Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems: Expanded Edition 9780823238118

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race questions, provincialism, and other american problems




expanded edition

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race questions, provincialism, and other american problems EXPANDED EDITION


josiah royce Edited by Scott L. Pratt and Shannon Sullivan

fordham university press

new york

2009

Copyright 䉷 2009 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Royce, Josiah, 1855–1916. Race questions, provincialism, and other American problems / Josiah Royce ; edited by Scott L. Pratt and Shannon Sullivan.—Expanded ed. p. cm. Originally published: New York : Macmillan, 1908. Includes six supplementary essays by Royce. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0-8232–3132–4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978–0-8232–3133–1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States—Civilization. 2. Cultural pluralism—United States. 3. United States—Ethnic relations. 4. United States—Race relations. I. Pratt, Scott L. II. Sullivan, Shannon, 1967– III. Title. E168.R89 2009 973—dc22 2009005485 Printed in the United States of America 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

Contents




Introduction to Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems

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Royce’s ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’

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shannon sullivan

Pa r t On e Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems

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Pa r t Two What Should Be the Attitude of Teachers of Philosophy Towards Religion?

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The Problem of Natural Religion: The Present Position

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Football and Ideals

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Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization

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Provincialism. Based upon a Study of Early Conditions in California

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An American Thinker on the War

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Notes

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Index

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Editors’ Note




W

e have left the spelling and punctuation in this volume exactly as Royce had them. We’ve not altered the material except to replace the original page numbers in cross-references with the corresponding page numbers in the Fordham University Press edition of the book.

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race questions, provincialism, and other american problems




expanded edition

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introduction to race questions, provincialism, and other american problems Scott L. Pratt




I

n May 1915, a German submarine sank the passenger liner Lusitania. More than 1,100 passengers and crew died, among them 123 Americans. The respected Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce had remained publicly neutral on the issue of the war in Europe. Yet he responded to the attack on the Lusitania with a public letter of outrage that reasserted the ‘‘doctrine about life’’ that he named ‘‘loyalty’’ and that he had earlier applied to situations of social conflict in Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, which he had published in 1908. Royce had long admired German culture and philosophy and had seen them as a source both of wisdom and of practical social and economic development that could serve as a model for the world. With Germany’s declaration of war in 1914, Royce ‘‘dutifully preserv[ed] a deliberate reticence in the classroom,’’ a practice consistent

My thanks to Mathew Foust for his comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.

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with his understanding of his role as a philosopher. In his 1902 address about philosophers teaching religion, Royce concluded that ‘‘clearness of thought, and the judicial spirit [in comparison of views], are the philosopher’s peculiar tasks.’’1 After the Lusitania was torpedoed and the German government expressed approval of the action, Royce declared that ‘‘I am no longer neutral, even in form.’’2 The action of destroying the Lusitania and ‘‘the appeal that Germany now makes to all humanity . . . [express] utter contempt for everything which makes the common life of humanity tolerable or possible.’’3 If this appeal were accepted, he continued, ‘‘whatever makes home or country or family or friends or any form of loyalty worthily dear, is made an object of perfectly deliberate and merciless assault.’’4 His former loyalties were set aside in favor of a larger loyalty to ‘‘the cause of true peace,’’ even if he must set aside the neutrality demanded by his loyalty to the practice of philosophy. Royce had introduced the idea of loyalty as the central moral principle in his 1908 volume The Philosophy of Loyalty. Loyalty, ‘‘the willing and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause,’’5 marks a complex relationship. On one hand, it is the relation of individuals to causes and groups that provide purpose for their activities. Teachers are loyal to the cause of education, doctors to medicine, scientists to science. In each case, an individual’s activities are understood and evaluated in relation to the larger cause of being a teacher, or a doctor, or a scientist. A teacher’s work is not simply an individual activity done for its own sake, but rather something that gets its character and purpose at least in part through a teacher’s commitment to a cause shared by others. ‘‘[A] cause,’’ Royce held, is ‘‘something which seems to the loyal person to be larger than his private self, [and] in the second place, unites him with other persons by some social tie.’’6 Such loyalty is not loyalty to oneself. Even when a person’s cause includes herself, as when a person is loyal to her country, the cause ‘‘is still much larger.’’ Loyalty, in Royce’s sense, means that the person believes her cause would keep its ‘‘essential value’’ even if her ‘‘private interests were left out of account.’’7

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On the other hand, for a loyal person, the cause does not prescribe exactly what ought to be done in service of the cause one has taken up. People choose causes and give or bring to them things unique to the individual, literally ‘‘devotions.’’ In this sense, loyalty provides a context for meaning for individuals (in which, for example a teacher is a teacher) and a means by which individuals are made distinct (the devotion of a particular teacher adds something to the cause and in so doing allows the teacher to stand out as an individual). As a result, loyalty marks both a defining relation and an activity that goes beyond the relation given. In this way, causes are sustained and constantly transformed by loyal action. In notes prepared for an ethics course offered near the end of his life, Royce wrote: Loyalty, if it is anything, is or ought to be in all of us a growing doctrine about life, and a growing method of trying to solve the problems of life. The doctrine of Loyalty does not consist of a collection of formulas which you can memorize verbatim, and apply mechanically to all cases as they come up. . . . [W]hat one means by loyal conduct can be defined only through a continual effort to readjust the problems of life to an ideal, which, just because it is always living and growing, involves a willingness to reinterpret the situations which arise, to reconsider the solution which we have thus far attempted.8

The necessity of choosing a cause or an ideal raises an immediate problem. Does it matter what cause is selected? Is it enough just to be loyal to something? ‘‘Plainly,’’ he says, ‘‘a good many different sorts of people and of deeds have been called loyal. And, if you view the matter merely upon the basis of a comparison of a few widely various instances of loyalty, you may be disposed to say that the moral quality in question is too wavering and confused a feature of character to be fitly used as a type of all moral excellence.’’9 Royce, in fact, recognizes that there is ‘‘some good’’ even in loyalty to bad causes, and so may have considered the German sailors that carried out the attack on the Lusitania to be loyalists—patriots devoted to Germany. In his condemnation of the action, it was not the loyalty of the sailors that was at fault; rather it is the nature of the cause. Given the importance of

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loyalty to individuals, that is, providing them with a context for selfknowledge and purposive action, the best causes are the ones that recognize the value of loyalty and foster it. This, Royce concludes, is the central ethical principle: loyalty to loyalty. The cause of war, Royce came to believe, is not merely an assault on lives, it is also an assault on the meaning and potential of peoples’ lives. Royce rejected the cause of the aggressors in favor of a loyalty to humanity as a whole for its potential to foster loyalty on an ever wider scale. It would be easy to conclude that loyalty is, for Royce, a virtue like courage or charity. While Royce claims that loyalty is a ‘‘certain attitude of mind,’’ it is an attitude that marks a relation that is necessary for every special virtue. ‘‘I maintain,’’ he says, ‘‘that without loyalty there is no thoroughgoing morality; and I also insist that all special virtues and duties, such as those which the names benevolence, truthfulness, justice, spirituality, charity, recall to our minds, are parts or are special forms of loyalty. My theory is that the whole moral law is implicitly bound up in the one precept: Be loyal.’’10 Since loyalty marks a willing commitment to something beyond oneself and involving others, it is manifest in each virtue. If one were to try to give up loyalty in favor of another virtue, one would, on Royce’s account, still necessarily be loyal. The virtues of courage and charity are particular ways of being loyal to a cause that also fosters the loyalty of others. Courage marks one’s commitment to a cause despite difficulties so that others may take it up; charity marks one’s commitment to others in order that they may follow the causes they choose. Even as each virtue marks a commitment to a particular cause, it also marks a commitment to furthering the cause of loyalty itself. Further, when one recognizes the logical priority of loyalty, one can choose to take it as a cause directly: loyalty to loyalty. This logically prior principle then can serve as the standard in terms of which particular loyalties can be judged. ‘‘There is no duty,’’ he says in The Sources of Religious Insight, ‘‘there is no virtue whose warrant and whose value you cannot deduce from this one principle.’’11 In Race Questions, Royce concludes, ‘‘regard your neighbor’s loyalty as something sacred. Do nothing to make him less loyal. Never despise him for his loyalty,

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however little you care for the cause he chooses.’’12 In the sinking of the Lusitania and its aftermath, Royce saw the cause of German nationalism reject loyalty to loyalty and so show itself as evil. Loyalty to loyalty, even as it includes diverse causes, must at times reject the ones that undermine the possibility of furthering loyalty.13 When Royce introduced the philosophy of loyalty in 1908, the importance of a willing devotion to a cause had already been part of his thinking at least since his 1886 history of California. Writing of the claim that, in general, the California mining camps were well ordered, he argued that ‘‘this good order, widely spread as it often was, was still in its nature unstable, since it had not been won as a prize of social devotion, but only attained by a sudden feat of instinctive cleverness. The social order is, however, something that instinct must make in its essential elements, by a sort of first intention, but that only voluntary devotion can secure against corruption.’’14 A few years later, one of Royce’s students at Radcliffe College, Ella Lyman Cabot, wrote in her notebook: ‘‘Royce’s ethical motto: ‘Act so as to make more ties and stronger ones . . . that is be loyal and loyalty includes sympathy and order.’ ’’15 By 1908, Royce concluded that ‘‘loyalty is the practical aspect and expression of an idealistic philosophy.’’16 The causes to which one is loyal provide the ideals that guide action. To the extent that one recognizes the centrality of loyalty, one can become loyal to the greatest cause, the ideal of loyalty itself. ‘‘If, then, we look over the field of human life to see where good and evil have most clustered, we see that the best in human life is its loyalty; while the worst is whatever has tended to make loyalty impossible, or to destroy it when present, or to rob it of its own while it still survives.’’17 Causes, in the end, came to be identified with communities by Royce. In his 1912 The Sources of Religious Insight and his 1913 The Problem of Christianity, loyalty is transformed from a commitment to a cause to ‘‘the practically devoted love of an individual for a community.’’18 The transformation is significant and opens a whole new range of philosophical questions where loyalty properly captures the relation and activity of individuals within communities. In The Sources of Religious Insight, he recognizes that it is not enough for

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individuals to act with respect to a passive cause. Rather, causes themselves, as communities, have the character of still larger selves, which also must act: ‘‘the community is a being that attempts to accomplish something in time through the deeds of its members.’’19 One form of action draws the community together and another places the community in relation to other communities. The former Royce calls grace. For those who become devoted to a cause, Royce writes, ‘‘A peculiar grace has been indeed granted to them—a free gift, but one which they can only accept by being ready to earn it—a precious treasure that they cannot possess without loving and serving the life that has thus endowed them. . . . This grace, this gift, is what may be called their Cause.’’20 The other form of action, loyal action, is the way in which the community, through its members, acts in relation to other communities and to its own past and future. On this view, loyalty is part of a reciprocal process in which one both chooses a cause and is chosen by it. In 1914, Royce returned to his formulation of loyalty in a series of lectures given at the University of California at Berkeley. Here he summarizes three principles of loyalty. First, the communities to which individuals are loyal ‘‘may be, and under certain conditions are, genuine selves, living beings whose reality is of a higher type than is your individual reality or mine.’’21 The second principle connects the meaning of the life of the individual to her or his community. Royce calls this process of meaning-making ‘‘salvation.’’ ‘‘[T]he salvation of every individual man depends upon his voluntary devotion to some such living and lovable community.’’22 Finally, ‘‘we all, precisely in so far as we are loyal, come into some genuine touch with one and the same reality, with one and the same cause, with one and the same live spiritual reality.’’23 In the act of being loyal, each person (individual or community) becomes united in a larger whole, that is, each person becomes part of the community of those loyal to loyalty. At the same time, acts of loyalty distinguish each person from the whole. The result is at once unification and, by the actions of loyalty, individualization.

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Royce was born in 1855 in a California mining camp that later became the town of Grass Valley. The connection between him and his home community remained central to his work throughout his career, and the questions raised by this relationship were formative. Speaking of his philosophical development as beginning in his childhood in California, he explained in his 1915 autobiographical remarks, ‘‘When I review this whole process, I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered on the idea of community.’’24 Royce attended the University of California and graduated in 1875. That same year, he traveled to Germany to study philosophy. In 1876, he returned to the United States to begin study at Johns Hopkins, the new graduate studies university in Baltimore, and in 1878 became one of the first four students to receive a doctorate from the university. He returned to California to teach but in 1882 was called to Harvard University to serve as a replacement for William James while James was away on a sabbatical. Royce was eventually invited to stay at Harvard and remained there, with frequent trips back to California, until his death on September 14, 1916, at his home near the Harvard campus. Royce’s move to Harvard marked both a crucial break with his past in California and a starting point for his work. Even as he developed his conception of loyalty and community, he struggled to make sense of the ever larger context in which loyalty would be realized. The result, in 1899 and 1900, was his series of Gifford Lectures delivered in Scotland and published as The World and the Individual. While these lectures addressed a conception of the Whole (the ‘‘Absolute’’), Royce was not satisfied that he had successfully shown how his insights about the universe applied to lived human experience. In a lecture series given in 1907, he attempted to make the connections clear between the Whole and its parts by considering the relationship between individuals and communities in the context of finite human life. The initial positive reception of these lectures, published in March 1908 as The Philosophy of Loyalty, led to the publication later that year of Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, five essays that sought to apply the philosophy of loyalty to specific problems faced by Americans in the first decade of the twentieth

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century. These problems included racial differences and conflict, the development of distinct regions and regional characters in the United States, the limits of public debate, the role of the environment in fostering communities, and the place of physical training in relation to well-being. In each case, the philosophy of loyalty plays a key role both in understanding the problem and in framing a response. The challenge for readers, then as now, was how to understand this general doctrine of life. The essay ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’ is, as Shannon Sullivan’s introduction (following) suggests, a unique contribution by an American academic philosopher of the early twentieth century. While most philosophers skirted the issue, Royce used the issue of race to title his volume. The essay, given first as an address to the Chicago Ethical Society, surveys the conception of race and ongoing race conflicts in the United States and elsewhere. The essay raises significant questions about the ways in which race is understood and how race prejudice can be addressed. At its center, Royce presents two examples of good responses to race conflict, one from Jamaica and one from Trinidad. In each case, Royce holds that the key to fostering tolerance and peace is the development of a sound administrative and legal system that includes full participation by non-whites. In response to this conclusion, he imagines a complaint from a person in the U.S. South, ‘‘that the race-problem is such as constantly to endanger the safety of his home’’ and if African Americans were to become full participants in the legal system, they would bring even more danger to Southern whites. Royce’s response seems unsatisfactory: ‘‘The problem that endangers the sanctity of your homes and that is said sometimes to make lynching a necessity, is not a race-problem. It is an administrative problem.’’25 It would be easy to dismiss Royce’s answer here on grounds that his diagnosis ignores the real problem of racism, but this is in fact the place in which the philosophy of loyalty emerges most clearly. For Royce, loyalty to loyalty is a commitment to one’s causes in a way that fosters the loyalty of others. This further relation,

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the fostering of others’ loyalty, is not the product of indifferent accident or of forced practices, but rather is part of an ongoing negotiation among the groups seeking to realize their own futures. Administrative relations provide a formal context in which the boundaries of communities can intersect, come into conflict, and promote ways of resolving conflicts that preserve and foster others’ loyalty. This solution, for Royce, is an old one and emerges in his own work in his discussions of California. The answer to the disorders of the mining camps was the establishment of a sound administrative structure to mediate conflicts when they emerged and help foster the development of communities—causes—with a sense of their history, of their present place, and of hope for the future. In the end, Royce seems to offer a conception of racial coexistence not unlike that offered by his former student W. E. B. Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk.26 The essay ‘‘Provincialism’’27 likewise takes up the philosophy of loyalty, here emphasizing three problems that can interfere with the development of that form of loyalty Royce calls ‘‘wise provincialism.’’28 To be a loyal member of a community is to be committed to fostering the growth of one’s local community in a way that promotes the growth of other communities as well. He summarizes his appeal on behalf of wise provincialism this way: ‘‘I hope and believe that you all intend to have your community live its own life, and not the life of any other community, nor yet the life of a mere abstraction called humanity in general.’’29 This effort, however, faces three challenges: ‘‘unassimilated’’ newcomers, a leveling tendency, and the ‘‘mob spirit.’’ The first problem is faced when newcomers enter a community but refuse to become a part of it. The result is internal conflict and a loss of a sense of shared commitment. Even though ‘‘newcomers themselves are often a boon and welcome indeed,’’ their failure to become part of the community, Royce claims, is ‘‘a source of social danger’’ that threatens to undermine the community and block the potential of individuals to grow in their service to the community.30 The second is a product of ‘‘the ease of communication amongst

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distant places, . . . the spread of popular education, and . . . the consolidation and . . . the centralization of industries and of social authorities [that lead us to] submit to the same overmastering social forces, to live in the same external fashions, to discourage individuality, and to approach a dead level of harassed mediocrity.’’31 Like concerns about globalization in the present world, the challenge to provincialism, and so to loyalty, is that economic and cultural connections can overwhelm differences among communities and put emergent individuality at risk as well. The third problem is related: the rule of the mob.32 As in the case of the leveling tendency, individuals lose their sense of distinctiveness, but in this case, Royce observes, ‘‘like a hypnotized subject, the member of the excited mob may feel as if he were very independently expressing himself . . . when as a fact the ruling idea is suggested by the leaders of the mob or even by the accident of the momentary situation.’’33 Here again, both community and individuality are lost. The solution, again, is to return to the idea of loyalty to loyalty and seek to foster communities that support individual loyalties and the loyalties of other communities as well. The third essay of the original volume, ‘‘On Certain Limitations of the Thoughtful Public in America,’’ challenges the American public in terms of the philosophy of loyalty. ‘‘The great limitation of our thoughtful public in America,’’ Royce proposes, ‘‘remains its inability to take sufficient control of affairs.’’34 In many ways, this essay is a direct response to the Social Gospel and ‘‘mutualist’’ movements of the time.35 These movements are framed by a broad commitment to social betterment, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘‘betterment’’ achieved was very limited. ‘‘The prophets true and false,’’ he observed, ‘‘speak their many words. Many listen and applaud. Yet at the elections the prophets do not win. The thoughtful public remains the most characteristic, but too often the least effective, portion of the community.’’36 With those in the Social Gospel movement, Royce argued that reform must ‘‘come from within. The kingdom of heaven is within you; and that truth is precisely what all ideally minded people know.’’37 Here, loyalty marks both the value of

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the ideals to which Americans appear committed, and the necessity of the work of individuals to bring about reform. ‘‘The work of one man, in this life, has a narrow range. Yet, on the other hand, the forest is made of trees; and great reforms are due to the combined action of numerous individuals.’’38 The difficulty faced by such demands is that individuals are not able to address all of the problems or state all of the ideals required to bring about a reform of society in which people can flourish. To put it another way, even as one is loyal to a society as a whole, the limitations of individuals require that each person take up only part of the whole and make a limited, specialized contribution. At first Royce’s solution sounds like a call for experts of the sort that Walter Lippmann would make a few years later.39 ‘‘In brief,’’ Royce concludes, ‘‘I say to our thoughtful public, overcome your limitations, first by minute and faithful study of a few things and by clearness of ideas about them; then by childlike simplicity in the rest of life, by faithfulness to enlightened leaders, and above all by work.’’40 However, instead of arguing in favor of an expert class to serve as leaders as Lippmann would, Royce’s model calls for the widest possible participation in social development that, on one hand, relies on loyalty and, on the other, recognizes human limits. The result is a division of labor in the process of social reform in which individuals, through their larger loyalty, commit to the ideals of a society that warrants their trust in others, even so-called enlightened leaders. At the same time, each individual’s own work brings a distinctive and potentially creative component to the work of reform as a whole. From this angle, one can see how a loyal public is essential to the emergence of a province through a common commitment and to the ability to address problems such as racism through the development of a wider structure in terms of which race prejudice can be identified and undermined. The essay on the Pacific Coast focuses on the development of loyalty and its social character as provincialism in the context of the environmental constraints and affordances of northern California.41 From one angle it seems that Royce tries to credit the climate and

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geography of California with producing a distinctive form of idealistic philosophy. The attributions, however, are not instances of the genetic fallacy, but instead mark a recognition that, like any community that responds to its place and history, a geographical region develops a distinctive sense of its own purpose and future. It is not that California generates idealism and other places do not, but that, like other places, California has developed its own distinctive provincial character, aided by its isolation from the eastern United States and its place at the intersection of Spanish-speaking peoples, immigrants from Asia and Europe, and emigrants from the East Coast.42 The result is again the development of individuals who generate new ideas and possibilities and a broader commitment to the community as a whole, framed by a government that reflects at once the conservation of the past and the demand for innovation to realize a common future. The final essay in the original collection, on physical training, is probably the last written and the essay in the volume most directly tied to the philosophy of loyalty as it stood in 1908. Originally an address to the Boston Physical Education Society, Royce argued that physical training could directly support the effort to teach loyalty to youth.43 Here again, there is a strong connection to the social reform movements of the day (he makes direct reference to the Young Men’s Christian Association, for example). Part of the effort to transform urban communities into environments that fostered growth and citizenship included athletic training. Jane Addams argued for such training as part of the Social Settlement movement in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets,44 and organizations such as the YMCA and the Boy Scouts had physical training as an important part of their work with youth. Royce affirmed these efforts by suggesting that physical training could make four contributions to the general effort to foster loyalty. First, Royce observes that devotion to a cause is more than an abstract decision; it is a ‘‘motor process’’ as well and requires that ‘‘one must be in control of one’s powers, or one has no self to give to one’s cause.’’ Physical training provides the skills needed to control one’s activities so that they can

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be directed in service of a cause. Second, ‘‘athletic work is loyalty itself . . . the tasks that imply the devotion of a man’s whole power to an office that takes him out of his private self and into the great world of real social life.’’45 And third, athletic activity fosters a sense of ‘‘fair play.’’ Like loyalty to loyalty, fair play is a disposition that seeks to make it possible for others to participate fully in the activity. It ‘‘depends upon essentially respecting one’s opponent just because of his loyalty to his own side . . . to enjoy, to admire, to applaud, to love, to further that loyalty of his at the very moment when I keenly want and clearly intend to thwart his individual deeds and to win this game, if I can.’’46 Finally, athletic training can also foster moments of learning that Royce calls ‘‘maximal experiences.’’ These moments are ones in which loyalty is not experienced reflectively but is, in effect, fully lived. Maximal experiences are ones that mark the value of lived loyalty and provide guideposts for fostering still more loyalty in the increasingly complex world beyond the school and gymnasium. In order to understand better the emergence of loyalty, this new, expanded edition of Race Questions includes six additional essays that help frame the original set of five. The first, ‘‘What Should Be the Attitude of Teachers of Philosophy Towards Religion?’’ was originally an address to the American Philosophical Association delivered in 1902. At its center, Royce offers a version of the notion of loyalty that was informed by his discussion of the thoughtful public in 1899. Here he argues that a philosopher’s task is specialized and serves larger causes in specific and limited ways. It remains neutral in controversial matters and, in doing so, serves as part of the ‘‘division of labor . . . required for the sake of humanity’s loftiest interests.’’47 This essay helps both to set the stage for Royce’s later work and lay the ground for the sharp change in his understanding of the practice of philosophy in the last work included here, ‘‘An American Thinker on the War.’’ Royce’s philosophical study of religion is discussed at some length in the second essay included here, ‘‘On the Problem of Natural Religion,’’ published in 1903.48 The problem of natural religion, as it is framed by Royce, turns on the relation between facts and ideals or

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facts and values. The argument shows that appeals to facts in both natural religion and science require a commitment in advance to the ideal that there are facts in the world that will determine the truth and falsity of claims. This notion of a necessary commitment to ideals for there to be meaningful facts is exactly the relation present in loyalty. Loyalty represents the attitude or process of commitment to an ideal in terms of which facts can be selected and ordered and sociality can be instituted. In this sense, the paper provides a bridge between the earlier Royce of The World and the Individual and the later Royce of The Philosophy of Loyalty. The essay ‘‘Football and Ideals,’’ published in 1908, follows the argument of the physical training essay in the original Race Questions volume. ‘‘Football,’’ Royce says, ‘‘is at present a great social force in our country. It has long been so. Apparently it is destined long to remain so.’’49 The general point is that while the players may be cultivating loyalty in their play, the spectators are not. He has in mind big sports events where the behavior of the spectators is that of a crowd— that is, a release from thinking rather than an effort to cultivate loyalty. The problem is that many claim that sport fosters loyalty in the crowd because of fan commitment. Royce thinks that it does not—in fact, it is miseducative in that it mistakenly suggests that cheering for a team and celebrating their victories are loyalty. While the athletes work hard and learn the skills of loyalty, the spectators do nothing or, worse, do things that undermine loyalty. The fourth and fifth additional essays, ‘‘Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization’’ and ‘‘Provincialism Based Upon a Study of Early Conditions in California,’’ respectively, take up the issue of provincialism discussed in the original edition of Race Questions. The first essay was written and given as an address to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society in January 1900. Royce was in Scotland to give the second half of his Gifford Lectures. While ‘‘Characteristic Tendencies’’ does not develop the notion of provincialism explicitly, Royce is here extending his earlier considerations about the character of California to an account of the ‘‘American character’’ in general. The address is framed in terms of the ‘‘present situation’’ and ‘‘crisis’’

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faced by the United Kingdom. Though Royce never states what the crisis at hand is, the date of the address at the end of January suggests that he refers to the Boer or South African War, which began in October 1899. British forces in South Africa, who were fighting to maintain British hold on South Africa and its Transvaal gold fields, had suffered a series of military defeats in December and January. Given the examples Royce offers, including the U.S. Civil War, it is clear that he was considering provincial character in light of its relation to a larger national (or imperial) Whole. Royce begins the essay by noting the different approaches taken by the United Kingdom and the United States to the incorporation of new lands into their unions. The United Kingdom, he observes, used the process of colonization that required establishing local governments on the British model and decentralizing power. The United States, in contrast, used assimilation, which brought new lands and peoples into a strong union with a shared central government. Under colonization, local cultures remained intact and the struggle faced by the British was to maintain the wider union without a common ground. The U.S. model transforms cultures into ones that share a common sense of unity even as they struggle to maintain some provincial distinctiveness. Royce offers two examples of this process of unification to his British audience: the U.S. Civil War and California. The first marks a unification of provinces into a larger union and the second marks the unification of a province. In the case of the Civil War, each side came to recognize in the other loyalty to ideals and this recognition served as a common ground to bring about national unity. Speaking of the future of the North and South in the United States, Royce declared, ‘‘The descendents of those foemen will not retain the old hatreds. They will honor each other more because the fathers know so well how to die for ideals.’’50 Royce admits that the ‘‘problem’’ of African Americans remained great, but he also concludes that ‘‘nobody desires to see him again a slave or seriously wishes the old slavery days back again.’’51 The ‘‘reunified’’ North and South at the end of the Civil War, like the unified individuals in a province, ‘‘still [preserve] a certain wholesome individuality at the

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same time when they contribute to the life of one nation.’’52 Royce commends the results of the Civil War to his British audience as a sign of hope that, like the conflict between the U.S. North and South, the fracture in South Africa between the British Empire and the Boers will end with their distinct cultural characteristics united by a larger cause. The second example, the development of California, considered the influx of culturally different others.53 In this case, unification is fostered not by war but by ‘‘material and ideal’’ causes. Material conditions such as geographic proximity, industrial development, faster transportation, and better communication served to connect communities and reduce isolation, even as the ideal causes reduced cultural differences. Language, religion, and values brought by immigrants at first rivaled those of U.S. culture, but they were ‘‘destined’’ to give way: ‘‘The foreigners determined no important part of our life [in California]. We, in turn, were moulding to our own ways their life. Our real interests lay in the country as a whole, in the exciting fortunes of the Civil War. . . . They, the foreigners, had no such interests and ideals to hold them together. In the end their systems of ideals must yield to ours—and did so.’’54 Royce is confident about the triumph of the British values of human freedom, especially as they had been transformed in America. At work in this ‘‘triumph’’ is the idea that cultures with strong shared memories (such as those of the Civil War) have a dynamic unity that, when encountered by small groups of outsiders, ultimately breaks down sharp divisions and brings outsiders in. It is the ideal character of a community (its historical sense, its goals and aspirations, and its tolerance to allow new members) that generates unity. Although a stranger to the British, Royce nevertheless concludes the address with a series of recommendations for how the Empire might be maintained. The recommendations include, for example, the development of a stronger central government that can enforce a uniform education system and the affirmation of a kind of ‘‘manifest destiny’’ for Anglo-American culture. It is important to note, however, that these recommendations came to be challenged in Royce’s

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later work. His emphasis on national unification and his claims for the inevitability of a single culture are left behind with the adoption of a conception of knowledge and community that is fundamentally dynamic and finite. Rather than finding nations (or empires) as the ideal, the Beloved Community introduced in The Problem of Christianity provides a framework that will undermine causes that seek to dominate others. The second paper on provincialism was published in Putnam’s Magazine in 190955 and focuses on the character of a province outside his earlier worry about a national unity in contrast with the importance of provincial consciousness. The essay (which repeats in substance his discussion of California in ‘‘Characteristic Tendencies’’) looks at the development of California during his youth and the ‘‘second stage of frontier life’’ that led to the formation of a provincial consciousness. Initially, during the period of settlement by emigrants from the eastern United States, miners and adventurers entered and left the region without developing a home, a place to settle. As people came and stayed by accident or plan, histories began to be told and people began to gain a sense of the geology, geography, and climate of the region and so over time developed a sense of the region as home. They even came to ‘‘regret their former devastation’’ of the environment. While the essay in the original edition of Race Questions focuses largely on the development of a wise provincialism relative to other provinces, this essay proposes three principles that should govern the character inside the community itself. First, he says, is ‘‘the determination of the community to live its own life, not in isolation, not in sectional selfishness, but through preserving the integrity of its individual ideals and customs.’’ This principle has implications for newcomers such that the community, following the second principle, should exert ‘‘gentle but firm authority . . . towards newcomers and sojourners—not expelling them, not despising them, but insisting that the soul of the community has its dignity to assert over the souls of all those wayward individuals who have not yet learned to appreciate its meaning.’’ The third principle—he calls it ‘‘provincial love’’— idealizes the province ‘‘by adoring it, by glorifying it through legend

18

introduction

and song and good works, and kindly provision of its inhabitants.’’56 In addition to the provincialism of California, Royce saw a similar successful provincialism in Scotland and Germany. The problem, not addressed by Royce but suggested in light of his 1900 address, is that such provinces risk losing their salvific role for individuals by becoming authoritarian and imperial. What holds them from such ends is a faith in the power of loyalty to loyalty to keep a community open and responsive, alive to new possibilities and critical reflection. To this end, he thought, Germany probably stood as the best example of a wise provincialism and had the potential to teach the world how a community can offer reflection and growth and finally salvation. It is no wonder that the outbreak of World War I took Royce by surprise. The fact of Germany’s involvement and willingness to commit to war seemed to undo the best example of loyalty to loyalty. The final essay, a brief letter written in 1915 after the sinking of the Lusitania, offers Royce’s first response to the war and to his loss of faith in Germany even as it is an attempt to apply again the philosophy of loyalty to concrete problems. For Royce, the role of a philosopher in the division of loyal labor was to encourage reflection and to give people an opportunity to make up their own minds on key issues. In many cases, the loyal philosopher will be neutral toward the alternatives. When an alternative becomes disloyal to loyalty, however, it becomes an ‘‘enemy of mankind’’ and neutrality is not an option. The loyal philosopher must take a stand against such an alternative. The blow to Royce’s faith in German culture must have been severe, but his reaction reinforced the ‘‘philosophy about life’’ he still actively developed. In this case, his commitment as a philosopher remained to making things clear and directing people toward reflection precisely by rejecting the model offered by Germany’s imperial designs. While, in 1900, Royce offered support for British imperialism in the context of war, Royce here sets aside his earlier conclusions to reject the German quest for empire. Royce concludes his letter with an illustration of the imperatives of loyalty to loyalty: I no longer feel that any duty or desire makes me hesitant concerning the expression of whatever plain speech and worthily

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strong sentiment might be able to contribute to a good cause. You will see from the way in which I spoke to my class, after long dutifully preserving a deliberate reticence in the classroom, regarding the war—you will see that my mouth is now open enough, if only any words that could be of use for the cause of true peace, or against the deeds and the motives of the declared enemies of mankind, could be uttered by me. It is a relief to have in such matters not only a free soul, but a perfectly free right of speech, so long as one’s speech promises to contribute anything, however little, to the cause of mankind which such bitter and cruel enemies are now assailing in the sight of us all.57

royce’s ‘‘ race questions and prejudices’ ’ Shannon Sullivan




O

ne of the most striking features of Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems is that Josiah Royce wrote ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’ as early as 1905 and then chose to make it the lead piece of a collection that puts his philosophy of loyalty to work. These facts suggest that the topic of race, especially in connection with an increasingly global world, was at the heart of Royce’s thinking about the pragmatic and existential implications of his idealist philosophy. In the book’s 1908 introduction, Royce says that its lead essay is ‘‘an effort to express and to justify, in the special case of the race-problems, the spirit which I have elsewhere defined as that of ‘Loyalty to Loyalty.’ ’’1 Royce refers to his development of his ethical philosophy in The Philosophy of Loyalty, also published in 1908.2 While his comment in the introduction might seem to imply that ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’ merely applies a concept first developed in The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce’s essay on race in fact is where Royce begins to work out the philosophy of loyalty later presented more fully in his book on loyalty. { 20 }

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The centrality of the race essay to Royce’s thinking is all the more significant since, with the exception of W. E. B. Du Bois and perhaps also Jane Addams, no other major figure associated with pragmatist philosophy substantially addressed issues of race and racism in his or her written work, nor did so as early in the twentieth century as Royce did.3 Alain Locke delivered five ‘‘Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race’’ in 1915, but unfortunately they were never published in his lifetime.4 In a written corpus spanning over seventy years, John Dewey devoted one essay to the topic of ‘‘Racial Prejudice and Friction’’ in 1922; his 1932 ‘‘Address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’’ was published posthumously.5 The absence of pragmatist treatments of race is most noticeable, however, in the works of William James, George Herbert Mead, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Alfred North Whitehead, who rarely if ever broach the topic in their philosophical writing. Royce stands out in the history of classical American philosophy because of his anti-racist focus on race questions when very few philosophers—especially white male philosophers—took scholarly time to think about these issues. ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’ also is situated historically in ways that bear on the essay’s significance. It was composed two years after the 1903 publication of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois famously declared that ‘‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.’’6 The year 1905 also was the year of President Theodore Roosevelt’s now-infamous speech ‘‘On American Motherhood,’’ in which Roosevelt warned of white ‘‘race suicide’’ if white families continued to reproduce at a slower rate than other races (http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trmothers1905.html). In ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices,’’ Royce was speaking and writing against racism in a time of growing anti-immigration sentiment and pro-imperialism caused by white anxiety in the United States about the possible decline of global white supremacy. It is unclear whether Royce read Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk before writing ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices,’’ but he begins his essay by acknowledging something like Du Bois’s color line as a significant problem looming at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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In the essay’s opening section, Royce notes that the ‘‘numerous questions and prejudices which are aroused by the contact of the various races of men . . . promise . . . to become, in the near future, still more important than they have ever been before’’ (45). Their importance will grow, Royce claims, because of the increasing communication between different races and civilizations across the globe. This increase in contact will intensify the age-old problem of how to deal with people who seem different from one’s own group and how to tell which of these people might be helpful or perilous to one’s own group interests. Royce cautions his readers that as they confront this problem, they cannot assume that they already know which racial groups are potentially harmful to civilization. And he alerts his white readers, in particular, that it is possible—even likely—that they significantly contribute to the current harm being done. ‘‘Is it a ‘yellow peril,’ or a ‘black peril,’ ’’ Royce asks, ‘‘or perhaps, after all, is it not rather some form of ‘white peril,’ which most threatens the future of humanity in this day of great struggles and of complex issues?’’ (46). With this remarkable question, Royce turns the table on his white contemporaries, who tended to view racial problems as concerning anyone and everyone but white people. The question that white Americans usually direct at black Americans—‘‘How does it feel to be a problem?’’7—is one that can and should be directed at white people instead. Anticipating Du Bois’s insight in 1920 that the ‘‘seeming Terrible [of World War I] is the real soul of white culture,’’8 Royce sees that white domination and imperialism might be the greatest threat to the flourishing of humankind in the twentieth century. How then to find answers to these complex questions about race? One route would be to turn to scientific studies of race, especially anthropology and ethnology, but Royce cautions that race theorists tend to use science to support their assumption that white people are superior to people of other races. Particularly because of its posture of infallibilism with regard to race questions, the science of race is untrustworthy and cannot serve as Royce’s starting point. Royce thus instead turns to ‘‘two instances which have recently been much in

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[his] mind, and which bear upon the meaning of race prejudices’’ (48), those of Japan and of the U.S. South in comparison with Jamaica. He turns, in other words, to two lessons of experience, using concrete situations from around the globe to show the fallibility of Euro-American racial prejudice. Only after disturbing his (white) readers’ convictions that they already know the answers to race questions will Royce return to the issue of what is essential to the different races. Royce’s first task, in other words, is to get his readers to realize that there is indeed a question at stake: a question of how to respond to difference. That question is covered over by the usual (read: racist) meaning of race questions as questions of what Euro-Americans should do with the allegedly inferior races with whom they come into contact. The lesson of Japan is that one cannot judge the merits or deficiencies of a group of people by their physical features and characteristics. Royce notes that Japan often has been exoticized in the United States as a perverse and strange land, and when it is not being exoticized, it tends to be portrayed as a nation of children who merely imitate European customs. Royce also was taught these ‘‘truths’’ about the Japanese, but he came to see them in a different light after working closely with some Japanese people as his students. His experience with their ‘‘unconquerable polite and obstinate reserve’’ (50) convinced him the Japanese possessed a wealth of beliefs and customs that his own Euro-American background did not and perhaps could not encompass. Royce came to see that the reserved attitude typical of the Japanese was something far different than quiet acceptance of Western knowledge and customs. Royce’s comments about his Japanese students’ learning style complement his earlier advice in ‘‘Provincialism’’ (written in 1902) about how to develop the provincial spirit. Distinguished from false forms of provincialism such as sectionalism, ‘‘wholesome’’ provincialism combats what Royce sees as evils of modern life: disconnected and isolated newcomers to a community, the leveling tendency of civilization, and the emergence of a mob-spirit in large groups. Genuine provincialism enables one to develop loyalty to a local community

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that does not rely upon hostility toward other, and especially national, communities. One important way to nurture a genuinely provincial spirit, Royce tells us in the second essay in this collection, is to have relationships with communities other than one’s own and to use what they learn from others to further the life of their own group. And in that essay, Royce briefly but explicitly holds up the Japanese as an example of this lesson (91). Loyalty to one’s group need not and should not entail an unwillingness to learn from foreign cultures, as the Japanese demonstrate. Royce expands his praise of the Japanese in ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices,’’ noting that the Japanese ‘‘learned well; but plainly they meant to use this learning for their own purposes’’ (50). Royce’s conclusion from the example of the Japanese is not to simplistically turn the tables and declare that they necessarily are racially superior to Euro-Americans. The lesson instead is that ‘‘so long as we [Euro-Americans] judged them [the Japanese] merely by their race, and by mere appearances, we were judging them ignorantly, and falsely’’ (50). ‘‘We’’ thus would do well to recognize that some of our judgments regarding race can be—and have been—false. Royce’s second lesson of experience comes from the different types of relationships between white and black people in the U.S. South versus Jamaica. As I will explain shortly, this lesson is problematic from a contemporary anti-racist perspective, but not because of its starting point, which acknowledges white judgments of black inferiority in the United States. It is crucial to recognize the provisional nature of Royce’s opening admission that ‘‘the negro is in his present backward state as a race, for reasons which are not due merely to circumstances, but which are quite innate in his mental constitution’’ (51). As Royce promises, the final sections of his essay return to the topic of whether perceived black backwardness is innate, but ‘‘for the moment,’’ he grants, ‘‘let that view pass as if it were finally accepted’’ (51). The race question on the table, then, is the urgent one faced in the U.S. South at the turn of the twentieth century: how can white and black people live side by side with a minimum of ‘‘friction’’? The Southern answer has been that black people must be taught to accept

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their subordinate position, using ‘‘irritation’’ (read: violence in general and lynching in particular) when necessary. But Royce rejects this answer. Pointing to a different lesson about racial relations that he learned when in Jamaica, he argues that even if black people are innately inferior to white people, violence against black people is not needed to keep them in their place. Although, in Royce’s view, Jamaica suffers from many economic and geographical disadvantages,9 it does not have the race problems of the U.S. South. Little open controversy exists about racial superiority in Jamaica, and its white people are able to control the country with little racial ‘‘friction.’’ How is this possible, and what can white Southerners learn about race questions from the English white people who live in and govern Jamaica? The answer is not found in ‘‘race-amalgamation’’ or interbreeding between white and black people, which Royce says has not occurred any more in Jamaica than in other regions where English white people have moved. The solution instead is English administration and reticence, and it is here that Royce’s second lesson becomes problematic from a contemporary anti-racist perspective. Royce claims, ‘‘Administration, I say, has done the larger half of the work of solving Jamaica’s race-problem’’ (55). It has built good roads, reduced tropical disease, established court and police systems, and taught the native Jamaican population loyalty, order, and self-respect. And it has done all this without producing the ‘‘ ‘negro domination’ ’’ that U.S. Southerners fear, and in that way ‘‘administration has allayed ancient irritations’’ (55). An important component to the success of English administration is that it included native Jamaicans in moderate positions of authority over other natives. The English established local police and civil services that trained black men to police other black men. ‘‘Educated negroes found in due time their place’’ (54), which helped all black Jamaicans to incorporate English laws and customs. The educated black man learned to identify with English administration through his responsibility for it, and the ‘‘humblest Negro’’ also learned to be respectful, even fond, of societal order, since he frequently saw those of his own race as its administrators (54).

