties of Religious Experience," the sentence
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Vital Lies
Btares me in the face with its complete significance :
"They (mystical states) are excitementB like the emotion
of love and ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of
which facts already objectively before us fall into a new
expressiveness ... (it was here that I broke off) and
make a new connection with our active life.''
Extraordinary that I should have missed out that
half sentence ! For, I remember, I have even quoted
the one immediately following, viz. : " They do not
contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our
senses have immediately seized . . . there never can
be a state of facts to which new meaning may not
truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more
enveloping point of view."
What must have happened is that the passages about
facts, " facts abready objectively before us fall into a new
expressiveness "—and " They do not contradict these
facts as such "—somehow coalesced in my thoughts
and covered over, hidden in their overlapping, that
little half sentence which looks so unimportant, and
which is yet (on such unobtrusive points do great
results sometimes turn !) the very pivot of the whole
valuation of mystical states "for knowledge," and
indeed, the pivot of the pragmatistic re-valuation
of truth. Let me repeat it, contemplate, emblazon,
enshrine it ! —
" And make a new connection with our active life."
Do the energy and virtue bred of mystical states
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4
The Truths of Mysticism 139
make such a new connection ? In some eloquent pages
(" Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 309 and 363)
Professor James examines the question whether re-
hgion stands approved by its fruits as these are exhibited
in the saintly type of character; and answers it as
follows : —
" Whoever possesses strongly this sense (of the divine)
comes naturally to think that the smallest details of
this world derive infinite significance from their re-
lation to an unseen order. The thought of this order
yields him a superior denomination of happiness, and a
steadfastness of soul with which no other can compare.
In social relations his serviceability is exemplary ; he
abounds in impulses to help. His help is inward as
well as outward, for his sympathy reaches souls as well
as bodies, and kindles imsuspected faculties therein.
Instead of placing happiness where common men place
it, in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner
excitement, which converts discomforts into sources
of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So he turns his back
upon no duty, however thankless ; - and when we are
in need of assistance we can count upon the saint
lending his hand with more certainty than we can count
upon any other person. Finally his humble-minded-
ness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty
personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary
social intercourse, and his purity gives us in him a
clean man for a companion."
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Vital Lies
Moreover, Professor James bids us remember that
saintliness is apt to turn to heroism.
" Now, mankind's conmion instinct for reality has
always held the world to be essentially a theatre for
heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery
is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity
whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand,
no matter what a man's frailties otherwise^may be,
if he be willing to risk death, and still more, if he suffer
it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact
consecrates him for ever. Each of us in his own person
feels that a high-hearted indifference to life would
expiate all his short-comings. The folly of the cross,
Bo inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible
vital meaning. . . . Naturalistic optimism is mere
syllabub and flattery and sponge-cake in comparison.'*
Now, although the " folly of the cross " and all this
saintly heroism for which it stands, may be, as Professor
James tells us, " inexplicable by the intellect " — of the
saint, who happens to possess it, by no means follows
that it is " inexplicable " as regards its utility to the
race at large by the calmer and more judicial intellect
of the practical man who is appraising it from a mere
utilitarian point of view. Professor James is just such
a calm, judicial, practical man, and this is how, immedi-
ately after that pastry-cook's metaphor apphed to
Naturalistic optimism, he judicially appraises the
ascetic's enthusiasm.
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The Truths of Mysticism 141
" The practical course of action for us, as religious
men, would therefore, it seems to me, not be simply
to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as
most of us to-day turn them, but rather to dis-
cover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the
way of privation and hardships will be objectively
useful."
" As religious men "—I have underUned those words,
because I should have thought that to the reUgious mind
the justification of reUgious impulses would be in the
reUgion itself, the justification of the foUy of the cross
would be, so to speak, in the Cross and all it stands for.
But then, I am not among " religious men," and cannot
place myself at their point of view of trying to discover
some way of turning the self-denial and heroism of
reUgious fervour into an outlet leading to the " object-
ively useful." Moreover, we must remember that
we have been valuing mystical states, if not always
strictly "for knowledge," at aU events from the
Pragmatistic point of view, namely, that " If there
be any life that it is really better we should lead,
and if there be any idea which, if beUeved in, would
help us to lead that life, then it would be better
for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief
in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital
benefits."
Now, we have been expressly told that the mystics
themselves necessarily beUeves in the truth of (shall
{
we call them ?) the orUological messages acquired during
his mystical states, so that it is idle disputing whether
he is or is not to give them his belief. On the other
hand we have been equaUy told that this beUef can
never be communicated (remember that our beliefs or
convictions are hardly ever engendered in such matters
by logical reason !) to the sceptics and deniers, least of
all to those who have listened to " shallow medical
talk "—such as does not bear upon the mystical states'
mhie for knowledge. Both mystics and non-mystics
havmg been ruled out, the valuation of the mystical
states is left in the hands of those other persons, religious
men Uke Professor James himself, unbiassed in either
sense, and who, by careful estimation of possible *' fruits
for Hfe," are alone capable of applying the pragmatic
pnnciple (Pragmatism," p. 273) that "we cannot
reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow
from it. . . . If they (universal conceptions) have any
use they have that amount of meaning. And that
meaning wiU be true if the uses square with life's other
uses."
Now I understand why the rehgious men were
advised to inquire for outlets which should or could
direct the FoUy of the Cross and similar mystical
heroism to something '' objectively useful." The
inquiry in question is imphcit in the whole of Professor
James's volume, and at the end he sums up its results
as foUows C Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 377) :
i
The Truths of Mysticism 143
" In a general way then, and on the whole, our
abandonment of theological criteria and our test-
ing of religion by practical commonsense and the
empirical method leave it in possession of its
towering place in history. Economically the saintly
group of qualities is indispensable to the world's
welfare."
Well, that is precisely what I might have said, and
other persons, not accounted " reUgious men," who
believe in the occasional, perhaps frequent, necessity
for the World's Welfare of Noble Lies like Plato's, or
Vital Lies like Ibsen's, and all their many intentional
and unintentional varieties : Mistakes, Delusions,
Fallacies and Falsehoods. But the advantage of
Pragmatism is that you need not stoop to such immoral
views or such offensive language. For Pragmatism
(with Professor James's voice) declares : —
(" Pragmatism," p. 28) : " You can say of it (an
opinion) either that it is useful because it is true, or it
is true because it is useful. Both these phrases mean
exactly the same thing."
and again, p. 75 :
" The true is the name of whatever proves itself to
be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for
definable, assignable reasons."
sJi'^JlM
144
Vital Lies
XII
Thus, while learning wherein consists the value for
knowledge of mystical states, we have, incidentally,
learned about some of those definabhy assignable reasons
which give us the right to call opinions true.
CHAPTER IV
FRUITS FOR LIFE
^ " To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states we must . .
inquire into their Fruits for Life."
(W. James, " Variety of Religious Experience," p. 413.)
-J^RUITS for Ufe.~The Pragmatism, I have been
J^ arraigning, and arraigning solely inasmuch
and forasmuch, is an obscurantist method
primarily concerned wtih increase or maintenance of
these ; while its definitions of truth in general, its
discussions of truths in particular, are secondary and
subservient to this concern for similar Fruits for Life.
For at the bottom of such obscurantist methods,
whether theoretically proclaimed or merely incidentally
appUed, is one preoccupation which characterises and
unites them however dissimilar and scattered, the
pre-occupation with what I must call (a very modem
name for a very modem conception!) the dynamo-
genetic property of ideas.
That an idea, nay, a mere mdimentary mental image,
if occupying the focus of attention, will set up a mood!
determine an action or re-arrange and co-ordinate the
*K 146
/
146
Vital Lies
rest of the mind's contents, unless such effects are pre-
vented by the similar but superior power of what we
call objective facts in contradiction to such ideas, this,
which I have summed up as the dynamogenetic property
of ideas, is one of the most popular generalizations of
modem mental science ; and it is also one of the pet
postulates of those investigations and speculations
which hide their disorder under the name of Sociology.
In fact, while modem philosophers have been busily
employed (and none more busy, naturally, than apolo-
gists for obscure dogmas, none more busy than all
the various pragmatistic obscurantists) attacking the
prestige and shaking the throne of the reputed monarch
Reason, their attempt to instate Will (or more properly
Wish) in Reason's stead, has really resulted in showing
that Will, Wish and the various Emotions are them-
selves subject to the domination of intellectual images,
or groups of memories, in fact, of simple or complex
ideas. If to fed makes you think ; to think, to think
of something or a relation of somethings, makes you
feel in a manner conditioned by that thought. Hence,
we get among other hypotheses, which have been
welcomed as much for their names as for their
meaning, the Id^ Forces of Monsieur FouiUee.
And this remark about Fouill6e's Id^es Forces leads
me to an essential peculiarity of this dynamogenetic
property of ideas : namely, that it may be the property
of two separate and different ideas, in fact, the dynamo-
Fruits for Life 147
genetic property of a name awakening in one mind an
idea that may differ in ninety-nine particulars from
the idea awakened in another mind, while agreeing
with it on the one point of generating a given mood,
emotion, or attitude. Whether names as such can act
dynamogenetically without the interposition of any
idea at all ; whether emotions and attitudes, dynamic
soul-states in their turn generate ideas; whether
either of these proceedings has invariable precedence,
are questions for nice philosophical definition and
elaborate psychologic investigation, which, taken
together, may some day revolutionize this subject.
But whether or not it eventually turns out that such
an idea must always be present in case of soul-dynamo-
genesis, this much is akeady obvious, to wit, that an
idea can act thus dynamogeneticaUy in one mind
without itself having been produced by a correspond-
ing, or cognate, or indeed an?/ idea in any other person's
mind. Are we not famiUar with the imaginatively
dynamogenetic properties of smells, contacts, fifes,
drums, bells and church-organs? Above all (re-
turning to my theme), are we not familiar with the
dynamogenetic property of luords ? Indeed, this whole
question can be best understood by considering this
power of words.
For, even as a word has a great many connotations,
so an " idea "-a dynamogenetic " idea "—may cover,
so to speak, a great many different ideas, which wiU
ill
148
Vital Lies
in no two cases be the same, its identity (if we may
speak of identity where there is none !) consisting in
a property of awakening given moods and attitudes.
n
Now philosophers bent upon such " Fruits for Life,"
as we have found to be Professor James's continual pre-
occupation, fix their attention upon this one point of
similarity, namely, the similarity in spiritual dynamo-
genesis, and ignore the rest. Thus the idea " CathoU-
cism " has not meant quite the same thing for Father
Tyrrell as for Pope Pius X ; but that " idea " has
sufficed to make both of them feel in conmiunion with
many miUions of other persons ahve or dead to whom
it also did not mean the same thing, and enabled them
both to partake of the same sacraments with the same
mystical fervour, until indeed the Pope's unphilo-
sophical attachment to definitions and his ignorance
of Bergsonian Pragmatism, resulted in Father Tyrrell
being excluded from that communion and deprived of
those sacraments.
Similarly it will, I hope, presently become plain to
my readers that the idea "General Strike" is not
the same in the mind of Monsieur Sorel, the philo-
sophical expounder of its " mystic " value, and in
the mind of the French Syndicahst Proletarian, in
I
;
,
Fruits for Life
149
whom he would foster this ''mystic" notion; but
what is the same is the dynamogenetic property of
stirring up class warfare of this idea " General Strike,"
as it appears both to the subtle philosopher and to the
ignorant trade unionist.
And with regard to my third example of applied
Pragmatism, we shall see that in the eyes of the an-
thropological Sociologist, Crawley, the dynamogenetic
property of religious ideas is avowedly the only thing
common to the theology of contemporary church-
going conservatives and those remotest ancestors
who beUeved in eating the flesh of eminent person-
ahties and who had not yet, we are informed, dis-
tinguished between the notions of holiness and impurity.
III
I will meanwhile forestall the results of my study
of those particular instances of — may I call it? —
Practical Pragmatism, by remarking that a con-
siderable part of the undoubted dynamogenetic pro-
perty of ideas may be due to ideas being expressed (or
rather not adequately expressed) by words : you can
get a universal "practical" response, because the
practical response, or rather what produces it, is just
the only common element in the various "ideas"
grouped under one single name. Indeed, I ahnost
ISO
Vital Lies
Fruits for Life
i5>
suspect that the latter-day unwillingness for definition,
the Bergsonites' contempt for " InteUigence " as
distinguished from " intuition," the fashionable pre-
ference for " unconscious " or " sub-conscious " states
as distinguished from " conscious " ones, may be due
to — shall we say ?— an intuitive, unreasoned, uncon-
scious, sub-conscious consciousness that you can get
more " fruits for Ufe " if you leave people to their
own individual definition (or lack of definition) of the
" idea " which rings them back to church or trumpets
them on to battle.
IV
But be this as it may with respect to the popularity
of Bergsonian and cognate philosophies, the present
obsession with what I have called the Dynamogenetic
Property of Ideas can be explained, quite apart from
rehgious conservatism, by the general state of scientific
thought. The conception of force seems to be replac-
ing that of matter ; mutation of species has taken the
place of fixity ; psychology has substituted processes
for faculties ; on the other hand, the economist is
narrowing supply and demand into acquiescence and
desire, and the biologist is for ever asking his question :
what use has this for the individual or the race ? The
notions of activity, of alternative, of impulse, instinct
I
I
and adaptation are dominant in every department of
our thinking. Moreover, the scientific spirit tends to
fix rather on what is than what should 6e, and the
investigation as to what gives us the right to consider
anything true, is replaced by the study of what actually
happens in the cases when anything is, however
gratuitously, considered to he true. Hence a general
and inevitable intellectual hankering after a prag-
matistic alternation (like a musical shake which is
two notes and no note !) between truth and usefulness ;
and, to return to my main subject, a sort of fascinated
preoccupation with that most potent of mysterious
questions, that question which deals essentially with
confusions and powers, the dynamogenetic property
of ideas, and of the names given to ideas.
Besides, our time is one of loosened custom,
questioned law and consequent universal recourse
to persuasion and panacea. We all want to save
something or somebody, we are all urging on or hold-
ing back, wanting to have our finger into this great
chaotically shaping pie of the immediate future. We
all want to get hold of other folk's volition and action,
to do something more than we can do to, or through,
or for, ourselves.
Hence Imperialism, NationaUsm, Progress, Order,
Orthodoxy, Individuahsm, SociaUsm. What words
to conjure with ! What investments for the man of
actions, the moralist's, the saviour's, dealing with his
V
152
Vital Lies
Fruits for Life
fellows ; and what a lot of meaning they all have,
these great idees forces, however undefinable or in-
coherent, if only we measure meaning by effect on
conduct.
But, even as in the fairy story, where some tiny
proviso takes off, alas, so much of the spell's value,
of the magic ring or magic lamp's virtue, so in this
matter of the sovereign power of ideas, there is a tire-
some Uttle condition which requires fulfilling. The
idea, in order to have effects on conduct, mitst he
believed to he true.
Let us look at this, occasionally awkward, pecuUarity
of the dynamogenetic property of ideas.
VI
We may approach it through a brief return to the
subject (touched upon in my dealings with Professor
James's valuation of mystic states) of Art, Simply
because Art happens to be in the highest degree
dynamc^enetic, and, at the same time, conspicuously
barren of practical results in conduct. I am thus
explicit, because unlike (I think) Professor James, I
not only like expHcitness, but I am, moreover, far from
I
a
153
Umiting " Fruits for Life " to such results as these.
For I am tempted to think that one great service
rendered to Life by Art may just have been the
production of moods and attitudes which are not spent
in practice, both because there may already be more
such practice than needful, and also and chiefly, because
such spending in practice may check the refreshment,
the renewal, the alteration and purification wrought
in the soul by moods and attitudes which are
dwelt upon, or perhaps I should have said, dwelt in.
Whether this notion of mine prove justified or not,
no one will deny that art has immense dynamogenetic
properties. It produces moods and attitudes of what
Professor James characterises as (acquiescence or nega-
tion, of optimism or pessimism : poetry, music, archi-
tecture, even the humblest pattern art produces, in
the very act of its perception, changes in the degree
and mode and direction of our activities. But the
pecuUarity of Art resides in the fact that this change
in ourselves is not transformed into a change (or an
attempted change) of something not ourselves : the
dynamogenetic ideas (and an artistic form, visible or
audible, is an idea) of Art do not abut in practice. We
may be obsessed by the thought of the treasure in
" Treasure Island," but we never take any steps to dig
it up ; and only in hyperboUc anecdote has a play-
goer ever leapt on to the stage and throttled lago.
Yet in both these cases the idea may have been more
ifi
154
Vital Lies
intensely and completely dynamogenetic, our mood
and attitude more decided, than when we draw our
money out of the bank on a bare suggestion of possible
future insolvency, or when we call the police on the
strength of mere suspicious noises in the house. The
artistic idea has in these opposite cases provoked
greater intensity and duration and exclusiveness of
mood and attitude ; but the other idea, though so
much less vivid, enduring and absorbing, has abutted
in action. Now the difference between the artistic
idea which was not acted upon, and the non-artistic
idea which loas acted upon, Ues in the absence in the
one case, and presence in the other of something
additional which is itself an idea : the idea that toe are
dealing with reality. Stevenson's " Treasure " and lago's
villainy are ideas which are not true, or rather which
are yonside of true and false. But the idea of in-
solvency of the bank, or the idea of the burglars in
our house, must either be true or false, and so long as
it rr^ay be true, it results in action, were it only the
action of inquiring whether it happens to be true or
false.
This is the explanation why artistic ideas, however
much they move us, do not move us to action ; every
child knows it, and practical moralists, among whom
I find even so expert a psychologist as Professor James,
are apt to suspect Art of turning our characters soppy
for lack of such abutment in action.
h
Fruits for Life
155
If
1;
it
■I.
And thus, through our excursion into the function
of Art, we have come back again, and face to face with
the Httle difficulty besetting those who value ideas for
what Professor James means by their " Fruits for
Life." An idea, to produce action, requires that we
should hold in our mind not only the idea itself, but the
certainty, the probability, or at least the possibiUty,
of its heing true. Briefly : we require to beheve,
beUeve that something is possible if not certain, befoie
we can act. And what we beUeve in is not merely
the idea of that something, but also the truth of that
idea.
VII
This is not all. Ideas will not produce action unless
these ideas are believed to be, at all events possibly,
true. But belief that an idea is or may be true will
produce action, for instance, such fruits for Hfe as the
mystics exhibit, even when that idea not only may be
but actually is, false. The only thing needed is that
the action should be required of the persons who
beUeve that it is true ; or that the people from whom
the action is required should be the same who do the
beheving. Hence the practical efficacy of mistakes,
fallacies, muddles, delusions, Noble Lies d la Plato
or Vital Lies after the less classic recipe of Ibsen. You
can raise fruits for life out of all of them, or they can
156
Vital Lies
Fruits for Life
157
be left to produce equally nutritious and less pre-
carious fruits for life without any cultivation, so long
as someone believed them to be true. Indeed, we shall
see by studying Mr Crawley and M. Sorel on myths,
that ideas may be only the more fruitful for life because
they are not true ; and the Modernist theory of sjrmbols
is but a re-statement of the advantages for sentiment
and conduct of an idea which, never having any fixed
contents, can never be proved to be false and need
never be asked to be true. I have stated pretty
plainly, and shall (with the help of these practical
pragmatists) show more plainly still, that the practi-
cal value of ideas depends not only upon being true,
but also, and quite independently, upon being thought
true.
Speculative thinkers interested in questions of truth
and falsehood for their own sake (let us say because
such questions involve truth and falsehood), can
find no difficulty in admitting all this, and doing
justice to all the various efficacious Ues, noble or vital,
or neither noble nor vital. But Pragmatism of the
sort I am deaUng with. Pragmatism has an eye to
effects, or rather effects fill its whole field of vision and
dazzle it. And in Pragmatism of this kind (I am
deahng once more with no other), such dazzhng pro-
duces a curious illusion : when an effect is true (and
everything which truly takes place is evidently true),
how can its cause be otherwise than true also ?
And the way to make that cause, namely, an idea,
true, is to define truth by those very effects. Hence
the various answers to, or evasions of, the stoUd old
question, " What is Truth ? " We get " true-in-so-
far-forth " and the trueness of these theological ideas
which " prove to have a value for concrete Ufe." We
get " will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense that
they are good for so much." We get the trueness
of Universal conceptions which " if they have any use
have that amount of meaning, and the meaning will
be true if the use squares with Ufe's other uses " ;
and so on,, till we arrive at that supreme identification
by superposition (" Pragmatism," page 76) . " What
would be better for us to beheve ? That sounds
very Uke a definition of truth ; it comes very near
to saying what we ought to beheve ! Ought we ever
not to beheve what it would be better for us to
beheve ? "
Something which has good effects is better to believe ;
it is what we ought to beheve ; it is therefore true, and
since it is true, it is evidently what we cannot help
beheving. And by this curious optical delusion,
turning two parallel fines into a circle, quite naturally
and ingenuously, by one of those intuitive processes
which it holds so far superior to reasoning, Pragma-
tism gets hold of the one thing needful : the dynamo-
genetic property of the idea, or at least of the word,
Truth. For Truth is what you vdlhngly accept, what
<i>
158
Vital Lies
4
you accept for assignable reasons, to wit, its useful-
ness ; but Truth is also, oh miracle, a mysterious prin-
ciple which wields an imperative. Thus, by the virtue
of circular thinking, Pragrmtistic truth becomes a law
to Itself. Unluckily it is not a law to any one else.
If you believe what it is better for you to beheve,
your neighbour beheves what it is better for him to
believe.
Pragmatiwn, as one of those first enthusiastic Prag-
matists later confessed, would be a splendid thing, if
only one could monopoKse it for oneself.
For there-^since we are dealing with advantages
determmng belief - comes in the advantage of
behevmg in truth as independent of your wiUing :
It is equally independent of the willing of your con-
tradictors.
PART II
APPLIED PRAGMATISM
w
i
Benan Fragm. Phil.-Il n'esaaye pas de priver ks religiom de
leurs dogmes particvliers ; il n^ croit pas qu'en analysant les diverses
CToyances on tr<yu.vi^ait U viriU, an fond du crenset. Une teUe opSra-
turn ne donneraU que le niant et le vide, chaque chose n'ayani s<m
pnx que par la forme particvliire qui Venveloppe et la caracUrise.
Mats tlprend tout symbole pour ce qu'il est, une expression parH-
eidtire d'un sentiment qui ne saurait tromperr
f'v//
CHAPTER I
FATHER TYRRELL: MODERNISM
AND THE WILL TO CONTINUE
BELIEVING 1
" Non disse Cristo al suo primo convento :
Andate, e predicate al mondo ciance"
Dante, Paradiso XXIX.
THE quarrel between the Pope and the Modern-
ists turns upon the Right-to-BeUeve in a
very different sense from that discussed by
Pragmatism. It is a question not of why but of what.
The Pope defines certain views on (what we are
learning to think of as) philological, historical, and
philosophical questions as indispensable qualifications,
if not for salvation, at all events for salvation through
the organisation for salvation over which he himself
presides, and by means of the sacraments which he
dispenses. If you do not hold his views, you are
not of his Church, and you cannot partake of
his sacraments ; you are, moreover, presumably
excluded from salvation, since the Pope's church
is the special organisation for salvation, all other
1 " Christianity at the Cross Roads." By George Tyrrell. 1909
(posthumous work).
1l ui
If
l62
Vital Lies
analogous ones being not only unable to save,
but, owing to their impious, fraudulent competition,
eminently efficacious to damn you. That is the long
and the short of what the Pope says. The Modernists
answer, more or less explicitly — and usually less than
more — that certain of the views insisted on by the Pope
are mere philological and historical blunders or philo-
sophical muddles, and that, so far from their acceptance
being necessary for membership of the church, and
participation in the church's sacraments, they have
nothing whatever to do with either, and are bound to be
eliminated out of the church and disconnected from the
church's sacraments by the continuation of that very
evolution, which built up the merely temporal and
human institutions and dogmas, wherein the imperish-
able truths of rehgion have been vehicled through the
centuries and made accessible to various stages of
civilisation.
Such is the controversy between the Pope and the
Modernists, sketched roughly from a distance, and
merging all individual ins and outs of opinion in the
general outUnes. We will examine it in detail in the
very noble posthumous book of the late Father Tyrrell.
But before beginning this examination, I want to
point out how the Modernist contention and, more
particularly. Father Tyrrell's apology for it, can be used
in our study of Pragmatism and the Will-to-BeUeve.
In the case of the Modernists, as indeed in most cases
) .
Father Tyrrell 163
of genuinely religious persons, it is rather the Will-Not-
to-Disbelieve.
These Modernists are scientific inquirers and philo-
sophic thinkers, philologists and historians mainly,
also, in the case at least of Father Tyrrell, metaphysi-
cians, psychologists, and students of comparative
religions. The facts and hypotheses which such studies
have rendered familiar to their thoughts, have acted
as a solvent to a vast amount of just those traditional
views which the Church of Pope Pius X. holds indis-
pensable for participation in that Church's sacraments :
the solid mass of dogma and quasi-dogma has been
eaten into on all sides; the Pope himself having
furnished, in his EncycHcal, a detailed descriptive in-
ventory of the ravages of modern scientific and philo-
sophic thought, both those abready to be lamented, and
those also to be feared at the present rate of the erosive
process. Now, such an erosion of religious beliefs has
been going on elsewhere than in the Catholic Church ;
indeed, the very fact of Modernists being ordered to
recant, shows that the Catholic Church is just the one
where it has operated least. The hostility of Roman
CathoKcism to any kind of independent inquiry has
driven the intellectual class of certain nations and
periods— say the French eighteenth century— entirely
out of its dominion ; while, on the other hand, the
various kinds of Protestantism have either made less
efiectual resistance, or made it, as is shown by the rise
164
Vital Lies
of German exegesis, in a much more partial manner.
We are thus able to compare the anti-dogmatic action of
Modernism with the far greater and sometimes entire
destruction of creeds which has taken place outside the
Church of Rome. And if we regard this further
destruction as representing the unimpeded tendencies
of scientific thought when appHed to rehgious creeds,
we can by such a comparison discover in how far it has
been checked by the requirements of such CathoUcism
as the Modernists insist upon clinging to. For the
Modernists, who are heretical innovators in the eyes of
Orthodoxy, regard themselves, and with justice, as
conservatives in opposition to Protestantism and
Rationalism.
Thus returning to the Will-to-BeUeve or Will- (as it
often is) Not-to-DisbeUeve, we shall understand its
action in the case of Father Tyrrell, by seeing where he
begins to oppose himself to Liberal Protestants and
Rationalists ; and we shall recognise the nature of his
pragmatic " What it would he better for him to believe "
by studying the questions upon which he ceases to
inquire, to analyse and to speculate, and continues to
believe because, as he will tell us, life without such
belief would be intolerable in his eyes.
And before beginning this demonstration, which I
feel to be in places cruelly hostile, I wish to express
(and that almost remorseful sense of my ruthlessness is
itself an expression thereof) the very pecuUar admira-
t
i
Father Tyrrell
tion and reverence with which Father Tyrrell's pos-
thumous book has fiUed and still fills me. After a
course of Pragmatistic theory, with its hurry to talk
over ; its shirking of conclusions and shifting of re-
sponsibilities ; its words thrown down at random,
revoked when convenient ; its twihght of suggestion
and occasional Sludge-the-Medium gesture of turning on
the fight and showing that there's no deception ; after
the jumbled metaphors of Dr Schiller, the verbal
slovenfiness of Professor James ; after that lack of logical
structure which makes even M. Bergson's magnificent
volumes fike caverns, gfittering with gems and ores, but
viewless and without exit ; after aU that confusion of
genius and shoddy, of ideafity and hustle, the satis-
faction inspired by this book of Father TyrreU's is almost
moral, and is most certainly aesthetic. It is fike the
satisfaction felt in certain churches : the recognition
that all is swept and garnished, well set ashlar and
massive silver, fair finen and pure vessels ; everything
done and spoken without hurry or passion ; with
no audience save the One, whom the Initiate carries
in his own consecrated hands..
Such is Father Tyrrell's posthumous book. Not a
work of original genius, or perhaps even original
research, but thought out and set forth with absolute
definiteness and order ; every point made clear, every
objection forestaUed and given its due; the results
of other men's work assimilated with lucidity and
1
i66
Vital Lies
orderliness ; a book which appeals to no reader, which
has no hope of converting ; a work for a noble mind's
own satisfaction ; a testament (as it proved) such as a
dpng man may make for the God he believes in, and the
disciples he barely hopes for ; and which, like the
treatise of Browning's " Grammarian " we may rever-
ently place between his hands, folded at last and after
much strife, in peace, as we take our last look at him.
II
I do not know to what extent, if at all, Father
Tyrrell had been an original investigator or an original
speculator in any of the studies, historical, philo-
logical, anthropological and psychological, which aie
nowadays deahng with the rehgious activities and their
manifestations. But he had learned the current
scientific methods, and assimilated the data and hypo-
theses resulting from them. And he therefore came
to beUeve in the same probabihties and certainties as
the least theological of his contemporaries, and to
beheve as a result of the same processes of reasoning
appHed to the same data.
Viewed historically, or genetically, Rehgion is for
Father Tyrrell a series, or rather a number of compet-
ing series, of more or less co-ordinate or more or less
disorderly syntheses of various products of mental
Father Tyrrell 167
activity : explanatory, utiUtarian, social-discipUnarian,
8Bsthetic and sentimental ; constantly changing, drop-
ping out one item, adding another, in fact, evolving
in company and under the pressure of those other
syntheses of human activities which have gradually
differentiated themselves as social organisation, science,
philosophy, crafts and trades, and art and poetry ;
differentiated themselves in continual response to the
development of man's mentality, and to the tasks which
he was obliged to set himself.
Beginning (to use Father Tyrrell's expression), as
pseudo-scientific in its magic mysticism and as dis-
cipUnary on its ethical side, Rehgion has slowly turned
from such utihtarian functions to ministering, hke art
and poetry, hke science and philosophy, to man's dis-
interested, contemplative desires ; and a spiritual
element, denied by Father Tyrrell to the primitive
magic-rehgions has thus gradually been evolved in
rehgion under the bhnd and casual fingering of for-
gotten races and unnumbered generations, but also
under the lucid handhng of occasional men of genius,
philosophers, poets, legislators and prophets. Our
present-day itself epitomizes, in its various contem-
poraneous grades of civihzation, this endless past
evolution ; and even in the most recently organized
rehgions, the grossest utihtarian magic elbows the
highest spiritual contemplation.
This is what Father Tyrrell beheved to be the past
i68
Vital Lies
Father Tyrrell 169
'E
of all Religion, and that much of its present which
represents its past. As to the future of ReUgion, that
also will be the result of continued evolution, and be
conditioned by the evolution of the other branches of
human activity. Indeed, Father Tyrrell repeatedly
tells us that the continued progress and ultimate sur-
vival of rehgion depends upon its adaptation to the
progress of psychology and the science of rehgions, to
which it will have to stand, he expUcitly mentions, as
medicine does to the chemical and biological sciences.
During all this past evolution there has been a per-
petual struggle for existence between various rehgions
as wholes, and the various elements of which each of
them consisted. And, this competition continuing and
increasing, there must result that the most vigorously
adaptive kind of rehgion, will not only evolve away its
own deciduous portions, but also, and in consequence,
oust aU its competing kindred.
This is how Father Tyrrell conceives the future of
rehgion, unless indeed (a possibihty which he does not
exclude) rehgion should prove incapable of further and
sufficient evolution and become entirely extinct.
So much for what Father Tyrrell beheves to be the
truth about the genesis and development of Rehgion.
His behef on matters of historical detail is equally based
upon contemporary scientific research, and is, if possible,
in even more flagrant contradiction with the traditions
of the Church and the Church's dogmas. He does not
even discuss either the divine inspiration or the chrono-
logical and personal authenticity of the various parts of
Scripture, but imphcitly accepts on these points the
decisions of philological criticism. Nor is this all.
According to Father Tyrrell the Founder of Chris-
tianity worked miracles only in the ignorant behef of
men who did not even distinguish between natural and
supernatural, because they had no conception of
nature's regularity. Jesus did not rise from his grave
and show himself to his disciples, but his disciples
thought that he had thus risen. Moreover — and we
must note that Father Tyrrell is continually attacking
" Liberal Protestantism " for the contrary opinion —
moreover, nothing can be more absurd than to attribute
to the Founder of Christianity a mentahty in advance
of his time and nation and class. Jesus was an un-
educated and superstitious Jew, of the reign of Tiberius ;
his mind was incapable of certain views, which are
nowadays attributed to him ; and, on the other hand,
full of ideas which had to be revised as a result of his
own death, and the non-fulfilment of his own prophecies.
Jesus was not a moral innovator, since his morahty
was current both among the Jewish pietists and the
Gentile philosophers of his day.
Furthermore, the morahty which he preached was
such as could be apphed only to a world on the brink
of destruction, and among men preparing in penance
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170
Vital Lies
for an immediate Judgment of Heaven. Jesus was
preaching righteousness, not for its own sake, nor even
for the love of God, but for the sake of a heavenly
kingdom, which was a material, not a spiritual one, and
which was to be inaugurated by himself ; so that the
orthodox reference of his teaching to a future spiritual
existence, is as historically false as its reference, by
Liberal Protestants, to a subjective Kingdom in the
Spirit of Righteous Men.
In fact. Father Tyrrell not only denies any historical
vahdity to the Church's statements as contained in its
creed and catechism, but even demonstrates that the
creed and the catechism, the whole body of tradi-
tion and dogma, nay, the whole appKcation of the
moral preaching of Jesus outside his own expectation
of an immediate end of the world, were all of them
subsequent accretions historically and psychologically
exphcable (and often philologically demonstrable) by
the nonfulfilment of the very expectations which
Jesus had come to prophecy, and the adaptation of
his predictions and precepts to totally different times,
circumstances and modes of thought.
Ill
But in Father Tyrrell's orderly and homogeneous
structure of historical, psychological, and philological
*;
♦
#
V
Father Tyrrell 171
convictions, there occasionally appear lapses of logical
continuity and changes of intellectual orientation,
interruptions, in fact, which suggest the lurking presence
of heterogeneous and irreducible elements. Of such
unexpected interruptions the first to awaken suspicion
is that, while ostensibly regarding Rehgion as a human
product, exphcable by human needs (of which more
anon) and subject to human development. Father
Tjorell should nevertheless impUcitly Hmit reUgion to
Christianity and expend much argument in hmiting
Christianity to Cathohcism. Whereas, the biologist
follows up the various species derived from a common
type, and considers their various adaptation to circum-
stances. Father T5n:rell, on the contrary, passes over the
other great developments of original rehgious activities,
Shintoism, Buddhism, and Islam, as if they had atro-
phied and perished ; and he dismisses the suggestion
of a possible fusion between Cathohcism and other
creeds from a biological objection against crossing of
genera, an analogy which (if I may forestall other
questions) might surely have been urged against the
hybridization of human rehgious thought by trans-
cendental revelation.
The non-Christian rehgions are, therefore, left out of
discussion. As regards Protestantism, on the other
hand, Father Tyrrell's book (like M. Loisy's famous
one) is directed, not so much at freeing Cathohcism from
scientifically untenable doctrines, as at showing that
»
- itmi
iginmiici
172
Vital Lies
" Liberal Protestantism," with its substitution of the
ethical elements for the sacramental and transcendental
ones, so far falls short of being the true embodiment
of the Rehgious Idea.
This Rehgious "Idea," by which Father Tyrrell
means not only (in metaphysical sense) the adequate
fulfilment of a typical function, but also something Hke
M. Bergson's creative-evolutive impulse, this Rehgious
** Idea " will play the chief part in the following pages,
and it is therefore well to try and grasp its (so far as
graspable) meaning. The Rehgious "Idea," there-
fore, deals with the union of the Spirit of Man with the
Divinity. And the various rehgions must be valued,
from the rehgious point of view, according to the degree
in which they embody this " Idea," by achieving, or
tending to achieve, this union.
Having got so far, we must pause and examine
what this definition may mean, for, in its apparent
simphcity, it is susceptible of more than one inter-
pretation, and of two at least which are divergent.
From the standpoint, both of psychology and of the
comparative study of rehgions, Rehgion can be defined
as that which connects Man with the Divinity. From
the anthropological and comparative mythological
point of view, this means that the particular group
of doctrines and practices studied by these sciences is
intended, is supposed, to put Man into such connection
with the Divinity ; similarly, magic can be defined as
Father Tyrrell 173
the group of doctrines and practices enabhng Man to
deal with the mystically embodied powers of Nature ;
that is to say, magic is intended to do this. Whether
reUgion or magic does do either of these things except
in the opinion of its votaries is a question which the
*' science of rehgions " does not enter upon. Turning
to the psychological standpoint, we may also retain
that definition of rehgion : Rehgion is what brings Man
in connection with the Divinity. It does so, says
psychology, as Art brings Man in connection with the
Beautiful or Science in connection with Knowledge :
in all three cases, we have transformed into a noun,
objective to the verb connect, what is itself a verb, " to
conceive " or " to desire," and what really does the
connecting with the predicate Divinity, Beauty or
Knowledge. Moreover, just as Psychology analyses
Beauty into the quality of being beautiful or Righteous-
ness into the quality of being righteous, so it analyses
divineness into the quality of being divine, and shows
us the successive operations by which such " divineness "
is turned into " divinity " and (always in men's mind),
from divinity into a God, and finally God.
In this sense anthropology on the one hand, and
psychology on the other, can, and do, accept Father
Tyrrell's definition of Rehgion.
But this is not what Father Tyrrell means by that
formula. Father Tyrrell means that Rehgion, quite
apart from what any science thinks on the subject,
V
'Vl
174
Vital Lies
Father Tyrrell 175
does bring man into connection with the Divinity.
And he means that the Divinity, however much it may,
as psychology tells us, exist in the mind of Man as a
human idea, does exist, in some manner transcending
all human conception, outside the mind of Man. The
Divinity (or Spirit, as he often calls it) is not in this
sense a human thought at all ; it is an object of human
experience irreducible to mere subjective existence :
the divinity is not the thought, which can become an
obsession, of the divine ; it is a Spirit, which can enter
into man by a process wholly transcending any psycho-
logical or rational description, a spirit by which Man
can be not obsessed, but possessed.
IV
This brings us to another of those interruptions,
as I have called them, of the sequence and homo-
geneousness of Father TyrelPs scientific thought-
interruptions, as the reader will soon recognize, them-
selves representing a hidden continuity, and which,
if we follow their seemingly disconnected reappearance,
will help us to penetrate into the underlying unity of
what is in Father Tyrrell's mind. Father Tyrrell's
view of the Objectivity of Grod will lead us to his view
of the Divinity of Christ and the unique Quality of
Catholicism ; and, on the other hand, it will lead us
back to his conception of Rehgious Ideas, thence
to his conception of Ideas as such, and thus close the
circle.
I have already summed up Father Tyrrell's views
as to the historical, and so to speak historically con-
ditional nature of the " Man Jesus." Indeed, one of
his chief quarrels with "Liberal Protestantism" is
the tendency, with which he credits it, to explain
away Christ's sayings and beUefs in order to make
them acceptable to modern thought. Father Tyrrell
will have none of this kind of modernizing in the teeth
of historical evidence and probability. The " Man
Jesus," he repeatedly tells us, had and could have
only the mentality of his particular time and nation ;
an enormous proportion of his conceptions and behefs,
and first and foremost his notion of an immediate end
of the world and an ensuing material Kingdom of
Heaven, must be put to the account of that unclarified
mentality of his day and country. Such being the
case, it becomes necessary to discriminate between
what Jesus thought and said inasmuch as a ** man "
— a " superstitious," almost a " fanatical " man of
unclear, crass ideas — and what Jesus thought and
said inasmuch as an incarnation of the Divinity. The
"Man Jesus" could, did, and must make erroneous
statements and teach exaggerated behaviour, but the
Deity (since Father Tyrrell relegates as magical
mythology the Old Testament stories of False Prophets
176
Vital Lies
Father Tyrrell 177
erroneously inspired by that very Jehovah whom the
" Man Jesus " beheved in)— the Deity could evidently
only reveal truth ; and truth presumably such as
could be obtained only through such revelation.
Now, of all the things which Jesus said, and among
which we must thus discriminate between human
error and revealed truth, there is one which Father
Tyrrell accepts as essentially of the latter kind— namely,
the belief (quite analogous to that in the end of the
world and the material Kingdom of Heaven) of Jesus
in his own divine nature and in the divine origin of
his message. In other words, Father Tjrrell accepts
the fact of a transcendental revelation on the testi-
mony of a person who in his human character was
likely to have confused ideas on this especial subject ;
and also on the corroborative statement of those
disciples and of that early Tradition which, we have
been told, were not only full of the grossest hteral-
ness, but also of irremediably superstitious habits of
mind.
This is a strange contradiction. But, in reaUty,
as we shall discover later on, the real witness to Christ's
Divine Nature and Mission is not the word of Jesus
or the tradition of the Church, themselves hable to
criticism and often to rejection. The Testimony is
in Father Tyrrell himself ; and it is the testimony of
his Will, or Need, to believe.
Guided by Anthropology, by comparative Mythology,
and by Psychology (let alone other scientific studies)
Father TyrreU has therefore presented us with an
evolutional scheme where the rehgious function plays
a part corresponding to that of the scientific function ;
the truths needful for man's weKare being, in both
cases, originally overlaid by all manner of human errors,
through which, by a slow evolution, those truths'
laboriously make their way, only partiaUy emerged
in our own day, and perhaps never destined to emerge
completely from that obscuring and distorting accre-
tion of misunderstanding. But note the difference !
Whereas in the case of science the needful knowledge
of nature is attained (so far as it goes) by merely
human agency ; the equaUy needful (for if not needful
where would be rehgion ?) knowledge of the Divine is
suddenly intercalated in the human evolution, and
what is more, intercalated by a transcendental revela-
tion which, inserted into inadequate human inteUi-
gence, becomes immediately overlaid and distorted
by the grossest misapprehensions, even on the
part of the very Person to whom and through
whom this necessary revelation is made for Man's
benefit. In other words, while what we mean by
Nature, however profitable the knowledge thereof.
M
178
Vital Lies
has revealed itself piecemeal since the begin-
ning of human thought, and continued to reveal
itself without much hope of any eventual com-
plete revelation, the object of the rehgious need
of man, namely, the pre-existent, eternal, Infinite
and Absolute, is hurried, by a sense of man's dire
need, to attempted self-revelation in the year 753 of
the Building of Rome, in the province of Judsea and
through the miraculous mediation (we might almost
say mediumship) of an ignorant and superstitious
Jewish pietist, whose mind is, if possible, more in-
capable of grasping the divine reahty than that of
mankind as a whole, and of his contemporaries in par-
ticular. That such should be the case has hitherto
been dealt with, perhaps wisely, as a mystery. But
to Father's TyrreU's scientific, eminently historical
mind, the mystery admits of an explanation.
According to him the very choice for this trans-
cendental revelation of a historical moment rife with
the clogging superstitions of " pre-rehgious, pseudo-
scientific" magical utihtarianism and hterahiess,
explains hkewise the choice of a mediator who, as a
human personahty, was fitted to cater to the super-
stitions of his times by his sincere and stirring behef
in an immediate destruction of the world and advent
of a by-no-means metaphysical or subjective Kingdom
of Heaven. And the Divinity's choice (for Father
TyrreU frequently speaks of the Divinity as amenable
y
Father Tyrrell 179
to motives) of such a jumble of human error for its
own revelation, is explained to Father Tyrrell's very
up-to-date (and distinctly Bergsonian) psychology, by
the advantage of transcendental truth being vehicled
(as colours are vehicled by oU or white of egg) into
the human soul, not by the hard and fast (and fre-
quently erroneous) modus operandi of definite ideas,
but by that of legends and metaphors, whereof every
man and every generation could take, or not, the
"spiritual essence," and about which successive or veiy
different ages and peoples might have Kved in brotherly
community of faith, had it not been for the presump-
tuous interference of the human reason.
The Divinity, in other words, had forestaUed the
Modernist theory of the value of symbolism.
VI
The value of symbolism is indeed one of the oldest
discoveries of theological thought, for symbols are the
natural resort of dogmatism whenever one of its
assertions can no longer be easily maintained, and yet,
owing to the necessary sohdarity of dogmatic teaching,'
cannot be rejected or abandoned : the historical account
of the stopping of the sun, or of the creation of the
world, once caught in the clutches of scientific dis-
cussion, disembodied itself into symbol, and vanished,
!l
1 80
Vital Lies
Father Tyrrell 181
BO to speak, into a fourth dimension of thought ; the
dimension where, as we know, ghosts find a convement
retreat It is in this way that Modernism has had to
make use of symboUsm. But to such (may we caU it ?)
value of convenimce (felt but never put mto words by
those who feel it most), there ha^ been added of late
years another and more scientific appreciation of the
uses of symbols.
Psychology has taught us that the contents of one
mind does not mirror itself (as we see rooms and land-
scapes and ourselves mirrored in the eye of our neigh-
bour) with mechanical and passive correctness m
another mind ; that, on the contrary, words merely
stir the impressions abeady stored up in their hearer,
and turn on processes akeady f amiUar ; so that the
word produces a change, but a change conditioned and
Umited by the residue of all previous changes. Hence
the assimilation of a word or sentence impUes its m-
terpretation, and no one can interpret the unknomi
save into what he knows akeady. This view of words
and their inodm operandi which is now current com
among educated people, explains, and is explained by
(its having arisen at aU) the inevitable change m the
meaning of the same words and sentences when passing
from individual to individual, and from generation to
generation. We know, for instance, that so simple a
piece of Uterature as a page of Bradshaw " means '
something different to the traveller who has seen the
places registered therein, and the clerk of Messrs Cook,
who seeks in it only connections of trains. We know
that Virgil's verse meant something different to Dante
from what it could mean to Horace ; and, if we recon-
struct Dante's mental possibihties by reference to
his contemporary philosophy and pohtics, we also
know that Dante's own verse meant something quite
difierent to him, the dogmatic church-man and
aristocratic authoritarian, from what it meant when it
incited Gioberti and Mazzini and Garibaldi towards a
unified ItaUan democracy. In fact, we are learning to
recognize that the poets who five through the ages are
also those to whom each age gives a new lease of Ufe
by fixing its attention upon items different from those
which interested its predecessors, and by associating
with whatever of the poet's sayings it thus happened
to focus, the thoughts and feehngs most vivid in itself,
but often most foreign to the poet. From this
recognition of the changing mental syntheses produced
by poetry and Ukewise by much philosophic precept,
it is an easy step to recognition of the symboHcal value
of rehgious teachings. And this recognition includes
not merely that the same form of words, the same
definition, commandment, or narrative wiU take
different connotations and appHcations according to the
hearer, but also that this fluctuation in the meaning,
united with stabihty in the wording or imagery, wiU
enable such rehgious formulae to five on, Hke the poet's,
l82
Vital Lies
through the centuries with the revived and increasing
power due at once to adaptation and to stability. For
a passage of Virgil or Dante, a sentence of Greek
philosophy (" man is the measure " or " know thyself "),
a verse of the Bible, Uve through the ages partly
because they have an intrinsic quaUty which makes
them eternally appHcable, and partly because they
admit of that appHcation being altered with each mind
that assimilates them ; but above all, they Uve, they
exist, because they remain outwardly unchanged, and
because this unchanged form acquires the accumulated
imperative of habit.
The power on our emotion remains the same, while
the intellectual contents alters and renews itself : and
thus the authority of different monarchs and different
monarchies of our soul Uves on uninterrupted through
all change, thanks to the traditional royalty of the word
which never dies. Nay, it may happen that our own
ideas, clearly recognized as ours, react upon ourselves
with increased efficacy if we express them in one of those
quotations which have stirred variously the hearts of
generations : sunt lachrymcB rerum ; or, amcyr cVa nidlo
anuUo amar perdona ; nay, even a phrase " God's in His
Heaven, alVs right in the world" written almost during
our own hfetime by Browning, whom we ourselves have
known ! And the person whose Ufe has been most
absolutely untouched by reUgious teachings and
practices, to whom a knowledge of Christianity has come
Father Tyrrell 183
like that of Uterature and art and history, may feel
that his poor individual thought, without stabiUty
or authority of its own, can borrow the power of up-
Ufting our head, or of bending our knees — a power more
irresistible even than that of artistic form — if only it
be expressed in the words which have been prayed and
sung for eighteen centuries or in the images which exist
equally in Giotto or Michelangelo's frescoes and in any
wayside crucifix, or penny coloured print of the Via
Crucis.
How much more is this the case when the symbol is
not merely read or remembered, but repeated with
every circumstance of solemnity and pathos ; when it is
enacted in a ritual (the metaphor of the bread and wine
translated into Uteral concreteness, for instance), where
we are ourselves the actors, or handed over to the
behever (as in devotional meditations, like those of St
Ignatius), with the express command that he shall
reahse its every detail with his own dramatic
imagination ?
The great reUgions of the world have thus become
a marveUous Hving organism of symbols wherein the
new is grafted on the old, where change of essence
is hidden under unchangeable appearance, where
accumulated primaeval emotions and imperatives
exchange quite unperceived subject and, so to speak,
substance ; and thanks to which, men Uke M. Loisy
and Father Tyrrell may still imagine themselves to be
I
184
Vital Lies
in direct traditional connection with St Paul St Tn.
and the Early Father, i.* ■ , ' ^' ''°""'
-c^rtrzirare^r -^■-
«o.. but positive addiC':rL;:2tt:"
workings of the human mind. '^°^^'^'' of the
VII
But psychology, individual and racial A
-^ely e^anune and demonstrate TiJZn'^oi
l^torical Itetir: ^'^^Tr ^^^^
particular meaning. howeCer li^tl^ a^i d^
to every symbol, so also every symM T ,
enough back has h^ ,„ • 7,^^^^ "^ ^e go far
Moreover Psvcr. ? °"^"''' """^ "^^'''l ^^^ning
but r^rt °^„?;7 r "- 1^ *^e ^4:
andpracticai;:e.l:'^; t"-^^^^^^
-reasing dyn'amo.genetr;i;rtr Ts? "' t "
the total andirreducLediv^g^TcTtothei?'"'." "^
to that symbol at th. r^*"'* "" '^« »<l«as attached
mbol at the extreme ends of its evolution.
Father Tyrrell 1 8 5
And even if psychology did not assure us that this must
be the case, and ecclesiastical history with its definitions
and re-definitions did not prove it enough, an incom-
parable proof would be afforded by the writings of the
Modernists and their condemnation in the famous
EncycUcal Pascendi.
St Paul and St John did not, could not, mean really
the same things as Father Tyrrell and M. Loisy ; the
" Man Jesus " himself. Father Tyrrell does not hesitate
to say, could not, in so far as a historical personage,
mean the same thing ;— indeed one can scarcely bear the
thought of what Jesus would have felt if, in the hours
on the cross, he had learned on irrecusable authority,
that the end of the world and the Kingdom of Heaven
were not at hand, and that these things must be under-
stood (to use the Apologetic expression) not facie ad
faciem, but per specula et aenigmata.
Father Tyrrell's recourse to symboHsm is logical so
long as we identify the unchanging contents of the
symbol with some human thought, however vague ;
some, however highly emotional, human conception
of an aim in fife, or an order of the Universe. But if
we continue this argument in favour of symbohsm, it
finally abuts not only at Christ, but at the Divinity
whom Christ revealed. And we then find ourselves in
the presence of a Divinity who, subjected to alternatives
and preferences (Father Tyrrell distinctly speaks of the
Divinity as induced to the Christian revelation by over-
I
1 86
Vital Lies
flowing of the cup of man's misery and the misdeeds of
the Powers of Evil), obliged to accept such poor
symbolic means for his revelation, is itself but a larger
and vaguer kind of human being, conditioned by its
own nature and by surrounding circumstances ; not
the real, the objective author of the revelation, but
the imagined author thereof, in other words a divinity
which is a purely human conception, revelation and all
—just one of those human notions of which the study of
symbols has shown us the genesis and transformations.
Now this is exactly what the rationalist thinker,
following along Father Tyrrell's scientific Unes, would
arrive at. The Christian God, hke the Christian
Christ, like the legends and symbols, is himself a mere
symbol ; crudely anthropomorphic in primitive times,
more and more hazy, negative, so to speak, residual, as
man's thought progresses and gradually shuffles off its
anthropocentric explanation of the universe; it is
we who have made this Divinity, not this Divinity that
has made us. But for Father Tyrrell the Divinity at
the bottom of Christian revelation is the one who has
made us, not the one whom we have made, however
much we have botched and boggled His image. He (and
no longer U) is an Objective Spiritual Entity which, in
some transcendent but absolutely objective manner, has
entered into the " Man Jesus " and told him things
such as could not otherwise have been known ; things
which are eternally true, however erroneous and
Father Tyrrell 187
deciduous the symbols wherein, first and foremost by
Jesus himself, they have been conveyed to mankind.
For this logical difficulty Father Tyrrell has prepared
by pointing out the usefulness of symbols in a branch of
thought, namely the scientific, which is admitted to
approximate moie and more to a perhaps never com-
pletely attainable truth. And it is, indeed, undeniable
that wherever we do not know, or do not yet know, the
whole of our subject, it is wise to avoid premature
definitions which might mislead, and substitute sym-
bolic expressions committing us, as for intsance the
word Force as scientifically employed, to the smallest
number of connotations; thus Herbert Spencer
showed more prudence than usual in referring not
to God but to the Unknowable, and leaving his readers to
identify the two if so disposed. In this manner one
can understand that theological ideas might have
been best promulgated in metaphysical formulae, or,
better still, in, say, algebraic symbols. But that is
the exact reverse of what has happened; and the
symboKsm in which transcendental " ideas " have been
conveyed by the Church and its founders, is the kind
which says not less, but a great deal more, than is
necessary; it is the symboHsm which increasing
connotations and associated notions increases probable
misunderstanding instead of checking it. If the
Powers Above had intended to diminish man's mis-
taken views (and consequent quarrels) about them-
i88
Vital Lies
selves, they (for I do not wish to identify the pro-
blematic X postulated by my argument with the
Divinity of Father Tyrrell's worship), They could not
have hit upon a worse plan than employing the
symbolism of Scripture and Scripture's commentators.