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The smaller but nonetheless important half of the work of solving Jamaica’s race problems has been accomplished by English reticence. As Royce claims, ‘‘the Englishman, in his official and governmental dealings with backward peoples, has a great way of being superior without very often publicly saying that he is superior’’ (55). Loudly insisting on one’s superiority, even if it is true, makes it likely that one’s inferiors will rebel against you. Speaking to white people, Royce explains that precisely because they allegedly are superior, ‘‘you can afford to say little about that subject in your public dealings with the backward race.’’ The lesson that English governance teaches is that public speeches and spectacular demonstrations of white racial superiority, especially lynching, are not going to keep black people in their place. ‘‘Superiority is best shown by good deeds and by few boasts,’’ Royce tells us, which means that restrained and taciturn administrative techniques that include black people will best solve the South’s racial problems (55).10 Compared with the violence and horror of lynching, keeping black people in their place through administration and reticent governance can seem like a significant improvement. And in some respects it is. But put succinctly, what Royce admires about the English is the way that they dominated people of color through imperialism and colonization. Such domination need not rely on rifles and cannons. In fact, it is all the more effective, as Royce understood on some level, if it is internalized by those who are dominated rather than forced on them with arms. As Michel Foucault realized, effective discipline is the selfdiscipline of bodies made docile.11 And as Charles Mills more recently has argued, an indication that the racial contract of global white supremacy has been completely victorious is that its victims have happily and willingly signed on to its terms.12 Writing before the worldwide post-colonial struggles that generally began after World War II, Royce did not see that imperial colonialism was part of the violence of global race problems, not a means toward their nonviolent solution. He did not recognize that the ‘‘English type of social pedagogy’’ that made black people ‘‘conscious helper[s] toward good

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social order’’ could be a deceptively polite way of making black people the enforcers of their own subordination (55). If the English administration of Jamaica was relatively peaceful compared to Southern race relations in the United States, its administration nevertheless should be seen as an instance of what Franz Fanon called ‘‘that peaceful violence that the world is steeped in,’’ which is complicit with explicit racist violence.13 As the post-colonialism theorist Ann Laura Stoler has demonstrated, ‘‘the [colonialist] discourse of nation . . . was saturated with a hierarchy of moralities, prescriptions for conduct and bourgeois civilities that kept a racial politics of exclusion at its core.’’14 Royce’s experiential lesson teaching the value of English administration is problematic because it fails to see the psychological, ontological, and other forms of violence inflicted on non-white people by imperial colonialism. Royce closes his section on Jamaica by explaining that it and Japan teach a common lesson, which is that ‘‘we’’ (white Euro-Americans) tend to mistake as essential racial characteristics that are accidental and/or changeable. Here Royce implicitly returns to, by retracting, his earlier provisional admission that black people are inferior to white people. Physiological differences between racial groups are not signs of meaningful mental or moral differences between them, Royce tells us, and many race problems that seem inevitable because of racial differences could be eliminated if a different form of administration were adopted. We need to realize that we know less than we think we do about race. A great number of seemingly intractable racial problems are the product of potentially malleable social conditions, and failing to realize this fact tends to make those racial problems worse. Fallibly recognizing white ignorance regarding race, Royce moves to the second half of his essay by asking what, if anything, essential about race can be known. And again, Royce dismisses physical variation as productive of any helpful knowledge about racial differences. True to his idealism, Royce insists that ‘‘we are now interested in the minds of men . . . [and] what the races of men are socially good for’’ (58). What we need to know—and what physical anthropology, for example, cannot tell us with its examination of skulls, hair, and

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skin—are the ‘‘mental powers’’ and ‘‘moral characteristics’’ of groups of people (59). If one racial group’s mental powers and moral characteristics are inferior to those of another, we especially need to know how much of its inferiority is innate and how much is caused by environmental factors. Royce thus agrees with the experts of his day that a scientific field of race-psychology could contribute to a fuller understanding of the human species, but he skeptically cautions that the present state of science is not able to do so. This is because science insists on using external, physical characteristics as signs of the inner, psychological life of human beings. Anthropology tends to point to acts such as cannibalism and witchcraft and beliefs in magic and taboo as evidence that some racial groups are more primitive than others, but Royce argues that if the influence of civilization is subtracted from the equation, all races share in the evils of primitive humanity. Given that it is difficult to determine what race means apart from the environmental influence of culture or civilization, ‘‘a racepsychology is still a science for the future to discover’’ (62). Royce considers the objection that his comments on civilization have glossed over the best test of racial superiority and inferiority, which is being capable of civilization. Perhaps all races have had a primitive or barbaric stage in their development. The real question, then, is how do they react to processes of civilization? Do they refuse civilization? Perish at first contact with it? Or adapt and improve by means of it? The races that appreciate and learn from civilization, and then go on to create civilization themselves, are the highest races. The ones that stagnate or die out when confronted with civilization prove themselves to be mentally inferior. And the difference between the two reactions—so the objection goes—is ‘‘deep and ineradicable’’ (62). Different reactions to civilization reveal different racial types of mind that are impervious to environmental influence. As Royce handles this objection, we can see his philosophy of loyalty at work. For Royce, loyalty means being loyal to a concrete, passionately felt cause in such a way that one is loyal to loyalty itself. Loyalty to loyalty, in turn, means respecting and encouraging the loyalty of others to their own passionately felt causes, even if—and even

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more difficult, precisely when—one finds those causes unappealing. As Royce summarizes loyalty to loyalty in this collection’s fifth essay, ‘‘Physical Training in America,’’ ‘‘charity, benevolence, and— simplest of all—plain fair play are tendencies that are thus to be ethically defined and deduced from our central principle’’ (155). Respect for one’s opponent in athletics, for example, means respecting her skill and activity even as it is put to work against one’s own, and this respect is manifest in fair play.15 Royce responds to the test of civilization objection by not only questioning the fairness of how the test has been applied, but also by arguing that civilization often creates the intractable racial differences that are thought to precede it. Agreeing that the test of civilization is important, Royce immediately adds that some, but not all, racial groups were given a cheat-sheet for it in advance. White Americans’ Germanic ancestors, for example, admittedly responded well to the civilization of the Roman Empire, but they had been remotely influenced by it before they explicitly met up with it. The twists and turns of history, including Germanic conquest of ‘‘cultivated’’ Roman peoples, gave German ‘‘barbarians’’ an extended probationary period in which they became familiar with civilization. German culture and forms of education thus were already consonant with civilization before their first official encounter with it. Without previous exposure to Roman culture, the Germanic people probably would have failed the test of civilization, decisively proving their racial inferiority by either dying off or becoming hopelessly degenerate via disease and alcohol. ‘‘Dead men not only tell no tales,’’ Royce wryly reminds us, ‘‘they also, strange to say, attend no schools, and learn no lessons’’ (63). And in that way, they seem to prove themselves as hopelessly and intractably mentally inferior to other people of other races. But this ‘‘proof’’ of inferiority is the result of unfair play on the part of white culture, and so it should be discounted. The test of civilization has never been fairly applied. We could say that in their loyalty to their own race, white people have betrayed the spirit of loyalty by discouraging the loyalty of other races to themselves. And if one replies that the test is fair because some particular race must have

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originated civilization and thus is superior to the others who later came into contact with it, Royce counters that we do not know precisely where civilization began and that no one race was its sole originator. While in principle using civilization as a measuring stick seems to be a good way to judge the value of different races, in practice it is unfair and fails to provide any reliable results. The test of civilization cannot do justice to the complex situation of different racial and ethnic groups’ historical development. It does not promote loyalty to loyalty. Even worse than the test of civilization’s being unfair because unreliable is that civilization is able to create physically and socially degenerate groups who are incapable of improvement. Royce cautions that race does not explain the existence of degenerate groups, as many people have implicitly assumed and often explicitly argued. Any race can become so degraded that it cannot recover if it is oppressed from generation to generation. Royce agrees with his interlocutors that the members of ‘‘some races’’ are more educable than others, but instead of faulting non-white people, he points his finger at the civilization that allegedly proves the superiority of white people. ‘‘For man, whatever his race,’’ Royce scathingly remarks, ‘‘is an animal that you unquestionably can debase to whatever level you please, if you only have power, and if you then begin early enough, and devote yourself persistently enough to the noble and civilized task of proving him to be debased’’ (63). Royce accuses (white) civilization of working to ensure that certain non-white people become mentally and morally inferior to white people, rather than to educate and uplift them to a better way of life. The cruel hypocrisy pointed out by Royce is that in the name of helping allegedly racially inferior people, civilization tends to do the exact opposite. Its ‘‘nobility’’ is rooted in debasing certain groups of people, which is to say that its alleged nobility is nourished by the moral depravity and mental inferiority that it contrasts itself with.16 On this point, Royce’s work hints at the issue of white ignorance discussed by Du Bois in ‘‘The Souls of White Folk’’ and analyzed via an epistemology of ignorance by Mills in The Racial Contract.17 Du

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Bois begins his analysis of whiteness with a vivid description of his distinctive knowledge of white people: ‘‘Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. . . . I see these souls undressed and from the back and side, I see the working of their entrails.’’18 He then continues with a searing indictment of whiteness as ownership of the earth, speaking a truth about the lie of white benevolence, charity, and exceptionalism that most white people do not want to know. Approximately eighty years later Mills coined the term ‘‘epistemology of ignorance’’ to explain the global pattern of cognitive dysfunction regarding race and racism required of white people.19 According to Mills, as part of the racial contract that establishes white people as full persons and nonwhite people as subpersons, white ignorance about the role of enforced white supremacy in social, political, economic, ontological, and other realities is not an accidental gap in knowledge but instead the product of ‘‘a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities.’’20 Ironically, given white culture’s depiction of itself as enlightened, white ignorance of white culture’s depraved underside is built into the operations of whiteness itself.21 Royce’s condemnation of civilization’s purported nobility exposes civilization’s betrayal of the principle of loyalty. With Mills, we could say that Royce’s condemnation of civilization reveals the disloyal ignorance of civilization’s actual effects that is required of its members. The so-called civilized see themselves as helping the less fortunate rather than debasing them, and their misunderstanding on this point is not accidental. It is part of the conditions in which civilization thrives—which is to say that it is how white people who debase non-white people can do so with a clear conscience. With Du Bois, we could say that civilized people are required not to see themselves ‘‘undressed and from the back and the side’’ because if they did, they would see the hypocrisy of their nobility and the lack of their loyalty. Losing their ignorance, they could not maintain their alleged superiority over the so-called uncivilized and, in fact, might have to recognize their ‘‘clairvoyant’’ knowledge of the debasing effects of civilization.

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Royce ends the penultimate section of ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’ with an explicit reminder of ‘‘our’’ (white) ignorance. After criticizing civilization, he concludes that no one knows with certainty how different racial groups are from one another, nor how fixed or changeable the traits of any particular group are. Perhaps there are significant differences and perhaps also there are fixed traits that future science will uncover. But ‘‘we are at present very ignorant regarding the whole matter,’’ and that ignorance should not be treated as if it were knowledge of white supremacy (65). Given this conclusion, Royce then takes an interesting tack in the essay’s final section. After declaring ‘‘our’’ ignorance, he then asks if there is anything significant that can be said about modern raceproblems. And his reply is that ‘‘scientifically viewed, these problems of ours turn out to be not so much problems caused by anything which is essential to the existence or to the nature of the races of men themselves. Our so-called race-problems are merely the problems caused by our antipathies’’ (65). Royce moves from a claim of ignorance to a claim of knowledge, but here the knowledge in question is that which helps dispel, rather than support, white supremacy. Royce argues that human beings have all sorts of capricious antipathies, and those antipathies should not be made more significant, real, or true by giving them a name. Once they have been named, they tend to be treated ‘‘as sacred . . . and then you get the phenomena of racial hatred, of religious hatred, of class hatred, and so on indefinitely’’ (65). Royce urges that instead of intensifying or systematizing our haphazard antipathies, society can and should educate our habits to eliminate them. White supremacy is an illusion, and rather than sanctifying it with science, we should work to dispel it. Intertwining themes of ignorance and knowledge thus mark the end of Royce’s essay on ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices.’’ Questioning white people’s claim to know the allegedly essential differences between various races, Royce points out the vastness and even deliberateness of white ignorance about race, including the pernicious effects on other races that it has. After recognizing ‘‘our’’ ignorance, however, he concludes that we know that racial prejudice, not racial

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difference, is at the heart of the United States’ and the world’s race problems. Logically speaking, this is a claim of knowledge to which Royce is not entitled. It smacks of the fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam. But read pragmatically, with an eye for the effects of knowledge and ignorance on the possibilities for increased loyalty, the claim can be interpreted as a fitting conclusion. To be loyal to loyalty, white people need to dispel the illusion of white supremacy, which actively and violently discourages the loyalties of people of other races. Dispelling that illusion means recognizing white ignorance, but given that white supremacy has been crafty enough to fold white ignorance into its service, stronger measures against white supremacy are required. White people must live and act as if they know that racial differences are inessential, and the training of habits provided by society should support this new way of living. Only with this type of countermeasure can existing habits of knowing, living, and thinking that white people are essentially superior to non-white people be transformed. Royce does not quite say that the solution to racial discrimination and oppression is the elimination of the category of race. But he suggests as much in his final paragraph when he vows, ‘‘For my part, then, I am a member of the human race, and this is a race which is, as a whole, considerably lower than the angels, so that the whole of it very badly needs race-elevation. . . . And it is in this spirit only that I am able to approach our problem’’ (68). Today philosophers and other theorists thinking critically about race disagree about whether race, and the category of whiteness in particular, must be eliminated if white supremacy and privilege are to be abolished. Royce’s appeal to the human race appears to align him with proponents of colorblindness, who claim that justice is best achieved when social policies do not take race into consideration, and with contemporary white ‘‘race traitors’’ who work for the abolition of whiteness.22 More persuasive, I find, are arguments that colorblindness often supports, rather than undermines, white dominance, and that whiteness is unlikely to be eliminated anytime soon and so should be transformed into an anti-racist category.23 But even if Royce’s final plea in favor of

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universal humanity does not achieve the anti-racist effects he desired, his careful examination of racial prejudices and his critical treatment of whiteness as a racial category land a significant blow against racial oppression and help dismantle white supremacy. His obliviousness to the racist domination of imperialist colonialism also can be instructive by alerting us to the dangerous deceptiveness of ‘‘peaceful violence,’’ many forms of which exist today.24 Over one hundred years after it was written, ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices’’ remains a powerful example of how philosophy in the American grain can be brought to bear on social-political issues that are still of great importance.

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race questions, provincialism, and other american problems Josiah Royce

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Preface


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he five essays which make up the present volume were all, at some time, read, before various audiences, as addresses. Each one contains indications of the special occasion for the sake of which it was first prepared. Yet each one of them also states opinions which, from my own point of view, make it a part of an effort to apply, to some of our American problems, that general doctrine about life which I have recently summed up in my book entitled ‘‘The Philosophy of Loyalty.’’ In the light of that philosophy I therefore hope that the various special opinions here expressed may be judged. This book I regard as an auxiliary to its more systematic predecessor. The closing essay of the present volume contains, in fact, a summary of the theses upon which my ‘‘Philosophy of Loyalty’’ is based, as well as a direct application of these theses to a special practical problem of our recent education. The first essay here printed—that on ‘‘Race Questions’’—was read before the Chicago Ethical Society, in 1905. It was later published in the ‘‘International Journal of Ethics.’’ It is an effort to express and to justify, in the special case of the race-problems, the spirit which I have elsewhere defined as that of ‘‘Loyalty to Loyalty.’’ The second and fourth essays of this book both relate to ‘‘Provincialism,’’—the one discussing, in general terms, the need and uses of that spirit in our American life; the other sketching, as well as I am able, the bases upon which rests that particular form of provincialism to which I, as a native Californian, personally owe most. The paper on ‘‘The Pacific Coast’’ was prepared as early as 1898. The general { 37 }

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essay on ‘‘Provincialism’’ was read as a Phi Beta Kappa Address, at the Iowa State University, in 1902. In the ‘‘Philosophy of Loyalty’’ the importance of an enlightened provincialism is discussed in the course of the fifth lecture of that volume,—a lecture whose general topic is: ‘‘Certain American Problems in their Relation to Loyalty.’’ What I there merely sketched regarding provincialism is here more fully set forth. In my own mind, meanwhile, the essay on the ‘‘Pacific Coast’’ is a continuation of the study which first took form in my volume on the history of California, published, in the Commonwealth Series, in 1886. In that work I stated, in various passages, views about the provincial aspects of loyalty,—views which have later come to form part of the more general ethical doctrine to which I am now committed. Loyalty is the practical aspect and expression of an idealistic philosophy. Such a philosophy, in relation to theoretical as well as to practical problems, I have long tried to maintain and to teach. A familiar charge against idealism, however, is, that it is an essentially unpractical doctrine. Such a charge can be fairly answered only in case an idealist is quite willing, not only to listen with good humor to his common-sense critics, but also to criticise himself and to observe the defects of his tendencies. In such a spirit I have tried to write the third of the essays here printed. I should be glad to have this paper read in the light of the lecture on ‘‘Conscience,’’ in the ‘‘Philosophy of Loyalty.’’ Some passages in these papers show special signs of the dates when they were written; and therefore the reader may notice a few allusions and illustrations—due to passing events—which would be otherwise chosen or stated were the papers composed to-day. Thus, my sketch of conditions in Jamaica, in the essay on ‘‘Race Questions,’’ contains a few statistical and other data that were publicly reported in 1904, and that would need some modification to adapt them to the present moment. But I believe that none of these matters interfere with what my volume attempts to be,—a series of illustrations, prepared in the course of a number of years, but all bearing upon the application of a certain philosophical doctrine and spirit to some problems of American life.

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I have mentioned the Japanese, more than once, in these pages. It is fair to say that the characterization of their national spirit which occurs in the essay on ‘‘Provincialism’’ was written in 1902, and here appears substantially unchanged. Mrs. Royce has constantly aided me in preparing these essays for publication; and to her help many things in this volume are due. josiah royce Cambridge, Mass., October 16, 1908.

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Contents




I. RACE QUESTIONS AND PREJUDICES

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Importance of the problem, 45–46.—Summary statement of various questions about races, 46, 47.—The defects of our present scientific knowledge regarding racial psychology, 47– 48.—The lesson taught by Japan, 49–50.—The lesson taught by Jamaica, 51–58.—The meaning of race in the history of civilization: sceptical survey of the state of our knowledge, 58–65.— The psychology of racial antipathies, 65–68.—Conclusion, 68.

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II. PROVINCIALISM Definition of Provincialism, 69–71.—In praise of provincialism, 71–74.—The evils in American life which provincialism must correct; first, the evils due to the newness of the country, 74–77.—The evils due to the levelling tendency of recent civilization, 77–79.—The evils due to the mob-spirit, 79–83.—The right type of social group defined, 83–85.—The problem of dealing with the mob-spirit, 85–87.—The service that provincialism may accomplish in dealing with the foregoing types of evils, 87–88.—How to cultivate provincialism without merely lapsing into narrowness, 88–92.—The province as an ideal rather than as a boast, 89.—Provincialism, docility, and individualism: illustration in the case of Japan, 90–91.—The cultivation of the youth of a province, 91.—Provincialism and art, 92. { 41 }

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III. ON CERTAIN LIMITATIONS OF THE THOUGHTFUL PUBLIC IN AMERICA

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American idealism, in its popular and practical aspects, its power and prevalence, 93–100; its excesses, 97–98; its good aspects seen in the modern academic movement, 98–99.— Ineffectiveness of too large a portion of our idealistically disposed public, 100–102; illustration from our early provincial history in the newer parts of the country, 102–104; and from older communities, 104.—The cure for this ineffectiveness, 104–117.—Difficulty and importance of this cure, 104–106.— The tendency to abstractions, 106–108.—The limitations of the effectiveness of the human thinking-process, 108–110.—Not alone philosophers abuse the reasoning powers, 110–111.— Instinct and reason, their respective practical offices, 112–114.— Resulting advice, 114–115.—On the love of the ‘‘new’’ in thought, 115–117.—Practical conclusions, 117.

IV. THE PACIFIC COAST. A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE RELATIONS OF CLIMATE AND CIVILIZATION

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The journey to California, and its goal, as an introduction to the study, 118–120.—General review of the physical conditions and climate of the Pacific coast, 120–126.—The early society of California, 126–128.—The relations of climate and mental life as characterized by the poetical writers of California, 128–133.—General consideration of physical, social, and individual conditions as determining the Californian mind; resulting individualism; accompanying loyalty; the tension between the two tendencies, 133–138.—Historical illustrations, 138–142.—Peculiar forms of individualism in California, 140– 144.—Resulting idealism, 144.

V. SOME RELATIONS OF PHYSICAL TRAINING TO THE PRESENT PROBLEMS OF MORAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA The general relations of physical and moral education, 145– 147.—General definition of Loyalty, 147–151.—‘‘Loyalty to Loyalty’’ defined and illustrated, 151–156.—The first way in which

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physical training can be of service to loyalty, namely as a preparation of the organism for devotion to causes, 156–159.—The second service of physical training to the cause of loyalty: team-loyalty, and similar tendencies, 159–161. The third service of physical training: fair play and the spirit of universal loyalty, 161–164.—What kinds of sports and contests best further loyalty, criterion stated, 164–167.—Philip Stanley Abbot’s account of the mountain climber’s ‘‘fulness of life,’’ 167–168; contrast with certain other types of athletic experience, 168–170.— Results as to the values of athletic sports and exercises for moral training, 170–172.

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I race questions and prejudices




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he numerous questions and prejudices which are aroused by the contact of the various races of men have always been important factors in human history. They promise, however, to become, in the near future, still more important than they have ever been before. Such increased importance of race questions and prejudices, if it comes to pass, will be due not to any change in human nature, and especially not to any increase in the diversity or in the contrasting traits of the races of men themselves, but simply to the greater extent and complexity of the work of civilization. Physically speaking, great masses of men are to-day brought into more frequent and closer contact than was formerly possible, because of the ease with which at present the numerous means of communication can be used, because of the increase of peaceful migrations, and because of the imperial ambitions of several of the world’s great peoples. Hence whatever contact, conflict, or mutual influence the races of men have had in the past, we find to-day more ways and places in which men find { 45 }

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themselves in the presence of alien races, with whom they have to learn to live in the same social order. When we think of East Indian coolies now present as laborers, side by side with the native negroes, and with white men, in the British West Indies; when we remember the problem of South Africa, as it was impressed upon our minds a few years since, at a moment when Dutchmen and Englishmen fought for the land, while Kaffirs and Zulus watched the conflict; when we recall what the recent war between Japan and Russia has already meant for the future of the races of men in the far East; and when, with a few only of such typical instances in mind, we turn back to our own country, and think how many different race-problems confront us,—we then see that the earliest social problem of humanity is also the most recent problem. This is the problem of dealing with the men who seem to us somehow very widely different from ourselves, in physical constitution, in temperament, in all their deeper nature, so that we are tempted to think of them as natural strangers to our souls, while nevertheless we find that they are stubbornly there in our world, and that they are men as much determined to live as we are, and are men who, in turn, find us as incomprehensible as we find them. Of these diverse races, what ones are the superior and what ones are the inferior races? What race or races ought to rule? What ones ought to yield to their natural masters? To which one of these races has God, or nature, or destiny, ordained the rightful and final sovereignty of the earth? Which of these types of men is really the human type? Are they by their presence and their rivalry essentially perilous to one another’s interests? And if so, what one amongst them is there whose spread, or whose increase in power or in number, is most perilous to the true cause of civilization? Is it a ‘‘yellow peril,’’ or a ‘‘black peril,’’ or perhaps, after all, is it not rather some form of ‘‘white peril,’’ which most threatens the future of humanity in this day of great struggles and of complex issues? Are all men equal, as the Eighteenth Century theorists insisted? Or if the actual inequality of men in power, in value, in progressiveness, is an obvious fact, then how is this fact related to racial distinctions?

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Such are a few of the questions that crowd upon us when we think about the races of men, and about their various relations to civilization. I do not mean, in this brief discussion, to exhaust any of these questions, but I want to call attention to a few principles which seem to me to be serviceable to any one who wants to look at race questions fairly and humanely. I It will be natural for some of my readers to interpose, at this point, the suggestion that the principal guidance in any attempt to answer such questions as the foregoing must come from an appeal to the results of the modern scientific study of the races of men. Why speculate and moralize, one may say? Have not the races of men been studied in recent times with elaborate care? What can tell us how to deal with the race-problems, in case we neglect the results of anthropology and of ethnology? And if we consult those sciences, do they not already give us a basis for decision regarding all such matters—a basis which is far more valuable than any chance observations of an amateur can be? As a fact, if I supposed that, in their present stage of progress, the sciences which deal with man had already attained to exact results regarding the mental and moral differences, prospects, and destinies, of the different stocks of the genus homo, nobody would be humbler than I should be in accepting, and in trying to use the verdict that would then have been obtained. But I confess that, as a student of ethics and of certain other aspects of our common human nature, I have been a good deal baffled in trying to discover just what the results of science are regarding the true psychological and moral meaning of race-differences. I shall later speak further of some of the difficulties of this scientific aspect of our topic. It is enough to say here that when I consult any of the known Rassentheoretiker for light, I do indeed learn that the concept of race is the key to the comprehension of all history, and that, if you only form a clear idea of the important types of men (types such, for instance, as the marvellous

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Germanen of Chamberlain’s Grundzu¨ge des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts), you can then determine with exactness precisely who ought to rule and who ought to yield, and can predict the forms of civilization, the Weltanschauungen, and the other possessions, which will be characteristic of each type of men, so long as that type shall endure. When I observe, however, that the Rassentheoretiker frequently uses his science to support most of his personal prejudices, and is praised by his sympathizers almost equally for his exact knowledge and for his vigorous display of temperament, I begin to wonder whether a science which mainly devotes itself to proving that we ourselves are the salt of the earth, is after all so exact as it aims to be. It is with some modern race-theories, as it is with some forms of international yacht racing. I know nothing about yachting; but whenever any form of the exalted sport of international yachting proves to be definable as a sort of contest in which the foreigner is invariably beaten, I for my part take no interest in learning more about the rules of that particular game. And precisely so, when men marshal all the resources of their science to prove that their own race-prejudices are infallible, I can feel no confidence in what they imagine to be the result of science. Much of our modern race-theory reminds me, in its spirit, altogether too much of some of the conversations in the ‘‘Jungle Book,’’—or of the type of international courtesy expressed in ‘‘The Truce of the Bear,’’—too much, I say to seem like exact science. Mowgli’s remarks addressed to Red Dog may have been good natural history; but scientific Zoo¨logy does not proceed in that way. While I deeply respect, then, the actual work of the sciences which deal with man, and while I fully recognize their modern progress, I greatly doubt that these sciences as yet furnish us with the exact results which representative race-theorists sometimes insist upon. Hence I am unable to begin this little study by a mere report of what science has established regarding the mental and moral varieties of men. I must rather make my beginning with a mention of two instances which have recently been much in my mind, and which bear upon the meaning of race prejudices. One of these instances is to-day in everybody’s mind.

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II I refer then, first, to the wonderful lesson that Japan has been teaching us regarding what human energy and devotion have done and can do, and can do also in case of a race that is indeed remote enough from our own. I remember well the Japan of the geography textbooks of my childhood, text-books which were even then antiquated enough; but I believed them. Japan was a weird land, according to the old text-books,—a land from which foreigners were excluded, a land where all things were as perverse as possible, where criminals were boiled in oil, where Catholic missionaries had long ago been martyred. Whatever the Japanese were, they were plainly men of the wrong race. Later, however, I learned something of the contemporary history of Japan as it then was. The scene was now, indeed, vastly changed. The Japanese had opened their land; and hereupon, lo! in a magic way, they were imitating, so we heard, all of our European customs. So we next had to alter our own opinion as to their essential nature. They became in our eyes a plastic race of wonderful little children, small of stature, quick of wit, light-minded—a folk who took up any suggestion precisely as the playful children often do. They, too, were playing, it seemed, with our whole Western civilization. Plainly, then, they were a race who had no serious life of their own at all. Those of us who disliked them noted that they thus showed an ape-like unsteadiness of conduct. This, then, was their racial characteristic. Those who admired them thought of them as a new sort of pets, to be humored and instructed with all our superior condescension. Well, as time went on, and I grew to manhood, I myself came to know some of these Japanese as students. Hereupon, however, I gradually learned to see such men in a wholly new light. I found them, with all their steadfast courtesy, pleasantly, but impenetrably reserved—keepers of their own counsel, men whose life had, as I soon found, a vast background of opinions and customs that I could not fathom. When, I said, shall I ever see what is behind that Japanese smile? What is in their hearts? With an immovable self-consciousness they resisted every effort to alter, from without, any of their essential

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ideals. Politely, whenever you pressed them, they declined to admit that any of our Western arts or opinions were equal in value to their own most cherished national ideal treasures. And this they did even at the moment when they were present, most respectfully, as learners. They learned well; but plainly they meant to use this learning for their own purposes. An enthusiastic lady in an American University town was once seeking to draw from a Japanese visitor some admission of the importance of Christianity for the higher civilization of his country. ‘‘Confess,’’ she insisted, ‘‘confess what a boon our missionaries have brought you in introducing Christianity into your land.’’ ‘‘You are right,’’ answered the Japanese, with his usual courteous smile, ‘‘you are right; the missionaries in introducing Christianity, have indeed brought us a great good. They have completed the variety of religions in Japan.’’ This impenetrable Japanese self-consciousness, this unconquerable polite and obstinate reserve, what did it mean? Well, Mr. Hearn and his kin have now let us know in a literary way something of the true heart of Japan. And the recent war has shown us what Japan meant by imitating our Western ways, and also what ancestral ideals have led her sons to death in battle, and still hold the nation so closely knit to their Emperor. Already I have heard some tender souls amongst us say: ‘‘It is they who are racially our superiors.’’ Some of us may live to see Japanese customs pervading our land, and all of our professional imitators trying to be Japanese. Well, I myself am no worshipper of any new fancy or distant civilization, merely because of its temporary prominence. But the true lesson which Japan teaches us today is, that it is somewhat hard to find out by looking at the features of a man’s face, or at the color of his skin, or even at the reports of travellers who visit his land, what it is of which his race is really capable. Perhaps the Japanese are not of the right race; but we now admit that so long as we judged them merely by their race, and by mere appearances, we were judging them ignorantly, and falsely. This, I say, has been to me a most interesting lesson in the fallibility of some of our race judgments.

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III So much, then, for one lesson of experience. I have recently been much impressed by another lesson, but by one of a very different character, occurring, so to speak, at the other extremity of the world of modern race-problems. The negro has so far shown none of the great powers of the Japanese. Let us, then, provisionally admit at this stage of our discussion that the negro is in his present backward state as a race, for reasons which are not due merely to circumstances, but which are quite innate in his mental constitution. I shall indeed return to that topic later on. But, for the moment, let that view pass as if it were finally accepted. View the negro, then, for the instant merely as a backward race. But let the race-question here be our own pressing Southern question: How can the white man and the negro, once forced, as they are in our South, to live side by side, best learn to live with a minimum of friction, with a maximum of cooperation? I have long learned from my Southern friends that this end can only be attained by a firm and by a very constant and explicit insistence upon keeping the negro in his proper place, as a social inferior—who, then, as an inferior, should, of course, be treated humanely, but who must first be clearly and unmistakably taught where he belongs. I have observed that the pedagogical methods which my Southern friends of late years have found it their duty to use, to this end, are methods such as still keep awake a good deal of very lively and intense irritation in the minds not only of the pupils but also of the teachers. Now irritation, viewed merely in itself, is not an enlightening state of mind. It is, therefore, according to our modern views, not a very pedagogical state of mind. I am myself, for instance, a fairly irritable person, and I am also a teacher. But at the moments when I am irritated I am certainly not just then a good teacher. Is, however, the irritation which seems to be the accompaniment of some of the recent methods of teaching the negro his place an inevitable evil, a wholly necessary accompaniment of the present transition period in the South? Must such increase of race-hatred first come, in order that later, whenever the negro has fully learned his lesson, and aspires no more beyond

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his station, peace may come? Well, concerning just this matter I lately learned what was to me, in my inexperience, a new lesson. I have had occasion three times, in recent summers, to visit British West Indies, Jamaica, and Trinidad, at a time when few tourists were there. Upon visiting Jamaica I first went round the coast of the island, visiting its various ports. I then went inland, and walked for miles over its admirable country roads. I discussed its condition with men of various occupations. I read some of its official literature. I then consulted with a new interest its history. I watched its negroes in various places, and talked with some of them, too. I have since collected such further information as I had time to collect regarding its life, as various authorities have discussed the topic, and this is the result: Jamaica has a population of surely not more than 14,000 or 15,000 whites, mostly English. Its black population considerably exceeds 600,000. Its mulatto population, of various shades, numbers, at the very least, some 40,000 or 50,000. Its plantation life, in the days before emancipation, was much sadder and severer, by common account, than ours in the South ever was. Both the period of emancipation and the immediately following period were of a very discouraging type. In the sixties of the last century there was one very unfortunate insurrection. The economic history of the island has also been in many ways unlucky even to the present day. Here, then, are certainly conditions which in some respects are decidedly such as would seem to tend toward a lasting state of general irritation, such as you might suppose would make race-questions acute. Moreover, the population, being a tropical one, has serious moral burdens to contend with of the sort that result from the known influences of such climates upon human character in the men of all races. And yet, despite all these disadvantages, to-day, whatever the problems of Jamaica, whatever its defects, our own present Southern raceproblem in the forms which we know best, simply does not exist. There is no public controversy about social race equality or superiority. Neither a white man nor a white woman feels insecure in moving about freely amongst the black population anywhere on the island. The colony has a Legislative Assembly, although one of extremely

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limited legislative powers. For the choice to this assembly a suffrage determined only by a decidedly low rate-qualification is free to all who have sufficient property, but is used by only a very small portion of the negro population. The negro is, on the whole, neither painfully obstrusive in his public manners, nor in need of being sharply kept in his place. Within the circles of the black population itself there is meanwhile a decidedly rich social differentiation. There are negroes in government service, negroes in the professions, negroes who are fairly prosperous peasant proprietors, and there are also the poor peasants; there are the thriftless, the poor in the towns,—yes, as in any tropical country, the beggars. In Kingston and in some other towns there is a small class of negroes who are distinctly criminal. On the whole, however, the negroes and colored population, taken in the mass, are orderly, law-abiding, contented, still backward in their education, but apparently advancing. They are generally loyal to the government. The best of them are aspiring, in their own way, and wholesomely self-conscious. Yet there is no doubt whatever that English white men are the essential controllers of the destiny of the country. But these English whites, few as they are, control the country at present, with extraordinarily little friction, and wholly without those painful emotions, those insistent complaints and anxieties, which at present are so prominent in the minds of many of our own Southern brethren. Life in Jamaica is not ideal. The economical aspect of the island is in many ways unsatisfactory. But the negro racequestion, in our present American sense of that term, seems to be substantially solved. How? By race-mixture? The considerable extent to which race-mixture went in the earlier history of Jamaica is generally known. Here, as elsewhere, however, it has been rather the social inequality of the races, than any approach to equality, which has been responsible for the mixture, in so far as such has occurred. It was the social inequality of the plantation days that began the process of mixture. If the often-mentioned desire to raise the ‘‘color’’ of their children, has later led the colored population to seek a further amalgamation of the two stocks, certainly that

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tendency, so far as it is effective, has been due to the social advantages of the lighter color—and not due to any motive which has decreased the ancient disadvantages under which the darker race has had to suffer. If race-amalgamation is indeed to be viewed as always an evil, the best way to counteract the growth of that evil must everywhere be the cultivation of racial self-respect and not of racial degradation. As a fact, it is not the amalgamation of the stocks, so far as that has occurred, which has tended to reduce the friction between the races in Jamaica. As to the English newcomers to the island, they probably do not tend to become amalgamated with the colored stocks in Jamaica, more than in any other region where the English live. The English stock tends, here as elsewhere, to be proud of itself, and to keep to itself. How then has the solution of what was once indeed a grave race-question been brought about in Jamaica? I answer, by the simplest means in the world—the simplest, that is, for Englishmen—viz.: by English administration, and by English reticence. When once the sad period of emancipation and of subsequent occasional disorder was passed, the Englishman did in Jamaica what he has so often and so well done elsewhere. He organized his colony; he established good local courts, which gained by square treatment the confidence of the blacks. The judges of such courts were Englishmen. The English ruler also provided a good country constabulary, in which native blacks also found service, and in which they could exercise authority over other blacks. Black men, in other words, were trained, under English management, of course, to police black men. A sound civil service was also organized; and in that educated negroes found in due time their place, while the chiefs of each branch of the service were and are, in the main, Englishmen. The excise and the health services, both of which are very highly developed, have brought the law near to the life of the humblest negro, in ways which he sometimes finds, of course, restraining, but which he also frequently finds beneficent. Hence he is accustomed to the law; he sees its ministers often, and often, too, as men of his own race; and in the main, he is fond of order, and learns to be respectful toward the established ways of society. The Jamaica negro is described by

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those who know him as especially fond of bringing his petty quarrels and personal grievances into court. He is litigious just as he is vivacious. But this confidence in the law is just what the courts have encouraged. That is one way, in fact, to deal with the too forward and strident negro. Encourage him to air his grievances in court, listen to him patiently, and fine him when he deserves fines. That is a truly English type of social pedagogy. It works in the direction of making the negro a conscious helper toward good social order. Administration, I say, has done the larger half of the work of solving Jamaica’s race-problem. Administration has filled the island with good roads, has reduced to a minimum the tropical diseases by means of an excellent health-service, has taught the population loyalty and order, has led them some steps already on the long road ‘‘up from slavery,’’ has given them, in many cases, the true self-respect of those who themselves officially cooperate in the work of the law, and it has done this without any such result as our Southern friends nowadays conceive when they think of what is called ‘‘negro domination.’’ Administration has allayed ancient irritations. It has gone far to offset the serious economic and tropical troubles from which Jamaica meanwhile suffers. Yes, the work has been done by administration,—and by reticence. For the Englishman, in his official and governmental dealings with backward peoples, has a great way of being superior without very often publicly saying that he is superior. You well know that in dealing, as an individual, with other individuals, trouble is seldom made by the fact that you are actually the superior of another man in any respect. The trouble comes when you tell the other man, too stridently, that you are his superior. Be my superior, quietly, simply showing your superiority in your deeds, and very likely I shall love you for the very fact of your superiority. For we all love our leaders. But tell me that I am your inferior, and then perhaps I may grow boyish, and may throw stones. Well, it is so with races. Grant then that yours is the superior race. Then you can afford to say little about that subject in your public dealings with the backward race. Superiority is best shown by good deeds and by few boasts.

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IV So much for the lesson that Jamaica has suggested to me. The widely different conditions of Trinidad suggest, despite the differences, a somewhat similar lesson. Here also there are great defects in the social order; but again, our Southern race-problem does not exist. When, with such lessons in mind, I recall our problem, as I hear it from my brethren of certain regions of our Union, I see how easily we can all mistake for a permanent race-problem a difficulty that is essentially a problem of quite another sort. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page in his recent book on the ‘‘Southerners’ Problem’’ speaks, in one notable passage, of the possibility which he calls Utopian, that perhaps some day the negro in the South may be made to cooperate in the keeping of order by the organization under State control of a police of his own race, who shall deal with blacks. He even mentions that the English in the East Indies use native constabulary. But this possibility is not Utopian. When I hear the complaint of the Southerner, that the raceproblem is such as constantly to endanger the safety of his home, I now feel disposed to say: ‘‘The problem that endangers the sanctity of your homes and that is said sometimes to make lynching a necessity, is not a race-problem. It is an administrative problem. You have never organized a country constabulary. Hence, when various social conditions, amongst which the habit of irritating public speech about race-questions is indeed one, though only one, condition, have tended to the producing and to the arousing of extremely dangerous criminals in your communities, you have no adequate means of guarding against the danger. When you complain that such criminals, when they flee from justice, get sympathy from some portion of their ignorant fellows and so are aided to get away, you forget that you have not first made your negro countryman familiar with, and fond of, the law, by means of a vigorous and well-organized and generally beneficent administration constantly before his eyes, not only in the pursuit of criminals, but in the whole care of public order and health. If you insist that in some districts the white population is too sparse or too poor, or both, to furnish an efficient country constabulary

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constantly on duty, why, then, have you not long since trained black men to police black men? Sympathy with the law grows with responsibility for its administration. If it is revolting to you to see black men possessed of the authority of a country constabulary, still, if you will, you can limit their authority to a control over their own race. If you say all this speech of mine is professorial, unpractical, Utopian, and if you still cry out bitterly for the effective protection of your womankind, I reply merely, look at Jamaica. Look at other English colonies. In any case, the Southern race-problem will never be relieved by speech or by practices such as increase irritation. It will be relieved when administration grows sufficiently effective, and when the negroes themselves get an increasingly responsible part in this administration in so far as it relates to their own race. That may seem a wild scheme. But I insist: It is the English way. Look at Jamaica, and learn how to protect your own homes. I have reviewed two very different lessons which I have recently had brought home to me regarding race-problems. What is there which is common to these two lessons? Is it not this: In estimating, in dealing with races, in defining what their supposedly unchangeable characteristics are, in planning what to do with them, we are all prone to confuse the accidental with the essential. We are likely to take for an essential race-characteristic what is a transient incident, or a product of special social conditions. We are disposed to view as a fatal and overwhelming race-problem what is a perfectly curable accident of our present form of administration. If we are indeed of a superior race ourselves, we shall, however, best prove the fact by learning to distinguish the accidental from the essential in our relations with other races. I speak with no lack of sympathy for the genuine and bitter trials of our Southern brethren when I say that I suppose the mistake which I now point out, the mistake of confusing the essential and the accidental, is the mistake that they are now making in many of their sincerest expressions of concern over their race-problem. So much for the two lessons that have led me to the present discussion. But now let me pass to a somewhat wider view of race-problems. Let me ask a little more generally, What, if anything, can be

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known to be essential about the characteristics of a race of men and consequently an essentially important consideration in our dealings with alien races? Speaking so far as we can, apart from prejudice, what can we say about what it is which distinguishes the various races of men from one another? V The term ‘‘race’’ is popularly used in a very vague way. The newspapers not long ago said, during trouble in Poland, that the Russian soldiers then in Warsaw showed ‘‘race-antipathy’’ in their conflicts with the people. We all know, however, that the mutual hatred of Russians and Poles is due mainly to political and to religious causes. Frenchmen of the northern provinces, who are anthropologically wholly indistinguishable, as Professor Ripley tells us, from the inhabitants of many western German districts, still have what they call a ‘‘race-antipathy’’ for the men across the border. Thus almost any national or political or religious barrier, if it is old enough, may lead to a consciousness of difference of race. On the other hand, there are, of course, unquestionable physical varieties of mankind, distinguished by well-known physical contrasts. But the anthropologists still almost hopelessly disagree as to what the accurate classification of these true races may be. Such a classification, however, does not concern us here. We are now interested in the minds of men. We want to know what the races of men are socially good for. And not in the study of skulls or of hair, or of skin color, and not in the survey of all these bewildering complications with which physical anthropology deals, shall we easily find an answer to our more practical questions, viz., to our questions regarding the way in which these various races of men are related to the interests of civilization, and regarding the spirit in which we ought to estimate and practically to deal with these racial traits of mankind. For after all, it is a man’s mind, rather than his skull, or his hair, or his skin, that we most need to estimate. And if hereupon we ask ourselves just how these physical varieties of the human stock, just

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how these shades of color, these types of hair, these forms of skull, or these contours of body, are related to the mental powers and to the moral characteristics of the men in question, then, if only we set prejudice wholly aside, and appeal to science to help us, we find ourselves in the present state of knowledge almost hopelessly at sea. We know too little as yet about the natural history of the human mind, our psychology is far too infantile a science, to give us any precise information as to the way in which the inherited, the native, the constitutional aspects of the minds of men really vary with their complexions or with their hair. Yet that, of course, is just what we most want to know. It is easy to show that an Australian is just now far below our mental level. But how far is his degradation due to the inherited and unchangeable characters of his race, and how far to his long struggle with the dreary desert? How far is he, as we now find him, a degenerate, whose ancestors were on some far higher level? In other words, is his type of mind a true variety of the human mind, inbred and unchangeable? How far is it, so to speak, a mere incident? Upon what level were the minds of our own ancestors in the early stone age of Europe? How did their minds then compare with the minds of those ancestors of the Australian who were then their contemporaries? Who shall answer such questions? Yet just such questions we should have to answer before we could decide upon the true relations of race and of mind. To be sure, anthropology has made a beginning, and a very important beginning, in the study of the mental types of primitive man. By various comparative and archaeological methods we can already learn a good deal about the minds of our own ancestors. We can also study various races as they are to-day. We know, about the early stages of human culture, far more than we knew a little while since. But one result may forthwith be stated regarding what we have so far learned concerning the early history of the human mind, whether it is the mind of our ancestors, or of other races. Of course, we cannot doubt that, just as now we widely differ in mental life, so always there must have been great contrasts between the minds of the various stocks of men. No doubt, if the science of man were exact, it would indeed

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include a race-psychology. But my present scepticism concerns the present state of science, and the result of such study as we have yet made of the racial psychology of man is distinctly disappointing to those who want to make their task easy by insisting that the physical varieties of mankind are in our present state of knowledge sufficient guides to an interpretation of the whole inner contrast of the characters and of the mental processes of men. For what anthropology thus far shows us is, that, so soon as you go back beyond those stages of cultivation where history is possible, and so soon as you view men as they are apart from the higher culture—well, then, all men, so far as we can yet study them, appear to us not, of course, the same in mind, but yet surprisingly alike in their minds, in their morals, and in their arts. Widely as the primitive men differ, in certain broad features they remain, for our present knowledge, notably similar. And these common features are such as are by no means altogether flattering to our racial pride, when we think that our own ancestors, too, were, not very long since, comparatively, primitive men like the rest. All the more primitive men, namely, are largely alike in the grossness and in the unpromising stupidity of their superstitions, and in their moral defects and virtues. Very many of them, belonging to the most various races, resemble one another in possessing customs which we now, for the most part, profoundly abhor, and which we are at present prone to view as characteristic of essentially debased minds. Such customs as cannibalism, or as human sacrifice, or as the systematic torturing of prisoners of war, such horrors as those of the witchcraft from whose bondage Europeans escaped only since the seventeenth century—such things, I say, are characteristic of no one race of men. To surround one’s life with a confused mass of spiritual horrors, to believe in ghosts, or in vampires, in demons, in magic, in witchcraft, and in hostile gods of all sorts, to tangle up one’s daily activities in a net of superstitious customs, to waste time in elaborate incantations, to live in fantastic terrors of an unseen world, to be terrified by tabus of all kinds, so that numerous sorts of useful deeds are superstitiously forbidden, to narrate impossible stories and believe in them, to live in filth, to persecute, to resist light, to fight against

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progress, to be mentally slothful, dull, sensuous, cruel, to be the prey of endless foolishness, to be treacherous, to be destructive—well, these are the mental traits of no one or two races of men. These are simply the common evil, traits of primitive humanity, traits to which our own ancestors were very long ago a prey, traits against which civilized man has still constantly to fight. Any frenzied mob of civilized men may relapse in an hour to the level of a very base savagery. All the religions of men, without exception, and however lofty the heights that they have since climbed, appear to have begun with much the same chaos of weird customs and of unreasonable delusions. Man’s mental burdens have thus been, in all races, of very much the same sort, except, to be sure, that civilization, side by side with the good that it has created, has invented some new mental burdens, such as our increasing percentage of insanity in recent times illustrates. The souls of men, then, if viewed apart from the influences of culture, if viewed as they were in primitive times, are by no means as easy to classify as the woolly-haired and the straight-haired races at first appear to be. If you study the thoughts of the various peoples, as the anthropologist Bastian has loved to mass them together in his chaotic and learned monographs, or as Fraser has surveyed some of them in his ‘‘Golden Bough,’’ well, these primitive thoughts appear, in all their own chaos, and in all their vast varieties of detail, to be the outcome not of racial differences so much as of a few essentially human, although by no means always very lofty, motives. These fundamental motives appear, with almost monotonous regularity, in the superstitions, the customs, the legends, of all races. Esquimaux and Australians, negroes and Scotch Highlanders of former days, ancient Japanese and Hindoos, Polynesians and early Greeks,—all these appear side by side, in such comparative studies of the primitive mind of man, side by side as brothers in error and in ignorance, so soon as you proceed to study by the comparative method their early magic, their old beliefs, their early customs. Yet only by such a study could you hope to distinguish what really belongs to the mind of a race of men, as distinct from what belongs to culture.

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If, then, it is the mind and the heart of man that you really want to know, you will find it hard, so soon as you leave civilization out of account, to tell what the precise meaning of the term ‘‘race of men’’ is, when that term is conceived as characterizing a distinct hereditary variety of human mental constitution. A race-psychology is still a science for the future to discover. Perhaps, however, as you may say, I have not been just, in this very summary statement, to what, after all, may prove to be the best test of the true racial differences amongst the various types of the human mind. Some races, namely, have proved themselves to be capable of civilization. Other races have stubbornly refused civilization, or have remained helplessly degraded even when surrounded by civilization. Others still have perished at the first contact with civilization. The Germanic ancestors of the present western Europeans were barbarians, although of a high type. But when they met civilization, they first adopted, and then improved it. Not so was it with the Indians, with the Polynesians. Here, then, is the test of a true mental difference amongst races. Watch them when they meet civilization. Do they show themselves first teachable and then originative? Then they are mentally higher races. Do they stagnate or die out in the presence of civilization? Then they are of the lower types. Such differences, you will say, are deep and ineradicable, like the differences between the higher and the lower sorts of individual men. And such differences will enable us to define racial types of mind. I fully agree that this test is an important one. Unfortunately, the test has never been so fairly applied by the civilized nations of men that it can give us any exact results. Again, the facts are too complex to be estimated with accuracy. Our Germanic ancestors accepted civilization when they met with it. Yes, but they met civilization under conditions peculiarly favorable to their own education. They had been more or less remotely influenced by its existence, centuries before they entered the field of history. When they entered this field, they met civilization first as formidable foes; they were long in contact with it without being themselves enslaved; and then later, in numerous cases, they met civilization as conquerors, who, in the course of

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their very efforts to conquer, found thus the opportunity and later something of the leisure to learn, and who had time to discover by centuries of hard experience, how great were the advantages the cultivation of the Roman empire had to offer them. But suppose that Caesar in the first century B.C. had already had the opportunity to undertake the civilization of Germany by means of our own modern devices. Suppose that he had then possessed unlimited supplies of rum, of rifles, and of machine guns. Suppose in brief that, by the aid of such gentle arts as we now often use, he had very greatly abbreviated the period of probation and of schooling that was open to the German barbarians to learn the lessons that the cultivated peoples had to teach. Suppose that Roman syndicates had been ready to take possession, at once, of the partly depopulated lands of the north, and to keep the few surviving natives thenceforth in their place, by showing them how cultivated races can look down upon savage folk. Well, in that case, the further history of civilization might have gone on without the aid of the Germanic peoples. The latter would then have quickly proved their natural inferiority once for all. They would have furnished one instance more for the race-partisans to cite in order to show how incapable the lower races are of ascending from barbarism to civilization. Dead men not only tell no tales; they also, strange to say, attend no schools, and learn no lessons. And hereby they prove themselves in the eyes of certain students of race-questions to have been always of a much lower mental type than the cultivated men who killed them. Their surviving descendants, if sufficiently provided with the means of corruption, and if sufficiently down-trodden, may remain henceforth models of degradation. For man, whatever his race, is an animal that you unquestionably can debase to whatever level you please, if you only have power, and if you then begin early enough, and devote yourself persistently enough to the noble and civilized task of proving him to be debased. I do not doubt, then, that some races are more teachable than others. But I do very much doubt our power to estimate how teachable a race is, or what can be made of them, or what hereditary mental powers they have until we have given them centuries of opportunity

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to be taught. Fortune and the defects of the Roman Empire gave to the Germanic peoples an extraordinary opportunity to learn. So the world found out how teachable they were. Let their descendants not boast unduly until they, too, have given to other races, not indeed the opportunities of conquerors, but some equal opportunity to show of what sort of manhood they are capable. Yet, you may insist, civilization itself had an origin. Were not the races that first won civilized rank superior in mental type to those that never showed themselves capable of such originality? Well, I reply, we do not know as yet precisely where, and still less how, civilization originated. But this seems clear, viz.: first, that physical environment and the forms of social aggregation which this environment determined, had a very great share in making the beginnings of civilization possible; while, secondly, whatever part race-qualities played in early civilization, certainly no one race has the honor of beginning the process. Neither Chinese nor Egyptian, neither Caucasian nor Mongol, was the sole originator of civilization. The African of the tropical swamps and forests, the Australian of the desert, the Indian of our prairies, was sufficiently prevented by his physical environment from being the originator of a great civilization. What each of these races would have done in another environment, we cannot tell. But the Indian of Central America, of Mexico, and of Peru, shows us that race alone did not predetermine how remote from the origination of a higher civilization a stock must needs remain. Chinese civilization, and, in recent times, Japanese civilization, have shown us that one need not be a Caucasian in order to originate a higher type of wisdom. In brief, then, there is hardly any one thing that our actual knowledge of the human mind enables us to assert, with any scientific exactness, regarding the permanent, the hereditary, the unchangeable mental characteristics which distinguish even the most widely sundered physical varieties of mankind. There is, to be sure, one exception to this rule, which is itself instructive. It is the case where we are dealing with physical and social degeneracy, the result of circumstances and of environment, and where such degeneracy has already

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gone so far that we have before us highly diseased human types, such as can no longer be reclaimed. But such types are not racial types. They are results of alcohol, of infection, or in some instances, of the long-continued pressure of physical environment. In such cases we can sometimes say, Here is a hopelessly degraded stock of men. But, then, civilization can create such stocks, out of any race of men, by means of a sufficient amount of oppression and of other causes of degradation, if continued through generations. No race of men, then, can lay claim to a fixed and hereditary type of mental life such as we can now know with exactness to be unchangeable. We do not scientifically know what the true racial varieties of mental type really are. No doubt there are such varieties. The judgment day, or the science of the future, may demonstrate what they are. We are at present very ignorant regarding the whole matter. VI What, then, in the light of these considerations, is there which can be called fundamentally significant about our numerous modern raceproblems? I answer, scientifically viewed, these problems of ours turn out to be not so much problems caused by anything which is essential to the existence or to the nature of the races of men themselves. Our so-called race-problems are merely the problems caused by our antipathies. Now, the mental antipathies of men, like the fears of men, are every elemental, widespread, and momentous mental phenomena. But they are also in their fundamental nature extremely capricious, and extremely suggestible mental phenomena. Let an individual man alone, and he will feel antipathies for certain other human beings very much as any young child does—namely, quite capriciously—just as he will also feel all sorts of capricious likings for people. But train a man first to give names to his antipathies, and then to regard the antipathies thus named as sacred merely because they have a name, and then you get the phenomena of racial hatred, of religious hatred, of class hatred, and so on indefinitely. Such trained hatreds are peculiarly pathetic and peculiarly deceitful, because they combine in such

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a subtle way the elemental vehemence of the hatred that a child may feel for a stranger, or a cat for a dog, with the appearance of dignity and solemnity and even of duty which a name gives. Such antipathies will always play their part in human history. But what we can do about them is to try not to be fooled by them, not to take them too seriously because of their mere name. We can remember that they are childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with a dread of snakes, or of mice; phenomena that we share with the cats and with the dogs, not noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature. Upon the theoretical aspects of the problem which such antipathies present, psychology can already throw some light. Man, as a social being, needs and possesses a vast range of simply elemental tendencies to be socially sensitive when in the presence of other men. These elemental tendencies appear, more or less untrained, in the bashfulness of childhood, in the stage fright of the unskilled, in the emotional disturbances of young people who are finding their way in the world, in the surprises of early love, in the various sorts of anthropophobia which beset nervous patients, in the antipathies of country folk toward strangers, in the excitements of mobs, in countless other cases of social stress or of social novelty. Such sensitiveness may arise in advance of or apart from any individual experience which gives a conscious reason why one should feel thus. A common feature of all such experiences is the fact that one human being finds other human beings to be portentous, even when the socially sensitive being does not in the least know why they should be so. That such reactions have an instinctive basis is unquestionable. Their general use is that they prepare one, through interest in men, to be ready for social training, and to be submissively plastic. In milder forms, or upon the basis of agreeable social relations, such instinctive emotions easily come to be moulded into the most fascinating of human interests; and the social life is impossible without this basis of the elemental concerns which man feels merely because of the fact that other men are there in his world. If decidedly intense, however, such

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instinctively determined experiences are apt, like other intense disturbances, to be prevailingly painful. And since novelty, oddity, and lack of social training on the part of the subject concerned are motives which tend to make such social reflexes intense, a very great number of the cruder and more childish social reactions involve antipathies; for a social antipathy is merely a painful, and so, in general, an overintense, reflex disturbance in the presence of another human being. No light need be thrown, by the mere occurrence of such an antipathy, upon any permanently important social character of the hated object. The chance intensity of the passing experience may be alone significant. And any chance association may serve to secure, in a given case, the intensity of disturbance which makes the object hated. Oddities of feature or of complexion, slight physical variations from the customary, a strange dress, a scar, a too steady look, a limp, a loud or deep voice, any of these peculiarities, in a stranger, may be, to one child, or nervous subject, or other sensitive observer, an object of fascinated curiosity; to another, slightly less stable observer, an intense irritation, an object of terror, or of violent antipathy. The significant fact is that we are all instinctively more or less sensitive to such features, simply because we are by heredity doomed to be interested in all facts which may prove to be socially important. Whether we are fascinated, or horror-stricken, or angry, is, apart from training, largely a matter of the momentary subjective intensity of the disturbance. But all such elemental social experiences are ipso facto, highly suggestible. Our social training largely consists in the elimination or in the intensification or in the systematizing of these original reactions through the influence of suggestion and of habit. Hence the antipathy, once by chance aroused, but then named, imitated, insisted upon, becomes to its victims a sort of sacred revelation of truth, sacred merely because it is felt, a revelation merely because it has won a name and a social standing. What such sacred revelations, however, really mean, is proved by the fact that the hungry traveller, if deprived of his breakfast long enough, by means of an accidental delay of his train, or the tired

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camper in the forest, may readily come to feel whatever racial antipathy you please toward his own brother, if the latter then wounds social susceptibilities which the abnormal situation has made momentarily hyperaesthetic. I have said little or nothing, in this paper, of human justice. I have spoken mainly of human illusions. We all have illusions, and hug them. Let us not sanctify them by the name of science. For my part, then, I am a member of the human race, and this is a race which is, as a whole, considerably lower than the angels, so that the whole of it very badly needs race-elevation. In this need of my race I personally and very deeply share. And it is in this spirit only that I am able to approach our problem.

II provincialism




I

propose, in this address, to define certain issues which, as I think, the present state of the world’s civilization, and of our own national life, make both prominent and critical.

I The word ‘‘provincialism,’’ which I have used as my title, has been chosen because it is the best single word that I have been able to find to suggest the group of social tendencies to which I want to call your especial attention. I intend to use this word in a somewhat elastic sense, which I may at once indicate. When we employ the word ‘‘provincialism’’ as a concrete term, speaking of ‘‘a provincialism,’’ we mean, I suppose, any social disposition, or custom, or form of speech or of civilization, which is especially characteristic of a province. In this sense one speaks of the provincialisms of the local dialect of any English shire, or of any German country district. This use of the term { 69 }

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in relation to the dialects of any language is very common. But one may also apply the term to name, not only the peculiarities of a local dialect, but the fashions, the manners, and customs of a given restricted region of any country. One also often employs the word ‘‘provincialism’’ as an abstract term, to name not only the customs or social tendencies themselves, but that fondness for them, that pride in them, which may make the inhabitants of a province indisposed to conform to the ways of those who come from without, and anxious to follow persistently their own local traditions. Thus the word ‘‘provincialism’’ applies both to the social habits of a given region, and to the mental interest which inspires and maintains these habits. But both uses of the term imply, of course, that one first knows what is to be meant by the word ‘‘province.’’ This word, however, is one of an especially elastic usage. Sometimes, by a province, we mean a region as restricted as a single English county, or as the smallest of the old German principalities. Sometimes, however, one speaks of the whole of New England, or even of the Southern states of our Union, as constituting one province; and I know of no easy way of defining how large a province may be. For the term, in this looser sense, stands for no determinate political or legal division of a country. Meanwhile we all, in our minds, oppose the term ‘‘province’’ to the term ‘‘nation,’’ as the part is opposed to the whole. Yet we also often oppose the terms ‘‘provincial’’ and ‘‘metropolitan,’’ conceiving that the country districts and the smaller towns and cities belong even to the province, while the very great cities belong rather to the whole country, or even to the world in general. Yet here the distinction that we make is not the same as the former distinction between the part of a country and the whole country. Nevertheless, the ground for such an identification of the provincial with that which pertains to country districts and to smaller cities can only lie in the supposed tendency of the great city to represent better the interests of the larger whole than do the lesser communities. This supposition, however, is certainly not altogether well founded. In the sense of possessing local interests and customs, and of being limited to ideas of their own, many great cities are almost as distinctly provincial as are certain less populous regions.

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The plain people of London or of Berlin have their local dialect; and it seems fair to speak of the peculiarities of such dialects as provincialisms. And almost the same holds true of the other social traditions peculiar to individual great cities. It is possible to find, even amongst the highly cultivated classes of ancient cities, ideas and fashions of behavior as characteristically local, as exclusive in their indifference to the ways of outsiders, as are the similarly characteristic ways and opinions of the country districts of the same nationality. And so the opposition of the provincial to the metropolitan, in manners and in beliefs, seems to me much less important than the other opposition of the province, as the more or less restricted part, to the nation as the whole. It is this latter opposition that I shall therefore emphasize in the present discussion. But I shall not attempt to define how large or how well organized, politically, a province must be. For my present purpose a county, a state, or even a large section of the country, such as New England, might constitute a province. For me, then, a province shall mean any one part of a national domain, which is, geographically and socially, sufficiently unified to have a true consciousness of its own unity, to feel a pride in its own ideals and customs, and to possess a sense of its distinction from other parts of the country. And by the term ‘‘provincialism’’ I shall mean, first, the tendency of such a province to possess its own customs and ideals; secondly, the totality of these customs and ideals themselves; and thirdly, the love and pride which leads the inhabitants of a province to cherish as their own these traditions, beliefs, and aspirations. II I have defined the term used as my title. But now, in what sense do I propose to make provincialism our topic? You will foresee that I intend to discuss the worth of provincialism, i.e. to consider, to some extent, whether it constitutes a good or an evil element in civilization. You will properly expect me, therefore, to compare provincialism with other social tendencies; such tendencies as patriotism, the larger love of humanity, and the ideals of higher cultivation. Precisely these

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will constitute, in fact, the special topics of my address. But all that I have to say will group itself about a single thesis, which I shall forthwith announce. My thesis is that, in the present state of the world’s civilization, and of the life of our own country, the time has come to emphasize, with a new meaning and intensity, the positive value, the absolute necessity for our welfare, of a wholesome provincialism, as a saving power to which the world in the near future will need more and more to appeal. The time was (and not very long since), when, in our own country, we had to contend against very grave evils due to false forms of provincialism. What has been called sectionalism long threatened our national unity. Our Civil War was fought to overcome the ills due to such influences. There was, therefore, a time when the virtue of true patriotism had to be founded upon a vigorous condemnation of certain powerful forms of provincialism. And our national education at that time depended both upon our learning common federal ideals, and upon our looking to foreign lands for the spiritual guidance of older civilizations. Furthermore, not only have these things been so in the past, but similar needs will, of course, be felt in the future. We shall always be required to take counsel of the other nations in company with whom we are at work upon the tasks of civilization. Nor have we outgrown our spiritual dependence upon older forms of civilization. In fact we shall never outgrow a certain inevitable degree of such dependence. Our national unity, moreover, will always require of us a devotion that will transcend in some directions the limits of all our provincial ideas. A common sympathy between the different sections of our country will, in future, need a constantly fresh cultivation. Against the evil forms of sectionalism we shall always have to contend. All this I well know, and these things I need not in your presence emphasize. But what I am to emphasize is this: The present state of civilization, both in the world at large, and with us, in America, is such as to define a new social mission which the province alone, but not the nation, is able to fulfil. False sectionalism, which disunites, will indeed always remain as great an evil as ever it was. But the modern world has reached a point where it needs, more than ever

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before, the vigorous development of a highly organized provincial life. Such a life, if wisely guided, will not mean disloyalty to the nation; and it need not mean narrowness of spirit, nor yet the further development of jealousies between various communities. What it will mean, or at least may mean,—this, so far as I have time, I wish to set forth in the following discussion. My main intention is to define the right form and the true office of provincialism,—to portray what, if you please, we may well call the Higher Provincialism,—to portray it, and then to defend it, to extol it, and to counsel you to further just such provincialism. Since this is my purpose, let me at once say that I address myself, in the most explicit terms, to men and women who, as I hope and presuppose, are and wish to be, in the wholesome sense, provincial. Every one, as I maintain, ought, ideally speaking, to be provincial,— and that no matter how cultivated, or humanitarian, or universal in purpose or in experience he may be or may become. If in our own country, where often so many people are still comparative strangers to the communities in which they have come to live, there are some of us who, like myself, have changed our provinces during our adult years, and who have so been unable to become and to remain in the sense of European countries provincial; and if, moreover, the life of our American provinces everywhere has still too brief a tradition,— all that is our misfortune, and not our advantage. As our country grows in social organization, there will be, in absolute measure, more and not less provincialism amongst our people. To be sure, as I hope, there will also be, in absolute measure, more and not less patriotism, closer and not looser national ties, less and not more mutual sectional misunderstanding. But the two tendencies, the tendency toward national unity and that toward local independence of spirit, must henceforth grow together. They cannot prosper apart. The national unity must not kill out, nor yet hinder, the provincial self-consciousness. The loyalty to the Republic must not lessen the love and the local pride of the individual community. The man of the future must love his province more than he does to-day. His provincial customs and ideals must be more and not less highly developed, more and not

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less self-conscious, well-established, and earnest. And therefore, I say, I appeal to you as to a company of people who are, and who mean to be, provincial as well as patriotic,—servants and lovers of your own community and of its ways, as well as citizens of the world. I hope and believe that you all intend to have your community live its own life, and not the life of any other community, nor yet the life of a mere abstraction called humanity in general. I hope that you are fully aware how provincialism, like monogamy, is an essential basis of true civilization. And it is with this presupposition that I undertake to suggest something toward a definition and defence of the higher provincialism and of its office in civilization. III With this programme in mind, let me first tell you what seem to me to be in our modern world, and, in particular, in our American world, the principal evils which are to be corrected by a further development of a true provincial spirit, and which cannot be corrected without such a development. The first of these evils I have already mentioned. It is a defect incidental, partly to the newness of our own country, but partly also to those world-wide conditions of modern life which make travel, and even a change of home, both attractive and easy to dwellers in the most various parts of the globe. In nearly every one of our American communities, at least in the northern and in the western regions of our country, there is a rather large proportion of people who either have not grown up where they were born, or who have changed their dwelling-place in adult years. I can speak all the more freely regarding this class of our communities, because, in my own community, I myself, as a native of California, now resident in New England, belong to such a class. Such classes, even in modern New England, are too large. The stranger, the sojourner, the newcomer, is an inevitable factor in the life of most American communities. To make him welcome is one of the most gracious of the tasks in which our people have become expert. To give him his fair chance is the rule of our national

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life. But it is not on the whole well when the affairs of a community remain too largely under the influence of those who mainly feel either the wanderer’s or the new resident’s interest in the region where they are now dwelling. To offset the social tendencies due to such frequent changes of dwelling-place we need the further development and the intensification of the community spirit. The sooner the new resident learns to share this spirit, the better for him and for his community. A sound instinct, therefore, guides even our newer communities, in the more fortunate cases, to a rapid development of such a local sentiment as makes the stranger feel that he must in due measure conform if he would be permanently welcome, and must accept the local spirit if he is to enjoy the advantages of his community. As a Californian I have been interested to see both the evidences and the nature of this rapid evolution of the genuine provincial spirit in my own state. How swiftly, in that country, the Californians of the early days seized upon every suggestion that could give a sense of the unique importance of their new provincial life. The associations that soon clustered about the tales of the life of Spanish missionaries and Mexican colonists in the years before 1846,—these our American Californians cherished from the outset. This, to us often half-legendary past, gave us a history of our own. The wondrous events of the early mining life,—how earnestly the pioneers later loved to rehearse that story; and how proud every young Californian soon became of the fact that his father had had his part therein. Even the Californian’s well-known and largely justified glorification of his climate was, in his own mind, part of the same expression of his tendency to idealize whatever tended to make his community, and all its affairs, seem unique, beloved, and deeply founded upon some significant natural basis. Such a foundation was, indeed, actually there; nature had, indeed, richly blessed his land; but the real interest that made one emphasize and idealize all these things, often so boastfully, was the interest of the loyal citizen in finding his community an object of pride. Now you, who know well your own local history, will be able to observe the growth amongst you of this tendency to idealize your past, to glorify the bounties that nature has showered upon you, all in such wise as to

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give the present life of your community more dignity, more honor, more value in the eyes of yourselves and of strangers. In fact, that we all do thus glorify our various provinces, we well know; and with what feelings we accompany the process, we can all observe for ourselves. But it is well to remember that the special office, the principal use, the social justification, of such mental tendencies in ourselves lies in the aid that they give us in becoming loyal to our community, and in assimilating to our own social order the strangers that are within our gates. It is the especial art of the colonizing peoples, such as we are, and such as the English are, to be able by devices of this sort rapidly to build up in their own minds a provincial loyalty in a new environment. The French, who are not a colonizing people, seem to possess much less of this tendency. The Chinese seem to lack it almost altogether. Our own success as possessors of new lands depends upon this one skill in making the new lands where we came to dwell soon seem to us glorious and unique. I was much impressed, some years ago, during a visit to Australia and New Zealand, with the parallel developments in the Australasian colonies. They too have already their glorious past history, their unique fortunes, their romances of the heroic days,—and, in consequence, their provincial loyalty and their power to assimilate their newcomers. So learn to view your new community that every stranger who enters it shall at once feel the dignity of its past, and the unique privilege that is offered to him when he is permitted to belong to its company of citizens,—this is the first rule of the people of every colonizing nation when they found a new province. Thus, then, I have pointed out the first evil with which our provincialism has to deal—the evil due to the presence of a considerable number of not yet assimilated newcomers in most of our communities. The newcomers themselves are often a boon and welcome indeed. But their failure to be assimilated constitutes, so long as it endures, a source of social danger, because the community needs well-knit organization. We meet this danger by the development of a strong provincial spirit amongst those who already constitute the centralized portion of the community. For thus a dignity is given to

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the social order which makes the newcomer long to share in its honors by deserving its confidence. But this aspect of provincialism, this usefulness of local pride, is indeed the best known aspect of my topic. I pass at once to the less frequently recognized uses of the provincial spirit, by mentioning the second of the evils with which a wise provincialism is destined to contend. IV This second modern evil arises from, and constitutes, one aspect of the levelling tendency of recent civilization. That such a levelling tendency exists, most of us recognize. That it is the office of the province to contend against some of the attendant evils of this tendency, we less often observe. By the levelling tendency in question I mean that aspect of modern civilization which is most obviously suggested by the fact that, because of the ease of communication amongst distant places, because of the spread of popular education, and because of the consolidation and of the centralization of industries and of social authorities, we tend all over the nation, and, in some degree, even throughout the civilized world, to read the same daily news, to share the same general ideas, to submit to the same overmastering social forces, to live in the same external fashions, to discourage individuality, and to approach a dead level of harassed mediocrity. One of the most marked of all social tendencies is in any age that toward the mutual assimilation of men in so far as they are in social relations with one another. One of the strongest human predispositions is that toward imitation. But our modern conditions have greatly favored the increase of the numbers of people who read the same books and newspapers, who repeat the same phrases, who follow the same social fashions, and who thus, in general, imitate one another in constantly more and more ways. The result is a tendency to crush the individual. Furthermore there are modern economic and industrial developments, too well known to all of you to need any detailed mention here, which lead toward similar results. The independence of the small trader or manufacturer becomes lost in the great commercial

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or industrial combination. The vast corporation succeeds and displaces the individual. Ingenuity and initiative become subordinated to the discipline of an impersonal social order. And each man, becoming, like his fellow, the servant of masters too powerful for him to resist, and too complex in their undertakings for him to understand, is, in so far, disposed unobtrusively to conform to the ways of his innumerable fellow-servants, and to lose all sense of his unique moral destiny as an individual. I speak here merely of tendencies. As you know, they are nowhere unopposed tendencies. Nor do I for an instant pretend to call even these levelling tendencies wholly, or principally, evil. But for the moment I call attention to what are obviously questionable, and in some degree are plainly evil, aspects of these modern tendencies. Imitation is a good thing. All civilization depends upon it. But there may be a limit to the number of people who ought to imitate precisely the same body of ideas and customs. For imitation is not man’s whole business. There ought to be some room left for variety. Modern conditions have often increased too much what one might call the purely mechanical carrying-power of certain ruling social influences. There are certain metropolitan newspapers, for instance, which have far too many readers for the good of the social order in which they circulate. These newspapers need not always be very mischievous ones. But when read by too vast multitudes, they tend to produce a certain monotonously uniform triviality of mind in a large proportion of our city and suburban population. It would be better if the same readers were divided into smaller sections, which read different newspapers, even if these papers were of no higher level. For then there would at least be a greater variety in the sorts of triviality which from day to day occupied their minds. And variety is the beginning of individual independence of insight and of conviction. As for the masses of people who are under the domination of the great corporations that employ them, I am here not in the least dwelling upon their economic difficulties. I am pointing out that the lack of initiative in their lives tends to make their spiritual range narrower. They are too little disposed to create their own world. Now every man who gets into a vital

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relation to God’s truth becomes, in his own way, a creator. And if you deprive a man of all incentive to create, you in so far tend to cut him off from God’s truth. Or, in more common language, independence of spirit flourishes only when a man at least believes that he has a chance to change his fortunes if he persistently wills to do so. But the servant of some modern forms of impersonal social organization tends to lose this belief that he has a chance. Hence he tends to lose independence of spirit. Well, this is the second of the evils of the modern world which, as I have said, provincialism may tend to counteract. Local spirit, local pride, provincial independence, influence the individual man precisely because they appeal to his imitative tendencies. But thereby they act so as to render him more or less immune in presence of the more trivial of the influences that, coming from without his community, would otherwise be likely to reduce him to the dead level of the customs of the whole nation. A country district may seem to a stranger unduly crude in its ways; but it does not become wiser in case, under the influence of city newspapers and of summer boarders, it begins to follow city fashions merely for the sake of imitating. Other things being equal, it is better in proportion as it remains selfpossessed,—proud of its own traditions, not unwilling indeed to learn, but also quite ready to teach the stranger its own wisdom. And in similar fashion provincial pride helps the individual man to keep his self-respect even when the vast forces that work toward industrial consolidation, and toward the effacement of individual initiative, are besetting his life at every turn. For a man is in large measure what his social consciousness makes him. Give him the local community that he loves and cherishes, that he is proud to honor and to serve,—make his ideal of that community lofty,—give him faith in the dignity of his province,—and you have given him a power to counteract the levelling tendencies of modern civilization. V The third of the evils with which a wise provincialism must contend is closely connected with the second. I have spoken of the constant

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tendency of modern life to the mutual assimilation of various parts of the social order. Now this assimilation may occur slowly and steadily, as in great measure it normally does; or, on the other hand, it may take more sudden and striking forms, at moments when the popular mind is excited, when great emotions affect the social order. At such times of emotional disturbance, society is subject to tendencies which have recently received a good deal of psychological study. They are the tendencies to constitute what has often been called the spirit of the crowd or of the mob. Modern readers of the well-known book of Le Bon’s on ‘‘The Crowd’’ well know what the tendencies to which I refer may accomplish. It is true that the results of Le Bon are by no means wholly acceptable. It is true that the psychology of large social masses is still insufficiently understood, and that a great many hasty statements have been made about the fatal tendency of great companies of people to go wrong. Yet in the complex world of social processes there can be no doubt that there exist such processes as the ones which Le Bon characterizes. The mob-spirit is a genuine psychological fact which occasionally becomes important in the life of all numerous communities. Moreover, the mob-spirit is no new thing. It has existed in some measure from the very beginning of social life. But there are certain modern conditions which tend to give the mobspirit new form and power, and to lead to new social dangers that are consequent upon the presence of this spirit. I use the term ‘‘mob-spirit’’ as an abbreviation for a very large range of phenomena, phenomena which may indeed be classed with all the rest of the imitative phenomena as belonging to one genus. But the mob-phenomena are distinguished from the other imitative phenomena by certain characteristic emotional tendencies which belong to excited crowds of people, and which do not belong to the more strictly normal social activities. Man, as an imitative animal, naturally tends, as we have seen, to do whatever his companions do, so long as he is not somehow aroused to independence and to individuality. Accordingly, he easily shares the beliefs and temperaments of those who are near enough to him to influence him. But now suppose a condition of things such as may readily occur in any large

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group of people who have somehow come to feel strong sympathy with one another, and who are for any reason in a relatively passive and impressible state of mind. In such a company of people let any idea which has a strong emotional coloring come to be suggested, by the words of the leader, by the singing of a song, by the beginning of any social activity that does not involve clear thinking, that does not call upon a man to assert his own independence. Such an idea forthwith tends to take possession in an extraordinarily strong degree of every member of the social group in question. As a consequence, the individual may come to be, as it were, hypnotized by his social group. He may reach a stage where he not merely lacks a disposition to individual initiative, but becomes for the time simply unable to assert himself, to think his own thoughts, or even to remember his ordinary habits and principles of conduct. His judgment for the time becomes one with that of the mass. He may not himself observe this fact. Like the hypnotized subject, the member of the excited mob may feel as if he were very independently expressing himself. He may say: ‘‘This idea is my own idea,’’ when as a fact the ruling idea is suggested by the leaders of the mob, or even by the accident of the momentary situation. The individual may be led to acts of which he says: ‘‘These things are my duty, my sacred privilege, my right,’’ when as a fact the acts in question are forced upon him by the suggestions of the social mass of which at the instant he is merely a helpless member. As the hypnotized subject, again, thinks his will free when an observer can see that he is obliged to follow the suggestions of the hypnotizer, so the member of the mob may feel all the sense of pure initiative, although as a fact he is in bondage to the will of another, to the motives of the moment. All such phenomena are due to very deep-seated and common human tendencies. It is no individual reproach to any one of us that, under certain conditions, he would lose his individuality and become the temporary prey of the mob-spirit. Moreover, by the word ‘‘mob’’ itself, or by the equivalent word ‘‘crowd,’’ I here mean no term that reflects upon the personal characters or upon the private intelligence of the individuals who chance to compose any given mob. In former

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ages when the defenders of aristocratic or of monarchical institutions used to speak with contempt of the mob, and oppose to the mob the enlightened portion of the community, the wise who ought to rule, or the people whom birth and social position secured against the defects of the mob, the term was used without a true understanding of the reason why crowds of people are upon occasion disposed to do things that are less intelligent than the acts of normal and thoughtful people would be. For the modern student of the psychology of crowds, a crowd or a mob means not in any wise a company of wicked, of debased, or even of ignorant persons. The term means merely a company of people who, by reason of their sympathies, have for the time being resigned their individual judgment. A mob might be a mob of saints or of cutthroats, of peasants or of men of science. If it were a mob it would lack due social wisdom whatever its membership might be. For the members of the mob are sympathizing rather than criticising. Their ruling ideas then, therefore, are what Le Bon calls atavistic ideas; ideas such as belong to earlier and cruder periods of civilization. Opposed to the mob in which the good sense of individuals is lost in a blur of emotion, and in a helpless suggestibility,—opposed to the mob, I say, is the small company of thoughtful individuals who are taking counsel together. Now our modern life, with its vast unions of people, with its high development of popular sentiments, with its passive and sympathetic love for knowing and feeling whatever other men know and feel, is subject to the disorders of larger crowds, of more dangerous mobs, than have ever before been brought into sympathetic union. One great problem of our time, then, is how to carry on popular government without being at the mercy of the mob-spirit. It is easy to give this mob-spirit noble names. Often you hear of it as ‘‘grand popular enthusiasm.’’ Often it is highly praised as a loyal party spirit or as patriotism. But psychologically it is the mob-spirit whenever it is the spirit of a large company of people who are no longer either taking calm counsel together in small groups, or obeying an already established law or custom, but who are merely sympathizing with one another, listening to the

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words of leaders, and believing the large print headings of their newspapers. Every such company of people is, in so far, a mob. Though they spoke with the tongues of men and of angels, you could not then trust them. Wisdom is not in them nor in their mood. However highly trained they may be as individuals, their mental processes, as a mob, are degraded. Their suffrages, as a mob, ought not to count. Their deeds come of evil. The next mob may undo their work. Accident may render their enthusiasm relatively harmless. But, as a mere crowd, they cannot be wise. They cannot be safe rulers. Who, then, are the men who wisely think and rightly guide? They are, I repeat, the men who take counsel together in small groups, who respect one another’s individuality, who meanwhile criticise one another constantly, and earnestly, and who suspect whatever the crowd teaches. In such men there need be no lack of wise sympathy, but there is much besides sympathy. There is individuality, and there is a willingness to doubt both one another and themselves. To such men, and to such groups, popular government ought to be intrusted. Now these principles are responsible for the explanation of the well-known contrast between those social phenomena which illustrate the wisdom of the enlightened social order, and the phenomena which, on the contrary, often seem such as to make us despair for the moment of the permanent success of popular government. In the rightly constituted social group where every member feels his own responsibility for his part of the social enterprise which is in hand, the result of the interaction of individuals is that the social group may show itself wiser than any of its individuals. In the mere crowd, on the other hand, the social group may be, and generally is, more stupid than any of its individual members. Compare a really successful town meeting in a comparatively small community with the accidental and sometimes dangerous social phenomena of a street mob or of a great political convention. In the one case every individual may gain wisdom from his contact with the social group. In the other case every man concerned, if ever he comes again to himself, may feel ashamed of the absurdity of which the whole company was guilty. Social phenomena of the type that may result from the higher social group, the

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group in which individuality is respected, even while social loyalty is demanded,—these phenomena may lead to permanent social results which as tradition gives them a fixed character may gradually lead to the formation of permanent institutions, in which a wisdom much higher than that of any individual man may get embodied. A classic instance of social phenomena of this type, and of the results of such social activities as constantly make use of individual skill, we find in language. However human language originated, it is certain that it was never the product of the mob-spirit. Language has been formed through the efforts of individuals to communicate with other individuals. Human speech is, therefore, in its structure, in its devices, in its thoughtfulness, essentially the product of the social activities of comparatively small groups of persons whose ingenuity was constantly aroused by the desire of making some form of social cooperation definite, and some form of communication amongst individuals effective. The consequence is that the language of an uncultivated people, who have as yet no grammarians to guide them and no literature to transmit the express wisdom of individual guides from generation to generation, may, nevertheless, be on the whole much more intelligent than is any individual that speaks the language. Other classic instances of social processes wherein the group appears wiser than the individual are furnished to us by the processes that resulted through centuries of development in the production of the system of Roman law or of the British constitution. Such institutions embody more wisdom than any individual who has taken part in the production of these institutions has ever possessed. Now the common characteristic of all such social products seems to me to be due to the fact that the social groups in which they originated were always such as encouraged and as in fact necessitated an emphasis upon the contrasts between various individuals. In such groups what Tarde has called ‘‘the universal opposition’’ has always been an effective motive. The group has depended upon the variety and not the uniformity of its members. On the other hand, the other sort of social group, the mob, has depended upon the emotional agreement, the sympathy, of its members. It has been powerful only in so far as they

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forgot who they individually were, and gave themselves up to the suggestions of the moment. It follows that if we are to look for the source of the greatest dangers of popular government, we must expect to find them in the influence of the mob-spirit. Le Bon is right when he says that the problem of the future will become more and more the problem how to escape from the domination of the crowd. Now I do not share Le Bon’s pessimism when he holds, as he seems to do, that all popular government necessarily involves the tendency to the prevalence of the mob-spirit. So far as I can see Le Bon and most of the other writers who in recent times have laid so much stress upon the dangers of the mob, have ignored, or at least have greatly neglected, that other social tendency, that tendency to the formation of smaller social groups, which makes use of the contrasts of individuals, and which leads to a collective wisdom greater than any individual wisdom. But why I do insist upon this is that the problem of the future for popular government must involve the higher development, the better organization, the more potent influence, of the social groups of the wiser type, and the neutralization through their influence of the power of the mobspirit. Now the modern forms of the mob-spirit have become so portentous because of a tendency that is in itself very good, even as may be the results to which it often leads. This tendency is that toward a very wide and inclusive human sympathy, a sympathy which may be as undiscriminating as it often is kindly. Sympathy, however, as one must recollect, is not necessarily even a kindly tendency. For one may sympathize with any emotion,—for instance, with the emotions of a cruelly ferocious mob. Sympathy itself is a sort of neutral basis for more rational mental development. The noblest structure may be reared upon its soil. The basest absurdities may, upon occasion, seem to be justified, because an undiscriminating sympathy makes them plausible. Now modern conditions have certainly tended, as I have said, to the spread of sympathy. Consider modern literature with its disposition to portray any form of human life, however ignoble or worthless, or on the other hand, however lofty or inspiring,—to portray it not because of its intrinsic worth but because of the mere fact

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that it exists. All sorts and conditions of men,—yes, all sorts and conditions of emotion, however irrational, have their hearing in the world of art to-day, win their expression, charm their audience, get, as we say, their recognition. Never were men so busy as now with the mere eagerness to sympathize with, to feel whatever is the lot of any portion of humanity. Now, as I have said, this spread of human sympathy, furthered as it is by all the means at the disposal of modern science, so far as that science deals with humanity, is a good thing just in so far as it is a basis upon which a rational philanthropy and a more intelligent social organization can be founded. But this habit of sympathy disposes us more and more to the influence of the mob. When the time of popular excitement comes, it finds us expert in sharing the emotions of the crowd, but often enervated by too frequent indulgence in just such emotion. The result is that modern mobs are much vaster, and in some respects more excitable than ever they were before. The psychological conditions of the mob no longer need include the physical presence of a crowd of people in a given place. It is enough if the newspapers, if the theatre, if the other means of social communication, serve to transmit the waves of emotional enthusiasm. A nation composed of many millions of people may fall rapidly under the hypnotic influence of a few leaders, of a few fatal phrases. And thus, as our third evil, we have not only the general levelling tendency of modern social life, but the particular tendency to emotional excitability which tends to make the social order, under certain conditions, not only monotonous and unideal, but actively dangerous. Yet, as we have seen, this evil is not, as Le Bon and the pessimists would have it, inherent in the very fact of the existence of a social order. There are social groups that are not subject to the mob-spirit. And now if you ask how such social groups are nowadays to be fostered, to be trained, to be kept alive for the service of the nation, I answer that the place for fostering such groups is the province, for such groups flourish under conditions that arouse local pride, the loyalty to one’s own community, the willingness to remember one’s own ways and ideals, even at the moment when the nation is carried

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away by some levelling emotion. The lesson would then be: Keep the province awake, that the nation may be saved from the disastrous hypnotic slumber so characteristic of excited masses of mankind. VI I have now reviewed three types of evils against which I think it is the office of provincialism to contend. As I review these evils, I am reminded somewhat of the famous words of Schiller in his ‘‘Greeting to the New Century,’’ which he composed at the outset of the nineteenth century. In his age, which in some respects was so analogous to our own, despite certain vast differences, Schiller found himself overwhelmed as he contemplated the social problem of the moment by the vast national conflict, and the overwhelming forces which seemed to him to be crushing the more ideal life of his nation, and of humanity. With a poetic despair that we need indeed no longer share, Schiller counsels his reader, in certain famous lines, to flee from the stress of life into the still recesses of the heart, for, as he says, beauty lives only in song, and freedom has departed into the realm of dreams. Now Schiller spoke in the romantic period. We no longer intend to flee from our social ills to any realm of dreams. And as to the recesses of the heart, we now remember that out of the heart are the issues of life. But so much my own thesis and my own counsel would share in common with Schiller’s words. I should say to-day that our national unities have grown so vast, our forces of social consolidation have become so paramount, the resulting problems, conflicts, evils, have been so intensified, that we, too, must flee in the pursuit of the ideal to a new realm. Only this realm is, to my mind, so long as we are speaking of social problems, a realm of real life. It is the realm of the province. There must we flee from the stress of the now too vast and problematic life of the nation as a whole. There we must flee, I mean, not in the sense of a cowardly and permanent retirement, but in the sense of a search for renewed strength, for a social inspiration, for the salvation of the individual from the overwhelming forces of consolidation. Freedom, I should say, dwells now

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in the small social group, and has its securest home in the provincial life. The nation by itself, apart from the influence of the province, is in danger of becoming an incomprehensible monster, in whose presence the individual loses his right, his self-consciousness, and his dignity. The province must save the individual. But, you may ask, in what way do I conceive that the wise provincialism of which I speak ought to undertake and carry on its task? How is it to meet the evils of which I have been speaking? In what way is its influence to be exerted against them? And how can the province cultivate its self-consciousness without tending to fall back again into the ancient narrowness from which small communities were so long struggling to escape? How can we keep broad humanity and yet cultivate provincialism? How can we be loyally patriotic, and yet preserve our consciousness of the peculiar and unique dignity of our own community? In what form are our wholesome provincial activities to be carried on? I answer, of course, in general terms, that the problem of the wholesome provincial consciousness is closely allied to the problem of any individual form of activity. An individual tends to become narrow when he is what we call self-centred. But, on the other hand, philanthropy that is not founded upon a personal loyalty of the individual to his own family and to his own personal duties is notoriously a worthless abstraction. We love the world better when we cherish our own friends the more faithfully. We do not grow in grace by forgetting individual duties in behalf of remote social enterprises. Precisely so, the province will not serve the nation best by forgetting itself, but by loyally emphasizing its own duty to the nation and therefore its right to attain and to cultivate its own unique wisdom. Now all this is indeed obvious enough, but this is precisely what in our days of vast social consolidation we are some of us tending to forget. Now as to the more concrete means whereby the wholesome provincialism is to be cultivated and encouraged, let me appeal directly to the loyal member of any provincial community, be it the community of a small town, or of a great city, or of a country district. Let me

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point out what kind of work is needed in order to cultivate that wise provincialism which, as you see, I wish to have grow not in opposition to the interests of the nation, but for the very sake of saving the nation from the modern evil tendencies of which I have spoken. First, then, I should say a wholesome provincialism is founded upon the thought that while local pride is indeed a praiseworthy accompaniment of every form of social activity, our province, like our own individuality, ought to be to all of us rather an ideal than a mere boast. And here, as I think, is a matter which is too often forgotten. Everything valuable is, in our present human life, known to us as an ideal before it becomes an attainment, and in view of our human imperfections, remains to the end of our short lives much more a hope and an inspiration than it becomes a present achievement. Just because the true issues of human life are brought to a finish not in time but in eternity, it is necessary that in our temporal existence what is most worthy should appear to us as an ideal, as an Ought, rather than as something that is already in our hands. The old saying about the bird in the hand being worth two in the bush does not rightly apply to the ideal goods of a moral agent working under human limitations. For him the very value of life includes the fact that its goal as something infinite can never at any one instant be attained. In this fact the moral agent glories, for it means that he has something to do. Hence the ideal in the bush, so to speak, is always worth infinitely more to him than the food or the plaything of time that happens to be just now in his hands. The difference between vanity and self-respect depends largely upon this emphasizing of ideals in the case of the higher forms of self-consciousness, as opposed to the emphasis upon transient temporal attainments in the case of the lower forms. Now what holds true of individual self-consciousness ought to hold true of the self-consciousness of the community. Boasting is often indeed harmless and may prove a stimulus to good work. It is therefore to be indulged as a tribute to our human weakness. But the better aspect of our provincial consciousness is always its longing for the improvement of the community.