That sort of symbolism is not calculated to make men
understand that they do not understand more than
they actually do ; and the historical result has shown it.
So that one has a right to wonder why, knowing that
each century is bound to symbolize truth in a way
different from other centuries, the " Spirit " should
have chosen to symboUze once for all, and that in a
particularly materiaUstic and metaphor-loving race
and country, and through a particularly (in so far as
himself not a symbol) hteral-minded person, instead of
going to the expense of furnishing as science does a fresh
and less inadequate symbol to suit each age. Why one
Christ only, and only one direct revelation ? Of course,
Father Tyrrell's theory of symbols would answer (and
Father Tyrrell has said so in scarcely less expUcit
terms) that symbols are improved by the puUing about,
that they work themselves deeper in. But (which
Father Tyrrell seems to overlook) they at the same
time work themselves, at the other end, further out :
the material imagery and hteral interpretations raise
disbelief after a time, and the end of the world which
has not come ceases, after some repetition of its not
coming, to have its full effect.
I
I"*
Father Tyrrell 189
But the Modernist theory of intentional symbolism
is either based upon the habit of our own ignorant and
blundering mankind, groping its way under colossal
difficulties, and in whose image we allow ourselves
(symbolically) to conceive the *' Spirit " which is
neither human nor conditioned. Or else (and this
is, I think, more probably the case), this theory of
rehgious symbolism is merely one of the various in-
consequences of Father Tyrrell's mode of thought,
started on plain rationalistic lines, and, ever and anon,
running against that hidden centre of habitual and
beloved behefs, and against the need to beheve in
them which he finds in himself.
Such is, roughly, the scheme of Father Tyrrell's
behefs, and I think I am correct in saying that, even
as according to them the Transcendental grafts itself
miraculously onto the historical, so similarly, but
vice versa, in the mind of Modernists, the historical,
the casual and analytical, grafts itself with equally
confusing effect, on the mystical: the "it seems"
on the *' it must have seemed."
VIII
Leaving behind us the uses, divine as well as
human, of Symbolism, we will proceed, penetrate
if we can, to the something thus symbohzed for
^T3B5S£^i^-^ir~!T"
igo
Vital Lies
the greater glory of Grod or the greater convenience
of Man.
This something persisting intact, much hke Weiss-
mann's imperishable Germ-Plasm through the genera-
tions of mortal bodies, and vehicled by those ever-
changing Uteral and symboKcal interpretations which
have Uved in virtue of that vital essence they have
debased and endangered, this virtuous and victorious
something attracting errors to its service and discard-
ing them, is what Father Tyrrell calls the Religious
Idea.
Let us try and grasp as much of it as we can, that
much of it which is conceptual. The non-conceptual
part, on which Father Tyrrell never fails to insist,
we may, or may not, succeed in approaching further
on in our inquiry.
The ReUgious Idea, as it is commonly used in modem
times, is, in point of fact, a group of ideas, by no means
logically inseparable from one another ; — a group,
moreover, which I find it convenient to separate into
two subgroups, the philosophical and the sacramental.
I call the first group philosophical, because its com-
ponent ideas refer to a view of Man's place in the
Universe and Man's destinies, a WeUamchauung in
the sense of those given us independent of rehgion
by various philosophers. This religious philosopher
or religious Weltanschauung can be described as
follows : The life of Man upon this earth is due to a
If
j
Father Tyrrell 191
Divinity, who is infinite, eternal (hence unconditioned
and all-powerful), also absolutely just and merciful,
indeed, the fountain of all that is known by men as
goodness. For some inexpHcable reason this abso-
lutely Good, Infinite, and Eternal is crossed in its own
designs (or crosses its own designs) by the presence
of what Man knows as Suffering and Sin. But this
contradiction is set right by the divine arrangement
of an after-fife in which suffering is compensated,
and sin either obfiterated, if we have arrived at a
humanitarian stage in the interpretation of symbols,
or if we are in a previous stage — ^let us say the Dante
or Pascal stage — thoroughly well, indeed eternally,
punished. The centre of this half of the " ReHgious
Idea " is therefore the Sub-Idea that there is an after-
life in which everything will he set right : Man has but
a few miserable years wherein to be just, but, as Pascal
remarked, " Dieu a I'eternit^." . . .
The other half of the " Refigious Idea " is what I
have ventured to call the sacramental^ which others
might perhaps have called the mystical. Its centre is
the notion of direct and objective conmiunication during
this fife between the Divinity and Man : by prayer,
divine possession, and revelation, more particularly
by certain material practices of which the principal is a
sacrificial act, partaken in by lay beUevers as well as
by the consecrated priest.
Such are those two parts of the refigious idea which
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Vital Lies
can be reduced to human concepts, as distinguished
from another part, or, rather, another side, of which
more anon.
Kational examination can be appUed to this con-
ceptual nucleus (or double nucleus) of the Keligious
** Idea " as similar examination is applied by Father
Tyrrell to the dogmas and S3nnbols in which this
" Idea " has travelled across the centuries, and to
the gospel narratives, the scripture texts, in which
the " Idea " makes its first appearance in a form
singularly suitable (as Father Tyrrell points out) to
the mentaUty of those times and places, but requiring
a great deal of interpretation and even omission,
before it is suitable to ours. This apphcation of
secular criticism has been made, time after time, and
the result has been roughly as follows : There is in
all this Weltanschauung nothing requiring the inter-
vention of the Divinity ; no elememt with which we
are not famiUar among the products of purely human
thought, that is to say, in rehgions and philosophies
which the Church of Rome does not recognize as
Divine revelations, but, on the other hand, cannot be
discarded as adulterated imitations of what the Church
offers as revelation, since, as a whole or as parts, they
preceded that revelation instead of following it. More-
over, leaving the historical question aside, there is
nothing in this philosophical half of the rehgious
" Idea " which could not be arrived at by human
III
*
. {
Father Tyrrell 193
thought without the assistance of divine revelation ;
indeed, the incoherences like the notion of an Infinite
and Eternal Cause thwarted in its just and merciful
designs by the presence of Evil, nay, of an Infinite
which should have any designs or quaUties at all — are
themselves just the incoherences we have learned to
expect from the workings of the human mind, par-
ticularly before it has learned to separate its various
standpoints ; in other words, great as is the share of
nonsense which Man has attributed to various divini-
ties, enough nonsense has been talked by Man him-
self for us to attribute the whole to his unaided efforts.
While, on the other hand, important as may be the
psychological truths and moral judgments embodied
in this divine theory of man's position and destiny,
there are surely enough other truths undoubtedly
arrived at by man alone for us to credit him with these
supposed divine ones as well. Now, if we strip away
these parts, fooUsh and sensible, as merely the human
additions, particularly the incoherences, due to man's
effort to compass divine meaning with a human in-
strument, then what remains of the diviniely revealed
meaning ?
But besides the philosophical half, the WeUanschau-
ung, of that germinal nucleus which is the '' Re-
hgious Idea," there is the other and more important
part, namely, the element of sacramentaHsm which
informs Christianity and especially CathoUcism.
In
194
Vital Lies
Father Tyrrell 195
IX
Father Tyrrell is anxiously careful to separate the
sacramentalism essential to Catholic Christianity
from those more primseval behefs to which he denies
all transcendental value, dismissing them as utihtarian
pseudo-science, whose traces can exist only in the
accretion, in the magical lore which has enabled the
genuine and immortal Keligious " Idea " to pene-
trate, very often incognito, into imperfectly spiritual
times and classes.
In attempting this separation Father Tyrrell is not
merely turning away from scientific evidence but,
what is far more remarkable in so candid a thinker,
he is actually flying in its face, since if there is any-
thing common to those earUer cults and to Chris-
tianity, it is precisely the notions concerning man's
mystical relations with superhuman creatures which
can be summarised as prayer, possession, revelation,
and the sacraments ; and it is just these notions, with
which comparative mythology has made us so famihar
under the heading of magic, which Father Tyrrell
accepts as one half of the eternal germinal nucleus of
the Rehgious " Idea."
Now it happens that this mystical and sacramental
element's existence in pre-Christian, nay, primaeval
behefs, has an importance beyond its suggestion that
s
the Rehgious " Idea " may have existed independent
of revelation and previous to it. For if the mystical
and sacramental element is to be found in primitive
and merely pseydo-scientific rehgions, then we have
a right to regard it as primitive pseudo-scientific when
it reappears as part of Father TyrreU's Rehgious
" Idea "—and, what is more, to apply to it in this
privileged return upon the scene, the same rational
criticism which Father TyrreU himself would apply
ruthlessly to its first manifestation in those despised
non-spiritual cults of primitive man.
Such criticism of Christian mystical and sacramental
habits has been carried out pretty thoroughly by
anthropologists and comparative mythologists ; it
is enough to mention Professor Frazer, and I shall
presently examine, as one of my types of latter-day
Obscurantism, the apology which another learned
mythologist, Mr Ernest Crawley, extracts for AngUcan
Christianity out of an assimilation of its mysteries to
the rehgious notions of savage races.
But even admitting that further scientific inquiry
should prove the sacraments of the church to be no
such survival of primaeval magic, and the Christian
(or Mosaic) revelation to be no equivalent to the
revelations which other rehgions sought in oracles
and auspices and dreams ; even supposing our com-
parative mythologists to prove mistaken, and Father
Tyrrell to be justified in refusing to derive his Re-
^--'=i^-i'^~-
196
Vital Lies
ligious " Idea " from any earlier beliefs, there remains
the quite separate objection that if we can explain
SacramentaHsm and Mysticism by merely human
mental operations in the case of primitive superstition,
then the origin of similar SacramentaHsm and Mysti-
cism existing in Father Tyrrell's Kehgious " Idea '*
need no longer be referred to transcendental explana-
tion. If psychology (psychology racial as well as
individual) can account for certain " transcendental "
behefs in savages, why should not psychology ac-
count for the same " transcendental " items in Father
Tyrrell? And this is exactly what ethnological
psychology, that is to say, the study of the human
mind in its more primitive phases, is beginning to do.
The appUcation of psychological analysis to the
data of mythology and ethnology is beginning to shed
light upon the slow development of what seem now-
adays man's inevitable and almost innate mental
attitudes and processes. One of the most difl&cult
steps in this human evolution has been the gradual
emergence from primaeval confusion of [what seems
to us] the simple distinction between the inner and
the outer world. One of mankind's labours of Her-
cules has been the endless re-grouping of associated
ideas in such a way as to separate the constantly
recurring impressions from without and the emotional
and practical reactions which these impressions set
up within ; in other words, to think of the not-oneself
III
1^
i
/
Father Tyrrell 1 9 7
as connected with but opposite to the on^df. Re-
peated checking of man's desires and actions has
graduaUy set free and clear in man's consciousness
our now familiar conception, the thing, the object, as
distinguished from the feelings and acts which that
thmg's quaHties eUcit in man. And in this fashion
there has graduaUy emerged, there is stiU emerging,
from the chaos of associations, that orderly world of
thought made more orderly, as Peircian Pragmatism
teaches, by our past, by our present, and our foreseen,
practice. What man expects has become more and
more dependent upon experience, and less and less
upon desire. Experience itself has become less and
less of the single case connected with man's own action,
and more and more of repeated cases involving differ-
ent human attitudes, and at last no human attitude
at aU save that of contemplative thought : the cases
thought by us as a Law. Thus has come about the
separation of It is from / feel and do ; the gradual
recognition that our thoughts, feehngs, desires can
deal with things only in so much as things exist inde-
pendently of them. Expectation-I must repeat it,
for it bears upon my whole subject-<jomes to be less
and less desire, and more and more experience ; and
belief becomes logical and objective, separating itself
more and more from the self-centred kinds of emotional
thought called hope and fear.
At the same time (the time extending from man's
I K
198
Vital Lies
h
remotest past to man's yet distant future), the
imperative of reason is substituting itself for the
imperative of authority : belief depends more and more
upon the fitting in of facts by comparison, analysis,
and causaUty, rather than upon reiterated assertion
of statements taken in the lump and by themselves.
In other words, the more belief— which, is active and
synthetic— develops, the more also does faith dwindle ;
faith which is submission of one man's thought to
another's ; in great part submission of the thought of
the hving to the thought, the misinterpreted, symboU-
cally explained, thought of the dead ; for our accept-
ance of a fact on scientific authority is not an act of
faith, but an abutting of experience and argument.
And as, in this manner, behef is more and more difPer-
entiated from Hope and Fear, a further change takes
place: Faith merges more and more into the con-
fidence which disarms or propitiates, the relation of
Will and Power on the one side, and of Want and
Weakness on the other.
Now with this evolution of man's thinking faculty,
and his distinction between himself and not-himself,
there has grown up a distinction between natural
and supernatural.
Natural is that which can be analysed, foretold,
thought ; Supernatural is that which cannot. And
as the Natural grows, invades and appropriates in all
directions, the Supernatural shrinks or evaporates, as
Si
ii
h
Father Tyrrell 199
we see it, for instance, in Spencer's " Unknowable."
Primaeval darkness breaks and melts away from the
large spaces of human existence, curdling and shrinking
into an ever smaller corner : for is not every theology
or theosophy such a segregation of primitive thought
still saturated with personal and racial emotion ?
Indeed, I can conceive that the day may come when
some of our paradoxical apologists will tell us that
rehgions have been indispensable to the progress of
thought by gathering into an ever-diminishing and
less disturbing heap the vestiges of the great primaeval
confusion. Did not Heaven become a place of exile
for those Gods who, for so many aeons, had wasted
poor mankind's strength by warring across his path,
hiding in every object which he grasped or saw,
thwarting his attempts at every turn, large or small,
of his miserable, harassed existence :
" genus infdix humanum, talia divis
Cum tribuit facta atque iras adiunxit acerbas"
For of that primaeval confusion there remained,
there still remains, and will long remain, an insulated
and impregnable corner in man's own soul : the
obscure place of man's dark instinctive hopes and
fears, of his unsatisfied longings and incurable griefs.
There, as in the mind of our earliest ancestors, the
Self and Not-Self are stiU merged ; expectation is not
experience but wish ; and belief is what is given the
name of Faith.
I !
200
Vital Lies
" Lea tendances iniellectuelles, aujourcPhui inniea, que la vie a dH
crier au cours de son Evolution, sont faiies pour tout autre chose que
pour nous fournir une explication de la vie."
Bergson, " Evolution Cr6atrice," p. 22.
"Son objet {de la science positive) n'est pas, en effet, de nov^
rivder le fond des choses, mais de nous fournir le meilleur moyen
d'agir sur dies . . . Tout autre, a notre avis, est cdui de la
phUosophie" Ibid., p. 101.
And here I would open a parenthesis to point out
that the obscurantism of our day frequently tries to
identify this residual, and so far irreclaimable, mass of
mystic thought with the subconscious or automatic
activities constituting life's very core ; while our
impatient, indiscriminating disdain for the insufficiency
of former rationahstic explanation of the world delivers
us into the hands of these apologists for dying creeds.
Moreover, the vitahstic conceptions of much recent
biology lend themselves, occasionally perhaps even
in the minds of their authors, to a vague animism.
On the other hand, our gradual recognition of the
part played in history by myths and misappre-
hensions, our recognition also how Uttle has been
achieved by lucid programme and how much by mere
blind struggle of passions and habits, has further
contributed, in a negative sense at least, to an attempted
restoration of the old principles of faith and mystery ;
while the increasing importance given by mental science
Father Tyrrell 201
to the notion of unconscious reflexes and of psychic
processes outside of the focus of attention, has also
been caUed upon for the hmniUation of the former
despot Reason and the reinstatement of whatever
mental Chaos preceded it. The imperfect disciphne
of many minds brought unprepared in contact with
philosophic thought has resulted in an intellectual
tendency paiaUel to the neo-monarchic and neo-
aristocratic arraignments of the shams and drawbacks
of democracy. We may thus daily witness an at-
tempted identification of the residual mysteries left
by scientific thought with the mysteries enshrmed by
various reUgions. Thus : If the theological explana-
tion of Evil is full of contradiction, is the philosophical
crux of otyjective and subjective not equaUy bewUdermg ?
If the sacraments are unfathomable by human reason,
is memory, is heredity, is Ufe itself any easier to
understand ? Such are the criticisms we hear on aU
sides In short, there is at present a tendency, not
merely to identify (Uke Spencer) the Unkrwwn with
the VnhmmabU, and the Unktmoabk with wfud w
knoum as God, but also to treat lucid consciousness as
a delusion separated from aU Ufe and hopelessly unable
to tackle life's problems. The only true Knowledge,
so we are constantly having it hinted (for hinting goes
V better with such views than plain statement) is the
obscure knowledge called Instirwt or IrUuUim, the
"integral" mass of consciousness; the knowledge
f
202
Vital Lies
which, so to say, knows what we want to do and does
not trouble itself with what the not-ourself may happen
to he.
Now there is indeed a sense in which this latter-day
adumbration (for obscurantism prefers showing the
shadow rather than the substance) may be considered
correct ; but it is not the sense in which it is intended :
Life, individual and racial, is certainly based in dark-
ness, and the most constant and indispensable of hfe's
processes, those shared not only with animals but with
plants, indeed those which we share in as much as
mechanical aggregates and chemical compounds with
what we caU inanimate nature, are unaccompanied, not
only by lucid thought, but often by consciousness of
any kind. Now that lucidity should not accompany
the wriggUngs of protozoa, or the chumings and
cookings of man's viscera, nor even the strainings
and shrinkings of man's sense-organs ; that lucidity
should be imperfect in the thought of infants and
savages, all this does not prove that lucidity is opposed
to the true knowledge of ourselves and the Universe.
For httle as we raw philosophers may know of either*
we yet know more than plants and microbes, mor^
than our viscera and Hmbs, more than our new-bom
children and our own earhest forefathers. And incom-
mensurable with reahty as doubtless are our thoughts,
they do know more of it than instincts and reflexes ;'
know, at least, that there is something to know about.'
Father Tyrrell 203
H
I
Indeed it is only since emerging so far from this " direct
knowledge " possessed by reflexes and instincts, that
we know, for one thing, that reflexes and instincts, the
great Sub-Conscious itself, exist at all : for what are all
these things save inferences, they and their superior
powers, made by that lucid thought which we are told
to despise. And if knowledge is to be measured by its
knowing (if I may use such a paradox) that there are
objects of knowledge besides our own cravings and
movements, then, little of it as there yet may be, there
was remarkably less in the beginning. For in the
Beginning was, not the Word or the Thought, but the
Want and the Act ; and all around lay the unexplored
chaos where everj^hing could be something else, where
space could be simultaneously occupied by different
bodies and time inverted, where difference could be
the same as identity, where contradictions did not
exclude each other ; and the only certainty was what
man hoped and feared, suffered and did, particularly
what a great many people said and did and hoped and
feared together.
It is this primaeval chaos, with its fitful gleams
of idea and its ceaseless heaving of hopes and
fears, which still Hves on in the hidden corners of
Modernism.
204
Vital Lies
XI
Religious habits have so accustomed even un-
believers to such survivals of primaeval mental chaos,
that it takes a kind of isolating diagram to make us
aware of their existence. Such an example is un-
intentionally offered by Father Tyrrell's theories.
Here is a historian, who is also a metaphysician,
giving to the unknowable, i.e. the region where our
intellectual categories fail us, a historical happening
in the person of Jesus, since the Ufe of Jesus marks
the point of intersection where the " transcendental "
cuts into, grafts itseK upon, the rationally conceivable.
This is far grosser than the notion of the Transcen-
dental Unknowable incarnating in an individual man.
For we can make something of such an incarnation
by regarding the Transcendental Unknowable as
thougJU by that incarnating man, by turning the Tran-
scendent into an accusative of the verb to think —
of which that incarnating man is the nominative.
But a historical revelation has to be the accusative of
a verb to reveal, whose nominative is the Transcendent
Unknowable. Now the Unknowable, the Tran-
scendent, being only a residual and empty category,
we get the following logical pattern : a residual nega-
tive concept which is the nominative of a transitive
verb necessarily limited to a historical point, namely,
)
Father Tyrrell 205
the historical moment when the Unknowable made
the revelation. In other words the Unknowable,
which has hitherto governed the verb to be (since all
they can be postulated of an Unknowable is Umited
to its bare being) suddenly leaps out and becomes the
nominative of the verb to reveal ; and what is worse,
of the verb to reveal in its past, its historical, tense.
This is how the case shapes itself if thought out in
logical, nay, in merely grammatical terms. But
Father Tyrrell thinks these things in a rapid alter-
nation, a shimmer, of objective and subjective : his-
toric revelation, voices, spoken words, Christ's birth,
teaching, and death ; turn about with permanent
possibihties of feeling, Christ's, Tyrrell's own, other
men's, an abstract category. And, further to confuse
us, he thinks of the Whole in metaphysical terms, and
then feels the Whole as part of his own feelings. And
the welter of these contradictory elements is what he
means by the ReUgious " Idea."
XII
" Charged with untold and untdlable Wisdom."
We learn from Father Tyrrell, what is indeed
imphcit in all religious writers, that the " Rehgious
Idea," as he calls it, consists very largely in an impulse
towards union with a Whole whereof man is and knows
ace
ama
WS
2o6
Vital Lies
V
but a tiny part. Now there are two possible manners
of realizing, or partially realizing, this which, for mere
lack of proper vocabulary, I must designate as the
program impUed in that Rehgious " Idea." There
is a manner of realizing a whole by reahzing the
co-ordination of many into one : a deed of analysis
followed by one of sjmthesis, or perhaps properly
speaking an interplay of analysis and synthesis, Uke
that of the musician in " hearing out " the notes of
chords and the parts of a counterpoint, taking stock
of their separate nature, of their mutual relations,
and uniting them in the unity of a musical idea —
(not at all an "idea" in Father Tyrrell's sense!).
The musician in question is in this fashion united,
or rather imites himself, with the whole which is the
composer's intention. Similar to this is that whole
of the Universe to which the human mind would
be united, were any human mind capable of knowing
analytically and grasping synthetically all the relations
of which that whole universe would consist.
This manner of union with a whole is, as you see,
dependent upon a separating, a holding asunder and
co-ordinating of parts. This tmy of being united with
a whole is, it is well to notice, unfrequent in primaeval
man, because the stress of practical life, the adapta-
tion to immediate wants and dangers do not allow
such contemplative synthetic analysis, such building
up of a whole from which,^like the musically developed
i
Father Tyrrell 207
hstener to a symphony, man holds himself distinct :
for union, in this sense of union with a whole, impUes
previous separateness. Primitive man, and every
individual of us in so far as he resembles Primitive
man (during infancy, for instance), has not leisure or
strength for such contemplative construction : in
him associations are still largely individual ; in his
mind, experience is not a contemplative continuity,
but so many bundles, often individual (or appljdng
to his tribe or country) of items grouped casually
under the hegemony of his own feeUng and action.
We have dealt so far with the Whole which is the
result of analysis and synthesis ; the whole which
impUes co-ordination ; the whole which we know, and
know to be the particular whole which it is. The other
Whole, or rather the set of phenomena to which that
name is given, is of different and even opposite nature ;
and the way in which man can be said to unite with it
is different and opposite also. This second Whole is
a whole not because we co-ordinate its parts, but
because we do not perceive or conceive them. It is,
so to speak, homogeneous chaos, differentiated only
from ourself, but undifferentiated in itself. This
kind of " Whole " is due to the abohtion or the
not yet existence of quahties and relations ; it is
the whole whereof we know only that it is there and
that we know nothing of it. It is the not-ourself
as yet unexplored and unmeasured by the ourself.
m
I
I >f
il
i
t )
208
Vital Lies
It is the whole, not as it is apprehended by the musi-
cian who hears a symphony, but as it is feU by the
unmusical hearer to whom that symphony is a mere
sea of sounds of which he can tell us nothing save how
he felt in the midst of it. And this is the whole of which
we are told the revelations of mystics. I have re-
ferred to the unmusical hearer of the symphony (the
one for whom the symphony as symphony has no
existence) being able to tell us nothing except what
he felt. Knowledge, not of what made him feel, but
of how he felt, is the characteristic of this other kind of
union with the whole : what dominates in it, even as
appetite and action predominate in the primitive
man's experience, in the infant's and probably the
animal's, are the man's emotional and motor con-
ditions. Above all, he knows them ; and if they are
satisfactory, he, hke the lover in Whitman's " Terrible
Doubt of Appearances," feels satisfied about the rest.
For we must remember that where emotion is strong
and of a piece, it leaves no room for anything else ;
no questions remain unsolved, no conflicts remain
unsettled, simply because questions and conflicts
have vanished ; and when the lover, or the mystic,
or the man immersed in mere aesthetic deUght, re-
members that there ever have been such questions
and conflicts, these become, compared with the over-
whelming satisfactory emotion, mere unreahties,
phantoms without the power of troubling.
Father Tyrrell 209
Thus has the mystic come in contact with the wh)le,
the whole in the sense of what alone is dominating his
spirit, of what is known to be different from himself
but not differentiated in itself, even as the unmusical
man is immersed in the chaotic sea of sound. And
if his attendant emotion has been satisfactory, this
condition of knowing nothing is afterwards described
as comprising the satisfying knowledge of everything,
and this emotional reahzation of homogeneous chaos,
is described as mystic union with the whole.
That this realization— if we may call it so— of an
I emotionally irradiated mental void should be satis-
factory is due not only to the specific satisfactoriness
of unification of consciousness, but, what is more
important, to the fact that unsatisfactoriness would
mean dismissal : for, except in mental disease, a pain-
ful unity of consciousness will produce attempts at
riddance, at discrimination, and the contemplated
chaotic whole will be broken up into fragments of
coherent thought or coherent action. Be the ex-
planation as it may, there exist such emptyings out
of the consciouness for the benefit of one absorbing,
satisfying emotion which, dismissing all questions,
seems thereby to answer them :
((
Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty thai, after all, we rmy he de-
luded . . .
2IO
Vital Lies
To me these and the like of these are curiously answered
by my lovers, my dear friends,
When he whm I love travels with me or sits a long
while holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words
and reason hold not.
Surround us and pervade us.
Then I am charged with untold and untellMe wisdom,
I am silent ; I require nothing further ;
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of
identity beyond the grave ;
Bui I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.''
Like Whitman's Lover, the Mystic feels himself
" charged with untold and mitellable wisdom." Of
that whole with which he feels himself united he
knows only that it is satisfying. He is per-
vaded by the impalpable, the sense that words
and reason hold not; and, hke Whitman's lover,
the Lover of God is freed from " the terrible doubt
of appearances." ^
1 Cf. W. James's " Varieties of Religious BeUef," and my criticism
on hia account of mystic Truth, p. 112 et seq., of this book.
Father Tyrrell 2 1 1
XIII
" The Terrible Doubt of Appearances.^'
Equally exphcable by the primitive confusion
between Man's thought and Man's emotions is the
attitude of ReHgion towards two other of its " Mys-
teries " : Death and Suffering.
In the Ught of biological knowledge, Death is one
of the most orderly of all phenomena, indeed, irre-
placeable in the mechanism of the higher kinds of
life. For Death is co-related to assimilation and ex-
cretion, to reproduction, multipHcation, competition ;
in fact, to all bodily and social existence ; a detail
so indispensable as to warrant Weissmann's sugges-
tion that the supreme adaptation which raised certain
organisms above others and secured to their species
not survival merely but development, was, so to
speak, the happy accident, or the happier invention,
of death.
This is how death must appear to the modern in-
tellect ; how, indeed, it would have presented itself
to earher philosophic thought, but for the traditional
tyranny of notions arisen from man's emotional wants.
For to all our habits and instincts, our love of others
and of ourselves, to the dominant mass of our feelings,
death is a wrench, a tearing up, a monstrous violation.
This thing of constant experience (and logical in-
212
Vital Lies
evitableness) is felt to be unnatural. And becoming
unnatural, it becomes mysterious, and thence in-
credible. Fear and horror end in disbelief ; and
clinging to his own life and the life of his dear ones,
Man substitutes for death some sort of immortahty :
" Behold I show you a mystery. . . . When this
corruptible shall have put on incorrwption, and this
mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall he
brought to pass that is u)ritten. Death is swallowed
up in victory. Death, where is thy sting?
grave, where is thy victory ? "
But to the unemotional part of man, to his ex-
perience and reason, it is the absence of death which
would have a sting, that is to say, would be difficult,
impossible to face.
As it is with Death, so it is with Suffering and Sin.
These are facts of experience which, logically con-
sidered, have nothing strange about them ; indeed,
the strange thing would be if they had not existed.
Suffering and Sin (which is the social expression for
what produces or is supposed to produce suffering)
are, rationally considered, the result of individual
and collective sensitiveness, sensitiveness necessarily
always (logically again) in advance of the adaptation
which it strives to compass. While, as regards the
presence of Evil in the universe, that problem, as we
shall see in dealing with the Manichsean crux of all
rehgion, would not exist save for man's projection of
t]
Father Tyrrell 213
his own preferences beyond the Hmits of his own
nature, and his gratuitous identification of the Uni-
verse's ways with his own : there is every reason,
and the whole of experience, to tell us that the telluric
processes of a particular portion of land and sea can-
not be subservient to the safety of the inhabitants
of Messina, although the safety of the inhabitants of
Messina is so barbarously jeopardized by these pre-
existing processes. So the question of Evil appears
to mere reason. But emotionally considered, the
presence of Evil in the Universe, as exemplified by
just such an earthquake (and also, I may add, by the
sufferings of a vivisected dog !) is a flagrant violation
of man's instincts, instincts which reason shows us
to be inevitable and indispensable to man. Suffering
exists only for sentient, evil only for sentient and
thinking beings ; but for such beings they become the
most important of all facts. Hence man is puzzled
by the existence of them : he cannot realize that
what hurts him is not intended to hurt him, still less
that there need be no intention in the matter. To
his emotion suffering means injustice ; and therefore
he carves out of the unknown Beyond, out of that
great continent of the Unthought lying beyond his
exploration (as Dante carved out of the earth's
bowels and the star's radiance), a place or time where
evil is punished and suffering compensated, a world,
transcendental indeed, but not recognized as con-
214
Vital Lies
substantiate with his own mind and feehng, where
death will not be, nor (as Jesus and other theologians
logically added) marrying and being given in marriage
either.
These are simple enough phenomena easily expUcable
(if only all other problems were as simple !) by what
we know, scientifically and also by everyday observa-
tion, of the mentahty of man. But these cravings
and puzzles, these contradictions and contradictory
solutions, this substitution of the " I want " — for the
** It is " — are still given us by men hke Father Tyrrell
as mysteries, transcendental, divine, and whose ex-
planation is so impossible to compass that we must
accept it and them as altogether superior to reason,
and approachable only by faith.
XIV
Religion, Father Tyrrell and all other rehgiouB
apologists tell us, not only satisfies our craving for
Union with the Whole, but gives us the certainty that
this Whole is, in some way transcending our under-
standing, good, indeed, aU-good and the Ocean, as it
were, from which all human goodness proceeds and to
which, in the form of reUgious obedience, it returns ;
moreover that, in some transcendental way, suffering
and sin will be neutrahzed or compensated ; above aU,
i
^
I
r]
«
I
Father Tyrrell 215
that there is, for the individual soul, a transcendental
but Uteral and objective life beyond this mortal one.
" Death," as St Paul wrote, " is swallowed up in
victory."
Now let us ask ourselves whether these beliefs are
such that they must be accepted as transcendental
truths divinely revealed; or whether they are the
notions which could and must have arisen in the
unaided human mind ; notions moreover which, Hke
that of the Mystic Union with the Whole, the human
mind is sooner or later bound to explain by what it
knows of its own constitution, and to discard as some
of its own inevitable, but also inevitably rehnquished,
misapprehensions.
I have akeady referred to what recent study of
primitive psychology is able to tell us about one of
the main distinctions between the mentahty of primi-
tive peoples and our own : namely, the comparative
absence in the thought of savages not only of abstraction
and general ideas, but, what is more distinctive and im-
portant, of that principle of contradiction which poUces
our thought and reduces it to law-abiding order.^
1 L6vy-Bruhl, " Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Soci6t^ In-
f^rieures " (1910), p. 77.—" En d'autres iermea, pour cette mentaiiU,
Vopposition entre Vun et le plusieurs, le mime et Vautre etc., n'impoae
pas la nicessiU d'affirmer Vun des termes si Von nie Vautre, ou
riciproquement." M. L^vy-Bruhl's most interesting book is full of
such instances of " pre-logical " thought, coinciding curiously with
the indifference to temporal and spatial possibilities shown in the
drawings of children. Cf. Levinstein's " Kinderzeichnungen."
2l6
Vital Lies
Now, while the secular thought of the race has
become more and more subject to experience and hence
more capable of logical operations, so that the tradi-
tions of primaeval confusion have been more and more
replaced by a heritage (transmitted in language and
the scarcely noticed education of the earUest years of
infancy) of experiential axioms and logical operations,
— while such has been the case in secular life, the
rehgious hfe of mankind has become more and more a
segregated survival, secured by the primitive methods
of memorial repetition and ritual association, of habits
of thought such as psychological ethnography is
studying under the rubric of " pre-logical." Most
characteristic of religious belief, wherever it lingers
(and however much disguised as " philosophy "), is
that lack, so characteristic in primitive man, of the
principle of contradiction.
In all rehgious thought, as in the matter of " Union
with the Whole," what dominates is the sense of
emotional conditions— need, want, striving,— which do
reaUy exist alternately in the individual consciousness,
and whose successive assertions are grouped together
regardless of their incompatible (because successive)
nature, and more regardless still of their conflict with
everything else. Thus all Christian philosophical
thought is crevassed through and through by certain
antinomies : the postulate of Omnipotent Infinity on the
one side, that of Absolute Goodness on the other ; or, in
Father Tyrrell 217
other words, the rational conception of a causal whole
with the emotional demand for S5nmpathy and righteous-
ness. This contradiction has led, in the Christian
" Idea " as expounded by Father Tyrrell, to a practical
-^ dualism (once boldly declared by the Manichaean sects)
of a Good God and a Wicked Devil, among whose con-
flicts and occasional truces mankind develops its tragic
destiny ; and when it has become philosophically
untenable in its rehgious definiteness Professor WilHam
James has crumbled it into less obvious fragments and
sprinkled it about in his plurahstic system. That the
Whole should be all good, yet contain (or will) evil ;
that God should be omnipotent yet tolerate a principle
of evil and leave man free to sin and to follow its
interference, is a grouping of ideas which can be ac-
cepted as " transcendentally " true only because logical
thought has not analysed it and separated what it
contains of observation and reason from the admix-
ture of man's desires or strivings ; because, moreover,
rehgious habits have accustomed us to accept by *' acts
of faith " and transmit by verbal memory and ritual
symbol, contradictions which, had they occurred in ob-
jective experience, would have long since been solved
by the analysis of their components and arrang-
ing them under separate points of view. For all
contradiction disappears once we recognize that
morahty, goodness, truth, mercy, are quaUties evolved
in Man because necessary to Man's social existence,
■"^rr-mm^KiKm
fefeijffl gg
Vital Lies
218
but having no meaning where no human relations
exist, while they are absolutely out-of -plane with such
conceptions as the Infinite, the Eternal, the Absolute,
the Cause, the Whole, call it Nature or Divinity. The
frightful antinomy vanishes in the clear recognition
that human needs have their abutment not in what
the Universe is, but in what mankind contrives to do
or make of himself and its small scrap of that universe.
But religious habit leaves the contradiction in its
crudest form, the astounding symbol of a Divinity
thwarted by a Demon of his own creating, rebelled
against by his other creature Man, and having lost
patience (as Father Tyrrell tells us) at the excesses of
the principle of evil, "making man's necessity into
God's opportunity'' and letting himself be partially
placated by the monstrous sacrifice of a portion of
himself in expiation of man's disobedience. This
inconsistency reUgion keeps and enshrines in every
metaphor, in every verbaUsm susceptible of rousing
human emotion; and, having silenced the sense of
logical contradiction in the overpowering union or
harmony of feehng, religion insists that there is no
contradiction ; till the beUever, again hke Whitman's
lover, forgets the terrible doubt of appearances^ and
"whether there is or is not identity beyond the
grave."
y
Father Tyrrell 219
XV
Together with a " conceptual " side which I have
tried to analyse in certain of its philosophical items,
such as " union with the whole " and the problem of
Suffering and Death, there is in the " Rehgious Idea "
what Father Tprell calls a mystical, and I should
venture to call, a sacramental side. Let us attempt,
from however far off, to get a glimpse of it.
" The Sorcerers of Loango allow the public, for a
trifling consideration, to put additional articles of its
oum into tJwir authorized collection of magical para-
phernalia, and leave them in contact for weeks and even
months."
This passage in M. Levy-Bruhl's remarkable volume
on the " Mental Functions of Primitive Mankind " re-
minded me that I had myself once witnessed a method
of increasing the already existing stock of wonder-
working valuables by no means unlike that of these
Loango wizards. It was in the crypt of the former
abbey of Jouarre, near the Marne. You tied a tape
tight round the arm of a certain miraculous statue
and took it away with you when it was judged to have
absorbed a sufficient amount of thaumaturgic power
by this contact. From such dehberately obtained
(I scarcely know whether to call them) fetishes or
reUcs, my mind passed analogically to the fact of
:
220
Vital Lies
having once been asked to bring back from Rome an
ivy-leaf off the grave of Keats. What was the differ-
ence between this leaf and all similar mementoes-
locks of hair, autographs and so forth — on the one
hand, and, on the other hand, both the tapes I had
seen round that miraculous image at Jouarre and those
small portables which, as M. Levy-Bruhl tells us, the
Loango sorcerers turn an honest penny by placing in
contact with their own authenticated magic posses-
sions ? The difference between the two cases will
perhaps make us understand some of the peculiarities
of the mj^tical-sacramental frame of mind. Take the
ivy leaf off Keats's grave. My friend in receiving and
I in picking it, undoubtedly have a httle emotion, in
which the thought of Keats is more vivid than when
we merely mention his name, and even perhaps when
we read his poems or his Hf e. Indeed, it is for the sake
of this emotion, this acutely felt presence of what we
call '' Keats," that the leaf is picked and preserved.
But we are thoroughly aware that the leaf as such has
, nothing to do either with Keats's genius or with Keats's
sad history, even should it be materially sprung from
Keats's mortal remains. We know that our emotion
arises from our own thoughts about Keats's genius, his
untimely death and the ivy having grown out of his
grave. We know that except for the presence of such
thoughts the ivy leaf, nay the whole ivy bush, would
have no such emotional power : similarly a lock of
Keats's hair or a scrap of his writing would have no
effect on a person who did not know that it was Keats's
hair or Keats's writing ; nor upon a person who, know-
ing these things, was not emotionally sensitive to the
idea of the poet. The ivy does not produce the Keats-
emotion as a nettle stings, or a malaria-mosquito gives
fever. What works in all this case is not anything
intrinsic in the ivy, but certain ideas which we connect
with it.
Now the case is quite otherwise with the tapes
which have been tied on the arm of the wonder-working
statue : they are expected to cure rheumatics or avert
accidents quite independent of aU mental associations
of the wearer ; they may be hung as scapulars round
the neck of unconscious babes or atheistic lovers;
and similarly the various objets ffe pM which have
rubbed magical powers off the Loango sorcerer's
authentic paraphernalia are expected to heal or hurt
quite independent of any associations in the mind
of the sick friend or the Sister Helen'd enemy.
The difference between us sentimental triflers
extracting poetical pathos out of the ivy off Keats's
grave and those horn fide votaries of the Jouarre image,
those even more horn fide customers of the Loango
wizards, is that we distinguish between associations
existing only in our mind and objects and quahties
existing outside it ; between our thoughts and what
we think about ; between our feelings and what sets
222
Vital Lies
our feelings going ; while these genuine beUevers do
not thus distinguish, or even if they do distinguish
by fits and starts, relapse perpetually into that con-
fused identification, whenever they are less interested
in the nature of things and more absorbed (and they
are always thus absorbed !) in themselves and their
own hopes and fears, and loves and cravings.
Now the sacraments of the Church are approached
in a state of mind which partakes more of that of the
Loango and Jouarre votaries than of the sentimentaUsts
steahng a leaf for the love of Keats. When a CathoUc
thinks of the Eucharist he ceases to hold asunder the
notions Bread and Fhsh, Wine and Blood, each with
its ascendants and descendants and cognates leading
thought into opposite directions. He ceases Ukewise
to hold asunder the idea God from the idea Man, the
idea then from the idea now. He allows nine-tenths
of these various words' meaning to drop away, all
their incompatible denotations to vanish ; and in so
doing he loses also the clear meaning of the verb to be
with its correlated not to be. Or perhaps (and this
seems psychologically probable) the is which has faded
away as a connection between coincident quahties
gets replaced in his vague consciousness by a different
IS, the IS of / am, the mutually exclusive portions of
the two ideas being obKterated by the reaUty of his
own emotion ; since Emotion and Action check the
thought of whatever does not immediately concern
Father Tyrrell 223
them ; moreover, in the presence of emotion and
action any contradictions outside their sphere lose
their importance. Alluding to the conmion primitive
beUef that certain individuals become animals as soon
as they put on, in ritual masquerades, the skin of a
wolf, a tiger or a bear, M. Levy-Bruhl tells us that
these savages do not trouble their heads whether the man
stops being a man in order to become a tiger, nor whether
he afterwards stops being a tiger in order to become a
man " ; and adds further on : " The aim and effect of
such ceremonies and dances is to awaken and keep up . . .
the sense of essential oneness (la communion par essence)
in which are merged the present individual, the ancestor
whom he is sprung from, and the animal or vegetable
species which is his totem. For our mentality these are
necessarily three distinct realities, however closely united
by kinship. But for the pre-logical mentality of primitive
nuin, the three are one, without ceasing to be three.^^
But of all similar explanations of the sacramental
element Father Tyrrell takes no account. He is even
permanently at war with Liberal Protestantism for
its turning the Christian symbols into facts of the
human soul. According to him God is not consub-
stantial with man's spirit ; salvation is not a state
of man's inner Ufe ; the sacramental emotions are not,
like those of art, emotions which man satisfies for him-
self ; the " Transcendent," he lets us know not once but
continually, must not be understood as the subjective.
san
224
Vital Lies
I
If
In fact Father Tyrrell believes in a dimension, so to
speak, which is neither material nor mental, which
participates in both while being different from either.
And in this " transcendental " dimension all contra-
dictions and antinomies melt into the mystic unity.
XVI
The clue of rationalistic criticism, which has led
Modernists so dangerously and heroically beyond the
Church's estabUshed boundary lines, would lead them
further still into the continuous and homogeneous
field of proven facts and plausible hypothesis existing
in the mind of the scientific laity.
From the discovery that scriptural texts, instead of
being dictated by the deity, are a patchwork, even
like any heathen cycle of sagas, made of the narratives
of uncritical eye-witnesses. Modernism has gone on
to the discovery that those earhest Christian witnesses
must have shared the mental habits of their own
contemporaries, nay, that the founder of Christianity,
in order to be its founder, must have had behefs which,
80 far from being all-important to more advanced
mankind, are absolutely incompatible with its in-
evitable ideas. Furthermore, Modernism, as repre-
sented by Father Tyrrell, has gone on to recognize
that the continuity in the religious idea can be ob-
I
Father Tyrrell 225
tained only by rejecting both this hteral teaching of
Christ and his Apostles, and the successive additions
and emendations made thereto by the Church, as so
much historically explicable misinterpretation of a
nuclear group of notions and practices equally suitable
to all times, but which each time, taken separately,
was unable to assimilate without the vehicle of its
own added errors.
This explanation, obtained by mere human exam-
ination, and moreover based upon the psychological
and historical knowledge of human nature and of
human ideas and institutions, leads logically to a
further rational belief : namely, that the nuclear
groups of notions and feelings and practices for which,
under the name of " Religious Idea " Father Tyrrell
claims what we may call generative immortality, is
(in so far as it really exists) itself to be explained by
what we know, or shall get to know, of man's more
or less unchanging or changing needs and habits. In
short, after having proved that man and not God was
the Author of the Scriptures and the inspirer of Church
tradition, we should find that man was the inventor
of revelation and of sacraments, and that the God
existing in the Rehgious " Idea " was, like the re-
hgious " Idea " itself, not the Creator, but the creation
of Man. But Father Tyrrell, as we have seen, has
never followed rational criticism to this, its ultimate
consequence, but, on one path after another across
22(^
Vital Lies
'
this continuity of rational conception, has suddenly
stopped short before a chasm which interrupted his
passage : a chasm of inherited mystical behef , in-
explicable only to those who shared it. For that
mystical behef which interrupts Father Tjrrrell's
thought at the critical point is itself a humanly
exphcable phenomenon of human nature.
The clue which has led Father Tyrrell so far, and
which might have led him and his fellow-Modernists
so very much further, into a region inaccessible to
encychcals and excommunications, that clue may be
given a homely name : whjl man is likely to have done.
Or, more exphcitly : given our knowledge, historical,
philological, anthropological, psychological, and so
forth, of man's ways of proceeding, how are we to
explain the various phenomena grouped together as
the rehgious creed of the Koman CathoKc Church ?
And now, having arrived at the point where Father
Tyrrell refuses to ask more questions, we must apply
our further examinations, not in his company, but to
his person.
We must ask ourselves how, given our knowledge
of man and mankind, are we to explain, not the re-
ligious phenomena which Father Tyrrell has examined
in the teeth of the Roman CathoKc Church and its
prohibitions ; but the phenomenon of Father Tyrrell's
obstinate though partial and discriminating fidehty
to that selfsame Church of Rome ? And the formula
Father Tyrrell 227
of inquiry changes from " What is mankind likely to
have done and thought," to " What is this Modernist
priest likely to have wished ? "
Thus, after a long circuit, we are back again at the
" Will-to-heliever
XVII
" The principle of Christian action'' writes Father
Tjrrrell, ** rmkes for the fullest expansion of man's tran-
scendental and spiritual nature in every direction. It
recognizes the Divine, not only in conduct and in relation
to man's moral progress, but also in thought and feeling ;
it lives for the aesthetic and intellectual as well as for the
ethical " ought "—and ideal. It is the foe of falsehood
and of ugliness as well as of wickedness ; it sees in all of
them the principle of evil, death, and decay."
Again, on the next page :
** The truth, then, that Christianity symbolizes under
the temporal nearness of the End, is a fundamental prin-
ciple of the best spiritual life, the principle of an
attachment to the world's highest interest, at once
strengthened and subdued by an attachment to an
eternal and transcendent life, symbolized by the Kingdom
of Heaven. ..."
It would be easy to cull from Father Tyrrell's book
a httle anthology of passages hke the above, such as
might have been written by Professor James himself in
228
Vital Lies
Father Tyrrell 229
11
ii
his most moralizing and citizenly view of Pragmatism.
But such quotations would do injustice to the par-
ticular kind of Will-to-helieve really dominant in Father
Tyrrell, and really responsible for his refusal to face
the logical corollaries of his application of scientific
thought to the history and tenets of CathoUc Chris-
tianity. For Father Tjn-rell (and this is his quarrel
with that " Liberal Protestantism " which, according
to him, falsifies the " Idea " of Christianity far worse
than the most superstitious kinds of Papistry), for
Father Tjrrrell does not identify rehgion with moraUty ;
still less does he value it as a vehicle for moraUty.
That rehgion should favour righteousness is but a
secondary advantage and a secondary confirmation
due to the accident (if I may use this expression) of
the Divinity happening to have invented righteousness
and insisting upon its pursuit. And in Father Tyrrell's
thought (which naturally identifies itself with the
" Rehgious Idea "), rehgion is not there for the sake
of morahty, but rather morahty for the sake of rehgion.^
The *' fruits for hfe " are of a less obvious sort
than those cultivated by the " true-in-so-far-forth " of
Professor James ; and Father Tjnrell's Will-to-beheve
^ '^ So far as religious ethic identifies our duties in life with the Will of
Oody it asserts a neglected prijiciple of Christianity. But so far as it
identifies the moral mth the religious life and the Kingdom of Heaven
unth the ideal term of an endless social and moral process, it is a flat
etyniradiction of the Gospel of Christ'' (" Chxistianity at the Cross
Roads," p. 171). The nominative is religion.
is of a subtler, more venerable kind, a kind which was
infinitely ancient long before utiUtarianism was ever
erected into a system ; and the hfe he is aiming at is
not the mere moral, but the spiritual one.
" As things are,^' he writes on page 112, " the only
test of revelation is the test of life, not merely of moral, hut
of spiritual fruitfulness in the deepest sense.^^ This,
to borrow Professor James's happy expression, " sounds
very like " the Pragmatism of the " Varieties of Re-
hgious Experience." But note the continuation of
the passage, with its distinction between moral and
mystical and transcendental needs. *' It (Revelation)
must at once satisfy and intensify mxinh mystical and
moral need. It must bring the transcendent nearer to
his thought, feelings, and desires. It must deepen his
consciousness of union with God.^^
Let us think over these two sentences, with their
insistence upon needs, which revelation is at once to
satisfy and to intensify ; and with their unequivocal
repetition that the value of revelation is in its bringing
" the transcendent " — that is to say, that which tran-
scends reason — nearer, not only to Man's thoughts
(which, in the case of the unthinkable, can never be
very near !) but nearer also, and here the nearness may
become close indeed, nearer to man's " feehngs and
desires." Nay, those feelings and desires are to be
satisfied ; for Revelation, we are told, " must deepen
consciousness of union with God."
•ViTsr'
230
Vital Lies
And lest the reader should not be sure that Father
Tyrrell is identifying the existence of what he wishes
with the existence of his wish for it, the passage ends
as follows :
" This, as we have said, was the ' evidence * to which
Jesus appealed in proof of his * possession ' by God's
spirit. . . . Sych, too, is the evidence of Christianity
as a personal religion, its power over sovls that are already
Christian in sympathy and capacity ; the soul-compelling
power of the Spirit of Christ. Any other ' sign,' be it
miracle or argument, will appeal only to the faithless
and perverse . . . it may change their theology, it cannot
change their hearts.''
Now, before examining the value of such " evidence "
as can " thus change the heart," I would open a par-
enthesis about the other sort of evidence, the one which
Jesus and Father Tyrrell both make thus light of.
Old-fashioned though it sound, I should be extremely
incHned to accept the evidence of a miracle, if only a
miracle could be shown to bear upon the point at
issue, and, moreover, proved to have really taken place.
For, after all, a miracle is only an experiment by which
the divinity (hke some great Chemist or Physician)
should condescend to demonstrate a certain proposi-
tion, such, for instance as the consubstantiality of the
eucharistic wafer with Christ's body, which was
demonstrated by the miracle of Bolsena in the year
1263. The evidence of a miracle when it did happen
Father Tyrrell 231
need not be diminished by the difficulty of proving
that it had happened, by the scarceness of such demon-
strations on the part of Omnipotence, or even by the
fact, pointed out by Father Tyrrell with regard to the
Resurrection, that miracles usually turn out to be not
what has actually happened, but what somebody
could not help expecting would happen. Indeed, I
would point out that Christian behef was originally,
has hitherto been, and will doubtless (thanks to Pope
Pius X.) long be founded upon miracles accepted as
divine experiments which show that certain unlikely
statements were true.
This is what unbelievers and orthodox both think
about " evidence." Let us return to Father Tyrrell's
views on the subject.
The sentences quoted above (and a score of similar
ones which I could quote) not only reject both mir-
aculous demonstration and logical argument as suit-
able only to '* faithless " and " perverse " persons,
but leave no doubt as to what in both Father Tyrrell's
own views (and his views of Christ's views) should
constitute proper " evidence " to the truth of the
Christian Revelation.
In analysing the passage last quoted, the chief point
to be noted is that the revelation of a very particular
fact, namely, the " possession " of a man, Jesus, by
God's Spirit, is proved to be truly a revelation and
truly a revelation of a truth, by its answering the need
232
Vital Lies
^
M
of those whom it can satisfy. The existence of a given
fact [the fact of " possession " of a particular man in
that particular "transcendent" way] is thus made
dependent on the readiness of certain other people to
accept it. The doubts of those not interested in the
fact under discussion are dismissed on the score of
lack of that bias in its favour ; and only those are
accepted as judges who have got that bias, those
" souls ab-eady Christian in sympathy and capacity."
This sounds paradoxical. But Father Tyrrell would
remind us that in every branch of daily experience
truth is seen to be acceptable only when it finds a
certain mental preparation : can a truth of mathematics
or physics be recognized by a man totally ignorant of
the elements of science ? Evidently not ! Moreover,
Father Tyrrell would argue, does not daily experience
show that the recognition of truth depends on a desire
for truth, and is not truth itself one of the objects of
man's pursuit and craving ?
Granted! But desire for truth in general, and
recognition of a given truth in particular, are not the
same thing as the true existence of a fact. It took a
great many thousand years of intellectual preparation
on the part of mankind at large, and an inordinate,
invincible desire for truth on the part of one or two
astronomers, for the recognition of the Earth's going
round the Sun. But the Sun and the Earth did not
require to wait for either that intellectual culture or
mn
Father Tyrrell 233
that abstract love of truth before assuming that par-
ticular relation of going and gone round ; indeed, if
the earth had not gone round the sun quite inde-
pendent of anyone being prepared to recognize the
truth of its doing so, it is conceivable that there might
have been no persons capable or incapable of grasping
that particular truth, no persons with or without a
desire for truth of any kind, indeed, no life, human,
animal, or vegetable, preparing or not preparing for
the eventful recognition of that or any other truth —
on this earth at all. But behind this identification
(so unpragmatistically disregarded by the Sun and
Earth) of Truth and recognition of Truth, there is
in Father Tyrrell's soul (as there probably was in
those " souls already Christian in sympathy and
capacity ") an identification of Truth with Righteous-
ness, and also an identification of Trulh with the
Divinity.