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And now, in the second place, a wise provincialism remembers that it is one thing to seek to make ideal values in some unique sense our own, and it is quite another thing to believe that if they are our own, other people cannot possess such ideal values in their own equally unique fashion. A realm of genuinely spiritual individuality is one where each individual has his own unique significance, so that none could take another’s place. But for just that very reason all the unique individuals of the truly spiritual order stand in relation to the same universal light, to the same divine whole in relation to which they win their individuality. Hence all the individuals of the true spiritual order have ideal goods in common, as the very means whereby they can win each his individual place with reference to the possession and the employment of these common goods. Well, it is with provinces as with individuals. The way to win independence is by learning freely from abroad, but by then insisting upon our own interpretation of the common good. A generation ago the Japanese seemed to most European observers to be entering upon a career of total self-surrender. They seemed to be adopting without stint European customs and ideals. They seemed to be abandoning their own national independence of spirit. They appeared to be purely imitative in their main purposes. They asked other nations where the skill of modern sciences lay, and how the new powers were to be gained by them. They seemed to accept with the utmost docility every lesson, and to abandon with unexampled submissiveness, their purpose to remain themselves. Yet those of us who have watched them since, or who have become acquainted with representative Japanese students, know how utterly superficial and illusory that old impression of ours was regarding the dependence, or the extreme imitativeness, or the helpless docility, of the modern Japanese. He has now taught us quite another lesson. With a curious and on the whole not unjust spiritual wiliness, he has learned indeed our lesson, but he has given it his own interpretation. You always feel in intercourse with a Japanese how unconquerable the spirit of his nation is, how inaccessible the recesses of his spirit have remained after all these years of free intercourse with

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Europeans. In your presence the Japanese always remains the courteous and respectful learner so long as he has reason to think that you have anything to teach him. But he remains as absolutely his own master with regard to the interpretation, the use, the possession of all spiritual gifts, as if he were the master and you the learner. He accepts the gifts, but their place in his national and individual life is his own. And we now begin to see that the feature of the Japanese nationality as a member of the civilized company of nations is to be something quite unique and independent. Well, let the Japanese give us a lesson in the spirit of true provincialism. Provincialism does not mean a lack of plasticity, an unteachable spirit; it means a determination to use the spiritual gifts that come to us from abroad in our own way and with reference to the ideals of our own social order. And therefore, thirdly, I say in developing your provincial spirit, be quite willing to encourage your young men to have relations with other communities. But on the other hand, encourage them also to make use of what they thus acquire for the furtherance of the life of their own community. Let them win aid from abroad, but let them also have, so far as possible, an opportunity to use this which they acquire in the service of their home. Of course economic conditions rather than deliberate choice commonly determine how far the youth of a province are able to remain for their lifetime in a place where they grow up. But so far as a provincial spirit is concerned, it is well to avoid each of two extremes in the treatment of the young men of the community,—extremes that I have too often seen exemplified. The one extreme consists in maintaining that if young men mean to be loyal to their own province, to their own state, to their own home, they ought to show their loyalty by an unwillingness to seek guidance from foreign literature, from foreign lands, in the patronizing of foreign or distant institutions, or in the acceptance of the customs and ideas of other communities than their own. Against this extreme let the Japanese be our typical instance. They have wandered far. They have studied abroad. They have assimilated the lore of other communities. And they have only gained in local consciousness, in independence of spirit, by the ordeal. The other extreme is the one expressed

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in that tendency to wander and to encourage wandering, which has led so many of our communities to drive away the best and most active of their young men. We want more of the determination to find, if possible, a place for our youth in their own communities. Finally, let the province more and more seek its own adornment. Here I speak of a matter that in all our American communities has been until recently far too much neglected. Local pride ought above all to centre, so far as its material objects are concerned, about the determination to give the surroundings of the community nobility, dignity, beauty. We Americans spend far too much of our early strength and time in our newer communities upon injuring our landscapes, and far too little upon endeavoring to beautify our towns and cities. We have begun to change all that, and while I have no right to speak as an aesthetic judge concerning the growth of the love of the beautiful in our country, I can strongly insist that no community can think any creation of genuine beauty and dignity in its public buildings or in the surroundings of its towns and cities too good a thing for its own deserts. For we deserve what in such realms we can learn how to create or to enjoy, or to make sacrifices for. And no provincialism will become dangerously narrow so long as it is constantly accompanied by a willingness to sacrifice much in order to put in the form of great institutions, of noble architecture, and of beautiful surroundings an expression of the worth that the community attaches to its own ideals.

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o one who is engaged in any part of the work of the higher education in this country can doubt that, at the present time, our thoughtful public,—the great company of those who read, reflect, and aspire,—is a larger factor in our national life than ever before. When foreigners accuse us of extraordinary love for gain, and of practical materialism, they fail to see how largely we are a nation of idealists. Yet that we are such a nation is something constantly brought to the attention of those whose calling requires them to observe any of the tendencies prevalent in our recent intellectual life in America. I When I speak, in this way, of contemporary American idealists, I do not now specially refer to the holders of any philosophical opinions, or even to the representatives of any one type of religious faith. I here An address first delivered at Vassar College [Royce’s note].

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use the term in no technical sense. In this discussion, I mean by the word ‘‘idealist,’’ a man or woman who is consciously and predominantly guided, in the purposes and in the great choices of life, by large ideals, such as admit of no merely material embodiment, and such as contemplate no merely private and personal satisfaction as their goal. In this untechnical sense the Puritans were idealists. The signers of our Declaration of Independence were idealists. Idealism inspired us during our Civil War. Idealism has expressed itself in the rich differentiation of our national religious life. Idealism has founded our colleges and universities. Well, using the term ‘‘idealism’’ in this confessedly untechnical sense, I say that many of our foreign judges have failed to see how largely we Americans are to-day a nation of idealists. To be sure, we are by no means alone amongst modern men in our idealism. But elsewhere sometimes the consequences of long-continued and oppressive militarism, sometimes the stress of certain social problems, and sometimes the burdens of ancient imperial responsibility, have tended more to discourage, or even quite to subdue, many forms of that fidelity to ideals upon which surely all higher civilization in any country depends. But, with us, ever since the close of the Civil War, numerous forces have been at work to render us as a nation more thoughtful, more aspiring, and more in love with the immaterial things of the spirit, and that too even at the very moment when our material prosperity, with all of its well-known corrupting temptations, has given us much opportunity, had we chosen to take it, to be what the mistaken foreign critics often suppose us to be,—a people really sunk in practical materialism. Moreover, in saying all this, as to our general growth in spiritual interests, I am not at all unmindful of that other side,—that grosser material side of our national life, upon which our foreign critics so often insist. The growth of unwise luxury, the brute power of ill-used wealth, the unideal aspects of our political life, the evils of our great cities,—what enlightened American is there who does not recognize the magnitude of such ills in our midst? But you cannot prove the absence of light merely by exploring the darker chasms and caverns

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of our national existence. Vast as are those recesses of night, the light of large and inspiring ideas shines upon still vaster regions of our American life. Side by side with the excesses of mere luxury you find, amongst our people, a true and increasing, a self-sacrificing and intelligent love of the beautiful for its own sake. Side by side with the misuse of money, you observe the encouraging frequency of the great and humane deeds that wealth can do. Nor is this all. An ardent and often successful struggle for social reform, and a civic pride that aims, sometimes even from the very depths of municipal degradation, at the accomplishment of great and honorable public services,—these are tendencies that are growing amongst us, and that are never wholly or permanently checked even by the closest contact with the very worst of our national defects. Yet, of course, the real proof of the prevalence of what I have called idealism, in the great masses of our people, is above all to be sought not in any particular good deeds of wealthy men, nor yet in the public life of the great cities, but in the intellectual and religious life of the community at large. And here it is, as I say, that the college teacher, or any other worker professionally concerned with the higher mental interests of our people, has a chance to estimate the strength and magnitude of these interests in the unseen. In our country it is extraordinarily easy, and as one may at once admit it is too easy, to get a hearing for any seemingly new and largeminded doctrine relating either to social reform or to inspiring changes of creed. Whoever desires the reputation of the founder of a new sect has merely to insist upon his plan for reforming society and saving souls,—has merely to announce repeatedly to the public the high valuation that he sets upon his own ideas concerning nobler topics in order to win a respectful hearing from many, and, if his ideas have any measure of coherence and of humanitarian interest, an often all too kindly acquiescence from at least a few. And the faithfulness of these few may soon assume the pathetic intensity that so often marks the devotion of the followers of small sects. Need I mention many instances in order to remind you of the nature of these now so familiar processes in our American life? The late Mr. Henry George

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was, up to the time of the appearance of his ‘‘Progress and Poverty,’’ a man quite unknown to the nation at large,—a California newspaper man, with no obvious authority to teach concerning economic problems. His book received, at the time of its appearance, little or no support from the professional economists, and excited at first, I believe, little very close attention from their side. George himself was no party manager. He used hardly any showy devices for attracting popular attention. He was simply in earnest. Yet we all know how the sect of his followers grew. And any busy man who has sometimes received letters from propagandists of that particular sect will also know, I suppose, how humane, how faithful, how strenuous, how unworldly, and one may add, how unweariedly obstinate they may be in their efforts to convert the doubter and to lead people to see, and if possible to love, their new way of social salvation. A similar, and even more swiftly contagious kindliness made possible the dramatic, if temporary, success of Mr. Bellamy’s book, ‘‘Looking Backward.’’ And again, a case in point is the movement in connection with which Bryan gained his first national prominence in 1896, a movement which came near proving successful, and which was then for a time so dangerous. That movement had its origin quite as much in practical idealism as in material distress. Its fundamental motives were in considerable measure philanthropic, humane, and, in an abstract way, vaguely large-minded. That was precisely what made this movement most dangerous. Unwise philanthropy, uninstructed large-mindedness, can often prove injurious to the very interests they seek to further. Our greatest national danger now lies in an extravagant love of ideally fascinating enterprises, whose practical results are as hard to foresee and to estimate as was the end that lay before the noble-hearted Childe Rolande of Browning’s well-known poem, when he searched for the goal of his journey in the midst of the shifting landscapes, and the treacherous pathways of his romantic wilderness. Well, these, I say, are instances of our American idealism in social matters. In religion, a similar tendency has been strong in our life from the very first. It has not only multiplied sects among us, but it

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has also wrought great good by giving lasting strength to their missionary and to their other philanthropic enterprises. Moreover it has endowed them with an importance for the daily life of the people that no established State church could ever have won by a merely external show of authority. The same interest in ideals has kept the sects themselves from stagnation, has insisted upon an adjustment of whatever in their fashions of teaching was non-essential to the vital needs of each generation of people. On the other hand, this idealism often shows itself less worthily in the form of a hasty desire for whatever seems new, or remote, or fantastic in faith. At the present day there is hardly a conceivable creed about ultimate matters, be it never so quaint or so unreasonable that, if its apparent intents are only humane, and its catch words impressive, this creed once earnestly taught cannot very quickly find a body of adherents, not only in our country at large, but in some of the most thoughtful and sophisticated communities which our country contains. It is not the ignorant amongst us who are the prey of strange new doctrines, so much as a portion of the most considerate classes of our public. And we are indeed not obliged to be bigoted in order to feel that, at present, this spiritual plasticity of our American public has gone too far. We ought to be docile; but the disposition to prove all things can easily outrun the power to hold fast that which is good. As a consequence, if new sects thus easily find followers, and often faithful and permanent followers, there is also the other side of the picture. There are those of our people who waste life in merely floating from doctrine to doctrine. In such minds the art of holding fast has wholly been lost, in favor of the easier art of at least playing with all the things that belong in the realms of the spirit. For such souls, new doctrines are like new pictures, or new plays, or like the passing events of a social season. The more ardent amongst such people grow temporarily enthusiastic upon every new occasion where they listen to what they cannot comprehend. The more disillusioned find the novelties in doctrine more or less of a bore, just as some folk always find the plays and the parties tedious. But both the ardent and the disillusioned, in such social groups as I now have in mind, do indeed

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treat the new doctrines and the various rival plans of salvation altogether too much as they treat the social occasions, the plays, or the pictures. They expect something new to take the place of the old at each moment of their experience. And whether ardent or bored they continue their life-long quest for spiritual sensations. Such excesses of the higher life in our country are only too easy to observe and, upon occasion, to ridicule. I have not mentioned them however for the sake of ridicule. Spinoza said that human affairs are neither to be wept over nor to be laughed at, but to be understood; and Spinoza’s word, despite its seeming fatalism, had from any point of view its large measure of truth. I am speaking at present of symptoms. These symptoms, like other incidents of so complex a life as ours, have both their good and their evil aspects. Devotion to ideals has its dangers as it has its glories. I have to point out the one as an aid toward a comprehension of the other. I turn to still other and better aspects of the tendency here in question. If one asks what the devotion to ideals has of late accomplished with purest success in the intellectual life of our country, I myself should be disposed to name, as one of the noblest, most positive, and most unsullied products of American idealism in recent years, the whole modern educational movement. The reform of academic methods and interests, both in the younger and in the older universities and colleges has been such, within the past twenty-five years, as to constitute one of the most substantial and significant events in our national history. The general public still understands all too little of the vast work that has been accomplished. By the fault of too large a portion of the newspaper press of the country the more trivial aspects of our academic life,—the public athletic contests, and the idle gossip of the hour,—are continually exaggerated, while the serious and the most progressive tendencies of this same life are as persistently slighted and are often misrepresented. Yet despite the false perspective in which our colleges are thus often made to appear, the general public has nevertheless somehow learned to support nobly the interests of academic reform. The vast sums that have been dedicated to the cause of learning, the cordial approval that our more enlightened

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people have given to the attempts at bettering higher education,— these have been most encouraging features of our educational movement. Nor has this movement confined itself to the Universities and Colleges. In its connection with the lower schools it is still in the period of storm and stress and hope. But it is indeed, in all its forms, a movement in the interest of ideals. It has needed at every step great sacrifices, strenuous devotion, wide sympathies, and far-reaching foresight. And these have been forthcoming. When an intelligent American wants to vindicate the honor of his country to foreigners, I know in our recent history of no purer instance of single-hearted patriotism, devoted to humane and unsullied ideals, and successful against all sorts of foes, not only without but within,—I know, I say, of no purer instance of such true patriotism than is furnished by just the great educational reform movement, and especially the academic movement of the last quarter of a century. For this has indeed been no mere effort of dreamers. It has been a practical movement. It has been guided by administrators who were often of the highest executive talent,—men quite capable, in many instances, of winning worldly success in wholly different and more showy regions of public life. It has been supported by benefactors who were often tempted by all sorts of more selfish interests to use their wealth otherwise. It has given to great numbers of youth a light and guidance that have meant for them escape from spiritual bondage, and an opportunity to become in their turn benefactors. It has furnished to our country a constantly increasing class of cultivated workers, ready to enter practical life with the ardor of a genuine idealism in their hearts and minds. And great as this academic movement has been, its influence is only beginning. Its real fruits are still to be gathered. So far, then, I have surveyed a number of forms of recent American idealism. I have meant to be fair to both sides of the shield. Not all golden is our devotion to ideals. Yet this devotion is too marked a feature of our national spirit to justify the neglect of those among our foreign critics who regard us as mainly workers for wealth, or as lovers of mere material power. It may not be unfitting, upon this occasion, for us to ask ourselves what can yet be done to make our

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national idealism more intelligent, better organized, and, above all, more effective. II For, after all that we have thus far said, when we try to sum up the amount of influence exerted by these various forms of idealism upon the actual life of our country, we are obliged to confess that our thoughtful public is not yet as efficacious as it ought to be. Too frequently we find the lovers of the ideal engaged in unprofitable conflicts with their spiritual kindred. Plan wars with plan; reform stands in hostile array over against reform. Meanwhile the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. The people who dwell in the realms of thought and of higher faith consequently find themselves unable to organize effectively their reforms. They indeed associate, discourse, and take counsel together. But their enemies remain too often the better managers. While, as I just said, the academic movement is the great instance amongst us, in recent times, of the possible practical success of ideal interests, this educational progress stands too much alone. Our tree of life flourishes, and puts forth countless leaves; but it does not yet bear sufficient fruit for the healing of the nation. Our national idealism is more characteristic of our intellectual and religious life than it is productive of permanent, organized, and substantial results. Whenever the servants of ill perfect their devices for corrupting anywhere the state, and misusing its resources, the lovers of good things find themselves too frequently helpless to thwart such mischief. Yet amongst us the conscious servants of ill are really in a very decided minority. Our youth are exceptionally high-minded and aspiring. Our social life is full of admirable purposes. Our people are very generally interested in the things of the spirit. Yet the enemy seems to have possession of far too many of the effective weapons of social and of political warfare. When we try to meet him in the field, we are too scattered, too fantastic, or too uncertain in mind, to be ready for an effective fight. Our thoughtfulness involves too much idle curiosity, too much vaguely restless ardor, too

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much unwillingness to accept the necessary material limitations under which human work is to be done. And therefore we are indeed often, in practical undertakings, ‘‘beaten down’’ like Tennyson’s Lancelot in his quest for the Grail, ‘‘beaten down by little men, mean knights.’’ The enemy, the power of evil at work, in whatever form in our land,—the enemy at least always knows his own purpose. But we, we lovers of the ideal, spend far too much of our time vaguely wandering from one club-meeting or lecture or recent book to another, trying to discover just what it is that we are thinking about. While we, with eager minds, inquire into the shifting thing sometimes called the New Thought, the enemy is steadily engaged in serving the purposes of the Old Adam. And those purposes need no course of lectures to define them, no laborious clambering toward any ‘‘higher plane’’ to survey them. The devil within is always ready to explain them directly and personally to all comers. The consequence is precisely that appearance of grosser materialism which our foreign critics falsely take to be characteristic of our country. But much more characteristic of us is the intensity, the manifoldness, the restlessness, and in all but a few regions, the relative ineffectiveness of our national idealism. Look where you will, even in the regions where ideas best and most beneficently express themselves in our social life, and you find the same limitations of our thoughtful public exemplified, setting bounds to our spiritual progress even in the best regions of our activity, and resulting in too many cases, in a more or less complete inability to do wholesome reforming work where work is most needed. In speaking thus, I have in mind no one section of our country, no one type of activity, no one special class of our thoughtful public. As myself a Californian, and as one often called upon to visit, in connection with professional duties, very various parts of our land, I have felt the limitations of which I speak in the West as well as in the East, amongst good men and women, in the life of the professional classes as well as in the life of the people of the world. Wherever you go, you find the typical American sensitive to ideas, curious about doctrines, concerned for his soul’s salvation, still more concerned for the higher welfare of his children, willing to hear about

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great topics, dissatisfied with merely material objects, seeking even wealth rather with a view to its more ideal uses than with a mere desire for its sensuous gratifications, disposed to plan great things for his country and for his community, proud of both, jealous of their honor, and discontented with the life that now is. His piety has its ideal fervor none the less when it is the piety of the free thinker than when it is that of the faithful. He forms and supports great associations for public-spirited ends. He encourages science and learning. He pauses in the midst of the rush of business to discuss religion, or education, or psychical research, or mental healing, or socialism. His well-known and characteristic devotion to his children keeps fresh in his heart a childlike love of plans and hopes and beliefs that belong not so much to the marketplace, as to the far-off future, and to the home land of the Platonic ideas. Yet this same American is unable to give his idealism any adequate expression in his social life. His country towns and his manufacturing cities are too often full of hideous ugliness. Even the best of his great cities are in appearance whatever they happen to be. In founding new cities and in occupying new lands he first devotes himself to burning the forests, to levelling with ruthless eagerness the hill-slopes, to inflicting upon the land, whatever its topography, the unvarying plan of his system of straight streets and of rectangular street crossings. In brief, he begins his new settlements by a feverish endeavor to ruin the landscape. Now all this he does not at all because he is a mere materialist but (as a colleague of mine, Professor George Palmer, has pointed out), he does this because mere nature is, as such, vaguely unsatisfactory to his soul, because what is merely found must never content us, and because our present life itself is felt to be not yet ideal. Hence, the first desire is to change, to disturb, to bring the new with us. In the regions thus so quickly altered by man’s hand, a community spirit, a strong local pride, quickly springs up. The church, the school, the university, appear within a very few years, and seem at first as if they were quite at home. One is firmly determined, in each young community, that they shall all be the best of their kind anywhere to be found. The social order thus established has also its representative

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literature,—its poets, its artists, its public heroes, even its swiftly acquired local traditions, as well as its self-conscious social independence, somewhat too ardently and tremulously asserted, of the mere worn-out ideals and authority of the older regions of the country. Nor are the interests in ideal things confined to such expressions. Confident faith in the future and in the might of the new life asserts itself in such newer regions of our land in the overhasty construction of great railways, that pierce the mountains or invade the deserts, long before a less restlessly ideal people would have seen sufficient prospect of any adequate return for the material outlay. Our pioneer makers of railways have often seemed as if they were themselves amongst the prophets, the poets, or even the fanatics of our newer communities. But the result of this eagerness is too often a swift bankruptcy. The young community flies too near the sun, and then lies prostrate and wingless in the despair of hard times. Hereupon begins the grosser period. The community soon really possesses through mere accumulation more wealth and power; yet merciless money-getters have profited by the failures of the first period, and these now take possession of the creations of the pioneers, crush out weaker opponents, obtain too much influence in local politics, and give to the life of the community just that outward seeming of mere materialism of which we have spoken. And now the better men learn more thoughtfully to look about them, only to observe, at this stage, what vast opportunities have been lost, what noble natural beauties have been hopelessly defaced, what ideal kingdoms have been carelessly created only to be conquered by the enemy. The real struggle with evil herewith begins. The social order, so hastily and easily organized at the outset, through the finely ideal political instincts of our people, now becomes infected by various political diseases. Corruption grows too prominent in politics. The Philistines seem to have captured and blinded the Sampson whose deeds made the pioneer days so wonderful. Satan seems to have triumphed. Yet this triumph is never so real as it seems. The good are still in the majority. The heart of society is still healthy. The church, the

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school, the university, the public library, the literary circles, the intellectual clubs,—these not only remain, but multiply, and in these one finds centres for the propagation of ideal interests. Would-be reformers become numerous. But alas, they war among themselves. They are too often crude, strident, prejudiced. Greed too often wins possession of the strongest material forces of the community. The reformers lift their too familiar voices in vain. The prophets true and false speak their many words. Many listen and applaud. Yet at the elections the prophets do not win. The thoughtful public remains the most characteristic, but too often the least effective, portion of the community. Such is the tale of too many of our newer communities. Shall I speak still of the older communities? There indeed the processes are more complex; but the lesson, like the outcome, is too often the same. The great limitation of our thoughtful public in America remains its inability to take sufficient control of affairs. And in pointing out this limitation, I have already indicated, in a measure, both its causes and the directions in which we ought to look for a cure, if a cure is possible, for this ineffectiveness of our American idealism. Let me pass then to a closer study of this latter aspect of the case. I have not undertaken this discussion for the sake of merely criticising my brethren; but for the sake of suggesting some few ways of improving our state, in so far as any poor suggestions of mine can hope to possess value. III Yet, as I go on to this side of our topic, I must indeed admit quite freely that I have no panacea, no quack remedy to suggest, as any infallible cure for the ineffectiveness of our national idealism, or as any one saving device for overcoming the limitations of our thoughtful public. Such ills as the one here in question always lie deep in the very constitution of our temperaments. We cannot, by merely taking thought, add a cubit to our stature. One of the very limitations of our thoughtful public which are here under discussion lies in the fact that many of us suppose great reforms to be possible merely through good

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resolutions. Yet good resolutions have their place in accomplishing reforms. Our mere human consciousness never by itself transforms our temperaments; but it may do something toward lessening their ill effects, and toward intensifying or enlarging the range of their good qualities. Where limitations have to be overcome, a due measure of consciousness as to where the fault lies does not come amiss. Accordingly, with a full sense of the little that I can do by such mere practical advice as lies within my scope, I still wish not merely to point out the ailment, but to show how it may be attacked. That it is no hopeless ailment, such successes of our idealism as the modern educational movement have already shown us. May we not hope to escape in time and at last, in a measure from the ineffectiveness that now besets the efforts of the thoughtful people of our country? Reform, in such matters, must come, if at all, from within. The kingdom of heaven is within you; and that truth is precisely what all ideally minded people know. It is this knowledge which makes them lovers of the unseen. I cannot then offer any pedagogical device for raising the thoughtful public of our country to a higher level of effectiveness, unless my device appeals directly to the individual. The public as a whole is whatever the processes that occur, for good or for evil, in individual minds, may determine. No one of us is individually called upon for any very large share in determining other peoples’ lives. The work of any one man, in this life, has a narrow range. Yet, on the other hand, the forest is made of the trees; and great reforms are due to the combined action of numerous individuals. I appeal then to the individual lover of ideals. I say, upon such as you are, and upon such as you aspire to be, the future of our country depends. If you fail, in union with your spiritual kind, to win, and to win for good, the controlling voice in the nation’s affairs, corruption, grossness, despotism, social ruin, will sooner or later make naught of our liberties, of all the dear memory of our country’s fathers, and of the great work that we in America ought to do for mankind. And if such as you are find not the way to overcome, in time, these present limitations of the effectiveness of our thoughtful public, you will fail

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to win and to retain control of the constantly increasing complications of our national life. Our ideals will grow vaguer and more restless, even while our material activities become more steadily enchained by the powers of evil. We shall end where others have ended, in national disaster, in social dissolution, in humiliation, in the clutches of some domestic or foreign conqueror. But in case you win effective control over your personal ideals and over your own processes of giving them expression, you yourself as an individual will indeed accomplish but an infinitesimal portion of the nation’s vast task. Yet still it will be the nation’s task in which, in your measure, you will be engaged. For no man liveth unto himself, and no man dieth unto himself. I appeal then to you, and to the public, only through such as you are. If you, together with the others who love the coming of the kingdom of heaven, succeed in solving your personal problems, the good cause will win in public as in private. And what you need to find is some little task that you can effectually do. That task you need to perform. To the individual, then, I address myself. Nor do I forget that I am speaking to students who already know what one means by high ideals, and by hearty aspirations, and who stand at the beginning of life’s great tasks. There comes a sad time in many lives, when people who have long struggled in vain with foes without and foes within, grow weary of the cultivation of ideal interests. Those to whom I am especially privileged to speak, upon this occasion, have not reached this stage. I hope that when any of you reach it, you will pass it successfully, for nothing better have we in this life than our ideals and our hopes, and our power to do a little work. Just now you are privileged to have a faith, still unsullied, in such ideals, and a hope to do good work. I want to indicate some of the ways in which one may wisely nourish this faith, and undertake this work. IV My first word of advice, addressed thus especially to the thoughtful amongst us, relates to a certain moderation, to a certain temperance,

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that, as I believe, we must all cultivate in dealing with our own consciousness of what our ideals are. Devotion to what we believe to be a high cause demands of us, indeed, a certain thoroughness of surrender, a certain persistence in service, which, in its own due time and place, ought to know indeed no bounds. On the other hand, when thoughtful people cultivate ideals, they do so, in part, by thinking over these ideals, by reasoning about them, by becoming conscious of what they are, by trying to convert others to these ideals, and, in general, by giving these ideals articulate expression. The faithfulness of the unlearned may be dumb, half-conscious, incapable of giving any reason for itself. The fidelity of the thoughtful seeks definite formulation in a creed, propagates its cause by spoken and by written words, voices itself in a doctrine that can be defended or assailed by argument,—in brief, seeks to add knowledge to faith, insight to service, and teaching to example. You often hear how important it is to be not only devoted, but wise, clear of head as well as persistent in service. Now such tendencies are an important factor in the lives of all thoughtful people. Their highest expression is a reasoned philosophy, which undertakes to investigate, to compare, to harmonize, and then, finally, to formulate and to teach systems of ideals. Now I am myself by calling a teacher of philosophy. I believe in persistent thoughtfulness as a most important factor in the higher life of humanity. I try to become as conscious as I properly can become of what my ideals are, and of why I hold them, and of how they go together to make one whole, and of why other lovers of reason ought, if I am right, to accept my ideals. Over against the inconsiderate partisans of this or of that form of unreasoning faith, I often have, as teacher of philosophy, to maintain the importance, for certain great purposes, of giving a reason for the faith that is in us. And so, as you see, I am in every way disposed to favor, in its place, not only the thoughtful spirit of inquiry, but the disposition to formulate ideals in a definite and conscious way, to maintain them through argument, and to propagate them by the spoken and by the written word. I believe in the human reason, as a vastly important factor in the development of all our ideals.

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And yet,—I can here speak all the more frankly just because my profession is that of the reasoner,—I constantly see mischief done by an unwise exaggeration of the tendency to reason, to argue, to trust to mere formulas, to seek for the all-solving word; in brief, to bring to consciousness what for a given individual ought to remain unconscious. Thoughtfulness is, for us in this life, like any other human power and privilege. It must be exercised with a proper moderation. Thought must indeed be free. But freedom means responsibility. Thought, in any individual, must freely set limits to its own finite task. And when the thoughtful lovers of ideals forget this fact, they may become mere wranglers, or doctrinaires, or pedants, or, on the other hand, in the end, through failure in thinking, they may become cynics. Now some may wonder that, as a teacher of philosophy, I should at once lay the first stress upon this defect of the lovers of ideals, as a defect so often attendant upon the processes of unhappy thinkers. Some may wonder that I first confess the errors of my own calling. Yet why should I not do so? What defects has one more occasion to observe than those which occur in the erring human effort to pursue his own calling? If one loves his calling and believes in it, does he therefore ignore these defects? Shall one make a business of the art of seeing clearly, and yet entirely ignore the imperfections that may naturally beset his own organ of vision? Very well then, I first observe that many thoughtful lovers of ideals, many students, many reformers, many teachers, are too much disposed to trust to constant argument, reasoning, or reflection, to keep them faithful to their own ideals, and to win others to these ideals. Or again, some lovers of the ideal, even when they profess not to argue, but to be followers of intuition, still in many cases are too fond of abstract formulas, of catch words or phrases. Such mistake fads for eternal truths. Now all such have not observed the inevitable limitations of the human thinking process in each individual mind. They do not observe that any one of us can think clearly and reflectively and can formulate exactly and successfully only in case we think with due moderation, and think during the time properly set apart for thought, trying to formulate only what we have more or less expert

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right to understand, and then devoting the rest of life to naı¨vete´ and to relatively unreflective action. As a professional reasoner, I have a profound contempt for deliberate excesses in the work of reasoning; I personally try to avoid such excesses. As one busy with formulating theories, I have a great hatred for the excessive use of formulas. I remember well, from my student days, a pathetic incident that may illustrate the spirit in which I make this confession. While I was studying philosophy, one winter at Leipzig, I enjoyed many happy hours in company with a musical friend of mine, an advanced student at the Conservatory, who had devoted himself since childhood to the violin, and who has since won an important place in his profession. He often took me to attend the musical evenings at the Conservatory, and so helped me, as a mere listener, to enter the wondrous world of tones where he was making his home. But alas! for the moment, my friend, although so faithful and advanced a student of music, was himself no public performer at the Conservatory evenings, although in previous years he had been a prominent and favorite student player. Overwork had given him, for the time, one of those wellknown functional nervous troubles of coo¨rdination, or ‘‘occupation disorders’’; namely, in his case, a ‘‘violinist’s arm.’’ Neuralgic pains whenever he played had forced him to suspend his efforts. Prolonged rest for his arm was needed. My friend was perforce spending this year in the study of musical theory, and in other more general intellectual tasks relating to his art. Naturally this forced restraint was hard, and wounded ambition would often express itself; but still my friend was a man of general mental skill, who had therefore not a few resources in his distress. One evening we were together at the Conservatory. Many students played. Among them my friend’s principal contemporary and rival, a young violinist of no small skill, won abounding applause by a very brilliant performance. And my friend, sitting beside me with wounded wing, must merely listen! It would have been more than human not to rebel a little. But my friend could at least remember that he himself had his own variety of mental occupations. He did remember this fact, yet he grieved inwardly and deeply. As we were walking home he was silent for a time, and then

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his wrath at the chains that bound him burst forth. We spoke of the rival. We could not avoid the topic. ‘‘Confound that fellow!’’ said my friend. ‘‘Confound that fellow; he can’t do anything but fiddle!’’ Well, I speak somewhat in my friend’s general spirit, although I hope without any bitterness toward any particular rival student when I now say: ‘‘I am indeed not nearly as much of a reasoner as I desire to be. My skill in this art is far below my ambition. But, poor as I am, reasoning is indeed my own art. I love it. I prize it. I cultivate it. It is a great part of my life. And yet,—and yet I still insist,—let that reasoner, that thoughtful lover of ideals, that philosopher, if such there be, let him be confounded who cannot do anything but reason.’’ And in the same way I say to you of the thoughtful public: Woe unto the man or woman who can do nothing but be thoughtful. Yet why do I thus warn you? Pedantry, it will be said, is a disease of professors and of bookish men. The young, the ardent, and the general company of the faithful to ideals in our land, whatever their faults, are surely not pedants. An overcultivation of the merely abstract reason is not a besetting sin of most people. I reply that there are many forms of pedantry; there are many grounds for being on one’s guard against it. The misuse of the reasoning process enters the life of the thoughtful in more ways than one. The love of abstract formulas, of mere phrases, or of falsely simplified thoughtful processes is not confined to the professors. I remember once discussing with a young lady who was a college student of psychology, some points in the text-book of my honored colleague Professor William James. We spoke in particular of his wonderful chapter on Habit, so full, as some of you may know, not only of theoretical wisdom, but of wholesome practical advice about the formation and control of habits. I asked my young friend what she thought of this chapter. She replied, with adorable naı¨vete´, that she had found this chapter full of advice which must be very valuable indeed ‘‘for the young men for whom it was intended.’’ Well, my young friend had certainly observed part of the significance of Professor James’s chapter; but she did not admit having observed that his comments upon Habit apply to us all, whether young men or not.

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And now, just so, I should be sorry to have my word about the misuse of reason and the false love of abstract formulas supposed to apply only to those philosophers, if such there be, for whom it was indeed also intended. The lesson is general, and human. Especially does it apply to all the thoughtful public of America. For this fault of a too abstract thoughtfulness is committed, in substance, whenever people try to reform all the world, or even any great region of our complex lives, by insisting upon any one set of phrases, of human conceptions and words, which the individual himself has found somehow dear to his own consciousness. Not merely the partisans of technical reasoning, but the apostles of intuition, too, can commit our fault, whenever they trust in any mere abstraction. The people of one idea, the people to whom this or that single device for saving souls is alone important, the followers of fads,—these fall prey to this form of error. They mistake the power to define for the power to accomplish, the abstraction for the life, the single thought for all the wealth of truth that our human world contains, the exercise of an individual reason for the whole task of reforming our nature. And does not our modern America, both in the East and in the West, really suffer too much, nowadays, from mere fads? What shall I do to be saved? says the inquirer,—and the answer is,—‘‘Practise this or that system of mind cure, whose teaching can be made clear in just so many lessons. Follow Delsarte, study your attitudes, or oratory, or some other formal accomplishment. Accept this or that doctrine of the New Thought.’’ Now the people who cultivate ideals in this spirit often suppose themselves to be free from the philosopher’s overwrought love of the reason. ‘‘We follow,’’ they say, ‘‘spiritual intuitions. We thus avoid abstractions and wrangling.’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ one may reply, ‘‘but you none the less are anxious for some all-embracing formula, some one saving principle that shall do all manner of work.’’ Now the human mind, in its present form of consciousness, is simply incapable of formulating all its practical devices under any one simple rule. We have to learn both to work and to wait. We have to learn to obey as well as to formulate. What saves the world can never be any one man’s formulated scheme. Restless search for the immediate

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presence of the ideal is often vain, like the pioneer idealism that burns the forests merely to see what they hide. Let the forests grow. They are better than the empty hillsides. Much of the best in human nature simply escapes our present definitions, is known only by its fruits, and prospers best in the forest shade of unconsciousness. But a thoughtful lover of ideals, whether a philosopher or not, is of course thinking of something that he can formulate,—is trying to make his ideas conscious, explicit, teachable, and so abstract. Hence so much of his life’s business as he best formulates is likely for that very reason to be narrow when compared with his whole human task and with his own best and deepest aims. We are primarily creatures of instinct; and instinct is not merely the part of us that allies us with the lower animals. The highest in us is also based upon instinct. And only a portion of your instincts can ever be formulated. You will be able in this life to tell what they mean in only a few instances. But your life’s best work will depend upon all of your good instincts together. Hence a great part of your life’s work will never become a matter of your own personal and private consciousness at all. It is one of the duties then of the thoughtful lover of ideals to know that he cannot turn into conscious thinking processes all of his ideal activities. Accordingly, he must indeed cultivate a wise naı¨vete´, and that alongside of his reflective processes. That is why the companionship of children becomes the more useful to us the more thoughtful we are. They show us the beauty of unconsciousness, and help us to compensate for our tendency to abstraction by reminding us of what it is to live straightforwardly. And now, I say, this rule of mine applies to the very lover of ideals whom I now chance to be addressing. We who teach philosophy are constantly receiving inquiries from people who seem not to know how little in human life can as yet be reduced to any abstractly stateable formulas at all. Teachers inquire as to the final and correct theory of the development of the human mind, as to the precise number of powers that the mind possesses, or as to the one secret of method in education. Newspapers or magazines call for popular discussions of the most serious and complex issues, as if these could finally be dealt

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with in any brief shape. A newspaper once asked me to contribute to a so-called symposium whose problem was to be this: What characteristics will the ideal man of the future possess? As I only knew about the ideal future man this, that when he comes, he will, as in him lies, adequately attend to his own business, I felt unable to contribute anything original to the proposed discussion. The first condition of knowing how to think about ideal subjects consists in being aware not only what can be profitably formulated at all, but when and for what purpose a given formulation is profitable. When I visit a convalescent friend who is beginning to feel joyous after a long illness, I do not in general discuss the problem of evil. When I too am to enjoy the company of my friend, I do not first undertake to inquire into the metaphysical problem as to whether my friend exists at all. And yet just such problems have their place in philosophy. Now just so, when I vote, since, as it chances, I am no expert in sociology or in economic problems, I generally have no really very good reason that I can formulate, in a conscious and philosophical way, why I vote just as I do. I vote largely on grounds of sympathy and of instinct. I know better than to try to do otherwise. If I tried to formulate a political theory, it would be a very poor one; for I have no scientific comprehension of politics, no philosophy adequate to directing my choice of parties. For my business is largely with other branches of philosophy. I am a member of one or two deliberative bodies, where I often hear lengthy debates upon complex practical questions. The debates for a time instruct me; but later they often weary me, if they continue, without instructing me. When people ask me my reason for my own vote in such complex practical cases, or wonder why I am anxious for a vote to be reached, I often say that just because my profession is reasoning, I have learned to know some of the limits of the art, and to recognize that about some complex practical issues, after a certain point, it is vain to reason further, since only personal reactions, incapable of adequate reflective formulation, will decide. Hence I grow weary of the much speaking. I know that at such times I seem unreasonable; but I merely want to vote; and more formulations will in such cases make me no wiser.

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People often say that men act upon conscious reasoning processes, and women upon intuitions which they refuse to formulate. The assertion is, like most proverbial assertions, inadequate to the wealth of life’s facts. Certainly women often enough act with a mysterious swiftness of unconscious wisdom. But so do many of the most effective men. I have, however, often observed that some educated women, some women who enter public life as reformers, and perhaps too many college-bred women, are nowadays troubled with an overfondness both for mere formulas and for abstract arguments about complex practical issues that only a happy instinctive choice and wholesome sentiment can ever successfully decide so long as we remain what we are; namely, frail and ignorant human beings, who see through a glass darkly. The fault of being overfond of abstractions, or of trying to formulate bad reasons for one’s instinctive actions, does not characterize the man of business or the successful executive. One does not meet this fault in the market-place. But just this fault does characterize some of our most cultivated arid thoughtful people in this country. And among these people I find a good many intellectual women. What then is the happy medium? Shall I cease to think? No, not so. Be thoughtful, reason out some of your ideals for yourself. Know something, and know that something well. Have the region where you have a right to mistrust your instincts, to be keenly arid mercilessly critical, to question, to doubt, and to formulate, and then devotedly to maintain and to teach. But let that region be the little clearing in your life’s forest,—the place where you see, and comprehend, and are at home. Let there be such a place. You need it. It may be art, or theology, or Greek, or administrative work, or politics, or philosophy, or domestic economy, or general business, wherein you find this your chosen intellectual dwelling. In that region be indeed the creature of hard-won insight, of clear consciousness, of definite thinking about what it is yours to know. There the formula is in order. There the ideal is won by your investigations, and defended by your arguments. I say, have such a region. We need those who know.

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In that region, believe only when you know why you believe. But remember, life is vast, and your little clearing is very small. In the rest of life, cultivate naı¨vete´, accept authority, dread fads, follow as faithfully as your instinct permits other lovers of the ideal who are here wiser than you, and be sure that though your head splits you will never think out all your problems, or formulate all your ideals so long as you are in this life. If this precept were followed in this country there would be more experts, and fewer popular crazes, more effective work done, and less time wasted in hopeless efforts at general reforms. De te fabula, I say to every studious soul who is disposed to be too thoughtful rather than wisely effective. Be in your devotion to effective leaders relatively uncritical in many things, in order to be thoughtfully knowing in some. Be childlike in much of life in order to become maturely wise in some things. V If you are once aware of the vanity of trying to formulate everything, and to argue about all sorts of problems, you will not be tempted to pursue unwisely mere novelties of formulation for their own sake. I have spoken more than once of the feverish desire for new ideas in which our thoughtful public wastes much time. An entirely false interpretation of the doctrine of evolution has led some people to imagine that in any department of our lives, novelty as such must mean true progress toward the goal. Hence you constantly hear of the New Education, the New Psychology, the New Thought, the New Humanity, and whatever else can be adorned by the mere prefixing of this adjective. And yet people do not speak adoringly of the New Blizzard, or of the New Weather in general. We all of us have a fondness, not altogether wise, for the so-called news of the day, quite apart from its meaning; and the newspapers daily verify for us the ancient fact that bad men lie and steal and murder. Such news, which alas is no news, but the ancient sorrow of our race, we do indeed greet with a certain keenness of interest which is neither altogether rational nor highly ideal. But still the lovers of the ideal do not in such cases suppose that

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some new form of burglary must, because of the fatal law of evolution, be higher in nature, or nobler, or more worthy of study than the older arts of the thieves. So nobody preaches in praise of the New Burglary. Nor do we suppose that evolution implies, as any universal law, that the New Blizzard, when it comes, is an object worthy of admiration above all former caprices of our climate. We know that if news, in this sense, is indeed interesting, still the weather is the weather, and the thieves break through and steal, and that no news makes more ideal these ancient aspects of the visible world. Now much that is proposed as new in thought, or in the less exact sciences, or in complex arts such as education, has indeed its importance as embodying real progress. When we know that to be the case, we welcome the new, not because it is merely new, but because it is a substantial addition to what is already known to be a good. But, on the other hand, much that is novel in opinion is novel only as the latest change of the weather is new. And I warn you, not indeed blindly to condemn, but cautiously to suspect doctrines that are obliged to advertise, very ostentatiously, the supposed fact that they are new, in order to get a public hearing. In really progressive sciences, as for instance in psychology itself, the most important advances need not be thus loudly heralded. They make their own way, not because they are merely new, but because they are maturely conceived and carefully worked out. As for the world of faith, it is as vain to be a mere seeker of novelties as it is to be a mere conservative. In our deeper faiths the newest and the oldest of humanity’s deeds, interests, and experiences lie side by side. What is new for one soul is not new for another. Love and death and our duty, these are the oldest and the newest things in human destiny. The new love is not on that account the true one. The new coming of death teaches still the ancient lessons of the burial psalm. The new duty is no duty unless it is an example of the most venerable of truths. ‘‘These things’’ says Antigone, ‘‘are not of to-day or of yesterday, and no man knows whence they came.’’ As a fact, what you and I really most need and desire is not the new, nor yet the old. It is the eternal. The genuine lover of truth is neither a conservative nor a radical. He is beyond that essentially trivial opposition. He cares nothing for the time in which these things came to

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pass. For him their interest lies in their truth. Time is but an image, an imitation of the eternal. Evolution itself is only a fashion in which the everlasting appears. For God there is nothing new. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst founded the earth, from everlasting thou art God. Be docile then; be ready to learn what is new to you. But avoid this disease of merely running after every thought that loudly proclaims, or every plan that stridently asserts, ‘‘Behold, I am new.’’ Say to every such claimant for your reverence: ‘‘Are you such that you can grow old and still remain as good as ever? Then indeed I will trust you.’’ But is there nothing, then, in the idea of progress? Are there not certainly progressive movements, whose new stages will therefore be good? Yes. The actual discoveries of empirical science, once submitted to careful test, do indeed form a progressive series. Here the new, once assured by critical verification, is good. But the existence in any particular field of inquiry or of action of a progress that you and I can regard as certain, is never something to be merely presumed. The presumption is valid only after due examination. Only the expert can decide then, with clearness, whether the new is good. This holds in finance and in business as genuinely as in politics or in religion. Therefore it is only, once more, within the relatively narrow range of your expertness, that you can judge whether the new really is, as such, likely to be the good. Outside of that range, favor no novelties unless they appeal to your personal sentiments, to your most humane sympathies, to your best cultivated, but still in general partly unconscious, tastes and instincts. In brief, then, I say to our thoughtful public, overcome your limitations, first by minute and faithful study of a few things and by clearness of ideas about them; then by childlike simplicity in the rest of life, by faithfulness to enlightened leaders, by resignation as opposed to restlessness, and above all by work rather than by idle curiosity. Organize through a willingness to recognize that we must often differ in insight, but that what we need is to do something together. Avoid this restless longing for mere novelty. Learn to wait, to believe in more than you see, and to love not what is old or new, but what is eternal.

IV the pacific coast A Psychological Study of the Relations of Climate and Civilization




I

have been asked to describe some of the principal physical aspects of California, and to indicate the way in which they have been related to the life and civilization of the region. The task is at once, in its main outlines, comparatively simple, and in its most interesting details hopelessly complex. The topography of the Pacific slope, now well known to most travellers, is in certain of its principal features extremely easy to characterize. The broad landscapes, revealing very frequently at a glance the structure of wide regions, give one an impression that the meaning of the whole can easily be comprehended. Closer study shows how difficult it is to understand the relation of precisely such features to the life that has grown up in this region. The principal interest of the task lies in the fact that it is our American character and civilization which have been already moulded in new ways by these novel aspects of the far western regions. But we stand at the beginning of a process which must continue for long An address prepared for the National Geographical Society, in 1898 [Royce’s note].

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ages. Any one interested in the unity of our national life, and in the guiding of our destinies by broad ideals, desires to conceive in some fashion how the physical features of the Pacific Coast may be expected to mould our national type. Yet thus far we have, as it were, only the most general indications of what the result must be. In endeavoring to distinguish between what has already resulted from physical conditions and what has been due to personal character, to deliberate choice, or to the general national temperament, or to what we may have to call pure accident, one is dealing with a task for which the data are not yet sufficient. We can but make a beginning. I The journey westward to California is even now, when one goes by rail, a dramatic series of incidents. From the wide plains of the states immediately west of the Mississippi one passes at first through richly fertile regions to the more and more arid prairies of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. Then come either the steep ranges or the wide passes, and at last what used to be called the Great American Desert itself, that great interior basin of the rugged, saw-tooth ranges, where the weirdly dreary landscape at once terrifies the observer by its desolation, and inspires him by the grandeur of its loneliness, and by the mysterious peacefulness of the desert wherein, as one at first feels, nothing like the complex and restless life of our eastern civilization will ever be possible. As one travels by the familiar central route still further west, one reaches the valley of the Humboldt River, that kindly stream whose general westerly trend made the early overland migration possible. At the end of this portion of the route rises the vast wall of the Sierra Range, and the traveller’s heart thrills with something of the strange feeling that the early immigrants described when, after their long toil, they reached the place where, just beyond this dark and deathlike wall, the land of heavenly promise was known to lie. Abrupt is the ascent of this great range; slower on the other side, the descent,

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amidst the magnificent can˜ons of the western slope, to the plains of the Sacramento Valley. From the foot-hills of the Sierra one used to the journey could easily get at many points a wide outlook into the region beyond. The Coast Range in the far distance bounds with its blue summits the western view, and seems to hide the ocean for whose shore one already looks, as in childhood I, who then lived in the Sierra foot-hills, and had never seen the sea, used longingly to look. Through the valley beneath winds the Sacramento, fed by numerous tributaries from the Sierra. At length, as one continues the railway journey, one reaches the plains of the Sacramento Valley themselves, and enters that interesting region where the scattered oaks, separated from one another by wide distances, used to seem, I remember in the old days, as if set out by God’s hand at the creation in a sort of natural park. One crosses the valley,—the shore of San Francisco Bay is reached. If one is travelling in summer, the intensely dry heat of the Sacramento Valley suddenly gives place to the cold winds of the coast. Mist and the salt air of the sea greet you as you approach the rugged hills about the Golden Gate, and find your way by ferry to San Francisco. The region that to-day is so swiftly and so easily entered was of old the goal of an overland tour that might easily last six months from the Missouri River, and that was attended with many often-recorded dangers. Yet the route that in this brief introductory statement we have followed, is nearly identical with the one which first guided the immigrants to the new land. And in part this route was identical, namely, as far as Fort Hall, with the once familiar Oregon Trail. II Oregon and California, the Canaan which long formed the only goal of those who travelled over these intermediate regions, are determined as to their characters and climate by the presence beyond them of the great ocean, and by the trend northward and southward of the elevated ranges of mountains which lie west of the central basin. On all the continents of the world, in the latitudes of the temperate zones,

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the countries that lie on the lee side of the ocean receive the world’s prevailing winds tempered by a long course over the water. Accordingly, those countries very generally enjoy a relatively steadier climate than those which lie in the same latitudes but on the lee side of the great continental areas; that is, toward the east. But other influences join themselves, as secondary causes, in a number of cases, to this general consequence of the prevailing west winds of the temperate zones. The good fortune of Oregon and California as to their climate depends, in fact, as the meteorologists now recognize, partly upon the steadying influence of the vast masses of water that there lie to windward, partly upon the influence of the mountain masses themselves in affecting precipitation, and finally upon certain great seasonal changes in the distribution of the more permanent areas of high and low pressure,—changes which have been elaborately studied in the report of Lieutenant Glassford on the climate of California and Nevada, published as a government document in 1891. During the summer months, the entire region west of the high Sierra Range and of its continuation, the Cascade Range, is comparatively free, and in the southern portion almost wholly free, from storm disturbances. The moisture-laden winds of the ocean are then deflected by areas of high pressure, which persist off the coast, and the moister winds are prevented from coming into close relation to the mountains and discharging their moisture. On the other hand, during the months from November to March, and in Oregon still later, storm areas are more frequent, and their behavior along the coast, by reason of certain areas of high pressure which are then established in the regions east of the Sierra, is rendered different from the behavior more characteristic of the well-known storms of our eastern coast. The resulting conditions are sometimes those of longcontinued and decidedly steady precipitation on the Coast Range of California, and on the western slope of the Sierra, as well as throughout the Oregon region. Thus arise the longer rains of the California wet season. At other times in the rainy season the storm areas, moving back and forth in a more variable way along the coast, but still

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unable to pass the area of high pressure that lies farther inland, produce conditions of a more gently and variably showery sort over a wide extent of country; as the rainy season passes away in March and April, these showers grow less frequent in California, though they continue in Oregon much later. That portion of Oregon which lies east of the Cascade Range belongs, once more, to the decidedly dry regions of the western country; on the other hand, western Oregon has a much moister climate than California. In consequence, the climate, throughout this entire far western region, is characterized by a very sharp distinction between the wet and dry seasons; while otherwise, within the area of Oregon and California, there exist very wide differences as to the total amount of annual precipitation. Wide extents of country, as, for instance, the San Joaquin Valley in California, have needed the development of elaborate methods of irrigation. The relative variability of rainfall in the more northern regions has in some years beset the Sacramento Valley with severe floods. And still farther north, at places on the Oregon and Washington coast, the annual precipitation reaches very high figures indeed. If one then returns to the other extreme, in far southeastern California, one is altogether in a desert region. Normally the wet season of central and southern California, even where the rainfall is considerable, is diversified by extended intervals of beautifully fair and mild weather. But nowhere on the Pacific Coast has the variation of seasons the characters customary in the eastern country. A true winter exists, indeed, in the high Sierra, but even here this season has a character very different from that of the New England winter. Enormous falls of snow on the upper Sierra slopes are, indeed, frequent. But on the other hand, there are many places in the Sierra where an early spring very rapidly melts away these masses of snow from the upper foot-hills, and leads by a swift transition to the climate of the California dry season, in a dramatic fashion that happens to be prominent amongst my own childhood memories. In general, then, in California and Oregon, with the great western ocean so near, the routine of the year’s climate is much more definite and predetermined than in our Atlantic states. In western Oregon,

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where, as we have said, the climate is far more moist, the rains begin about the end of September and continue with more or fewer intermissions until May or June. The dry season then lasts steadily for three or four months. In California the dry season grows longer, the rainy season less persistent and wealthy in watery gifts, the farther south we go, until in the far south, except on the coast, there is often a very short intermission in the year’s drought. So much for the climate of this region as a whole. Meanwhile, there are numerous local varieties, and amongst these more distinctly local influences that modify the climate both in the wet and in the dry seasons, the Coast Range of California plays a very important part. This range, separated, as we have seen, from the Sierra by the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, joins its masses with those of the Sierra both at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley and at the southern extremity of the San Joaquin Valley. These two rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, flowing the one southward and the other northward, join their waters and find an exit to the sea through San Francisco Bay, which itself opens into the ocean through the Golden Gate. The Sacramento Valley is thus bounded on the east by a range that varies in height from seven thousand to fourteen thousand feet. The Coast Range on the west has an elevation varying from two thousand to four thousand, and in some cases rising to five thousand feet. The elevation of the Coast Range is thus sufficient to affect, in the rainy season, the precipitation in some localities, although the greatest rainfalls of the rainy season in California are due to the influence of the Sierra upon the moisture-laden winds of the sea during the passage of the areas of low pressure. But decidedly more marked is the influence of the Coast Range during the summer months, upon the determination of local climate along the northern Californian coast. Here the summer, from Monterey northward, is along the coast decidedly cold,—sea-breezes and frequent mists marking the days of the entire dry season, while at night the winds usually fall, and the cold may not be so severely felt. But frequently only a few miles will separate these cold regions of the coast from the

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hot interior of the Sacramento Valley or from the smaller valleys on the eastern slope of the Coast Range. To sum up the total result of all these conditions, one may say that the main feature of the whole climate, apart from its mildness, is the relatively predictable character of the year’s weather. In the dryer regions of the south, wherever irrigation is possible and has been developed, the agriculturist often feels a superiority to weather conditions which makes him rejoice in the very drought that might otherwise be regarded as so formidable. In central California one is sure, in advance, of the weather that will steadily prevail during all the summer months. Agricultural operations are thus rendered definite by the knowledge of when the drought is coming, and by the freedom from all fear of sudden storms during the harvest season. That this climate is delightful to those who are used to its routine will be well known to most readers. That it is not without its disagreeable features is equally manifest to every tourist. Nor can one say that this far western country is free from decided variations in the fortunes of different years. Where irrigation is not developed, great anxiety is frequently felt with regard to the sufficiency of the annual rain supply of the rainy season. Years of relative flood and of relative drought are as well known here as elsewhere. Nor is one wholly free, within any one season, from unexpected and sometimes disagreeably long-continued periods of unseasonable temperature. A high barometer over the region north and east of California occasionally brings to pass the well-known California ‘‘northers.’’ These have, in the rainy season, a character that in some respects reminds one of the familiar cold-wave phenomena of the east, although the effect is very much more moderate. Frosts may then extend throughout northern California, may beset the central Coast Range, and may on occasion extend far into the southern part of California itself. But when the ‘‘northers’’ come during the dry season, they are frequently intensely hot winds, whose drought, associated with hill or forest fires, may give rise to very memorable experiences. But these are the inevitable and minor vicissitudes of a climate which is, on the

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whole, remarkably steady, and which is never as trying as are the wellknown variations of our own northeastern climate. The generally good effect upon the health of such a climate is modified in certain cases by the possibly overstimulating character of the coast summer, which, as for instance at San Francisco, permits one to work without thought of holidays all the year round. In my own boyhood it used often to be said that there were busy men in San Francisco who had reached that place in 1849, and who had become prominent in mercantile or other city life, and who had never taken vacations, and never left San Francisco even to cross the bay, from the hour of their coming until that moment. Of course, such men can be found in almost any busy community, but these men seemed rather characteristic of the early California days and suggested the way in which a favorable climate may on occasion be misused by an ambitious man to add to the strains otherwise incident to the life of a new country. If one now turns from the climate to the other aspects of our region, the general topography at once suggests marked features that must needs be of great importance to the entire life of any such country. California and Oregon are sharply sundered from one another by the ranges north of the Sacramento Valley. The Washington region, about Puget Sound, is destined to still a third and decidedly separate life, by reason of its relation to those magnificent inland waters, and by reason of the two high ranges which bound the shores of the American portion of Puget Sound. And, in fact, the country of the whole Pacific Coast may be regarded as geographically divided into at least four great regions: the Washington region, in the neighborhood of Puget Sound; the Oregon region with the valley of the Columbia; the northern and central California region, including the coast and bay of San Francisco, together with the great interior valley; and, finally, the southern region of California. Both the social development and the material future of these four great sections of the Pacific Coast must always be mutually somewhat distinct and independent. The northern and central California region, the third of those just enumerated, is in possession of the largest harbor between Puget Sound and the southern boundary

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of the United States. It is, therefore, here that the civilization of the west was destined to find its first centre. Nor can this province ever have a social destiny independent of that of San Francisco itself. The southern California region, while not separated from central and northern California by any very high barrier, is still marked off by certain features due to the amount of precipitation, and to the smaller harbors of this part of the Pacific Coast. I have already mentioned more than once the breadth of landscape characteristic especially of central California, but often visible elsewhere on the Pacific Coast. Here is a feature that has to do at once with the materially important and with the topographically interesting features of this land. When you stand on Mount Diablo, a mountain about three thousand eight hundred feet high, and some fifteen miles east of San Francisco Bay, you look in one direction down upon the ocean and upon San Francisco Bay itself, while in the other direction you have in full sight the Sierra Range beyond the great valley, and vast reaches of the interior valley itself. Similarly, from the upper foot-hills of the Sierra, every chance elevation that overtops its neighbors a little gives you far-reaching views of the interior valley. The normally clear air of a great part of the year determines the character and sharp outlines of these broad views. The young Californian is thus early used to a country that, as it were, tells its principal secrets at a glance, and he sometimes finds his eye pained and confused either by the monotonous landscapes of the prairies of our middle west, or by the baffling topography of many parts of New England or of our middle states, where one small valley at a time invites one to guess what may be its unseen relations to its neighbors. The effect of all this breadth and clearness of natural scenery on mental life cannot be doubted. III Of climate and topography this very summary view must now suffice. We turn from nature toward life, and ask ourselves what bearing these geographical features have had upon the still so incomplete social development of California.

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In 1846, at the outset of our war with Mexico, the Mexican province of California extended toward the interior, at least on paper, so far as to include the present Nevada and Utah; but only the California coast itself was really known to its inhabitants. California was seized by the American fleet at the outset of the war. Its value to our country had been earlier made known partly through the New England traders who dealt on that coast, and partly through the appearance in the territory of American settlers. The famous report of the expedition of 1844 made by Lieutenant Fremont brought to a focus the popular interest in the importance of the entire territory, and prepared the way for the excitement aroused by the discovery of gold in 1848. The gold excitement determined the entire future history of California; and here of course the immediate influence of the physical upon the social conditions is the best known fact about the state. The golden period of California may be regarded as filling all the years between 1848 and 1860. Or perhaps a still better dividing line might be made in the year 1866, when the government first surveyed the mineral lands of California and parted with its title to these lands, so that the conditions of mining ownership were thenceforth no longer primitive. Up to that time the miners of California had worked by government consent upon land to which they could acquire no title, so that their right to hold land was entirely due to miner’s custom and to occupation, both of which were recognized by the courts of the state in dealing with conflicts amongst miners. With the close of the distinctively mining period, begins the agricultural period of California. Gold mining has of course continued until the present day, but the development of agriculture soon surpassed in importance that of all other industries in the state. Nevertheless, the civilization of the agricultural period has been of course determined in large part, despite the change of material conditions, by the traditions of the more romantic golden period. The California pioneers are gradually passing away; but as the fathers and the early Puritans determined in many respects the future of New England, so the miners, together with their peers, the merchants of early

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San Francisco, lived a life whose traditions, directly due to the physical conditions under which they worked, are sure to be of longcontinued, perhaps of permanently obvious, influence in the development of the civilization of California. If one attempts to describe in what way the civilization either of the golden days or of the later agricultural period has been affected by the geographical conditions, a student of my own habits and prejudices feels at once disposed to pass directly to the inner life of the Californian and to ask himself what influence the nature and climate of such a region seem to have upon the life of the individual mind and body, and, indirectly, upon the social order. Here of course one treads upon ground at once fascinating and enormously difficult. Generalization is limited by the fact of great varieties of personal character and type with which we are dealing. But after all, I think that in California literature, in the customary expressions of Californians in speaking to one another, and, to a very limited degree, in the inner consciousness of any one who has grown up in California, we have evidence of certain ways in which the conditions of such a region must influence the life and, I suppose in the end, the character of the whole community. I feel disposed, then, to try to suggest very briefly how it feels to grow up in such a climate, to live in such a region, thus separated by wide stretches of country from other portions of our own land and from the world at large, thus led by the kindliness of nature into a somewhat intimate, even if uncomprehended, relation to the physical conditions, and thus limited to certain horizons in one’s experience. I speak of course as a native Californian, but I also do not venture to limit even for a moment my characterization by reference to my own private experience. Californians are rather extraordinarily conscious of the relation between their home and their lives. Newcomers who have grown up elsewhere are constantly comparing their natural surroundings with those that they knew before. The natives, for reasons that I shall suggest in a moment, are put into a relation with nature which, whether they are students of nature or not, and whether they are observant or not, is in feeling a peculiarly intimate relation. The consequence may, as I

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have already suggested, be best understood by a reference to some of the wealthy and varied literature that California has already produced. Every one is familiar with that reflection of the change of seasons in poetical literature which we find first in the classic English literature, which we find again gradually appearing in new forms in adaptation to the more special conditions of our American climate. New England nature has now been perhaps almost too frequently characterized in literary art. We are here to ask how the nature of California comes to be characterized. Let me appeal at once to some of the poets to tell us. The most familiar account of the California climate in literature is Bret Harte’s characterization of the seasonal changes in his poem, ‘‘Concepcion Argu¨ello.’’ The scene is here at the Presidio at San Francisco, close by the Golden Gate, where the heroine waited for her lover during the long years that the poem describes. ‘‘Day by day on wall and bastion beat the hollow empty breeze— Day by day the sunlight glittered on the vacant, smiling seas; Week by week the near hills whitened in their dusty leather cloaks— Week by week the far hills darkened from the fringing plain of oaks; Till the rains came, and far-breaking, on the fierce southwester tost, Dashed the whole long coast with color, and then vanished and were lost. So each year the seasons shifted, wet and warm and drear and dry; Half a year of clouds and flowers—half a year of dust and sky.’’

The nature which is thus depicted has of course many other aspects besides this its fundamental rhythm; but prominent in all the literary descriptions is the stress laid upon the coming of the rains,—an event which occupies, very naturally, the same place in the California poet’s mind that the spring occupies elsewhere. Only what this springtime breaks in upon in California is not in general cold, but drought. It is here not the bursting away of any iron barrier of

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frost, but the clearing of the hazy air, the introduction of a rich and sudden new life, the removing of a dull and dry oppression from the heart,—it is such things that first come to mind when one views this change. A student of the University of California in the year 1878, a lady who has won success in more than one branch of literature, Miss Millicent Shinn, published in a college paper of that time the following sonnet, under the title of ‘‘Rain.’’ The poem deserves to be recalled here, just as a suggestion of the relation between nature and the individual mind under such conditions:— ‘‘It chanced me once that many weary weeks I walked to daily work across a plain, Far-stretching, barren since the April rain; And now, in gravelly beds of vanished creeks, November walked dry shod. On every side Round the horizon hung a murky cloud,— No hills, no waters; and above that shroud A wan sky rested shadowless and wide. Until one night came down the earliest rain; And in the morning, lo, in fair array, Blue ranges crowned with snowy summits, lay All round about the fair transfigured plain. Oh, would that such a rain might melt away In tears the cloud that chokes my heart with pain.’’

The heavy air of the close of the dry season, the weary waiting for the autumn rains, the quick change as the new life came,—all these things bring characteristically before one the nature life of central California,—a region of the half-arid type, where the conditions are far enough from true desert conditions, while at moments they simulate the latter. Yet not merely this fundamental rhythm of the climate so easily impressive to every sojourner, arouses the sensitive attention of the life-long inhabitant. The dwellers by the shores of San Francisco Bay see these seasonal changes in the midst of a highly varied landscape. From the hill slopes on the eastern shores of that great harbor one looks toward the Golden Gate. North of the Gate rise the rugged heights of Mount Tamalpais, to a point about twenty-six hundred feet above the sea level. South of the Gate, San Francisco itself

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adds its smoke to the ocean mists, and its hilly summits to the generally bold landscape. The wide expanse of water, stretching north and south in the bay, changes color under the daylight in the most varied manner, according as cloud and sunshine, or as dawn, morning, afternoon, and sunset pass before you. In the summertime the afternoon ocean mists enter, along with the steadily rising daily wind which falls only with the twilight. One of California’s most successful poets, Miss Coolbrith, depicts this scene in her poem entitled ‘‘Two Pictures.’’ Morning ‘‘As in a quiet dream, The mighty waters seem: Scarcely a ripple shows Upon their blue repose. The sea-gulls smoothly ride Upon the drowsy tide, And a white sail doth sleep Far out upon the deep. A dreamy purple fills The hollows of the hills; A single cloud floats through The sky’s serenest blue; And far beyond the Gate, The massed vapors wait— White as the walls that ring The City of the King. There is no sound, no word; Only a happy bird Trills to her nestling young, A little, sleepy song. This is the holy calm; The heavens dropping balm; The Love made manifest, And near; the perfect rest.

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Evening The day grows wan and cold: In through the Gate of Gold The restless vapors glide, Like ghosts upon the tide. The brown bird folds her wing, Sad, with no song to sing. Along the streets the dust Blows sharp, with sudden gust. The night comes, chill and gray; Over the sullen bay, What mournful echoes pass From lonely Alcatraz! O bell, with solemn toll, As for a passing soul! As for a soul that waits, In vain, at heaven’s gates. This is the utter blight; The sorrow infinite Of earth; the closing wave; The parting, and the grave.’’

Such is the daily drama of the dry season at the bay. On the other hand, the rainy season itself contains some tragedies that in no wise belong to the eastern winter. There are the northers, with their periods of relative chill and their swift winged sternness; and these northers have often been celebrated in California verse. But apart from such colder periods, the loud roaring storms and heavy rains are often likely to stand in a curious contrast to the abounding life of vegetation which the rains themselves have aroused. It is possible to cultivate roses in one’s garden throughout the greater part of the year. These, the rainy season will generally encourage in their blooming. On the other hand, the stormy wind will from time to time destroy them with its own floods of cruelty. Miss Coolbrith depicts such a scene in the poem entitled, ‘‘My ‘Cloth of Gold.’ ’’ As in tropical

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countries, so here the long storms seem often much darker and drearier by reason of their warfare with the rich life amidst which they rage. IV Such are a few of the many instances that might be given of the emotional reactions of sensitive minds in the presence of California nature. But now the outer aspect of nature unquestionably moulds both the emotions and the customs of mankind, insensibly affects men’s temperaments in ways which, as we know, somehow or other tend to become hereditary, however we may view the vexed question concerning the heredity of acquired characters. Moreover, the influence of nature upon custom which every civilization depicts, is precisely the kind of influence that from moment to moment expresses itself psychologically in the more typical emotions of sensitive souls. Thus, one may observe that if we are considering the relation between civilization and climate, and are endeavoring to speculate in however vague a manner upon the future of a society in a given environment, we may well turn to the poets, not for a solution of our problem, but for getting significant hints. Or, to put the case somewhat boldly otherwise, I should say that the vast processes which in the course of centuries appear in the changes of civilization due to climate, involve, as it were, tremendously complex mathematical functions. If it were possible for us to state these stupendous functions, we should be possessed of the secret of such social changes. Of such a stupendous function, a group of poems, expressing as they do momentary human changes, might be called, if you like, a system of partial, and I admit very partial, differential equations. I do not hope to integrate any such system of equations, or to gain an exact view of the types of the functions from a consideration of them, and of course I admit with readiness that I am using only a very rough mathematical metaphor. But to translate the matter once more into literal terms, the tendencies of the moment are in their way indications of what the tendencies of the ages are to be.

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Now what all this poetry in general psychologically means, quite apart from special moods, is that the Californian, of necessity, gains a kind of sensitiveness to nature which is different in type from the sensitiveness that a severer climate would inevitably involve, and different too in type from that belonging to climates mild but moist and more variable. In the first place, as you see, such a climate permits one to be a great deal out of doors in the midst of nature. It permits wide views, where the outlines are vast and in general clear. As, when you are on a steamer it is a matter of some skill to understand what are the actual conditions of wind and sea, while, when you are on a sailing vessel you constantly feel both the wind and the sea with a close intimacy that needs no technical knowledge to make it at least appreciated, so, in the case of such a climate as the one of California, your relations with nature are essentially intimate, whether you are a student of nature or not. Your dependence upon nature you feel in one sense more, and in another sense less,—more, because you are more constantly in touch with the natural changes of the moment; less, because you know that nature is less to be feared than under severer conditions. And this intimacy with nature means a certain change in your relations to your fellow-men. You get a sense of power from these wide views, a habit of personal independence from the contemplation of a world that the eye seems to own. Especially in country life the individual Californian consequently tends toward a certain kind of independence which I find in a strong and subtle contrast to the sort of independence that, for instance, the New England farmer cultivates. The New England farmer must fortify himself in his stronghold against the seasons. He must be ready to adapt himself to a year that permits him to prosper only upon decidedly hard terms. But the California country proprietor can have, during the drought, more leisure, unless, indeed, his ambition for wealth too much engrosses him. His horses are plenty and cheap. His fruit crops thrive easily. He is able to supply his table with fewer purchases, with less commercial dependence. His position is, therefore, less that of the knight in his castle and more that of the free dweller in the summer cottage, who is indeed not at leisure, but can easily determine how he

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shall be busy. It is of little importance to him who his next neighbor is. At pleasure he can ride or drive a good way to find his friends; can choose, like the southern planter of former days, his own range of hospitality; can devote himself, if a man of cultivation, to reading during a good many hours at his own choice, or, if a man of sport, can find during a great part of the year easy opportunities for hunting or for camping both for himself and for the young people of his family. In the dry season he knows beforehand what engagements can be made, without regard to the state of the weather, since the state of the weather is predetermined. The free life and interchange of hospitality, so often described in the accounts of early California, has left its traces in the country life of California at the present day. Very readily, if you have moderate means, you can create your own quiet estate at a convenient distance from the nearest town. You may cover your house with a bower of roses, surround yourself with an orchard, quickly grow eucalyptus as a shade tree, and with nearly equal facility multiply other shade trees. You become, on easy terms, a proprietor, with estate and home of your own. Now all this holds, in a sense, of any mild climate. But in California the more regular routine of wet and dry seasons modifies and renders more stable the general psychological consequences. All this is encouraging to a kind of harmonious individuality that already tends in the best instances toward a somewhat Hellenic type. A colleague of my own, a New Englander of the strictest persuasion, who visited California for a short time when he was himself past middle life, returned enthusiastic with the report that the California countrymen seemed to him to resemble the ancient, yes, even the Homeric, Greeks of the Odyssey. The Californians had their independence of judgment; their carelessness of what a barbarian might think, so long as he came from beyond the border; their apparent freedom in choosing what manner of men they should be; their ready and confident speech. All these things my friend at once noticed as characteristic. Thus different in type are these country proprietors from the equally individual, the secretively independent, the silently conscientious New England villagers. They are also quite different

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from the typical southern proprietors. From the latter they differ in having less tendency to respect traditions, and in laying much less stress upon formal courtesies. The Californian, like the westerner in general, is likely to be somewhat abrupt in speech, and his recent coming to the land has made him on the whole quite indifferent to family tradition. I myself, for instance, reached twenty years of age without ever becoming clearly conscious of what was meant by judging a man by his antecedents, a judgment that in an older and less isolated community is natural and inevitable, and that, I think, in most of our western communities, grows up more rapidly than it has grown up in California, where the geographical isolation is added to the absence of tradition. To my own mind, in childhood, every human being was, with a few exceptions, whatever he happened to be. Hereditary distinctions I appreciated only in case of four types of humanity. There were the Chinamen, there were the Irishmen, there were the Mexicans, and there were the rest of us. Within each of these types, every man, to my youthful mind, was precisely what God and himself had made him, and it was distinctly a new point of view to attach a man to the antecedents that either his family or his other social relationships had determined for him. Now, I say, this type of individuality, known more or less in our western communities, but developed in peculiarly high degree in California, seems to me due not merely to the newness of the community, and not merely to that other factor of geographical isolation that I just mentioned, but to the relation with nature of which we have already spoken. It is a free and on the whole an emotionally exciting, and also as we have said, an engrossing and intimate relation. In New England, if you are moody, you may wish to take a long walk out-of-doors, but that is not possible at all or even at most seasons. Nature may not be permitted to comfort you. In California, unless you are afraid of the rain, nature welcomes you at almost any time. The union of the man and the visible universe is free, is entirely unchecked by any hostility on the part of nature, and is such as easily fills one’s mind with wealth of warm experience. Our poets just

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quoted have laid stress upon the directly or symbolically painful aspects of the scene. But these are sorrows of a sort that mean precisely that relation with nature which I am trying to characterize, not the relation of hostility but of closeness. And this is the sort of closeness determined not merely by mild weather, but by long drought and by the relative steadiness of all the climatic conditions. Now, I must feel that such tendencies are of vast importance, not merely to-day but for all time. They are tendencies whose moral significance in the life of California is of course both good and evil, since man’s relations with nature are, in general, a neutral material upon which ethical relations may be based. If you are industrious, this intimacy with nature means constant coo¨peration, a coo¨peration never interrupted by frozen ground and deep snow. If you tend to idleness, nature’s kindliness may make you all the more indolent, and indolence is a possible enough vice with the dwellers in all mild climates. If you are morally careless, nature encourages your freedom, and tends in so far to develop a kind of morale frequently characteristic of the dwellers in gentle climates. Yet the nature of California is not enervating. The nights are cool, even in hot weather; owing to the drought the mildness of the air is not necessarily harmful. Moreover, the nature that is so uniform also suggests in a very dignified way a regularity of existence, a definite reward for a definitely planned deed. Climate and weather are at their best always capricious, and, as we have seen, the variations of the California seasons have involved the farmers in much anxiety, and in many cases have given the farming business, as carried on in certain California communities, the same sort of gambling tendency that originally vitiated the social value of the mining industry. But on the other hand, as the conditions grew more stable, as agriculture developed, vast irrigation enterprises introduced once more a conservative tendency. Here again for the definite deed nature secures a definite return. In regions subject to irrigation, man controls the weather as he cannot elsewhere. He is independent of the current season. And this tendency to organization—a tendency similar to the one that was obviously so potent in

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the vast ancient civilization of Egypt,—is present under Californian conditions, and will make itself felt. Individuality, then, but of a peculiar type, and a tendency despite all this individualism toward agricultural conservatism and a definite social organization—these are already the results of this climate. V I have spoken already several times of the geographical isolation of this region. This has been a factor that was felt of course in the social life from the very outset, and more in the early days than at present. To be sure, it was never without its compensating features. It shows its influences in a way that varies with pretty definite periods of California history. In the earliest days, before the newcomers in California supposed that agriculture was possible on any large scale, nearly everything was imported. Butter, for instance, was sent around the Horn to San Francisco. And throughout the early years most of the population felt, so to speak, morally rooted in the eastern communities from which they had sprung. This tendency retarded for a long time the development of California society, and made the pioneers careless as to the stability of their social structure; encouraged corrupt municipal administration in San Francisco; gave excuse for the lynching habit in the hastily organized mining communities. But a reaction quickly came. After the general good order which as a fact characterized the year 1849 had gradually given place, with the increase of population, to the disorders of 1851 and to the municipal errors of the years between 1850 and 1856 in the city of San Francisco, there came a period of reform and of growing conservatism which marked all the time of the later mining period and of the transition to the agricultural period. During these years many who had come to California without any permanent purpose decided to become members of the community, and decided in consequence to create a community of which it was worth while to be a member. The consequence was the increase of the influence of the factor of geographical isolation in its social influence upon the life of California. The community became

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self-conscious, independent, indisposed to take advice from without, very confident of the future of the state and of the boundless prosperity soon to be expected; and within the years between 1860 and 1870 a definite local tradition of California life was developed upon the basis of the memories and characters that had been formed in the early days. The consequence was a provincial California, whose ideals at last assumed that form of indifference to the barbarians beyond the border which my friend noticed as surviving even to the time of the visit of which I have spoken. But the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869 introduced once more the factor of physical connection with the East, and of commercial rivalry with the investors of the Mississippi Valley who now undertook, along with the capitalists of California, to supply the mining population of the still newer Rocky Mountain regions. On the whole, I should say that for a good while the provincial California, in the rather extremer sense of the tradition of the sixties and early seventies, held its own against the influence of the railway. But the original railway did not remain alone. Other transcontinental lines developed. The southern portion of the state, long neglected during the early days, became, in the beginning of the eighties, the theatre of a new immigration and of a new and on the whole decidedly more eastern civilization. There has resulted since that time a third stage of California life and society, a stage marked by a union of the provincial independence of the middle period with the complex social influences derived from the East and from the world at large. The California of to-day is still the theatre of the struggle of these opposing forces. VI It remains necessary to characterize more fully the way in which the consequences of the early days, joined to the geographical factors upon which we have already laid stress, have influenced the problems of California life and society. From the very outset, climate and geographical position, and the sort of life in which men were engaged,

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have encouraged types of individuality whose subtle distinction from those elsewhere to be found we have already attempted in a very inadequate fashion to suggest. Accordingly, from the first period down to the present time, the California community has been a notable theatre for the display of political and financial, and, on occasion, of intellectual individuality of decidedly extraordinary types. The history of both earlier and later California politics has been a very distinctly personal history. The political life of the years before the war had as their most picturesque incident the long struggle for the United States Senatorship carried on between David Broderick and William Gwin. This contest involved personalities far more than principles. Gwin and Broderick were both of them extremely picturesque figures,—the one a typical Irish-American, the other a Southerner. The story of their bitter warfare is a familiar California romance. The tragic death of Broderick, in duel with the once notorious Terry, is a tale that long had a decidedly national prominence. Terry himself is an example of a type of individuality not elsewhere unknown in border life, but developed under peculiarly Californian conditions. Terry was, very frankly, a man of blood. Regarding him as a man of blood, one finds him in many ways, and within his own limits, an interesting, even a conscientious and attractive personality. He was at one time upon the Supreme Bench of the state of California. He warred with the Vigilance Committee of 1856 in a manner that certainly wins one’s respect for his skill in bringing that organization into a very difficult position. He carried on this warfare both as judge of the Supreme Court and as wielder of a bowie knife. When he slew Broderick, he did so in a fashion that, so far as the duelling code permitted, was perfectly fair. He lived for years with a disposition to take the unpopular side of every question, to fight bitterly for causes for which no other man cared, and it was precisely for such a cause that he finally died. His attempted assault upon Judge Field, and the controversy that led thereto, and that resulted in Terry’s death, was, a few years since, in everybody’s memory. It would be wholly wrong to conceive California individuality as at all fairly represented by a border type such as Terry’s. Yet when one

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looks about in California society and politics, one finds even at the present day picturesque personalities preserving their picturesqueness amidst various grades of nobility and baseness, in a fashion more characteristic, I think, than is customary in most of our newer communities. The nobler sort of picturesque personality may be the public benefactor, like Lick or Sutro. He may be the social reformer of vast ideals, like Henry George. Or again the baser individual may be the ignorant demagogue of the grade of Dennis Kearney. Your California hero may be the chief of the Vigilance Committee of 1856, or some other typical and admired pioneer, growing old in the glory of remembered early deeds. He may be the railway magnate, building a transcontinental line under all sorts of discouragements, winning a great fortune, and dying just as he founds a university. But in all these phases he remains the strong individual type of man that in a great democracy is always necessary. It is just this type that, as some of us fear, the conditions of our larger democracy in more eastern regions tend far too much to eliminate. In California, such individuality is by no means yet eliminated. There is a symptom of this fact which I have frequently noted, both while I was a continuous resident of California and from time to time since. Individualistic communities are almost universally, and paradoxically enough, communities that are extremely cruel to individuals. It is so in a debating club, where individuality is encouraged, but where every speaker is subject to fierce criticism. Now, this is still so in California to an extent which surprises even one who is used to the public controversies of some of our eastern cities. The individual who, by public action or utterance, rises above the general level in California, is subject to a kind of attack which strong men frequently enjoy, but which even the stranger finds on occasion peculiarly merciless. That absence of concern for a man’s antecedents of which I before spoke, contributes to this very mercilessness. A friend once remarked to me that in California, Phillips Brooks, had he appeared there before reaching the very height of his reputation, would have had small chance to win a hearing, so little reverence would have been felt for the mere form of the causes that he maintained. This remark

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was perhaps unfair, since a stranger preacher—Thomas Starr King,— gained in early California days, at about the beginning of the war, a very great public reputation in a short time, received great sympathy, and had a mighty influence. But, on the other hand, it is perfectly certain that the public man who intends to maintain his ideals in California will have to do so under fire, and will have to be strong enough to bear the fire. His family, or the clubs to which he belongs, the university that he represents, the church that supports him,— none of these factors will in such a community easily determine his standing. He works in a community where the pioneer tradition still remains, the tradition of independence and of distrust toward enthusiasm. For one feels in California, very keenly, that enthusiasm may after all mean sham, until one is quite sure that it has been severely tested. And this same community, so far as its country population is concerned, is made up of persons who, whether pioneers or newcomers, live in the aforesaid agricultural freedom, in easy touch with nature, not afraid of the sentiments of the crowd, although of course disposed, like other human beings, to be affected by a popular cry in so far as it attacks men or declares new ideals insignificant. It is much more difficult to arouse the enthusiastic sympathy of such people than it is, in case one has the advantage of the proper social backing, to affect the public opinion of a more highly organized social order in a less isolated region. And now we have seen the various ways in which this sort of individuality is a product of the natural features of the state as well as of those early conditions which themselves were determined by geographical factors. On the other hand, in addition to this prevalence of individuality and this concomitant severity of the judgment of prominent individuals, there are social conditions characteristic of San Francisco which can also be referred to geographical and climatic factors. Early in the development of San Francisco a difficulty in the education of the young appeared which, as I fancy, has not yet been removed. This difficulty had to do with the easy development of vagrancy in city children. Vagrancy is a universal evil of cities, but the California vagrant can easily pass the night out-doors during the

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greater part of the year. A friend of mine who was connected with the management of San Francisco public schools for a number of years, laid stress upon this climatic factor and its dangers in official communications published at the time of his office. The now too well-known name of ‘‘hoodlum’’ originated in San Francisco, and is said to have been the name adopted by a particular group of young men. The social complications of the time of the sand-lot, when Dennis Kearney led laborers into a dangerous pass, were again favored by climatic conditions. Public meetings out-of-doors and in the sand-lot could be held with a certain freedom and persistency in California that would be impossible without interruption elsewhere. While such factors have nothing to do with discontent, they greatly increase the opportunities for agitation. The new constitution of California, adopted in 1879, was carried at the polls by a combination of the working men of San Francisco with the dissatisfied farmers of the interior. This dissatisfaction of the farmers was no doubt due in the main to the inadequacy of their comprehension of the material conditions under which they were working. The position of California—its geographical isolation again—has been one complicating factor for the California farmer, since luxuriant nature easily furnished him, in case he should use wise methods, with a rich supply, while his geographical isolation made access to market somewhat difficult. This difficulty about the markets long affected California political life in the form of dissatisfaction felt against the railway, which was of course held responsible and which in fact for years was more or less responsible for an increase of these difficulties of reaching the market. Well, this entire series of complications, which in 1879 combined San Francisco working men with the farmers of the interior, and changed the constitution of the state, is an example of the complex way in which the geographical situation and the factors of climate have acted to affect social movements. On the other hand, the individuality aforesaid, when brought into the presence of such social agitations, has frequently proved in California life a conservative factor of great importance. The mob may be

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swept away for a time by an agitating idea. But the individual Californian himself is suspicious of mobs. The agitations in question proved transient. Even the constitution, designed to give the discontented whatever they most supposed they wanted, proved to be susceptible of a very conservative construction by the courts, and public opinion in California has never been very long under the sway of any one illusion. The individuality that we have described quickly revolts against its false prophets. In party politics, California proves to be an extremely doubtful state. Party ties are not close. The vote changes from election to election. The independent voter is well in place. Finally, through all these tendencies, there runs a certain idealism, often more or less unconscious. This idealism is partly due to the memory of the romance due to the unique marvels of the early days. It is also sustained by precisely that intimacy with nature which renders the younger Californians so sensitive. I think that perhaps Edward Rowland Sill, whose poems are nowadays so widely appreciated, has given the most representative expression to the resulting spirit of California, to that tension between individualism and loyalty, between shrewd conservatism and bold radicalism, which marks this community.