The first has been the work largely of professional
moraUsts, from Moses to Socrates, and from St Paul
to Tolstoi, in the last of whom it has culminated in
the declaration that the only true science is the know-
ledge of right and wrong, and that all the onomies and
ologies are false sciences because they do not make
man more moral. With this morahzing tendency
has united the century-long habit of theological
definition and condemnation, punishing error as sin
against God, and identifying truth with the Church's
■J
m
234
Vital Lies
Father Tyrrell 235
pronouncements andwith whatever the Church accepted
as the word of God.
Of all these kinds of truths-in-so-far-foHh, there are
traces in Father Tyrrell's thought and very visibly
in that typical quotation. But there is a " true-in-so-
far-forth" infinitely more subtle, more difficult to
seize in its fluctuating yea-and-nay, in and out ap-
pearances and disappearances ; a true-in-so-far-forth
which, in Father TyrreU's case, is not only the legacy
of centuries and centuries of rehgious habits, but also
the theoretic gifts of an ultra-modem philosophy, of
that Bergsonism (faithful or not to Bergson's own
intentions) of which Father TyrreU was an adept and
intended to become an expounder.
Let us try to catch a sight of this Protean thing.
The Reader will remember that in the first quota-
tion just given, Father TyrreU says that reveUuion
must " at once satisfy and intensify man's mystical
and moral need," as if a revelation, instead of referring
to some fact, in this case Christ's divinity, were a revela-
tion, i.e. a true revelation, in virtue of its suitability
to the spiritual wants of the hstener ; and as if,
therefore, the revelation in question would have been
untrue if it embodied facts which— instead of " bring-
ing the transcendent nearer to his (man's) thoughts
and feehngs and desires," and " deepening the con-
sciousness of union with God "—had necessarily
produced the very reverse effect. And lest the Reader
should consider this passage as ambiguous, and refuse
to construe " revelation must " into " revelation must
do all this in order to he true," I will repeat the end
of the quotation :
" This—'' [i.e. " satisfying and intensifying man's
mystical and moral need," *' bringing the transcendent
nearer to man's thought and feelings and desires,"
** deepening his consciousness of union with God "]
" this was the evidence to which Jesus appealed in proof
of His possession by God's spirit. . . . Suoh, too, is the
evidence of Christianity as a persoruil religion."
All this is what Father TyrreU sums up at the begin-
ning of the passage as the " test of life," '* which is,
as things are, the only test of revelation." If, there-
fore, the revelation aUeged by Christ had been, let
us say, the one which came to Nietzsche as he sat
under that rock in the Alps, the atrocious revelation
of the Everlasting Return and its hopelessness, then
that revelation, not standing this " test of life," would
have been untrue.
Mr SchiUer, in a remarkable passage of one of his
Pragmatistic essays, has indeed asserted that there
could not exist a thoroughly depressing and demorahz-
ing truth, because mankind would have stamped it out.
But I do not know whether Father TyrreU would go
so far. There was, indeed, no need for facing this
painful alternative, for Father TyrreU had another
line of thought, or rather another confusion of lines
ill
(
236
Vital Lies
i
1
I
ii
of thought, in which to find safety. On page 173
of his book there stands the following passage :
"// trvth he the correct arUidpation of a possible
experience, it is our spiritual needs that are true to God."
I have meditated many hours on the logical contents
of this sentence which, with its Peircian pragmatic
beginning, bears so agreeable a promise of " making our
ideas clear." And I cannot yet unravel whether its
technical structure impUes that God is an experience
foreseen hy our spiritual needs which are therefore proved
to be true, or that our spiritual needs being an experi-
ence, God is therefore a correct anticipation of them and
in so far true. But Father Tyrrell has reminded us
elsewhere that spiritual needs and their satisfaction
are data of experience as much, at least, as what we
caU the facts of science ; Bergsonian philosophy has
shadowed forth that reason is probably a mere blunder-
ing adjunct of action, and that it is only by leaning
over our obscure consciousness, and Kstening to the
confused hum of instincts and impulses that we can
hope to learn something of the secrets of reaUty. And
80, letting alone aU attempts at hteral and logical
interpretation, I think we may understand darkly,
catch gUmpses of the flickering coming and going of
Father TyrreU's thought, if we content ourselves with
repeating that mystic formula : " If truth be the correct
anticipation of a possible experience, it is our spiritual
needs that are true to God.''
Father Tyrrell 237
I have called the formula mystic ; and mystic it
has every right to be. For are we not dealing with
what transcends human reason, with an order of things
whose sacraments partake of contradictory natures
and exist both inside and outside of space and time,
where what is believed has compelling powers ^ upon
what exists, a region (at once of reality and of thought)
where, as Goethe's Chorus Mysticus tells us, temporal
things are but a symbol, where the unattainable
becomes fulfilment, and the inexpressible becomes fact :
" Alles Vergdngliche
1st nur tin Gleichniss ;
Das Unzuldngliche
Hier wird's Ereigniss
Das Uribeschreibliche
Hier isfs gethan"
XVIII
" // truth be the correct anticipation of a possible experience, it is our
spiritual needs that are true to God."
As if in explanation of this mysterious pattern of
words. Father Tyrrell more than once reminds us that
* W. James : " God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and
increase of very being from our fidelity." Professor James did not
see that belief in such a God would be a comfort only if God were
not the Creator, but a fellow-creature ; not responsible for the
Universe and its evils, but trying to break loose from those evils.
In fact, part of a Manichean dualism, or subject to an antique Fate.
Or was Professor James's Pluralism merely a revived, a homeo-
pathic Manicheism ?
238
Vital Lies
I
mental habits, desires, in short, " spiritual needs," are
as much facts of experience as anjrthing we account
knowledge of the world outside us. Undoubtedly ;
but the experience of which spiritual needs form part
is experience of ourselves, of our own inner reaUty.
The experience of the not-ourselves is a different thing,
and the two kinds of experience are by no means
always in the relation of mirrored and mirroring
surface. The existence of a need, spiritual or material,
testifies to the previous existence of a group or sequence
of facts standing to this " need " in the relation of
cause. But this pre-existing group of causes of a need
is by no means necessarily the same as the group
of phenomena which would satisfy that need ; the
desire for food is not caused by the pre-existence of
food, but by the pre-existence of certain organic con-
ditions often implying rather the absence of food than
its presence, and producing that presence of food only
indirectly and in no inevitable manner. That in a
great many cases a need should answer to really ex-
isting objects ; that those really existing objects
should, in a yet larger number of cases, be such as to
put an end to the need, is exphcable by racial adaptation
to surroundings, individuals with unquenchable needs,
and unquenchable needs in individuals themselves,
having been eUminated under the competitive stress
of needs which it was possible to quench. But this
adaptative coincidence*^does not justify the assump-
Father Tyrrell 239
tion that the existence of a need implies either the
existence of the wherewithal to that need's satisfaction,
or that the need, if conscious, is correct as to the
nature of that satisfying wherewithal ; indeed, so soon
as representation of a satisfying object accompanies
desires, the mere feehng of want, although in itself
perhaps the correct expression of an organic state,
is subject to an association, even an interpretation
which may happen to be incorrect.
But if a " need " does not prove the possible existence
of its object, still less does the existence of a " need "
prove that the object is already existent. A " need '*
may be, often is (otherwise there would have been no
human progress) a brand new group of " lackings ; " a
need may be an unprecedented need due to unprece-
dented causes — ^indeed, to be thus new and unpre-
cedented has been the mark of every " higher " need,
therefore of every spiritual one : does not Father
T5n*rell himself deny the spiritual element to the
" religions " of primeval man ? Nay, more ; a need
may be such that its object inevitably eludes its pur-
suit, it may be a need for more, let us say a need of
justice or perfection : does the existence of this need
prove the pre-existence of sufficient justice or
perfection ?
Perhaps Father Tyrrell would answer boldly : " Yes ;
the need of justice and perfection proves the existence
of such justice and perfection in God." But this is
240
Vital Lies
using the existence of God as proof in an argument
itself intended to prove God's existence by the sup-
posed relation between needs and the wherewithal to
their satisfaction.
As a psychological fact, such an unconscious argu-
ment in a circle can be frequently traced in theology
(as elsewhere) and even in the theology of such
a psychologist as Father Tyrrell. The unravelling of
our premises, the separating of our standpoints, and
the holding asunder of our many successive subjects
of discourse, are intellectual tools which, hke per-
spective and foreshortening, take thousands of years
to fashion and master ; and despite all our treatises
of logic, we are still in danger of thinking, so to speak,
a full face eye in a profile head ; we are perpetually
mistaking our habitual hypothesis for facts in their
own support. The theological habit has been, and is,
to think not merely of God as pre-existent, but also
of man's faculties, hence his " needs " as created by
God with distinct reference to God's own existence ;
hence a need for God, being instituted by God, points
with the cogency of a circular argument to the reaUty
of God. And this circular manner of thinking has
doubtless been increased by the verbalism — that is to
Bay, the deficient analysis of meanings in such dis-
cussions. The habit of speaking of a need for some-
thing, has overlaid and hidden the fact of a need m
sememe; and verbal co-existence of desire and its
Father Tyrrell 241
object has been taken as representing a real co-
existence outside mere words, or, at the best, mere
verbal thought.
I have applied the word pre-existence to the where-
withal of satisfying a need, as the pre-existence, for
instance, of a divinity. I wish to return to the question
of pre-existence insisted on in all such theological argu-
ments, because it just happens that, in at least half of
all cases we know of, " need," want or desire, inci-
dentally shows that its object does not pre-exist
because it sets man making that object ; shows, more-
over, that the object is not independent of the need,
since the object is made conformably to that need.
For desire, which is what the old proverb mongers
meant by necessity, is the mother of invention.
And thus if man's soul needs, craves for, insists upon,
certain hopes and consolations which (it is Father
TjTrell himself who repeats it) are not warranted by
his rational knowledge of the existing universe, may
we not suppose that when we find such a " need '*
satisfied, it is, as in the case of arts and industries,
simply because man has made for himself what he
wanted ; and because a " spiritual need " is a need
whose satisfaction can be compassed without help of
objective reaUty, and merely by the presence of thought
and feehngs. And is it not consonant with all that
we know of man's cravings and makings, that reUgion
should prove itself merely one of man's great crafts.
2^2
Vital Lies
the great self-unconscious craft which has provided,
among many other much needed things, just those
hopes and consolations which Father Tyrrell finds
in the CathoHc Christian revelation such as he
accepts it ?
In this sense the anticipation of a particular ex-
perience would indeed prove the true existence of our
spiritual needs. But this humdrum rational pro-
position is not in the least equivalent to what I have
ventured to call, on the analogy of certain symbohcal
interlacings of Knes and of circles, the mysterious,
nay, the cabahstic pattern into which Father Tyrrell
has woven the same words.
XIX
" The Seraph Contemplatum "
The growing recognition by philosophers (ordinary
human beings having long taken it for granted) that
Man has other needs than those of mere reason, that
life consists of feeUng and action more than of thought,
and that there are other imperatives besides the
rational — this growing and now overwhelming recog-
nition, has, of course, served as explanation and apology
of the various Wills-to-beUeve and Wills-to-make-
Others-believe.
But in all this talk of man's emotional wants our
Father Tyrrell 243
obscurantists overlook that there exists a way of
satisfying the soul's cravings other than that of beUef :
the way of Art. Bent upon keeping or reinstating, or
(as we shall see in the case of M. Sorel's " Syndicalist
Myth " ) making afresh some kind of unrational belief,
they do not perceive that a good half of all mythology
is not dogma, but poetry, a good half of ritual is Art ;
that contemplation does not imply the question of
true and false, and that the legitimate satisfaction of
our wants, spiritual as well as temporal, is not through
beheving which we cannot, in so far as is genuine,
conmiand, but through making — that is, through the
creation in the world outside or the world within, of
those things, those shapes, those satisfactions, whereof
we stand in need. Thus, in the Will-to Believe there
has always lurked a portion, or a particle, of a nobler
essence : the Will, if I may call it so, to Contemplate.
It is to contemplation, to contemplative selection
and concentration that we owe all poetry, all Art, all
disinterested spirituality ; indeed, the spiritual hfe in
the psychological sense, is essentially the life of
contemplation.
All practically tends to be one-sided and perfunctory
because it sees in things only so many means to our
own constantly changing and partial ends : the least
possible time and attention are given because time
and attention are wanted for the next adjustment.
And this perfunctoriness of practicality may perhaps
244
Vital Lies
Father Tyrrell 245
be increased by an actual self-pcNwessing and self-
developing instinct, bidding the soul hurry until it
can find refreshment, repose, purification and renewal
in those visions which it makes to satisfy its own need
for more beauty and more righteousness than reality
as yet supplies : contemplation refits us for prac-
tice, and practice, in its turn, finds its fruition in
contemplation.
Such contemplation is an act of choice, in the sense
that it answers to permanent and co-ordinated pre-
ferences ; and it is an act of will in so far as it includes
directing and steadying of our attention, excluding
and intensifying.
Such contemplation of what we have ourselves
selected and co-ordinated is, I believe, the spiritual,
as distinguished from the utihtarian or merely person-
ally emotional, essence of all high religions. The
contemplation, steady and reiterated, of what, under
the name of Zeus, is vast and beautiful and terrible
in the material firmament ; under the name of Jehovah,
of what is irresistible in moral discipline and social
law ; under the name of Christ and Mary, of the purity
and tenderness, the brotherly and motherly loving
kindness, of which we do not get enough in Ufe ; under
the name of Buddha (who knows ?) of the insignificance
of our own fife, the indifference of the Universe, the
levelling and obUterating power of death, to feel which
gives us patience and peace.
i
Such contemplation does not imply belief. We can
get the good of these symbols while knowing that they
are made solely by ourselves. It is all this which
Pragmatists misunderstand when they speak of true
to our wants, using the word true in the sense, which is
not its sense, of fiUingness to something asked for and
expected, as when we say that a note is true, meaning
in tune, that is, precisely what it should be. Art and
poetry, contemplation of all kinds, draw upon reality
for their material; but their creations are outside
reality, and hence yon side of true and urUrue.
Walking among the olive yards of Val di Greve
(with distant profile of pine woods against the sky), I
was met this morning by the sounds of funeral bells,
and the sudden recollection that it was the Eve of All
Souls. The peasants along the roads are going to
visit their dead ; and the little desolate village ceme-
teries must be full of the bitter scent of their chrysan-
themum garlands, all soaked like the faded vines, the
fallen leaves, in the death of the summer. I know it
all so well; know it moreover, as feeling. I feel
profoundly united to something in it all, in these rites,
these creeds which are alien to me. And thinking of
Father Tjm-eU, and the whole of this discussion about
beliefs and believing, it comes home to me that every
one of us with any imaginative sensitiveness and
historical culture (and more and more as both of them
246
Vital Lies
increase) must in this manner partake in the religions
of other folk, of other times, and vaguely, even in the
dim forgotten ones. Partake not in Christianity only,
but in the Paganism beyond it ; worship Apollo, Apollo
cleansed of his oracle-shop venaUty and trickery,
clarified to the pure poetry of sun-kissed Delphic
rocks and of filleted Pheidian gravity and loveliness ;
Apollo and Demeter quite as much as Jesus and Mary.
They are all cherished, the Divine Ones, beUeved in as
shrined in our spirit, as shrines, also, of our spirit.
And is this not enough ?
XX
I fear not. ReUgion, with whatever of Art and of
contemplative thought it has aUied itself, is bom not
of Man's strength but of his weakness. It is, essen-
tially, the category of our thinking (if thinking we may
call it ) where wishes are fulfilled ; fulfilled not by
imposing our will upon reahties, or creating a world of
noble appearances, but by brooding over those wishes,
those wants and achings in our own heart. ReUgion
provides for the mortal want which cannot provide for
itself : it promises more of whatsoever is stinted — more
love, more justice, more hfe ; the very promise arising
from the felt insufficiency. The understanding and
sympathy which it brings is bom of the loneUness of
M/
m
Father Tyrrell 247
the lonely ; the balm which it pours into the wounds
is made of their smarting ; as in Browning's poem,
the strength which cows the tyrant is but his victim's
weakness.
Above all. Religion ministers to one of our deepest
needs : it gives the sense of reciprocity. Herein it is
different from what we call Poetry or Art. If I get
aesthetic and moral satisfaction by contemplating
such quahties and associations as are lovable in, let us
say, Apollo or St Francis, it is I who do all the loving.
Apollo or St Francis can do me good, but through my
own doing, since I have to a certain extent, made or
re-made him. But human hearts are not to be satisfied
by their own conscious activities, and human creatures
bring into rehgious contemplation that need, that
habit of reciprocity obtaining among themselves.
They want not only to love, but to be loved. They
do not seek consolation from mere refreshing loveliness
and nobihty. The consolation they crave is that
given to him whom his mother comforteth. For them
love must be loving and being loved. And all devout-
ness turns to some lover-Uke or filial relation. Thus far
the human need for reciprocity. But, at the same
time, rehgious persons require also community of
feeling, or the illusion, the feehng, of community of
feeUng. They would indeed hke to be the best beloved
child, but they also want other children, brethren,
with whom to love in company. For human creatures
-I i
I
248
Vital Lies
feel insecure and lost by themselves. They require
almost as much as light and bodily warmth, the sense
that others are thinking and feehng like themselves ;
a want, this of community of feehng, so deep in
us all that we satisfy it all through our daily Hfe
by the most obvious hoodwinkings and ostrich-
like proceedings. For it is tiring, tiring Hke a low
temperature, to know oneself alone in a way of
thinking or feehng, and to muster up the energy
requisite to go on with that thought or that feeling
uncompanioned. ...
This need for community or companionship is
satisfied by that (considerably fictitious and mis-
leading) abstraction, the Church ; and by the thought
of miUions of fellow-creatures who are known to agree
in our thought and feehng, or perhaps merely who are
not supposed to be disagreeing therewith ! The other
poor httle brethren gathered with us under the
Madonna's cloak (as in Pier della Francesca's fresco
and the Venetian gate rehefs) keep us warm quite as
much as the great mantle itself ; and are, perhaps,
only one-half less imaginary than the great gracious
Mother herself.
That cloak of the Madonna is the church of brick
and mortar, as well as the abstract church mihtant or
triumphant ; the concrete church whose aesthetic
unity of plan, of hghting and enclosure, makes us think
that the old crones and fleshly-looking priests are
Father Tyrrell 249
feeling and thinking as we do ! And that material
edifice satisfies us by the sense that if we have carried
our sorrows there, every one else has done, and is
doing, so ; the empty nave and aisles, the dusty
comers where ghmmer shrine lamps are full of sorrow-
ing desires. We feel that ; and we do not feel (for
feeling selects what it likes) that all these sorrows and
desires would in reahty conflict with our own quite as
much as concord with them. We forget in that church
how, in the houses and streets and the fields, burdens
are not only shared, but, the heavier and more numerous
they are, also cruelly loaded on other shoulders. There
is in religion, whether in the brick and mortar church
or in the abstract Christianity or Cathohcism, much
of that diffuse emotion, suggestive but unlabelled,
which music awakens, and of which each can appro-
priate and share (or think that he shares) whatever
he pleases.
Whereas to make one's sanctuaries for oneself and
dwell in them alone ; to shape an Apollo of the ivory
and gold of order and lucidity, throwing away all the
baser material ; to paint a Madonna on the pure
gold ground of whatever great love oneself may ever
have felt — that is a rare, a difficult, and to the
taste of most human creatures, an unprofitable
business. They do not want contemplative visions,
but authorised delusions and miracles. Rehgion
deals in miracles because it ministers to helpless
2SO
Vital Lies
hopefulness. In both senses of Goethe's ambiguous
words :
" Das Umiddngliche
Hier mrd's Ereigniss"
Through it not only is the unattainable attained, but
in the ordinary sense of that German word, the
insufficierU is made sufficing. For one of the functions
of religion is to furnish not only the impossible that
man cannot reach, but also the mere more, demanded
by his poverty and hunger : Uke Jesus, Religion does
not only raise the Dead and make the BHnd to see ;
it turns the water at Cana into wine, and feeds great
multitudes with seven loaves and a few little fishes.
The want becomes belief in its own satisfaction.
That any one should feel what religion must be, and
yet not have it, is a surprise to the genuine beUevers
among one's friends ; and, at times, alas, a source of
vain hopes and disappointed misunderstanding. If
you feel reUgion Uke that, they will sometimes say.
Why, then you are religious. Alas, dear friends, it is
because I feel what religion is, all that it gives and
saves, that I know that religion must be made by Man.
XXI
Psychological analysis and observation will teach
us more and more to reinstate the (in our spiritual
Father Tyrrell 251
life) negative factor, which is often stronger than the
positive factor, although hidden by the positive
factor's greater . . . well, by the positive factor's posi-
tiveness. Thus, under the positive heading " Will-to-
BeUeve " there comes in an all-important neglected
negation, " the Will-Not-to-Disbelieve."
This is, I think, one of the dominant instincts of
the soul, because removal from a position of habitual
thought to another is one of the most disruptive and
painful efforts (judging by the feeling of it, I might have
said of bodily efforts) we can be called on to make ;
disruptive and painful in proportion as our thought
is organic and organised ; rooted in our nature and
rich in ramifications. It happens sometimes that we
can watch ourselves, obUged to make this effort, and
shirking it with the unreasoning ingenuity which
shirks all kinds of discomforts : we are holding on,
shrinking, and, at the same time that we cling to the
old, laying hold of something else and shifting our
intellectual weight on to that. We get to think the
other thought, but only by averting our eyes from its
otherness ; calling it by the same name in order to
keep up the comfortable, Hfe-saving sense of famili-
arity ; or else stealthily moving, on to that new and
hated bit of spiritual ground, our pet Lares, or our
favourite heirlooms.
It is not the pleasure or advantage of what we
have not yet enjoyed, it is the habit of what in many
u \
^
252
Vital Lies
Father Tyrrell 253
cases we may have almost ceased to enjoy which is
at the bottom of much " will-to-beUeve." Thus, as
remarked, will-to-beUeve can, in nine cases out of ten,
be analysed down into mll-not-to-dishelieve.
It would seem to be thus with Modernists : they
will give up the unity and tradition of the Church,
if only they may consider themselves as the reposi-
tories of that tradition and the restorers of that unity.
They will give up Christianity if only . . . well, if
only you leave them Christ. Or, rather, they will give
up Christ if only you will leave them the name of
Christ.
And naturally ; for that name of Christ has become
for them, not the poor thing they themselves mean by
symbol, but what psychology means by that term :
an " open sesame " for certain emotional phenomena.
XXII
Will-not-to-DisbeUeve, cUnging to habitual and
beloved practices and formulas ; Will-to-Contemplate,
craving for whatever helps, by ready-made and time-
enriched symbol, to steady without imprisoning our
thought of righteousness and beauty and harmony,
of aU wherewith present reahty whets, without satis-
fying, our hunger ; Will (and this is the most difficult
to unravel) Will or Wish, mistaken for its own fulfil-
ment, lover's dream, mystic's prayer, which is its own
fancied and felt reaUsation ; wish for immortality,
salvation, for God, creating in man's thought another
world, a state of being redeemed, and a deity according
to our heart's desire. All these are the various kinds
of " Will-to-beheve " which arrest Father Tyrrell
and his fellow-Modernists on those scientific roads
converging towards absolute freedom of thought.
But besides these, or mingled in them, or perhaps
sunmiing them up while separate (" not a third sound
but a star ") there is the Will-not-to-leave-the-Church.
The Church : not merely a certain body of beUefe ;
not merely the Church spiritual in the psychological
not transcendental sense ; but the Church historical,
human, social : the Church made of fellow-worshippers,
nav, the Church of brick and mortar, or ashlar or marble ;
the Church which is the visible Aesthetic equivalent, in
its uphfting or brooding forms, in its serenity of white
light or its soothing mystery of darkness, of all the
soul has ever imagined of moral peace, lucidity and
harmony ; the Church which, in the squaUidest
countries, is alone swept and garnished and purified
with incense, and in the poorest has vessels of silver,
and fresh-washed hnen ; the Church where the dead
have lain for centuries under the slabs, and into which
all the ages of man have entered, and knelt, or been
carried as infants or as corpses.
254
Vital Lies
XXIII
The day before yesterday, one of the first wintry
afternoons, I went, towards twilight, into some churches,
and preferably into those humbler ones where piety
gUdes in at dusk to mysterious' Uttle services which
are not obUgatory,
In that half hght, with only a few candles on the
altar or lamps before shrines, one feels oneself cradled
in the unsubstantial Church, not the stone and brick
which assert themselves by day, but the shadowy
spaces which they hollow out and enclose, the real
church of the spirit, not of the body. The people
who have stolen in one by one, barely Ufting the leather
door curtain, do not take heed of one another ; and
when each has sat or knelt down among the empty
benches, he sees, in that gloom, only the mystic golden
blaze of the altar and the vestments. But they feel
that they are not alone : they are side by side with
unseen fellow-creatures stripped by this darkness of
aU vain work-a-day personahty, reduced to mere
similar souls, suffering or hopeful, human, with a
common human need for sympathy or consolation ;
the human being in its weakness and sadness, the
ghosts that lurks in each of us, but shrouded in the
majestic impersonal forms of that church, of its half-
visible aisles and arches. And even if custom blunt
Father Tyrrell 255
and leaves things scarcely noticed, there must be peace
and rest and refreshment to be brought back from
these places ; the sense of those other men and women
unseen, nameless, and almost shapeless, who murmur
or chant the same (even unheard) words of supplica-
tion or thanksgiving, must leave the certainty that
there is, brooding like the dusky architecture, shining
out mysteriously Uke the distant altar, a great Reality
who hears and answers. The visible church is, I have
often felt, the shape of the invisible God. How much
more must not the prayers of these unseen fellow-
worshippers become the assurance of that God's Usten-
ing and understanding !
These are feeUngs in which, by the power of Art
and of whatever human sympathy one may possess,
even such an unbeliever as has never beheved, can
for a moment participate. What must not be the
longing for all this of one who has participated with-
out suspicion of his own fancy's share ; the longing
for that certainty such as neither act nor imagination
brings, the certainty that this is not the illusion of
the Creature, but the reaUty of the Divine ; what
must not be the longing for the faith that there is
Something — Something inexpressibly greater than all
longings — at the other end of these human supplications
and actions of thanks !
In the flash, the quiver of sympathy, by which we
glance into a soul's depths, as we sometimes glance
256
Vital Lies
:i
(1
1!
by a lightning's quivering flash into the veined and
opaline heart of a great cloud mass — in that transient
but unforgettable comprehension of Cathohc Chris-
tianity's gifts to its believers, how fooUsh and grotesque
becomes our surprise that Modernists hke Father
Tyrrell should not have gone further ; how respectful
becomes our amazement that they should have gone
so far from the full unreasoned acceptance of all these
things which the poor human heart has fashioned for
its comfort during the innumerable ages.
XXIV
At the bottom of Modernism (and there was a
Protestant Modernism long before we ever heard of
a CathoUc one) is the recognition that the power, the
human value, of reUgion is not in its doctrines. A
dogma is but a pattern of words, conveying different
meanings, or no meaning at all, to those who honestly
accept it as an emotional spell or a disciplinary word
of command. For emotion is directly communicable,
because it depends upon imitation of an attitude, or
action, or merely a gesture. Moods and habits can
be got secondhand and yet be genuine and eflGlcacious.
The antique mysteries, with their cjnnbal and torch,
bound their initiates in a unity of feeUng and habits
far more real than any community of dogma. Corn-
Father Tyrrell 257
munion with other worshippers is probably a large
part of the supposed union with the divinity, whether
that divinity be called Demeter, or Isis, or Christ.
Hence the all-importance of rites and of words which,
having lost any definite meaning to the intellect, have
become so many open sesames to the emotions. This
side of reUgion has the further advantage of being
taught less by the priest than by the mother; its
essentials have been handed on by the emotional
selection of kinships and surroundings. The arch-
type of such rehgious influence are the family rites of
Paganism and Judaism. The speciaUsed priesthood
of Christianity has taken over some of their potency ;
but a good deal may have got lost in the transfer.
Reading St Augustine, one has the impression that
Christianity must have seemed a kind of Rationalism ;
and, for all its appeal to individual hope and fear,
have caused a wrench, a sense of emotional diminu-
tion, to the convert from the old gods. And in our
times the loss of ritual conmiunion with one's fellow-
men, the loss, also, of the sacramental framework of
all human Ufe, has once more left the days and the
soul of man empty and desolate even as the material
world had become with the death of paganism ; a
world shorn of divinity, " die entgotterte Natur '* of
Schiller's poem.
The recognition of these facts is as essential to
Modernism as its rejection of the dogmatic Hteralness
1r
n
258
Vital Lies
1 1
of uncritical ecclesiasticism. Modernists like Father
Tyrrell have learned from their historical and philo-
logical and pscyhological studies not only that dogmas
will not hold water, but also that their real efficacy is
symbohc and ritual. And in this recognition they
have overlooked that dogma is the warrant for behef,
and that ritual and symbol are, after all, founded
upon beUef : that vast and soaring cathedral whose
arches and wall-veils, and buttresses and pinnacles,
draw our eyes to heaven and become themselves a
vision of a heavenly Jerusalem, is based, after all, on
a substrate of alleged facts ; and if you pull up fact after
fact, crumble one dogma after another into mere
symbol, your edifice will speedily show rent after
rent, and the day will come when it will strew the
ground, as the pinewoods of Olympia are strewn
with the column-drums of the temple of Zeus,
which in its day was one of the seven wonders of
the world.
There are many who think the condemnation of
Modernism by the present Pope, unless promptly
withdrawn, may sign the handing over of CathoUcism
to uneducated classes and countries, and to unedu-
cable individuals, its banishment to such rustic
" Hinterlands " as gave their names to the last votaries
of what the successful Christian innovation called
Paganism. And Father TyrreU may prove more
correct than he wished in prophesying that Chris-
Father Tyrrell 259
tianity itself must perish unless it accepts scientific
criticism.
But CathoUcism and Christianity have been sound
and secure, and I would almost add, sincere, only in
times and in souls which could say, like Newman
(" Apologia " 49), " Dogma has been the fundamental
principle of my religion. I know no other sort of
religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of
religion ; religion as a mere sentiment is to me a dream
and a mockery. ^^
XXV
These ideas which had come to me while reading
Father Tyrrell's " Christianity at the Cross Roads,"
have been accidentally confirmed in my mind in a talk
I have lately had with an extremely inteUigent Roman
priest. Don Erasmo — so I will call him — answers
the question embodied in my last chapter, by remind-
ing me that the Church can perfectly take back all its
censure of Modernism ; and, indeed, every other
thing it may at any time have said when it once ceases
to hold water. Triumphantly he points out that the
Church fought successively against the philosophy of
St Thomas, the Devotion to the Sacred Heart, and I
know not what else, which it subsequently incor-
porated. Newman, says Don Erasmo, censured by
Pius IX, was given the cardinal's hat by Leo XIII ;
U
w
260
Vital Lies
and Pius X has presented a principal Roman Church
(in the very middle of the Corso !) to the Rosminians
who had been condemned by his predecessors. " For
the Church,^^ says Don Erasmo (himself talking per-
haps to-day's heresy and to-morrow's orthodoxy)
** the Church is not opinion. It is Life, the very spirit
of Life, and its vitality and adaptability are so mar-
velUrus that one is really forced to attribute them to the
Holy Ghostr
[I can imagine some future Bergsonian Don Erasmo
identifying the third Person of the Trinity with the
Bergsonian conception of Life, with the Evolution
CrMrice itself.]
But this erring and repenting Church, in what is it
any better than any of us erring and repenting indi-
viduals ? Or better than our other institutions per-
petually exchanging an old imperfection for a new
one ? What is its Life ? Or rather, in this series of
changes, of alterations and recantations, what is the
unity which does the living ?
I refrained from putting this question. But Don
Erasmo answered it without my formulating, when
he went on to tell me that the fact of not partaking
in communion at Easter (he had been lamenting that
only nine per cent, of the male population of Milan
accomplish this duty) constitutes secession from
cathohcism, because Catholicism hinges not on doctrine
but on Sacrament.
Father Tyrrell 261
This is the explanation (though Don Erasmo is no
Modernist) of the attitude of Modernism, and especi-
ally, as I have attempted to show in the foregoing
chapters, of Father Tyrrell. You may think as differ-
ently as you please from your fellow-Christians,
indeed (according to Modernism) it is quite impossible
for people of different mentahty and culture to think
otherwise than differently, or to attach the same
meaning to the same words ; but you can feel
aUke, and you can act aUke ; or rather you can, by
your similar action, bear witness to a presumable
similarity of feeling. Moreover [and although the
Modernists do not perhaps proclaim it, this
is the psychological basis of all their varyings],
moreover you can fed united, feel similarity and
union, and it is such feeling of similarity
and union with past and future generations, with
distant unknown individuals, which is procured by
the sacraments. The sacraments unite ; identify
not only with God, but with all those who partake
in them : they enlarge the single believer's sense of
living, they give the feeUng of participation with the
whole. So long as the Church possesses this focus of
emotional union, or more correctly, this focus for the
emotion of union, the Church is herself a unity ; the
Church survives, and all her changes may be regarded
as those of a growing organism.
This is, I think, the Modernist point of view.
I.i
H
262
Vital Lies
What the Modernists fail to see, exactly because
themselves dominated by that very emotion, is that
once dogmatic acquiescence gone, the purely sub-
jective matter of such sacramental union will soon
be mooted. And this subjective nature of the sacra-
mental once understood, once men have seen that
it is they who are making their God for themselves,
what will become of the unity of the church and its
vitaUty ? Or rather, what will become of the Church
at all?
' 1
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HORTUS VIT^, Or, THE HANGING
GARDENS
THE ENCHANTED WOODS
THE SPIRIT OF ROME
HAUNTINGS: FANTASTIC STORIES
THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER
POPE JACYNTH AND OTHER FAN-
TASTIC TALES
GENIUS LOCI : NOTES ON PLACES
LIMBO, AND OTHER ESSAYS, to
WHICH IS
MANTUA
ADDED ARIADNE IN
LAURUS NOBILIS: CHAPTERS ON
ART AND LIFE
RENAISSANCE, FANCIES AND
STUDIES
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VANITAS : POLITE STORIES, includ-
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VITAL LIES
STUDIES OF SOME
VARIETIES OF RECENT
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BY
VERNON LEE
VOL. II
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
TORONTO: 9fiL^*«S& C0CJCD|3EN
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How then may we devise one of those falsehoods in
the hour of need, I said, which we lately spoke of — ^just
one royal lie [yevvatov ti iv rj/evdofiiyovi] which may
deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate
the rest of the city ?
Plato, Republic ^ iii. 414
(Jowett's Translation).
Relling. I'm fostering the vital lie in him.
Gregtrs. Vital lie ? Is that what you said ?
Relling. Yes — I said vital lie — for illusion, you know,
is the stimulating principle.
Ibsen, The Wild Duck.
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PART II . X
APPLIED OBSCURANTISM
{continued)
"On pragmatic principles, if the hypothesis of Ood vxrrhs satis-
factorily in the widest sense of the toord, it is true. Now, whatever
its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it certainly does
work and that the problem is ... to determine it so that it will com-
bine unth aU the other working truths." — W. James, " Pragmatism,"
p. 299.
" There is sound human nature behind the instinct, as we may
properly call it, which leads men to distrust an ' atheist.* " — Crawley,
" Tree of Life," p. 296.
CHAPTER II
ANTHROPOLOGICAL APOLO-
GETICS AND THE WILL TD
MAKE OTHERS BELIEVE ^
FROM the Will to believe we pass on to the Will
to make others believe.
Modernism, represented by Father Tyrrell's
very beautiful posthumous book, has afforded me an
example of how statements admittedly false in the
usual sense of that word, may be accepted as true in the
sense of truly adapted to certain spiritual demands.
It is in the books of an anthropologist, of all improbable
people, that I have found the expUcit theory, no longer
that opinions may be true because they are desirable,
but, on the contrary, that opinions which are false
have been and should continue to be fostered because
of their usefulness.
Mr Ernest Crawley is not himself a believer, or at
1 Emest Crawley, " The Tree of Life, a Study of Religion." 1905.
Same author, " The Mystic Rose : a Study of Primitive Marriage."
1902.
Vital Lies
least, he does not proceed as if he were one ; for the
critical chapters of Father Tyrrell's " Christianity at the
Cross Roads " make one cautious in the presence of the
amazing apparent openness of minds which reveal
themselves afterwards as quite amazingly made up.
Be this as it may, even as Father Tyrrell begins by a
thorough critical demoUtion of the CathoUcism which
he intends to rebuild, so Mr Crawley sets out with a
half volume destructive of the official, .the usual, claims
of Christianity in particular and of supematuraUsm in
general. A Priest-Eater, according to the ItaHan
phrase, could do no better than to carry about and if
possible get by heart those chapters of " The Tree of
Life " which deal with the historical genuineness of the
Christian Myth. If toleration had not taught agnostics
a certain perhaps prudish respectfuhiess, what a store-
house of Voltairian jests those chapters would be !
And now I come to think of it, are we latter-day
rationahsts so absolutely right in behaving as if we
really respected every "honest rehgious opinion"?
Should we be less serious if we honestly laughed at
the ideas of our adversaries? And are not certain
ideas grotesque, or merely dehghtfully, childishly funny
when held or taught nowadays, which may have
been venerable and tremendous in their original intel-
lectual surroundings ? Why should I have restrained
dehghted laughter at the sight of a certain Madonna's
complete trousseau, handkerchiefs, garters and all, and
Anthropological Apologetics 5
copied the embarrassed silence of the CathoUc friends
who accompanied me, merely because of our modem
theory that one must respect every sincere belief and
accept every insincere one as if one did not recognise
its insincerity? But I have not the courage of my
opinions on this subject of respectfulness, and indeed
I am not quite sure what my opinions are, nor is this
the place to go into them.
This parenthesis is really connected with the subject
in hand, since it is such books as Mr Crawley's which
have taught us some of that respectful attitude towards
behefs, sometimes poetic and charming, but oftener
also foolish and disgusting, as the ideas and habits of
barbarous people are Hkely to be ; since it takes a
stomach fortified by much science not to be sickened
by the contents of anthropologists' dredging-nets, as
they are pulled up out of the fertile primaeval filth of
nonsense which was once wisdom, and obscenity which
was once morals.
For after the chapters on the historical evidence of
Christianity, or rather historical evidence against
Christianity, come the chapters in the style of Frazer's
*' Golden Bough," on the prehistoric origins of religions
in general, as deduced from the comparative study of
obsolete mythologies and of what travellers can tell us of
the ideas and habits of existing savages. The anthropo-
logical chapters of " The Tree of Life," like the whole
of Mr Crawley's more purely anthropological volume.
Vital Lies
" The Mystic Rose," are minute studies of the concatena-
tions of ideas, the frequently faulty concatenations of
absurd ideas, out of which, according to Mr Crawley,
have arisen practices and standards, not only restric-
tions and sanctions, purifications and atonements (the
whole comphcated and often self-contradictory system
of taboos and sacrifices), but also actual religious
opinions to which Mr Crawley traces the origin of
dogmas like that of Original Sin and even of the
Trinity.
All this amounts to saying that the religious doctrines
and observances still taught in our days, do not answer
to the origin assigned as a reason for their acceptance.
The inspiration of Scripture, the tradition of the Church,
the Teaching of Christ, the Commandments of Jehovah,
are mere fallacies and falsehoods, bolstering up other
fallacies and falsehoods, as the false Decretals
bolstered up the false donation of Constantino. The
" Truths of ReHgion " are reduced to so much myth-
ology, mistaken scientific hypotheses, and futile
practical regulations of primaeval savagery, rendered
still more mistaken and futile by successive interpre-
tations, emendations, and interpolations without end.
With Mr Crawley as our Virgil we descend Dante-like
through layer after layer, depths within depths, of
superstitions we can scarcely conceive, and practices
we dare scarcely describe ; and at the bottom of
that pit we find ourselves in the presence of . . .
(!
Anthropological Apologetics 7
well, let us say, of that mystic musical instrument,
which consecrates and fertilises and exorcises : the
Bull-Roarer. This is the very reason, according to
Mr Crawley, for continuing to teach the doctrines of
rehgion, for conforming to its customs and endowing its
ministers ; the only one, above all, against disestab-
lishing the Church of England.
Thus crudely stated, the thesis of Mr Crawley sounds
too grotesque to be taken in consideration. But taken
— I will not say critically examined — in detail, it
embodies, however questionably, a large amount of
unquestionable fact, both psychological and sociological,
and sets forth, however sophistically, an even larger
amount of suggestive hypothesis. It constitutes, in
short, one of the finest achievements of the " Will-
to-beUeve."
n
And now let us return to the Bull Roarer, which may
be taken as a convenient symbol (the volume should
have been called after it, not after the Cross) of the
functions attributed by Mr Crawley to Rehgion. For
the Bull Roarer consecrates and purifies, makes things
lawful and unlawful ; it awakens fear, and " there is an
explicit connection between the Churinga (or sacred Bull
Roarer) and the transmission of physical life in the
Australian philosophy : the application of a Churinga
8
Vital Lies
is supposed to cause conception.^* In short, the Bull
Roarer presides over primitive man's version of what
Mr Crawley usually alludes to as the Elemental View
of Life.
And first of all : please do not confuse elemental with
elementary ; for nothing can be less elementary than this
view of hfe, as will appear from my difficulty in doing
what Mr Crawley never attempts, namely, defining it
in a few words.
We may make a first shot at what Mr Crawley is
talking about, by saying that the Elemental View of
Life is concerned with, or arises from (both in fact) the
consideration of what may be called the elements of
human life, individual and social, to wit, births, deaths
and marriages. And one meaning of Elemental View
of Life—ioT instance, when Mr Crawley is speaking of
the Elemental View of Life of primitive peoples— is the
view concerned with the dangers, real and imaginary,
connected with these elements of human existence, and
hence with the rules and proceedings, taboos, exor-
cisms, purifications, expiations, prohibitions, which are
supposed to diminish the dangers besetting man's hfe
throughout, but most particularly at its most critical
acts, points, and stages, namely, as ab-eady said, births,
deaths, and marriages.^
* P. 264 et aeq. ; " But every man, when he happens to be brought
down face to face with the elemental realities of existence, birth and
death, hunger and thirst, ipso facto becomes a religious subject.'*
Anthropological Apologetics 9
Dangers besetting Hfe ! Two-thirds of Mr Crawley's
anthropological work, both in this volume and in " The
Mystic Rose," are intended to bring home to us the way
in which primitive man is hagridden by the notion of
danger lurking in every object and attending every act.
Now we civilised persons also know that our hfe, our
comfort, our fortune, are at the mercy of a hundred
contingencies. But we have learned to think of sick-
ness, droughts and draughts, storms, accidents, as
concatenations of outer circumstances which, even if
we cannot forestall, we can in most cases understand.
Primitive Man, on the contrary, has not. What he
thinks most about are his own desires and habits ;
these alone are connected in his experience ; all other
facts are scattered, ragged and ragbaggy, taking what
order they get from intermittent connection with
himself. The object of primitive thought is barely
considered apart from the needs and customs of the
subject ; and when this object assumes some sort of
independent existence this objective existence is but
a copy of that of the subject.^ In other words, thinking
little, he thinks in confused personal terms and associ-
ates all that happens with a will, with passions and
habits like his own. The malignity inherent in things
is for him a Hteral reahty ; evils are evil-ones ; and
whereas evils may be prevented, evil ones must be
* Cf. L6vy-Bruhl'8 " Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Soci6t&
Infdrieures." 1910.
^i.„:-J™^.a3Mi
II
;
;
lO
Vital Lies
appeased. The Will, which Primitive Man imagines
inherent in all, things, is a personal will, and it is met
by personal feeUngs : not only fear, but hope, and
most of all, respect as towards another more powerful
and utterly mysterious self ; mysterious because the
personaUty is, after all, in things, not in men ; mysterious
because undefined, baflling, uninteUigible ; mysterious
above all, because this which is human and yet not
human, this monster-personality compounded, chimera-
like, of incongruous beings and objects — man-animal
but also man-stone, man-flame, man-plant, man-
sickness or man-storm — expresses its will not in definite
words but in the inarticulate and enigmatic language
of benefits and injuries. This being the case. Primitive
Man's unceasing efforts to circumvent the evil possi-
bihties besetting life begets what is more important
even than any system of sanctions and prohibitions,
namely the habit of propitiation of one knows not
what ; the tendency to conform and obey, only the
more that one is not sure why one conforms or what
one obeys ; the habit of bowing to an imperative whose
origins cannot be traced, and whose nature it is far
better to leave unquestioned.
This particidar religious habit of obedience to the
mysterious, is, I believe, another element, if I may use
the word, of what Mr Crawley means by the elemental
in human life ; elemental because, being automatic,
it is treated as instinctive, and being unreasoning, it
Anthropological Apologetics 1 1
is treated as unconscious ; in short, elemental, because
you cannot see your way beyond.^
Now this attitude of obedience to a mysterious will
is, I need scarcely remark, of very great advantage to
Primitive Man ; the famiUes and races which it welds
together are hkely to survive by the possession proxi-
mately of unity of purpose, and ultimately of self-
control in their single members ; and the survival of
those who possess these advantages means the survival
and increase of the advantageous group of habits. ^
Racial selection will have confirmed this obscure
element of racial existence ; and what we call selection
being automatic, unreasoning, and such that we think
of it in company with the " Forces of the Universe "
is itself surely something elemental — at least I think
its operation goes to increase that Elemental character
which Mr Crawley speaks about with all due elemental
darkness.
And here I would open a parenthesis : It is curious
how easily, in talking about things which are difficult
J " The Tree of Life," p. 260. . . . " In dose connexion tvith the
elemental limit of religion is the fact that its action generally takes jila^e
in the mysterious twilight of svh-consciousness. This is one reason why
man is so slow to realize, so chary of discussing and so tenacious in
holding what is to him a sacred possession. The impulse itself, which
makes us regard a tiling as sacred is a radiation from the rdigiout
impulse."
• " The Tree of Life," p. 332. " The wear and tear of evolution
has, so to say, brought the necessary elements into their proper places
by a natural process the motive forces of which we have attempted to
describe. . . ."
^
12
Vital Lies
i i
to understand and difficult to express, one developes
a certain imaginative, almost aesthetic, complacency
towards confusion and obscurity ; and how an instinct
—shall we say an elemental instinct ?— arises, ad-
monishing us in vague and irrefutable words or no
words— that where we do not understand there must
be many greater and finer things than where we do
understand; a feeUng akin to that of the subhme,
as of finding oneself in a huge building dimly Hghted ;
a feeling which has doubtless had its racial advan-
tages in making us patient with the stiU mysterious,
and impatient with perfunctory explanations. In
this sense it seems to me that Mr Crawley's concep-
tion of rehgion as a function of the " Elemental Life "
or of the " Elemental View of Life " is reinforced by
a Bergsonian Vitahsm identifying Life with some
kind of intuitive will, and a knowledge of reality with
instinct as opposed to reason. In some confused
fashion— and we have no right to ask for clearness
(and still less chance of getting it) in deahng with
such subjects and such philosophers— the original
anthropomorphism of primitive man is justified in Mr
Crawley's eyes (if one may talk of eyes where all is
dark) by coincidence with a philosophical anthropo-
morphism to which the evolution of the race is itself
the manifestation of a mystic racial will; the Bull
Roarer is not only venerable for what it symbolised
to our remote forefathers and our remoter savage
6
11
4
Anthropological Apologetic s 13
cousins; it becomes sacred, or at least semi-sacred
as the possible symbol of some dim philosophic creed
of this very modem philosopher.
Be this as it may, it is no supposition of mine, but
clearly expressed fact, that there is another important
side to Mr Crawley's notion of the part played by the
religious behefs and attitudes of Primitive Man. As
there was "an explicit connection between the Chur-
inga (or Sacred Bull Roarer) and the transmission of
physical Life,'' so there is an explicit connection, in
Mr Crawley's theory, "between the religious and the
sexual impulses, and even in the normal subject there
must be poirUs of contact between the two dominant ex-
pressions of vital forcer Basing himself upon the
evidence of primitive mythology and ritual, and
adopting rather hastily the hypothesis of certain
schools of psychology and psychopathy, Mr Crawley
mforms us that " the religious emotion springs from the
same source as the sexual " i and thence infers " that
1 Mr Crawley has considerably distorted the evidence of Mr
Starbuck's valuable "Psychology of Religion;" for Mr Starbuck
considers religious exaltation not as a consequence, but as a oc
tocident accompaniment, of puberty. In the foUowing passage Mr
Urawley mcorporates another of Mr Starbuck's views. I would
pohit out that Mr Crawley's whole thesis is never clearly organised,
but diffluent, putting ideas in contact rather than in connection.
It w at puberty (hat origimdity begins . . , and if mental develop,
ment chiefly depends on diverting the sexual, or rather the physicaUy
vital impulse into other channels, then we may infer that the deferring
both natural and artificial of the sexual life is one of the chief factors
of progress. In this matter religion has played an important part."
~-~WS!t
H
Vital Lies
by preserving sexual integrity and by consecrating this
secondary source of life, religion performs a service on
which the vitality of the race depends,^ adding in support
of his theory that " there is a curious analogy to be
found in what may be called the shyness of religion. Tfie
resentment shown by religious persons when their deepest
convictions are doubted or attacked, is an instinctive
recoil from danger threatening the sources of being."
Religion in this sense of " beir^g sprung from the same
source as sexual emotion " and of " preserving sexual
integrity," appears to Mr Crawley as more than ever '
Elemental and Vital. And this is why the demonstra-
tion of the anthropological, nay, physiological, origins
of religious beUefs is, in the eyes of Mr Crawley, not
an attack but a defence of reUgion, the very finest
defence that can possibly be made, since it vahdates
reUgion's claims by the very facts which have hitherto
been set forth to discredit and disgrace them. Vol-
taire himself, re-incamated in Anatole France, would
be flouted by anthropology in the person of Mr Crawley ;
for could not Mr Crawley cap every absurdity and
indecency with a greater one ? and has not Mr Crawley
appropriated to the service of reUgious orthodoxy,
that most grotesque and venerable of instruments of
music, the Bull Roarer ?
Now I want to say at once that, so far as an igno-
ramus can say so, I think Mr Crawley is probably
quite right, and that, in a way, Voltaire, with his jests
Anthropological Apologetics 15
about Nebuchadnezzar, the witch of Endor, and those
sacred onions of Egypt, " qui n'etoient pas tout a fait
des Dieux, mais leur ressembloient beaucoup," was
quite wrong. Many of these behefs and rites, which
appear to us ridiculous, obscene, or ferocious, may
have been at the time of their origin, respectable
scientific hypotheses and moral and humanitarian
practices. Moreover, they were not only useful in
keeping our savage ancestors aUve, and inducing them
indirectly to beget and to nurture us, but they
were even more useful in fostering certain standards
and commandments, and more useful even than that
in securing mental attitudes of reverence, of obedi-
ence, of conservatism: in fact, being part of the
Elemental Life (as well as of the elementary), they
were useful in producing Elemental Views of Life.
In short, so long as Mr Crawley wishes us to be grate-
ful for some of the extraordinary misconceptions of
Primitive Man, I am, so to speak, quite ready for a
sort of posthumous and platonic enshrining of the
Bull Roarer. In fact, I am more willing than Mr
Crawley himself ; for I do not mind saying that a respect
for truth and, indeed, for morahty of any kind, is a
purely human requirement, and does not seem to have
presided over the proceedings of the Forces which
fashioned the Universe, or the Gods which made Man,
thank heaven, in an image which was not their own.
So that when I was told, quite casually, that a rude
■^
i6
Vital Lies
i ',
musical instrument, still used for calling the faithful
during the Passion-days-silence of the Bells, was in
reahty the Bull Roarer, I felt I should Uke to visit the
church where it was, and bum a grain of incense in
its honour.
Ill
But how about Real Believers ? How about those
who still kneel like children at the knee of God, looking
with unquestioning faith into the eyes of the Father ?
Those whose passionate longing for the sacraments
is checked by their passionate reverence, those for
whom the drops from the chaHce, the wafer between
their unclosed Hps restore and refresh the soul as no
earthly food or wine ever comforted and strengthened
their body ? How about those for whom the cosmos
is held together by moral forces, for whom the heavens
still tell the glory of God, and for whom, even as for
Dante, the soul of man in moved by the same Love
which moves the sun and stars — " L'amor che muove
11 Sole e I'altre stelle ? " I have a right to speak of
them, because, in these days of Will-to-BeUeve, of
dogmas interpreted to mean something else, of faith
justified and recommended for its moral or social
utihty, it has been given to me to behold, even if only
through a glass and dimly, the loveUness and glory of
souls which really beheved : beheved as a child.
Anthropological Apologetics 1 7
because they were and could be no other than ex-
quisite children, with a good child's absolute trust
in the words of those that it loves.
What of them ? The bare idea revolts me, and yet
I feel bound to bring them in, and ask what would
they think of such passages as these, which I cull from
Mr Crawley's " Tree of Life.'"
P. 261, et seq. — " The analogies from savage culture
show that religion is a direct outcome of elemental human
ruUure, and that this elemental human nature remains
practically unchanged. . . . If a savage eats the flesh
of a strong man or divine person, and a modern Christian
partakes sacramentally of Christ's body and blood under
the forms of bread and wine, there is evidently a human
need behind both acts which prompts them and is respon-
sible for their similarity. '^
And then :
P. 224. — " Anthropologists seem to be agreed that
the primitive conception of the force which underlies
tabooed persons and whieh we here identify with the
sacred essences of life, is an undifferentiated idea ; that,
while we should call some of the persons and things to
which ' sacredness' attaches holy, and other unclean,
early man made no such distinction. The uncleanness,
for example, of girls at puberty and the sanctity of holy
mm do not, to the primitive mind, differ from each other.''