V some relations of physical training to the present problems of moral ed u cat ion in am er ica




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n asking me to address this Society, your Secretary was well aware that I have no right and no desire to pass judgment upon any of the more technical problems which are peculiar to the profession of physical education. But there are problems which are common to your profession and to that region of inquiry to which I am most devoted. These common problems, in fact, interest all who are concerned in the welfare of humanity, and who in particular aim to further the welfare of our country. I refer to those problems of moral education which, in the present time, assume new and difficult forms in American life. I am well aware that those of you, and of your numerous colleagues, who have been most earnest in furthering the cause of physical education, not only in our land, but in Europe, have always laid great stress upon the close relation of sound physical training to good moral training. And we all know how, from primitive times, mankind have used various forms of physical exercise as a An address before the Boston Physical Education Association [Royce’s note].

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part of the discipline which tribes or, later, nations or, in our modern days, civilized men generally, have regarded as fitted to form whatever well-rounded types of individual character the various stages of human culture have admired. Physical training has repeatedly had, in the past, a place in the religious life of various peoples, and systems of secular training have often so much the more followed analogous lines. Chivalry in Europe, Bushido in Japan, were systems of conduct which were inseparable from various plans for physical training. Today most of you lay constant stress upon your function, not only as teachers who care for the health, for the physical growth, and for the accompanying intellectual development of your pupils, but as instructors who contribute what you all believe to be a very significant part of the moral education of the youth of the country. The social organizations known as Young Men’s Christian Associations are the expression of explicitly religious motives, and are unquestionably intended for an ethical purpose. But they regard their gymnasiums as an essential part of their work. And this is but one example of the recognition of a close linkage between physical and moral training,—a linkage which you all believe to be important, and which most of you consciously emphasize in your own practice. The problems of moral education are common, then, to you and to your colleagues in other branches of education, of inquiry, and of social work. I myself, as a teacher of philosophy, have lately been led to consider some of the problems of ethics with especial reference to the present state of our American civilization. I have supposed, therefore, that you might be interested if I now attempt to state some of these problems in a way to suggest their possible connections with your profession. I make these suggestions very tentatively. As a student of philosophy, I have, indeed, my rights as an inquirer into ethical questions. But, when I try to tell you my view about how some of these questions relate to your calling, I at once run the risks which any man runs who attempts to connect his own views with those of others, by appealing to his fellows regarding the matters in which they are expert while he is not expert. But, in any case, I shall try to keep to the ground that is common to your calling and to mine. You all of

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you are interested in what some of you may call the philosophy of physical training. I am professionally concerned with philosophy. And so I want to meet you upon this common basis of your interest and mine in the questions which concern what I may call the moral philosophy of your calling. I I shall begin by asking what we mean by the moral training of an individual man. This question we can best attempt to answer by sketching a moral ideal,—an ideal of what, as I suppose, we all, more or less consciously, desire any moral agent to become. If we define this ideal, then the moral training of an individual will be defined as the training that is best adapted to help that individual to approach this moral ideal. The ideal human moral agent, as I assert, is a man who is wholeheartedly and effectively loyal to some fitting object of loyalty. This first statement of the moral ideal may seem vague to you. I hasten to explain a little more precisely what I mean. I have chosen the good old word ‘‘loyal’’ as the word best adapted to arouse, with the fewest misleading associations, that idea or the moral life which I believe to be rationally the most defensible. But, of course, my own usage of the word ‘‘loyal’’ must attempt to be more exact than the traditional usage is, because such popular words are always applied somewhat recklessly; and the loyalty that I have in mind when I employ this term is something that I try to conceive in as exact a fashion as the subject permits. ‘‘Loyalty,’’ as popularly understood, has always meant a certain attitude of mind which faithful friends, lovers, soldiers, or retainers, or which martyrs dying for their faith have exemplified. Plainly, a good many different sorts of people and of deeds have been called loyal. And, if you view the matter merely upon the basis of a comparison of a few widely various instances of loyalty, you may be disposed to say that the moral quality in question is too wavering and confused a feature of character to be fitly used as a type of all moral excellence. Cannot robbers be loyal to

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their band, slaves to their master, mischievous boys to the comrades whose pranks they incite and applaud, but whose names they refuse to tell to any teacher? Is loyalty, then, always a trait of the morally wise or of the good? Is it a typical virtue? Is it not rather an accidental accompaniment of goodness or, at best, a special form which goodness may sometimes take? I answer that all these just-mentioned instances of loyalty—even the loyalty of the robber to his band—involve some morally good features. My own definition of loyalty as a fundamental virtue is intended, first to emphasize these good features, which even the blindest forms of loyalty exemplify, then to separate these good features from their accidental setting, and then to define the ideal toward which all the forms of loyalty seem to me to tend. I will therefore proceed at once to characterize loyalty as it appears in its most typical instances and on higher levels. Loyalty, as I view the essence of this trait, means, in the first place, a certain attitude of mind which we can best understand by considering cases of strong and hearty loyalty as they occur in the life of a mature and highly trained man. This loyal attitude makes a man give himself to the active service of a cause. This cause is one which the loyal man regards, at the moment of action, as something beyond his own private self, and as larger than this private self, as vaster and worthier than any of his private interests. And yet, for the loyal man, his whole private self meanwhile seems inspired by the cause, so that, while he is engaged in his loyal activity, his eyes, his ears, his tongue, his hand, his whole strength, exist, for the time, simply as the organs of his loyalty. When a man is loyal and is actively engaged in his loyal undertakings, he is keenly and clearly conscious, therefore, of a strong contrast, and yet of an equally strong unity, present in his life and in his deeds. He himself, the natural man, with his desires and his private interests, with his muscles and his sense organs, with his property and his powers,—he is there in the world, and he knows this natural self of his, he is definitely aware of it. For loyalty—is never mere selfforgetfulness; it is self-devotion. And you cannot devote yourself unless you are aware of yourself. The loyal man lives intensely, vigorously, personally; and over against this natural self of his is his

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cause,—his side in a game, his army in combat, his country in danger, or perhaps his friend, his beloved, his family, humanity, God. He is conscious of this cause; and so the cause is, in great part, sharply contrasted with this private self of his. It is outside of him,—something vast, dignified, imposing, compelling, objective. Were he not aware of this sharp contrast between himself and his cause, he could not be loyal; for without the contrast the whole affair would be merely one of his private interests and passions. The cause meanwhile is itself no mere thing amongst things. It has at least the value of a person or of a system of persons. It is always, in fact, for any deeply loyal man, something which is at once personal and superpersonal, as your family and your country are for you. One cannot be loyal to merely inanimate things as such. And yet, on the other hand, loyalty always views persons in their deeper relations to something that seems larger than any one human personality or than any mere collection of persons can be. Thus your family is, for your family loyalty, more than the mere collection of its members; and the Joseph of the story was loyal to his brotherly and to his filial ties, and not merely to the various individual brethren. Well, this contrast of the natural man and of his imposing and objective cause is a fact of which the loyal man is keenly conscious. Yet, despite this fact, he is just as conscious that by his deeds he is always reducing his contrast ever afresh to unity. So long as he is indeed active, wide-awake, effectively loyal, he exists only as servant of this cause. The cause, then, is not only another than his private self; it is in a sense his larger self. Despite the contrast he becomes one with it through his every loyal deed. His private self is its willing instrument. The cause inspires him, acts through him. Loyalty is a sort of possession. It has a demonic force which controls the wayward private self. The cause takes hold of the man, and his organism is no longer his own, so long as the loyal inspiration is upon him. Such, I say, is, in the briefest language, a general characterization of the characteristic loyal attitude as it exists in its strong and maturely developed forms, and especially in the moments of our effectively loyal conduct. The boys, loyal to their mates, have the beginnings of

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loyalty, often in evanescent forms. The simple-minded folk who do not reflect are not always so keenly conscious of their loyalty as more thoughtful folk may be; but all the more are they able to prove their loyalty by their deeds. The fully mature and reflectively devoted man knows his loyalty, and is possessed by it. For loyalty, as you see, is essentially an active virtue. It involves manifold sentiments,—love, good-will, earnestness, delight in the cause; but it is complete only in motor terms, never in merely sentimental terms. It is useless to call my feelings loyal unless my muscles somehow express this loyalty. For my objective cause and my inner private self, in case I am loyal, are sharply contrasted. I have to think of both of them, if I am to be loyal; but they must be brought into unity. Only my deeds can accomplish this result. My loyal sentiments, if left to themselves, would merely emphasize the contrast without giving life any acceptable unity. Loyal is that loyally does. Hence the loyal attitude is one which especially interests any teacher who is concerned with what his pupil does. The nature of loyalty, then, in the pupil should interest any teacher of physical training who is considerate of the moral aspects of his calling. To be sure, on its higher levels,—in its ideal expressions,—loyalty goes over into regions where mere physical training seems to be very remote from the forms of loyalty that are in question. For loyalty, as I hold, includes in its spirit whatever has been meant in the past by the various inner virtues of sentiment, by charity, by high-mindedness, by spiritual training. It includes these virtues because the loyal act needs and expresses the loyal sentiment. But loyalty combines the sentiments with all the active virtues,—with courage, with patience, with moral initiative,— according as these are needed in one situation or in another. Yet on even its highest levels loyalty has its physical expression. For one is loyal through his deed. If I were here to define the moral ideal in terms of the Pauline virtue of charity, as described in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, we should have indeed some difficulty in pointing out within the limits of this paper the various intermediate steps by which this lofty spiritual virtue of the apostle is linked, as of course it is indeed linked, with the motor activities whereby our

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organism expresses our will. But, when I now define the moral ideal directly in terms of the loyal attitude, you all see at once how nobody can be effectively loyal unless he is highly trained on the motor side, and unless his ideas and his moral sentiments have long since won their way to an elaborate expression in the deeds of his organism. And so it is indeed plain that surely one way, at least, to prepare a man for a loyal life, is to give him a careful and extended motor training, such as organizes his conduct in harmony with his nobler sentiments. This you all see; and you know that the Japanese long ago saw it also, so that an essential part of their training in Bushido—that is, in their ancient code of chivalrous loyalty—was a training in the physical arts of a Samurai. Our very first view of loyalty suggests then a sense in which physical and moral training may be closely related. But before we estimate what this relation means we must get a fuller notion of what loyalty itself means. II I have so far only characterized the general attitude of the higher types of loyalty. Loyalty such as has now been defined may of course take countless special forms. And these forms may appear to be in conflict with one another. In practice the expressions of loyalty do in fact often conflict with one another. The loyal are often quarrelsome. Men can be equally devoted servants of their various causes and yet pass their lives in trying to kill one another. But, since I have so far emphasized the central significance of loyalty as a moral ideal, you may well wonder whether I am indeed right to make loyalty thus central. And so you may well ask me what I have to say, as a moralist, regarding those conflicts of loyalty of which so large a part of the history of mankind has consisted. When equally loyal people are found fighting together, when the heroic devotion of all that a man has and is to the cause which he has chosen as his own appears to demand of him that he should fight and perhaps slay his fellow-man,—well, as you may next ask, in such cases, Who is right? And, if loyalty is indeed any guide to right conduct, why should loyalty counsel me, as it so

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often seems to do, to oppose and to condemn the loyalty of my fellow? Must there not then be some higher moral principle than that of loyalty,—some principle in terms of which we can find out who is right when two forms of loyalty contradict each other’s claims, while each pretends to be the only true loyalty? After all,—as you may insist,—have I shown in the foregoing why the robber ought not to be loyal to his band? Have I shown what wise loyalty is as distinguished from slavish or base loyalty? Have not countless crimes been committed in the name of loyalty? To such questions I at once answer that, in making loyalty central as a moral principle, I mean to define loyalty in a sense which in the end will make explicit what the true and implied meaning of all loyalty is, even in the cases where loyalty, like love in the proverb, is blind. I defined the loyal attitude as something characteristic of a certain type of personal life. I have said that the genuinely moral attitude is always one of loyalty. I have meant, and I shall indeed stoutly insist, that nobody has reached any morally ideal position who is not, in his more active life, loyal to some cause or to some system of causes. I maintain that without loyalty there is no thoroughgoing morality; and I also insist that all special virtues and duties, such as those which the names benevolence, truthfulness, justice, spirituality, charity, recall to our minds, are parts or are special forms of loyalty. My theory is that the whole moral law is implicitly bound up in the one precept: Be loyal. But I freely admit that many men who have been enthusiastically and effectively loyal to various causes, and who in their personal lives have won as mature a notion of loyalty as they were capable of getting, have nevertheless often committed, in the name of loyalty, great crimes. And you may well ask how I explain this fact. You may well wonder how loyalty can be a central moral principle, when lives that were as loyal as the men in question knew how to make them have often been morally mischievous lives. My answer is that our loyalty leads us into moral error only in so far as we are indeed often blind to what the principle of loyalty actually means and requires. And such blindness is, as men go, human

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enough and common enough. The corrective to such errors, however, is not the introduction of some other moral principle than that of loyalty, but is just the discovery of the internal meaning, the true sense of the loyal principle itself. Whoever is loyal loves loyalty for its own sake. Let him merely bethink him of what this love for loyalty means, and he will be led to that definition of the precept: Be loyal,—to that definition, I say, which gives to this principle its true scope. Loyalty, namely, is a common good,—I might say that it is the common good of morally trained mankind. This, however, does not mean that all men ought to define in the same monotonous terms the causes to which they are to be loyal. There is a diversity of causes. There is one spirit of loyalty. In the spirit of loyalty, viewed just as a personal attitude, lies the only universal solution of the problem of every private personality. What am I here for? So a man may ask himself. And the rational answer is: You are here to become absorbed in a devotion to some cause or system of causes. Your devotion must be as thorough as your effective power to do work is highly developed. Herein alone lies the solution of your personal problem. In case you are loyal to nothing, your existence as a private individual will remain to you a mysterious burden, which you may learn to tolerate, or even, if you are lucky and thoughtless, to enjoy, but which you can never discover to be anything of rational meaning unless you take yourself to be a centre of activity of which some spiritual power to which you are loyally devoted makes use. And this power must be much bigger and worthier than your private fortunes, taken by themselves, can ever become. If such a spiritual power, such a cause, such a god stronger than you are, enters you, possesses you, uses you, and finds you its willingly loyal instrument, then you, just as you, have an office, a function, a place, a status, a right, in the world. This your right will become manifest to you only through your loyal deeds. You will work in the spirit of your cause. Your powers will be dedicated to the cause, and the otherwise miserable natural accident that there you are, with just your sensations, your ideas, and your physical organism, will become transformed into a notable event in the great

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world,—the event that precisely your unique service of your chosen cause has come to pass by your own will. Loyalty, then,—the general spirit of loyalty, I now mean,—is a common good of mankind. It is the only good the possession of which makes any man’s being thoroughly worth while from his own more rational point of view. Now, if this be so, loyalty, taken in its universal meaning, is just as much a true good in the world when my neighbor possesses it as when I possess it. If once I am wide-awake enough to grasp this fact, I shall value my neighbor’s loyalty just as highly as I do my own. He indeed will be loyal to his cause, I to mine. Our causes may be very diverse, but our spirit will be one. And so the very essence of my spirit of loyalty will demand that I state my principle thus: Be loyal, and be in such wise loyal that, whatever your own cause, you remain loyal to loyalty. That is, so choose your cause, and so serve it, that, as a result of your activity, there shall be more of this common good of loyalty in the world than there would have been, had you not lived and acted. Let your loyalty be such loyalty as helps your neighbor to be loyal. Despite the diversity of the individual causes—the families, countries, professions, friendships—to which you and your neighbor are loyal, so act that the devotion of each shall respect and aid the other’s loyalty. This simpler statement of the true meaning of the principle of loyalty enables us at once to see that, when in the past loyalty has led men into crimes,—that is, into needless hostility to other people’s loyalty,—it has done so, not because the men were loyal, but because they were blind to what their own loyalty signified. If they loved loyalty for its own sake (and this they did in case they were indeed loyal), then they valued loyalty not as their private possession, but for its own dear sake, as a type of spiritual activity, as a sort of human interest, that makes human life morally worth while for any man who shares this spirit. If they had remembered this fact, and if they had seen what the fact meant, they would have respected in their neighbors’ lives every form of genuine loyalty, wherever they met with it. And then they would have seen that the spirit of our true loyalty is

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never opposed to the existence of our neighbor’s loyalty. Charity, benevolence, and—simplest of all—plain fair play are tendencies that are thus to be ethically defined and deduced from our central principle. All such virtues are expressions of that loyalty to loyalty which I have now defined as the genuine and enlightened incorporation of the loyal spirit. Wherever a soldier has honored the heroism and devotion of his enemy, this honor, if it has taken practical form, has been an instance of loyalty to loyalty. One soldier fights for one cause, the other for the other. But each may, even as warrior, respect his opponent’s loyalty. Let the spirit of this loyalty to loyalty spread amongst us, and it will, indeed, in no wise mean that we shall all individually serve the same causes. We must have our various causes, just as we have our various families. And no man’s loyalty ought to consist wholly in a devotion to the same causes that other men serve. Loyalty is, for each man, something personal, individual. And yet, as I insist, the spirit of loyalty is a common good for all men. Each man must solve his own problem of life by means of his own form of loyalty. But the one cause that we shall all have in common will be the cause of loyalty to loyalty; that is, we shall all be disposed to make all men more loyal. Every man’s individual devotion to his own cause will be just his own, but his example of loyalty, his eagerness to be the instrument of his own cause, will be a help and not a hindrance to his neighbors in the fostering of their individual form of the loyal spirit. Let this spirit of loyalty to loyalty grow amongst us, I say, and then we shall, indeed, rejoice in the loyalty of foreigners to their own nations instead of despising them for having the wrong country to dwell in. Let this spirit of loyalty to loyalty become universal, and then wars will cease; for then the nations, without indeed lapsing into any merely international mass, will so respect each the loyalty of the others that aggression will come to seem inhuman. And instead of war there will then remain only the sort of cheerful rivalry amongst our various forms of loyalty which at present is finely represented by good sport when fair play prevails. For in true sport one’s loyalty to one’s own side exists as immediately expressed in deeds which fully respect the opponent’s loyalty to his own side, and which involve that

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loyalty to the rules of the game, and so to the common loyalty of both the opposing sides, which constitutes fair play. III Thus, if you please, I have sketched for you the basis of a moral philosophy. The rational solution of moral problems rests on the principle: Be loyal. This principle, properly understood, involves two consequences. The first is this: Have a cause, choose a cause, give yourself over to that cause actively, devotedly, whole-heartedly, practically. Let this cause be something social, serviceable, requiring loyal devotion. Let this cause, or system of causes, constitute a life work. Let the cause possess your senses, your attention, your muscles,—all your powers, so long as you are indeed active and awake at all. See that you do not rest in any mere sentiment of devotion to the cause. Act out your loyalty. Loyalty exists in the form of deeds done by the willing and devoted instrument of his chosen cause. This is the first consequence of the commandment: Be loyal. The second consequence is like unto the first. It is this: Be loyal to loyalty. That is, regard your neighbor’s loyalty as something sacred. Do nothing to make him less loyal. Never despise him for his loyalty, however little you care for the cause that he chooses. If your cause and his cause come into some inevitable conflict, so that you indeed have to contend with him, fight, if your loyalty requires you to do so; but in your bitterest warfare fight only against what the opponent does. Thwart his acts where he justly should be thwarted; but do all this in the very cause of loyalty itself, and never do anything to make your neighbor disloyal. Never do anything to encourage him in any form of disloyalty; in other words, never war against his loyalty. From these consequences of my central principle follow, as I maintain, all those propositions about the special duties of life which can be reasonably defined and defended. Justice, kindliness, chivalry, charity,—these are all of them forms of loyalty to loyalty. Even while I have set forth this sketch of a general ethical doctrine, I have intentionally illustrated my views by some references to your

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professional work. But at this point I next have briefly to emphasize the positive relations which physical education may have and should have to the training of the loyal spirit. Here I shall simply repeat what others, more expert than I am, have long since, in various speech, set forth. The first way in which systematic physical training of all grades and at all ages may be of positive service in a moral education is this: Loyalty, as we have seen, means a willing and thoroughgoing devotion of the whole active self to a chosen cause or to a chosen system of causes. But such devotion, as we have also seen, is a motor process. One must be in control of one’s powers, or one has no self to give to one’s cause. One must get a personality in order to be able to surrender this personality to anything. And since physical training actually has that relation to the culture of the will which your leaders so generally emphasize, while some physical expression of one’s personality is an essential accompaniment of the existence of every human personality,—for both of these reasons, I say, the training of physical strength and skill is one important preparation for a moral life. There is indeed a great deal else in moral training besides what physical training supplies; but the physical training can be a powerful auxiliary. Here I come upon ground that is familiar to all of you, and that I need not attempt to cover anew with suggestions of my own. The positive relation of good physical training to the formation of a sound will is known to all of you. The only relatively new aspect of this familiar region that may have been brought to light by the foregoing considerations is this: Loyalty, as you see, on its highest levels involves the same general mental features which are present whenever a physical activity, at once strenuous and skilful, is going on. As a skilful and difficult physical exercise demands that one should keep his head in the midst of efforts that, by reason of the strain, or of the excitement,—by reason of the very magnitude and fascination of the task, would confuse the untrained man, and make him lose a sense of what he was trying to do, even so the work of the effectively loyal person is always one which requires that he should stand in presence of undertakings large enough to threaten to cloud his judgment and to crush

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his self-control, while his loyalty still demands that he also should keep his head despite the strain, and should retain steady control of his personality, even in order to devote it to the cause. Loyalty means hard work in the presence of serious responsibilities. The danger of such work is closely similar to the danger of losing one’s head in a difficult physical activity. One is devoting the self to the cause. The cause must be vast. For its very vastness is part of what gives it worth. I cannot be loyal to what requires of me no effort. But the consciousness of the vastness and difficulty of one’s cause tends to crush the self of the person who is trying to be loyal. And a self crushed into a loss of self-possession, a self no longer aware of its powers, a self that has lost sight of its true contrast with the objects about it, has no longer left the powers which it can devote to any cause. Mere goodwill is no substitute for trained self-possession either in physical or in moral activities. And self-possession is a necessary condition for selfdevotion. When the apostle compared the moral work of the saints to the running of a race, his metaphors were therefore chosen because of this perfectly definite analogy between the devotion of the trained organism to its physical task and the devotion of the moral self to its cause. In both classes of cases, in loyal devotion and in skilful and strenuous physical exercise, similar mental problems have to be solved. One has to keep the self in sight in order to surrender it anew, through each deed, to the task in hand. Meanwhile, since the task is centred upon something outside of the self, and is a serious and an imposing task, it involves a tendency to strain, to excitement, to a loss of a due self-possession, to disturbance of the equilibrium of consciousness. The result is likely to be, unless one is in a state of physical or of moral training, just a primary confusion of self-consciousness accompanied by fear or by a sense of helplessness. Against such a mood the mere sentiment of devotion is no safeguard. To hold on to one’s self at the moment of the greatest strain, to retain clearness, even when confronted by tasks too large to be carried out as one wishes, to persist doggedly despite defeats, to give up all mere selfwill and yet to retain full self-control,—these are requirements which, as I suppose, appear to the consciousness of the athlete and to the

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consciousness of the moral hero in decidedly analogous ways. And in both cases the processes involved are psycho-physical as well as psychical, and are subject to the general laws of physiology and of psychology. Hence, when the teacher of physical training regards his work as a preparation of his pupils for the moral life, he can and should take account and take advantage of these analogies. His art is indeed one only amongst the many arts that contribute to moral training. But he may well insist that the organic virtues that he aims to establish in the bodily activities of his pupils are not only analogous to the moral virtues, but, in the loyal, may form a literal part of those virtues, since virtue exists either in action or in those results of training which prepare us for right action. To say all this implies no exaggeration of the importance of such physical education as is actually given at the present time. The whole question is one, not of inevitable or of fatal results, but of the good work that may be done, and of an alliance of the motives of physical and of moral training such as may take place if the teacher of physical training is alive to the higher possibilities of his calling. IV The second way in which physical training may serve the purposes of moral training is a more direct way. It is the one which Dr. Luther Gulick had in mind when he lately asserted in a paper in the School Review that ‘‘athletics are primarily social and moral in their nature.’’ Dr. Gulick is well known to you as one of the protagonists in the cause of the moral importance of physical education; and you know his main argument. Social training, in boys about twelve years of age, naturally takes the form of the training which gangs of boys give to their members. A gang of boys with nothing significant to do may become more or less of a menace to the general social order. A gang of boys duly organized into athletic teams, in the service of schools, and of other expressions of wholesome community activity, will become centres for training in certain types of loyalty. And this training

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may extend its influence to large bodies of boys who, as spectators of games or as schoolmates, are more or less influenced by the athletic spirit. Mutatis mutandis, the same considerations apply to the socially organizing forces that belong to college athletics. The plans of those who are engaged in physical education may therefore well be guided, from the first, by a disposition to prepare young people to appreciate and to take part in such group activities as these. Thus both the physiological and the intellectual aspects of physical training would appear to be subordinate, after all, to the social, and in this way to the moral, aspects of the profession. In speaking of these moral aspects, one would not even emphasize, as much as many do, the central significance of the self-denial, of the personal restraints and sacrifices, of the morally advantageous physical habits, which attend athletic training. One would rather more centrally emphasize the view that athletic work is not merely a preparation for loyalty, but that in case of the life of the organized athletic teams, and in case of any physical training class of pupils who work together, the athletic work is loyalty itself,—loyalty in simple forms, but in forms which appeal to the natural enthusiasm of youth, which are adapted to the boyish and later to the adolescent phases of evolution, and which are a positive training for the very tasks which adult loyalty exemplifies; namely, the tasks that imply the devotion of a man’s whole power to an office that takes him out of his private self and into the great world of real social life. The social forms of physical training in classes or in teams require, and so tend to train, loyalty. Physical training may then be so guided as to be a direct training in social loyalty. Your secretary has kindly put into my hands, during my preparation of this paper, two German monographs1 whose authors insist, in somewhat contrasting ways, upon this directly important office of the teacher of physical training as a teacher of loyalty and upon the value of play, of systematic gymnastics, and of athletic 1. Lorenz, Wehrkraft und Jugenderziehung, Voigtla¨nder’s Verlag in Leipzig, 1899; Koch, Die Erziehung zum Mute durch Turnen, Spiel, und Sport, Berlin, 1900. [Royce’s note]

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sports, as a training school for loyal citizenship. Both of these monographs are written under the influence of the spirit of militarism, one of them especially so; and you know now why I should view militarism as a decidedly blind, although often very sincere and intense, form of loyalty,—a form which will vanish from the earth whenever men come to an enlightened sense of what loyalty to loyalty implies. But one has to use, for the best, such types of loyalty as now prosper amongst men; and the good side of militarism is indeed the devotion that goes with it, even as the bad side of militarism is due to its implied suspicion that the loyalty of the foreigners to their country’s cause is somehow in essential opposition to our own loyalty. This suspicion is false. It breeds wars, and is essentially stupid. But loyalty is loyalty still, even when blind; and I prefer blind loyalty to the sort of thoughtless individualism which is loyal to nothing. In any case our two authors are right in insisting that loyalty and physical training are closely linked by ties which ought to be recognized by those who are planning and conducting the general system of national education. So much, then, for the second positive relation of physical education to the cause of general morality. Here, again, it is true that physical education can furnish only a portion, and a decidedly limited portion, of the means and motives whereby true loyalty is trained in the young, and whereby it may also be supported in older minds. But teachers who engage in your profession have a good right to insist upon this direct social significance of their work. They do well to insist also that they can and do train such direct loyalty, not only in the work of athletic teams, but in successful class-work of all kinds, such as the teachers of physical training can direct. V The third positive relation of physical training to moral training is suggested by what I have said about the need of an enlightened form of loyalty. Merely blind loyalty may do mischief: but it does so, we have said, not because it is loyalty, but because it is blind. It turns into enlightened loyalty in so far as it reaches the stage of loyalty to

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loyalty,—the stage where one certainly does not tend merely to take over into one’s own life and directly to adopt the special cause that one’s neighbor has happened to choose as his own, but where one regards the spirit of loyalty, the willingness to devote the self to some cause, as a precious common moral good of mankind,—a good that we can indeed foster in our neighbors even when their individual causes are not our own, or are even, by accident, opposed to our own. I can respect, can honor, I can help, my neighbor’s family loyalty without in the least wishing to become a member of his family. And just so I can be loyal to any aspect of my neighbor’s loyalty without accepting his special cause as my own. He may be devoted to what I cannot and will not view as my individual cause; and still, in dealing with him, I can be loyal to his loyalty. Now I have already pointed out that the spirit of loyalty to loyalty is finely exemplified by the spirit of fair play in games. For true fair play does not merely mean conformity to a set of rules which chance this season to govern a certain game. Fair play depends upon essentially respecting one’s opponent just because of his loyalty to his own side. It means a tendency to enjoy, to admire, to applaud, to love, to further that loyalty of his at the very moment when I keenly want and clearly intend to thwart his individual deeds, and to win this game, if I can. Now in the complications of real life it is hard to keep the spirit of loyalty to loyalty always alive. If my passions are aroused and if I hate a man, it is far too easy to think that even his faithful dog must be a mean cur, in order to be able to be so devoted to his master as he is. And real life often thus confuses our judgment through stirring our passions. But it is a very precious thing when you can keep your head so clearly as to be able to oppose even to the very death, if needs must be, your enemy’s cause, even while you are able to love his loyalty to that cause, and to honor his followers for their devotion to their leader, and his friends for their fidelity to him. Now it is just such loyalty to loyalty that can be trained in true sport very much more readily than in real life, because, in sport, the social situation is simple. And because the spirit of fair play, in an athletic sport, can constantly express itself by definite physical deeds,

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and because the passions aroused by wholesome athletic contests ought never to be as blind, as violent, or as enduring as those which real life unhappily so often fosters, the training in fair play ought to be much easier in the world of athletic sports than the training of loyalty to loyalty is in our daily life,—much easier, much simpler, and much more definite. Hence, if games were in all cases rightly conducted, if confusing passions were properly kept from unnecessary interference with the joyous devotion of the players to their respective sides, if the general physical training of all those who are to engage in school and in college sports were conducted from the first by teachers who had a serious interest in the moral welfare of their classes,—well, if these conditions were realized, physical education ought to contribute its important share to what we have now seen to be the very crown of human virtue; namely, to the spirit of loyalty to loyalty,—to the spirit that honors and respects one’s very enemies for their devotion to the very causes that one assails. The result should be the spiritual power to appreciate that common good for which even those who are mutually most hostile are contending. We human beings cannot agree as to the choice of our individual causes. We can learn to honor one another’s loyalty. The spirit of fair play, as trained in such sports as are founded upon a systematic physical and moral preparation for the strains of contest, ought then to be made a fine preparation for the very highest and hardest forms of loyalty, as such loyalty is needed for the great world’s social work. The spirit of fair play, as applied in the larger social life, has been called of late by a rather poor, if popularly effective name,—the now familiar name ‘‘the square deal.’’ The name is poor, despite the intent of the distinguished moralist who is responsible for its recent popular usage, because it is a name derived from games of chance, and because it suggests that the true spirit of loyalty to loyalty is sufficiently shown when you merely avoid any interference with your opponent’s agreed right to his share of the chances of the game. But true loyalty to loyalty involves a spirit that goes much further than this. It involves an active and effective positive respect,— yes, love, for loyalty, wherever you meet with it, even if the loyalty

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that you honor inspires those very deeds of the opponent which you most are required by your own cause to thwart. Now this active and practical honor for the loyalty of your opponents is no mere external ornament of the chivalrous virtues. It is simply the very essence of all the highest virtues. Higher civilization depends upon it. True justice, which certainly involves very much more than ‘‘the square deal,’’ true charity, truthfulness, humanity,—these are all the embodiments of loyalty to loyalty. And in real life this form of virtue is at once the most valuable and the hardest. Here, then, is an opportunity for the teacher engaged in physical training to set before his pupils the highest of human ideals in an extremely practical way, and in close connection with definite physical activities. If a man is loyal to the loyalty that he has seen,—has seen expressed in the activities of the playground, the gymnasium, and the athletic field,—he ought to be helped toward that loyalty to unseen loyalty which constitutes the soul of rectitude in great business enterprises, the heart of honor in our national and international enterprises. And yet this great opportunity, which the teacher of physical training possesses, is, as I need not say, attended by great and insidious dangers. Do the modern sports of our intercollegiate and interscholastic teams uniformly tend toward the encouragement of loyalty to loyalty? Is not this great moral opportunity of physical education far too much wasted, through the accidents and the excesses of our present educational system? To ask this question is to remind you of numerous recent controversies whose grave significance you all know. Great opportunities do not necessarily mean great successes. The corruption of the best may prove to be the worst. VI And with these words I am indeed brought to the central problem amongst all those with which this discussion is concerned. I have set forth the three sorts of positively helpful relations that a sound physical training can develop in its bearing upon the work of moral training. First, because skilful and serious physical exercise involves true

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devotion, a sound physical training can help to prepare the organism and the personality for loyal types of activity. Secondly, physical training, in so far as it is a part of the life of a social group, can more directly aid the individual to learn to be loyal to his group. Thirdly, physical training, in so far as it can be used to give expression to the spirit of fair play, may be an aid toward the highest types of morality; namely, to those which embody that spirit of loyalty to loyalty which is destined, we hope, some day to bring to pass the spiritual union of all mankind. I have pointed out that all these three forms are simply possible forms in which the moral usefulness of physical training may appear. There is nothing that fatally secures the attainment of any of these three results. All depends upon the spirit, the skill, and the opportunities of the teacher, and upon the awakening of the right spirit in the learners. Instead of these good results, a failure to reach any of these three sorts of good results, in any tangible form, is in case of any given pupil or class of pupils perfectly possible. And, as we have just seen, the failure of certain forms of athletic sports to further, in certain well-known cases, the high cause of loyalty to loyalty has of late been far too conspicuous. Can one who approaches this topic from the ethical side suggest to you any way in which you may hope, as a body, to do more than has yet been done to make physical education morally serviceable? To this question I venture, as I close, to suggest very fragmentary answers. In judging of the practical ideals that people cherish regarding their calling and regarding its results, one may make use of a tentative method which is likely to be at least partially enlightening. We all of us have had, in our lives, what may be called our typical great experiences,—our moments when life reached for the time its highest expression, the maxima of our curve of existence. Poets love to talk about such moments; romancers dwell upon them in narrating their stories; our own memories glow when we recall our own moments of this general type. A conversion or a sudden relief from great sorrow, a homecoming, the reunion of lovers long parted, the moment of hearing the first cry of some newborn infant,—these are familiar instances of what may be such maxima in the curve of experience of

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this or of that human being,—glorious discoveries of new success or of great attainment. Well, our personal and our professional activities, our avocations and our vocations, our exercises and our sports, are characterized each by its own type of maximal experiences. And you can tell something about the moral character and the deeper significance either of a person or of an occupation when you hear some typical report about what was, from the point of view of this person or of this occupation, the type of experience which seemed, in its own place and setting, to have such a maximal character. It has occurred to me to suggest, as one way of estimating the moral value of those experiences which one person or another may associate with athletic activities, an examination of some of the reports that experts, who also happen to be authors, have given of what to their minds seemed to be the truly great moments of athletic activity,—the moments when one most deeply experiences what, to himself personally, the whole business in the end means. Of course our daily life has to be lived, whatever our profession, upon a somewhat commonplace level. And it is upon such levels that, after all, we have to win many of the best moral results that devotion can bring into our lives. But just as love is for a lifetime, but the stories of love’s triumphs centre about the exaltations of the moment when two souls first find each the other, so it is our general custom to conceive the moral values of everyday life in terms of our memory or imagination of the great instants of life. ‘‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken;’’

says Keats; and one knows at once to what sort of exaltation he refers. This maximum of experience stands for a type of consciousness in terms of which the poet conceives all the long hours and days through which he devoted himself to Chapman’s Homer. Well, I have asked myself, how do expert athletes conceive the maximal moments of their lives as athletes? With what exultation are they filled when they contemplate their greatest attainments? Tell me that, and I can do something to comprehend their moral attitude toward their work, and the perils and the uses of this attitude.

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Of course, any one who tells, in an expert way, a story of athletic triumphs, will depict, in lively fashion, the moment of victory. And, of course, the exultation of victory, taken by itself, has somewhat uniform characters, such as any boys’ story of sports or any lively newspaper picture of a great game will portray. I need not dwell upon the fact that victory in any contest is keenly joyous, and constitutes a maximum point in the curve of experience, and that whoever writes a lively sporting story keeps you in suspense for a time, as the spectators at the game are kept in suspense, and then thrills you with the elemental delight of the victorious solution of the problem of contest, as the cheerful romancer lets the lovers agonize awhile, and then indeed somehow startles you with the perfectly familiar thrill of discovering that their hour of joy at length arrives. Such incidents are aesthetically attractive; but they are not the sorts of maximal experiences that I now have most in mind. For my present purpose, I want to know whether, as the expert recalls the moment of his highest athletic attainment, he thinks of anything besides victory, and whether this other feature, besides victory, which at such great instants he has before him, and which he later recalls, is of the nature of a morally significant enlargement or fulfilment of any higher self, so that the memory of this maximum is indeed any sort of moral inspiration in later life. Let me quote to you at once the report of an expert, in which he tells of a great athletic experience of his own, associated, as it was, with no little peril. In the year 1896 Philip Stanley Abbot, a Harvard graduate of the class of 1890, was killed by an accident during an attempted ascent of Mt. Lefroy, in the Selkirks. He was a man of great intellectual promise and power, and an experienced and devoted mountain climber, whose death left mourning a very wide circle of friends. In a memorial of Abbot that was published in the annual report of the Sierra Club of California, there is printed a passage from a letter which he once wrote to a friend about his first Selkirk expedition,—an expedition antedating by some time the final and fatal attempt to ascend Mt. Lefroy. The passage has the interest that Abbot, who was a scholar and a moralist, as well as a mountain expert, had

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long found in his mountain climbing a moral inspiration, which aided him in the hard work of his practical life. He was no pleasureseeker and no boaster. He had chosen his Alpine avocation because he found in it a moral support that, to his mind, justified its peril. Was his judgment sound in this particular? Well, let him tell his own tale:— ‘‘Palmer’s old theory, that the nearest approach that we can make toward defining the summum bonum is to call it ‘fulness of life,’ explains a great many things to me. Once we came out at seven o’clock upon the crest of a snow mountain, with two thousand feet of rather difficult snow work before us, when I had expected plain sailing,— and the daylight had already begun to fade. At the bottom of the two thousand feet we were, as it proved, still five miles from home; but we could have camped there. But where we were there was nothing more level than the roof of a house, except the invisible bottom of an occasional huge crevasse, half masked and half revealed. I had been feeling lifeless all that day, and we had already had nine hours of work. But the memory of that next hour is one of the keenest and most unmixed pleasures I have carried away,—letting one’s self go where the way was clear, trusting to heels alone, but keeping the iceaxe ready for the least slip,—twisting to and fro to dodge the crevasses, planning and carrying out at the same instant,—creeping across the snow-bridges like snails, and going down the plain slopes almost by leaps,—alive to the fingertips,—is a sensation one can’t communicate by words, but you need not try to convince me that it isn’t primary. However, this by the way.’’ You will all recognize this, I take it, as a maximal experience of a type that belongs to what one might call the lucid athletic activities, wherein the highest exertion, the completest devotion of the self to the end in hand, are accompanied by the clearest sense of the social relation to one’s fellow-workers, and so by the fullest self-assertion, self-expression, or, as Abbot calls it, by the fulness of life. Now are all the great sports equally characterized by such lucid self-possession at the maximal moments,—by such complete union of the active self and its object that skill, devotion, and success are all

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equally clear facts of consciousness just when the loftiest height of the experience is reached? That is a technical question which I have no right to try to answer upon my own authority. But, when I turn to the ordinary sporting story, I find that the highest height is said to be reached, in the mental life of some sports, just when, amidst the plaudits of vast crowds, in the intoxication of relief from suspense, in the exhaustion of the completely worked out organism,—when, I say, at such an instant,—the higher centres refuse to function definitely, and the victorious hero turns into an automatic physical mechanism, that somehow, half consciously or unconsciously, accomplishes in a blind way the crowning deed of triumph, while a sort of aurora of glorious and confusedly blessed sensations flickers dizzily and massively in the place where the hero’s mind had before seemed to dwell. In a recent sketch by Mr. Ruhl, ‘‘Left Behind,’’ the success of the hero in a mile footrace culminates in a kindly but subconscious automatism on the hero’s part, whereby he turns at the moment of winning, catches in his arms his fainting and defeated rival as the latter crosses the line, and carries him, then, to the tent near by. What followed, while the hero worked to revive his prostrate fellow-contestant, is thus depicted: ‘‘Outside the crowd cheered and howled, and pushed up against the canvas walls, and from the distance came the boom of the band, marching to them across the field. He [the hero working to revive the defeated rival] swabbed on witch hazel desperately— panting, dizzy with excitement and happiness, and a queer happyweepy remorse. The Other Man opened his eyes and blinked. ‘‘ ‘Bill,’ he grinned the best he could, and held out his hand, ‘I guess we’ve been fools long enough.’ Then he got tired again. ‘It was a great race,’ he said, without opening his eyes. The hero replies, ‘Yes! yes.’ He meant,’’ continues our author, ‘‘that he thought it had been long enough. Somehow he couldn’t remember any words. And then the crowd came in.’’ Now contrast these two maximal moments of athletic experience: in the one, the self alive to the finger-tips with devotion and triumph, joyously laboring side by side with its comrades amidst the beautiful and merciless fields of snow, and just above the half visible depths of

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the crevasses; in the other, the self with its ‘‘queer happy-weepy remorse,’’ confused, automatic, kindly, but maudlin. These are, I say, two maximal experiences, each to be remembered for a lifetime. Each has its obvious physical and psychological conditions. Each is quite in order in its own context. I have, of course, no objection to offer to the existence of either of them, when it comes to the man who has earned it and who has his right to it. But the contrast suggests at once a fair question. On the whole, since we are prone to estimate our lives and our daily work so much in terms of such maximal experiences, let us ask then which forms of sport, other things being equal, are, on the whole, likely to be best adapted to the steadiest sort of moral training,—those whose highest heights are reached in a state of ‘‘happy-weepy remorse,’’ amid howling crowds and dizzy confusions of consciousness, or those sports whose loftiest hours or moments of triumph leave the self ‘‘alive to the finger-tips,’’ not with mere muscular sensations, but with the sense of clearly conscious devotion, of self-possession, and of exalted, yes, genuinely spiritual, mastery of something that, however hard or perilous, seems to be worth mastering. All kinds of sport have, no doubt, their functions. I am, as you see, venturing to answer here no technical questions; nor do I doubt that there are maximal moments in the lives of all of us when we are, in Shelley’s phrase, ‘‘dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing.’’ Yet, on the whole, I can venture to say that, educationally considered, and especially from the point of view of moral education, those forms of sport must be best whose highest moments leave one as clearly in possession of himself, and of his loyal relations to his mates and his rivals, as the physical exhaustions attending these highest moments permit. Now this word about the experiences attending sport is meant here simply to make definite this closing suggestion regarding the conditions that must aid in keeping either a set of class exercises in gymnastics or a sport upon a high level as a means of moral education. What your athletic exercises need, in order that they may attain a high grade of moral efficacy, is a set of social conditions such as tend to clearheadedness rather than to confusion, such as at their highest point shall lead to Abbot’s and Professor Palmer’s fulness of life rather than

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to the flood of ‘‘happy-weepy remorse’’ or of other enjoyable destructions of moral equilibrium. For loyalty means clear-headedness; and you all regard sound wits, skilful and definite activities, lucidity, as mental traits that are to be trained by the greater part of all those class exercises and all those sports that you yourselves most admire. The evils, however, of the recent school and college sports have resulted, so far as I can see, almost wholly from the unsound social conditions which have been allowed to surround and to attend both the intercollegiate and the interscholastic games. For the ethics of sport have come, through the recent social conditions, to be influenced, both directly and indirectly, by the confused and unprincipled sentiments of great crowds of people, and, in general, by the intrusion of enthusiasms whose origin is due to the fact that too many people have been interfering in mass, in thoughtless ways, through the press, or through the presence of excited and cheering multitudes,—have been interfering with the moral education of our youth. Nobody can learn loyalty from mobs. The Harvard Stadium is an admirable place when it is not too full of people. But when it is full of people it is a bad place for the moral education of our athletic youth, just because, by the size of the crowds that it collects, it encourages, even in the most highly trained men and even in the most intelligent and skilful of sports, ideals that inevitably centre far too much about those poorer sorts of maximal experiences to which I have made reference and too little about that type of fulness of life which Philip Abbot glorified. Every athletic reform at Harvard must aim to minimize not so much the athletic as the social perils of modern sport. But you, the teachers engaged in physical education, are fostering the sort of athletic life that flourishes in small, clearly defined, wellorganized social groups. Whether class work or games are made prominent in this or in that part of your teaching, you are all working to combine in your pupils skill, devotion, loyalty of the individual to his community, and, whenever you have an opportunity to insist upon fair play in difficult situations, you are teaching loyalty to loyalty.