" Many a term, translated ' unclean ' in the Bible, is
to be interpreted in this way."
2b
)i
i8
Vital Lies
i V
Again :
*' Payne . . . has suggestedy on philological grounds,
that the distinction hetvoeen good and had first arose in
connection with food. The hunger and thirst after
righteousness is more than a metaphor" ^
Or this :
P. 264. — " It seems at first paradoxical that, our
highest imaginings should he rooted deep in our animal
nature, hut the conclusion hecomes a truism as soon as it
is formulated. . . .
** Women are, in the general sense, more religious than
men. Their life is kept hy organic peculiarities nearer
to the primitive."
Or this passage about the origin of the conception
of the Deity :
P. 253. — " But he (God) uxis neither a spirit nor an
abstraction, hut a superhuman man . . . man heing the
chief or only " Maker " knovm to man. In early thought,
therefore, God is not nature personified . . , to the
savage, ' spirit ' mmns something hoth more and
less than it mear^ to us. The same is true of
' God * — tJie term in early language is more of an
adjective than a noun. The idea of God is complex,
the sorcerer, as an ' embryo-God ' has a share in its
formation."
* Mr Crawley has started with a quotation from Starbuck that
"Physiological hunger widens its appropriateness . . . hungering
after righteousness is an irradiation of the crude instinct of Food-
getting."
Anthropological Apologetics 19
Or this one, with its Bergsonian and biological
treatment of that immortal essence, the soul :
P. 237. — ** First of all we must note a common fallacy
of the animistic theory of religion, namely, that it is the
soul which gives life. The truth is that the life is the
soul."
Or these quotations bearing on the relations of
Religion and Ethics :
P. 266. — ** Religion affirms not morality nor altruism,
hut health and strength of hody and character, physical
and moral cleanliness and decency, deference to age,
experience, and position, principles which are hound up
V)ith the elemental view of life."
P. 273. — " . . . If ever a conviction seemed to he
mortized in adamant it is perhaps the helief that religion
is essentially altruistic. But the facts unmistakeahly
point to the exact opposite. The most powerful instinct
in hurrmn nature could hardly he expected k priori to
show in its second stage such a reversal of type."
P. 277. — " The lesson of religious cruelty, like the
lesson of martyrdom, is that if religion, the permanent
expression of vitality, can show such invincible strength
of cruelty on the one hand, and of endurance on the other,
the fact is due to an increase of vitality."
Above all, what would Real BeUevers say to the
chapters in which Mr Crawley expounds all the con-
verging though sometimes conflicting facts and hypo-
theses against the divine origin of the faith which
)!
20
Vital Lies
i
\^
they hold ? " We must not unduly emphasize this
point of vieWy'' as Mr Crawley concludes after quoting
anthropological authorities in favour of a primitive
identification of ** holiness " and " uncleanness," and
of " sacred " with " dangerous."
Decidedly not. And least of all with Real BeUevers.
A generation ago they would have ceased to call on us ;
in 1842 they would have imprisoned us like Holyoake ;
in 1812 pilloried us like the bookseller Eaton ; ^ and a
couple of centuries earher, they would have burnt us
like Servetus or Bruno. Nowadays they would only
be inexpressibly surprised and hurt. And, para-
doxical though it sound, one would not hurt with one's
opinions these self-same people who, if we had not got
the upper hand, would have hurt us very zealously
ad majorem Dei gloriam.
But they will not read Mr Crawley's book nor mine.
And Mr Crawley's book is not intended for them.
For are not such Real Behevers themselves the
perfect product of that gradually developing elemental
^ In 1812, Eaton, a bookseller, was prosecuted for selling the " Age
of Reason," and sentenced by Lord Ellenborough to be imprisoned
for eighteen months, and to stand for an hour in the pillory
(" Modem England," by A. W. Benn, vol. i. p. 123). In August,
1842, G. J. Holyoake was condemned to six months' imprisonment
in Gloucester Gaol for declaring disbelief in God's existence and
saying " tn the present state of distress the people were too poor to have
a Ood" and that as a measure of economy the lecturer (H.) would
" put the Deity on half-pay" meaning that he would devote half
the revenue of the Church to secular purposes (A. W. Benn,
" English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century," vol. i. p. 405).
?
Anthropological Apologetics 21
view of life, with all its incomparable efficacy of mis-
understanding and mystery, its safe subconscious
vital egoism, its roots in the instinct of physical pro-
pagation ; in fact, are they not religious because they
can never understand the true functions of rehgion ?
IV
I think that this is the distinctly expressed, rational-
istic and indehcate core of what Mr Crawley would
suggest in terms leaving more to the imagination and
the sentiment of his Reader. The book is evidently
written for other kinds of — I scarcely know whether
BeUevers or UnbeUevers. However, before accom-
panying Mr Crawley to his real audience, I want to
make quite sure — or rather I want to stir about in
my thoughts — whether the Real BeUevers are really
so completely dominated by the subconscious elemental
view of Ufe as we are apt to take for granted.
The Real BeUever beUeves that he ought to beUeve.
This ought to believe might possibly be resolved into a
habit of the elemental view of Ufe, a habit socially, if
not physiologically, transmitted. But what do we
mean by this? That the habit should result either
from imitation or from precept. Precept we have, for
the purposes of this inquiry, ruled out. The habit
is therefore transmitted by imitation ; and imitation
.
V
t(
22
Vital Lies
M
h
]
is indeed a non-rational, instinctive matter, quite
suitable to the Elemental View of Life, and extremely
useful for its propagation. So far we agree with Mr
Crawley. There is even something more to be said
in favour of his thesis, although, curiously enough,
I do not remember his having said it : BeUef is, psycho-
logically speaking, itself of the nature of a habit ; it
is, in the first instance, the expectation that what has
happened before will happen again, that what is
afl&rmed is rightly affirmed ; it represents a line of
least resistance for mental activity ; since, were this not
the case, we should not beheve in the most necessary
things but go straw-sphtting and cavilling along our
way, or rather along no way at all. Psychologically
the tendency to beheve is merely a differentiation of
the tendency to acquiesce, and when there is no counter-
vaiUng stimulus man is an acquiescent animal. Thus
we get a tendency to beheve quite apart from all
primaeval habits, as a result of something underlying
all habits primaeval or otherwise, something really
very elemental, namely, mental inertness. But here
it seems to me that the elemental business comes to
an end. In "Our Fathers have told us" there is
imitation, there is habit, there is inertness. But there
is also the active observation that our Fathers, nine
times out of ten, have proved right ; and the active
deduction therefrom that if it is in then- nature to be
wise, they will probably prove right again, more par-
Anthropological Apologetics 23
ticularly if their experience and their thought happen
to have dealt with the subjects involved. This is the
intelligent, the reasoning portion, as distinguished
from the " elemental," as Mr Crawley calls it, of the
principle of authority. Now it is quite as much to
this side, to this actively inteUigent side that rehgious
" behef " has been due ; exactly as it is, I venture to
say entirely to the actively inteUigent, and not to the
** elemental " side of the human mind that religious
beliefs, that is, things believed, are due. Mr Crawley's
anthropological facts, both in this book and in the
purely scientific (not openly apologetic). " Mystic
Kose," demonstrate that what seems to us so much
raving folly is merely the best common sense which
could be supphed by excessively imskilled minds,
pressed for time and perpetually scared by the fear
of practical dangers, and rushing from conclusion to
conclusion without our leisurely habits of defining
our meaning. The view of things at the base of the
rehgious practices of primitive Man are associations
of ideas, generahzations, deductions, none the less
inteUigent for being mistaken ; and accepted by those
who hold them because the enormous majority of
cognate associations of ideas, generahzations, and
deductions have stood the test of experience ; and
because a proportion of those which have not stood
this test have appeared to do so to the unpractised
mental eye of the savage behever.
JUA ' UUWJf
u
24
Vital Lies
The perpetual transformation (and incidental con-
fusion) of the items of primitive beKef, that protean
self-contradiction of aU those views about what is
or is not dangerous, that changing and wavering from
the notion of sacred-unclean to sacred-purifying is,
in fact, the result of primitive man's dissatisfaction
with his explanation of things, and the proof that those
explanations are rational and progressive. This Mr
Crawley, anthropologist and historian as he is, cannot
fail to admit. He tells us (p. 262) that—
" Christianity is no survival from jmmitive religions,
but a higher development from the same permanerU
sources^
Agreed : if by permanent sources are meant man-
kind's tendency to observe, to question and to reason,
as weU as mankind's tendency to acquiesce in what
it is told and to be frightened of inquiring any further.
If these are Mr Crawley's ''permanent sources;' we
agree with his tautological addition " these are' con-
stant."
But that is only the beginning of Mr Crawley's
sentence ; here is the whole of it : " Christianity is
no survival from pnmitive religion, but a higher develop-
ment from the same permanent sources. These are
constant, and the beliefs to which they lead are constant
also, recurring spontaneously or rather through the same
functional causes ; tradition simply supplies them with
a groove;*
^
Anthropological Apologetics 25
Here we cease to agree with Mr Crawley, in so far
that we cease to be clear about his meaning. Of
course if we accept the " permanent sources " both of
developed Christainity and of crude primaeval myth-
ology and ritual to be the that dualism of mental
activity and mental inertness, they being constant,
would produce constant behefs ; dut those behefs
would surely be the axioms at the base of all science,
rather than any rehgious formula. But Mr Crawley
makes an end to our indecision as to the functional
causes to which he ascribes permanence and constancy
by specifying the kind of beliefs to which they lead, and
which are themselves constant and spontaneously re-
current.
" Science,** goes on Mr Crawley — (immediately after
the clause " tradition simply supplies them (the spon-
taneously recurrent beliefs) a groove) — " Science can
thus endorse the words of a thoughtful writer (Church
Times, 28th August 1903), that these rites and beliefs
declare eloquently that there are spiritual needs common
to the whole of mankind"
Let us pause and think over this double assertion ;
or rather sixfold ; for we have : (1st) Mr Crawley
asserting that (2nd) science endorses, that is to say,
asserts the truth of (3rd) the words of the Church
Times* Thoughtful Writer, which assert (4th) that
certain rites and behefs (5th) declare eloquently that
(6th) there are spiritual needs conmion to the whole of
tsasKmrntmim
26
Vital Lies
mankind," which comes to saying that Mr Crawley
and science both admit the existence of "spiritual
needs common to the whole of mankind." This seems
profoundly true. And aU the anthropological-psycho-
logical evidence placed before us by Mr Crawley really
seems to come to that : mankind has needs of inquiry
and needs of acquiescence which are common to all
its branches; thus: Primitive peoples showed their
spiritual needs in their elemental philosophy of fetish-
ism, taboo, and, generally speaking, of the Bull Roarer ;
Mediaeval Christianity displayed its spiritual needs in
that mixture of Hebrew history and classic philosophy
and cosmogony of which the poem of Dante is the
inmiortal expression. And as to Mr Crawley and me,
we show our common spiritual needs in regarding
both Primitive Rehgion and Mediseval Christianity
as of purely human and not at all supernatural origin,
with the Uttle divergence that Mr Crawley's common
spiritual needs lead him to affirm (what my spiritual
needs lead me to deny) namely, that this non-super-
natural but eminently human origin of Christianity
is the very reason why Christianity (being spontaneous)
had better continue to be taught.
But I have run on too fast, and left the Thoughtful
Writer of the " Church Times " too far behind. Let us
turn back and resume our, or rather Mr Crawley's,
quotation of his thoughtful words :
"These rites and beliefs declare eloquently that
Anthropological Apologetics 27
there are spiritu>al needs common to the whole of
mankind.^
We had got so far, and Mr Crawley had agreed,
and agreed also to disagree, about what I imagined to
be those spiritual needs common to the whole of man-
kind — the whole, mind you, Buddhists, Mahometans,
Shintoists, Agnostics, materiahsts, etc., etc., etc.
Now mark how the Thoughtful Writer of the Church
Times enumerates these common spiritual needs :
" The need of an Incarnate Saviour, of a Triune God,
of a Sacrament of Communion, are fundamental aspira-
tions of the human race crying imperiously for satis-
faction, and that He by whom alone they can be satisfied
completely is in no mere phrase, but in very truth * the
desire of all nations.* "
All these are indeed spiritual needs of the Real
Believers, of those real Christians whom I mentioned
before, and for whom, not without a quite unintel-
lectual sense of rehef, I shall now part company with
the Thoughtful Writer of the Church Times of August
28, 1903.
How have these Christians (for, I think, believers
in Buddha, Mahomet, and Jews and infidels may be
left out of count) come to feel the need of an Incarnate
28
Vital Lies
Saviour, of a Triune God, of a Sacrament of Com-
munion, above aU, of Him who is truly the desired of
all nations ? Is it because their remote, undreamed-of
ancestors made no distinction between the uncleanness
of girls at puberty and the sanctity of holy men, con-
sidered the sorcerer as an embryo God, ate the flesh
of strong men or divine persons, in short, let us say,
beUeved in the sacred BuU Roarer ? We may know
that it is so ; Mr Crawley, the Church Times, and my
unworthy self. But let us ask the Christians (and
I should advise no allusions to anthropology !) them-
selves, why they believe in an Incarnate Saviour, in
a Triune God, in a Sacrament of Communion and
more especiaUy in Jesus Christ : I think they wiU
answer that they beheve in it aU because it has been
revealed by God, registered in the Holy Scriptures,
and taught by the Church. They will refer us to a
thousand texts, a miUion ecclesiastical authorities,
and, if we press them further, to the consensus of
Christianity as expressed in the Creed and the Cate-
chism. In other words, they beUeve because they have
been taught. They have been taught about an In-
carnate Saviour, a Sacrament of Communion, a Triune
God, and a " Jesus Christ his only son our Lord who
was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Bom of the Virgin
Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified,
dead and buried, he descended into hell, the third day he
rose again from the dead, he ascended into Heaven and
Anthropological Apologetics 29
sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, ^^
exactly as they have been taught (or should have been
taught) the multipHcation table, the geography of the
world, and the chronology of the kings of England
(or kings of some other place). Indeed, they have
been taught it far more thoroughly, since their tuition
began at least by proxy at the first act after their
birth ; and that, after passing strict examination in
these matters (even in the countries where no reading,
writing, or arithmetic get taught !) they have been
made to repeat the whole lesson not only on every
important occasion of their lives, but on every Sunday
and hoHday most regularly. And to make the lessons
if possible still more effectual, these Christians have
been taught that their godfathers and godmothers
promised and vowed for them that they would beUeve
all the articles of the Christian Faith, and taught that
they themselves are bound to believe in them on
account of their godfathers' and godmothers' promise.
This course of instruction (so indispensable that it is,
very reasonably, begun by proxy) is carried on, not
only in Christian communities, but is pressed, as the
one thing needful, upon every other community what-
soever, teaching the Heathen or the Infidel having
begun with the apostles and been continued through
the ages, at the price of immense sufferings endured
and inflicted in the process : for what are all the
martyrs and all the inquisitors save people who have
30
Vital Lies
wanted others to believe in the Catechism as taught to
and by themselves ?
This necessity of teaching reUgious beUefs has been
moreover declared by the fact that, with the exception
of the Hebrew Patriarchs and Prophets and the Em-
peror Trajan, no single human being, however virtuous
and wise, has been admitted to heaven if bom before
the teaching of these truths had begun, or bom in
places and circumstances where they had not been
taught. And finally, what greater proof that rehgious
beUefs required teaching than the practice of the
Almighty Himself, who found it necessary, not only
to make (perhaps rather sketchy) revelations of
them to Moses and the prophets, but eventually
to send his Only Begotten Son to complete the
information, followed by the Apostles, the Evan-
geUsts, St Paul, the Fathers, and all the Councils
and Doctors to settle the details of this necessary
instruction.
Surely in the face of such a consensus on the need
for special religious tuition we must dissent from
Mr Crawley and his Thoughtful Writer in the Church
Times, and recognize that the recognition of the need
for an Incarnate Saviour, a Triune God, and a Sacra-
ment of Communion, let alone the recognition of
some omitted but important items like Everlasting
Reward in Heaven and Everlasting Punishment in Hell,
could scarcely be trusted to elemental philosophies
Anthropological Apologetics 31
subconsciously inherited from cannibal and taboo-
fetishistic savages.
VI
Christian beliefs require to be taught : that much
we have upon the very best authority. I scarcely
think Mr Crawley would be of a different opinion ;
nor, to do him justice, have I found in all his book a
single word suggesting that the truths of anthropology
and comparative mythology (however much they
justify those of Anglican Christianity) should be taught
in the place of, or in addition to, the catechism. This
is one of those questions where modern philosophy has
shown its superiority by recognizing the existence of
different planes of thought, a conception lacking equally
in the cmde systems of ideology and in the theology of
the past. The piUine of causality, for instance, is now
recognized to be different from the jo^ne of freedom ;
the plane of natural science and psychology is a different
plane from that of metaphysics ; and it is because these
planes are different that our mind can go from one to
the other and even co-exist in several at a time (time,
like space, being outside the plane of pure being)
without the smallest contradiction or inconsistency. ^
* This invaluable addition to obscurantist philosophy heis been
admirably systematized in a work of Professor Miinsterberg, whose
scope and importance is clearly set forth on the paper wrapper in
w
32
Vital Lies
Similarly the plane of the anthropologist and myth-
ologist is independent of the plane of the Christian
behever, and the connection between the two must on
no account be interpreted as a causal or merely scientific
which, as in a mantle of honour, it is presented to the reader by an
appreciative publisher. I will copy out this document in exten^o,
as affording a perfect schematic view of those various planes of
thought which (although occasionally connected in practice) must,
according to this school of philosophy, be kept intellectually apart.
"A book which ought to appeal to every serious reader who
seeks a deeper meaning for his life.
The
ETERNAL VALUES
BY
Hugo Munstsbbebg
Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
Part L
The Meaning of Values.
Part II.
The Logical Values.
Part in.
The iEsthetical Values.
Part IV.
The Ethical Values.
Part V.
Metaphysical Values.
I. Physical Nature.
II. The Psychical Nature.
III. The personalities.
IV. The obligations.
V. The satisfaction of the Will.
VI. The Eternal Values.
VII. The values of Existence.
VIII. The value of Connection.
IX. The values of Unity.
X. The values of Beauty.
/ XI. The values of Development.
I XII. The values of Achievement.
/ Xni. The values of Holiness.
i XIV. The values of Absoluteness.
{
{
" We have come to feel that life does not become more tcorth living b^
a mere heaping up of scientific facts. We seek a philosophy which can
do justice to aU the experiences and aU the aspirations of the ttoentieth
y
Anthropological Apologetics 33
one ; it is far more probably one of those connections
which belong to the domain of Will. The ex-
planations of the anthropological mythologist are
therefore not intended to confirm the rehgious beUefs of
those who already possess such ; that possession as the
Church (while teaching those behefs) has always taught,
is a matter of free will. The anthropological myth-
ologist's explanations being purely scientific, regard
only the causes why that beUef — which from the
scientific (causal) point of view is, of course, determined
(though from the metaphysic or theologic point of
view, of course, free) has been determined, in other
words, has had to exist. These two planes — that of
the behever and of the anthropological mythologist —
do not conflict, because they never come into contact :
nothing, even in the most empirical sense, is rarer than
that a Christian behever should be an anthropological
century, and yet which avoids the shallowness of modem positivism
and scepticism. Mere preaching and mere enthusiasm are insufficient.
What is needed is a starting point for any new development, is a
thorough system of thought in which our right and our duty to believe
in the eternal ideals are proved to the sceptical thinker. Truth and
beauty, progress and morality, religion and metaphysics must bt
recognized as absolute valuss in sharpest contrast to the Pragmatism
of our time. The ' Eternal Values ' aims to fulfil this demand."
After which valuation, not only of Existence, Beauty, Develop
ment. Achievement, Holiness, Absoluteness, etc., but of Professor
Miinsterberg's attempt to value them as Eternal there remains to
deal with only one other value, and this accordingly closes the list
in capitals only one size smaller than the " Eternal Values " of the
title:
Tbn Shillings and Sixpence Net.
34
Vital Lies
J ^
!)
I.
mythologist, or vice versa ; and on the rare occasions
when these different planes co-exist in the same indi-
vidual, they are nevertheless parallel and distinct,
e.g. the anthropological mythologist, as is shown by
this very book, never dreams of addressing his purely
scientific [causative] and deterministic remarks to minds
on the purely metaphysic {i.e. free, non-causative)
plane of belief. And therefore it is not only legiti-
mate, but inevitable (if one may use the word in such
philosophical discussions) that Mr Crawley's book is
written for persons who are on the plane of not
beheving in AngUcan Christianity. For instance I find
on page 261 :
" When we recognize, as the anthropological evidence
enables us to do, that it (Christianity) is rooted more
firmly than other systems in the good ground of human
nature, and that its vital principle is the instinct for life
in its purest form, we have, I think, secured a new
method of defence which is both positive and scientific.''
You see by those two last adjectives that we are on
the causative plane, that of mere science, not of meta-
physics, of the Will and Behef. My own remarks in
answer exist also, be it well understood, on that merely
scientific and positive plane, for I have no sort of hope,
that any genuine Christian beHever will ever come
across, or coming across, ever be influenced by, them.
And here are some of these my purely rationahstic and
quite causally determined reflections.
Anthropological Apologetics 35
VII
(Excursus)
" Concentrated vitality,'' writes Mr Crawley, " is in
itself neither good nor bad, but for prax^ical purposes it
is a blessing only if it can be safely guided into proper
channels."
What practical purposes ? Whose practical pur-
poses ? The Cultus of " Concentrated Vitality," the
" Elemental View of Life " — would seem, from Mr
Crawley's admiration for it, to have been a blessing for
primitive man ; since, had it not been a blessing, even if
only in disguise, why should it be pointed out as the
honoured ancestor from whom less primitive religions
inherit their rights ? The practical purposes must there-
fore extend to more recent times ; and Mr Crawley must
mean that although the cultus of Concentrated Vitality
was a blessing once upon a time, and perhaps a blessing
in its indirect influence upon the future, the only cultus
which could be a blessing later on would be the cultus,
not of Concentrated Vitality as such, but that of the
Safe Guidance of such Concentrated Vitality into Proper
Channels. Instead of the Concentrated VitaKty, it is
the Safe Guidance which has become the blessing, or
else the Proper Channels. But this means a change in
the cultus, corresponding to the change impUed in the
36
Vital Lies
Anthropological Apologetics 37
ill
passage from the notion " holy-dangerous-unclean "
to the notion " holy-desirable-pure," — the change, in
fact, from a reUgion of sorcery to a reUgion of morality.
The savage, or the half-civiUzed man, may worship a
" Concentrated VitaUty " because he conceives it as
something vaguely human and amenable to propitia-
tion ; his worship depends not upon some kind of
admiration for " Life " and whatever symboUzes
" Life," but upon the notion that ** Life " may play
him a trick unless " Life " is respectfully treated :
indiscriminate veneration depends upon undiscrimin-
ating fear. But once man guesses that " Life " is
not a kind of human being, but a way we have of
thinking of certain processes, such wholesale worship
comes to an end, and mankind begins to agree with
Mr Crawley that ** concentrated vitality is in itself
neither good nor bad, hut for practical purposes it
is a blessing only if it can he safely guided into proper
channels. ^^
Civilization impUes the gradual development of a
principle of human selection, of a choice by which man
encourages what makes for his safety and happiness,
while discouraging what does not ; and it implies, of
course, also the gradual replacing thereby of the notion
of man being in the hands of forces which must be
propitiated because they are stronger than he, and
which can be propitiated because they have the same
nature as himself.
Mankind gradually learns that only other human
beings can be propitiated by human civilities ; and
that while that which is more powerful than mankind
cannot be propitiated in any way, that which can be
averted or turned to man's purpose need no longer be
propitiated : we do not compliment the bacillus of
malaria, we destroy him ; we do not pray to the
lightning, we conduct it away from our houses. The
eacredness of beneficent or mahgn natural forces and
outer objects is gradually replaced by the sacredness
of such of our feelings and actions as conduce to more
universal and enduring safety and happiness. What
becomes important is not hfe, however c<mcewtratedt
but how life is Hved.
VIII
Speaking of the chaotic mentality of primitive
mankind, Mr Crawley informs us (p. 252), that in this,
may I call it elementary, if not elemental, view of hfe
discoverable in savages, " not only can the Species
not he thought of apart from the individual, hut the
* individual ' is not an abstraction either, and the species
inheres in this or that other individtud only. Take
away aU the individuals, and no conception of the species
remains."
Yet, on an immediately preceding page we were
38
Vital Lies
told, as if co-existence with such jumbles could be a
recommendation for any idea, that " doctrines like
that of the Trinity are not superimposed upon mono-
theism, hit are implicit already in the primitive mind.^^
Implicit. ... A great deal has been done by
theology, orthodox and unorthodox, with that modest
word, and it would be interesting to know the
precise meaning of thereof in this quotation. " Not
superimposed " suggests that implicit means that the
doctrine of the Trinity really is in the Primitive Mind,
and that the Primitive Mind, if only it could get over
its Uttle difficulty (above mentioned) of disentangling
the notions of individual and species, would, without
ceasing to be primitive, discover or unwrap the doctrine
of the Trinity which lay, like the petals of a rose,
dose-enfolded in the sheath of that confusion between
individual and species. Or is it perhaps Mr Crawley's
opinion that the confusion between individual and
species so characteristic, he tells us, of the primitive
mind, is exactly the stuff — let us say the rosebud — out
of which the doctrine of the Trinity wiU, in a genial
theological sunmier, be sure to unfold its hitherto only
implicit existence ?
Be this as it may, that statement about the primitive
mind's little difficulty with the individual and the
species, might suggest to some mere rationalist that
the implicit existence therein of a particular theological
doctrine is not necessarily an argument in favour of
Anthropological Apologetics 39
that doctrine being acceptable to a mind, or even to
minds (for we have distinguished between the indi-
vidual and the species), having long ceased to be
primitive.
But in all this that Mr Crawley calls " a new method
of defence which is hath positive and scientific,^^ there is,
as in cognate less scientific apologetics, a very curious
and recurrent oversight. In their anxiety to prove
that rehgious behefs, specified or unspecified, are
desirable and indispensable, our apologists ignore that
the essence of a religious belief is that it should be held
to be true. They forget that although such beliefs
may be quite wonderfully useful as long as they are
held, they are not held except inasmuch as they are
held to he true. And they will cease to be held as true
so soon as it is understood that they originate not in
Divine revelation but in the jumbled abortive thoughts
and panic-ridden rituals of savage men.
" These analogies from savage culture,^'' writes Mr
Crawley (p. 261 et seq.), " show that religion . . . is a
direct outcome of elemental human nature, and that this
elemental human nature remains practically unchanged
. . . if a savage eats the flesh of a strong man or divine
person, and a modern Christian partakes sacramentally
of Christ's body and blood under the forms of bread
and wine, there is evidently a human need behind both
acts which prompts them and is responsible for their
similarity. '^
40
Vital Lies
But need to eat a strong man's (or " divine person's ")
flesh in order to get his strength, is precisely not a
constarU need. What is constant is the need to get
increase of strength somehow. The cannibal habit is
due to a mistaken inference, namely, that, since some
of the bodily elements of an ox are transmitted to us
when we eat a beefsteak, the enviable quaUties of a
strong or holy man will be transmitted by the same
process; the wrong inference being further compli-
cated by a confusion between various kinds of desirable
quahties and their modes of transmission. This being
the case, once the mistake is cleared away, the need for
eating strong men comes to an end, and the need of
increasing one's own strength— which alone is really
constant— resorts to " Plasmon," or Sandow's method,
or electric belts, or Swedish massage, or some other
substitute for the eating of "Long Pig." And the
same would apply to that sacramental communion
which is, according to Mr Crowley's hypothesis, but a
more refined substitute for ritual cannibaUsm. With
the difference that the desired and transferable virtues
ceasing to be bodily, to become more and more spiritual,
and spiritual conditions being more dominated by
expectation than bodily ones, an increase of hoKness,
or at least of the f eeKng of hohness was actually obtained
by partaking, in their most bodily manner imaginable,
of what was beUeved to be the Divinity's mystic
substance, was actually obtained, and undoubtedly still is.
Anthropological Apologetics 41
But will such a sense of spiritual elevation accompany
the taking of the Eucharist once it is clearly understood
that this rite is not a mystery instituted by Christ as
the seal of his unending sacrifice for man's soul or the
symbol of his unbroken communion with man's spirit,
but a survival, transformed by successive interpretative
misconceptions, of the savage's mistaken theory that
since eating dead ox furnishes us with bodily strength,
so partaking of the flesh of deceased men of mark must
similarly endow the eater with some of their character-
istic superiority ?
IX
The rehgious practices and prohibitions of Primitive
Man have been shown by Mr Crawley to have had very
utiHtarian objects. " The taboo " he tells us (p. 295),
" is intended to preserve the integrity of human nature,
to keep intact the sources of life'^
So also is that very unreUgious modem equivalent,
Hygiene ; with the difference that it succeeds rather
better. Mr Crawley's account of the Taboo-rehgion,
with its thousandfold precautions against *' influences "
from other individuals, from goods and chattels, from
surroimdings, from places, from food and drink, even
from the Taboo-ist's own wife, who had better have a
brief pre-nuptial idyl (if possible with some " holy '*
42
Vital Lies
man), for the removal of such " influences," the anthro-
pological chapters of this book and the whole of Mr
Crawley's " Mystic Kose " have left in me, at least, an
overwhehning impression not only that savages are in
constant terror about their hfe and health, but that
the precautions on which they spend much of their
time and thought, are just those which, being utterly
mistaken, do not preserve the "integrity of their
nature " or " keep intact the sources of their hfe."
But stop ... I think I have misunderstood Mr
Crawley's thought. Or is it possible that he has
misunderstood it a httle himself? The integrity to
be preserved was not the integrity of the nature of
those poor heathens taken individually, or even collect-
ively ; it was not the wholeness of wind and hmb
which they themselves beheved to be threatened by
some of those everlasting influences (whence Influenza /)
neither are the sources of life which were kept intact
that which our primaeval ancestors discussed in less
elevated phraseology. The integrity was the integrity
of Human Nature sub specie cetemitatis, or, at least, sub
specie historice ; and keeping intact the sources of life
meant, as appears by comparison with other passages
of Mr Crawley's writings, desisting from habits, let us
say, for pohteness' sake, excesses in infanticide, which
would have put an end to the race or the tribe
altogether.
Of course integrity of Human Nature was not con-
1
Anthropological Apologetics 43
templated by the untutored minds of those poor
Indians (or poor whatever they were) when they gave
themselves such trouble to invent and observe Taboos
entirely miscalculated for their intended purposes. Or
rather— since all this matter is extremely comphcated,
and we must see to no confusion of those various irre-
ducible phnes of thought above mentioned — or rather
what was intended by those primitive people was not
in the least the intention for which those tahoos were
really intended; thxU intention being such as could
exist only in the Will ... no, not of Providence, for
we are on the strictly Scientific, Causal (anthropological-
comparative-mythological) plane at present, where
Providence can't be— well, shall we say, that this
intention about the integrity of human nature and the
intactness of the sources of Life, could exist only in the
Will of the Race ? or could exist perhaps in the mind
of philosophers, more particularly Mr Crawley's and
mine?
Because what we really mean is that although those
taboo-customs of primitive mankind were not very
well adapted to their objects, at least not at all as
adapted as good hygienic rules perhaps supplemented
by some rough and ready pohce-measures, yet they
produced habits of refraining from definite acts, and of
shrinking from general disobedience such as the mere
conmion-sense imperatives of more scientific times
could not have produced, particularly when they
44
Vital Lies
I
themselves did not exist. We mean, at all events,
that such Taboo-beliefs and customs begat habits of
massive, undiscriminating, automatic acquiescence and
repulsion, such as alone could impel and restrain our
gross and violent ancestors.
Ancestors ? But are you sure it is only ancestors ?
Why not descendants also, and more especially, why
not contemporaries ?
But before entering upon this question we must
return to that essential philosophical distinction, always
implied in such apologies for reUgion : the distinction
between the phne of scientific (causal) thought and
that of immediate experience, undetermined Witt,
morality and expediency, the plane— shall we coin a
Bergsonian phrase ?— of " lucid instinct." For
returning to it we shall find dependent thereon a
further development of separate planes ; and first and
foremost, the phne of the Subject and the plane of the
Object. The subject is I and is also you, when you are
thought of as part of we, that is to say, when you and
I are of one mind about something or somebody that
is not we ; the Object is, of course, he, she, or it, or
they, Man, Humanity, in fact anybody who is not /
nor you, you thought of as part of we ; in fact, the
t
Anthropological Apologetic s 45
Object is anybody who is talked of, but not talked to.
Now, it is perfectly evident that on the plane of the
Subject, it is no use hoping for the morahzing and
civihzing results of reUgious belief (say in the Trinity,
the Fall, the Sacraments, to which I really must add
Paradise, or at least Hell) by insisting to ourselves, to
you and me that such beliefs would make us more moral
and more really progressive. The Subject always
beUeves exclusively because what he beheves is true ;
besides, the Subject is very rarely in need of being
improved in any way whatsoever.
But it is, naturally, entirely different when we pass
on to the plane of the Object. The Object, remember,
is the person, or group of persons (say mankind, for
instance) who is being talked about, and as such is, of
course, not taken into our confidence. It is the most
obvious thing in the world, and indeed quite one of
the commonest, to remark upon the Object's possession
of desirable qualities hke those of moraUty and that
happy mixture of conservative tenacity and readiness
for improvement which is so necessary for true pro-
gress ; and to discuss the causal reasons for his having
held or still holding the particular religious beliefa
which, owing to mere causal reasons, will result in an
increase of such a desirable blend of quahties ; for I
need scarcely remind the Serious Reader (and all my
Readers are, I hope, serious Subjects, not Objects) that
so soon as we are on the plane of the Object, we
III
i
[111
mi
■'
46
Vital Lies
get back to causality and determination, which are
evidently out of place when We— You and I— are
talking as Subjects.
To return then to the question left behind during
this indispensable philosophical a parte.
Of course there can be no question (subjectively
speaking) of our beheving in any doctrines because
they have conduced and may stiU conduce to human
welfare ; and their utihty has depended upon their
being believed. But, having discussed (most objectively,
of course) all the advantages which accrued, thanks to
our ancestors having held these behefs, it is perfectly
legitimate to consider whether similar advantages
might not be obtained, or at least retained, by those
behefs continuing to be held by our contemporaries.
The planes are being kept separate. The Reader
and Mr Crawley and I are talking of other persons,
not of ourselves.
And this is how we talk : Mr Crawley doing for the
moment the talking, and the reader— perhaps that
serious Thinker of the Church Times of August 28th,
1903-<loing the hstening, all of us, bien erUendu
Subjects.
Mr Crawley loquitur (" Tree of Life," p. 266).
" Religion affirms not morality nor altruism, nor science,
hut health and strength of body and character, physical
and moral cleanliness and decency, deference to age,
experience and position, principles whidi are bound up
Anthropological Apologetics 47
with the elemental view of life. . . . It is objected to
religion that it has opposed every new movement which
in the end made for human development and happiness.
This is true, and it is well for humanity that it is. Every-
thing that is new needs testing, and the best test is that of
the permanent in human nature. It is no less true that
in the end religion has accepted every new movement
which has been made for human development and
happiness. . . .
" The end of science is knowledge, the end of religion
is life. . . .
"Religion stands for progress; not only is it the
permanent foundation of character, but it is bound up
with the roots of being. . . . Reason has always a tendency
to interfere with the normal, and the tendency is kept in
check by religion.*^
There is much truth in this ; very much and very
practically valuable truth. In fact, so much truth that
we had better go and preach it to those behevers, just
to show them how important it is that they should
beheve.
Tut, tut ! You are forgetting that we are discussing
behef objectively ; the behevers are objects of discussion ;
you mustn't go and talk to them as if they were
Subjects! You can'<— logically can't— talk to, or at
least talk with, an Object. An Object is on a different
plane ; it's Kke belonging to a different caste or class :
it can't ever be we.
V I
48
Vital Lies
(|
i
Mr Crawley continues to quote from page 304 :
** The religious spirit always tends to separate from
the rational and to confine itself to the elemental sphere of
human energy, while the rational tends to break away
from the vital instirui. . . . We can say that religion,
becoming itself a cause, has guided and influenced the
whole of human evolution. Institutions, when once
formed, are preserved by the religious impulse which
produced them, and their life is then protected by a veil
of religious mystery covering what is holy and not to be
defiled:'
XI
Now that again, I say, is wonderfully true. The
only thing is, how about people — not you or me, of
course, since we cannot be Objects, but people like you
or me, who have somehow developed their reason, even
to the extent of being able to follow such arguments
as the above and such evidence as is furnished by
anthropology, the Bull-Roarer sort of thing, I mean.
Well, would you say that we are, so to speak, " breaking
away from vital instincts ? "
Answer : Of course not. Is it not written on page
305 that ** . . . in modem civilization the process of
differentiation has gone further, and the religious sphere
is narrowed until it embraces, as a rule, merely the sub-
ccnscious life of the average individual^ and the domestic
Anthropological Apologetics 49
relation of the family circle, and not all these, but only
such part as is not concerned with practical life.''
To be sure ! I was forgetting the sub-consciou>s action
of religion ; the discovery of sub-consciousness is really
one of the finest achievements of modern thought ;
you must admit that the rational principle was doing
useful work for once in estabUshing that. Or perhaps
it was not the rational principle that discovered sub-
consciousness ?
But without answering this question, Mr Crawley
merely emphasizes the importance of sub- con-
sciousness.
" Psychologists " he tells us (p. 296), " are now agreed
that instinctive tendencies have paramourit influence over
our mental processes.''
So they have ; and quite right too !
" Well then," continues Mr Crawley (p. 305) "...
Even in cases where the influence of rationalism or
expediency has completely eocduded religion from the
consciousness, yet the material from which it may grow
still remains."
That's evidently the case with You and Me— I beg
your pardon, not you and me precisely, for it's impohte
as well as unphilosophical to discuss present company —
I mean it's the case with a category of minds of which
ours may be considered typical. Pray forgive my
interruption.
" Yet the material from which it may grow still remains
2d
50
Vital Lies
I!
and gives rise sub-consciously to principles which act
essentmlly though not consciously religious. . . ."
[The whole thing is, of course, suh-consdous-the
sub-conscious is full of rehgion, and the principles,
although conscious in themselves, are not consciously
but sub-consciously rehgious.] You mean that it
gives rise sub-consciously to principles "which are
essentially, though not consciously religious, as in the
relations of domestic life, the personal rules of honour
and decency, duty, commercial and social, rdigim still
inspires these. In such cases religion has become sub-
conscious once more. ..."
[Was it sub-conscious originaUy ? I had imagined
that aU that " elemental view of life," and the taboos
and the sacredness of the BuU-Roarer, had been con-
scious ? But perhaps savages aren't really ever very
conscious, and, of course, their rationahsm is quite
rudimentary ; not yet at aU destructive to normal hfe.]
" And:' continues Mr Crawley, " when we are told
that sane and normal characters do actually live without
religion, the reply is that they are stUl religious sub-
consciously, and in many cases have turned against the
ancient faith through some misconception of its meaning.'*
[Quite so. And Mr Crawley's book is intended to
show just them-people like me, for instance, who are
rehgious in their sub-consciousness, the anthropological-
mythological facts, and the sociological-evolutional
reasons, why they had better cease turning against
Anthropological Apologetics 5
their ancient creed and now sub-conscious. For who
would turn against the Trinity, the Sacraments, the
Fall and the Redemption, the whole catechism in fact,
once he understood that their meaning was only to
keep up the Integrity of the Elemental Life and the
Intactness of the Springs of Existence, and is, for all
philosophical purposes, identical with the meaning of
eating the flesh of a strong man or divine person or any
of the other, not quite so quotable, practices of
Primitive Peoples ?
And this makes me think. . . . Now let me see
whether I have got hold of my thought properly, for one
had best be careful of one's steps among all these different
logical planes, and this conscious and sub-conscious.
Well, what occurs to me is this : Since, as Mr Crawley
says, (and, of course, he must know!) religion was
originally sub-conscious (so I gather from his words
" religion has become sub-conscious once more "), and
since reUgion can, in some cases, safeguard the relations
of domestic life, the personal rules of honour and decency,
duty, etc., by means of principles not consciously
religious, and when itself rehgion has " become sub-con-
scious once more "—why, since the rehgious spirit is
distinguished from the rational spirit by its sub-conscious
character, may we not trust ourselves in the hands of
such sub-conscious reUgion, and have done with the
teaching of the catechism? And, of course, that is
exactly what Mr Crawley is driving at ; for has he not
52
Vital Lies
Ji
i
??
explicitly said (p. 312), " True religion cannot live and
cannot be understood for what it is, unless its forms are
constantly changing.''
True religion, we now know, is sub-conscious religion ;
and how obvious (now that Mr Crawley has drawn
attention to it) that those doctrines imported into
sub-conscious religion by the historical rationalism of
the Hebrews (with all their boring chronological
literature) and the metaphysical rationaUsm of decadent
Greece, should be a mere changing form, and the sooner
changed away altogether the better. Also as long as
all that dogma is beUeved in, true rehgion cannot (as
Mr Crawley wishes it) " be understood for what it is,''
Since how can a man who beheves the Creed under-
stand that true rehgion has nothing really to do with
God the Father, or the Virgin Mary, or Pontius Pilate,
or even with (p. 266) " morality and altruism " taught
in those historical fabrications the Gospels, but is
concerned only with the Integrity of the Elemental
View of Life and the Intactness of the Springs of Exist-
ence; and is founded not upon a most partial and
local revelation, but upon the universally existing
elemental view of hfe of prehistoric man ?
Did I not always think that Mr Crawley and I, being
both of us on the subjective plane, and only (strictly)
sub-consdously rehgious, must, despite apparent differ-
ences, arrive at the same conclusions?
But, behold how Uttle one should trust to the
Anthropological Apologetics 53
rational principle even in discussing the uses of the
irrational ! All this is precisely what Mr Crawley does
not mean, either consciously or sub-consciously. Those
cases where religion has once more become suh-conscious
and given rise sub-consciously to the personal rules of
honour and decency, duty, commercicd and social, and a
few other items, are merely exceptional ; they refer
only to people like you and me, thinking and wiUing
subjects, not thought of or willed about objects. The
Objects meanwhile, the people whom we are talking
about but on no account talking to, and who (being hke
all objects, determined and with no will in the matter)
must on no account be left alone with a rehgion " become
once more suh-conscious,'^ nor can their sub-conscious-
ness be trusted to send up (as ours does, and that of
primitive savages did) sub-consciously, principles in
support of honour and decency, duty, commercial and
social, etc., . . . They, unhke us, are in danger of
losing their Elemental View of Life, and Mr Crawley
tells us from what causes (p. 318) : " in the first place,
the neglect of the principles of heredity " (the context
shows that Mr Crawley does not refer to the principles
of Mr Bateson, Mr Saleeby, or the Laboratory for
Eugenics, but rather to the principles of the Primrose
League), " and the encouragement of such practices ^ as
* There ia no indication of Mr Crawley meaning the practice of
drinking^beer^and 'spirits, encouraged on the contrary by the present
incarnations of^the Principle of Heredity.
54
Vital Lies
produce nervous degeneration ; and, in the second place,
the realization of abstract theories like Socialism.'*
xn
These Objects we are speaking about, but not
speaking to— shall we call these Objects briefly the
lower classes ?— are, in fact, in terrible danger (their
Elemental View of Life, that precious heritage from
Bull Roaring days jeopardized) from SociaHsm. For,
as Mr Crawley explains (p. 279), Socialistic proposals
make for " not real development, nor even equalization
of oppoHunity, nor the bringing down of the weak from
the high places and the raising of the strong from the
dust, but an unfair bestouxil upon the weak of larger
rewards than they deserved And (p. 276) he adds " it
was no Socialist who died upon the Cross," a solid
historical fact extremely valuable after Mr Crawley's
masterly recapitulation of all the conflicting hypotheses
of his fellow-anthropologists and mythologists as to
whether any person did die upon that particular cross,
which cross was itself a derivation from some primseval
mythical Tree of Life. . . .
But even at the end of this, my puzzled attempt to
follow Mr Crawley's conscious or sub-conscious
principles, I find myself once more in uncertainty
about his real meaning. All those early chapters on
Anthropological Apologetics 55
the various scientific attacks upon the truths of
Christianity, all that masterly exposition of the theories
and hypotheses of Higher Criticism, of History, of
Mythology and Anthropology — can they, is it possible
that they should, be intended by Mr Crawley to
demonstrate that the orthodox doctrines are true,
and that this array of science is all nonsense ? For
what should I find on page 310 but the following
statement : —
" The bitter attack upon religion and Christianity,
some arguments of which we have surveyed, is chiefly the
work of a socialistic party exploiting the daims of the
lower classes. . . . The object is to discredit the national
religion as the abode of privilege, and the clergy as its
depositaries and representatives.**
Chiefly the work of Socialists ! Think of that !
Strauss and Colenso, Tylor and Frazer, and all those
scholarly persons for whom these names may stand,
were in reality but the representatives or the tools of
Socialistic agitators !
These revelations of the subconscious activities lurk-
ing in scientific consciousness are positively stagger-
ing. And as I reel under this great discovery there
recurs, bell-like, the question : And the Tree of Life ?
And the Mystic Rose, and all about Taboo, and the
Elemental View of Life, and the Bull Roarer — ^is all
that a trick which the Socialists have been playing
(representing no doubt the rationalistic principle)
56
Vital Lies
upon Mr Crawley's own subconscious belief in
Christianity ?
No. Mr Crawley's thought is not self-contradictory,
and his consciousness and his sub-consciousness are
in perfect agreement. The whole matter hinges upon
the difference of those two planes so dear to obscurantist
philosophy, the plane of Free Will and the Plane of
Scientific Thought ; the Plane of the Subject who is
doing the thinking and the Plane of the Object who
is being thought about; in metaphysical terms it
hinges upon the eternal (and Obscurantism likes things
to be eternal) difference between We and They. We,
Mr Crawley, you the Reader and I, who are dis-
cussing the matter, are free to believe in Higher
Criticism, Anthropological Mythology and Evolution
which (p. 322) " has so to say, brought the necessary
elements into their proper places, the motive forces of
which we have attempted to describe " ; to beUeve also
in the Elemental View of Life and the close aflinity
of the rehgious and the sexual instincts ; in the de-
rivation of moraUty from taboos and the derivation
of the Eucharist from the eating of the "flesh of a
strong man or divine person " ; in short we are free
to beUeve in the theories expounded in the Tree of
Life. But they, who are not Mr Crawley, nor you,
nor I, nor perhaps anyone with whom we should care to
discuss these subjects — they who are likely to lose
respect for the national religion, they who cannot
Anthropological Apologetics 57
spontaneously appreciate the remarkable fact (p. 322)
** that the traditional Christian ideal of the organisation
of the Universe is so closely parallel, both socially and
politically, if the phrase may be itsed, to ow own " (viz.,
that of the British Empire ; ^ they whose " claims "
are Uable to " exploitation by a Socialist Party " —
They had better be left to the " instinct " — " behind
which " (p. 296) " there is sound human nature, which
leads men to distrust an atheist. ^^
In fact, the perusal of the Tree of Life is to persuade
Us that They had better not peruse that book, but
stick to the Bible and the catechism. " For,^' says Mr
Crawley (p. 279 et seq.), " a broad survey of human history
and an insight into human possibilities might enable us to
maintain . . . that such a use of such a means of control as
religion is entirely right and furthers the best interests
of the race. For the weaker and less successful members
of any community are apt to attribute their grievances
to the present social system whereas they are due to the
laws of evolution and the inevitable working of natural
selection."
Such a separation of the planes of the Subject and the
^ The original arrangement of sentences is as follows : " The wear
and tear of evolution has, so to say, brought the necessary elements into
their proper 'places by a natural process, the motive forces of which toe
have attempted to describe. Even in the political evolution of the
British Empire this may be seen. It is a remarkable fact and more
than a coincidence that the traditional Christian ideal of the organiza-
tion of the Universe is so closely parallel both socially and politically,
if the phrase may be used, to our oum."
h
58
Vital Lies
Object, of the We and the T%, although (perhaps
because !) the highest achievement of apologetic meta-
physics is akeady adumbrated in the suhconsdousness
of peoples still undisturbed in their Elemental View of
Life : For in the Tree of Life (p. 144 et8eq.)m Crawley
tells us, on the authority of Messrs Spencer and Gillen,
that among the Northern Tribes of Austraha the young
man who has been " initiated " is taught by the elders
that the Bull Roarer is a musical instrument just like
any other, and "that the spirit creature whom up to
that time he has regarded as all-powerful is merely a
myth, and that such a being does not really exist, and is
only an invention of the men to frighten the women and
children.'''*
So let this be the last but not least lesson of com-
parative mythology and its sacred Bull Roarer !
XIII
But stay ! there remains another one, although this
lesson is not the one intended by the candid mytho-
logist who has been guiding us among the Vital
lies of Primitive Peoples. And this last lesson I
will present as a parable.
Ethnographers tell us of the fasts and vigils and
mortifications of all kinds, varying from enforced
chastity to the elaborate wounding and hacking of
Anthropological Apologetics 59
their own body, with which certain savage tribes induce
the spirits to favour their bear-stalking. And it is
added that these mistaken practices have fostered habits
of self-restraint, endurance, discipHne and heroism,
which those savages might otherwise have lacked.
Moreover, when these practices included ritual dances
and music and ornament, they have also conduced to
sesthetic development. In fact, the only good effect
these practices did not have was their intended one
upon the bears !
Now, I will readily admit that these great moral
results may be obtainable in no other way from savage
persons with thoughts entirely bent upon the killing
of bears. But, given that we have recognised the
desirability of self-restraint, chastity, heroism and art
for other purposes than that, might we not be trusted
to take about these spiritual gifts a Httle of the trouble
which the savages took about their bears ? Or must
we keep up not only mistaken views about bears, but
an artificial archaicizing interest in these animals ?
XIV
Already nearly a century ago, the Bridgewater
Treatises showed that rehgion was no longer a matter
of assent (in Newman's phrase) but already a matter
of inference. There must be a God, they argued,
! t
< !
ll
6o
Vital Lies
because what could be better made to grasp than the
human hand, to see than the human eye, to smell than
the human nose ?
More recent investigation has shown that there could
quite w<3ll have been something better if grasping,
seeing, smeUing, etc., had been the original purpose of
an all-powerful creator. Indeed we have been taught
that what is called grasping, seeing and smelling has
resulted from the possibihties of the hand, eyes and
nose rather than these organs being devised for such
purposes. Be this as it may— (and Bergson and others
are beginning to tell us that the eye may have been
the expression of the bUnd beast's will to see rather
than of the bhnd Cosmos' will to nothing in particular)
—be this as it may, the Bridgewater argument is
a weapon dangerous to the user when inverted by
reUgious apologists : For you may persuade people of
the existence of God by showing how very well (or
how indifferently well) an eye is suited to see, or a hand
to grasp. But to show the extreme suitableness to
human requirements of a behef in God is, somehow,
scarcely the way to persuade people of God's real and
independent existence. It was, after all, Voltaire,
and not St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas who made
the cogent remark, " Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait
Tin venter."
I
C5HAPTER III
M. SOREL AND THE "SYNDICALIST
MYTH" OF THE GENERAL STRIKE
V'i in questo scopo qualche cosa di rdigioso e di cristiano : VatteM,
di un mondo nuovo, che non verra se non attraverao i martirii. —
Prezzolini, " La Teoria Sindacalista," p. 115.
SPEAKING of Professor James and Doctor
Schiller, I remarked that it takes bolder men
than they to call mistakes mistakes, lies lies, and
yet assert that both may have usefubiess and goodness
and value fully as much as truth, and even occasionally
more. The bolder man, the ultra-pragmatist, has
actually appeared ; not indeed among us " practical "
Anglo-Saxons, but among those French folk who are
never afraid (for M. Bergson is a half English Jew)
of pushing intellectual formulae to their utmost
consequences.
A Frenchman, M. (xeorges Sorel, has, to use Nietzsche's
phrase, re-valued our valuation not of truth, but of
falsehood ; he has ceased to call the useful, efficacious
untruth [the vital he] truth, tnUh-in-so-far-forth, truth
61
\
*
62
Vital Lies
in 80 far as good for, etc. He has called it, when
supremely efficacious, "the myth"; and he has
insisted that the myth is potent for good just in pro-
portion as it disdains to be a partial truth. He has
not used pragmatism as a convenience, pragmatically
hesitating between yes and no, but, Hke a thorough
behever, a genuine apostle, he has carried his doctrine
to its own glorious logical death.
Mysteriously impelled, one might say (as the apostles
were impelled to forsake Jesus "in order that the
scriptures should be fulfilled "), to give the reductio
ad absurdum of his own doctrines, he has actually
pubUshed in the chief Syndicalist paper, and cheek
by jowl with furious preachings of the General Strike^
a series of essays setting forth that the General Strike
must be preached because it is an unreaKzable myth,
and because only unrealizable mjtha can beget un-
hesitating behef and wholesale action.
n
"Nous vivons de I'ombre d'une ombre. De quol vivra-t-on
apr^ nous ? "
So wrote Renan, repeating the very same words in
two separate contexts. Monsieur Sorel has been not
only a student of those historical and psychological
" origins " of Christianity which took up so much of
The Syndicalist Myth 63
Kenan's activity ; he has been a student of Renan
himself, and in quoting that famous passage he is
giving us the genealogy and also the premiss of his own
theory of the Syndicalist Myth.
The " Ombre d'une Ombre " occurs, as I have said,
twice in M. Kenan's works. Let me put together the
two contexts which happen to complete each other.
In the Preface to FeuUles DMch^es we read : " Nous
pouvons nous passer de religion parceque d^atUres en ont
eu pour nous. Ceux qui ne croient pas sont entrain6s par
la masse plus ou moins croyante ; mais le jour ou la
masse n'aurait plus d'elan, les braves eux-memes iraient
mollement a Vassaut. Ou tirera heaucoup moins d'une
humanity ne croyant pas d Vimmortalit4 de Vdme que
.dune humanity y croyant.
" Les personnes rdigieuses viverU d^une ombre. Nous
vivons de Vombre d'une ombre. De quoi vivra-t-on apr^
nous? . . .
" Ne d^esperous pas sur la dose ni sur la formule
de la religion ; bomons-nous d ne pas la nier, gardens
la oatigorie de Vinconnu, la possibility de river. II ne
faut pas que la ruine devenue inevitable des religious
prMendu£s riviUes, entraine la disparition du senti-
ment rdigieux."
Here we have the assertion that religious behef is
necessary for the thorough and sufficient output of
mihtant moral energy : " on tirera beaucoup moins
dur^ humanity ne croyant pas d Vimmortaliti de Vdme
:
■
64
Vital Lies
I
m
que d'une humanity y cfoyant" Then we are told that
what religious people live off is an unreality — " lea
personnes rdigieuses vivent d'une ombre.*^ Remark
that it is the religious beUevers Renan is speaking of ;
not us who no longer believe and who are described
as hving only on the shadow of the shadow, while the
shadow itself is kept for the true beUevers. And
thirdly, after asking " dequoi vivra-t-on apr^s nous ? "
M. Renan tells us that we must not allow the destruc-
tion of the reUgious doctrines hitherto taught to de-
prive us of this necessary reUgious spirit. And again
he repeats that reUgious beUef is of the nature of a
shadow, admonishing us to keep " la catSgorie de
Vinconnu, la possibility de reverb Then, in the Preface
of the " Dialogues Philosophiques," we again get —
*'Nous vivons de V ombre d'une ombre. De quoi vivra-t-on
apris nous ? " but with the immediate addition : " une
seide chose est silre; c'est que Vhumanite tirera de son
sein tout ce qui est n^cessaire en fait d'illusions pour
qu^elle remplisse ses devoirs et accomplisse sa destin^e.
Ell n'y pas failli jusqu'id ; die n^y faiUira pas dans
Vavenir"
Now let us come to M. Georges Sorel. Mankind,
he tells us, being always in need of such illusions —
shadows of shadows — fertile in virtue and heroism, has
perpetually made and remade them in the past, and it
is busy at the same work in the present. To the great
historical myths like that of early Messianic Christianity
I
I
The Syndicalist Myth 65
and the Humanitarianism of the French Revolution
is now being added, to renew the world's needful ideals
and miUtant moraUty, the SyndicaUst Myth of the
General Strike.
ra
Before expounding the theory of the Syndicalist
Myth, it will be necessary to explain or recall to my
EngUsh reader the nature of the very un-EngUsh form
of SociaUsm which takes its name in Latin countries
from the Syndicates, or, as we should call them. Trade
Unions. I have brought in this word trade unions
in order to forestall the reader's natural tendency to
imagine that Syndicalism and Trade Unionism are the
same. They are absolutely different,* as M. Sorel
and his ItaUan exponent, Signor PrezzoUni, repeatedly
insist ; indeed, the best way of understanding the
SyndicaUsm of Latin countries is to oppose it to British
Trade Unionism. For the British Trade Union is a
corporate body within the State, employing its special
corporate action for special corporate purposes, that is
^ " Que la grSve ginirale ne soil pas popvlaire dans VAngleterre
contemporaine, c'est un pauvre argument a faire valoir contre la porOe
historique de Vidie, car les Anglais se distingv^nt par une extraordinaire
incomprehension de la lutte de classe . . .la corporation, privilegiie
ou protigie au mains par les lots, leur apparatt toujour s comme Vidial
de Vorganisation ouvriere. C'est pour VAngleterre que Von a invenU
le terme d' aristocratic ouvriere pour parler des syndiquis " (Sorel :
" Reflexions sui la Violence," p. 90).
2e
66
Vital Lies
n'
'M
to say, in corporate bargains with employers ; and its
members, besides being members of the union, are also
parts of other collectivities, members of a church, a
township, or a pohtical party ; above all, citizens of
a State employing their civic powers, municipal and
parUamentary votes, like any other citizens. On the
contrary the member of a Latin Syndicate (at least,
of a thorough-paced Syndicalist Syndicate) is, or wishes
to be, nothing but a member of that Syndicate, and
through it only of whatever confederacy of similar
Syndicates may have been formed in or outside his
country. In or outside his country, but not recog-
nised as in or outside of it ; for the Syndicahst recognises
only his Syndicate and confederacy of Syndicates,
and the Nation, the State, does not exist for him : he
pays the taxes, obeys the laws, serves in the armies
of this country or that, but only as a matter of com-
pulsion, and denying all its claims. Seen from the stand-
point of the State or Nation, he is an Anarchist (the
cosmopohtan SyndicaUsts of Chicago seem to call
themselves by that name) ; ^ seen from inside his own
Syndicate, he is a completely unindividuaUstic part
of a collectivity ; even as the primitive Christian,
absolutely submissive to his church, was a rebel in
the eyes of the Roman official. But the SjTidicaUst
proletariat is not a new State within an old State which
it disregards ; it is a new State erecting itself in oppo-
* Cf. Haj^ood'a moat Interesting " The Spirit of Labour."
The Syndicalist Myth 67
sition to an old State which it intends to destroy and
absorb.
And to destroy and absorb without employing any
of the means furnished by that old State — any means,
in fact, except its own. Herein Hes the pecuHarity
of SyndicaKsm, its superficial resemblance to Anarchism,
and its essential difference from all other forms of
Sociahsm : it rejects, not only all theories of compromise
and evolution, but aU employment of pohtical and
municipal machinery. This distinctive characteristic
of S3aidicaUsm becomes easier to grasp when we remark
that it exists principally in countries which, having
long possessed a well-organised State-sociahst party,
have actually seen SociaUsts, if not Sociahsm, in
power, and have seen, therefore, that, once in power,
once installed in municipahties or parHaments, or even
in cabinets, they have failed to carry out the wholesale
promises made to electors. This inabihty, doubtless
often turning to unwiUingness, has discredited parha-
mentary Sociahsm in the eyes of the proletariat, let
alone in those of rival and unofficial demagogues ;
and the very compromises and concessions of the
bourgeoisie have been interpreted as attempts to cor-
rupt, to enervate, and hoodwink Sociahsm. Hence
the attitude of the Syndicahst proletariat, or rather
of course, of the leaders, organisers, and theorisers
of Syndicahsm : they will not hear of Fabians, of
sympathising bourgeois, of intellectuals, of members of
J
*l
mi
J!:
f i
t ' i
il i
68
Vital Lies
municipalities and parliaments. Moreover, the pro-
letariat recognises no bonds and no differences of
nationality ; no duty towards the State (SyndicaUsts are
logically anti-militarists), as it accepts no advantages
from the State. It refuses to employ the mechanism
of capitaUstic society even against itself ; it makes
war on capitahsm without using capitaUsm's weapons.
The SyndicaUst proletariat is to conquer and suppress
and replace the capitalistic State by systematic ab-
stention and opposition ; and its means of doing so are
inherent in the Syndicate constitution and in the
fact of the labourers being labourers. Labour is going
to besiege and starve out Capitahsm. And the battles
which must be fought in the great class warfare are
what we call strikes.
These strikes may be ostensibly to gain this
momentary concession or that, even as a skirmish or
a siege in other wars may aim directly at securing
a position of vantage or seizing stores or capturing a
hostile troop ; but their true importance, and the
reason for sacrificing to them all individual motives,
will depend upon their leading to a final, a distant, an
indefinable, Armageddon called the Greneral Strike.
Thus has arisen, partly from Marxian and Anarchist
theorisings, and partly from the practical conflict of
Labour with Capital, a feehng of class warfare, an
expectation of the day of hberation, retribution, and
triumph, of a coming of the working man's kingdom
iA
The Syndicalist Myth 69
of heaven on earth. We have all read some of the
hterature of Catastrophic SociaUsm, from Morris's
" News from Nowhere " to Kropotkin's " Conquest of
Bread," and we all know that ideas such as these have
been pubhshed in thousands of pamphlets and journals,
and preached in milUons of meetings and clubs, for
the last half-century and more. Moreover, we have
learned from Zola, and from the far more romantic
" human documents " of sociological students of
proletarian Ufe on the Continent and in America, that
with the habit of strike, with the thought of class-war-
fare, and the expectation of a Sociahstic or Anarchistic
catastrophe, there has grown up among the working
classes something amounting to a new religion and a
new kind of altruistic ethic, whose watchword is
** sohdarity," and whose first, and occasionally sole,
commandment is, " Thou shalt not be a blackleg." ^
When will the general strike be brought about, with
its destruction of the capitahstic regime and its kingdom
of proletarian righteousness ? How soon ? Where ?
In what way ? Perhaps in a remote future, perhaps in
a Uving man's Hfetime, perhaps to-morrow, perhaps
. . . ? But everyone feels that come it must, and that
only by renouncing all other desires, by sacrificing all
individual superiorities and advantages, by postponing
wife and child to the Union and the Cause, by lenience
to all the weaknesses and vice of faithful comrades, by
» Cf. Hapgood, '^ The Spirit of Labour."
Ma
70
Vital Lies
The Syndicalist Myth 71
f
ruthlessness to all dissidents and strike-breakers, by
refusal of all compromise with capitalistic society and
its institutions — in fact, only by the unanimous girding
up of loins, the watching and praying and preaching
of the working man, can class warfare be kept up and
the General Strike brought about.
All this is well known to us of the bourgeoisie^ known
with hatred or terror or sympathy and admiration ;
known also, by some of us, in its pathos and grandeur,
with sadness and indignation that so much rehgion and
heroism should be wasted or exploited.
M. Sorel, who is not a workman, but a retired ofl&cial,
and, as I have already remarked, a philosophical student
of Renan, has seen it all with other eyes : —
'* N0U8 savons,^^ he writes ("Reflexions sur la Violence,"
p. 95), ** nous Savons que la gr^ve gent^rale est hien ce que
fai dit, un myihe dans lequel le sodalisme s^exprime
tout entier, une organization damages capahles d^^voquer
instinctivement tous les sentiments qui correspondent
aux diverses manifestations de la guerre engage par le
sodalisme contre la socidU modeme. Les grdves ont
engendre dans le proletariat les sentiments les plus nobles,
les ^lus profonds et les plus moteurs quHl poss^de ; la
grive gin^rale les groupe tous dans un tableau d^ensetnble
et, par leur rapprochement, donne a chacun son maximum
dHrUensit^ ; faisant appel h des souvenirs tris cuisants
de conflits particuliers, elle colore d'une vie intense tous
les details de la composition presentee a la conscience.
I
" Notts obtenons ainsi cette intuition du socia^lisme
que le langage ne pouvait pas nous donner d'une rmini^re
parfaitement cLaire — et nous Vobtenons dans un ensemble
pergu instantan^ment.^^ ^
Monsieur Renan had wondered out of what illusions
the world would thenceforward extract its virtues.
*' Nous vivons de I'ombre d'une ombre," he had written
in that much-quoted passage, " de quoi vivra-t-on
apres nous ? " Monsieur Sorel answers, " On this "
— ^and he christens it (in more senses than one) the
SociaUst Myth of the General Strike.
IV
Here I must parenthesize and forestall a very natural
question : Why should the General Strike be a myth,
and not a coming reaUty ?
In the first place, and more generally, because in the
multipUcity of historic factors, many unguessed-of
and most of them incalculable, it is next to impossible
that anything should happen as it is foreseen, and still
less as it is foreseen by multitudes of ignorant and
passionate men.
The Syndicahst idea of the General Strike is
essentially opposed to all the hopes of *' evolutional "
SociaUsm ; it excludes the co-operation of unintended
1 " Cest la connaiasance parfaiie de la phUosophie Bergsonienne,"
72
Vital Lies
The Syndicalist Myth 73
!l(
r
il
factors, it disdains unexpected improvements ; it is,
for all its vagueness, a programme, and history teaches
us that programmes are never accomplished except
by compromise with other programmes ; but you cannot
imagine the martyrs of Nero's persecution going to the
stake either on the understanding that Christianity
should absorb Pagan institutions, or in the vague hope
that, given the condition of antique civihzation,
*' something was sure to turn up." No : the Kingdom
of Heaven, and nothing short of it, had to come, and to
come through the very sufferings of those who beheved
in it. Similarly with the hopes embodied in the notion
of a catastrophic end of the capitalistic regime.
But there are also special reasons why the General
Strike can never be more than a myth. It must remain
a myth chiefly because (and whatever remains obscure
in M. Sorel's text is thoroughly cleared up by his
commentator, Signor Prezzohni) the General Strike
must not be conceived as a mere revolution, a fine
Bastille day, even a Reign of Terror, after which things
return to a mitigated status quo. It is not even a mere
dramatic finale, a Gdtterddmmerung of the bourgeois
Olympus. It is (hke the coming of Christ and the
Judgment of the Quick and the Dead) essentially the
beginning of a new regime; that is to say, of the
absorption of all the achievements of capitaUstic
civihzation by the victorious proletariat. The war
of classes will end by the estabhshment of one single
class of syndicated working men. Now such a taking
over by the proletariat of the complex functions, the
enormous economic machinery of capitahsm (not
production only, but credit and exchange), would
require that the proletariat should akeady have risen
to the level of the " directing " classes ; short of which
the defeated bourgeoisie would return to power in the
disguise of foremen and organizers, or a new aristocracy
would arise out of the proletariat itself ; or— what would
be quite as bad — all the accumulated wealth of the
world would be wasted and destroyed.
" In other words" sums up Signor Prezzohni, " once
the working classes are able to carry through their General
Strike they will no longer require to hive it ; but they must
go on attempting their General Strike . . . well, as long
as a General Strike is impossible to carry through."
"The so-called General Strike" continues Signor. -
Prezzohni elsewhere, " can therefore never be general.
Its function is educational. It will simply, and by
grouping them together, educate the majority of working
men to mutual knowledge and helpfulness, teach them to ^
free themselves from all tutelage, to reject the advances
of over-friendly capitalism, and finally, it will enable
them to constitute, by their various associMions, the
rudiinentary organs of a new social organism.
" To liberate all classes, to destroy all false ideologies,
to unite labour with the faeidty of directing it, means the
production of a new human being : and this new mankind
L
\
74
Vital Lies
I il
tfta
I
is produced by the wUl of Socialism, or,- more stridly
speaking, of Syndicalism " (queU' uomo che e la volizione
del Socialismo, o meglio del Sindacalismo).
The will of Sijndimlism, but not necessarily the will
of one, or many, or all, or any of the syndicalized
proletarians. It is not they, paying their wages into
union funds and starving in strikes and out-locks, who
want the " new human being "—spoken of by Signor
PrezzoUni. The wUl of Syndicalism \b . . . well, first
and foremost, it is the will which SyndicaUsts, those
who reaUy beUeve in the General Strike, happen not
to have. This will is the name for a tendency which
philosophers find in certain historical events, a tendency
which is a mere abstract generahzation from what has
actually happened (or, in the case of Syndicahsm, can
happen), and which these philosophers Uke to con-
template, to personify, and (being, indeed, only in
their own consciousness) to project, as a sort of
mjrstic will, into the unconscious depths of . . . one
scarcely knows whether individuals or the race— but,
at all events, of people conscious only of something
quite different.
When philosophers of this kind speak of the will
of, say, Syndicahsm, the only certainty is that they
are talking of what they will to think abotU : for philo-
sophers love to ascend to the high places, whence nations
and centuries are seen in tidy fore-shortening and
colour patterns, totally unUke what any real thing
The Syndicalist Myth 75
could ever be ; high places where they interrogate the
titanic abstractions " World- will " and " Race-will "
—and now " Proletarian- will "—whom they have made
out of their own brain fumes, their own burnt pinch
of historical mummy-dust, and with whom they feel,
as they truly are, in company worthy of themselves.
It is these " wills " who, taking over the business of
the departed gods— it is these wills, particularly the
historical ones, which, so to speak, will the myths ;
that is to say, will that an enormous lot of people, say
the whole Syndicahst proletariat, should strive and
struggle to attain something which it does not intend,
under the impression that it is struggling for something
which it does intend. . . . Since that, when all is said
and done, is what Monsieur Sorel means in talking of
the Syndicahst Myth.
(Parenthetical and Margitial)
Since Monsieur Sorel is always adjuring us to look
at things from the " historic standpoint," I may as well
remark that Monsieur Sorel's myth theory is itself
historically exphcable as a violent reaction from the
theories of so-called " Historic MateriaUsm " for which
Marx and other SociaUsts (Uke Loria) are so largely
responsible. The philosophic, Uke the artistic, mind
w1
76
Vital Lies
The Syndicalist Myth rj
m
I
is very easily bored with any dominant fashion.)
SociaUsts had hitherto explained everything by mere
economic pressure and practical interests ; the natural
revulsion has been that the world's changes are now
explained by '* ideas "—and " ideals "—and, to be more
unpractical still, by myths. Formerly, to use a homely
simile, dreams were explained as dependent upon the
state of the digestion ; now, the digestion is explained
to depend upon mental causes. And thus ad libitum.
And now let us hear Monsieur Sorel expound his own
theory of the efficacy of myths : —
" Vexperience nous prouve que des constructions cTun
avenir indSermin^ dans le temps peuvent avoir une
grande efficacit^ et n'avoir que bien peu dHnconv^ients
lorsqu'dles sont d'une certaine nature; cda a lieu
quand il s'agit de mythes dans lesquels se retrouvent
les tendances les plus fortes d'un peuple, d'un parti,
ou d'une dasse, tendances qui viennent a se presenter
d VesprU avec Vinsistance d'instincts dans toutes les
circonstances de U vie, et qui donnent un aspect de pleine
r4alUe d des espoirs d'actim procliaine sur lesquels se
fonde la r^forme de la volantd. Nous savons que ces
mythes sociaux n'empSchent d'ailleurs nuUement Vhomme
de savoir tirer profit de toutes les observations qu'il jail
au cours de sa vie, et ne font point obstacle d ce quHl
remplisse ses occupations normales.
" Les premiers Chretiens attendaient le retour du
Christ et la ruine totale du monde paien, avec Vinstaura-
tion du royaume des SairUs, pour ki fin de la premiire
gdn^ration. La catastrophe ne se produisit pas, rruiis la
pensee chr^tienne tira un td parti du mythe apocalyp-
tique que certains savants contemporains voudraient que
toute la predication de J^sus eut port^ sur ce sujet unique."^
Monsieur Renan had not thought it necessary to
explain whether mankind ever lived on a substance ;
the distinction made by him between the diet of
religious beUevers and of us who have lost our reUgious
beliefs is between a shadow (une ombre) first-hand and
a shadow (Tomhre d^une ombre) second-hand. Monsieur
Sorel adds the information that, so far as moral growth
is concerned, reaUty must not be considered sufficiently
nutritious. That is the gist of the pages just quoted.
But lest they should have left the reader unpersuaded,
I will add a few explanations, and an illustration not
taken from the historical standpoint.
Suppose you want a child to move off from whatever
occupation, doubtless mischievous, he may be engaged
in. If you say, *' Go to the back-door, and you will
see the milkman fiUing the milk-cans," you are making
but a very sKght appeal to the child's imagination and
sentiment, and you are running the risk that the milk-
1 " Reflexions sur la Violence," p. 92.
78
Vital Lies
man and the cans may happen not to be there at this
moment ; so there are two chances against you, one
that the child will not budge, and the other that the
child will be very angry and never again beheve a word
of what you say. But if you say, " My dear young
friend, there is a pot of pure gold at the foot of the
rainbow, and you would be truly wise to go and secure
it at once," you will, or, at least, you may, get the child
to walk for miles in the direction you tell him, and he can
never be sure that the pot of gold was not just a Httle
further off.
This homely simile explains the superior efficacy of
myths in cases where you yourself are inventing them,
like Plato's guardians making up " noble hes " for the
preservation of the Commonwealth, or like those
Bonzes and Old Men of the Mountain to whom the
eighteenth century, voiced by Voltaire's enchanting
stories, ascribed the mahgnant and selfish invention
of rehgious creeds of every kind. Now, of course, we
modems have got beyond such silly notions {simpUsmes,
the French call them), and the history of civiUzation
and rehgion (even when treated by infidels hke Buckle
and Michelet) has made it obvious that there never have
been such deUberate virtuous or villainous impostures.
Add to this that a course of Pragmatism (and you
can be a Pragmatist without ever having heard of
Professor James or Mr Schiller) has prepared us all for
the practical, if not theoretical, recognition that it is
I
The Syndicalist Myth 79
quite as easy, and a deal more efficacious, to begin
by beheving oneself whatever others had better beheve
is true in so far forth and according to its " fruits for
life.'' 1 Monsieur Sorel's myth is therefore your
thoroughly up-to-date myth, psychologically correct,
Bergsonian withal, for Monsieur Sorel is an avowed
follower of the great vitahst psychologist, of the
philosopher, as they call him, of action. The myth
with which Monsieur Sorel deals is therefore the
spontaneous myth,^ the myth which people make up
for themselves, or accept from one of themselves because
they might themselves have made it up ; or rather, it
is the myth which people would spontaneously make
out of something presented by some one else who
meant something different; for history shows that
the Primitive Church had its EvangeHsts, and that
SyndicaKsm has its JournaHsts, of neither of whom
the historic student can affirm that he knows exactly
how much they did or do beheve. Be this as it may,
the myth as enthroned by M. Sorel is efficacious in
begetting emotion and action just in proportion as it
expresses men's desires and dreams, in proportion as
it is symptomatic of an akeady existing tendency in a
given direction. One's myth is, so to speak. Oneself,
» Cf. W. James, " WiU to BeUeve," " Pragmatism," and " Varieties
of Religious Experience" ; SchiUer, " Humanism," etc.
« Prezzolini, " La Teoria Sindacalista," p. 133 : " Lo sciopero
generaie i una ddle piii spontanee idee nella classe operaia, vera figlia
deUa coscienza e delV azione sva."
M
8o
Vital Lies
and in so far familiar and comforting ; whereas Reality
is something outside, indifferent, and frequently hos-
tile ; at the very best, Reahty is not busy smoothing
one's pillow or waiting to answer the bell.
Moreover (and here we return to the pot of gold at
the foot of the rainbow), a myth is eminently vague,
not limited in time and space (being as much an emotion
as a thought), so that it can fit individual requirements
as well as collective ones, and, what is most important
of all, never disappoint those requirements, similar
or dissimilar, by realization.
For, of course, the essential characteristic of a myth
is that, whatever else it may produce (and M. Sorel
assures us that it can produce all the greatest things
visible from the " historical standpoint "), the one
thing which it cannot produce is its own realization.
It is part of the Messianic Myth that the Messiah
never makes his appearance ; did not the Messianic
Jews crucify Jesus Christ for saying he had come ?
It is part of the mythical character of the " General
Strike " that it will never come off. Like that, you
can continue expecting, and getting the greatest output
of sanctity and heroism out of your expectation. You
can even, as Signor Prezzolini has told us, get the
Superman whom you do not expect or want at all,
if only you go on expecting something else, like the
General Strike, with sufficient self-denying fervour.
The Syndicalist Myth 8i
VII
As a matter of fact, therefore, we are dealing not
with one messianic expectation, but with two. There
is the messianic expectation of the General Strike and
the Coming of the Kingdom of Labour, an expectation
whose realization is believed in by the Syndicalist
Proletariat ; and there is the messianic expectation
of the coming of the new Proletarian Humanity and
its realization through belief in the General Strike ;
and this messianic expectation is also very genuinely
believed to be really realizable ; only it is entertained
not by the Proletariat but by Monsieur Sorel and the
intellectual bourgeois his disciples.
And the puzzling (and yet true !) circumstances
about these equally truly existing messianic expecta-
tions (we must not call both myths !) is that their
relation is such that while M. Sorel's expectation of
the coming of the Proletarian New Humanity is strictly
dependent for realization on the Proletarian expecta-
tion of the General Strike, this Proletarian expectation
of the General Strike would come to an instant end were
the Proletariat to accept or even to understand Monsieur
Sorel's expectation of the coming of the Proletarian
New Humanity.
82
Vital Lies
VIII
These almost metaphysical complications make the
situation just a trifle delicate, and M. Sorel'a book is
full of fear lest the effects of the Syndicalist Myth —
nay, the S3mdicali8t Myth's very existence — may be
jeopardised by lack of faith and fervour ; indeed, we
shall see that the " Violence " which he takes for his
title is intended to keep up the requisite fury of class
warfare and the consequent output of millenarian
virtues.
It is here that Syndicalism — meaning thereby not
the mere reality of existing syndicates and syndicated
workmen, but the personified imconscious essence
which guides that trumpery reality in a direction it
little dreams of — it is here that Sjmdicalism steps in,
showing itself to be the true historical Will, and a Will
mysteriously related to Bergson's Evolution Creatrice.^
" Le syndicalisme,'' writes Sorel (p. 89), " s^efforce
d'emphyer des moyens d" expression qui projettetU sur
les choses une pleine lumiere, qui les posent parfaitement
* " Cette philosophie par laquelle Bergson a renouvdi la psychologie,
M. Sorel et la Nouvdle Ecole en font Vapplicaiion a la Sodologie et
a V Economic politique. Uoppoeition du moi superficiel et du moi
profond, du micanique et du vivant, ils la trouvent . ... en science
sociale dans Vopposition entre Tutopie et le mythe ; en politigtie dans
Vantagonisme entre le riformisme ligal et la revolution totale."
0. Guy-Grand : " La Pbilosophie Syndicaliste " in " Annales de la
Jeuuesae."
^
The Syndicalist Myth 83
a la place que leur assigns leur nature et qui accusent
toute la valeur des forces mises en jeu. Au lieu
d(UUny£f les oppositions, il faudra, pour suivre Vorienta-
tion syndicaliste, les mettre en relief ; il faudra donner
un aspect aussi solide que possible aux groupements qui
luUent entre eux ; enfin ou reprSsentera les niouvements
des nmsses r^U^es de telle maniere que Vdnie des rMies
en regoive une impression pleinement maitrisante.^'
" Une pleine lumidre ! " writes M. Sorel. But it
is the light produced by the fashionable burner patented
by Bergson (" c'est la connaissance parfaite de la
Philosophic Bergsonienne," M. Sorel informs us, in
a footnote, p. 95) and, like that of the place referred to
by Job, it is li^U which is as darkness. For remark
that the lucidity of the arrangement is to consist in
suppressing any troublesome "indecisions" such as
parliamentary Socialists [farceurs, bavards, menteurs,
and moreover admired by decadents !) may have left
in the mind of the working man ; and in making the
parties in conflict seem as conflicting as possible,
doubtless by suppressing all mention of the many
interests which, as human beings, as consumers, and
even as employers and employed they actually have in
common. Any such reality is to be left out in that
dynamogenetic myth, left to return (expelle furca
one may say of reality, since reality i^ nature) and
revenge itself by Assuring and rending the fine myth-
built edifice. The lucidity recommended by M. Sorel
84
Vital Lies
\i
consists in " representing the movement of the revolu-
tionary masses in such a way that the soul of the
insurgent shall receive a completely overpowering
impression " {en regoive une impression phinement
maUrisatUe). Language, being but a creation of mere
superficial logic and a traitor to the " profound reality
of things," must somehow be supplemented for the
production of such adequate effects.
" Le langage, ne saurait suffire four produire de teU
rSsuUats d'une mani^re assure, il faiU faire appel d
des ensembles dHm/iges capables d'evoqiier en bloc et par
la seule intuition {SoreVs underlining) avant toute analyse
r^fiSchie la wxisse des sentiments qui correspondent aux
diverses manifestations de la guerre engage par le
socialisme contre la sociit^ m/yderne"
It is not interesting to meet again, after having
become acquainted with it in our studies of Professor
James's views on mysticism, and of Father Tyrrell's
" Religious Idea" that venerable primaeval conglomerate
of objective fact and subjective associations and
emotions ? That " connaissance parfaite de la
Philosophic Bergsonienne," that " ensemble d'images
capables d'evoquer en bloc et par la seule intuition
(Mr Sorel has even furnished the very italics I wanted)
avant toute analyse reflechie la masse des sentiments
qui correspondent, etc., etc " ? Here the sentence
ends off — " correspondent aux diverses manifestations
de la guerre engagee par le socialisme contre la societe
The Syndicalist Myth 85
moderne " — but it might equally well have been
tailed off into conneidon with Father Tyrell's " Catholic
Idea " or with Mr Ernest Crawley's " Elemental
Points of View " described as a panacea for preserving
a Tory Church and State from the dangers of Ration-
alists and Socialists.
For here is the mischief (the eternal drawback of
all Vital Lies) that everybody equally can deal in
" ensembles d'images capables d'evoquer en bloc et
par la seule intuition avant toute analyse reflechie,"
that is to say, in confusions of what is with what is hoped
or feared, in truths-in-so-far-forth and all the various
devices of (however unofficial) W ill'to-helieve Prag-
matism. Indeed, as Signer Prezzolini remarked about
the Modernists, the only objection to such will-to-
believe Pragmatism is that one cannot keep it for one's
own exclusive use. And, therefore, in the long run,
we have all of us to invoke objective reality, facts
which take none of our habits and likings into considera-
tion, as a final appeal against our opponents and our
opponents' " beliefs " and " myths."
IX
As regards our Sjoidicalist Myth, these objective
and opposing factors are already giving M. Sorel
a good deal of annoyance, and even anxiety.
86
Vital Lies
The dangers besetting the present and the future
are naturally not those insisted on by orthodox
economists, for M. Sorel, like, I suppose, all Syndicalists,
proceeds from Marx and takes all Marx's economics
for granted, much as the Messanist Christians of
the first century took for granted the Law and the
Prophets.
The powers of evil dreaded by M. Sorel are various :
they are the spontaneous tendency to social improve-
ment, the more accommodating spirit of capitalistic
society, the Socialistic hankerings of parliamentary
governments, above all, the growing humanitarianism
of an enfeebled bourgeoisie. These nefarious realities
must be checked at once in the interest of the myth
which alone can bring us the new mankind and its
new virtues— " /or," writes M. Sorel (p. 45), " «*
. . . les bourgeois 4gar^s jxir les blagues des pr^icateurs
de morale ou de sociohgie, reviennent d un id^al de
m^iocfiti conservatrice, cherchent d corriger les abus
de V^conomie et veulent romjyre avec la barbarie de leurs
ancienSj alors une partie des forces qui devaient produire
la tendance du capitalisme est employ^ d Venrayer,
du hasard sHrUroduit et Vavenir du monde est compUte-
merU indetermin^. Cette indderminalion augmerUe
encore si le proUtariat se convertit d la paix sociale en
meme temps que ses maitres. ..."
^ Inddermin^, of course, in the sense of not being
determined in accordance with M. Sorel'a wishes,
.
The Syndicalist Myth 87
and with the Will— the historic, unconscious Will— of
that semi-personified abstraction Syndicalism.
From the historic standpoint, whence Monsieur
Sorel directs the future (as other historically-minded
persons direct, in a fashion, the past), every real factor
omitted from the great Marxian horoscope is treated
as an interloping " chance," very much as theologians
treat man's disobedience and the wiles of Satan as an
atrocious accident breaking in upon the harmony
pre-ordained by a wise and benevolent omnipotence.
Imagine the scandalous historic irregularity of tolerable
relations between capital and labour coming about
by, let us say, a gradual interpenetration of the two
classes, or the recognition of the common interests
as consumers uniting both against the prsetorian
tyranny of special monopolies and rings, whether
in the shape of oil trusts or of railway servants'
Syndicates.
More shocking still would be the disruption in the
Syndicalist order of the universe if, the parliamentary
(what we call Fabian) element of Socialism increasing,
its reforms and reconstructions gradually left the
catastrophic Sjmdicalist with nothing to rage against ;
and, in a disastrous dulness of logical give and take,
dissolved the jumble of combative emotional associa-
tions and Marxian theorisings which alone can keep
up the regenerating expectation of the General Strike,
Can any historically-minded philosopher endure the
88
Vital Lies
gradual substitution of such selfish and comfortable
lucidity for that " connaissance parfaite de la Philo-
sophie Bergsonienne " ? M. Sorel for one is going
to oppose himself with all his might to any such
intrusion of " hasard " ; and so he preaches recourse
to " La Violence," violence on the part of the prole-
tariat for the sake of rousing violence on the part of
the bourgeoisie, in order to keep up the violence of the
proletariat and Da Capo. For without the " con-
naissance parfaite " of a state of class warfare, you
cannot get your crop of heroic and saintly virtues,
your moral regeneration of the world, and your New
Humanity willed by Syndicalism.
We can now imderstand the apparent contradiction
of M. Sorel foretelling the course of historical events,
and putting out so much zeal lest that course be de-
flected.
" Marx supposait" writes M. Sorel (p. 48), " que
la bourgeoisie rCavait pas besoin d'Stre excite a employer
la force ; nous sommes en presence d'un fait nouveau
et fort impr^vu : une bourgeoisie qui cherche d att^uer
la force. Faut-il eroire que la conception Marxiste est
morte ? Nullement" answers M. Sorel, betraying per-
haps more doubt in the answer than in the question —
" car la violence proUtarienne entre en seine en mime
temps que la paix sodale pretend apaiser les confiits.
Non seulement la violence prol^rienne peui assurer
la r^lution future " (i.e., by frightening the bourgeoisie
The Syndicalist Myth 89
into keeping up the necessary amount of class hatred),
" mais encore elle semhle Stre le seul moyen dont disposers
Us nations europ^nnes abruties par Vhumanitarisme
pour retrouver leur andenne Snergie."
That famous energy ! The energy which Gobineau,
then Nietzsche, and now Monsieur Sorel (let alone
innumerable other literary persons incapable of hurting
a fly) are always looking for in the past and in the
future ; one might almost suspect because they do not
feel sufficient thereof in themselves to recognise it in
the much maligned present !
And now we have got to the element of humorous-
ness, which, by a merciful dispensation, rarely fails to
grow up, a refreshing prison flower, in some cranny of
even the grimmest edifice wherein systematic thinkers
enclose themselves and their readers.
Violence is requisite to keep up the Myth ; Violence
to shake up those miserable bourgeois {ve4les, ahrutiSy
etc., etc.) who have not the spirit needed for their part
of Antichrist, and who, left to themselves, might leave
off making the modicum of martjrrs necessary for the
upkeep of the Messianic Sjmdicalist Myth. Violence
is wanted !
Violence (does he not call his book Reflexions there-
iSK!r-^*-i-,s;^!Bw
m
90
Vital Lies
upon, and give us, heaven knows, Violence of vitupera-
tion enough behind that red- waving title ?), and once
more Violence ! But not really very much of it. Nor in
the least of a bad kind : just a little will do the job,
skilfully applied, made the most of ; but, taken in
itself, not really enough to put on the point of a knife
and choke a dog withal. For do not forget that we
are in the land of mj^hs, and that a myth of violence
may produce a myth of bourgeois reaction without
resorting to coarse material facts : the facts, as usual
when we deal with myths, are to be employed merely
as symbols — " nur ein Gleichniss," as Goethe's Chorus
Mysticus sings with so much sociological acumen ;
or, in more modem and aesthetic language, it is a
question of getting the " values," the values of violence,
as an artist, by skilful contrasts, gets the full values of
a tropical mid-day out of a lick of whitey-brown body
colour.
Hence M. Sorel (p. 168) enters upon a long historical
inquiry to prove, more or less on Hamack's authority,
that the actual number of early Christian martyrs
was very small ; deducing from the efficacy of these
few but telling acts of faith, that, analogically . . .
well, that the Syndicalist Myth of Ruthless Class War-
fare and Universal Cataclysm will prove to require, for
efficacy similar to that which established Christianity,
only a comparatively small number of deeds of fury
on the part of the working classes : the terror-inspiring
The Syndicalist Myth 91
clash and clangour will be out of all proportion to the
real breakage.
*' Nous pouvons done concevoir que le socialisrm soil
parfaitement rdvolutionnaire encore quHl n'y ait que des
conflUs courts et peu nombreux, pourvu que ceux-ci aient
une force suffisante pour pouvoir s^allier d Vidde de la
grive g^nerale : tous les MnemerUs apparaitrorU alors
sous une forme amplifi^e, et, les notions catastrophiques
se maintenant, la scission sera parfaite"
So that, while class warfare will be in all imagina-
tions {la scission parfaite means each class considering
the other as an irreconcilable and villainous enemy),
*' la civilisation rCest point menacde de succomber sous
les cons^uences d'un dSveloppement de la brutalitS.^^
Thus does the apostle of proletarian violence fore-
stall "Tobjection que Ton adresse souvent aux re-
volutionnaires."
Surely one of the most admirable peculiarities of
the pragmatistic spirit, even where not officially pro-
claimed, is this engaging tendency to make light of
obstacles ; and, even in the moments of utmost
partisanship, to show itself ready to oblige everybody.
XI
Be it as it may with the exact dose of violence,
M. Sorel adjures the proletariat to apply it in the
i
\\v
J
interests of the Syndicalist myth, of the War of Classes,
and the coming of the New Humanity, himself
apparently regardless of the circumstance that, once
they have understood that the Mjrth is only a myth,
these working men may refuse to expend their violence
or anything else in its service. For there is a second
humorous element in the matter, and that is shown in
the original publication of the "Reflexions sur la
Violence" in one of the principal periodicals intended to
enlighten and discipline the working man. M. SorePs
belief in the efficacy of his Myth is so complete that
he cannot refrain from explaining that it is a Myth to
the very people who are required to believe that it is
not one !
XII
M. Sorel's acute and imaginative mind has been
busied especially with the lessons of history, those
lessons which will never cease to be a field for philo-
sophical discussion, because they consist for the most
part in merely verbal analogies. Among these many
alleged lessons of history there is one which does
seem irrefutable (so long, of course, as the reverse is
irrefutable also !), namely, that a great many great
results have come about by people having striven
sufficiently hard to bring about something entirely
different. It is a safe prediction that something will
The Syndicalist Myth 93
come of the Socialistic strivings of our own day and of
the days of our fathers, both of the Parliamentary and
the Syndicalist sort, both of M. Jaures' and of M.
Sorel's pattern ; and it is safer still to predict that the
something coming will not be exactly like what these
various strivings are deliberately aiming at. For,
in the first place, Parliamentary Socialism and
Syndicalistic Socialism must have different effects
whose co-existence will produce an unintended com-
pound ; and, secondly, the strivings of all the various
kinds of Socialism (let alone Anarchism also !) will have
to combine, in however hostile a spirit, with the striv-
ings of Capitalism, and perhaps with the strivings of
other hitherto uncatalogued sociological and political
factors. You cannot let loose so much hope and fear,
so much effort to take, and so much effort to keep,
without the face of civilization being considerably
changed by it all. That much seems a lesson of history,
and, moreover, a logical necessity, although only a
Socialist (Parliamentary or Syndicalist, as the case may
be) or a Bourgeois Reactionary can feel perfectly sure
whether the something will more favour collectivism
or capitalism ; and it is mere personal guesswork to say,
as I should be tempted to do, that the new rdgime may
be some yet unknown integration of capital and labour
in the same individuals, and may be brought about by
the end of class warfare in a united resistance of all
consumers against the threatened tyranny of the
i^H
i
ii'
J
N
i
bureaucracy on the one hand, and of the monopolistic
corporations of capitalists or of labourers on the
other.
In this sense, something is sure to come out of eveiy-
thing, and in the case under contemplation something
is sure to come out of the Syndicalist Myth, as something
came out of Early Christian Messianism ; and something
which is sure not to be like what is expected, for the
very good reason that such expectation always leaves
out of count everything that it does not happen to think
of, which omitted factor (in the case of Messianism,
the constitution of Antique Civilization and of human
nature in general) is sure to assert its presence in a
product which disappoints everybody.
In this sense it seems probable, nay, certain, that
something will come of the Syndicalist Myth of the
General Strike, with its programme of class warfare
and violence ; that the something will be different from
the expected Armageddon and coming of the Proletarian
Kingdom on Earth. And to this we may even add
that, taking visible factors for progress into account,
and particularly the growing capacity of classes and
individuals to see and defend their own interests, it
it possible, even probable, that the unknown something
will be rather less intolerable than the known somethings
of the present and the past.
But this is not M. Sorel's conception of the way that
Myths— especially his own Syndicalist Myth— should
The Syndicalist Myth 95
act. The new rigime is not to be a compromise, a
fusion of dijBEerent interests, but a subordination of
one kind of interest to another ; or rather, it is to be
an exclusion of all save one kind of interest. Does
M. Sorel, therefore, partake in the belief that the
Syndicalist Myth, the Myth whose efficacy is in its
mythicalness, can ever be realized ? Certainly not.
It is not the coming of a r^ime of proletarian happiness
which the Syndical myth is to compass : firstly, because
that would mean realizing a myth, and M. Sorel tells
us a Myth cannot be realized ; secondly, because
M. Sorel shows no inclination to accept a future of pro-
letarian comfort, leisure, and culture when oSered as
the fruit of any cessation of class warfare, and this not
because the oSer of such a future appears to him a mere
lying promise destined to prevent its own accomplish-
ment. Moreover, and this is a significant point,
the educative functions of the Syndicalist Myth are
not conceived by him as conducive to such economic
and administrative capacity as would be requisite
before the proletarian could take over the functions
of capitalism while continuing those of labour. For
M. Sorel makes a distinct proviso that the beneficial
effects of class ivarfare can he compassed only if economic
progress he not jeopardized ; a proviso referring,
doubtless, to the levelling down of production in Trade
Unions, the protection of idle and improvident members
lest they should become blacklegs, and to the systematic
.'
96
Vital Lies
waste of time and damaging of plant at present preached
and practised in Syndicalist milieus under the official
name of sabotage.
" It remains to be seen,'' writes M. Sorel, " s'il y a,
dans le momde des producteurs, des forces d'entkomiasme
capables de se combiner avec la morale du bon travail,
en sorte que, dans nos jours de crise, celle-ci puisse
acquerir toute I'autorite qui lui est necessaire pour
conduire le monde dans la voie du progres economique.
. . ." (underhning mine).
This may seem to many of us a very big if ; and a
slovenly reader, or one who had not penetrated suffi-
ciently into the Syndicalist Myth, might imagine that
it is to this that M. Sorel is alluding when he warns us
prophetically against " Le danger qui menace I'avenir
du monde."
But that " danger'' he goes on to state, " pent itre
4cart4 si le prol^riat s'aUache avec obstination aux
idees r^lutionnaires," and as such exclusive attach-
ment to revolutionary ideas is not diminishing but
increasing the probabilty of economic barbarism
and diminished social productiveness, we have seen
that M. Sorel thinks that such economic decadence may
possibly jeopardize the full benefits of the Syndicalist
myth. We must, therefore, seek elsewhere for that
" danger which threatens the future of the world, and
which can be avoided if the working class adheres
obstinately to revolutionary ideas"
The Syndicalist Myth 97
XIII
And that danger, alluded to time after time in the
whole course of the book, is called by its name on the
very last page of the " Reflexions sur la Violence."
" J'ai 6tabli , . . que . . . dans la ruine totale des
institutions et des moBurs, il reste quelque chose de puissant,
de neuf et d'intact, c'est ce qui constitue, d proprement
pdrler, I'dme du proletariat rSvolutionnaire : et cela
ne sera pas entrain^ dans la d^h^ance g^n&ale des
valeurs morales, si les travailleurs ont assez d'^nergie
pour barrer le chemin aux corrupteurs bourgeois, en
r&pondanl d leurs avarices par la brutality la plus in-
telligible. "
The total ruin of institutions and morals. A very
dangerous business that would be ! And it is, indeed,
difficult to imagine how the worid would get on without
institutions or morals ; so difficult, indeed, that some
people feel sure (and myself among them) that the
future can be trusted to make itself an ever new and
adequate supply of things so indispensable to its safety.
But M. Sorel, like many even of his most Anarchical
countrymen, has no such comfortable though mean-
spirited utilitarian view of ethics ; for him, institutions
and morals are not a means, but an end, a by-product
of human life which human life will neglect and starve,
like some beautiful and useless flower, unless en-
2a
98
Vital Lies
thomiasme waters it by sacrificing some of its poor little
ration of happiness ; nay, I suspect that in M. Sorel's
thought, morality can flourish only on sacrifice, on tears
perhaps, and possibly on blood.
For remark, that if the valeurs morales have no chance
save from the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice begotten
by the Syndicalist myth, that Sjnidicalist myth cannot
itself be kept up with its class warfare and militant
virtues, except by the application of such " violence "
(however platonic) as will exasperate the selfish ruth-
lessness of the bourgeoisie, and make, or keep, it just
as wicked and vile as you may want it.
Did not the enthusiasm and the " vigorous and
intact " moral values of Primitive Christianity re-
quire, according to M. Sorel, a soil rich in the vices
of decaying Antiquity, that fertile compost of
abominations of which St Paul has left us a detailed
analysis ?
And there comes to my mind a sentence in the book
of another moralist relying upon the efficacy (the " so-
far-forth " truth) of myths.
" Not the Absence of Vice " writes Professor William
James ^ '' but Vice there, and Virtue holding it by the
throat, seems the ideal human state.^'
» In the volume of essays entitled, "The Will to Believe."
1
The Syndicalist Myth 99
XIV
. " Et si le nwnde contem'porain," writes M. Sorel (p.
5«0), " ne renferme fas des racines pour une nouveUe
liorale, que deviendra-t-il ? . . . Peu de temps avant
% mort, Renan 4tait fort pr^ccup^, etc. ... "
' Here we are back at our starting-point, namely, the
■ kinship of this preacher of class warfare with the great
free-thinking obscurantist who wrote (and in two
different places, as already remarked) that we are living
off the shadow of a shadow, and wondered what un-
substantial moral pabulum mankind would provide for
the morrow.
A few pages further (p. 250) M. Sorel again
quotes Renan, as follows : —
" Le soldat de Na'polion savait bien quHl serait toujours
un pauvre homrm ; mats il sentait que Vepop^ cl laquelle
il travaillait serait dernelle, quHl vivrait dans le gloire
de la France. . . . A ddfaut de paradis il y a h gloire
qui est une espdce d' immortality."
This curious quotation, where La Gloire takes the
place of religious rewards, has connected itself
in my mind with a certain newspaper interview (La
Voce, December, 1909), in which M. Sorel refers to a
Latin, what he calls (from Comeille) a Cornelian
conception of virtue ; for, taken together, they afford
a suggestion of— how shall I express myself ?— well,
il
lOO
Vital Lies
'}
of the texture of the shadows on whose shadows we are
supposed to be living.
The myth — ^for that is the original shadow — ^is, as
M. Sorel shows it us, an obscure fusion of concepts and
emotions, and its function consists in calling forth in
the individual a definitely directed — indeed, most often
a monoideistic — enthusiasm, which enhances his
energy and endurance far beyond his normal personal
level, and keeps up this exaltation by the contagion
of a similar state in his companions. Now such an
exaltation of individual moral energy, and such direct-
ing it into a single common channel, is what we find
connected in Classical Antiquity, or rather in Classical
Antiquity as interpreted by Renaissance Italy and
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, with the
particular thing called glory — not the glory of God,
but the glory (which we Anglo-Saxons sometimes
paraphrase as vainghrioicsness) of Man.
" Romains, faime la gloire et ne veux point nCtn taire :
Des travaux des humains c'est le digne salaire ;
Qui n'ose la votdoir, rCoae la miriier " —
(That is Voltaire, doing the Corneille, and not so
badly either.)
And it is with such glory that, as is shown by the
quotation from Renan by Sorel, both these myth-
mongers have explicitly connected that Ombre without
which we can none of us live.
*-
The Syndicalist Myth loi
" A defaut de Paradis il y a la gloire," sajB
M. Renan, " qui est une espte d'immortalite."
The virtue-producing myth can therefore be under-
stood by thinking, not merely of religious " revivals,"
but also of the Napoleonic, or other similar military
^p^s, whose glory, as we are told, will be
eternal.
Now virtue of this sort does not merely depend
for its production (so the myth-mongers tell us) on a
delusion. This extra, this " marginal increment " as
economists would word it, of virtue, may itself be
something delusory, inasmuch as it does not answer to
the permanent energies and organized habits of the
individuals and the crowds from which it has been
obtained.
Hence, even as each soul-exalting mjrth sooner or
later discredits itself by insolvency, and requires re-
placing by some new myth of still untested credit,
so also does the individual or collective soul turn out
unable to keep up an output of heroism surpassing its
real resources. This explains the distressing manner
in which great myth-bred movements have either died
out ingloriously or been succeeded by the more or less
cynical turning to profit of the dogmas and rituals
they had created. Think of the moral bankruptcy
of the various Christian revivals, with their sects and
monastic orders arising in successive reformations ;
think of the moral bankruptcy of the humanitarian
I02
Vital Lies
myth of 1789, even before the Directory and the Con-
sulate. Nay, at this very moment stalwart French
Liberals, believers in M. Sorel like MM. Peguy and
Daniel Halevy, are lamenting the degeneration of the
splendid Dreyfusard movement into political intrigue
and anti-clerical jobbery.^
And, in the face of such a phenomenon of national
delusion as Italy (December 1911) at present offers,
I am led to wonder whether the political and
administrative, the civic marasma which has grieved
and disappointed every well-informed friend of Italy
(" Italy is not yet a nation " wrote Giovanni Cena,
alluding to the incapacity shown after the various
Earthquakes) may not be attributable in part to
the myth-bred enthusiasm which was employed, if
not required, to obtain her independence as a
nation.
Myths and the moral fillip they produce are apparently
among the automatic means by which mankind,
historically considered, shoves along on its path. But
are they not wasteful, perhaps mischievous means ?
And should we not ask ourselves whether they are not,
on the whole, vast, even if inevitable blunders, and ask
ourselves also whether we are not blundering (and
blundering from intellectual wantonness, not from
* Hal6vy, " Apologie pour notre Paaae ; P^guy, " Notre Jeunesse,"
both in " Cahiers de la Quinzaine," 1910-11. Cf. also the lament-
able picture of French political life in the latter volumea of
RoUaad'a " Jean Christophe."
i
The Syndicalist Myth 103
ignorance) in the latter-day admiration for them
exemplified by M. Sorel and his followers ?
XV
What is the balance, the cash-vdlue of a myth?
What are the real fruits for life of that exaltation,
religious, military, revolutionary — which, as our
myth-mongers remind us, raises men above their
ordinary selves ?
I have no wish to sit among the re-valuers of values,
merely denying because others have affirmed. I
merely wish to try and think out for m3rself , and ask
others to study what may be the complicated, contra-
dictory, perhaps inextricable truth about this matter.
I have just put the case against the myth, pointing
out the dangers of tliis alleged lifting of individuals
and masses above their natural moral level. Let me
put the case in its favour, so far as I myself can
admit it.
It seems undeniable that most of us are often, indeed
nearly always, putting out less moral and intellectual
powers than we really have, because these powers are
clogged by habit or run to waste in wrong channels.
Our spiritual health, let alone growth, can benefit
by the breaking up of routines, the opening of new
directions, by the occasional occurrence of some sort of
I'
104
Vital Lies
y ^
ill
crisis : it is not only religious persons who need to be
twice-, indeed, thrice-horn. The drums and cymbals
of Myths call forth our dormant energies ; the mythic
expectation supplies a nucleus round which new habits
can organize. In so far Myths are accomplishing a
vital function for the race. But there are other
factors of such necessary disruption and reorganization.
There are natural renovations, re- births of the soul,
besides these artificial, or at least accidental ones.
Love, for instance, and in every one of its meanings,
from the bodily stirring of sex and parenthood, to the
passionate preference for certain kinds of work or
surrounding*— love in each of its various avatars
elicits the latent forces and brushes away the efEete
habits of the soul. And does not every kind of strong
joy do the same, and many kinds of grief ? Life is,
or might be, full of its own replenishings. And I am
by no means sure that if it is not, this is not due in
part to the clogging presence of old myths. For in
speaking of myths and their functions, we ought
surely to remember that a myth is not always spontane-
ous and new-bom : it is, in most cases, quite incal-
culably old and most artificially preserved. Indeed,
while M. Sorel ascribes all morality to the coming of
new myths, Mr Crawley~who stands in this for a far
larger number of thinkers— has ascribed all morality
to the survival of old ones.
The Syndicalist Myth 105
XVI
" Les peraonnes rdigieusea vivent d'une ombre. Nous vivons de
Voinbrc cTune otnbre. De quoi vivra-d-on apres nous ? "
Evidently, if any one continues living after us, it
will be on something. And if people have lived for
thousands of years on a shadow, and are now living on
that shadow's shadow, it seems likely that being thus
happily accommodating about spiritual nourishment,
mankind will go on finding or making itself a mjrthical
pabulum, or learn to live without such aliments at
all, who knows. After this long dieting on illusions
and traditions of illusions, it may, in some odd unex-
pected manner, accustom its spiritual digestion to the
strong, but not very palatable food of reality.
But, after much turning it over, I am beginning to
suspect that all this question of what will replace present
and past myths, is but an idle one. It is due, I believe,
to the dilettantishness of our philosophic thinkers, and
even more to us philosophers attempting to appropriate,
to secularize for our own benefit, the booths and sign-
boards, the inventories and ledgers of former, or still
existing, priesthoods. Those priests we are trying to
replace (evjn when we officially keep them)/earned their
livelihood and kept up their dignity by dealing in
mysteries, dispensing consolations and purifications,
trafficking in amulets and philtres, explaining dreams,
f
1 06
Vital Lies
V
In
i(i
and generally foretelling the future. Have we not
peradventure, taken over their business, and fed our-
selves, if not our readers, ofi the manufacture of fig-
ments ?