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My purpose in this paper has been to suggest the correlation of your work with that of others who are engaged in moral education. Loyalty to the community and loyalty to loyalty,—and both of them expressed, not in confused sentiments, but through clearly conscious deeds,—these are the traits that the teacher of morals must inculcate. You see the task. I have suggested its dangers. I am sure that you, ‘‘alive to the fingertips,’’ are ready for your share of the perils of our great modern educational effort to find our way to the high places of the Spirit.

what should be the attitude of teachers of philosophy towards religion?




T

he proper attitude of the teacher of philosophy towards Religion depends, I think, for its justification, as for its definition, upon two or three very simple principles. The first principle is that Religion, in its higher sense, constitutes the most important business of the human being, and by Religion, in its higher sense, I mean the consciousness of practical relations to a real but at present unseen spiritual order, whose authority as furnishing the rule for our conduct is conceived as absolute, and whose worth and dignity we recognize as above every other worth and dignity known to us. This higher sense of the term Religion appears, in history, only since the attainment of somewhat advanced states of civilization, and since the rise of the more universal moral ideals. We are not concerned at present with the forms of religious faith. I expressly A paper read before the American Philosophical Association, at Washington, D.C. [Royce’s note], and later published in the International Journal of Ethics, 13 (1902–03): 280–85.

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define the general term so that Buddhism and Christianity, the socalled Ethical Religions of some modern teachers, and the more positive creeds of tradition, equally fall within the scope of my definition. What I consider essential to the definition of any higher form of Religion is, that it is a kind of consciousness, whose object is an unseen and spiritual order, and whose content includes a view of our practical relations to that order, while this spiritual order itself is conceived as having, for us, a maximum of worth, of dignity, and of moral authority. Now Religion, as thus defined, constitutes the most important business of man, just because man’s present and worldly life, as experience shows it to us, is, even in the most fortunate cases, a comparatively petty affair, whose passing joys and sorrows can be viewed as of serious and permanent importance only in case this life means what it at present never empirically presents to us, namely a task and a destiny that have, from some higher point of view, an absolute value. The goal of our life, if our life has a goal, is never attained, or even made clear to us, by means of any of our present mortal experiences or successes. The worth of our life, if it has any absolute worth, is behind the veil of sense, and of our present fortunes. Religious wisdom, if such wisdom is attainable, therefore has to do with the discovery of that which makes our whole present life worth living. Hence it is that I assign, in agreement, as I doubt not with many of you, the highest worth to Religion amongst the interests of humanity. But now, as my second principle, I have to add that, in human history, Religion in proportion to its importance, characteristically appears as amongst the worst managed, if not the very worst managed, of all of humanity’s undertakings. I call this fact characteristic. I need not pause to explain it. Humanity’s important business has generally been mismanaged in proportion to its significance. I remark merely that this holds true in the case of the highest of all humanity’s interests. My proof is in the best known facts of history. The variety of contending faiths, the cruel mutual misunderstandings that the followers of opposing faiths have cherished towards one another, the

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religious wars, the multiplication of sects, the confusion of the essential with the trivial in religious life, the substitution of conventionality in religious practice for spirituality in religious experience, the enormous waste of energy over confused thinking about religious matters,—these are a few of the evidences of the truth of my principle. Religion has fared, in even comparatively recent history, far worse than the cause of human liberty, far worse than philanthropy, incomparably worse than the care of physical health. Nothing has man treated worse than his own and his brother’s chances of spiritual salvation. Nowadays, to be sure, the religious situation is much improved. The religious wars have almost ceased. But many evils remain. There follows from these two principles a third:—The task of improving the conduct of so great and so mismanaged a cause as that of religion is so complex and difficult an undertaking as to demand a division of labor, and a very great and varied division of labor. Reformer and prophet, man of common sense and philosopher, the worker and the thinker, the devout soul and the critic,—all such are needed for the task. There is room, in the further evolution of the religious consciousness, for the greatest diversity of gifts to be applied to the service of the one spirit, and all this division of labor is required for the sake of humanity’s loftiest interests. Well, the teacher of philosophy, whose task is indeed a very humble one, has something that he ought to contribute to the cause of the gradual improvement of the religious consciousness of humanity. His personal efforts will be of slight avail. But the harvest is so plenteous, the laborers are so few, and yet so many kind of laborers are needed, that the teacher of philosophy is indeed called upon to do his share. Now there are two things, and two only, that the philosopher, as philosopher, can hope to contribute towards training humanity to do better its work of striving after a sound religious consciousness. These things are:—(1) Clearness of thought about religious issues; and (2) a judicial spirit in the comparison, in the historical estimate, and in the formation of religious opinions. I repeat, clearness of thought, and the judicial spirit, are the philosopher’s peculiar tasks. He ought to

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strive after them, to express them in his teaching, and to do what he can to get his fellows to share them, and this is what he can contribute to the gradual improvement of the religious life. The philosopher, as a religious inquirer, is extremely fallible. Now in this defect he is not alone amongst men. It is just that defect, as it exists amongst men, which has filled religious history with such misery. But it is the philosopher’s precious privilege to make the consciousness of his own fallibility one of the principal topics and aims of his research. Other men estimate their fellows in terms of the convictions that these fellows chance to hold or to profess. The philosopher estimates his fellow students in terms of the care that they display in their methods of testing their convictions. He wishes to be tested himself by the same standard. Other men may cast out heretics. The philosopher knows of no heresies in doctrine, but only of defects in care regarding the investigation of doctrine, and of failures in devotion to the considerate pursuit of truth. Other men cry, ‘‘Lo here and lo there; we have found the truth, believe us or perish.’’ The philosopher asks: ‘‘How did you find out the way to discover your truth?’’ As to perishing,—the philosopher had rather assume, as an inquirer, the risk of perishing with one clear insight in his possession, than obtain the reward of living forever in a heaven of confused impressions. Now in these, his characteristic interests, the philosopher, like any other man, shows himself to be one-sided. There are in life many good ideals besides the ideal of clearness. That some men are prophets, and that some men born to lead sects or nations, and that God may also have chosen the weak, with their gracious instinctive devotion, frequently to confound the wise,—all this the philosopher may well recognize. He knows that his is not the only task. But he knows that it is his task. And all his guidance of young minds must emphasize and express this his own peculiar office. What are the consequences that flow from all this as to what the proper attitude of the philosophical teacher shall be towards religion? I answer: First, the philosophical teacher, in appealing to elementary students, must begin by cultivating in them the judicial rather than

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the merely dogmatic attitude towards religious problems. He can best do this by means of a teaching of the history of thought. The historical method of approaching religious issues is the great antidote for the counteracting of the sectarian spirit, and the great encourager of the spirit of patience, calm, and earnestness in the facing of humanity’s deepest problems. The proper study of the history of thought shows us the human spirit profiting by its very narrowness and by means even of its imperfections, in case it is only patient enough ‘‘to reach a hand through time to snatch the far off interest of its own errors.’’ History teaches us to unite tolerance with seriousness, and criticism with reverence. To find out how long the world has had to wait to obtain its full returns from the treasures that ancient thought stored up for it, is to render ourselves more willing to tolerate even much that we fail as yet to justify in the spiritual efforts of to-day. The philosopher should so teach the history of thought as to cultivate the spirit of piety towards all serious thinking. Just such piety is what I mean by the judicial spirit. Secondly, in guiding his more advanced pupils, the teacher of philosophy should seek to help every one of them to become clearer in mind as to what his own personal religious interests and problems mean. The philosopher’s attitude towards the earnest young inquirer, whether he be a doubter or a believer, can properly be expressed, in the form of an appeal to the individual thus: ‘‘It is not my office to propagate my faith; but to help you to understand the meaning of your faith, or of your doubt, as it has pleased God to show you the matters that concern His truth at the present point of your development. In the end, you must be saved, if at all, then in your own way, which indeed will then also be God’s way, but which will doubtless be for that very reason your own individual way. It is my office to help you towards finding your own soul. I do not want to convert you, but to help you to the attainment of your own inner light. The wind bloweth where it listeth. I am to teach you only to distinguish for yourself, whence the wind comes to you, when it comes. I am to help you to grasp your own meaning. If you want authority, to tell you from without what you must believe, you must look elsewhere.

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If you want some one to help you to define the promptings of your own spirit, it is my duty to try to give such aid.’’ Thirdly, in dealing with his more advanced students, it is the office of the philosopher to help them to profit by one another’s religious queries, doubts, strivings, and varieties of religious opinion and experience. In this aspect of his work the philosophical teacher is a mediator rather than an appellate judge. He expresses, indeed, his own convictions, but he contributes them only as one more product of human experience, and of the effort to attain truth, and not as a decisive dogma. He holds all questions open for serious discussion, just because the decision of all such questions is the privilege of the individual, and it is not the prerogative of the philosophical teacher to save other men from the responsibility of making their own choices. Finally, as to the attitude that the philosophical teacher assumes in presence of the general public, regarding religious problems, that attitude should be as frank as it is conciliatory, as judicially critical as it is reverently earnest, as free from dogmatic presumption as it is from indifference. Since he stands for clearness of thinking, he should shun no inquiry that he is duly called upon to undertake. He should never hide his opinions, however unconventional they may be, when he is rightfully asked, on a fitting occasion, to express them. On the other hand, it is not his business to feed the multitude when the multitude is not hungry. He is no propagandist. He is sent to those who desire wisdom, and not to those who hate light. Moreover, he seeks no occasion to occasion scandal to the little ones. He appeals to those to whom the spirit of truth has already spoken. For the rest, I myself am glad when, under the conditions as they exist to-day, the philosophical teacher’s convictions are such that he sees his way to avoid all connection with any sect or form of the visible church. I say, I am glad of this result, when it occurs, because, first, I am persuaded that a personal relation to the visible church has to-day a value which concerns chiefly the man engaged in certain practical philanthropic tasks. These tasks are indeed of the utmost social importance, but they form no part of the philosopher’s peculiar and special social function,—a

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function that I have already characterized. I like to see the philosopher devoted to his own business. And secondly, as I hold, the philosopher, by holding aloof from the visible church, helps himself to maintain in himself and to display to his students, that judicial spirit which I have insisted upon as his especial possession. The mass of mankind cannot cultivate this judicial spirit except as a mere incident of their practical life. The philosopher has to make it his professional business, and I think therefore that he gains by an avoidance of relation to the visible church, just as a judge gains by declining to be a party man. To the invisible church the philosopher, if loyal to his task, inevitably belongs, whatever be his opinions. And it is to the invisible church of all the faithful his loyalty is due. Josiah Royce. Harvard University

the problem of natural religion The Present Position




T

he term natural religion admits of a somewhat varied usage. Any treatment of the problems of religion which confines itself to an appeal to the unaided ‘‘light of nature,’’—any effort to show that, apart from revelation, we can attain to truth possessing a religious value, comes within the range of the meaning of the term. In scholastic philosophy there was a definite and technical distinction made between so much of religious doctrine as the unaided human reason can demonstrate, and that portion of religion which only revelation can make known to us. The distinction has ever since been insisted upon by all the more thoughtful believers in revelation. On the other hand, all those religious inquirers who, for any reason, feel doubtful concerning either the existence, or the scope, of a revealed religion, find in the study of natural religion an undertaking that has for them an especially strong interest. Yet this strong interest is in some degree shared also by the believers in revelation themselves; for while they This paper was published in the International Quarterly, 7 (1903): 85–107.

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often are disposed to set decided limits to the claims of the unaided human reason, it always remains a matter both of apologetic and of scientific interest for them to make clear how much the unaided human reason can know concerning God, and concerning man’s duty and destiny. The believer uses his natural religion both to explain the truth to the doubters, and to confirm his own faith. Hence the field of natural religion, interesting, as it does, all thoughtful people for whom religion has any value whatever, has remained, ever since the scholastic period of philosophy, a relatively neutral territory, where believer and unbeliever could take counsel together without unkindliness, and where the conflicts of the sects could be for the time forgotten, while the highest interests of our common humanity were all the more clearly remembered. I I have been called upon to define, in the present discussion, my own view of the present state of inquiry concerning the principles of natural religion. In undertaking this task, I find myself especially embarrassed by the fact that within the past few years I have been repeatedly required to go over this very ground of the problems of natural religion, and to state publicly my own opinions about them in great detail, from various points of view, and in several different forms. To repeat once again such an undertaking is to run the risk of having only my own hackneyed formulas to present. And nothing can be more unfair to the depth and to the beauty of the central problems of life than is such a repetition, on the part of any one, of his own former expressions. For both in philosophy and in religion the letter killeth, while the life giving and immortal spirit, whether it be called the spirit of wisdom or of goodness, needs constantly fresh embodiments, and declines to be imprisoned in any single form of words. Yet since the present task is assigned to me, I can only try to outline, in as direct and unhackneyed a fashion as is possible to me, what I take to be the central problems of natural religion, and also what I regard as the present position and prospects of this sort of inquiry. I

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ask, however, in advance, indulgence for my doubtless too frequent repetitions of formulas that, as teacher or as writer, I have used before. I confess freely, and insist, that such tedious restatements are not signs of any dull monotony in the genuine nature of this topic,—a topic which is as ancient, but also always as full of novelty, as life itself. No, my dull repetitions are but the result of the poverty of my own routine of thinking. Yet even because of this poverty, I shall all the more try, as I state my case, to go afresh to life itself, that the wealth and vitality of the religious interests of the human mind may supply, if fortune permits, something of what my own reflection lacks,—namely, freshness and individuality. II First, then, for a statement of the problem of natural religion. It is one of the problems furnished to us by the relations between our ideals and the facts of the real world. Upon a certain apparent opposition between these two sorts of objects, ideals and facts, all religious problems depend. Let us try first to define these two sorts of objects themselves. The conception of a world of facts is one of the most essential of the possessions of sane minds. Without such a conception, no conscious truthfulness of speech, no fidelity to definite plans of action, no clear understanding with our fellows, no reasonableness of life, is possible. The problem as to what we mean by this fact-world is the central problem of the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics. The contents of this world of facts form the topic which the numerous special sciences divide amongst themselves, and treat from various points of view, while vast ranges of facts remain still, in the present imperfect state of human knowledge, outside of the range of any special science, and are known to us only in the forms in which our common sense at present chances to be able to deal with them. If we ask, quite apart from any more detailed study of metaphysical problems, what character seems most universally assignable to all facts, one answer seems to be that a fact is something which of itself

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determines whether a given statement that you, as observer or inquirer, make about it, is or is not true. Moreover, this character of any fact, this power of the fact to determine the truth or the falsity of statements made about it, is something that applies not only to some of the statements that you may make about it, but to all possible statements that anybody may make about it, so far as these statements have a precise meaning, and refer to one single fact. Thus, to illustrate, Mount Washington is one of the objects belonging to the factworld. As such it determines, of its own nature, whether some statement made about it, say an assertion as to its height, is true or is false. It either is or is not over six thousand feet in height, and any statement that it is over six thousand feet in height is thus predetermined to truth or falsity, in case the statement is made with sufficient definiteness regarding the period of time in question, and is otherwise a statement possessed of a precise meaning. Moreover, the fact which this mountain embodies is equally decisive as to the truth or falsity of any other statement that, with a definite meaning, may be made about it, by anybody. Even the most fleeting facts of the universe are viewed by us as possessing, during the instant of their existence, just as much definiteness as belongs to the most lasting of realities. Transiency, in the world of facts, does not, therefore, imply indecisiveness. A fact, in order to possess definiteness, need not be a lasting fact. The new star recently observed in Perseus increased thousands of times in brightness within two days, and then slowly faded away; but its brightness at any one instant during its brief period of flaring, was always some definite degree of brightness; and whatever one may assert as to that star,—as to its distance, its size, its temperature, its spectrum, or as to the physical causes of its wonderful outburst, such an assertion, made for any one phase of its existence, is predetermined to be true or false by the very nature of the facts to which the assertion refers, however fleeting the phase in question, in the life history of this star, may have been, and however enormous the changes which in a brief period may have entirely displaced and made no longer real the events or physical states to which the given assertion relates.

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That facts give warrant to true assertions made about them, and determine the falsity of erroneous assertions,—this we often express by calling facts objective, in contrast to ‘‘mere ideas,’’ or to mere opinions or judgments formed or asserted about the facts. The ideas, opinions, or judgments, are then called, by contrast, subjective. The principle that facts are decisive not only as to some, but as to all judgments which may be made about them, so that every possible and perfectly definite assertion which may be made about any single fact is either simply true or simply not true,—this principle we often express by attributing to facts, what we call, in technical language, their individuality. Individuality as possessed by each and every fact, is opposed to that generality or abstractness which our so-called ‘‘mere ideas’’ often possess. Such generality or abstractness we do not attribute to the single facts themselves. The general characters common to many facts do, indeed, permit and require you to define as true or as false certain of the judgments which you make about an object possessing any such general characters. But so long as you judge merely about the general characters of things, you are left without the means of determining the truth or falsity of at least some of the judgments that may be made about the objects in question. Thus, if I ask whether mountains, conceived in general, are or are not over six thousand feet high, no simple answer to the question is predetermined, just because the query is not about single facts, but only about general characters. For the general term ‘‘mountain’’ names primarily an idea of mine, and no one fact. Some individual mountains are, while some are not, over six thousand feet high, So that no one simple answer to this question, no direct yes or no, is determined by my general idea of a mountain, An individual fact, however, is one whose nature decides, in advance, every question, without exception, that can be asked about it with a precise meaning. The individual mountain, at any one stage of its geological history, is or is not over six thousand feet high. So much, then, as to the most universal characters which we are accustomed to attribute to the world of facts. But now as to the other

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member of the pair of apparently opposed terms which we mentioned a moment ago, in beginning our definition of the problem of religion. We spoke of the contrast between facts and ideals. What is an ideal? An ideal may take the form of a plan for our own conduct, of an aspiration or hope regarding our character or fortune, or of a hypothetical account of a state of things that we have not yet observed or confirmed. An ideal does not necessarily come to our minds in a very determinate form. It often appears as a very abstract and general idea. Yet it may, upon some occasions, seem to us to be embodied in facts, as when we call a beautiful day, or person, or deed, an ideal object of its own type. But in any case, an ideal, as it first comes to our consciousness, usually seems to differ from a fact in that it appears powerless to determine of its own self whether certain judgments that we wish to make about its relation to the world of fact are true or false, while, on the other hand, our ideal is so much our own that we ourselves seem to determine what does and what does not belong to it or agree with it. Thus facts are determinate, and so bind our assertions to determinate truth or falsity. But our ideals may appear to us in an indeterminate form, and in any case we ourselves seem to give them whatever determinateness they come to possess. Facts we just called objective. An ideal comes to us as something of our own, as something subjective. Since we ourselves, in the very act of possessing our ideals, seem to determine by our own nature and attitude what does and what does not belong to them, or agree with them, they consequently seem to change as we change, to grow as we grow, and to express, primarily, our own will and our own personal meaning. On the other hand, they suggest to us assertions, such as the hopeful assertions, ‘‘My ideal will prevail,’’ ‘‘I shall succeed,’’ ‘‘The facts will be found to bear out and embody my ideal.’’ And nevertheless, as the ideals come to our consciousness, they do not appear, of themselves, to predetermine in the least whether these assertions are or are not true. It is the fact-world, as we are accustomed to say, which decides about this aspect of the matter. You may form what ideals you will.

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The question always is whether or no the facts permit your ideal to be realized. In general, the nature of an ideal is definable in terms of one of the most familiar and fundamental of our conceptions, namely, in terms of the conception of the Ought. An ideal is an idea that, from our point of view as believers in this ideal, ought to be a fact. If it is a distinctly practical ideal, this ought takes the ethical form. My moral ideal is an idea that I myself ought to embody in the form of fact, by means of my own deeds. For if our human ideals seem, as such, incapable of predetermining whether or no the facts shall embody them, the power of our will to determine certain outer facts is supposed to be, in individual cases, itself one of the facts of life. And an ideal that I accept, as mine, and am able to embody, or to turn into a fact, by a deed of my own, is, for me, a matter of duty, that is, of the moral ought. There remains, however, the vast range covered by those ideals of ours which our human will seems powerless to embody. They ought, in our opinion, to be real. As subjective ideals, they seem to us, in the form in which they come to our human consciousness, to be incapable of determining, by themselves, whether the facts do or do not embody them. We also, as weak human creatures, are powerless to realize them by our personal deeds. Yet they seem to us, in at least some cases, infinitely significant. To confine ourselves here merely to these, the most significant ideals, we may say at once that they are, in the civilized man’s mind, the topics of religious faith and doctrine. The ultimate triumph of the right, the attainment of the good as the final goal of ill, the immortal destiny of man, the accordance of the world’s whole plan with the demands of reason,—these, in our civilized consciousness, are supreme and fundamental ideals. They ought, in our opinion, to be real. They are ideals about the world as a whole. As we men conceive them, we are unable, by our own individual power, to make them real. The facts which we seem so far to observe in the known world, do not yet manifestly and adequately embody them. And as subjective ideals, they do not appear to us to be capable, of themselves, of deciding between the truth and the falsity of the assertions which we make in hypothetically attributing

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to them a sovereignty over all facts. Hence, as they stand in our minds, they have not yet the place in the world of facts which they themselves seek or demand. Accordingly, our religious consciousness looks elsewhere than in ourselves, or in them, or in the regions of the fact-world which are so far apparently accessible to our observation, for the Being who, as we conceive, is able and willing to give them the determinate expression in the realm of facts which we think that they ought to possess. The problem of our religious consciousness is the problem whether we have any right to regard such a Being as himself a fact, or the whole world of facts, seen and unseen by us, as the expression of his will, or as destined in the end, or on the whole, to manifest this will. Such, then, is in substance, the mere statement of our religious problem. Commonplace as this elementary analysis of the concept of fact and of ideal may seem, we shall soon find that upon precisely such elementary commonplaces, easily neglected by reflection because they are so familiar in experience, a sound method of thinking concerning ultimate problems depends.

III The problem of natural religion having been thus defined, we turn to the question, What does the light of nature indicate to us regarding the solution of the problem? And here at once we are met by a method of endeavoring to answer this question which in former ages was of great historical importance for the course of discussion concerning natural religion. This method consists in trying to follow the light of nature by examining the implications of what science and common knowledge reveal to us concerning the physical world, concerning its laws, its development, its general constitution,—in a word, its reasonableness. The term physical world is a collective name for a vast mass of facts which we seem to have come in some measure to know. If we ask, then, as to the contents of the fact-world, our knowledge of external nature seems at first to give us our only accessible

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and definite reply. And this knowledge, resulting from the accumulated experience of many generations of men, has of late vastly increased, and constitutes today a comparatively well organized whole, with regard to which very large generalizations are already both possible and inevitable. It seems wise, then, to ask whether this, our knowledge of physical nature, when viewed in the most comprehensive way, gives us convincing evidence that the facts of the universe, despite their complexity and obscurity, are, on the whole, the embodiment of ideals which we can recognize and accept. In other words, does nature, as known to us, present to our view a sufficient agreement with ideal purposes to prove that some Being exists whose will is expressed in the facts and laws of nature? As we have already said, it is, indeed, true that the facts of the universe, as now known to us men, do not embody our highest ideals in a fashion that appears to us at once adequate and manifest. But, since we are also aware that at present we are acquainted only with a fragment of reality, the question is whether the fragment revealed to us through our acquaintance with outer nature is a recognizable embodiment of ideals to an extent sufficient to give us sound reason for believing that, if we could know the whole, we should see that it is in agreement with our highest ideals. Such an effort to trace, amidst all the obscurities of the fact-world, the signs of a divine plan,—to decipher the obscure inscription of which our experience shows us, as it were, fragments, to read in nature the manifestation of the purposes of God,—has, for many thinkers, of the foretime, constituted the mainstay of natural religion. The question regarding the value of this effort possesses a peculiar interest at the present time, in view of the importance which our knowledge of nature has justly acquired in modern life. But this interest has been made especially, and tragically central, in recent discussion, in view of the fact that, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the results of the study of nature have seemed, to many of the guides of popular opinion, to constitute not, as so often in former ages, a significant auxiliary to natural religion, but rather the principal barriers in the way of an ideal interpretation of the universe,—the principal obstacle to a religious assurance. The significance of this change of

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view, the reason for this turning of one of the principal weapons of the older forms of natural religion against every religious interest, can best be indicated here by means of a word regarding the general history of discussion during the nineteenth century. In earlier centuries the doctrine of natural religion made frequent and positive use of the orderliness of nature, and of the adaptation of natural facts to man’s needs, both as proof that the order of the physical world must be due to the designs of an all powerful creator, and as evidence that these designs must include a benevolent intent to fulfill the highest ideals which man is able to form regarding his own life and its meaning. But by the close of the eighteenth century, these older forms of natural theology were brought into considerable discredit amongst more critical thinkers. The scepticism of Hume had shown how little rational necessity belonged to certain of the principles which the natural theologians had all along been assuming. The profound alteration which the thought of Kant demanded regarding the foundations of all human knowledge appeared, for the time, to make utterly vain every effort to prove the existence of a creator by the signs of his purposes which one seemed to find manifest in nature. For, from Kant’s point of view, what we call nature is simply the realm of man’s outer experience of phenomena, of the appearances of the sense organized in accordance with the principles of our understanding. We can know nothing, theoretically speaking, about any ultimate facts whatever. We can reach, and should properly seek, no ultimate explanations of phenomena. We know, in case of nature, only the occurrences and the relations of such phenomena, such facts of experience, themselves. The order of this world of human experience, in so far as it is manifested in the laws of nature, is due to the conditions under which phenomena come to enter into the field of our knowledge. For our own understanding predetermines what forms must belong to the phenomena, in case we are to understand them. Meanwhile the ideally interesting character of nature, its beauty, where that is present, its teleology, where that appears, are objects which our judgment recognizes as present in experience, but which our limited powers forbid us to refer to any one theoretically

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intelligible and ultimate cause as their source. Natural theology can, therefore, never rest upon our knowledge of nature. Its source must be found elsewhere; and Kant actually looked for the true basis of natural religion not in any theoretical procedure of thought, but in the demands or postulates made by our moral consciousness. In general, Kant’s result was that since phenomena alone are accessible to us, while things in themselves are unknowable, the older bases for natural religion must be abandoned. During the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, there sprang up, upon the basis prepared by Kant, the idealistic movement in philosophy. Accepting Kant’s central thesis that our knowledge is necessarily confined to the realm of organized experience, and that facts outside of all experience can never be known, this idealistic movement, nevertheless, attempted to show that the principles manifested even in our very experience itself, have a certain divine and absolute significance, and so do enable us to know something of the nature of an Absolute Being, whose life is manifested even in our own personal selfhood, and whose characters are precisely such as the deepest religious consciousness has sought to define in speaking of God. With this idealistic movement we have not, at this stage of our discussion, especially to do. It suffices at the moment to say that, after a period of great activity, this movement, just because it had too much neglected to take account of the work of the special sciences of nature, fell into a certain discredit with the philosophical public. By the middle of the nineteenth century a renewed and most fruitful activity was manifested in the study of outer nature. New generalizations of vast scope and importance, derived from a study of physical phenomena, began to become more and more central in the field of human attention. The physical world came anew to appear as the one accessible revelation to man regarding the knowable nature of things. The nineteenth century became, more and more as it advanced, the century of science. But this new study of the special sciences of nature was still very generally pursued in the spirit which Kant’s rigid criticism of the limitations of our knowledge had first made conscious and definite. The

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further natural knowledge advanced, the less were most of the leaders of opinion disposed to use it for the sake of proving the existence or of defining the plans of any Being beyond or behind nature. The knowable, they now said, was the fact-world as manifested in human experience. The more critical students of the theory of knowledge, therefore, often insisted, quite in Kant’s spirit, that all our insight into nature was concerned solely with the phenomena, with appearances, never with ultimate truths, and that we could learn from science only the ways in which human experience is capable of being organized, in such wise that the facts of our experience can be predicted in advance of their occurrence. Like Kant, such critical students of the principles of science thus rejected every effort to give ultimate explanations, and therefore declined to see any foundation for natural religion in the results of scientific inquiry. But meanwhile there were, amongst the students of nature, those who were less cautious, and who did indeed attempt, in some measure, to use the results of science for the purpose of getting a notion of the ultimate nature of things. Yet such investigators, also, were for the most part quite indisposed to return to the principles of the older forms of natural religion. For the one great lesson which such students were disposed to read as the result of the natural sciences was that physical nature, being subject to unchangeable law, is very strongly contrasted with the whole realm of our ideals. For our ideals, in demanding, as they do, scope for individual initiative, and endless progress towards absolute goals, and the possibility of the occurrence of novel and significant deeds, define precisely what nature, that is, the fact-world, declines (as such thinkers maintain) to present to us. For, as such students were disposed to insist, in nature, as conceived under the form of rigid law, nothing essentially novel ever happens. The natural world consists of matter whose mass is invariable. All the changes of this matter are to be conceived as mere alterations of its ultimate parts. These changes themselves all occur so as to involve a perfect conservation of energy. All that happens is essentially predictable. Hence all appearance of significant novelty is an illusion. Progress is

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at best no universal fact, but is only a more or less temporary appearance. Individuals are but instances of the necessary laws themselves, and have no true initiative. Free will is impossible, and our deeds are only particular instances amongst the phenomena of nature, and are, like other phenomena, wholly subject to law. Thus over against our fluent and living ideals, stands a realm of fact whose characters are essentially changeless and lifeless. Thus both the more critical and the more dogmatic students of the general results of our modern knowledge of nature have shown a disposition, in recent times, to decline to base any doctrine of natural religion upon these results. The more critical students have declared that we can never transcend the limitations of our experience of nature, or learn anything about what lies beyond or behind this experience. The more dogmatic thinkers have indeed regarded our natural knowledge as throwing some true light upon the actual constitution of the world of facts, but have all the more been led to make a very sharp contrast between this constitution and that which our ideals define, so that, in sum, our modern knowledge of nature has been viewed as a barrier in the way of natural religion, rather than as any auxiliary in our search for a positive knowledge that the world of fact possesses an ideal character. Such, then, has been the situation of a great deal of recent thinking regarding the relations of the sciences to natural theology. IV And now, what shall we say regarding the merits of this controversy? Is our modern knowledge of nature an auxiliary, or is it rather in its whole tendency, a logical obstacle to natural theology? In answer I can here only briefly mention a few leading considerations that bear upon this side of our topic. First, then, I regard the whole investigation of the bases of our knowledge of nature, which Kant initiated, as of the most lasting importance, not only for the problems of the logic of science, but also for the true interests of natural religion. For I hold that the outcome of Kant’s investigation of the bases of our knowledge, while making us justly sceptical regarding all the efforts of the

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pre-Kantian theologians to read in physical nature the convincing marks of God’s handiwork, does, nevertheless, prepare the way for an interpretation of the true relation between facts and ideals,—for an interpretation, I say, which goes far beyond anything that those older forms of natural theology were ever able to reach. Kant and his critical followers are right in saying that no knowledge of physical nature which is accessible to us men under our present conditions is, when taken by itself, capable of giving us trustworthy proof either as to the existence or as to the purpose of any Being whom we can justly regard as the author of the physical world. The older forms of natural theology were logically unsound. They were founded upon a failure to appreciate the true place which our knowledge of the physical world occupies in the whole scheme of our life and of our rational insight. Kant justly set them aside. But, on the other hand, this negative result of Kant’s critical philosophy can be reached only by means of certain general considerations concerning the very definition of facts and of ideals, of knowledge and of being. And these considerations, once rightly understood, lead us to positive results which Kant himself only dimly foresaw. I shall speak further of these results. They are of critical importance for the proving and for the proper use and improvement of the genuine principles of natural religion. But secondly, even without going into these deeper aspects of the problem regarding the limits of knowledge, it is not hard to show that if our present knowledge of the physical world does not give us any positive proof of the existence and of the plans of God, those have been overhasty who have undertaken to show that our acquaintance with external nature is such as to furnish any definite presumption against the supremacy of ideals in the constitution of the universe. It is not merely true that our empirical acquaintance with the physical world is still too narrow and fragmentary to give us any power to prove a negative regarding the presence of ideals in or behind the world of facts. One can go further, and can say that the evidence which is often supposed most to tell against the claims of natural religion is in large part the result of a perfectly recognizable human illusion, of a false emphasis which certain of our interests strongly tend

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to make us give to one side only of our really very complex and diverse experience of that form of reality which we call the physical world. For the negative evidence in question is supposed to rest upon the discovery that this physical world is a realm where unchanging law is actually universal, where the mass of matter and the quantity of energy are alike invariable, where, since all occurs according to rigid laws, everything, from the point of view of omniscience, would be predictable, where freedom and essential novelty, and all individual initiative, are consequently alike impossible. It is supposed that such a world, once shown to be the true world of facts, stands in such hopeless contrast with what our fluent and living ideals demand, that hereby a strong presumption is created against any view which tries to conceive the universe as a manifestation of ideals. But whoever accepts this position with regard to the whole matter forgets by what sort of evidence this supposed result regarding the physical world has been reached. Man, ever since the stone age, and before, has been engaged in a ceaseless struggle with the mysteries and with the actually endless varieties of what we now call outer nature. He has been able to survive only because he has learned to organize his own conduct, and to cooperate with his fellows. But both this organization of his conduct, and this social cooperation with his fellows, have in their turn depended upon man’s power to select, amidst the maze of his experience, (1) those phenomena in which he could successfully detect some definite and controllable routine, and (2) those which he could successfully describe to his fellows, and about which he could thus learn to agree with his fellows, so as consciously to observe, to define, and to use these experiences in common with the other men. Now it is precisely so much of human experience as chances to possess this sort of definite and controllable routine, which we have learned to regard as furnishing to us the signs that tell us about what we usually call the physical world. For by the physical world we very generally mean precisely so much of the whole world of our experience as we men can learn, with socially effective

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results, to control, to describe, to predict, and to conceive in common. But the very idea of outer nature, thus in question, is the outcome of a long struggle to select those facts of human experience which permit us to describe them and, in our social coo¨peration, to control them together. So much of our experience as we can so far neither describe nor control nor predict we therefore often regard as at best a faulty and relatively illusory indication of physical facts; and we do this simply because our whole long struggle to attain the mastery over our life has trained us to search for the uniformities of experience, and to regard them as indicating the existence and the true essence of natural facts, while we have come to define either as personal and subjective, or as narrow and misleading, so much of our experience as does not bring us to a knowledge of exactly definable natural laws and facts. These are the grounds that have led us to emphasize the uniformity and mechanical characters of the physical world as its most essential ones. Now that such a search for law, for describable uniformities of natural fact, and for an order in our experience should, after so many centuries of more or less conscious struggle, have proved at length so wonderfully successful, as it has proved in the course of the history of recent science,—this fact surely does not tend to disprove the tendency of great ideals to triumph at last over the confusing oppositions that long may stand in their way. For this our modern conception of nature is itself the partial but very significant realization of a great practical ideal, namely, of the ideal of man’s control over the guidance of his individual and social life. So far, then, the success of our science in being able to select out of the seeming chaos of our raw experience systems of facts so coherent, uniform, describable, and common to all men, that they serve the purpose of enabling us to organize our lives, and our whole social order, this success of our science, I say, would seem to tend to illustrate how, after all, rational and ideal interests may be destined, in the long run, to win in this universe. But, nevertheless, it is this very picture of the success of our scientific ideals which has for many of us that reverse and disheartening

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aspect upon which I have just dwelt. For the success of the ideal of describing and controlling certain regions of human experience has gone hand in hand with the inevitable tendency to regard just these regions of experience as furnishing the best evidence of what the real nature of the physical world and of the whole universe may be. We forget that we have all along been making in our sciences a deliberate selection of portions only of human experience. Hence we easily fall into an illusion,—the result of a false emphasis. In truth, a Shakespeare or a Plato regarded as a man amongst men, is at least just as much a part of the real world of natural fact as is a permanent mass of matter, or as is the total energy of a physical system of bodies. But since we can neither describe nor explain nor predict Plato and Shakespeare, we are obliged to be content with enjoying their ideal meaning, with estimating them as guides or as masters, and with saying very little about their describable place in the natural order. We merely presume that somehow they too must conform to natural law, we know not how. The typical natural facts we thus come to regard as the most rigid and describable ones; but we tend to do this merely because our principal interest, in our struggle with outer nature, has been an interest in getting a socially organized control over it. But if we look closer, we see that this very tendency to make so vast a contrast between the rigid and permanent natural facts and laws upon the one hand, and our own ideals upon the other, is due to the very conditions which have caused the conceptions of both these classes of objects to develop together in our minds. It is just for the sake of our own ideals that we have tended to conceive external nature in so unideal a fashion. In brief, human civilization depends upon two things. It depends, namely, (1) upon making what we call the physical world appear to us more and more as a sort of storehouse and system of controllable instruments, of tools, of mechanisms, and of phenomena that we regard as behaving with mechanical uniformity, so as to be either practically or conceptially controllable. But such phenomena, viewed as realities, come to seem to us the very opposite of ideals. On the other hand, civilization depends (2) upon the growth, the intensification, the constantly increasing love of our human ideals.

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Hence, however, the tendency to bring into sharper and sharper contrast our ideals on the one hand, and our conceptions of external nature on the other. And since we have tended, to a very great extent, to call natural phenomena real in proportion as we have learned to think of them as instances of rigid and verifiable law, the contrast of the mechanically conceived facts and the ideals, has tended to grow disheartening. And that is why, in so much of modern thought, a theoretical materialism regarding the nature of things flourishes side by side with a growing sensitiveness to the significance of ideals. At the moment when philanthropy becomes far reaching and ardent, a belief that, after all, the universe is a cruel and heartless mechanism, becomes prevalent. And yet I repeat, all this contrast is a result of false emphasis. The resulting modern tragedy of opinion is due to a mere abstraction, a false insistence upon one of two actually correlative terms. If you look more closely you see that what we know most certainly of all about nature is that men live in it, and spring from it, and possess their ideals, and war for these ideals, and often win in their warfare. These men themselves, together with all their ideals, are at least as genuine natural phenomena as any of the others. They have at least as much right as the permanent mass and the invariant physical energy of the physical universe to be taken into account when we estimate the genuine relations of facts and ideals. By no such special estimates shall we ever come to decide ultimate questions; but so far, if one views the whole matter in a judicial spirit, one can say, I think, that, fully accepting all the inductively acquired results of the special sciences of nature, we have so far merely a drawn battle between the partisans and the opponents of an interpretation of the universe in terms of ideals. Neither side can win in such a contest; for every such method of dealing with our problem involves emphasizing now one and now another special group of facts of experience; and all hypotheses which undertake to unify, upon a purely empirical basis, these various groups of facts, are subject to essential alteration as soon as new groups of facts shall appear. But at all events our empirical knowledge of nature furnishes no presumption against the truth of natural religion.

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I may venture to add, in leaving this branch of our topic, that despite the foregoing tendency to emphasize falsely the mechanical aspect of nature, some of the very largest of our modern inductions about the physical world are the ones that seem most to suggest, what of course by themselves they cannot prove, namely, that the physical world is rather the expression of a mental than of a mechanical process, and in so far has at least analogies with our own ideal interests. The doctrine of evolution, by indicating that we men ourselves, including also the Platos and the Shakespeares, are products of genuinely natural processes, tends to establish a relative continuity between material and mental phenomena. It seems somewhat easier to interpret the meaning of this analysis by supposing the material world to be a phenomenal manifestation of mental processes, than by the reverse hypothesis. But still more, the principle of the irreversible character of most of the processes whereby energy is transformed in the physical world, becomes, of late, more and more prominent in our conceptions of nature. This principle is certainly of very vast scope. It seems to have some very deep meaning. It is a principle which has been declared inconsistent with a purely mechanical theory of the nature of the physical world. This principle, in connection with certain other facts, has led of late to an effort to reduce all natural phenomena to transformations, or to states of more or less temporary equilibrium, of what we now call energy. This effort goes so far with some scientific thinkers, as to take the form of an attempt to do away with the concept of matter altogether, and to reduce the whole physical world to a collection of forms and transformations of energy. Where the equilibrium of a given distribution and grouping of energy remains for a long time nearly or quite invariant, we have the phenomena of masses of matter. But these need not be absolutely invariable. In long enough periods of time all natural things may undergo change. In essence the physical world thus tends to be conceived as through and through fluent. But minds, as known in our ordinary experience, have just this fluent character. Only they, as they are known to us, change at a more rapid rate. Such a conception of an essentially fluent nature,—the world of Heraclitus restored upon the

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basis of the generalizations of modern knowledge,—seems thus at present to be at least a tolerable empirical conception; and as such it has been suggested by at least one famous, although no doubt somewhat speculative scientific thinker,—Ostwald. He, to be sure, is not disposed to emphasize quite as much as I here do the resulting analogy between natural and mental processes. I have neither the right nor the desire to estimate the scientific worth of this conception; but it enables one to summarize a great many facts in a simple way. It suggests that the false emphasis which materialism has laid upon the contrast between matter and mind may prove in future to be not so persistent a tendency of speculation regarding nature as I myself have been accustomed, for the reasons just stated, to expect it to prove. The analogies between certain aspects of the physical world and the processes characteristic of a mind do not here cease. I repeat that these analogies seem to me to be manifested in a number of the most important and most pervasive of the aspects of the natural order. The whole tendency of nature to the formation of new individuals,—a very widespread tendency which Professor Shaler has recently discussed in his volume entitled ‘‘The Individual,’’ displays many analogies with the processes characteristic of mind. There exists, also, an analogy between the tendency of minds to form habits, and certain tendencies even in what we call inorganic nature, which seem to be very pervasive. This analogy has been studied at length by various thinkers. As a result of such analogies we may say that while the older natural theology was indeed faulty in its effort to demonstrate, by the design argument, the existence and the plans of God, nevertheless, at the present time the hypothesis that what we call the physical world is throughout the manifestation of mind, appears, upon a purely empirical basis, and apart from an idealistic philosophy, at least as plausible a cosmological hypothesis as is the supposition that the physical world consists, let us say, of vortex rings that move about in a frictionless fluid. As a fact, however, no such hypothesis is thus to be demonstrated. Ultimate questions demand thoroughgoing inquiries. I have dwelt upon these ambiguous aspects and tendencies of modern inquiry

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partly because we are often tempted to believe that the empirical evidence regarding the bases of natural religion tends all in one direction, and partly because the cultivation of a genuinely judicial spirit involves an effort to see both sides of this great modern controversy. V Yet we have not gone forth into this wilderness of physical mysteries merely to see the reed of opinion shaken by the wind. I have had a positive purpose in mind even in dwelling upon the indecisive character of our present knowledge of the natural order. The present inability of the human mind to come into the desired direct contact with ultimate facts illustrates a principle of the utmost importance regarding the true relations of facts and ideals. I ventured, at the outset of this discussion, to define facts as individual, as determinate, that is, as decisive of the truth or falsity of all assertions which refer to them. Whatever the real world is, it consists of such precisely determinate facts, and that, too, whether these facts be finite or infinite in number and complexity, whether they be permanent or transient, material or spiritual. To deny this principle of the determinateness of all the real facts of the universe would lead to a direct self-contradiction. For if you make any given assertion about the real world, or about anything in the real world, and if that assertion has any definite meaning, then the assertion in question is either true or false. To say that it was neither true nor false would be selfcontradictory. But now the truth or falsity of this assertion constitutes its relation to the facts. It has, then, a perfectly definite relation to the facts, and the facts have a determinate relationship to that assertion, just because it is true or false regarding them. Since this principle holds of every possible assertion about facts, we can only conceive the facts as themselves possessed of absolutely determinate characters. There is nothing indecisive about them. Or to sum up the matter in a well known formula of the textbooks, everything in the world is precisely what it is, and either does or does not possess any predicate that, with a precise meaning, may be assigned to it. To say all this is, indeed, to reiterate the commonplace of logic.