Surely it were well if we pondered over this possibility
when we see Tolstoi protesting that without his
particular spiritual formula the life of man is no better
than that of cattle, or no life at all ; when we see poor
wavering, self-assertive Nietzsche labouring at suc-
cessive fashion plates, patterns of Supermen, in order
that the centuries to come may know once for all " how
to make themselves noble " (sich veredlen) ! Nay, even
that nice, wise, kind, sceptical old Renan, full of amiable,
priestly optimism, asking, with one foot in the grave,
what delusions unregistered in his pharmacopeia will
serve as invalid's food for the coming generations !
And now, here is M. Sorel, Kenan's syndicalist
disciple, promising an adequate supply of quite fresh
morality, an abundant output of heroism and sublime,
by the simple device of an artificially fostered myth
of General Strike and General Class Warfare.
T h in k ing over these examples (and sundry others
not mentioned in this volume), I feel myself growing
suspicious of these stolen Church properties. And the
suspicion increases when, returning to M. Sorel's
volume, I re-read the passage from Renan immediately
preceding the famous " de quoi vivra-Uon apr^s
nous ? "
The Syndicalist Myth 107
((
Les valeurs morales haissent " (it is Renan writing,
and Sorel quoting, but myself underhning), " cela est
8iir ; le sacrifice disparait presque ; ou voit venir le jour
ou I'egoisme organise remplacera I'amour et la d'evoue-
ment."
I have underlined those two sentences, not merely
because their self-confidence amazes me, but because
their meaning is important in proportion to its
obscurity.
Does Renan mean that, for lack of the necessary self-
sacrifice, mankind will rot away and perish ? If so,
the thing to be grieved at is the terrible result of such
diminished devourment and self-sacrifice, not the lack
of these virtues which has so produced it : after a
railway accident it is not over the wrong signalling or
the jerry built bridge that we lament, but over the re-
sulting deaths and mutilations ; if trains and passengers
had been just as safe with no signalling at all, or across
bridges of lath and plaster, there would be no cause for
lamentation.^
But this is not Renan's meaning. Like many
1 Cf. Pi-ezzoUni, " Teoria Sindacalista," p. 122.
" AUa lotta di classe intesa come conquista politica e come miglior-
amento conlinuo non danno i sindacalisti alcuna importanza : essi
la considerano invece soiio Vaspetto etico, e pensano piuttosto aUe
nuove virtii che crea che ai maggiori salari che permette e pro-
mette." The press campaign in favour of the Tripolitan War has
presented an amusing interweaving of promises of lands flowing
with milk and honey mth just such " disinterested " readiness to
pay half a million (let alone killed and wounded) for the acquisition
of Latin virtues.
I
moralists and all religious persons, he has cultivated
(at least, in others), virtue, purity, altruism, heroism,
sublimity, so strenuously for their own sake, that he
forgets that their cultivation was originally detennined
by their usefulness; and he is shocked at the bare
thought of a worid sufficiently decent to require rather
less of them. For moralists and religious persons
have striven, or at least talked, so long to establish,
let us say, strict marriage ties for the greater
safety and happiness of mankind that they would
willingly sacrifice any human decency and happi-
ness which could dispense with such conjugal
indissolubility.
And similariy with patriotism, it has cost mankind
a deal of moral effort to establish it ; and moralists
cannot admit that the time may come when it will be
superseded, like horsemills and handlooms.
That Renan is just such a moralist (a gardener bent
on prize vegetables rather than on feeding the hungry)
is revealed by his horror at organized selfishness ever
replacing the virtues. But would organizable selfish-
ness not be the very perfection of conceivable virtue, if
virtue is that which conduces to the world's happiness
and progress in prosperity ?
This, of course, is not at all Rejian's conception. " Si
ce globe vient A manquer d ses devoirs "—he writes with
gloomy optimism— "i/ »Vn trouvera d'aiUres 'pour
pousser a oulrance le programme de toute vie. . . ."
The Syndicalist Myth 109
You imagine, perhaps, that Renan means herewith
that if this globe were to perish from sheer lack of
dutifulness, another globe, cultivating those neglected
and necessary spiritual qualities, will take its place
with a new lease of life ? Nothing so crass ! The
sentence closes with a definition of life's proper
program. Listen : " Pour prusser d outrance le
programme de tout vie : lumi^re, raison, vMd.^*
So if this poor old world of ours achieved life and
happiness without compassing that threefold reiteration,
that tautological trinity of Lumi^re, Raison, V6rit^,
another world would have to take its place, a world with
sounder views about devoirs. Now when a man like
Renan speaks of devoirs, of what is due, we may well
ask due, duty, to whom ? Due to mankind, coming and
to come ? But would mankind ask for Lumi^re, Raison,
Verite, or be wise in asking, before more humble
desiderata were forthcoming ? Surely there would be
neither light nor reason in such a choice, and mankind
would never make it. Hence that devoir is not to
mankind. It is, in fact quite evidently, from or of
mankind. And asking once more towa/rds whom, we
are met by a mere impersonal vagueness called Dieu, or
perhaps some new fangled similar abstraction, but
behind which lurks what Nietzsche (alone, I fancy,
among philosophers) had the clear-sighted outspoken-
ness to call " My taste — mein Geschmack.^^ In other
words, there would, in this case be found hidden the
'^J
..£^^
■HWiBBSP
H^HfiSS-
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Vital Lies
habits of mind, the standards, nay, the professional and
professorial preferences.
There was, indeed, in Renan another element, of
straightforward sympathy, of honest, shamefaced,
sceptical good sense, making him insinuate ever and
again, indeed at times proclaim, that Caliban was
a safer monster, when all is said and done, than sublime
Prospero ; that the craving for ease, peace and pleasure,
all poor vulgar mankind's pathetic recoil from pain and
passionate grasping at happiness, might after aU, and
more than any taste for " Lumiere " and " Devoue-
ment " be the force which drives the spiritual world.
Who knows ? the force through which alone the love of
Lumiere and D'evouement, the very existence of any
spirituality at all, could ever have arisen, and can ever
take significance.
It is probably for such moments for sceptical and
lowly insight that M. Renan has been denounced
as nihilistic and dilettantish by some of his fellow-
obscurantists, among whom especially Prof. William
James. But it seems to me that if there was in Renan
any moral dilettantism, it was precisely of the same
sort as Professor James' own disgust at the mawkishness
of an unheroic world.
Such preachers of morality for morality's own sake
(as other dilettantes preach art for art's own), like to
contemplate heroes, martyrs, sages, supermen living off
ombres and ombres d'une ombre as grosser persons like
The Syndicalist Myth
1 1 1
to look at prize milch cows or at the forced and seedless
plants at a flower show. And Renan is only the most
subtle and charming, precisely because the most
sceptical and self-contradictory, representative of that
priestly mind which takes for granted that God, God
more, or perhaps less. Almighty — must have the same
tasks as himself, and therefore have intended the
Universe for this taste's (a taste refined, ddicat, a taste
in good taste !), especial cultivation and delectation.
XVII
And naturally, for, as already remarked, it is the
especial vocation and business of men like these to
select and enrich the world's necessary growth of
virtues. Indeed — and now we may return from the
Master to the disciple, from Renan to M. Sorel —
it seems just possible that the philosophical importance
of the Myth should be sought in its being not a cause, but
an effect. The myths with which each individual
among us consoles and urges on his spirit — mjrths of
personal ambition, activity, of loving and especially
being loved — are, after all, undeniable symptoms of
our deep down needs ; and needs, when they do not
run to waste in just such myths, are the particles of
energy, whose summed up minuteness moves, rends,
and reshapes the world. And similarly one may ask
;'
A
I 12
Vital Lies
whether the Christian myth and the myth of 1789 have
not been operative merely inasmuch as — well, as not
they, but the needs and powers they stood for, were
genuine realities. Is not this why M. Sorel's syndicalist
myth of the General Strike may truly represent some
as yet indescribable change and improvement in
the condition of the Proletariat? In fact, one
might profitably ask oneself whether, in the WiU-to-
Believe, the passive deciduous element is not the Belief,
and the active, the creative, because real one, the Will
which begets fiction so long as it cannot yet engender
reality ?
XVIII
And to return (now for the last time), to M.
Sorel and his theory of myths. The interesting, original
(and also amusing) peculiarity about him is that he
values the Will to Believe just because it does not lead
to reality. Let us sum up his argument one last time.
Look round the world. No sooner are we face to face
with reality, no sooner do we know the true details of
things and their actual workings, but we have to
recognise that there is only perf unctoriness, fraud, and
corruption. Hence you can get no great enthusiastic
mass-movements, no sustained heroism and saintliness
out of any realisable projects. But myths have neither
details nor consequences, hence no drawbacks, and the
I
The Syndicalist Myth 113
more you pursue, the further they draw you on. Reality
is succeeded by reality, each unsatisfactory, and each
demolished in turn. But the myth eludes all assaults,
and soars undiminished and undefeated. Hence the
world's greatest revolutions : Primitive Christianity,
the Reformation and 1789, have been brought about by
belief in a myth. And the next great revolution will be
brought about by the Syndicalist myth of the Greneral
Strike.
Yes; but the Apostles did not preach that the
Coming of the Kingdom of Heaven was a myth pregnant
of other consequences. Neither did the first Protestants
go to the stake to uphold what they knew to be a mere
myth leading to the scission of the Teuton and Latin
worlds and the arrival of David Strauss and the Higher
Criticism. Still less did the men of the Revolution go
(and send their neighbour) to death in hopes of the
establishment of a French Bourgeois Monarchy or a
Combes-Briand Republic. And one wonders whether
those syndicalists who read M. Sorel's "Reflexions
sur la Violence" will be quite as ready to spend
their wages in preparing and keeping up strikes once
they have grasped that it is the essence of the General
Strike never to come off, and the function of the
Syndicalist myth merely to replenish the world's supply
of early Christian or Cornelian-antique virtues ?
<^
tmim
114
Vital Lies
lII
XIX
These Vital Lies, new-fangled or old-established, thus
pressed upon us by philosophers, are of the nature of
those royal roads of which we are told there can be none
in geometry.
Nor in Truth of any kind. For royal roads are those
along which, our wishes magically turned into horses, we
beggars are wont to ride.
Viewed in this way they become more or less
sympathetic. For they most often represent, they and
all their cognate Utopias and panaceas, the expression,
the passionate desire of some man or men to compass,
single-handed (and often single- witted), the reformation
or the preservation of the moral and sometimes of the
social world. When a man is generous enough to fix
his imagination upon some of the vast stupid atrocities
of human life as it exists, the horror that such things
should be, easily turns into disbelief of their being even
temporarily inevitable. The violently stirred human
nature of the looker-on enlarges, envelopes, obscures
everything, and becomes for him nature herself; his
violated feelings, the mere sample of nature's out-
raged intentions, as when Tolstoi tells us that what he
felt on witnessing a guillotining made him understand
beyond all power of argument that the infliction of
death on human beings must be wrong ; whereas the
The Syndicalist My th 1 1 5
right and wrong of that, as of other action, can be
decided only by comparing the possible horrors avoided
with the evident horror committed. All of us who have
ever been decently young must recollect similar episodes,
where the overwhelming of our own feelings has brought
with it the conviction that there must be some way out of
it, and bid us burst our hearts and brains till that way
was found. Now a way out of many, perhaps most,\
abominations there very probably is: the gradual,!
steady impinging of fact on fact, of interest on interest,
and will on will, which infinitely slowly, but inevitably
rolls away the various loads of human horror. And
optimism consists in recognizing that, however, in-
finitesimal the share of ourself and our day, we can
each of us contribute our microscopic will towards the
purpose ; indeed that the less each one of us can
singly do, the more need that each should singly do it.
But that is a recognition which comes (sometimes, alas,
only with our own diminished vitality), when we notice
that there is not one evil only to combat, but a hundred,
and that concentration on one may neglect and even
increase the others. Now the minds seeking for royal
roads see only one direction in which to go ; only one
goal ; and they become willing to sacrifice all other
goals and directions, nay, they become jealous, suspicious
of every other aim and every other effort. For there is
furious envy and hatred in such reformers ; they almost
prefer Evil to other proposed Good, or other means of
/
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Vital Lies
ii.-
la'
I
attaining good; see M. Sorel's rage with parlia-
mentary socialism, with bourgeois humanitarians, with
anything that tends to social reorganization, otherwise
than in his own way. And (this time tragic instead of
humorous) think of Tolstoi's destructive hatred (of
him whose recipe was hving !) of liberalism, socialism,
science, in fact all those means towards his end which
Beemed an interference and a criticism of his own
panacea. Such seekers after royal roads would make
the world a wilderness, and like religious fanatics,
choke hell with victims to keep their private paradise
select.
Perhaps, being so opposed to the multiplicity and
complexity of reality, such minds are not really
dangerous, and representing after all one, however
warped, moral force, they may be useful. But they are,
if we look at them calmly, not (as I said) entirely
sympathetic, and rather figures for farce or tragedy —
(Tolstoi, the King Lear of morality !)— good for our
intellectual entertainment and moral catharsis, or
shaking up by pity and terror, rather than genuine
benefactors of mankind.
So it seems to me.
But then, I am the sort of person who believes that
fallacies and myths, and even the noblest self-delusions,
always leave a heavy debt to pay.
PART III
EPILOGUE
THE AUTHOR SOLILOQUIZES
'»
THESE studies of what I have called Vital
Lies, have been useful to myself by making
me think as clearly as I was able on the
points where my WiU-to-believe Obscurantists had
thought obscurely and ambiguously.
But their chief value in my own eyes is in the trains
of thought which have accompanied my readings in
Pragmatism, theoretical and applied ; trains of thought
converging towards a rough philosophy of my own, or at
least showing me the gap which some philosophy, at
once natural and practical, must some day fill up.
The following notes embody some of these trains of
thought ; after discussing so long with others, I owe
these the chance, and myself the satisfaction, of talking
about Truths and Lies, Vital or otherwise, on my own
account.
I
'M
/(
119
CHAPTER I
NOTK
L True in so far as Misunderstood
II. Truths and their Precedence .
III. Why Vital Lies are called Vital Truths
IV. Belief which is Doubt
V. The Benefit of the Doubt *. '.
VI. " Reason Unreasonable "
VII. Belief as Activity and Belief as Inertness
VIII. Socrates and the Tyrants
IX. Mid- Victorian Ethics
X. Of Racial Instinct ....
XL Of Private Cults . . . .*
XII. The Right tojDelude
PAGE
. 121
. 123
. 124
. 128
. 131
. 133
. 135
. 136
. 139
. 142
. 145
. 146
True in so par as Misunderstood
But, as the heading of this page will show you, there
are kinds of truth not usually mentioned in polite society,
like other offspring of passion, '' natural " but not
"legitimate." Thus Mr Crawley, we have seen, is
anxious that the machinations of socialists should be
circumvented by continued teaching of the Church
of England catechism, without any footnotes about
"Elemental ideas," identifications of religions and
sexual instincts, and the use of the Bull Roarer.
And even the dignified candour of Father Tyrrell
II
(a
122
Vital Lies
seems to claim only that he and his learned fellow-
Modernists be allowed to believe whatever they do, while
the rest of Christendom is apparently to continue believ-
ing . . . well, whatever it is told. As regards the Myth
of the General Strike, it would be interesting to know
the theory, and also the practice, of some Sjmdicalist
leader after study of the " R^flexons sur la Violence."
Would he feel himself justified in preaching Class
Warfare to workmen who had not studied M. Sorel, or
not profited by their study ?
In short, would all these high-and-wide-minded
persons continue using words with unequivalent equival-
ences of meaning, employing phrases which subserve
their purpose just in so far as they are misunderstood ?
[In 80 far forth true ! here is another application for
Professor James' definition.]
No two human beings, answer our obscurantists, can
ever mean quite the same thing. Psychology teaches us
that. Very possibly ; but is the result of this teaching
to be that those who have been taught it shall go on
letting those who have not learned this psychological
fact believe that in their case, at least, human beings
not only can mean just the same thing, but actually do
mean it?
Briefly, is our increasing discrimination of meaning
to lead to greater accuracy and sincerity, or to greater
slovenliness and double dealing ?
Do you remember Faust's theological discussion with
Truths and their Precedence 1 2 3
Gretchen on the garden bench ? He was bent upon
vulgar seduction, and had already sold his soul to the
devil when he assured the poor little girl that he and
she had, au ford, the same religious views. Yet even
Faust being but an eighteenth century freethinker, did
make some difficulties about that word " God," and
left himself open to the suspicion that he was no proper
Christian.
Our latter day sages, abundantly conscious of the
high purity of their intentions, are less explicit. They
do not stickle at current nomenclature, but calmly
found their reconstruction of society or morals on what-
ever convenient lumps of misapprehension may be
furnished ready to their hand by the World Spirit, or
by Macrocosmus in person.
n
Truths and their Precedence
We are so desperately persuaded of the supreme
value of Truth that we have ended by thinking (or
ruminatingly taking for granted) that only Truth can
have value, and therefore everything which is valuable
must be true.
Hence a complicated hierarchy of truths, complicated
like the rules of precedence for marshalling peers and
peers' sons and foreign ambassadors into dinner. For
k
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1
124
Vital Lies
instance, there is Moral Truth, which is—Oh, so high I
Religious truth making it, nevertheless, take a back seat.
There is Artistic truth, of which some persons suspect
that, being so singularly cavalier with things as they
seem to the inartistic eye, it must be of altogether
superior rank, or else a lunatic or malefactor.
There is also Truth, which we not only know, but
fed, that is to say, like, and its double appeal must be
doubly true. In short, among all these various kinds of
degrees of truth, there seems to be only one which all
thinkers are agreed to put into a simple and lowly place —
the Truth which, being neither Moral, nor Artistic, nor
Religious, neither higher nor double, does not appeal to
any of our likings, but merely deals with what things
insist on being.
in
Why Vital Lies are called Vital Truths
And by one of those paradoxes wherein this subject
naturally abounds, there is one particular Vital Lie which
is oldest, most immortal of all, perpetually reproduced
under the stimulus of human desire. That archetype
of Vital Lies is the one identifying all ideas, notions,
opinions found comfortable or beneficial by man, with
Truth.
For Truth is a thing we aU require to get from our
Vital Lies called Truths 125
neighbours ; and it is, at the same time, a thing our
neighbours by no means always require to give to us, so
we, by which I mean that vague abstraction of change
and habit called mankind, have surrounded the giving
of truth, and finally truth itself, with a halo of virtue.
Hence also, wanting it from others, we grow to think
of it as good to give to ourselves, and by a further
slipshod transition, to think that what it is profitable
for us to give ourselves, is true. So we get Keats'
" Beauty is truth, truth Beauty," and the more French
and normative " Rien n'est beau que le vrai, le vrai
seul est aimable " of elegant Boileau ; moreover, the
Pragmatists' less poetical definitions, " What it would
be better for us to think," etc., which are but the
paradoxical summings up of much religious habit,
exemplified in Tolstoi's naif clamour that Science
should teach us to he good ; exemplified also in the
theological identification of God with truth, of anything
the Church finds opportune to teach with the ordy
Truth, and the consequent damnation of such persons
as obstinately refuse to see the Truth.
All this is due to the value of truth-telling in social
relations, let alone that of knowing how things truly
are in all our practical dealings. But as a matter of fact
the inner life of man, as distinguished from his life
among material objects and his fellow men, requires a
constant supply of what is often not truth at all, indeed
occasionally takes its value from being false. For the
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126
Vital Lies
>
endurable cohabitation of the individual soul with its
own self requires food for self-esteem as much as the
health of the body requires material sustenance. Hope
also is wanted, and a degree of confidence in men and
things. Many men have, however, lived without much
of either, and even lived, glorious misanthropes and
pessimists, very comfortably indeed. But no man
has lived comfortably without some amount of
belief in^-4u%_own_JBa£0|tajace.; and the deadly
devitilization of the moments and days when we
have starved for lack of similar moral sustenance
proves that no entire life can ever do without
it. Such is the faith without which life is worthless !
And all religions and religious persons have distorted the
need for such faith in oneself into need for faith in some-
thing else. For what, I wonder, is faith in the loving
kindness of God, His pleasure in our love, except the
assurance that we are either worthy of love, or, in the
case of abjectest self-abasement, that we are invested
with extrinsic value by such undeserved concern for us ?
The spiritless wretch of Browning's Instans Tyrannus,
is secure just in proportion as he has no power or wish
to defend himself.
" Did I say ' without friend ? '
Say rather, from marge to blue marge
The whole sky grew his targe,
With iht sun's self for visible boss.
While an arm ran across
Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast
Where the wretch was safe prest.
Vital Lies called Truths 127
Do you see ? Just my vengeance complete.
The man sprang to his feet.
Stood erect, caught at Ood's skirts, and prayed.
So, I tvas afraid."
Just imagine the satisfactoriness of such a view of
man's relations with the Divinity ! Why, the Tyrant
himself is quite delighted to tell us the anecdote.
Now such faith in our (however humble) importance,
may, of course, be founded upon reality. It may be the
outcome of realities, of the mere obscure organic
strugglings of bodily existence which we do not recognize
for what they are, mankind mistaking for moral or
intellectual importance, the mere insistence of vegetative
growth or animal locomotion and animal appetites.
But the existence of this faith in our importance,
although warranted by such organic realities (whether
apparent or hidden), does not depend on them ; it
depends on a need which, reality or no reality warrant-
ing, produces it simply because it is needed. Such is
the chief, the primaeval Vital Lie. It may be coincident
with the vital truth, but it is independent of it. Indeed
its main biological function is that of a weapon, an
armour, a waterproof, against such truths as happen
not to be vital or vitalizing.
And this faith in one's own importance (and what
can assert its reality more tyrannously than our own
individual existence ?) may be eked out, given an
objective excuse, by our faith in someone else, to whom
we attribute the importance we lack ourselves : the
i W
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128
Vital Lies
Divinity, for instance, in the theological optimism of
Instans Tyrannus. Oftener still— for we all possess
secondary religions. Lares and Penates, more cherished
than the great gods— we obtain the needful faith by
belief in the importance of something — family, tribe,
nation, creed, regiment, or club — of which our small
unworthiness is a part. And in each case the belief in
this other being or other thing, is produced either by
exploitation of a truth, or, if more convenient, by the
mere employment of falsehood. For in this case — and
perhaps in every case — we take truth into account only
to the extent to which it may help out or jeopardize the
tissue of beliefs we happen to need, or at least to want,
whether true or not. Whenever, as often happens, we
detect this process in some of our neighbours, we laugh,
or, more humanely, smile. But among all the foolish
and wicked gods and goblins devised in our own image
there seems to be one lacking ; the divinity who
beams benignantly on the uses to which we put our
Olympus.
\
IV
Belief which is Doubt
Intimately connected with Truth-which-is-what-it
would-be-better-for-ufl-to-believe is another Pragmat-
istic identification, which, for brevity's sake, I must
\.
Belief which is Doubt 129
allow myself to designate as Belief-which-is Doubt.
Of this, though not sunmied up under so paradoxical
a heading, Professor James is fond of telling us that it
requires courage, shows a love of adventure, and to use
his own words, appeals to a generous power of risking
a little beyond the literal evidence.
" Faith means;' he writes (" Will to Believe," p. 90),
** belief in something concerning which doubt is still
theoretically possible, and as the test of belief is the
willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness
to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not
certified to us in advance. It is, in fact, the same moral
quality which we call courage in practical affairs. And
there is a very widespread tendency in men of vigorous
nature.^''
Well, in this sentence, as in so many similar
ones, there is the not-unpragmatistic equivocation
and ambiguity-mongering in the use of that word
Faith.
One of the meanings of Faith, of course, implies the
willingness to assume the attitude of belief when belief
is not really forthcoming. A person says : " Will
you have faith in me ? " meaning, " Will you
trust me ? Will you risk giving your time, your
money, your trouble, your affections, as if you were
certain that in thus giving them to me they
were safe." In this sense Faith is a substitute for
Belief, as credit is a substitute for wealth. But the fact
l\
I30
Vital Lies
of the substitution shows that the two things are
separate.
On the other hand we may say : " I have faith in
his word," meaning, " I actually believe him incapable
of telling me a lie." In this second sense. Faith is
identical with Belief. And it is in this second sense that
people have faith in religion, on the occasions (which
are indeed rare among our latter day obscurantists),
when they have got religious faith. Now in this latter
case there is ru) risk run, and there is no courage about
the business. On the other hand, when there is
conscious risk, and in proportion as this risk is known to
be risky, there is boldness, but there is also lack of belief,
or more precisely, what belief there is about something
else ; for in this risky kind of faith the belief consists not
in thinking that the friend cannot tell lies, the bank
cannot be insolvent, or Heaven and Hell turn out
figments, but in thinking that such things may be
but that contrariwise they may also not be, and [a
different added belief] that taken all round, for some
reason of fitness to our temper, of saving of time and
securing of opportunity, or as in Pascal's famous wager,
a reason of comparison between possible gains and losses
— ^which reason, whatever it is, is believed in quite bona
fide — one of the two possible alternatives is better to
face than the other. Such a choice between alternatives
may imply courage if the odds are great, or imply
prudence if the odds are small, and whether great or
The Benefit of the Doubt 131
small, it implies the taking of a risk. But this taking
of a risk can exist only if there is not belief in there
being no alternative. In other words risk implies
doubt as to which of two or more possibilities will turn
out true and force itself eventually on our belief, and it
is this form of doubt which obscurantists, as here
exemplified by Professor James, call belief. The con-
juring trick is done as follows : Belief is shown to be, in
several cases, as when we say " I have faith in his
word " the same thing as Faith ; Faith is shown to be,
in several cases (which are precisely those where there
can be no belief), the taking of a risk. Therefore,
ladies and gentlemen, you see that Belief is the taking
of a risk.
And all the time that Belief which is consciously
taking a risk has a name of its own : it is Doubt,
The Benefit of the Doubt
Much of the discussion of Will-to-Believe arises, I
am inclined to think, not merely from the slovenly use
of the word Belief, but also from the fact that much
which is nowadays called religious belief is not Belief
at all. Indeed it might more correctly be termed
Doubt, because it is an alternation, a "forse che is
II
L"v,
■*—*»
132
Vital Lies
foree che no," of recognized possibilities, or at the
utmost, of probabilities. There may be Heaven and
Hell, a Personal Divinity, Christ may have been God,
the Church may know more about it than other folk, the
Pope may be infallible, the may he testifying to the
presence in our mind of a may not. This is a condition
of Doubt, and in the ages of bona fide belief, it was
recognized as such, and as such experienced as a
torture and fought against as a peril, although it now
does duty as Belief. What turns such Doubt into the
thing modem believers call Belief is either the con-
sideration that it is safer to act as if one did believe,
namely, go to Church, partake in the sacraments, avoid
heretical discourse, etc., because doing so may prove
a gain and cannot prove a loss. Or real Doubt may be
turned into apparent belief for another reason and by
another process, namely, the comfortableness of a point
of view, the pleasantness of a certain thought habitually
indulged, as I may reiterate to myself the thought
that " Grod's sun's in the sky, all's right in the world,"
or, " il faut cultiver notre jardin," because one of these
views is suitable and pleasant for my contemplation.
But this kind of " Belief " is very different from the
belief in something being true, for instance, the belief
in fire burning in the abstract, or a concrete fire having
burnt a concrete house. Now it was in this latter sense
that Dante believed in Hell Fire in general, and the
burning of his pet evil-doers in particular.
Reason Unreasonab le 133
This modem shifting of the word "Belief" to
designate a state of Doubt, has brought with it the
misapplication also of the word Disbelief. In our latter
day parlance a Disbeliever or Unbeliever means one
who denies ; and Religious doubts mean at the very least
a beginning of denial, an altemation of denial and
aflSrmation. With such a conception of Belief, it is
easy to imderstand how Belief may be regarded as a
matter of deliberate choice ; and may even be credited
with a power of influencing the realization of its object.
For if you fix your mind upon the altemative, and
entirely exclude the opposite, you may, in certain cases,
increase by your steady push the chances of the chosen
altemative. Only, if you are aware of this little opera-
tion on your own part, you are reaUy believing not in
that altemative being certain, but only in its being
possible. In fact, you are in doubt as to what the
future has in store, and you are giving yourself and
your hoped for altemative the benefit of the doubt in
that very act of " Belief."
VI
"Reason Unreasonable
»j
All this matter of Belief which is Doubt is due to one
of those many imperfections of logical thought about
i
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Vital Lies
which Obscurantistfl are so constantly eloquent. Or,
more strictly, it is due not to thought being over
logical, but to thinkers being too slovenly to examine
into what they are thinking about ; the logical nexus is
not to blame, but the logic being applied to words
whose meaning is perpetually shifted.
For the great drawback of all thought, and more
especially of thought's verbal expression, is that thought
is necessarily always moving and shifting. We are, so
to speak, always thinking of some other point or from
some other point. And thought is also moving from
different points. We are always thinking in com-
parisons, in exclusions and negations ; we are always
imphcitly thinking in expectations : Syrup of Tamarind
may be thought of as sour, or a room heated to 60° as
cM, because we have started from an expectation that
syrup means a predominance of sugar, and heated rooms
mean such that we take off our outer garments. Given
the starting point that willows are green, we may say
that these particular willows, in this particular light, are
pink, meaning thereby that there is a very small
admixture of pink in their green, and that we distinguish
their greenness from other greenness by this tiny
amount of pinkness. We usually know what we are
talking about. But it does happen occasionally that a
painter fixes his attention upon the newly discovered
(therefore interesting) pinkness, and consequently
paints you willows which are pink in the sense of pink
t
Activity and Inertness 135
roses. And what this impressionist used to do in my
young days, we thinkers and we talkers are perpetually
doing in our discussions, adding to our well-established,
and, may I say, Socratic slovenliness, the new-fangled
slovenliness of falling foul of thought because we do not
happen to think correctly.
Moreover, we are perpetually and legitimately shuff-
ling the present and the future, and (not legitimately,
but very naturally) forgetting that we have thus
shuffled. Forgetting that the present is turning into
past and the future into present even while we think of
them, so that when we remark, as is fashionable nowa-
days, that belief can create its own object, we forget that
if the belief did the creating, why then, before that
creating had been done the belief was not true, but false.
Similarly, and for most obvious reasons, we hasten
to say that the human intellect is but a poor thing,
because we have experienced in our person, and more
frequently those of our opponents, that human beings
are rather poor in intellect.
VII
Belief as Activity and Belief as Inertness
There may be dignity, and even a certain safety, in a
delusion, if by delusion we mean such as are begotten by
H
'A\
136
Vital Lies
the demands of our nature, for then they represent, in
proportion to their strength, a portion of reality, that of
a want, a manner of feeling, of living, a necessity and a
force ; they represent oneself.
But is it not different with the mere lazy imitation
of other folks' and other times', often misunderstood,
formulae of experience or desire ? For that is mere
taking for granted. We take for granted everything
that is, I will not say pleasant or profitable, but easy,
what costs no effort to face. We take for granted that
we ourselves are normal, that others are normal,
that things are arranged to suit us, until we are bruised
by the contrary. We continue, despite all bruisings, to
think that we are likely to be in the right, and that
what we dislike is likely to be wrong.
All this is largely negative, lack of activity and of
organization, weakness, not strength. And from this
arise the Lies which, far from being Vital, are necessarily
killed off by the process of living, the Lies which try to
stop the process of living, to clog it with their presence.
VIII
Socrates and the Tyrants
Half truths, confusions, transparent sophisms, can,
when they suit the unconscious convenience of mankind,
I
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Socrates and the Tyrants 137
turn into what M. Fouillee has taught us to call
Idees-Forces. Thus, for instance, the sophism of
Socrates, in the Gorgias, insisting and persisting (and by
what a chain of argument !) that virtite and happitiess
are one and the same thing ; and Tolstoi's newer (or in
its Buddhistic essence far older) sophism identifying
Life with the Life of Mankind, and the happiness of the
individual with that of the race. Socrates was confus-
ing one single desideratum with that possession of many
desiderata, including freedom to do as we choose,
which is one of the causes of happiness. Meanwhile,
CalMcles and the Tyrants happened not to consider
virtue aa the one thing necessary for their happiness,
they preferred power, and went on being happy viciously
in the teeth of Socrates. Similarly, in the teeth of
Tolstoi, the happiness of nine hundred and ninety-nine
out of a thousand human beings (and perhaps Tolstoi's
own, when he was not thinking about such questions),
has consisted and consists in dozens of things besides
the sense of communion with God and of common life
with mankind. Sophisms, both, ombres d^une ombre, as
Renan would have said, and you might add, with the
peculiarity so remarkable in shadows, of magnifying,
but also distorting, even to caricature and monstrosity,
the solid, small, decent reality behind them. Shadows,
and grotesque ones, yet which, even as Renan expresses
it, have been lived on by humankind — ^lived upon, how-
ever, in conjunction with the very substantial reality
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138
Vital Lies
11
they contradict. Or rather, perhaps, promissory notes,
assignats like those current during the French Revolu-
tion, with very little cash behind them, yet forming a
system of national credit, and enabling you to buy a
penn'orth of bread in return for a promise of ten
thousand francs.
The sophism of Socrates, and the sophism renewed
by Tolstoi, have tended rather to their own realization
than to the contrary, because the convenience of many
individuals, co-operating unconsciously and selecting
automatically, has chosen to give them credit. Man-
kind made it easier and easier to identify Socratic virtue
with happiness, by giving those who had not got it an
unpleasant reputation, and an imeasy conscience,
which both disturbed what other happiness they had.
Similarly social, or rather racial, advantage has also
made it easier (or at least less difficult), to identify the
bulk happiness of life with a constantly trained and ever
growing sense of obedience to the will of God, until we
have got men like Tolstoi and his kind, in whom happi-
ness can be destroyed by lack of that sense of living in
God's ways.
The usefulness of one-sided views, of sophisms like
these of Socrates and Tolstoi, depends not on their being
of mythical nature, but on the prosaic fact that man-
kind is perpetually transposing the objects of its
desires, the ingredients of its happiness ; exchanging the
emotions attached to various realities and ideas, or
Mid- Victorian Ethics 139
rather attaching different kinds and degrees of emotion
to the same things and the same ideas : substituting
pleasure in the means for pleasure in the end, sub-
stituting pleasure in relief from pain for pleasure as
such, and pleasure in power, in sympathy, in conformity,
or in rebellion, for pleasure in the things which power,
sympathy, conformity, or rebellion can obtain.
Commandments and ideals are among the automatic
mechanism of such unceasing, unintentional transposi-
tion and transformation of desires and efforts. And
by the associative virtue of mere words, the drum-or-
church-bell-power of often repeated phrases, sophisms
have acquired still more of the utility of promissory
notes, lying statements if taken literally, but with a
humble use of eking out credit among a race of beings
still very lacking in the substantial wealth of knowledge
and self-control.
IX
Mid- Victorian Ethics
Attempting (though the reader may scarcely believe
it) to take a brief agaiast myself and do justice to ideas
similar to those of Mr Crawley, I have been reading
over again some notes of conversations with a very
typical English moralist of the Mid- Victorian School, a
moralist who is (and 'tis the most genuine kind) merely
140
Vital Lies
an intelligent old lady, having sufiered much and helped
much, and whose notions have stood the test of such
suffering and helping. There is much to commend
her views, if one may call views what consists very
largely in blinking and even turning one's back on what
there is to see. This straightlacedness has dignity,
simplicity, practicality, a sort of manliness, by the side
of which foreign and latter-day width of sleeve seems
futile and also decidedly plebeian. Compared with
their venerable British copy-book of beautiful call-
graphical precepts and fair blank pages, the kind of
literature typified (leaving contemporaries alone), by
Rousseau's Confessions or Stendhal's novels, is foul and
depressing reading. Among the headings in this living
book of practical morals, constantly repeated and
deserving of such honour, I find the principle that self-
denial is the highest wisdom, and that the human soul is
never the loser for any constraint or mutilation
accomplished on itself ; that a man, especially a woman,
is the happier, or at least the more efficient, for every no
said to the self. Of course, in point of fact, this no is
limited in the main to would-be breaches of the Seventh
Commandment, and we hear comparatively little of no
to ambition, pride, desire for wealth, and still less of no
to desire for domestic peace and apparent decorum ;
but the principle is tacitly supposed to have been
applied to other evil possibilities. Or rather it is taken,
for granted that other evil possibilities cannot intrude
Mid- Victorian Ethics 141
into decent society, and that only decent society exists
for decent contemplation.
As I listen, evening after evening, to anecdotes and
judgments embodying these aristocratic views of the
most aristocratic of all peoples, to wit, ourselves, I
feel, as I said, that everything else, Ibsenian notions for
instance, are oddly tentative, and oddly compounded of
furtiveness and aggression ; there is no foretelling
them, no order about them, whereas this tory morality
is order and nothing but order. It has a divine righty
not to say a divine certainty about it. It is only little by
little I begin to suspect its very human, even very much
too human, origin. Its one-sidedness and hard-and-
fastness reveal it to be one of the many illusions arising
from hurry and hurried convenience. Despite all its
airs of unselfishness, and even of self-immolation, it
makes daily life easier, less responsible, lazier, for it
makes judgment simpler and quicker at the expense of
truth. Indeed, when I look at it closely, it is rough and
ready, and ruthless, denying all appeal to the creature
judged, allowing every degree of hurry and slovenliness
to the judges : it savours of the court-martial. . . .
And this leads me to reflect (though I do not com-
municate my reflections to my venerable friend) that
moral codes are, after all, not much finer than the
economic methods which they accompany, and, like
these, they are often sadly wasteful and productive of
shoddy and refuse-heaps. But they are the short cut,
i
^
■«IWl lP ii
Pi
142
Vital Lies
at the time they arise, to some absolute necessary of
social life. They sacrifice a portion of truth, they blink
some part of reality, and every such disregard of truth
entails (however inevitable) a sacrifice of many
individuals and their powers for good : the Magdalen,
had she been duly stoned for her adulteries, would
neither have brought her ointment for Christ's feet,
nor watched, as we see her on the frescoes, by the side
of the cross. And here comes another illusion due to
life's roundabout practicality, the brutal need, the
stupid barbarous hurry, which has produced such im-
perfect codes, manages also by unconscious adjustment
to surround them with loyalty, love, and awe. And
the more imperfect our ethics, the more they are
safeguarded in our hearts and imaginations by the
reluctance to question, the horror of disobeying.
X
Op Racial Instinct
Certain obscurantists (of the Crawley type) find a
practical proof of the utility of superstitions, in the
almost animal anxiety displayed in guarding religious
and ethical premisses from enquiry and criticism.
Bad as are the quarrels of men of science and of
artists, these are confined to the interested specialists,
Of Racial Instinct 143
and the rest of mankind do not tear each other
to pieces about Post-Impressionism or the trans-
mission of acquired characteristics. It is only about
religious and moral questions (patriotism in its various
modem aberrations partaking of both) that we
find, in the field of mere belief and opinion, such
universal tigress-and-young fear and ferocity. The
result, all this, jubilate our obscurantists, and the
proof also, of a Rcu^ml Instinct defending these matters !
Possibly; but in that case how does your Racial
Instinct set to work ? And ought it not to have re-
sulted in the survival of fetichism and taboo, or at least
the disappearance of the races who first got rid of such
useful superstitions ?
Instead of Racial Instinct, so plentifully invoked
(like every word compounded of those great Xs
Race and Races) nowadays, is it not possible that the
persistence of superstitions and superstitious attitudes
may be explained by a mere individual instinct of which
daily life furnishes many examples : the instinct to
avoid taking trouble ? And is not such conservatism
bom of lazy convenience of ready-made rules and
averages ; of the hurried or wearied reluctance to verify
one's compass; of the discomfort, sometimes the
paralysing discomfort, of readjusting opinions and
conduct ; in fact, bom of inertness such as makes the
poor sluggard suffer agonies at being waked, and turn
desperately on to thq other ear ?
amm
mmmam
144
Vital Lies
PerliapB the obscurantists might answer that inert-
ness, fatigue, sluggishness, are themselves Racial
advantages and due to the great Racial Instinct.
Shall we conclude that if people had been more
alacritous and elastic, the human race would have
ceased to have offspring, been gobbled up by
Palaeolithic monsters, or (what obscurantists might
like even less), that its finer varieties, for instance the
noble Aryan, would have philosophized themselves
into non-resistance against the Negro, or even (what
Gobineau did indeed allege against the ancestors of
Plato and of Pheidias), into intermarriage with the
Semite ? This leads to the dilemma, either that the
superior sub-race was not superior in intelligence and
adaptive power, or, that too much superiority may be a
bad thing ; with the manifest corollary that a dash of
the negro, a preponderance of the Semite, might have
done the nobler Aryan races a world of good.
The proposition that prejudices have been necessary
for keeping up the standard or strain of superiority, would
thus require eking out by a counter proposition that
prejudices must he broken through to diminish that un-
practical superiority. And both propositions would
require the supplement of a remarkably terre d terre
statement, namely : Prejudices are sometimes useful
and are sometimes mischievous. Or, put in more
dignified language, superstition may be the result of
Racial Instinct, but if that be the case, then another
■3te
Of Private Cults
i^fa
145
result of Racial Instinct is the rebellious criticism of
that selfsame superstition.
So perhaps it is wiser, let alone more modest, not to
let Racial Instinct, that vast smoky genius, out of his
allegorical bottle. The persons, however, who insist
upon having dealings with Racial Instinct, do not regard
that huge personification as at all able to take care of
bimself, at least not nowadays. In any case they—
these philosophers both of the Crawley and the Sorel
type— seem always ready to lend him a hand in
keeping up old superstitions or fabricating new ones.
XI
Op Private Cults
De quoi vivra-Uon aprda noiiaf
AU this latter-day talk of the educative power of
religious and patriotic, and now, of socialistic delusions,
this everlasting fear that the human soul may starve
for lack of vital lies. . . .
But are we not many, most, perhaps all of us, brought
up (those educable at all) by delusions of a less public
kind, myths uncatalogued of historians and sociolo-
gists ? educated by phantom teachers, friends, parents,
lovers, made up by our own creative needs out of a
,'few, often misunderstood, indications ? Nay, I incline
146
Vital Lies
to think that these hidden episodes of the inner life
(when we have eyes to see them) may teach us by
analogy wherein lies the true power of other beneficent
delusions : in the fact of their being ours. The parent
whose word is law, the friend we blush to disappoint,
and the Godhead to whom we dedicate our efforts and
sacrifices, are, after all, consubstantial with those very
feelings of ours which we attach to their names ; they
are the patterns made for ourselves out of the moral
substance which we try, for days or years, or for a life-
time, to fashion in their image. It is surely a curious
proof of our unwillingness to recognize these fruitful
self-deceptions that the novel, so far as I know, has
hitherto not dealt with this large side of life and life's
romance and tragedy, namely, our education by parents,
and lovers, and friends, who have never really existed
save in our own loving imagination.
XII
The Right to Delude
On the undeniable fact that half of our beliefs result
from mere personal or collective passion, habit, and con-
venience, latter-day Obscurantism founds its modest
claim to believe useful and consoling things which do
not happen to impose themselves on our reason as true.
The Right to Delude 147
But beyond this point it passes immediately to the right
of teaching such desirable things which we ourselves
cannot believe, but other persons luckily still can. If
you and I see no good reason why virtue and vice
should get their deserts in Heaven and Hell, it does not
very often happen that the advantageous results of
such a doctrine enable us to believe it. But 'tis a fact
of daily occurrence that these advantageous results
induce us to teach eternal punishment to those who do
not ab-eady disbelieve in it ; or at all events to oppose
ourselves to anything that should awaken such disbelief.
And from the right to teach or abet the teaching of
what we cannot ourselves believe, Obscurantism goes
one step furtner, to the diUy of doing so. For in
the eyes of Mr Crawley and M. Sorel, those twins
(all unsuspicious of their twinship) bom of M. Renan
and his own imaginary Abbess of Jouarre, it is
evidently a sacred duty to teach the Church of England
catechism to the lower classes, or to help Syndicalist
agitators to lead the credulous French working-man by
the nose.
In this propaganda of Vital Lies, lies the chief danger
and odium of such applied Pragmatism ; in this zeal for
the moral edification of others, rather than in any
individual paltering with truths, of which every one of
us ab-eady unsuspectingly carries on about as much as is
possible. Moreover, besides the intellectual objection
to such Obscurantism there is a moral, that is to say, a
(
)
148
Vital Lies
social one. Deceiving a man is tampering with his
property, and jeopardizing his freedom. It is taking an
undue advantage, accepting the principle of fair play and
not plajdng fair. For we cannot teach what we know to
be a myth or a fallacy, without first making those
whom we teach believe in the good faith we are breaking.
s
CHAPTEB II
MOTE PAQB
I. The Rehabilitation of Obscurity . . . .149
II. Why we write Truth on our Signboard . . . 162
III. The Surface of Things and the Depths of the Ego . 155
IV. Contact and Sight, Instinct and Knowledge . . 162
V. Bergson's Direct Data .166
VI. " Rppa Passes " 170
VIL " PluraUstic Universes " 171
VIII. That Poor Drudge, Reason 173
IX. Thought as Movement ...... 177
X. Reason as Revelation ...... 180
XL Limitations of Thought and Limitations of Thinkers . 181
XII. Farewell to Vital Lies 182
XIII. Vital Lies as the Handiwork of the Gods . . . 186
The Rehabilitation op Obscurity
WE latter-day Philosophers are obsessed by
the efficacy of misconceptions, mjrths,
Vital Lies avowed or unavowable. It
is one of those inevitable reactions of Philosophic
Thought, by which the dust-bin of facts and theories
discarded by one fashionable synthesis becomes the
Crusoe's wreck, the treasure-heap of contrary
generalizations; until discardings and rehabilitations
having shifted and sifted every possible datum and
notion, the mind of man may at last learn a little less
148
'>
ISO
Vital Lies
hurry and cocksureness. In this manner the reaction
against Rationalism (Mill's as much as Voltaire's)
bestows a pleasing sense of high breeding (or at least
gentility) whenever we assert the deficencies and
limitations of Reason. Our thought, whatever it is,
shall never be guilty of being crass ! I employ that
word because its squahd connotations bring home
our intention of being on the contrary, select, initiate,
esoteric.
And we display, or at least secretly enjoy, our
initiation and esotericism by making light of Ration-
ality and seating ourselves ad dexteram of the Obscure,
the Profound, better still, the Mystic, Forces of the Uni-
verse ; or, short of that, converse with our Sub-
conscious, our Intuitive Self, emerging from such closed-
door interviews with enigmatic wisdom on our barely
unsealed lips. Such is, thanks to historical reaction, the
attitude of the latter-day philosophic Beau Brummel.
Moreover, and quite apart from this, it happens tliat
certain studies, psychology, mythology, ethnography,
sociology, still in their presumptuous callowness, have
brought to our notice a mmiber of facts never before
dreamed of, and among these we are naturally most
struck by those most contradictory to what people
had hitherto supposed. Here we have another reason
for the attention bestowed on what, for brevity, I have
symbolized under Ibsen's expression of Vital Lies, and,
of course, for the importance in all fashionable schemes
'
^
Rehabilitation of Obscurity 151
of welfare and progress, of notions like Renan's Ombres
and Ombres d^une Ombre.
Now, far be it from me to deny the existence, even
the occasional advantage, of such Vital Lies. All I
protest against is our latter-day neglect of the every-
day, humdrum, taken for granted, paramount im-
portance of Vital Truths. We forget that compared
with a substance a shadow is a rare and negligible
occurrence ; let alone that if there were no substances
there would be no shadows, no, nor shadows of shadows
either.
For instance, we are impressed by the primitive
belief that the success of a bear-hunt may depend upon
preliminary abstinence, chastity, and ascetic practices,
and we recognize that such a misconception must have
done much for the moral habits and standards of bear-
hunters. But we overlook, just because we take for
granted, that for one useful misconception there have
been a hundred correct notions which have likewise
furthered the establishment of codes and habits. We
despise the familiar fact that every justified forecast or
analogy, every correct analysis or synthesis (say that
the whole is greater than its parts or that similar causes
produce similar results), is creating a habit, an ideal of
intellectual honesty, that every utensil manufactured
or implement used is teaching self-restraint, attention,
and thoroughness ; that every barter or load is establish-
ing the sanctity of promises ; nay, that no infant can be
152
Vital Lies
I
reared without a prodigious output of self-sacrificing
virtue. And as to the tillage of the ground, what
myth has ever called forth and consolidated by inex-
orable repetition so much postponement of present
advantage, so much reverent steadfastness and
efficiency, as has this great eternal lesson that Nature
gives in proportion to man's best effort ? But these
are, luckily for mankind, everyday, habitual, humdrum
matters. And mankind, especially Man-of-Letters-
kind, is, by a legitimate fear of boring people, debarred
from calling attention to what everyone already knows.
Now philosophers, ever since they have ceased being
what used to be called " Natural Philosophers," that is,
men of science, happen to be men of Letters, and there-
fore pursued by the Man of Letters' terror of the Obvious.
n
Why we write Truth on our Signboard
Reading all these ingenious discussions of the non-
logical elements which go to make up our religious
beliefs— William James, and Venn and TyrreU, and
Crawley and Sorel— one point keeps striking me more
and more : to wit, that in the beliefs on which practical
action is based, such elements are always diminished
and oftenest eliminated. If the personality, the
Why we write Truth 153
emotions and aspirations of the believer, were allowed
a voice in physics, nay, in the most rule-of-thumb
housewife's science, such as they nowadays claim for
themselves in religion and in philosophy, we should not
be able to navigate, to tUl the ground, to breed cattle, or
to cook a meal. Indeed, that the gradual weeding-out
of such emotional reasons for belief has not taken place
in religious and philosophic thought, suggests (it seems
to me) that both religion and philosophy (or what passes
for such talk) bearing on the practical life of civilized
men, that their function, like that of art, is to vent
impulses, construct ideal frameworks for emotion, and
thus conduce not to practical decisions but to the soul's
health and well-balanced activity. We are beginning
to recognize that certain among the philosophic writers
who have most influenced us, say Schopenhauer,
Carlyle, Emerson, Tolstoi, are not so much thinkers as
poets — lyrists as my friend Halevy has called one of
the greatest of them, Nietzsche — ^men who have applied
passionate temperamental onesidedness to expressing
the various modes of spiritual being requisite (all of
them) for our complete and balanced emotional and
imaginative life.
At that rate, you will say (inclining as my reader
probably may, to side rather with my adversaries than
myself) at that rate, the element of personality, of
desire, call it what you choose, deflecting our thought,
has, after all, a practical function in our lives ? Un-
154
Vital Lies
doubtedly ; but the practical function belonging to
imagination and self-expression, not to Truth. Music,
for instance, has a practical, vital function in wakening
emotion, sometimes to vent and void it artificially,
more often (and in its nobler forms) to discipline and
purify it into hannony. Yet this very real service
fulfilled by music in our individual and racial life, does
not make us call a Beethoven quartet true. The
difference between art on the one hand and religion
and philosophy on the other, lies just in this, that in
order to commend itself to our acceptance, art does
not (need not) pretend to be more than a pleasure and
a refreshment, leaving its deep utility to individual and
race to be deduced or guessed (or neither) just from
this modest, venerable fact of pleasantness. Whereas
religion and philosophy (not always pleasant) have
sprung originally from a bona fide practical search for
truth. (Why do suns scorch, and rains quicken,
pestilences rage ? and so forth), and have continued
to deal in truth, to say they furnish truth, long after
they had made over to scientific thought the very
wish that it be sought. Why ? Perhaps because,
lacking the straightforward attractiveness of art,'
religion and philosophy would have found less clients
had they written upon their signboard : " This is the
shop for soothing, stimulating, bracing, useful dreams
and mistakes ; the Great Emporium of Vital Lies."
The Surface of Things 155
III
The Surface op Things and the Depths of the Ego
" Comparee k I'ignorance, du moins a I'ignorance
consciente, la connaissance est sans doute ane possession
de son objet," writes M. Levy-Briihl. " Mais compar6e
k la participation que realise la mentalite prelogique,
cette possession n'est jamais qu'imparfaite, insuffisante
et comme exterieure. Connaitre, en general, c'est
objectiver ; objectiver, c'est projeter hors de soi, comme
quelque chose d'etranger, ce qui est a connaitre.
Quelle communion intime au contraire, les representa-
tions de la mentalite prelogique n'assurent-elles pas
entre les etres qui participent les uns des autres !
L'essence de la participation est que precisement toute
dualite s'y efface, et qu'en depit du principe de la
contradiction le sujet est k la fois lui-meme et Tetre
dont il participe. . . L'effort rationnel pour connaitre
Dieu semble a la fois unir le sujet pensant a Dieu
et Ten eloigner. La necessite de se conformer aux
exigences loigiques s'oppose aux participations entre
I'homme et Dieu qui ne sont pas representables sans
contradiction. La connaissance se reduit ainsi a fortpeu
de chose. Mais quel besoin de cette connaissance ration-
nelle a le fidele qui se sent uni a son Dieu ? La conscience
qu'H a de la participation de son etre a l'essence divine
.
^56
Vital Lies
ne lui procure-t-elle pas une certitude de foi au prix de
laquelle la certitude logique sera toujours quelque chose
de p^le, de froid, de presque iudifferent ? Cette ex-
perience d'une possession intime et complete de Tobjet,
possession plus profonde que toutes celles dont
Tactivite intellectuelle pent etre I'origine, fait sans doute
le ressort des doctrines dites anti-intellectualistes. Ces
doctrines reparaissent periodiquement et a chaque reap-
parition elles retrouvent faveur. Car elles promettent
ce que ni la science positive pure ni les autres doctrines
philosophiques ne peuvent se flatter d'atteindre : le
contact intime et immediat avec I'etre, par Tintuition,
par la compen^tration, par la conmiunion reciproque
du sujet et de I'objet, par la plaine participation, en un
mot, que Plotin a decrite sous le nom d'extase. Elles
montrent que la connaissance soumise aux formes
logiques est impuissante k surmonter la dualite, qu'elle
n'est pas une possession veritable, qu'elle demeure k
la surface ext^rieure des choses."
Nothing could be a better example of the latter-day
recrudescence of just such mystical tendencies than
this very passage from a thinker who has done so much to
describe (by the study of primitive ideas) and define
this, which he calls the pre-hgical or mystical stage of
thought, the stage when qualities have not yet been
grouped into things, and feelings, desires, and moods
grouped as part of ourselves ; when emotions and not
*
The Surface of Things 157
observation determine the coalescence of associations ;
and when no principle of contradiction has yet cleared
away confusion of time and place and identity. In
this passage M. Levy Briihl, whatever his ostensible
philosophy, is implicitly accepting the Bergsonian
conception of an obscure knowledge, when he says that
" la connaissance soumise aux formes logiques, n'est
pas une possession veritable, qu'elle demeure a la surface
exterieurs des choses." Let us think over those two
last sentences, let us try and run to ground these two
meanings, placed in opposition to one another : " real
possession " and " surface of things." And let us begin
by the second of these rival and, it would seem, in-
compatible expressions. What is the surface of things ?
In the present connection it means, in the first place,
something less than the whole of things ; it means two
dimensions instead of three ; it means comparative
poverty of our knowledge. But it means something
more also, and this is made obvious by the recurrent
word " penetration " : a surface is that which checks our
progress, it is that into which, continuing our own move-
ment, we cannot penetrate. There is therefore in this
talk of the surface of things already a reference to con-
ditions of our own as distinguished from conditions and
qualities of the things we are thus said to know only
on this surface ; and this reference to ourselves it is
important to remember. WeU ! now let us ask our-
selves in what sense the rational, the objective know-
158
Vital Lies
ledge of things can be justly termed superficial ? Not
in the sense of its lacking a dimension, of its aUowing
our thoughts to move only up and down while refusing
their entrance into the solid mass of the subject. For
rational, objective knowledge means on the contrary
that we can give ourselves a representation of the
various qualities of things and their relations to one
another, not only in the three dimensions of space,
but in the more numerous dimensions of time and of
every other reference ; objective knowledge means that
we can send our thoughts from any of a hundred
points of view, through the known universe not
only as across a map, or as down by a shaft or
diving-beU, or up as by a baUoon, but also analyti-
caUy as through a series of microscopes, syn-
theticaUy as through telescopes embracing more and
more of the [firmament. Such is rational know-
ledge: it is the making of inteUectual tracks in
every direction and so closely interwoven and inter-
meshed as to leave out less and less of that reality which
exists as simultaneity, but which we can think (as we
can move in it materiaUy) only in a mitigated con-
secutiveness. Now what is the difference between this
and " real possession " of things ? And what is the
element the latter can give, and whereof the intellectual
dealing with things is thus said to defraud us. We shaU
understand if we pick up a word, which I asked you to
earmark, the word " pcwetra^ion." Penetration/ But
The Surface of Things 159
our thoughts have penetrated through the known
universe, and are constantly penetrating through it,
from ever new points, in ever new directions and
dimensions, until the whole of human thought nets
things round, not like the latitudes and longitudes of a
globe, but in every mode of penetration. Indeed, such
objective, disinterested " grasping " of wholes is the
precise reverse of the one-sided interest with which
desire and practical purpose concentrate upon a single
quality or group of qualities and disregard all the
other " sides " and " ways " which happen not to
be in immediate relation with themselves. What
does the man who eats a fruit know of its chemistry
and botany ? What even the man who grafts the
tree, with his thoughts bent on that and fruit
production, know of the relation with one another
of tree and fruit and soil, and air, beyond just
what his " interest " requires. What does the
mother know of the life of the embryo save that its
movements fill her with hope and rapture and awe ?
What does the lover know of the beloved except the
qualities which he loves and the fact of his loving?
And what does the religious ecstatic (since we are back
again at the " Varieties of Keligious Experiences ")
know about God except the assurance that God is
present and near and is all-sujficient for his wishes.
Nay, the religious mystic has, at all times, shown
amazing indifEerence to any possible aspects of
i6o
Vital Lies
I
I
the divinity other than those benignantlj turned
towards himself :
" Confutatis maledictis.
Flammis acribus addictis,
Vooa me cum benedictis."
And when, like Dante's Piccarda, the mystic has
been safely called among the blessed, he or she is
resigned not only to other blessed ones living in
closer neighbourhood to the Centre of Love, but
resigned apparently to the eternal horrors of heU in
the world's bowels below. "In sua voluntade e
nostra pace " means that you concern yourself with
only that much of the supreme will which happens to
contribute to your own peace. For there we have got
to the point : the possession which rational compre-
hension does not give is the possession by our desires ; and
the surface which we seem to encounter, is resisting
not to our understanding, but to our emotions. This
rational universe can be penetrated into in every
direction, but on one condition, that we shall modestly
seek it for itself, that we be interested in it, that we
leave our desires and passions at the door. That door
through which our self-feeling cannot pass, is the surface
it complains of and off which it feels itself repeUed.
Beyond that boundary lie the fields of knowledge,
Ues the realm of being, that is to say, of that which is,
as distinguished from that which / fed and / want.'
And by one of the most amazing of egoistic delusions,
The Surface of Thin gs 1 6 1
the mystical thought of all time has taken that
exclusion for an inclusion, it has called its passionate
abysming of itself in itself penetration into the reality
of things; it has mistaken the obscure ebbings and
Sowings, and quiverings and shrinkings of its inner, per-
haps its bodily, microcosm, for a profounder experience
of the Universe ; and, like the eastern ecsfcasy-monger,
it has taken its own fixedly contemplated navel, that
memento of mere vegetative life, for the hub of all
existence.
And this penetration into itself, this submerging in its
own imiermost processes, is what a certain philosophy
is ofiering us once more as the truer possession of
reality !
It is more satisfactory. Such is the latter-day
commendation of this profound, intimate penetration
beyond the surface of things, that surface which is their
boundary, and as much their nature as our nature is
also our boundary. It is not merely satisfactory to be
concerned with ourselves and our modes of being,
and to insist upon them, it is also necessary and
legitimate. But on one condition : we must re-
cognize that it is ourselves we are dealing with.
liCt us say : " I wish," " I want," " I love," " I
make," but not it is.
And here, perhaps, comes in the great hidden educator
and moraliser, Art. Art, through the infinite genera-
tions, has taught us to give to ourselves the emotional
l62
Vital Lies
satisfactions which reality refuses, to carve the idol and
build the temple instead of thinking that we have seen
the divinity ; in more modem days, to build up sounds
into the expression of those modes of feeling which we
cannot obtain strong and pure enough in our own lives ;
and, by the poet's, by the writer's craft to allow each
individual to gather his associations into groups
dominated consciously by the heart's desire. I have
called Art a great educator and moraliser ; for, among
other important functions. Art has taught us to deal
fully aware with a world yonside of truth and error ; in
so far, to distinguish between what we want and what
is, and, even if only in such matters as these, to be
lucid and honest.
IV
Contact and Sight, Instinct and Knowledge
Modem obscurantism is always suggesting, and
occasionally proclaiming, that there is truth in ideas
which minister directly to our feelings, as distinguished
from the tmth of ideas answering not to such emo-
tional needs, but to the alluvium of objective impres-
sions which we call experience. Subjective phenomena,
these philosophers tell us, are also and equally part of
our experience. Of course ; but only when considered
objectively. And it is only thus objectively regarded
1
Contact and Sight 163
that subjective phenomena become legitimate parts of
ideas and amenable to the distinction of being tme or
false. My weariness, my dislike or my longing become
assets to knowledge only inasmuch as I think of them
as experienced. But however much they may influence
my ideas, they cannot form part of my ideas so
long as experienced. And however much they may
influence my ideas, they cannot form part of my
ideas so long as they are only felt, and are not yet
thought of.
The lack of this little distinction, simple and yet
elusive, is responsible for a great part of all unll-to-
believe Pragmatism, and is what vitiates (so far as
I can grasp it) the systematic portion of Bergson.
The philosophers of the Past, little concerned with
psychology, did not bring subjective phenomena into
count as part of the really existing ; they treated a
delusion as non-existent, because the delusion was
" empty." Modem philosophers of the psychological
school (and remark that Bergson, like James, is
eminently a psychologist, recognising that delusions
exist, and are potent) are tempted to regard the some-
thing about which people are deluded as being tme
because those people are truly deluded ; although one
might answer, in an Irish manner, that a true delusion
cannot truly exist.
There seems to be a relation, a relation which is
perhaps in reality an attitude, between our hold on
164
Vital Lies
reality and our possibility of getting outside ourselves,
one might almost say our altruism. We hmyw in pro-
portion as we transcend our own needs and desires,
since these are directed to only one or two qualities
of things, while our thought unites many qualities and
possibilities, making things cubic, placing them in a
third dimension and in complex relation, not to our-
selves only, but to one another. An existence is essen-
tially a more or less thought-out group of actual and
potential qualities, a combination of past, present and
future experiences, and not the experiences which we
think of as ours, but the experiences also of minds which
we think of as like our own. There goes a certain
altruism, as I said, and a certain unselfish imagination,
to the conception of realities, for that conception, that
dUefr, is gained on the margin left by the consciousness
of our own present states, hence it seems to me (and in
direct opposition to Bergsonian enshrining of intuiton)
that our least imperfect and incomplete knowledge
is precisely the knowledge least directly connected with
practice and least steeped in self-regarding emotion.
Practice takes into account a minimum of relations
between objective qualities, and feeling takes those few
objective qualities that concern itself ; but this narrow
experience has the warmth and vividness of our ego
and its activities ; the warmth of our circulation and
the vividness of our movements. And this warmth and
vividness, which is of ourselves, has led certain thinkers
1
i
Contact and Sight 165
(as it had led poets long ago and mystics) to the notion
that need and practice, desire and satisfaction, are the
very perfection of knowing. Latter-day philosophy
tends to identify knowledge with intuition, and even
with the instinct which pushes an animal to adapt its
proceedings it knows not to what or wherefore ; such
philosophy tends to measure knowledge by its obscurity
and even its unconsciousness. And such philosophy
seems made on purpose for those people who, ever since
always, have spoken of knomng God as equivalent to
loving or wanting God, and to whom truth is not fulfilled
anticipation, but satisfied desire.
Would it not be correct, on the contrary, to compare
the difference between knowledge and instinct with
the difEerence between sight and bodily contact ? Like
seeing, knowledge is reconstruction; it implies not
merely memory, but expectation ; like bodily contact,
instinct sets the reflexes at work, and the whole
creature quivering with its own warmth or cold. All
individual life begins with contact and instinct, and all
life abuts there, but seeing and knowing are those
links of the perpetually necessary human rhythm by
which alone it enlarges and tends to become com-
mensurate with the rhythm of the universe.
;
i66
Vital Lies
Beroson's Direct Data
There seems to be, as Bergson is always teaching (but
with another corollary !), an inevitable obscurity about
what this psychologist in philosopher's garb has called
the direct data (donn^ immMiales) of our consciousness,
an obscurity which I explain psychologically by our
ccenesihesia being, in the normal state, remarkably
deficient in such marks as help us to localize sensations.
Indeed, these direct data, this knowledge from within, this
knowledge from what Professor James alludes to as
" subconscious regions," consists mainly in modes of
our activity ; these inner data are hows rather than
whats, they are facts of succession, co-existence, re-
petition, tension, slackness, effort, relief, direction ;
above all, facts of grasping forwards, shrinking back-
wards, seeking, avoiding — in short, of preference and
repulsion. This is what I would call, rather than the
subamscious, the purely subjective, the absolutely inner
self ; it constitutes, I think, the very essence of the
chaotic dark consciousness of our life.
Now there would seem to be (and it is easy to guess
why) a constant tendency to connect these fragmentary
and chaotic items of inner consciousness with the data
of our outward-dealing senses, and, while shaping our
Bergson's Direct Data 167
outer sensations into our inner modes, also to give these
inner modes a contents, a " meaning " consonant with
our outer sensations. For our inner data are few and
obscure, because they are the facts of vital processes
constantly repeated, largely therefore automatic and
entirely intimate and indispensable. Our outer data
are endlessly various because they depend on endlessly
changing outer circumstances, and also extremely
distinct because they are classified by the highly
specialized outer sense-organs ; the data of sight and
hearing, for instance, thoroughly separate from one
another, those of taste and smell already less so, and
nearer to the inner sensitiveness ; touch, temperature,
and the muscular sense still closer to the coenesthesia.
The safety of our existence depends upon the peri-
pheric consciousness being brought into relation with
our inner activities, and our inner adjustments being
regulated by our outer sensations ; hence a perpetual
inter-play between the outer and the inner data, the
facts of the peripheral senses being assimilated to the
inner experience.
There is, I imagine, a necessary outward tendency of
our activities, our peripheral functions, stoking, so to
speak, for our inner ones, as the primitive sea creatures
draw into themselves the water wherein they float, as
we ourselves imbibe air, and as our constituent cells
imbibe the liquids in which they steep. On the other
hand, we are perpetually throwing off not oxdj our
I
1 68
Vital Lies
waste but our surplusage : generation and all making
and fashioning are of this order. Hence there is every
reason why there should be a permanent exchange or
change of place between our inner and our outer data,
why the modes of the inner life (modes of motion, energy'
sequence, volition, connection, etc.), should be attri-'
buted by what the Germans calls EinfUhlung to the
data of the senses, why all inner data which are not
needed to regulate our adjustments (pleasure-pain data
particularly) should be projected onto the periphery.
But from this give-and-take there arises also that our
inner states, and in proportion as they are difficult to
localize, tend to explain themselves by such reference
to the outside, to the non-ego ; in other words, we get
the habit of giving our inner states the support, the'
explanation, of outer facts, of finding objective reasons
for our own elations and depressions, our inner crav-
ings and shrinkings. This tendency to seek external
reasons, motives, sometimes excuses, for our own inner
conditions, has doubtless been increased by the fact that
outer impressions, being not only very various but
independent of us in their variation, would harass and
interrupt our inner consciousness if it did not, so to
speak, use them up for its own purposes, and as a
framework, often an incorrectly connected framework,
for itself.
Thus it happens that whenever we want certain inner
states to continue and intensify, instead of being
Bergson's Direct Data 169
interrupted and confused, we attach them, by automatic
habit, to an outer cause. We beat back the inroads of
the outer world by establishing the headquarters of our
own inner conditions in it or in what seems to be it ;
we are not able to keep up any synthesis of inner
consciousness without thus allying it to the thought,
if not the reality, of something outside us ; our inner
life is like that most perfect egoist, Meredith's Sir
Willoughby, requiring to bolster up his ego on the per-
sonality of tyrannized-over or admiring fellow-beings.
For the human soul, by the necessities of human life, is
directed outwards, and our whole existence an inner-
outer rhythm. In this lies the explanation of Art.
Certain desirable inner congruities of function require
the prop, the framework of outer circumstances ; and it
is given us by Art. The work of Art is what enables us to
obtain an uninterrupted, intensified (maximum and con-
tinuum) synthesis of our own most beneficial modalities
of being ; it makes us live intensely and harmoniously.
The study of ^Esthetics sheds considerable light upon
all this side of Religion. The God, like the work of Art,
like the lover's or idolater's Fetish, is (among other
things) a device for reviving or producing certain
syntheses of feeling in ourselves, syntheses which may
last a second, or, through constant repetition, be spread
almost uninterruptedly over a lifetime. The difference
is that in the case of Art we do not attribute independent
objective existence to our own states ; we know that we,
I70
Vital Lies
or others like ua, have arranged the thing ; we know
that we are contemplating to please ourselvea, and that
the contemplated object has been made for such con-
templation. In the case of Religion we muddle this
fact up with the quite different fact of the existence of
an independent Universe, the Universe which sensations
testify to, and we persuade ourselves that we are serv-
ing someone else when we are only serving ourselves.
Hence the greater sincerity of Art. Hence also Art's
far lesser efficacy. For Art requires an Artist ; we are
not able, most of us, to make beautiful scaffoldings for
our feelings ; we have to accept them from the imperious
natures of greater men, who leave us only a small amount
of freedom (irrelevance, misinterpretation) and bid us
feel as they choose rather than as we do. Now in the case
of Religion the individual believer can tinker at his
divinity ; his God is hidden in his own mind, and he
improves or defaces the Idol far more freely than he
could venture to do the work of Art.
u
VI
PippA Passes "
By the delusory transfer of the various states of the
soul or its various activities, we are for ever mistaking
our attitudes for ideas. When Pippa and Browning
says, " God's in His heaven, all's right with the worid,"
''Pluralistic Universes'' 171
this is the expression, not of the idea which it literally
signifies, but of an attitude in which Pippa and
Browning are readier to accept the argument for Gx)d
being in His Heaven than the contrary one, and readier
to see what is right in the world than what is wrong.
And an attitude is, at bottom, an emotional condition.
Pippa's emotion is optimistic, and hence Pippa looks
rather at optimistic explanations of the universe than at
pessimistic ones. We cannot Think an emotion, still
less put it into the logical form in which we most often
transfer the contents of our consciousness to others, or
register it for ourselves ; so we lay about us for some
idea, or rather most often some ready-made set of words,
suitable to the emotion, whatever it is, and we register
or communicate that. What is at the bottom of
Pippa's mind, the fact her remark really answers to,
is, " I am well and pleased, the Sun is bright," or
perhaps a certain musical theme, say, of Mozart.
{(
VII
Pluralistic Universes "
Reading W. James's Pluralistic Universe and re-
reading Bergson's three great books.
That logic should be false to Reality : surely not.
Our religion, our art may indeed be fabricated by our-
selves to render our life more endurable ; delusions,
172
Vital Lies
things made to suit us and by us. But in order to
fabricate these delusions, or any other kind of Vital Lie,
we are obliged to postulate something outside and
independent of them, namely, reality. Analogy is
experience ; a delusion is a false analogy. If our judg-
ments were acts of free choice, instead of being impera-
tives constraining us, the scene-painter could not delude
us into accepting his arrangement of verticals on the
flat for horizontals in cubic space. Similarly, in order
to please ourselves with " God's in His heaven, all's
right with the world," we have to coerce ourselves by
certain analogies. If I happen to be happy this
morning, happiness exists, and if happiness exists,
other people may also be happy, etc., etc. All em-
ployment of human thought for human satisfaction
depends upon the existence of thought unconditioned
by human satisfaction, thought which before becoming
our servant must be recognized, like the statesman
or general, or even policeman, as our master. And all
arrangement of things or notions to suit human needs
—needs physiological, aesthetic, moral, or "tran-
scendental "—presupposes that man exists in a milim
independent of his thoughts and volitions, and which
can therefore react upon these thoughts and volitions
in the way desired.
As regards Pragmatism, it does not furnish us with a
Pluralistic Universe, but with a thinker who interrupts
his thinking, an experimenter who breaks off his ex-
That Poor Drudge, Reason 173
periment, whenever it suits his feelings. Pragmatistic
thought resembles the artist's thought, in so far as both
not only build for the Heart's Desire, but also (as Omar
Khayyam forgot to mention), break ofE and sweep
away its own construction whenever the logical
necessities, i.e. the peculinrities itidependent of his
wishes, begin to bore or to annoy it. The Pluralistic
Pragmatist takes advantage of the fact (for even he
must build with facts!) that we need not always
think on and on, that there are other subjects and
other points of view; in short, that although the
independent universe rolls on in its established maimer,
with or without the music of the spheres and the hymn
of Goethe's archangels, human attention can turn
upon its ear and, for a while, dream of its own juicy
cabbages or intoxicating, efEulgent roses.
VIII
That Poor Drudge, Reason
That intellectualism, as its disparagers call it, has been
fostered by human practicality, I think no one could
deny, because it seems likely that, seeing man's far from
excessive energies, only such activities would have
developed as were practically valuable. But that
" intellectualism " should be due to the manufacturing
it
174
Vital Lies
In
practicality in especial, to man's intending and willing
and making, or rather that the limitations of human
intellect should be thus explained, is a totally different
assumption. Those who make this assumption (the
Bergsonians, for instance) forget that the limitations of
the human intellect are largely explicable by its acting
with far more consecutiveness than simultaneity ; a
fact in its turn explicable by the things which concern
us not concerning us all at the same moment, existing
in various points of space because they are many,
whereas each of us being only one, exists at one point at
a time ; we are obliged to shift our point of view and
alter our focus, and hence all " intellectual knowledge "
tends to analysis. Thus the very sense of a whole seems
to exclude an adequate appreciation of separate parts.
We have to think the microscopic aspect at a different
moment, in a different manner, from the macroscopic ;
the mountain range as a separate act from the moun-
tain's component earths and ores ; and when we think
both together we think vaguely and rather emptily
and verbally, or else in a rapid oscillation between the
two. But that this defect— if it is a defect and not
a richness— should be due to practicality I fail to see,
except in so far as practicality is identified with life
itself. Rather it is explained by our double peculiarity
of possessing locomotion, hence successive experience,
and specialized analytic senses (sight, taste, smell, hear-
ing, and touch), which not only afford a multitude of
That Poor Drudge, Reason 17 5
different impressions, but capture into their laboratory
different natural phenomena. To say that practicality
has made intellect analytical is merely saying that
practicality had to conform to the fact of such con-
secutiveness and analysis. But practicality tends, on
the contrary, to synthetic perception, to the pre-
dominance of a need, of an intended action fastening
on to a single quality or group of qualities, and englob-
ing them and itself in a narrowed down vision ; for what
can be narrower, more fragmentary than the instinctive
reaction, upon the single datum of a single sense, as in the
instinct of lower animals and of our own least conscious
selves, which Bergsonism treats as a most complete
knowledge ? I sometimes wonder whether there is not a
confusion in Bergsonians (William James, for instance),
and even in Bergson himself : a false analogy snatched by
their crepuscular thought, between practical manufacture
and intellectual construction and whether this may not
be the explanation of their notion of " practicality "
having " disintegrated " reality into intellectual con-
cepts ? For if practicality, or practicality's forced
recognition of existing constitutions, has analyzed and
separated and classified our perceptions, it has also
reconstructed them into the concentric and super-
posed synthesis wherewith we attempt to compass
Reality. Thus our locomotion, our consecutiveness,
make us measure and compare ; the analytic habit of
our specialized senses enables us to form scales of
M
176
Vital Lies
quaUties, and these we are able to break up and re-
build in various fashions.
FinaUy, I would deny that there is any inferiority
in the intellectual necessity of analysis. To a creature
who is but a small fragment of Reality, the whole of
Reality cannot surely be a continuum ; the more of
Reality such a creature can apprehend the more that
must be discontinuous, discrete, because attention is
intermittent, and positions, points of view are various,
and because specialized sense is specialized. We do
not swim in a vague over-alUish experience penetrating
into us with equal force and provoking everywhere the
same reactions, we move among alternating experiences,
exposmg partial surfaces thereto, and aU our consciou^
life IS the registration of their variety and alternation ;
indeed, but for alternation and variety, there could be
no consciousness at aU. And it is this alternating,
vanous, discontinuous nature of our experience which
gives to this experience its comparative universality ;
universality compared to what it would be if it were
not thus alternate, various, and discontinuous. For if
human experience were a continuum (as what lies
beyond and beneath experience probably is) it would
indeed not corUain any limits, but it would be limited
Itself ; we should not move within experience with that
power of measurement and comparison, with that seuse
of similarity and difference which give command over
the future as well as the present by organizing expecta-
'
Thought as Movement 177
tion and registering disappointment. In other words,
" non-intellectualized " experience would also be far
more partial, it would be as the experience of skin and
viscera compared with the experience of sight and loco-
motion. It would, it seems to me, be purely sub-
jective ; experience of variations in our states, not that
experience of a non-ego which implies the projection of
some of our sensations into a not-ourselves, into a space
constructed by our locomotion^ out of our specialized
senses, our separate and intermittent data ; such ex-
perience would be all " I am " and no "It is." Now
" It is " happens to be the name we give in life to what
is called philosophically " Reality."
IX
Thought as Movement
All our thinking is done in terms of movement, and
all our thinking is consecutive. We can pursue only one
line of thought, make one series of connections, at the
same fraction of time. But we know that besides the
line we have just been pursuing, besides the points we
have just been connecting, we have pursued other lines
and connected other points ; and we know that we can
* Cf. M. Ribot, " Le R61e latent des Images Motrices," in Revite
PhUosophique, March 1912.
If
!
'• |i
11
178
Vital Lies
do 80 again. Moreover, we know that we have aUemately
pursued the same and other lines, connected the same
and different points, and that our expectation, based
upon similar experience, of returning to lines previously
pursued, to points previously connected, has been in
many cases justified, we can return on to the road to
the North which we left to pursue the road to the South,
and the roads East and West which we pursued before
that. We are able to alternate the pursuits of these
different directions, and we consequently infer that
these roads co-exist in the intervals of our pursuing them ;
that these directions could be pursued at the moment
that we do not pursue them. All this constitutes a
sense of the possibility of simultaneous activity if we
could give it, in other words, a sense of the co-existence
of possibilities of sensation and action if we could feel
or do in sufficient simultaneity. Such possibility of
co-existence means the construction of a space, a some-
where in which we could move alternately in various
directions ; and in which things (or if you prefer mere
ideal lines of direction) are waiting, so to speak, for us
to turn to them in our alternating movement. Mean-
while, the knowledge that we have had various
grouped sensations at various moments, and that
these grouped sensations have reappeared when we
followed along other groups of sensations, similarly
binds up our various and separate sense-impressions
into that belief in their potential existence which is
Thought as Movement 179
what we mean when we believe in the existence of
things.
When we say " while so and so was going on, such
another was going on elsewhere," we mean that if at
a given moment, we had removed our attention, let ua
say, from the Paris rabble marching to Versailles in
1790, we might have witnessed Mozart directing an
opera at Vienna. We mean that the two events were
contemporaneous although we can only think them
consecutively, and that there must have been different
portions of space for them to go on. Moreover, we mean
that if we could have received two different and exclud-
ing groups of impressions, those of the marching
crowd on a road and of Mozart at his pianoforte in
a theatre, there would have been wherewithal to
furnish us with those groups of impressions; and
this again is that grouping together of potential,
though not actual, impressions which we call the real
existence of things.
Now one of our greatest intellectual difficulties,
perhaps the one which has cast most slur on the
intellect's powers, is just this necessity of taking up the
threads we have let go, the lines we are no longer
moving along ; in fact, the necessity of our thought
being, like our words, discontinuous, discursive in
many dimensions and directions of time and space ;
subject to the ands and huts of our var3dng movements.
%i4
I 80
Vital Lies
Limitations of Thought 181
H
!t
'
Reason as Revelation
Might one not say, reversing Bergson's notion, that
reasoned knowledge is that message from outer Reality,
which has been able to penetrate through our obscure
preferences and habits ; nay, that logic is that minimum
of sense of the ways of Reality required for even our
hide-bound existence ; the evidence of what we do rwt
expect or vnsh registered in those very habits which
represent our safety % And, so far from thought, as
Bergson has it, defacing the non-ego, is it not rather
thought which brings to the ego, to the creature sewn
up in its skin, soaked in its liquids and imperfectly
windowed by its senses, the requisite, the modicum of
knowledge of what exists beyond it ? For, after all,
ib is thought, it is logic, which has suggested the inference
that reality transcends our experience, that reality
cannot be coped with, perhaps, by our logic. It is
thought which, revealing all we know of Reality,
assures us at the same time that Reality exceeds,
because it contains, this revelation.
XI
Limitations of Thought and Limitations op
Thinkers
Much thought (the fact keeps striking me afresh)
is but the reinstatement of fragments of truth elimin-
ated in a previous summing up, in the synthesis (usually
by some one else) of a few other fragments of truth.
This lamentable besetting sin of all statement — or
perhaps I should have said incurable laziness and
cocksureness of all who state — ^has something to do,
I think, with our latter-day depreciation of thinking as
such, with its addition that thought is not commen-
surate with fact, and its innuendo that all we call
truths are partial falsehoods. But suppose Thought
applied not primarily to stating, persuading, and
dissuading, but, once in a way, to plain understanding
of things, should we not, in that case, get something
fairly commensurate with the experience which it
embodied and connected ? And if we considered no
longer the Thought detached by the statement, the
enunciation of individuals and schools at given moments,
but the body of thought of all men at all times, we might
surely recognize in it something as vast and various as
experience, and able to deal efficiently with it. But
individual Thought (mcluding that of schools and
/
t i ».m-_ .a i A i J '"
l82
Vital Lies
trades) has not merely organized itself for fragmentary
purposes of practice, but it has learned many of its
proceedings in the course of acting upon other minds,
curtailing itself for easy communication, foreshortening
itself for points of view, let alone that it has contracted
all the vicious habits of personal advocacy and personal
domination.
XII
Farewell to Vital Lies
Whenever the time have come that we who teach
others (perhaps because we cease to do so) shall have
recognized the mischief of thus hoodwinking the good
faith of those whom we teach, and thereby lowering the
standard of intellectual honesty and destroying the credit
of all teaching ; whenever that distant time have arrived,
it is quite possible that the word lie will be dropped
out of similar discussions, or rather the words correct
or incorrect be substituted, in matters of opinion, for
the words true and false. It may be not only a proof of
obscurantistic habits, but a mark of imperfect under-
standing and of the habit of small personal considera-
tions, to connect what we think about Nature and Man
with such notions as that of honesty on one hand or
fraud on the other. To do so shows that low as
may be commercial integrity, intellectual honesty is
Farewell to Vital Lies 183
lower still, since it has not yet established a system
of credit.
Be this as it may, we can still watch our educated
selves and neighbours failing to discriminate, e.g. in
the sort of Researches called psychical or spiritualistic
becaiL3e they deal with the h)rpothetical souls or spirits
of the dead, instead of the obvious souls of the living —
we can watch ourselves failing utterly to discriminate
between testimony and proof ; indeed, in more practical
questions even, it is still largely the character of the
witness which helps to hang or to release, quite as much
as the nature of what that respectable witness happens
to allege. Parents and educators, let alone Govern-
ments and Nations (Tripoli, Nov. 1911) are still apt
to take ofience as if doubt of their statements implied
doubt of their honour. Authority is still the basis of
parental as it is of military and sacerdotal discipline ;
authority in the sense of " do you call me a liar ? " as
opposed to authority as presumable competence of
knowing. And just now the Pope has taken to making
priests swear that Modernism is wrong and the old
theology is right, absolutely on the principle of the
continental swashbuckler who runs you through the
body for " doubting his word," or contradicting too
hotly. And it is not only characteristic but perhaps
advantageous that such should have become the Pope's
methods of carrying his point about, let us say, the
authorship of the Gospel of St John.
184
Vital Lies
MeanwhJe the human mind will be freed from super-
stihon m proportion a8 it recognizes that a fallacy need
not be a l^e, that error ia more plentiful than truth
because error is tentative and truth final. Moreover
aat error when widespread implies no inteUectual'
(and stJl less moral) Obliquity, since it is nine times
out of ten the inevitable result of haw we know and
^hcu we know So that while error may be exploited or
clung to or artificu^lly kept up, there is very littie chance
^ need) of ,ts having been invented on pipose to take
f!th Tf .T *'^ <^*''* '"o- ^ -hat our grand-
fathers called "Priestcraft," would be the reco^tion
ttat so far from having been fabricated to ke^Tth^
i; Plato T ' ■''?■ " '^°'*^^^' '"^^ ^^^''^ -
Odder), Plato also opmed, all myths are the inevitable
oute^eofthehonestthinkingofagiventimeorp^S?
Furthermore, the most important lesson taught me
^ Id : "" "' "' ^°"''°" ''' ^' ""t the un-
guessed, usually unconscious action of habits and
desares, which close up certain channels of thoZt 2
deepen others into stagnant pools without an i«ue
X have even caught myself wondering whether
Human hfe has reaUy ever required Lies. But it ^
hopes and consolations where there was reason fo^
toed minds before they had got to a rational resting-
Handiwork of the Gods 185
place, and freedom for busy ones to think of something
else. So, when all is said and done. Vital Lies represent
human weakness, human sloth, and human dullness,
above all, perhaps human impatience, which cuts down
the tree to eat the fruits. In other words, it seems as
if Vital Lies meant the need of the moment and the
individual against the need of the race and of the
future.
XIII
Vital Lies as the Handiwork op the Gods
And now, after so much discussion with others and
with myself, so much backwards and forwards, how do
I stand toward Vital Lies ?
I think thus :
Vital Lies are among the devices with which the Gods,
possibly blind (perhaps because their eyes are unlike
ours), shape us and our destinies out of the material of
our own desires and powers. But Vital Lies are not
articles of common or domestic utility, to be made by
Man for Man's own using, still less things which men
can discuss, and of which they can lend one another the
pattern !
CHAPTER III
I. Humanism ........ 186
n. Man the Measure ....... 189
IIL The Teleology of the Man and the Teleology of Universe 194
IV. The Immorality of Immortals and the Morals of Mortals 199
V. The new Morality for Mortals ..... 201
VI. " Ye are the Salt of the Earth " . . . .204
Vn. Truth is what does not care what you think of it . 205
Vin. "And Man for Me," etc 207
IX. Cui Bono ? 209
X. Ecce Deus fortior me ..... . 210
Humanism
AND since I am now soliloquizing, saying
what has come into my private head
about vital truths and vital lies, it is fitting
I should make a confession.
If I have shown, perad venture, lack of moderation
and sweetness towards Will-to-believe Pragmatism, it is
due in part to the exasperated recognition that this
doctrine, and these doctors, have distorted views which
are mi ne, or which resemble my own : utilitarianism,
relativism, and the idea vaguely roughed out in the
saying that Man is the Measure of All things. In the
IM
Humanism
187
same way that they have wasted, discredited, d^rmnetisS,
as the French say, removed out of honest philosophical
currency, that word Pragmatism, so excellently invented
by Mr C. S. Peirce for his method of " making our ideas
clear" by inquiring into those ideas' equivalents in
expected facts ; so also they, in the person particularly
of Doctor Schiller, have wasted another valuable word,
" Humanism,'' by applying it, with the Protagorean
dictum for which my friend Alfred Benn originally
invented it, to a theory of " Making of Truth," and its
correlative unmaking, or destroying of truth when that
truth did not happen, as in the days of the Inquisition,
to suit the requirements of " Humanity."
Now " Humanism " is the name that could have been
given to views which, although not yet (and so much
the better) formulated as a philosophic system, are
already arising, and must arise more and more, with the
daily growth of scientific habits on the one side, and of
lay ethics on the other.
This humanistic, as distinguished from arUhropocentric
view could be roughly summed up as follows : Our
human interests, our thoughts, are conditioned and
limited by our constitution. Our constitution is
limited, qualified by the Universe. But the only uni-
verse which can exist for us is the Universe which exists
through the medium of those limitations and qualifica-
tion of our constitution. We are our own centre of the
Universe, because we cannot change our place in the
Vital Lies
Universe. We are the Measure of All Things, because
the only things we know of are known with reference
to our standards. We are more important than the
rest of things, because when we say important we are
implying a relation to ourselves, a relation we can
conceive as outside ourselves only by attributing the
modes of our own experience to what exists beyond our
own experience. The Universe has made and is still
making us. But the only Universe we can conceive is
the one constructed in our consciousness. This is the
conclusion to be drawn, and which many of us have
drawn, without formulating this principle that the
importance of our ideas is their importance to us, but
that their importance to us depends upon their repre-
senting not our wishes and purposes, but rather the
something outside us whereby our wishes and purposes
are themselves originated and conditioned. It is to
this principle that I have long given in my mind (and
other thinkers have doubtless done alike in theirs),
some name like Humanism.
So, as I have just confessed, my quarrel with these
self-styled Pragmatists has been exasperated by the fact
of their having deflected this principle of thought's
relativity yet certainty ; this conception of the positive
importance and comparative unimportance of Man's
standards ; and their having distorted it into a sham-
bling sophistic that turns belief into choice and truth
into expediency ; a sophistic which, requiring belief in
f\
r
I
^ii
I
Man the Measure 189
truth for the efficacy of fallacy and falsehood, is i'pso
facto condemned to perpetual self-contradiction.
But instead of yielding to such irritation (and I
crave pardon for every time I have done so) one ought
rather to rejoice that the incoherences and tergiversa-
tions of this school of so-called Pragmatists (includ-
ing the Pragmatistic myth-and-symbol-mongers and
Practical Obscurantists) may result in more careful
criticism and more rigorous selection of that other kind
of Humanism, namely, of that conception of human
standards and valuations which, without much
formulations or promulgation, is being approached by
the spontaneous convergence of scientific thought and
utilitarian ethics.
II
Man the Measure
While the moralists and moralizing logicans calling
themselves Pragmatists have given us leave to deal in
Vital Lies by calling them truths so soon as they seem
" better for us to believe," a more esoteric branch of
Obscurantists have been telling each other that Vital
Lies are one of the instruments by which Nature (some-
times called History) accomplishes her designs ; and
these philosophers (and each of us philosophers has been
one such at least in " lost moments ! ") derive much
!■
I(
190
Vital Lies
satisfaction from having so far penetrated the secret,
been admitted into the confidence of that arch-
Machiavel, the Unconscious, leading mankind with
fallacies, falsehoods, superstitions. Myths, and all that
magic-lantem business of " ombres cTune ombre."
But is not this also perhaps a Vital Lie, delightful to
our philosophic self-importance, and necessary, perhaps,
to bridge the difficult transition from the status of
priests, soothsayers, and poets, to the less tempting
one of observers and classifiers of facts, and makers of
nothing much more prophetic than weather forecasts ?
Are we not, many, all of us " thinkers," making up for
loss of office round the throne of the Almighty, or in
the dingier household of the Absolute, by this hinted at
intimacy with the Unconscious, its " designs," its lack
of " Morality," and its especially reprehensible (or, if
you prefer, splendidly prodigal) Wastefulness ?
For, in the first place, how can we be sure that It
(" Life " formerly known as " Nature ") is Unconscious,
and if Unconscious, how can it have designs, or be
moral or immoral, or economical or wasteful ? More-
over, even supposing its unconsciousness to be so
different from any unconsciousness of which we have
experience, what right have we to suppose, as our
chief philosopher of " Life " evidently does, that the
Unconscious has been toiling and travailing to elaborate
Consciousness, in plainer language, that " Life " has
been organizing itself in view of producing (whatever
Man the Measure 191
else besides) just you and me ? For unless that pro-
duction of something most uncommonly like present
mankind had been one at least of Nature's or Life's
'' aims," we have no right, surely, to call it immoral
when it does not conform to our morality, and still leas
wasteful, when it launches out into expenditure (let us
say in microbes) which we, personally, should have
avoided. For this much does seem plain, that while all ex-
perience and notion of " designs," " plan," " intention,"
" conduct " (whence moral and immoral, wasteful and
economic), are taken from ourselves and are not
necessarily applicable beyond ourselves; the plans,
designs, and modes of conduct of anything so different
from us as " Nature " or " Life," always supposing
*' Nature " or " Life " to have any, would evidently
be as different from ours as Nature or Life is different
from us, the plans of the " Whole " would surely be wider
than those of the " Part," and the methods of the
Unconscious could scarcely be judged, still less profit-
ably adopted, by the Conscious.
For that is what it comes to. Not so much that
we want, like Milton, " to justify the ways of God
to man," but rather to justify the ways of man by
those of . . . well, whatever modern philosophy
may call the more constitutional successor of God.
For instance, in this small matter of Vital Lies,
alias myths. That mankind has blundered through a
vast number of mistakes, false analogies, wrong classi-
192
Vital Lies
fications, partial deductions and more partial induc-
tions, quid pro quos and (to suit the words to the study
of " Les Formes prelogiques de I'lntelligence ") coqs d
Vdne, as shown in Totemism, and that, moreover, some
good results may have occurred such as sundry pro-
hibitions, purifications, and a general law-abidingness,
from this blundering, all this suggests to some philo-
sophical minds, such as Mr Crawley, and M.
Sorel's, or let alone Kenan's, that since myths and
superstitions have been good enough for the Uncon-
scious in its historical and prehistorical dealings with
mankind, mankind or those enlightened classes or
individuals possessing the Unconscious' secrets, need
not, in their turn, be too fine to use them. " What
God could dare to give, he dares to name," wrote Young
of some eighteenth-century Walt Whitman ; which we
may paraphrase : What Nature, Life, History, Fate (or
any other of the aliases of the Unconscious) dared to
invent in order to make men moral and self-restraining
and heroic, surely Mr Crawley may support, or
M. Sorel may preach, in order to keep up that output
of morality, self-restraint and self-sacrifice, without
stickling with such purely human precepts as that
which bids us tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
Now here I must return to my previous remark,
namely, its being a mere human assumption to ascribe
designs and methods to anything beyond human beings
and animals greatly resembling them ; and secondly,
Man the Measure 193
its being quite illogical, once such designs and methods
have been ascribed to the Unconscious, to imagine that
the benefit or edification, or even the production of man-
kind, was precisely what those aims and methods in-
tended to compass. Indeed, what we call the Waste-
fulness of Nature is surely a proof that if Nature was
aiming at anything, it was not at pleasing the creatures
whose life and pain she made so free with : we our-
selves do not call it wastefulness when we breed
cattle for the sake of their flesh and hides, though the
cattle assuredly must consider our methods of feeding
and shoeing ourselves excessively wasteful. Hence,
there is nothing to tell us that when the Unconscious
lavished centuries-full of human mistake and dis-
appointment this was really to the end that these
superstitions and myths should result in morality,
heroism, or saintliness. The Unconscious may have
been thinking of something quite different, and human
morality, heroism, and saintliness have been, in its eyes
(since the Unconscious is full of inchoate faculties)
mere waste products, rubbish, slag, or shavings from
some other bit of work.
Whence I conclude that we had better not take
example save by ourselves, and better stick to one of the
few educative certainties we possess, namely, that human
morality, whether intentionally or unintentionally pro-
duced, is useful, indispensable to Man ; that human
logical habits are similarly requisite, and that one of the
2n
•«fS«IP
194
Vital Lies
'1-
I
items evolved by human morality and human logic is a
respect for truth as such due to the fact that where we
do not believe that a statement is true we refuse to act
upon it. small fellow human beings, we are a very
microscopic, and perhaps quite negligible, portion of
the Universe ; but we are the portion we happen to be
directly concerned with, and the only one through
which we can, moreover, approach, interpret, the rest.
Man is legitimately his own, since he is his only measure
of all things, so long as he bears in mind that the instru-
ment of mensuration may be " out " by a few millions
of degrees.
Man is certainly not the centre of all things, but I
do not see what else is to be his centre save himself !
Ill
The Teleology of Man, and the Teleology op the
Universe
In connection with such views it is as well to recon-
sider the subject of teleology, with which latter-day
obscurantism does a good deal of conjuring.'
I conceive that the universe might do without any
intelligence outside it, and yet contain and require
mtelligence, or rather let us call it consciousness, inside
it Indeed the presence of consciousness in creatures.
/
I
The Teleology of Man 195
so far from proving, makes it easier to dispense with,
the notion of consciousness in some sort of Creator. For
such existing consciousness explains details in evolu-
tion which would remain obscure in its absence.
According to this view, which is mine, the production
or development of consciousness from some rudiment
thereof inherent in living, who knows, in inorganic
matter, would be a part of the automatic modus operandi
of the cosmic mechanism ; feeling in its most rudi-
mentary forms, attraction, and repulsion, mere crude
preference and aversion, being part of the stufE acted on
by unconscious selection, and reacting on what we call
the materiality of things by determining some of its
groupings and shapings. Be this as it may, the presence
of consciousness in the universe, so far from loosening
the chain of causation, in reality tightens it ; for feeling
and knowing are the most easily recognized of all
determinants, indeed the only determinant that is not
a mere inference ; we see a stone fall or a kettle rise, and
infer cause and effect, but we feel our preferences and
aversions pushing in one direction rather than another ;
we feel cause and effect in ourselves.
Pope's famous lines : —
" And binding Nature tight in Fate
Left free the human will,"
are so far wrong that the only Fate, the only necessary
sequence of which we have direct knowledge, is precisely
■
1
t!
196
Vital Lies
that of our own feelings and volitions ; and if we had
no such experience of causal sequence in ourselves, we
should not be able to attribute it to the outer world ;
there would be sequence, comcident and usual sequence,
but not Fate, since Fate implies inevitable causation.
As it is with determinism, so it is with teleology.
To say that there is no teleology in the outer universe
may be a rash statement, but rash or not rash, it does
not imply that there is no teleology in the human
consciousness ; indeed here again, as in the case of
determinism, the only teleology of which we can be
quite sure is precisely in the human consciousness, and
more particularly in yours or mine. Any other is at
best, an inference, correct or incorrect, but most often
it is a mere metaphorical mode of speech, a case of what
psychological aesthetics call Empathy, or projection of
human modes of being into outer forms or objects.
With regard to any teleology outside of direct human
self-experience it is important to recognize that such
intention, inferred from our own experience, and
attributed, logically or merely poetically, to what we
call the universe, is an intention or set of intentions^
which need not in the least coincide with the intentions
we are aware of in ourselves. What we interpret as
intentions in nature are tendencies which condition and
limit one another ; or more correctly, we human beings,
whenever we find one of our own bona fide (because felt)
tendencies checked or deflected, instantly suppose that
i
i
■Ml
The Teleology of Man 197
this can Jmppen only by the intervention of some inten-
tion different from the one of which we are ourselves
conscious. And by this system of inferences, more or
less metaphorical and anthropomorphic, we get to think
of a number of Wills, separate from, but coercing our
own : the Will of the Race, the Will of the Universe, let
alone the more venerable or old-fashioned Will of God ;
Wills all thought of on the pattern of those of our
family and nation, limiting our own teleology, and
obliging us to fulfil our own intentions by conformity
with their larger and more powerful ones.
Now, once we have made it clear to ourselves that all
this talk of other Wills than our own is a mere metaphor,
and may possibly be a totally misleading one, there is no
objection to continuing to talk about Teleology and to
examining into a possible order or hierarchy of these
various metaphorical or metaphysical Wills. We
should, then, recognize that the Will of the Individual
(about which, when it is yours or mine we do happen to
be sure) is not necessarily directed to the same aims
as is the Will (supposing there to be one) of the Race ;
still less to the same aims as would be the Will (if Will
there were) of the Cosmos, or of God Almighty. For
the Will of the Individual aims at comfort, meaning
thereby a minimum of thwarting and a maximum of
satisfaction of all possible desires. The Will of the
Race or Species would aim at survival, since to that it
sacrifices everything else by natui-al selection. And
196
Vital Lies
that of our own feelings and volitions ; and if we had
no such experience of causal sequence in ourselves, we
should not be able to attribute it to the outer world ;
there would be sequence, coincident and usual sequence,
but not i^ote, since Fate implies inevitable causation.
As it is with determinism, so it is with teleology.
To say that there is no teleology in the outer universe
may be a rash statement, but rash or not rash, it does
not imply that there is no teleology in the human
consciousness ; indeed here again, as in the case of
determinism, the only teleology of which we can be
quite sure is precisely in the human consciousness, and
more particularly in yours or mine. Any other is at
best, an inference, correct or incorrect, but moat often
it is a mere metaphorical mode of speech, a case of what
psychological aesthetics call Empathy, or projection of
human modes of being into outer forms or objects.
With regard to any teleology outside of direct human
self-experience it is important to recognize that such
intention, inferred from our own experience, and
attributed, logically or merely poetically, to what we
call the universe, is an intention or set of intentions,
which need not in the least coincide with the intentions
we are aware of in ourselves. What we interpret as
intentions in nature are tendencies which condition and
limit one another ; or more correctly, we human beings,
whenever we find one of our own bona fide (because felt)
tendencies checked or deflected, instantly suppose that
The Teleology of Man 197
this can Jiappen only by the intervention of some inten-
tion different from the one of which we are ourselves
conscious. And by this system of inferences, more or
less metaphorical and anthropomorphic, we get to think
of a number of Wills, separate from, but coercing our
own : the Will of the Race, the Will of the Universe, let
alone the more venerable or old-fashioned Will of God ;
Wills all thought of on the pattern of those of our
family and nation, limiting our own teleology, and
obliging us to fulfil our own intentions by conformity
with their larger and more powerful ones.
Now, once we have made it clear to ourselves that all
this talk of other Wills than our own is a mere metaphor,
and may possibly be a totally misleading one, there is no
objection to continuing to talk about Teleology and to
examining into a possible order or hierarchy of these
various metaphorical or metaphysical Wills. We
should, then, recognize that the Will of the Individual
(about which, when it is yours or mine we do happen to
be sure) is not necessarily directed to the same aims
as is the Will (supposing there to be one) of the Race ;
still less to the same aims as would be the Will (if Will
there were) of the Cosmos, or of God Almighty. For
the Will of the Individual aims at comfort, meaning
thereby a minimum of thwarting and a maximum of
satisfaction of all possible desires. The Will of the
Race or Species would aim at survival, since to that it
sacrifices ever3rthing else by natural selection. And
198
Vital Lies
the Will of the Universe or of the Divinity would aim,
if one may use such a word in such a context, at mere
existence, the whole, or omnipotence, being unable to
will anything that it is not ; God having theologically
defined himself by the mere first person present of the
verb to 6c, and the universe being philosophically
definable as the third person of that same all-including
yet empty form of speech. Hence we get a meta-
phorical or metaphysical consideration of Wills actually
feU (to wit, our own) and Wills inferred or imagined.
And this concentric arrangement is as follows : the Aim
of the Race selects among the aims of the individual,
among the proceedings which aim at his own comfort ;
the teleology of the Race kills or breeds; it uses
or refuses individual's various desires for its sole end of
Race survival. I say Race survival, because race-
improvemerU is an aim of, and a shifting definition of,
the cattle-breeder or the moralist, and race-survival
may be attained by what both these persons would call
deterioration or regression. And the teleology of the
Universe in its turn selects among the various race
teleologies, to the end (already attained) of the universe
subsisting.
This schematic arrangement is interesting and
perhaps instructive, but on one condition : if we re-
member that of all these three Teleologies or Wills, two
are mere metaphors, mere attributions of our modes
to what is unlike ourselves; but the third is a real
;
4
•! f
Immorality of Immortals 199
Teleology, a real purposefulness, a real choosing of
what-hurts-least or pleases most ; and that teleology
is Marl's.
The deterministic view of human progress ia, there-
fore, that such progress is compassed not by seeking
any final " good," still less by any remote intention of
co-operating with the Race or the Universe, but by the
conscious and unconscious shifting of our burden of
desire and discomfort. If the individual subserves, as
he calls it, consciously and willingly, the safety and
progress of the race, this is inasmuch as the safety and
progress of the race are objects of his thoughts and
desires, the race is part of himself; nay, the universe
also, because the race and the universe for which he is
ready to sacrifice smaller satisfactions are part of his
present consciousness, and inasmuch conducive to his
greater satisfactions or dissatisfactions.
IV
The Immorality of Immortals and the Morals of
Mortals
Despite all myth-and-symbol-mongering, and despite
the various pragmatistic subterfuges, both such as
philosophy prefers (" just the thing that you want "),
and such as our individual unreasoning hurry and
200
Vital Lies
feebleness can furnish forth, there are, it seems to me,
certain recognitions which reality will gradually force
upon us, and indeed is already forcing.
First and foremost, that we human creatures are only
a tiny portion of Reality, and that Reality's methods,
even those by which it has made us, are not necessarily
the ones which our own omnipotent superfineness would
have adopted. We shall have to admit that the process
of evolution and selection that has made our morality is
as unintelligent and ruthless as the one to which we owe
our bodily structure and functions, is, in fact, the con-
tinuation of the same process. The admission will cost
some pangs. More difficult even to admit will be that,
despite such horrid origins, morality is " good " and
tends to even greater goodness. This will be even more
difficult to recognize, because while the majority of
mankind shirk the thought of what is highest and most
venerable being produced by every kind of evil, the
minority shudder away from the claims of a moral code
which has been elaborated by cruelty and stupidity, by
perfunctory selfishness, and (as we see in the case of
our taboo-bom prohibitions), by ludicrous blunders.
Anarchic religious mysticism has, throughout the
centuries of faith, made light of the commandments,
blotted out good and evil ; and nowadays we can watch
the law-breaking moralists extending, like Dostoiefsky,
brotherly arms to those who, while victimizing their
neighbours, are themselves victims of Nature by Fate.
A
New Morality of Mortals 20
I
But in proportion as we face things as they are, and
not as we should like them to be, we shall gradually
recognize that whatever infringement of our moral
preferences may have been needed for the elaboration of
OUT moral codes and ideals, these are, on the whole, the
best and most improvable among our possessions, and
one of the safest means to the gradual elimination of
those very processes of human stupidity and brutality
which have been active in their production.
Thus, for instance, though the Blind Immortals
(blind because their eyes are not fixed solely on our small
selves) have apparently found it necessary to lead
mankind along by lies and false promises, mankind, thus
led, has had to recognize that, whatever the Gods of the
Universe may permit themselves, it — ^that is to say, you,
I, and all our neighbours— had best deal as little as
possible in statements which we know to be false, and
in promises which we do not intend to keep.
The New Morality of Mortals
Perhaps there may be the foundation for a new
morality for mortals (as distinguished from World Wills
and Race Wills and other divinities) in the recognition
by parents and guardians that you have to teach
l
202
Vital Lies
children to consider things as naughty when they
happen to be inconvenient, merely because there is no
time to go into whys and wherefores, but without there-
fore invoking the sanction of those gods or chimney-
sweeps who presided over the morals of our remote
infancy. In other words, a new ethical attitude of
recognizing that our moral preferences are not neces-
sarily shared by the Cosmos, nor by all our fellow-
creatures, nor by our ancestors and descendants even to
the seventh generation, but that it is nevertheless need-
ful that we, being what and where and how we are,
should give these moral preferences paramount im-
portance. Such an ethical attitude would recognize all
the self-seekings which make us act, and recognize at
the same time that we must frequently counteract
them ; that the world is moved by appetite and self-
interest, and for this very reason curb appetite and
purge interest of its selfishness ; that all codes and
institutions are provisional, perishable, mixed up of
advantage and drawback, and that we must alter
and at the same time respect them. Above all, such
an attitude would take for granted that Nature snaps
her fingers at us, and yet that we must not snap our
fingers at Nature.
Such a new ethical and (philosophical) attitude would
mean the possession of a rare and delicate accomplish-
ment, namely, of intellectually and morally balancing
ourselves, which we shall have, however difficult, to
New Morality of Mortals 203
learn : Balancing and looking both to the right and to
the left, casting our glance forwards and backwards
and all round us. For we shall have to take account
of what seem contradictions, but are in reality only
countervailing consequences ; for instance, that the
Ego and the Present are the only real existences and
yet must perpetually sacrifice themselves to the AUer
and the Future, these being in truth but a prolongation
of them in their own thought, a part of their own mental
contents, and their sole practical and moral touchstone.
All this will have to be learnt, is beginning to be
learned already ; but 'tis a slow and laborious job at
best.
It was far easier and more convenient immediately
(though perhaps not always in the long run) to talk of
ourselves (as we were talked to) as " Your Father," or
" Your Mother " with a religious impersonality of
intonation, ignoring all possibility of imperfections.
Easier and more convenient also to consider the Nation,
the State, as something transcending both the tax-
payers and the officials ; far easier and more immediately
convenient to set our likings and dislikings ad dexteram
Domini, and consider that the Universe was made for
Man, and Man was made by God.
Far easier and more convenient ; particularly when
dealing with children, servants, and the lower classes ;
and easier and more convenient to bear in mind our-
selves. Unfortunately, these easy and convenient
204
Vital Lies
Pi
I 1 1
methods did not correspond to the reality of things.
And hence, despite the best will in the world, and
especially the best Will to Believe and To-Make-others-
Believe, there was a continual queer leakage in
human ethics and politics, and a disquieting breaking
off short. . . .
VI
((
Ye are the Salt op the Earth
j»
And to begin with us Thinkers, who all think (what-
ever our other divergences) of ourselves as that salt
wherewith the insipid and indigestible human mass
needs to be salted. Given this undisputed fact, there are
one or two precautions which might be commended to
ourselves, to the purpose that we lose not our savour,
become good for nothing, and be cast out and trodden
under foot of men.
These precautions for keeping our salty virtues might
be summed up as follows : Try to bear in mind and
reconcile the two main facts of life : To-day and To-
morrow ; or, if you prefer. What is with what ought to be.
Recognize the reality of things without therefore
accepting (a la Whitman) their desirableness. Obey a
law while taking steps to change it. Possess an esoteric
ethic, but not a secret one. Declare openly to our
neighbours that we have in this matter or that passed
Truth
205
beyond them, but recognize that though they will stand
to-morrow where we are standing to-day, it is natural
and useful that they should meanwhile, try to check our
progress. Criticize, combat, and welcome criticizm
and combat, select rigorously, and accept rigorous
selecting of ourselves. With this would naturally go :
make no use of Vital Lies ; they are vital and useful
only when they are honestly accepted as vital truths.
These, and doubtless other precautions might secure
the Salt of the Earth against loss of savour. But
then, it would have to begin with being such salt ;
and are we really any of us anjiihing except lumps, more
or less insufficiently salted, of the stale, yet fairly
nourishing, dough of common humanity ?
VII
Truth is what does not care what you think of it
Let us be truthful, if possible, even about the hve of
truth, and discard the heroics of the professional
prophets, who, like Nietzsche and Tolstoi, think they
are manfully facing the whole truth because they are
pinning their attention to some aspect of Reality
which inflicts pam on themselves, and through them,
on their neighbours.
Reality is not a thing to which we can say, whether
2o6
Vital Lies
a
And Man for me/' 207
if
■)
\
with jubilation or lamentation, yes or no. It is a thing
which forces itself upon us, just because it is reality.
And perhaps intellectual manners and morals, at some
distant day, may turn looking things in the face from a
heroic counsel of perfection into a precept of common
sense. As matters stand at present the love of truth
is oftenest an unconscious excuse for the itch of self-
assertion, the lust for inflicting pain even on oneself ;
or else for some misplaced taste for aesthetic effects
" power," "distinction " (Nietzsche's Vornehme), and
generally speaking, what your low bred neighbours
cannot attain.
Truth, or, I should rather say, Reality, or plainly,
" What exists whether we like it or not," is a far less
satisfactory affair. I mean less satisfactory to the
heroic, or dramatic, or elegiac instincts of thinkers.
And the most unsatisfactory peculiarity about Truth is
that, happening {jxice Pragmatists !) to be independent
of you, it maybe agreeable or disagreeable or indifferent,
or all three turn about, instead of being pre-arranged
to afford you, even (as in lover's quarrels) by its in-
difference, desirable opportunities of pure joy, pure
sorrow, heroic rebellion or stoical acquiescence, indeed
any fine definite feelings. We — you and I, and every
one of us — are neither the splendid champions nor the
sombre adversaries (" de la realite grands esprits con-
tempteurs," wrote Baudelaise of certain scandalous
sinners) of Reality. We are only a tiny scrap of it, de-
tached from the rest only inasmuch as it is forced upon
our knowledge as something independent of us. And the
difficult, useful, sensible, but also, alas ! the uninterest-
ing task is to recognize Reality as nearly as possible what
it is, that is to say, as something infinitely bigger than
yourself, infinitely more complex, infinitely more old
established and long enduring, infinitely regardless of
your likings and your posturings ; and, which, as you
are part of it, allows you to live and have your wishes
only by recognizing its independence of you.
And here I would venture an additional attempt at
defining truth. Truth is that which does not care a
button what you think of it.
VIII
"And man for me," exclaimed a pampered goose. — Popb.
" To the stimulus of light," (so I read in a book of
biology),^ " the plant answers by unfolding its leaves,
to the chemical stimulus by changes in assimilation
and elimination; to the stimulus of temperature
by acceleration of its processes of growth."
All that whirling cosmos of give-and-take even in a
1 Richard Semon's Mneme, a book which, modestly studying the
relations and equivalences between heredity, growth, and memory,
has given us a new schematic vocabulary enabling us at last to
think clearly on these and many other scientific and philosophical
points.
fe
208
Vital Lies
Cui Bono?
209
ll
plant, in the tiniest weed on the meanest duck-pond.
And in the face of this mjniad-activity we think it
necessary to invoke copies of our Will, to furnish
pattern sheets of our purposes and preferences for the
Universe's explanation ! How blind, deaf, and stolid
has this will of ours, this purpose, this right-and- wrong
of ours, made us, starving our potential perceptions,
atrophying our imagination and our reason down to
the narrow needs of our own survival ! How it has
reduced us to recognizing only ourselves as active in this
thousandfold activity, allowing us to think such
infinite change only in the terms of our half-dozen
changes of consciousness !
Worse than that ; our practical preoccupations have
tried to put blinkers to those eyes of ours which at best
cannot see our own ears, and bid our poor powers
of thinking to think only such thoughts as may be
immediately available. What I have dealt with in
this volume under the lamentably debased name of
Pragmatism is the philosophy of limiting down our
thoughts within the narrowest practicality of all, that of
individual consolation and of social convenience, of
" What it would be better to believe."
The same philosophy (like most other philosophies)
talks very big of the need, for our spiritual worthiness,
of a belief in free wiQ and immortality, a belief in some-
thing transcending ourselves.
Now such a belief in what transcends our ephemeral
pettiness is indeed requisite to save our intellectual eye-
sight, our logical and imaginative muscle, our whole
spiritual life. But that something, transcending our
whole smallness, is the network of relations inde-
pendent of our convenience and our wishes, which we
call Reality. And the belief in such existence trans-
scending and continuing our own, that belief is mani-
fested in the humble and heroic habit of seeking and
accepting truth.
IX
Cm Bono ?
There is a sense for ever growing in me, of the utter
lack of aim in life as such, or rather of the illusory
nature, the perfunctoriness of the various aims which
we clap variously on to life's various pieces. But with
this sense there grows, even stronger and more unfailing,
the conviction that this should not make us doubt of
life's value to ourselves, or of life's greatness in itself.
Far from it ; for if our aims are illusion, is this not a
sign of life's sufficiency, of our living through life's (that
is, our own) imperious constitution ? It is life's own
necessities and powers, obscure, disguised, imperative,
leading to those acts, feelings, thoughts, which reflective
reason tries vainly to explain and legitimate by aitns.
Nay, this very seeking for aims, this criticism and in-
20
2IO
Vital Lies
'' Ecce Deus Fortior Me " 211
«
h
terference of reason, is but another manifestation of
those seemingly, those possibly, aimless necessities
and powers of things.
For what are we living ? Answer me first for what
are the atoms attracting one another, the moisture
condensing on the earth and evaporating off its surface,
spreading the loam and carving the rocks ; for what
are the chalk animalcules laying down continents, and
the coral insects building up islands all through the
ages ? For what is the flower-pollen being carried on
the winds, for what is the carcass of the beasts giving
back to the soil the elements which it took from it ?
For nothing : But because of everything. And for
what do we think, and thinking, ask such questions,
except because thinking and asking are modes of our
living. And if we go on thinking long enough, we may
come to the conclusion that " to what purpose ? " is a
question which man has the right to ask only of his own
doings, but has, with regard to them, the duty of
asking it rather more critically at times, than he does.
" Ecce Deus Fortior Me "
Admitting, once for all, the inevitable anthropo-
centrism of all our knowledge, there might come to be
a kind of religious importance and use in our thought
of an unthinking (not an unthinkable !) Beyond, and
in the conception of a universe to which our human
likings and dislikings could not be applied.
In such a conception of an existence infinitely
transcending our own, of which our Right and Wrong,
our Why and Wherefore, are but minutest facets, in
such a recognition of what contains and surpasses our-
selves, it seems to me that we might profitably purify
away the cloggings of our little human mechanism.
And in the thought of that for which our very ques-
tions cease to have any meaning, of existence apart
from our wishes and sanctions, we might gain strength
for our own living and thinking, even as the inhabitant
of busy cities may seek refreshment in the scarce
breathable air of barren mountain-tops, by whose
snows and suns he is frozen and half-blinded, and by
whose outlooks he is made dizzy.
Finis
INDEX
Absolute, the, i. 83, 84, 85. 86, 87
*' Anoeaheiic Revelation and ike Gist
of Philosophy"'!. 117
''ATicator Worship," I 31
Apollo, i. 246, 247
*' Apologia," \. 2b%
*' Apelogie pour notre PassS," ii.
102 note 1
Art. i. 152, 153, 154
Augustine, Saint, i. 257 ; ii. 60
"Axioms as Postulates — Personal
Idealism" i. 22, 23, 27, 47 note 1
B
Bain, James, i. 15, 36, 38, 39, 42
Baldwin, Professor, i. 18 note 1
Bateson, ii. 53
Baudelaise, Charles, ii 206
" Beauty and Ugliness," i. 108 note 1
Benn, A. W., ii. 20, 187
Bentham, Jeremy, i. 42
Bergson, Monsieur, i. 54, 69, 165,
172, 200 ; ii. 60, 61, 82, 83, 163,
166, 171, 175
Berkeley, George, i. 13, 14, 15, 18
note 1, 19, 34, 38, 39
Blavatsky, H. P., i. 107
Boileau, Nicolas, ii. 126
BOLSBNA, MiRACLB OP, i. 230
Boni, Signer, i. 62
*• Bough, Oolden," il 5
Bridgewater Treaiises, ii. 59
Bright, John, i. 42
Brown, Thomas, i. 38
Browning, Robert, i. 182 ; ii. 126,
171
Brummel, Beau, ii. 150
Bruno, i. 90
Buckle, Henry Thoma», ii. 78
Buddha, i. 244
"Bull Roarer." ii. 7, 12, 13, 14. 15.
16, 26, 28, 50, 55, 58
Calderoni, Mario, i. 5, 6
Cambridge, Massachusbtts, i. 18
note 1
Carlyle, Thomas, ii. 153
Catherine, Saint, of Siena, i. 58
"Causation," i. 13, 14
Cena, Giovanni, ii. 102
" Century Dictionary," i. 18 note 1
" Christianity at the. Cross Roads."
i. 160. 228 note 1, 259 ; ii. 4
" Church Times," Thoughtful Writa-
in, ii. 25, 26, 27, 28,' 46
Clifford, W. K.,i. 42,43
Cobden, Richard, i. 42
Colenso, John William, ii. 55
" Conquest of Bread ," it 69
Corneille, Pierre, ii. 99, 100
Crawley, Ernest, i. 99, 149, 156,
195 ; ii. 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 34,
35, 36, 37, 38, 89, 40, 41. 42, 48,
46, 48, 49, 50. 51, 52, 53, 54, 65,
56, 57, 58. 85, 104, 121, 139, 145,
147, 152, 192
Dante, i. 181, 182, 213 ; ii. 16, 26,
132, 160
Death, i. 211, 212, 219
Demeter, or Isis, or Christ, i. 267
" Dialogues Philosophiqiies," ii. 64
"Dictionary of Psychology and
Philosophy," i. 18 note 1
Dostoiefsky, F. M., ii. 200
218
■ &,ilwii..JI
Index
215
£
Eaton, ii, 20
EoYPT, Sacrbd Onions of, ii. 15
'* Elemental P<yi7Ut of Vieio," ii. 86
Ellenborough, Lord, ii. 20
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ii. 153
Endob, THi Witch of, ii. 15
'* England, Modem," ii. 20
" English RationcUism in Nindetntk
Century^' ii, 20
Erasmo, Don, i 259, 260
"Eternal Valuet" u. 32
''Evolution CrkUnce," i. 200. 260:
ii. 82 '
P
*'Fonctions Mentales dans les Societis
In/h-ieures," i. 215 note 1, 219 ;
ii. 9 '
''Former p'iloaiquei de I' Intelli-
gence" ii. 192
Fouilltfe, Monsieur, i. 146 ; ii. 137
France, Anatole, ii. 14
Francesca, Pier della, i. 248
Francis, Saint, i. 247
Frazer, Alexander, i. 195 ; ii. 5,
55
Freud, Siegmund, i 123
Frmts for Life, i. 145, 148, 153, 155,
228
G
Galileo, i. 65
Garibaldi, Joseph, i. 181
Gillen, ii. 58
Gioberti, Vincenzo, i. 181
Giotto di Bondone, i. 183
Gobineau, ii. 89, 144
Goethe, Johann von, i. 237, 250 : ii.
90,173
Guy-Grand, G., ii, 82 note 1
H
Hal^ry, David, ii. 102, 153
Hapgood, ii. 66 note 1, 69 note 1
Heam, Lafcadio, i. 30
Hihhert Journal, i. 7, 18
"Historic Materialism;' ii. 75
Holyoake, G. J., ii, 20
Horace, i. 181
"How to Make our Ideas Clear," I
12,14, 17, 21, 25 no<<; 1, 37. 46.
126 ; ii. 187
" Human Identity/;' i. 14, 19
"Human Immoitality ," i. 35 note 2,
44
" Humanism," ii. 79 note 1, 187
Humanity, Proletarian Neic, ii. 81
Hume. David, i 13. 14, 16, 19, 34,
Ibsen, Henrik, i, 11, 52. 100 : ii. 160
" Idees Forces," i. 146
Ignatius, Saint, i, 183
"Iliad," I. 131
" Illustration of the Logic of Science,"
i. 21 note 1, 22, 30, 46, 47
''Instans Tyrannua," il 126, 128
Intuition, i. 201
James, William, i. 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 note 1,
12, 14, 15, 17. 18 note 1. 19, 22
23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34.
36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46,
47. 48, 50, 51, 53. 55. 56, 57, 59
60, 64, 65, 66, 67. m, 69. 71. 73
74, 75, 76. 77, 78, 79, 80. 82, 83
84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 92. 93, 94, 95.
96, 97, 98, 99, 100. 101, 102, 108,
105, 106, 108, 109, 110. 112 113
114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121,
122, 123, 124, 125. 126, 127 128
129, 130, 181, 132, 133, 135 136
137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145
148, 152, 154, 155, 165, 228, 229
237 ; ii. 3, 61, 78, 79 m>te 1, 84,
98, 110. 122, 129, 131, 152, 166!
171, 175
Janet, P.,i. V2!5 notel
Jaur^s, ii. 93
''Jean Christophe," il 102 note 1
John, Saint, i. 185
Johnson, Samuel, i. 62, 63
Joshua, i. 65
JOUARRE, Abbess of, ii. 147
Jouarre, Abbey of, i. 219, 221, 222
" Journal of Philosophy," i. 6
Judea, i. 178
Kant, Immanuel, 1. 39
Keats, John, i. 51, 220^ 221 ; u. 125
Khayyam, Omar, ii. 173
Kropotkin, Peter, ii. 69
"La Philosophie Syndlcaliste," ii.
82«o<cl
" La Teoria Sindacalista," u. 61, tv
note 2, 107 note 1
"La Foce," ii. 99
Lee, Vernon, i. 108 note 1
Leo XIII., Pope, i. 259
Leuba, Doctor, i. 127 ,
L^vT-Bruhl, Monsieur, 1. 215, 219,
220, 223 ; ii. 9, 155, 157
" Liberal Protestantism," i. 169, 228
Li^, Vital,!. 11, 99. it\}5^i'r;!i-
85, 114, 119, 124, 127, U7, 150,
151,154,185,205 .
" Life, EleToeiUal Vmo of, u. 8, 12,
15, 22, 35, 37. 51, 52. 53, 55, 56,
"Life, Tree of," ii. 2. 4. 5, 11, 17,
ig. i9. 46, 47. 54, 55. 56, 57, 58
LoANGO, sorcerers of, i 219, 220,
221
LOANGO wizards, i. 219, 221, 222
Locke, John, i- 13, 14, 15, 19, 34,
36, 38, 39
Loisy, Monsieur, i. 171| 183, 185
Lombroso, i. 92
Lona,%ii. 75
Loyola, Ignatius de, 1. 94
M
Maiiano, i. 5
Man, Primitive, ii. 9, 10. 11, 13, 15
Marx, Karl, ii. 75, 86
"Matter,"'!. 13, 14
Mazzini, Giuseppe, i, 181
Mendel, Abbot, i. 61
Meredith, George, ii. 169
Messina, i. 213
Michelangelo, i. 183
Michelet, Jules, ii. 78
Milan, i. 260 .,.,,, oa qq
Mill, John Stuart, 1. 15, 34, 36, dV,
42, 69, 70. 81 ; ii. 150
Milton, John, u. 191
''Mind," I 6
Morris, William, ii. 69
Moses, i. 98. 233 ; ii. 30 ..
Mountain, Old Men of the, il 7»
Mozart, Wolfgang, ii. 171, 179
Miinsterberg, Hugo, ii. 31 note 1
Myth, Messianic, ii. 80
Ah, Syndicalist, i. 243 ; u. 65, 75,
§2, 8^, 89, 90, 92. 94, 95, 96
N
Napoleon, ii. 99
Nebuchadnezzar, ii. 15
Nero, ii. 72 . ..
Newman, John Henry, 1. 259 ; u.
59
" News from Nowhere," ii. 69
Nietzsche, i. 10, 11, 235 ; ii 61, 89,
106, 109, 153, 205, 206
" Notre Jeunesse," ii. 102 note 1
Papini, Signer, i. 76
Papirie, Professor, i. 18 note 1
Paris, ii. 179 „, ,n, ••
Pascal, Blaise, i. 41, 134, 191 ; u.
130
Passion, i. 136
Paul, Saint, i. 185, 233
P^uy, ii. 102 . e ^ -
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 1. 5, 6, /,
8, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18 note 1, 19,
21 Tiote 1, 22, 25 note 1, 28, 29,
30, 31, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 46,
47! 49, 56, 60, 110, 126 ; h. 187
Pheidias, ii. 144
Pilate, L 50
Pilate, Pontius, ii. 52
Pius IX., Pope, L 259
Pius X., Pope. i. 148, 168 260
Plato,i. 52, l60;ii. 78, 144,184
Pluralistic Universe, i. 86, 87
"Political Economy,"!. 81
2l6
Vital Lies
Index
217
11
Poloniui, L 77
Pope, Alexander, ii. 183, 196,
Popular Science Monthly, i. 18 nott
1, 21 note 1
Pi-actical Difference, i. 16, 19
''Pragmatic Principle," i. 15, 16,
17, 18, 19
" Prafftnatitm," i. 23, 24, 25. 27, 35
no<e 1, 40. 42, 47, 50, 55 noU 1,
60, 66, 68, 69, 78, 79, 82, 86, 88,
137, 142, 143, 145, 157 ; ii. 3, 79
note 1
" Pragmatism and Psexido-Pragma-
titm" i, 86 note 1
PrezzoJini. ii. 61, 65, 72, 73, 74,
79 nott 2, 80, 86, 107 note 1
*' Principles of Psychology," i
Protagoras, i, 45
"P»ychology:'i.lb
•• Reason, Age of," iL 20
'• RejUxions nir la Violence," ii 65
nott 1. 70, 76, 77, 88. 92, 97, 113,
122
" Religion. Psychology of," ii. 13
Religious Idea, i. 172, 176, 190, 191,
192. 193, 194. 195, 205, 206, 217,
224, 225, 228 ; ii. 84
Renan, Ernest, ii. 64, 70, 71, 77.
99. 100, 101, 106, 107. 108, 109,
110, 111, 137. 147. 161, 192
"Review, North American," i. 3
•• Revue du Mois," i. 6
** ReviLe Pkilosophique," i. 18 note 1 ;
ii. 125, 170 note 1
Ribot, ii 170 note 1
Roget. Peter Mark, i 11, 118
RoUand, ii. 102 note 1
ROMB, i 88, 178
"i2o*e. Mystic," i\. 2, 6. 9, 23, 42,
65
Rousseau. Jean Jacques, ii. 140
S
SalMby, ii. 63
Sandow, Eugen, ii 40
Schiller, F. C, i. 5, 7, 8, 19, 22,
23, 26, 27. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34.
35, 36, 38, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47. 48,
49. 62, 65. 99. 136. 166, 235 : ii
61, 78, 79 note 1, 187
Schopenhauer. Arthur, ii. 163
" Scritti di Giovanni Vailati" i, 5
Servetus, ii. 20
Socrates, i. 53. 233 ; ii 137, 138
Sorel, Georges, i. 62, 99, 148, 156,
243 ; ii 61, 62, 64. 65, 70. 71, 75.
76. 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84. 85,
86. 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94,
95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103,
104, 106. 107, 111, 112, 113. 116,
122. 145, 147. 162. 192
Spencer, Herbert, i. 42, 187, 199,
201 ; ii. 68
" Spirit of Labour" ii. 66 note 1, 69
note 1
Starbuck, ii. 13 note I, 18 note 1
Stevenson, R. L., i. 154
Stendhal (Beyle, Marie-Henri), ii
140
Stewart, Dugald, i. 38
Strauss, David, ii. 55, 113
Strike, General, i. 148, 149 ; ii. 62.
71, 72, 73, 80, 81, 113
" Studies fin Humanism," i 22. 23,
26, 44, 45, 136 note 1
Suffering, i. 211, 212, 213, 219
Sjrmonds. J. A., i. 117
-Sec Myth
Teresa, Saint, i. 94
" Terrible Doubt of Appearances,"
i 208, 209. 210, 218
" Thesaui-us of English Wm-ds and
Phrases," i. 118, 120
Thomas Aquinas, ii. 60
Thomson, C. A., i. 108 note 1 ^
Tiberius, i. 169
tolstoi, Leo, i 233 ; ii. 106, 114,
116, 126, 137, 188, 163, 205
Trajan, Emperor, ii. 30
Tripoli, ii 183
*' Trut^n-so'far-forth," i. 82, 83,
86, 86, 87, 110, 234
Tylor, ii. 66
Tyrrell, George
164, 165, 166,
171, 172, 173,
178, 179, 183,
188, 189, 190,
204, 205, 206,
223, 224, 225,
231, 233, 234,
240. 241, 242,
ii. 3, 4, 84, 85
, i. 148, 162, 163,
167, 168, 169, 170,
174, 175. 176, 177,
184, 185, 186. 187,
192, 194, 195, 196.
214, 217, 218, 219,
226. 227, 228, 230,
235. 236, 237, 239,
253, 256, 259, 261 ;
. 121, 152
U
Universe, Pluralistic, ii. 171, 173
Vailati, Giovanni, i. 5, 6
Val di Greve, i. 245
Value of Symbolism, i.VJ^
Varieties of Religious Belief, i. 210^
• ' Varieties of Religious Experience, "
i. 13, 38, 43, 60 note 1, 79, 80, 87,
91, 100, 110, 116, 119, 137. 139,
142, 229 ; ii 79 note 1, 159
Venn, Henry, ii. 152
Verification Process, i. 56, 57, 58,
69, 60, 64
Versaillbs, ii. 179
Vienna, ii. 179
Virgil, i. 181, 182 ; ii. 6
" Voice of the Silence, " i. 107
Voltaire, Fran9ois, ii. 14, 60, 78,
100, 150, 184
W
Woissmann, August, i. 190, 211
Whitman, Walt, i. 208, 210, 218 ;
ii. 192, 204
" Will-to-Believe" i. 3, 4, 5, 9, 11,
12. 15. 16. 22, 28, 32, 33. 37, 41,
42. 43, 47, 61, 117. 164, 227, 228,
243, 261, 253 ; ii. 3, 7, 8, 16. 79
7iote I, 98 note 1, 112, 129, 184
Witch Trials, i. 97
Young, Edward, ii 192
Zeus, i 244
Zola, Emile, ii. 69
%.:■ ;. I
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VERNON LEE
Croiun Svo, 3/. 6d, net
Outlooi. — "The book is one to be enjoyed for its sheer
beauty of style by those who have never visited the places
described; but those who have will enjoy the amazing
aptness of epithet . . . ; in her extraordinary sensitiveness
to modes of time and place, Vernon Lee's attitude recalls
that of Mr Henry James."
Guardian. — '* Vernon Lee's peculiar gift is to be seen at its
best in her latest book, 'The Enchanted Woods.' . . . She
represents her feelings in broad, bright touches, at once
powerful and delicate."
Bystander. — " A book that should not be missed. It is full
of charm, and of fine thoughts fully expressed."
Pall Mall Gazette. — "The picturesque and facile prose
which this writer has made well known for many distinctive
qualities."
Glasgow Herald. — " Vernon Lee has real and very rare dis-
tinction of style; her diction is imaginative, individual, and
full of colour ; she can draw pictures that are unforgettable."
Dundee Advertiser. — "Delightful and suggestive pen-
pictures . . . delicately wrought, with shrewdly directed
colouring that has all the direct effect of an intoxicating
perfume."
Literary World, — " She not only charms us by her skill in
the art of putting things, but also by a wisdom that sees
beneath the apparent and the superficial."
Lady*s Pictorial. — "As a writer, Vernon Lee is full of
charm and poetic fancies ... by the peculiar magic of her
pen she can throw a glamour over the most commonplace of
subjects, and to her it is the easiest thing in the world to see
all woods through a veil of enchantment."
\ r^~
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
HORTUS VITAE
ESSAYS ON THE GARDENING OF LIFE
BY
VERNON LEE
Crotvn 8vo. 3^. 6d. net
Times. — "There are many charming flowers in it . . .
the swift to-and-fro of her vivid, capricious mind carries the
reader hither and thither at her will, and she has such wise,
suggestive things to say. . . . Whenever and wherever she
speaks of Italy, the sun shines in this garden of hers, the
south wind stirs among the roses."
Standard. — "There are imagination and fancy in the
volume, a wise and independent outlook on society, an
undercurrent of genial humour, and, what is perhaps still
more rare, an invitation to think."
Outlook. — "Vernon Lee possesses a mind richly imbued
with the lore of the finest literature, and distinguished by
just that touch of paradox, of the unexpected, which is the
other indispensable requisite of the true essayist. Also her
philosophy is never aggressively didactic, but always
refreshing and helpful."
Speaker. — "This volume of essays gives us the work of
Vernon Lee in her most eager and abundant mood. . . .
Cordial pages that convey so much sincerity of heart, so
much warmth, so much courage and love of life."
The Atheneeum. — "The talented lady who writes under the
name of Vernon Lee has in her new volume of essays much
to say on the conduct and management of life, as well as on
the culture of the aesthetic and other senses."
The Spectator. — " The grace of diction that marks one who
is at once a mondaire and a cosmopolitan, and a grace of
thought that sometimes recalls Mrs Meynell and sometimes
R. L. Stevenson, and even here and there reminds one of
Emerson. ... No book quite so good of its kind has lately
been published." '
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE SPIRIT OF ROME
LEAVES FROM A DIARY
BY
VERNON LEE
Crown 8vo. JJ. dd, net
Spectator "There is only one thing to do— to find a
place for « The Spirit of Rome ' on our shelf of treasures."
Academy. — "It breathes the very essence and spirit of
Rome. . . . Vernon Lee is a master of descriptive writing,
but we know no work of hers (nor, for that matter, of any
one's) to compare for beauty with many of the exquisite
pages among these notes."
Daily Mail. — "Vernon Lee's prose poems. . . . Her im-
pressions of Rome are vividly caught and delicately
described."
Illustrated London Netvi. — "In even the most insignificant
pages there is what the author intended to capture — the very
breath of Rome."
Daily Telegraph. — " A new volume of essays from the pen
of Vernon Lee is sure of a welcome from all readers who
appreciate literary artistry. . . . The author is well
equipped for the difficult task which she has essayed— that
of representing the ' spirit ' of the most fascinating of cities
by means of the printed word : she is gifted with the power
of seeing the essential items in a scene."
Liverpool i»(w/.— " The book succeeds in conveying a
wonderfully vivid impression of Rome. . . . That would be
a prosaic soul which did not gather a sense of poetry from
it."
Evening Standard.— *'. The quick, fresh, and impulsive
qualities of the book make it singularly fascinating to
read."
\'
i
BT THE SAME AUTHOR
THE SENTIMENTAL
TRAVELLER
NOTES ON PLACES
BY
VERNON LEE
Crown 8t>o. 3/. 6d. net
Spectator — " Full of human as well as of artistic interest.
... No one will question the originality and charm. . . .
Vernon Lee has written many delightful things, but nothing,
perhaps, more keenly suggestive and charmingly convincing
than the first chapter of her new book."
Daily Telegraph — «« Vemon Lee is a writer whose gift of
style is such as to render her musings and descriptions in
essay form always attractive to the reader with what may
be termed a literary palate."
DaUy Graphic— *^Tht book is not for the multitude, but
for kindred souls— and they will be charmed with it"
Globe.— *^\t is always a pleasure to meet with Vernon
Lee be she at home or abroad. ... A cultured, kindly,
sociable book." '
ScotsmaH.—*' In briUiant light and shade, in elusire and
wayward grace, in flamboyant fancy, and in other rare
literary qualities her handiwork may lay claim in the line of
succession to that of Sterne."
Nezv Age — «' 'The Sentimental Traveller' is full of such
delightful pictures in which the spirit of place seems sud-
denly to flash before the reader's mind. Individually each
separate essay has its own charm."
MorniHg Pott — " A beautiful book ; an oasis of leisure and
beauty amidst the noisy literature of the day."
BT THE SAME AUTHOR
LAURUS NOBILIS
CHAPTERS ON ART AND LIFE
BY
VERNON LEE
Croivn Svo, $s. 6d. net
Spectator.--'' It is long indeed since we have met with a
volume of art criticism so wise, so attractive, so suggestive
as « Laurus Nobilis.' . . . Interspersed with those exquisite
pieces of imaginative description in which few living writers
can surpass Vernon Lee The book is indeed too full
of charm, originality, and wisdom to be quickly read or
dealt with in a few lines. It should be bought and studied.
fVestminster Gazette.-'' Vevuon Lee has developed a
cultured, delicate style in her literary art that forms a
beautiful medium for the translation of her many-sided and
keenly apprehensive mind, and any book of hers is worthy
not only to be read but to be considered and carefully
pondered."
Morning Post.— "Her landscape is full of delight, and for
those who are curious in method hers is worth studying^
There is a real love of beauty, an intellectual curiosity and
honesty which ought to prove profitably disturbing to the
average lover of art."
Daily Express.-" A new book by Vernon Lee carries with
it the assurance of fine literature."
Daily Mail.—" Nothing could be more dainty than Vernon
Lee's style, nothing more refined than her intellect."
Observer.-". . . I so greatly enjoyed this delightful
volume because the writer has herself so beautiful and in-
spiring a mind, because her lyre is so ^ull of melody and
music, and the charm of her language is so rare ; and to
commune with it is like inhaling the scent of the early
morning woods and listening to the shepherd in Arcady.
BT THE SAME AUTHOR
LIMBO & OTHER ESSAYS
TO WHICH IS ADDED
ARIADNE IN MANTUA
BY
VERNON LEE
Crown 8vo. 3J. 6d, net
Spectator. — "It 18 really hard to fix on the best essays in a
volume full of fascination. * Ravenna and her Ghosts,' as
much as any, shows the writer's artistic power. 'About
Leisure ' is a dose of restful enjoyment for a tired brain."
Outliok, — "A volume of essays which shows Vernon Lee
to be a master of this lighter form of literature. It is full of
humour and truth."
Ntiu Age. — "What a relief to the mind it is to recover
that intense sunlight in which these essays are steeped, with
the more than hint of luxurious ease conveyed in the very
cadence of the sentences. All lovers of pure literature are
greatly indebted to Vernon Lee for many happy hours.
They will be further indebted by the inclusion of her beauti-
ful play 'Ariadne in Mantua.'"
Maurick Baring in Morning Patt. — "It is impossible to
give in a brief space any idea of the beauty and richness of
this drama, for in giving a mere skeleton of the plot all that
is important is omitted ; since the beauty and power of the
play depend entirely on subtle gradations of thought and
feeling answering to and playing upon each other, built up
note by note. Quotations from this play are like bars of
music torn from a beautiful song, or squares of canvas cut
out from a noble picture. To touch this play is to mutilate
it ; to appreciate it one must read it all, or, better still, should
some intelligent manager prove enterprising and give us the
opportunity, see it acted on the stage."
Observer — " It is a little chef (feeuvre both in language and
fancy. . . . There can be no question that this is an ex-
quisite little literary fantasy, rich with thought and poetry
and the meanings of life. It is written in very fine English."
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
ALTHEA
DIALOGUES ON ASPIRATIONS
AND DUTIES
BY
VERNON LEE
Crown 8vo. 3x. 6d. net
Nation, — *« . . . We are grateful to this coterie for reveal-
ing the opinions of the serene and significant intelligence
who signs herself Vernon Lee."
Saturday Review. — "There is an honesty of thought and
purpose in these papers and a gift of expression which make
them stimulating and delightful."
Literary Post. — "Vernon Lee has a charming gift of de-
scription, coupled with a strong love and sense of colour."
Illustrated London Nezvs. — " . . . Is it necessary to add that
the writing is a joy in itself? "
Aberdeen Free Press. — "The result is a long series of
delightful books. ... All written in a delightfully allusive,
almost capricious manner. She has a keen eye to the
esthetic, and in some places the way in which she weaves
into her dialogues allusions to the beauties of the earth is
almost startling in its exquisite suggestiveness. So long as
she continues to charm us with these glowing splashes of
beautiful thought we shall never have to sigh for the death
of the essayist."
Scotsman. — " Full of an interest which rests both on the
matter and the manner of them."
Irish Independent — "There is no gainsaying the fact of
Vernon Lee's singular literary charm. . . . Those who have
read others of her delightful volumes will not hesitate in
renewing her acquaintance."
f
Br THE SAME AUTHOR
VANITAS
POLITE STORIES, INCLUDING
"A FRIVOLOUS CONVERSATION"
BY
VERNON LEE
Crown Svo. 3/. 6d. net
Athenaum. — " Vemon Lee, in reprinting with Mr John
Lane the three • Polite Stories ' which make up the greater part
of ' Vanitas,' has added a fourth tale not hitherto published.
She has done well. The motive of this story ... is de-
veloped with a freshness and individuality which lend all
the charm of novelty to Vernon Lee's narrative. Her picture
of the young Austrian noble ... is singularly life-like
and pathetic. Madame Nitzenko is a noble figure, and her
relations with KoUonitz . . . are beautifully described."
Dailt/ Mail. — '* Vernon Lee's gift of delicate and expressive
prose is well known, and has won for its owner a secure
place in the world of letters. . . . The stories are quite
up to the high standard of their author's previous
achievement."
Outlook. — "It is a finished and moving piece of art from
beginning to end."
tVorld. — «' Polite Stories the author calls these tales, and
the description is apt. They are leisured, well-bred, finely-
gowned things."
Globe. — "These tales are cleverly written in a bright,
literary way ; the situations are good ; the points raised are
delicate, and the stories are neither too long nor too short."
Evening Standard. — "There is distinction in every
chapter."
Scotsman. — "Clever and exquisitely written like all the
work of this talented lady."
))■!
BT THE SAME AUTHOR
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
AND OTHER STUDIES IN
PSYCHOLOGICAL ^ESTHETICS
BY
VERNON LEE
AND
C. ANSTRUTHER-THOMSON
12s. 6d. net
iVa//.^._«jThis book is specially to be welcomed at this
stage of esthetic science, because the whole of it is securely
based on genuine and unfailing aesthetic enjoyment."
Manchester G«^r^/^«._« These studies contain a great deal
that IS invaluable for English students of aesthetics. . .
Professor Lipps theory is a thing of great significance, and
It I. here ably expounded and criticised, and to it the authors
add much incisive, determined reasoning of their own, some
admirable suggestions (all those concerning the « esthetic
imperative, for instance), and many interesting results of
experimental introspection." ^
..^''\^''1f^"'~*' ' ■.• ^"^ *^" thorough comprehensive
and exhaustive manner have the authors given expression to
much earnest thought-the fruit of honest and sincere work
prrfittXm^lte"''' -"^^'^^ ^"""^ "^^^ '^''^^ ^^^ -^^
Sundai, Times.—^^. . . These stimulating studies in
psychological esthetics, which are indeed a monument of
earning observation, and analysis, and must rank as an
invaluable contribution to a difficult subject."
Scotsman.— '^ The volume will be read with hearty interest
by aU serious students of the philosophy of art."
ranity Fair — "Vernon Lee is undoubtedly one of the
most erudite women writers of the day."
.nfr "^^Tu'^T '' '^^ ^°°^ ^^'"^ ^"^ inaugurate a new
epoch, abolish Tolstoy, and perhaps will lay the scientific
basis of the psychology of the work of art and the artist "
BT THE SAME AUTHOR
HAUNTINGS
FANTASTIC TALES
BY
VERNON LEE
Crown Svo. JJ. 6d. net. Second Edition
Spectator.—" Most romantic and delightful reading . . .
There i> enough imagination in these short stories to furnish
any number of present-day novels, and people with strong
nerve» who enjoy thrills can be unhesitatingly recommended
to read the book."
Westminster Gaz^W^.—" Imagination and fantasy are equal y
dominant in the four stories of Vernon Lees book,
« Hauntings.'" . _
Saturday i?«;/Vw.—« Seldom hare any stories of pure
fantasy contained more genuine and excellent qualities than
the four ghost stories of Vernon Lee . . . passages of real
beauty, sensitive and glowing descriptions of some Italian
scene, breathing the very spirit and essence of what she
describes. Her stories are truly mysterious, and grip the
imagination in their suggestion of the picturesque and the
terrible. But, above all, they are picturesque, drawn with
delicate and brilliant touches, and rich in colour and design.
POPE JACYNTH
AND OTHER FANTASTIC TALES
Crown Svo. 3 J. ^d. net
GENIUS LOCI
NOTES ON PLACES
Crown 8«yo. 3^. 6^. net
RENAISSANCE
FANCIES AND STUDIES
Crown %vo. 3J. dd. net
THE
COUNTESS OF ALBANY
With three Illustrations. Crown Svo. 3J. 6d. net
BOOKS ABOUT
ITALY
BY
VERNON LEE
LEO. G. SERA
G. A. GREEN
G. P. CLERICI
J. M. KENNEDY
Dr. OSCAR LEVY
EDWARD HUTTON
EDITH WHARTON
FREDERIC CHAPMAN
MAXFIELD PARRISH
A. MARY F. ROBINSON
VALENTINA HAWTREY
SIR FRANCIS VANE, RT-
ELIZABETH BROWNING
DENNISTOUN OF DENNISTOUN
CONSTANCE JOCELYN FFOULKES
AUTHOR OF " IN A TUSCAN GARDEN "
MONSIGNOR RODOLFO MAIOCCHI, D.D.
PUBLISHED BY JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD,
VIGO STREET, LONDON, W.
CASA GUIDI WINDOWS
BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
With an Introduction by A. Mary F. Robinson (Mme.
DucLAUX), and a Photogravure Frontispiece. Fcap. 8vo.
as. net.
The Athnueum.-'' Elegant, graceful and also discerning. Modern
versifiers can boast of more than Mrs. Browning, but a tithe ot her
poet's soul, her rare enthusiasm, would count lor a good deal more
than their admirable correctness and fastidious transfigurations "
naili/yeu>$—" The delightful new edition which Mr. John Lane
has just issued ought ceitainly to serve for the serious criticism and
admiration to which a great poet is entitled."
THE LIFE OF
SAINT MARY MAGDALEN
Translated from the Italian of an unknown fourteenth
century writer by Valentina Hawtrey. With an
Introductory Note by Vernon Lee. Illustrated by
Fourteen Full Page Reproductions from Old Masters.
Crown 8vo. Gilt. Price 5s. net.
PaUMcM Gazette.-'' Adminhly rendered from the Italian by
Miss Hawtrey. The story, with its devout purpose, and religious
atmosphere, is a striking contrast to the 'religious novels ' of to-dav
that strive to make effective the Gospel narrative."
Bookman.— A singularly beautiful translation of one of the best
ot the remarkable Italian devotional romances of the Middle Ages
it IS well translated by Miss Hawtrey, with a series of well executed
reproductions.
Daily yews.— "It is almost cruel to mention in the same breath
such modem popular efforts as ' Barabbas ' and to note how utterly
they stand condemned before the pure and quaint charm which
comes from the perfect childlike devotion of this old chronicler."
WALKS AND
PEOPLE IN TUSCANY
By Sir Francis Vane. Bt, With numerous Illustrations
by Stephen Haweis and S. Garstin Harvey. Crown
8vo. 5s. net.
This book treats of many walks and cycle rides, practically
describing, if not covering, the whole of Tuscany, It has been
written with the especial object of setting before the reader not only
the characteristics of the landscape but no less the inhabitants of
all classes, whom the author encountered. Not only, however does
he depcnbe the people and the scenery, but he has placed on record
his thoughts about them in a frank and bold manner. The author
also has a considerable acquaintance with history, heraldy and
genealogy, which prove useful to him in dealing with the social
system of Italy in the past and of to-day. The general scheme of
the work is to take the two centres. Florence the capital, and the
summer resort Bagi de Lucca, and the author has made his expe-
ditions from these, consequently covering with an effective network
ot raida the mountains and valleys between
BOOKS BY VERNON LEE
HORTUS VITAE
ESSAYS ON THE GARDENING OF LIFE
Crown Svo. ^s. 6d. net.
Tititcs. — " There are many charming flowers in it . . . the
swift to and fro of her vivid, capricious mind carries the reader
hither and thither at her will, and she has such wise, suggestive
things to say. . . . Whenever and wherever she speaks of Italy,
the sun shines in this garden of hers, the south wind stirs among
the roses."
IVestminster Gazette. — " They are of the family of Lamb, Hunt,
and Hazlitt, just as those derive from the Augustans, Addison,
and Steele. . . . Vernon Lee jxissesses the best gifts of the essayists
the engaging turn, the graceful touch, the subtle allusiveness."
The spectator. — "The grace of diction that marks one who is
at once a mondainc and a cosmopolitan, and a grace of thought
that sometimes recalls Mrs. Meynell and sometimes R. L.
Stevenson, and even here and there reminds one of Emerson.
... No book quite so good of its kind has lately been published."
THE ENCHANTED WOODS
AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE
GENIUS OF PLACE
Crown %vo. ^t^. 6d. net.
Outlook. — " The book is one to be enjoyed for its sheer beauty
of style by those who have never visited the places described ;
but those who have will enjoy the amazing aptness of
epithet . . . ; in her extraordinary sensitiveness to modes of
time and place, Vernon Lee's attitude recalls that of Mr. Henry
James."
Guardian. — "Vernon Lee's peculiar gift is to be seen at its
best in her latest book, ' The Enchanted Woods.' . . . She repre-
sents her feelings in broad, bright touches, at once powerful and
delicate."
Daily News. — " These vivid pictures of the beauty of places."
Pall Mall Gazettec. — "The picturesque and facile prose which
this writer has made well known for many distinctive qualities."
BOOKS BY VERNON LEE
THE SPIRIT OF ROME
LEAVES FROM A DIARY
Crown Svo. ss- 6d. net.
Daily Mail.— "Vernon Lee's prose poems. ... Her impres-
sions of Rome are vividly caught and delicately described "
Daily Telegraph. "A new volume of essays from the pen of
\ emon Lee is sure of a welcome from all readers who appreciate
!,rir''"l*l*''K^-u ■ • The author is well equipped for the difficult
task which she has essayed-that of representing the • spirit ' of
• t^2^ fascinating of cities by means of the printed word : she
is gifted with the power of seeing the essential items in a scene."
HAUNTINGS
FANTASTIC TALES
Crown %vo, 3s. 6ci. net. Second Edition.
spectator.—" Most romantic and delightful reading. There
is enough imagination in these short stories to furnish anv
number of present-day novels, and people with strong nerves whb
enjoy thrills can be unhesitatingly recommended to read the
Saturday Review.-" Seldom have any stories of pure fantasv
contained more genuine and excellent qualities that the four
f n^ «i "" °i ^*'^°?" ^^ • • passages of real beauty, sensitive
e^olp^^aidtSn'^croTwtr^ '-^'^'^^ *^«
THE
SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER
NOTES ON PLACES
Crown Svo. $s. 6d. net.
spectator.-" Full of human as well as of artistic interest.
No one will question the originality and charm. . . . Vernon
Lee has written many delightful things ; but nothing, perhaps,
cTapte'/^oJtrn^r.;::^^ ^^--gly-vincing thin Se fiS
Daily Telegraph. "Vernon Lee is a writer whose gift of
style IS such as to render her musings and descriptions in essay
lit^'^U ^ .^^""^ ^° ^^ '^"^^ "^^ what may be termed a
BOOKS BY VERNON LEE
LIMBO AND OTHER ESSAYS
TO WHICH IS ADDED ARIADNE IN
MANTUA
3s. 6d. net. Second Edition.
Maurice Baring in the Morning Post.— "it is impossible to
give in a brief space any idea of the richness and beauty of this
drama, for in giving a mere skeleton of the plot all that is important
is omitted ; since the beauty and power of the play depend entirely
on subtle graduations of thought and feeling answering to and
playing upon each other, built up note by note. Quotations from
this play are like bars of music torn from a beautiful song, or
squares of canvas cut out from a noble picture. To touch this
play is to mutilate it ; to appreciate it one must read it all, or
better still, should some intelligent manager prove enterprising
and give us the opportunit}', see it acted on the stage."
GENIUS LOCI
Crown Svo. $s. 6d. net.
POPE JAGYNTH
Crown Svo. $s. 6d. net.
Second Edition.
Second Edition.
RENAISSANGE FANGIES AND
STUDIES
Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. net. Second Edition.
THE GOUNTESS OF ALBANY
Crown Svo. With Three Illustrations.
3s. 6d. net. Second Edition.
ALTHEA
Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. net.
VANITAS : POLITE STORIES
Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. net. Second Edition.
LAURUS NOBILIS :
CHAPTERS ON ART AND LIFE
Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. net. Second Edition.
/
VINCENZO FOPPA of BRESCIA
FOUNDER OF THE LOMBARD SCHOOL: HIS
LIFE AND WORK. By Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes
and Monsigfnor Rodolfo Maiocchi, D.D.. Rector of
The Collegio Borromeo, Pavia. Based on research in
the Archives of Milan, Pavia. Brescia, and Genoa, and
on the study of all his known works. With nearly loo
Illustrations, 15 in Photogravure, and about 100 Docu-
ments. Demy 4to. Five Guineas net. Limited to 300
copies for sale in England and America.
No complete life of Vincenzo Foppa, one t)f the greatest of the
North Italian Masters, has ever been written. He was regarded
by some of his contemporaries as unrivalled in his art, and his
nght to be considered the head and founder of the Lombard
School js undoubted. His influence was powerful and far-
reachmg ; m the Milanese district it was practically dominant for
over a quarter of a century, until the coming of Leonardo da Vinci
The authors have unearthed a large amount of new material
relatmg to Foppa, one of the most interesting facts brought to
light bemg that he lived for twenty-three years longer than was
formerly supposed. The illustrations include several pictures by
Foppa hitherto unknown in the history of art, and others which
have never before been published, as well as reproductions of
every existmg work by the master at present known.
MEMOIRS OF THE DUKES OF
URBINO
Illustrating the Arms, Art and Literature of Italy from
1440101630. ByjAMES Dennistoun of Dennistoun. A
New Edition edited by Edward Hutton. with upwards
of 100 Illustrations. Demy 8vo., 3 vols. Price 42s net ;
postage IS. extra.
For many years this great book has been out of print, although
It still remains the chief authority upon the Duchy of Urbino from
the beginning of the fifteenth century The Court of Urbino was
perhaps the most splendid and cultured in Italy, and Duke
Fedengo one of the greatest soldiers of his time. Mr. Hutton
has carefully edited the whole work, leaving the te.xt substantially
the same, but adding a large number of notes, comments and
references. Everj- sort of work has been laid under contribution
to illustrate the text and biographies have been supplied on many
subjects. The book acquires a new value on account of the mass
of illustrations which it now contains, thus adding a pictorial
comment to an historical and critical one.
IN A TUSCAN GARDEN
With Numerous Illustrations.
Crown Svo. 5s. net.
Times. — " The book is brightly written, and the author's know-
ledge of Italian life, or rather of the life of a foreigner in Italy,
is remarkably full ; moreover she has a sharp eye for the follies of
her countrymen, and exposes them with tartness that is amusing
enough."
Westminster Gazette. — " Those who intend settling temporarily
or permanently in Italy will find the volume of more practical
use to them than any other single work we remember to have
come across. . . . We should not like to spare the volume from
our collection of works on the subject."
Spectator. — " This is a delightful, because delightfully personal
yet not unpleasantly egotistic, book. . . . The writer indulges,
too, in many asides on contemporary history, British national
characteristics, and a host of other things which are invariably
shrewd, and never malicious."
Morning Post. — " The reader wtll scarcely fail to find sornething
charming on every page."
UNDER PETRAIA
By the Author of " IN A TUSCAN GARDEN.*'
With Numerous Illustrations.
Crown 2>vo. 5s. net.
Daily Telegraph. — " The kindliness and geniality of the whole
thing is irresistible, for it recalls the spirit of Borrow, to whom sun,
moon and stars were all good things."
Westminster Gazette.—" How delightful it is on a bleak day in
spring to take up such a pleasant little book of Italian reminis-
cences ' Under Petraia,' by the author of ' In a Tuscan Garden.'
The charm of the book lies in the power of the author to recreate
the scenes one knows so well."
Globe. — " For, purely conversational in style as this book is, it
preserves that indefinable charm which holds fast the reader who
has opened its pages so that he cannot put it down till he has
reached the end. And even then it will be taken up again and
again, to be dipped into as the fancy seizes us."
M
ITALIAN VILLAS AND THEIR
GARDENS
By EDITH WHARTON. With numerous Full-
page Illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, of which
1 2 are finely printed in Colour. Royal 8vo. 2 1 s.net.
West minster Gazette. — "A genuine piece of artistic criticism
dealing with an ancient and beautiful form of art. . . . The book
is beautifully illustrated. . . . Mr. Parrish enters thoroughly into
the feeling of the Italian garden, and delights in its formal designs
and massive effects of light and shade."
Saturday Review. — "Mr. Maxfield Parrish's drawings are
deserving of a full measure of credit in the production of a beauti-
ful and valuable book."
A QUEEN OF INDISCRETIONS
The Tragedy of Caroline of Brunswick, Queen
of England. From the Italian of G. P. Clerici.
Translated by Frederic Chapman. With
numerous Illustrations reproduced from contem-
porary Portraits and Prints. Demy 8vo. 21/- net.
Daily Telegraph. — " It could scarcely be done more thoroughly
or, on the whole, in better taste than is here displayed by Professor
Clerici. Mr. Frederic Chapman himself contributes an uncom-
monly interesting and well-informed introduction."
Times. — " Signor Clerici has brought to his task immense pains,
lucidity and an impartiality of mind which does not prevent a
definite view from emerging. Mr. Chapman has done the trans-
lation admirably well, and his own introduction is a careful
assistance to thoroughness."
ITALIAN LYRISTS OF TO-DAY
By G. A. GREEN. Translations in the original
metres from about 35 living Italian Poets. With
Bibliographical and Biographical Notes. Crown
8vo. 5/- net.
ON THE TRACKS OF LIFE
THE IMMORALITY OF MORALITY
Translated from the Italian of Leo. G. Sera by
J.M.Kennedy. With an Introduction by Dr. Oscar
Levy. Demy 8vo. 9x5! inches. Price 7/6 net.
Daily Chronicle.—" A verj' frank expression of the side of
thought which regards the assertion of individuality as the first
duty of the individual."
s
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
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