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Yet observe in what a strange situation this, the first principle of all sane thinking, places us when we compare it with that very state of indecision, of inquiry, in which our study of the physical world has just left us. What we have just exemplified is our inability to observe for ourselves at present, any ultimate facts concerning the true constitution of the physical world. And yet, as we inevitably say: The true physical world, that is, the genuine and ultimate reality of which the natural phenomena are a hint, really has a precise, an individual, a perfectly definite constitution. Only our experience is at present too narrow, too special, too indeterminate, to reveal to us what that constitution is. Now precisely, this imperfection of our experience which our ignorance of the natural world exemplifies, this same imperfection is illustrated by the state of our finite human experience wherever we turn. It is as Kant said: In our human experience, as at present constituted, no ultimate facts, no perfectly determinate realities, such as our thinking demands, are anywhere presented to our observation,—and yet, with perfect assurance, we, nevertheless, insist that there are ultimate facts, and that they are decisive as against all our mere opinions. Now what does this whole baffling situation of our finite life mean? It means, I answer, above all, this: Our very conception of a world of determinate facts is one of our ideals, and is in truth the central one amongst all our ideals. When we at the outset opposed the factworld to the whole world of ideals, we were merely emphasizing a contrast amongst our ideals themselves. This contrast has constant and practical value in life, just because the idealism of discovering determinate truth is, indeed, sovereign amongst our purposes, and hence stands in strong relief over against lesser purposes. But in truth, a genuinely determinate and individual fact remains for our finite experience an ideal object, just as much as perfect saintliness or perfect beauty or perfect blessedness remain ideal objects. A fact is an object that we ought to observe, were we only wise enough, but that, in its truly determinate individual character, we do not observe; an object that we ought to seek, and do seek through all the process of our experience, but that we could find only in case our experience won a

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type of constitution which at present it essentially lacks. No man hath seen God at any time. But just so, no man hath seen a single individual fact, a single perfectly determinate content of experience. A fact is merely that which we should experience if our insight had become perfectly determinate with reference to all our possible inquiries, so that we found present that which answered all conceivable questions regarding its own constitution. Therefore, to attribute to the universe the determinate constitution which we have already found it necessary to attribute to the world of facts, is to regard the real world as the expression of at least one of our most central ideals. But while this ideal does, indeed, stand in a marked contrast with many other ideals, in the form which these ideals assume in our present stage of development, the contrast is not and cannot be such as to involve a permanent and absolute opposition. For, in the next place, as to the point which Kant treated so negatively: The ultimate facts do, indeed, lie beyond any insight that our present human experience ever reaches; but this does not mean or imply that the ultimate facts of the universe lie beyond all experience, both human and such as is not now human. For when we seek for facts, we simply follow any direction of research which seems to lead us towards a more determinate and definite experience. Experience grows more definite as it answers more definite questions. But it does not cease to be experience by becoming thus nearer to determination. Nor is that determinate state of things which furnishes the precise decision as to every question that can be asked, a state of things such as is able to exist apart from any and all experience. On the contrary, in order to be a world of facts, the world must be present to some experience, and in truth to an experience of absolute and divine completeness. For to possess any ideas, to make any assertions, to ask any questions, is, in us, a conscious process. And what this process seeks, in so far as it seeks to know the facts, is precisely the attainment of a conscious state wherein questions are seen to be determinately answered. No search for an ideal is a search for anything beyond all

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consciousness. It is a search for a complete expression of some conscious process. This state of consciousness wherein questions are determinately answered remains, from the point of view of a finite, of a searching and inquiring consciousness, an ideal object of search. And that state of consciousness is the only object that the ideal of the truth seeker can define as his goal. To say, as we must, that this ideal is actually realized, and that such realization constitutes the very nature of the true universe, is to assert simply that there is, then, a consciousness for which all questions are answered. Now such a consciousness is a mind to which all reality, natural and spiritual, is present in a perfectly determinate and individual form. No other account can consistently be given of the nature of facts. There are facts. They are perfectly determinate. They are such as to answer all questions and such as to decide regarding the truth and falsity of all assertions. For any inquiring consciousness these facts remain ideal objects, sought but not yet fully found, limited in experience, but not wholly possessed, approached as one’s experience grows more determinate, but definable only as the objects that would be present were the ideal of the truth seeker now and here fulfilled, and were his experience perfectly determinate, as now it is not. To assert that this ideal is not a mere ideal, but is fulfilled, is expressed by the real world, is to assert that the real world is present to a determinate and complete experience for which all questions about fact are answered. Now such an experience has at least the character of a divine omniscience, and it has all reality as its own present object. Yet there still remains the contrast between the ideal of the truth seeker, viewed merely as the search for determinate experience, and for the decision, through this experience, of every question,— between this ideal, I say, and these ideals of the moralist, of the lover of beauty, of the seeker for the triumph of righteousness with which we began. Even if we regard the fact-world as thus necessarily and simply a certain total of observed contents, present to a complete and determinate conscious experience, for which and in which are all things, does that throw any light upon the question whether the factworld fulfills any other ideals than those of mere truth seeking? Are

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the facts otherwise the fulfillment of ideals except as they merely possess decisive and determinate character? To this question a very simple consideration furnishes, in my opinion, the sufficient answer. Mere contents of experience, presented as our sensations are presented to us, can never be, of themselves, precisely determinate, not even if there were present an infinite variety and complexity of them. All such facts are still general in character. A being who merely saw such facts would see nothing final or decisive. In order to possess value as a determinate fact, an experience must embody an intention, must fulfill the purposes of a will. Even the ideal of truth seeking already illustrates this principle. For one who seeks truth does not seek mere wealth of experience, but determinateness of experience. He wants to know what is and what is not true. He wants to find out what is excluded by reality as well as what is presented. Now that some possible content of experience does not exist, this no being can recognize who merely observes various presented contents of experience, however numerous. To know that some possible object does not exist involves seeing that such a possible content is inconsistent with what does exist. Now no two mere contents of experience are inconsistent, as mere contents, with one another. But purpose can conflict with purpose, plan with plan, affirmation with negation, deed with deed. Hence I insist that in the world of our absolute experience nothing can be viewed as finally decided merely in terms of presented or absent contents of experience. The decision must be as between alternatives possessing value for a will. It is will that expresses itself determinately, and that gives individuality to facts. The absolute experience must also be an absolute will, and the universe must be the expression of such a will. Thus, then, in the world of the absolute experience, the ideal of the truth seeker cannot be fulfilled alone. In order for the ideal of the truth seeker to be fulfilled, all other ideals must be taken into account. For the rest, as you at once see, all finite ideals have some sort of determinate relation to the world of facts. But suppose that in the world of determinate facts some particular ideal of ours, I care not what, is found to be, from the final or absolute point of view, an ideal

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that the facts do not fulfill, but defeat, do not accomplish, but set aside. Now this defeat of our moral or aesthetic or personal ideals is, by hypothesis, a fact, and a fact belonging to the absolute or final world of experience. Now what merely presented fact of sense taken by itself, apart from some highly ideal interpretation, ever could show you or anybody that any ideal which you have once seriously possessed is actually defeated and excluded from any place of being? I call upon you who have waited and toiled for ideals, amidst all sorts of empirical discouragements, who have struggled with opposing fortunes, to bear me witness that the merely presented contents of experience, as our senses show them to us, can never prove that an ideal has failed, but can only illustrate how it has not yet succeeded. Ordinary common sense says, in the presence of apparent failure, ‘‘Wait and see,’’ ‘‘Try again.’’ In other words, it is not yet known, in any particular instance, and by mere presented experience that reality determinately excludes your ideal. Only a knowledge of the whole realm of fact could show that. Even death, taken as an empirical fact, never proves that love has really failed, losing altogether her own from the realm of reality. For faith and hope define, as at least a possibility, a higher life where love may find again her own. The mere possibility thus defined must no doubt be determinately settled, yes or no, from the point of view of that absolute experience to which we have now appealed as the knower of all reality. But from the point of view even of this absolute experience, what can be found present that would determinately say no to any once suggested possibility? What can wholly exclude a once defined possibility from being recognized and included by that absolute experience? I answer here by brief illustrations. Once geometers sought long for the solution of the problem called squaring the circle. This problem was one of their ideals. All sorts of experiences of temporary failure came to them as they tried various constructions in the effort to solve the problem. No such particular experiences could have ever shown that the desired solution of their problem had no existence in the realm of truth. For centuries they pursued the research. At last, however, they reached, as late as the year 1882, the definitive settlement of the quest

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about the circumference and area of the circle. And now what settled the question? I answer, the discovery which brought the problem to a conclusion was at once a defeat and a victory, an abandonment and a fulfillment of the original ideal. One abandoned this ideal in its cruder form, but fulfilled even thereby its true meaning in a higher form. What the mathematicians had all along meant and defined as the length of the circumference of a circle was definitely proved to be an existent object, but was shown to be one that could not be constructed or measured by any of the methods which the ancient geometers originally applied for the purpose, so that thus far the ancient effort was shown to be foredoomed to failure. On the other hand, the discovery of this very failure involved really fulfilling the immortal soul of the ancient ideal, by showing what the real and positive properties of the length of the circumference were, and what the ideal in question had all along really meant. In brief, the old ideal was included in a new one; and what it had directly undertaken was shown to be impossible, merely by showing what the deeper meaning of this undertaking was, and what the hidden implications of the ancient ideal were. In a similar way, the seekers after perpetual motion used to aim after a certain sort of control over nature. The assurance, never absolute, was made in course of time indefinitely probable, that the ideal of the seekers of perpetual motion, as they had defined it, was false, or was excluded by the nature of things. But this very assertion has involved, in fact, a realization, upon a higher level, of the immortal soul of the very ideal itself of the seekers of perpetual motion. For upon the postulate of the impossibility of perpetual motion is founded the whole modern theory of energy, the greatest generalization of physical science, and the one which defines our highest yet attained control over natural phenomena. These illustrations bring to light the principle which I here have in mind. No ideal, from my point of view, fails unless the absolute experience excludes its expression. But the ideal itself exists. Account must, therefore, be taken of it even in excluding it. Now one who takes account of an ideal, and who finds that, nevertheless, as it is stated, it cannot consistently with the whole of truth be fulfilled, does

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not merely observe particular contents of experience which here and there delay or prevent its fruition. He observes how, when carried out of its own legitimate consequences, the true meaning of this partial ideal can only be consistently fulfilled in some form which transforms, and yet in some measure retains the genuine, the deeper meaning of the original ideal itself. The absolute will, then, in confirming or defeating finite ideals, takes account of them, and fulfills their true intent even when it sets aside their cruder expression. The immortal soul of every ideal is determinately fulfilled in the absolute. VI Now such is the view of the inmost nature of the fact-world to which we are led, as I hold, by an effort to think out to the end the very criticism of our finite knowledge which Kant initiated. It is true that as we now are, we never experience the true nature of any ultimate facts. But that is because ultimate facts exist only as the determinate contents of an absolute experience, for which they are what they are merely because this experience, expressing as it does, ideals, excludes what is inconsistent with these ideals. This absolute Experience is also an absolute Will. Its life is the world. Its facts exist only as known and as willed. But it is not merely an Absolute Will. It takes account of every finite will, and is in fact the true fulfillment of the higher meaning of every finite will. For it excludes and defeats any special form of finite ideal only by including the true meaning of this very ideal in some higher form. Hence your religious instinct is right in affirming, as it does, what you often express thus, ‘‘God, that is, the absolute Will, takes account of me, of my ideals and intents, and opposes my will only in so far as he also includes and fulfills it. I, the individual, dwell in God, as he dwells in me, His providence takes account of my every ideal. I never fail except by winning in some higher form, the very ideal that I meant.’’ Such are the fundamental considerations upon which, as I hold, we must today, amidst all the complexities of the modern world, and in view of the great results of modern deflection, found our efforts to use and to improve the everlasting principles of natural religion.

football and ideals




N

ot long ago I printed an address that I had read before a society of teachers of physical training. This address dealt with some of the relations between physical training and the present problems of moral education in America; and in one passage of the discussion I referred to those of our modern athletic sports which attract the greatest public attention, which in consequence fill the largest place in newspaper reports, and which, as a matter of course, draw together the most notable and enthusiastic assemblages of people when the culminating events of each season take place. What I said in this passage, regarding these sports, was carefully confined to some observations upon their importance and their dangers as moral influences, as social forces, as phenomena of the life of great masses of our people, and especially as factors influencing the moral education of our youth. The editor of the Harvard This essay was originally published in Harvard Illustrated Magazine (10 [1908]: 40–47).

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Illustrated Magazine has asked me to restate some of my theses for his readers. He has himself seen my previous article. He knows what my position is. In requesting me to present the matter in a way that can make any sort of appeal to his readers, he is aware that, in some respects, I am an opponent of views that are now the ruling views amongst these readers. He cannot expect that, being what I am, I shall be able to affect these opposing opinions in any notable way. In brief, he asks me to lead, or at least to take part in, a ‘‘forlorn hope.’’ I can only say, at the outset, that, since the matter concerns a contest for a moral ideal, the task is as attractive as it is forlorn. I Football is, in many respects, the king among those athletic sports which arouse the keenest general interest, which are reported at the greatest length by the newspapers, and which draw together the notable and enthusiastic assemblages. Consequently, football is at present a great social force in our country. It has long been so. Apparently it is destined long to remain so. In consequence, any plain man, however little he knows about the game itself, is bound to form his impressions about its place among the great social forces of his time and his nation. The plain man has a right to these impressions—yes, even a duty to form them. He may be able to give many reasons for them without being even disposed to form or to express any opinion whatever regarding the more intimate and technical problems of the game itself. Any great social force properly attracts the attention and awakens the scrutiny of the man who is not directly involved in the activities which represent this force. It does so, not because of what those who are under the direct sway of this force regard as its most interesting features, but because of its interference or coo¨peration with the other social forces which mould our common life. Thus, for instance, the great labor strikes, nowadays so common, are phenomena that represent great social forces. Each great strike grows out of controversies whose merits are, in general, quite problematic to all who stand at a distance from the disputants, and who

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know nothing of the practical workings of the business in which the strike has arisen. To judge who is right in the particular controversy that has led to the strike is therefore usually impossible to anybody but the expert. And nevertheless, if the strike is a serious one, our ignorance of the merits of the controversy, and of the technique of the industry in whose conduct the quarrel has arisen, does not absolve us from forming an opinion as to the way in which the interests of our common social order are affected by the strike. Some of these common interests we do understand; and it is our social duty to understand them. If they are endangered by the strike, we form an opinion regarding the mischief done. We must form such an opinion. If hereupon a powerful employer of labor suggests that he has a ‘‘Godgiven’’ right to run his business in his own way, and that we, being quite ignorant (as in fact most of us are ignorant) of how his business must be run in order to make a fair profit, must not presume to comment upon his decisions in the matter under dispute,—we find just this particular appeal to the rights of experts simply grotesque. For the strike may be endangering our whole social order. And equally, if a labor leader assures us that, unless we have toiled in the dust and darkness side by side with the striking laborers, we can form no fair judgment regarding what their grievances justify them in doing for the sake of redress, we repudiate this way of viewing the merits of the case. For the rest of us have our own work to do, and with this whole work the strike may be interfering. Each man’s business, calling, sport, pleasure, grievance, love, or hate is his own; but the social order is for all of us. Whoever affects by his action its general forces can take no refuge behind his skill as an expert, or behind his rights as a free judge of what is good for himself, when we form and express our opinion about the effect that his institutions and practices have upon the common weal. Well, it is with great sports, and, in particular, with football, as it is with strikes. If such things affect the social order at large, they have to be judged by every loyal lover of the social order, whether he knows anything about the details of the industry in which the strikers are engaged or not, and whether he is acquainted with the technique

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of the game of football or not. Football must be estimated as to its general relations to the welfare of society, just as Standard Oil, or just as the railway management which results in killing a larger proportion of railway passengers in our country than in other countries, must be estimated; it must be judged by non-experts, precisely in so far as it influences their great common social concerns. II The great social concerns with which, in this little paper, I have to do are the concerns called Moral Ideals. Does this great modern social interest in football, does this gathering of crowds, does this fascination, does this long-continued prominence in the newspapers, help on our moral education? Do such social influences make our national ideals higher, sounder, more lasting, more effective? That is a fair question. For the reasonable answer to that question the opinions of a football coach, however expert he may be, and however honorable a man he may be, are not finally decisive. The question is one for moralists. Now a football coach may indeed be, and no doubt often is, a moralist. But as a moralist he has no special authority conferred upon him by his expertness in the game. Or again, the value of football may have been publicly estimated by a lover of sports and of ideals who is himself not only a most distinguished moralist, but a President of the United States. In this case, the distinction of the moralist, and his own lofty ideals and lengthy public services, will indeed give great weight to his judgment. But his expertness in sport will no more make his opinion upon the moral question final than his high political office will make it decisively authoritative. Problems about ideals must be thought out by each moralist for himself. And any man, according to his powers and his insight, can become a moralist who will take the trouble to think out his ideals for himself, with the hearty intent to put them into practice, and to make them indeed moral ideals. I have stated the question. Does football, as played under these absorbing and engrossing social conditions, under the sway of all this

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newspaper publicity, in the presence of these notable, these fascinated,—yes, if you will, these fascinating—multitudes,—does football (viewed not as a game, but as an American institution, as a great social force in our nation) help on the moral education of our people? Now there are some—I fancy that there are even many—who will turn rather lightly away from this question. ‘‘Football is a sport,’’ they will say. ‘‘It is not for moral education, but for the joy of power in those who play; and in those who look on, football exists to satisfy love of watching the mighty display their might.’’ So far as any chance reader of mine tends to respond in this way, he tends to answer my question at once; and, so far as he himself is concerned, he tends to answer it in a decisive way. A bard who sang in a recent number of the Harvard Illustrated Magazine gave voice to precisely the confused emotion which a great and excited crowd usually awakens in an unguarded mind, when, after a brief expression of the spectator’s joy in the game where ‘‘a man is a man and a team is a team,’’ he reminded us that the true football enthusiasm naturally culminates in a ‘‘glorious night in town.’’ Now, whoever states the case thus, points out that, to him at least, football stands for no moral ideals, but simply for ‘‘letting off steam,’’ or for what may be called, in a phrase that I borrow from Professor James, ‘‘a moral holiday.’’ I have here absolutely no comment to make upon the place of ‘‘moral holidays’’ in a man’s existence. I am discussing ideals. Whoever states the case for football as the author of the verses in question stated it, answers my question by saying frankly that football is, in his own mind, the teacher of no moral ideals whatever. And that, as far as it goes, is an instructive answer to my question. I regret the answer, but thank the bard in question for his frankness. I have no doubt that there are thousands of spectators who feel in the same way— ‘‘Where the world looks on from crowded stands; Where we hear the rip of quick commands, And the crash of cheers, and the boom of bands.’’

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A great social force that had only this message for those under its influence would possibly act as an anesthetic for over-sensitive consciences and might in consequence be recommended as an occasional relief to certain saintly invalids. But if this were the whole story, such a force would help no man to an ideal, but might serve to scatter and muddle whatever ideals he might happen already to possess, especially if he were young enough to believe that whatever the world on the ‘‘crowded stands’’ happens to feel or to think is important. I hasten to point out, however, that the true lovers of football, and especially that those true lovers who as players have been trained by it, or who, as experts in observing the moral influence of sports, defend it as an indispensable means for the training of a large portion of our youth to manhood,—that these, I say, find in the game another, and a very genuinely ideal value. These, the only true and enlightened lovers of the great sport, emphasize the thesis that it trains men to a very high and practical form of Loyalty. Now Loyalty is, to my mind, indeed the central moral ideal, an ideal of which our nation at present stands in very great need. If football, in its general social influence, is training our youth, as a socially organized group, to genuinely high forms of loyalty, then my question is answered effectively, and is answered in a sense favorable to the sport. I fully agree that if such high training in loyalty is as a fact the normal, the prevailing result of this intense social interest in the ‘‘game of games,’’—then very much can be endured in the way of incidental mishaps and extravagances, and still the sport can be viewed as a vastly important and perhaps indispensable factor in the moral education of our youth. I can and should regard with indifference a good many serious physical accidents; I ought to make light of much ‘‘roughness’’; I should cheerfully leave to the coaches and to the other experts the entire supervision of all the controversies about this or that rule or method of play,—if only the lovers of the game can make good their thesis that the game teaches to the majority of those concerned, both players and spectators, the art of honoring, of prizing, and of practising a hearty devotion to serious social ideals.

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Loyalty means a willing and practical sacrifice of a man for some significant cause. In its higher form loyalty means a hearty coo¨peration with the growth of the loyal spirit in all other men. Now ‘‘team work’’ and ‘‘fair play’’ are surely examples of the loyal spirit. The high physical and mental training involved in the preparation of the players, the coolness and self-control that they must learn to exercise under trying conditions, the obedience to discipline that is essential to their work, the self-sacrifice, the indifference to pain, the courage, which belong to their task, the fair play to which the rules, and the constant public criticism to which the players are subject, are supposed to hold the players—well, all these are means of training,—not merely ‘‘manhood,’’—but loyal manhood. And whoever defends football upon such grounds has indeed insisted upon ideals that are of genuine, in fact, of eternal worth. And such a lover of football, if only he can make out the thesis that this sort of training is the net result of football, has indeed hereupon every right to insist also upon the cheerily emotional aspect of the case, and to say that a sport which teaches ideals at all, teaches them far better than sermons, or even than set tasks of study or of enforced discipline, can teach them, and that it does so just because a sport is fascinating, and because it thrills a man through and through, even while it makes him work his hardest. Such lovers of the sport have a right then to dwell upon the joy of it, and to emphasize all its fascinations. And now, as a fact, I know some great public servants, men now devoted to the noblest and hardest social tasks, who assert that they personally first learned unselfish devotion, and the spirit of ‘‘team work’’ (that is, of social service) on the football field; and who say that the ‘‘roughness’’ and perhaps their own broken bones, first gave them the needed moral lessons in what have since proved to be the most delicately tender and the most earnestly devoted forms of loyalty. If such could be shown to be the prevailing social influences, due to modern football, the objections arising from ‘‘roughness,’’ from accidental injuries, from the occasional neglect of classroom studies, and from all the other mere incidents of the sport, would be swept away at a stroke. I should myself unhesitatingly say,—better broken

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bones and extravagant enthusiasms and much ‘‘roughness’’ with true loyalty as the net result, than physical safety and sedate demeanor without a youth trained to the spirit of loyalty. III But, as a fact, can the thesis be maintained that the prevailing result of this great social force which we are discussing, is, in view of the present condition of the sport, the training—not of this or of that individual,—but of the youth of our nation at large towards effective loyalty? I insist that this question is one, not for football experts, but for any fair-minded observer of general social conditions, and for any lover of loyal ideals. I also insist that, in answering this question, one must consider most of all not the effect of the game on the players, but its effect upon the spectators. The game, as it is now played, is played for ‘‘the world that looks on from crowded stands.’’ Were that world not there, or were it not expected to be there, the game, as we are often told, would ‘‘dwindle.’’ That is why any restriction of intercollegiate football is vigorously resisted by all who love the game. In other words, were not the crowds what they are, as to size and enthusiasm, nobody concerned would see any such reason, as he now sees, for the degree and the form of enthusiasm for the sport which is at present in him. The spectators come largely because each expects the crowd. The players regard their cause as deriving its importance from its publicity. For the sake of the crowds they have learned to be loyal to that cause. If this be so, since the players, and the candidates for the teams, are relatively few, and the crowds are vast, the prevalent, the widely and socially important moral influence, whatever it is, is the influence upon the spectators, and upon especially the watching academic youth. The moral effect upon the players is an effect of vanishing quantity when compared with the moral effect upon the masses who do not play. Now, does it train me in loyalty to see another man’s bones broken? Or, better (since the broken bone, or other notable

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physical mishap, is indeed only the occasional chance of the sport),— does it train me in loyalty to see another man showing his physical prowess in a loyalty devoted way? He, the player, indeed, is loyal. Does that make me, the spectator, a loyal man? Certainly there are conditions under which the example of loyalty proves contagious, and deeply effective. But if you will look through your life, you will see that the example of another man’s loyalty has been of the most ideal value to you, either (1) when you were yourself already working side by side with him, in the same sport, task, or other cause; or else (2) when you were aroused by his example earnestly to plan some way in which you could practically imitate him, or could at least somehow translate his spirit into your own deeds. Cheering a loyal man is good; but for you personally it is the cheapest and tamest form in which you can possibly honor loyalty. ‘‘Go thou and do likewise’’ is the only word that can convey the true spirit in which any loyal act of another man, whoever he is, should influence you. Cheer, if you will. But if a man has only taught you to cheer him, he has so far merely amused you, and perhaps has roughened your throat. Yet there are those who grow enthusiastic over the ‘‘vast influence’’ which the indeed genuine devotion of the players has upon the general spirit of college loyalty, and who seem to suppose that staring at the loyal players is itself loyalty, that cheering is loyalty, that a cloud of enthusiastic emotion is loyalty, that waving flags constitutes loyalty, that singing songs is loyalty, that talking over the chances of the game for weeks means loyalty, that neglecting other things in order thus to stare and to talk and to be stirred is loyalty, that, in brief, anything is loyalty which is not a hearty and sustained and clearheaded devotion of a man to his own hard individual work for his own chosen ideal and cause. The loyal players,—well, everybody knows that their business is not to stare, nor to cheer, nor to be overcome with emotion. Yet one persists in saying: ‘‘How loyal their devotion makes me, by reason of the contagion of their noble example! See the results. I cheer, I wave my flag. In the tumult and passion of

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my loyalty I lose my wits. How noble all this makes me! See how I rage and exult.’’ The fair retort to any such view of the matter is plain. What does this enthusiasm make you do? These players are setting you the example of loyalty. They risk their bodies, they devote their toil, they suffer and endure,—for their cause. And you,—you should regard it as a deep disgrace to have sat there staring and glowing, to have enjoyed the spectacle of their devotion, to have made your holiday out of their pain, to have gloried in their care and in their service,—unless in your life there is some service, some effective loyalty, which is at least as hard, as long, as painful, as cheerful in danger, as resolute in the face of apparent defeat, as patient when defeat has come,—as their loyalty has taught them to be. If this is the lesson that football teaches you, and if you go away from every game a man more practically devoted to your own tasks, whatever they are, just because these players are so devoted to theirs,—well, then football has helped you and is helping you to an ideal. If not, football, may have helped you to ‘‘let off steam.’’ But on the whole its prevailing influence will have been to enervate you, the spectator,—to make you less, not more loyal,—for all your cheering. For you have gloated over the sacrifice of others, and yourself have sacrificed, and intend to sacrifice—nothing. IV One may reply, and probably will reply, that to introduce such considerations as these to the ordinary member of the crowd of spectators is to attempt to remind him of something wholly incongruous with the occasion. ‘‘Of course,’’ one will say, ‘‘the enthusiasm of the crowd at the game is not itself any form of practically loyal devotion. But it is a sort of preliminary to a possible loyalty. It at any rate is a tribute to loyalty, and therefore need not be other than a perfectly innocent joy, with a tendency resulting to prize good work for its own sake.’’ I answer: As true as is the word: ‘‘On ne badine pas avec l’amour,’’ so true is the thought that one does not well to trifle with the spirit

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of loyalty, by cultivating a slavery to the enthusiasms of vast crowds and of an excited newspaper public in the place of a serious devotion of the great body of our youth to those possible activities which, whether under the name of sport or under the name of work, should actually absorb them in personal and practical and ideal tasks of their own. ‘‘Teamwork’’ is the great ideal of civilization; it is another name for loyalty. But is the crowd on the benches a team? And what is the prevailing social influence of the vast modern sports? Is it not far more this: To make and keep the crowd a crowd, rather than to train and keep the team a team? Now to my mind, all the special evils which are justly chargeable to any modern athletic sport as it exists in our schools, colleges, universities, are merely incidents, often mere transient accidents of the one great evil which results from the extravagant publicity of our sports, from the prominence which the newspapers give to them, from the size and the miscellaneous constitution of the crowds which attend them, and from the inevitable distracting, confusing, and unreasonable social influences which belong to sportive activities thus carried on. These evils I believe to be both great and manifold. The loyalty that is trained in the players is indeed precious. There is no praise too high for some of its best manifestations, even in case these are not always as wise as one could wish. For when a man devotes himself and all his powers, according to his lights, to his cause,—what more can you ask of him, so far as he has yet come in the pursuit of wise loyalty? But sometimes,—in some place, in some seasons,—this or that evil spirit of unfair play may for a time be suggested to this or to that group of players. At such times the crowds concerned in watching these players are not themselves in any condition to give discriminating counsel, or to help the players into a better insight. On the other hand, the crowd may, for a time, condone, or even ignorantly applaud the new evil, until it grows somewhat obviously intolerable. Then comes one of those worse seasons of football, when evils that nobody has ever deliberately intended wax prominent. We have

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known of such seasons. They lead to efforts, which are often very serious, to introduce reforms. These efforts prove temporarily effective. Good seasons follow for a time,—seasons when the friends of the game are content, and when its critics,—all except a stray moralist or two whom nobody will heed,—are silent. But the social forces involved in this extravagant publicity, in these fascinations of the crowd, are irresistible. After a time the moral clouds gather again,— now in some Western community, now nearer to our own homes. The clouds themselves vary endlessly in their form and their shading. Now one hears of ‘‘professionalism,’’ now of violence, now of some other form of unfairness; or perhaps one hears merely of triviality, of neglect of work, of an excess of accidental injuries, or of some other symptom of over-excitement. These are but examples of the evils which attend the social influences to which I have referred. For my part I care little what special form these passing evils take during the bad seasons. And I am never disposed to blame individuals, nor yet particular bodies of students, for any of these ills. What I note is that the modern game is played under social conditions which render such incidental and recurrent mishaps inevitable. These conditions involve namely a play of social forces which renders an enlightened and prevailing public opinion, such as shall steadily favor, in the mass of spectators a loyal life and a practical love of loyalty, impossible, so far as the conduct and the spirit and the results of these public displays are concerned. And so various evils result. The prevalent result is not favorable to the best moral education of the great body of our youth. V One will ask, Could these social conditions he changed without destroying the ‘‘great game’’? I answer that, if the colleges could more completely organize their own academic social order, and could shut out extraneous public sporting influences, and could meanwhile so develop their other sports, and their college activities generally, that the spectators at the great games were limited to those who had the

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opportunity and, in the vast majority of cases the wish, when they applauded the display of the loyal spirit, to ‘‘go and do likewise,’’ themselves, by doing their own work or play with equal loyalty,— well, then the great games might be simply culminating events in a generally loyal common social life. In that case I should have little fear that anybody would have occasion to complain of any excessive love of sport. I should be sure that football would retain all of its vigor and its true charm, without being helplessly obliged, every few years, to go wrong; and every year to mislead a good many people as to the estimate of true moral values. But I see no very near prospect that such a social change is imminent. And under present social conditions, I do not believe that the forces at work before and about the great public games tend to the general moral education of our academic youth. The players win training, and may learn the highest ideals through their devotion. But the crowds do not thus learn ideals. Hence the frequent incidental evils. Whoever believes that I am wrong, is meanwhile invited to refute me by using his opportunities as a spectator at the game as means of making himself a more loyal and devoted man, in whatever sport or calling he thinks wise, than ever he was before. If those who thus refuted me should prove to be the majority of those present at any game, I should ardently rejoice in being thus refuted. If the game, if the players,—if their devotion, if their patience in training, if their courage in facing difficulty or peril, if their self-control in adversity, if their moderation and dignity in triumph, if their sacrifices, if their coolness and clearness of head, awaken these virtues in the spectators, and make the latter a body of men as earnest and devoted as they are joyous and enthusiastic,—a body of men as much lovers of sound reason,—and of such sound reason put into loyal action,—as they are now lovers of football,—then let this body of spectators show the result in their whole social life. Hereupon I shall be indeed both refuted, and blessed in the consciousness that I am refuted by a wisdom which will be much better than all the cheers of many multitudes.

some characteristic tendencies of american civilization




A

t a moment when the thoughts of serious people in this country are fixed, not only upon the exciting events of the day, but upon the future problems and the new responsibilities which, for you and for the whole British Empire, must grow out of the present situation, I know of no more appropriate topic upon which I can venture to address this Philosophical Society than one which has been suggested to me, as a transient visitor, by some aspects of what I have heard during my journey about this very crisis through which your Empire is passing. I say suggested to me. I speak, of course, then, not of your crisis itself, as if that were directly my topic, but of suggestions that have come to my mind as I have thought over this crisis. It is, indeed, very far from my thought to attempt any direct study of that crisis as This essay was first given as an address to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society (Transactions of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 3 [1900]: 194—217) in January of 1900, when Royce was in Scotland to deliver the second half of his popular ‘‘Gifford Lectures.’’

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it exists for you. In such matters, not only would your knowledge altogether eclipse mine; but any comment of mine would be simply presumptuous. You have your present task to do, and, despite all obstacles, you will accomplish it; and I have no desire to offer anything but the expression of a sincere and fraternal sympathy regarding the griefs and the problems which at present rightly lie nearest to your hearts and to your purposes. But my own plan, in addressing you tonight in answer to your kind invitation, is none the less suggested to me, as a guest in your city, by what I have been learning of the nature of your present issues. For the stranger, at such times, learns, of course, through comparisons; and sees your world in the light of his own experience. He is reminded of the similarities and differences between the problems of your history and those of his own country. In such matters, as you will know, it is just through comparison that we attain new forms of. self-consciousness. We come better to see our own situation when we contrast it with that of our neighbours, and when we at the same time observe the parallels between the two cases. Nations as near to each other, not only in blood, but in their whole spiritual kinship as are America and Great Britain, can never view each other’s fortunes and issues considerately and justly without learning from each other. Our destinies, despite very strong contrasts, are of necessity closely akin. Our hopes and interests, despite all that might tend to keep us apart, are intimately bound together. A moment when either of our two peoples is forced to face a serious crisis, to decide a great issue, to pass through grave trials, and to look forward to new duties, is a moment when we can most profitably learn from each other, and can at the same time, through mutual and sympathetic observation, attain a clearer consciousness as to the meaning of our own history and of our task as servants of human civilization. I What, then, apart from the immediate interest of each day’s exciting events, your crisis has brought to the mind of one who, in one sense, is the stranger within your gates, and who is yet, in another sense, the

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guest constantly feeling anew that he is amongst his true brethren— what, I say, your present problem brings to my mind is, first, the thought of how the characteristic tendencies of your civilization, during the nineteenth century, have contrasted with our American tendencies. And to state at once what I suppose to be the most obvious, the broadest, and the most instructive contrast, it is briefly this:— Your Empire and our Republic have been, throughout the century, engaged in a career of very great and significant expansion. But we have, on the whole, expanded in different ways, and have undertaken, as we could, somewhat different offices. You have grown, in part, by direct colonization. The United Kingdom has reproduced itself—its general constitutional organization, its political ideals, its social order—by a process, so to speak, of budding, whereby, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Canada, new Commonwealths have either originated, or else, during the century, have grown into strong communities, children and similitudes, in great and essential respects, of the mother country. To this process our own process of forming new States has, in a sense, run parallel. But there has been, thus far, the well-known contrast, that our new States, closely linked by our general written constitution to the general government, and directly represented in Congress, have been subject to a far more centralized system of national control than you have undertaken to extend over your Colonies. Moreover, our States have grown up side by side, in the same great territory. Your Colonies are far from you and from one another. Railways now reduce to a very few days’ journey the distances between our remotest States; and our most distant possessions, such as Alaska, and the Philippine Islands, are not States at all, but regions under the direct sovereignty of the National Government alone. Such distant regions, however, are not characteristic of our system, but appear to us still as accidents of fortune. On the other hand, the oceans sunder by weeks, of even the fastest modern travel, the parts of your complex Empire. And this sundering is characteristic of your Empire. So far, then, the obvious contrast of our country, when compared with your Empire, lies in the greater centralization which

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has controlled our tendency to expansion, and in the physical continuity that, until recently, has characterised our national domain. But this obvious contrast is associated with yet another difference equally well known. For your other most characteristic Imperial task, in addition to your formation of your direct Colonial children, has been the government and protection of alien races. This task came to you slowly. But it has long been an essential part of your Imperial duty. You devoted yourselves to the learning of an art that never had been seriously undertaken, in such magnitude and complexity, by any earlier Empire; and you have made this art peculiarly your own. And now, in a way that, with all the obvious contrasts, has its genuine parallel, we, in America, have been led by a process, and to an extent that the founders of our Republic could not anticipate, to the task of receiving, and of uniting with ourselves large masses of population of alien origin. Our own civilization had an English stamp, and always, I believe, will retain that stamp. But we have been forced, as time went on, to try to make that civilization meet the needs of great numbers of foreigners, whose traditions were not our own; whose speech, when they came to us, was foreign; whose prejudices easily aroused a counter antipathy in the minds of our own plainer people; and whose customs, had we ever known them in their original home, we should not easily have understood. Now, both your tasks and ours have, in this respect, shared in common the obvious trait, that you and we were alike attempting to make the political traditions and the social arts, whose origin lay in Great Britain, suit the needs of peoples to whom this civilization was in greater or in less degree originally alien. But, of course, the contrast here is so great as easily to obscure the parallelism. For, except in case of the North American Indian, in whose wise management we very largely failed; in case of the Chinese labourers, whom, as far as possible, we have now rejected; and, finally, in case of the Negro, who gives us still our most pressing social problem, our dealings with the alien populations have generally been confined to men of European stock, and so of kindred races and religions; while in India, your care has

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been with great success extended over a very varied collection of peoples of a very distant type and civilization. In taking up what is now inevitably known, in popular speech, as the ‘‘white man’s burden,’’ you, therefore, have the ‘‘dear-bought wisdom,’’ while we are still in the most rudimentary stages of this art. But, on the other hand, in dealing with our less alien and more plastic foreign populations, our civilization has indeed developed powers which you have nowhere had occasion, as yet, to display upon anything like the same large scale. For our foreigners have not been, on the whole, alien races who were to be protected in the enjoyment of their native institutions, despite their acknowledgment of our sovereignty; they have been strangers upon our shores who were to be, and who, in large measure, already have been, assimilated, so that they were not to retain their own civilization, but to acquire ours, and were not to remain our subjects, but were to become our fellow-citizens. Accordingly, while your Imperial arts have been largely those of a benevolent government of your subject races, our social arts have been far more those of linguistic, political, and moral assimilation. This word, assimilation, then, names our peculiar and most characteristic tendency, in so far as our life stands in contrast to yours. The word applies, moreover, not only to the assimilation of alien races, but to the organization into one close-knit nationality of the diverse types and regions of our country. II So much, then, for a glimpse of the past development of our two forms of national life. But now, as to the present and the future, we seem indeed to be destined, in a measure, to become more and more alike in the essential nature of our two offices. We Americans have been recently forced, by a strange combination of good and evil fortunes, to begin the learning of a task that is essentially like yours. We, too, are henceforth to undertake the business of accomplishing, in distant regions, the protection and the government of alien populations, who will never become assimilated to our own. While, as for

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you—what more obvious lesson of your present situation is there than this, viz., that, apart from the momentary complications of your immediate crisis, the task of the future with you is the task of knitting closer the social, if not also the political constitution of your Empire, and of assimilating peoples with whom it is your destiny to live, and from whom you do not differ so widely in race that such future unification is impossible? In its larger aspects, the problem, of which your momentary crisis is a symptom, is plainly a problem of assimilation. We in America have had to deal with many such problems. As in your present case, so in our former life, one such problem with us led to a great war. That problem was the problem of bringing to a tolerable assimilation the types of civilisation belonging to the North and to the South. And the successful issue of that war with us meant in the end the liberty and the fraternity of the very people whom the passions of four weary and terrible years seemed hopelessly to have sundered. At the great crisis of our national history, when we, too, waited for days, weeks, months, for the eagerly-desired decisive news, and when with us the months lengthened into years, and ill success came again and again to our armies, and hope deferred and precious lives sacrificed made the whole nation heart-sick with sorrow and longing and dread—it long seemed as if the sole alternative before us was, either the hopeless loss and ruin of our whole national existence, or else a future in which one great section of our country would survive only as a subjected region, estranged from us in heart, and permanently embittered by defeat. But the result has shown us how false even our seemingly best-founded fears of those days were. The old enemies are now brethren. In our recent foreign wars, the North and the South stood side by side, not only as co-workers, but as enthusiastic rivals in the effort to show loyalty to the common country. In the South, the story of the Civil War—a war so earnestly fought out to the point of an absolutely honourable, because inevitable defeat—this story, I say, now survives, in the ideals of the new generation of Southerners, as a very precious memory of heroism and of endurance. It survives

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in sentiments of pride, and of affection for their dead. But the bitterness of the conflict, for this same new generation, has wholly passed away. The great lesson of our Civil War has been learned, and the fruit of this war is enjoyed by both the parties to the old conflict. We begin to see now that both the Confederate and his conqueror worked together, in the mysterious way that history so often exemplifies, to escape from the bondage of a destiny which the past had transmitted to that generation, to solve a problem which, alas, we fallible mortals in that land could only solve by fighting, and to prepare the way for a truer union that could only come into existence when the old issues had been thoroughly and honourably fought out. A few weeks ago, during a vacation, I made a visit to some of the best-known and tragically remembered of our Southern battlefields. In many places, even where little local attention has been devoted to preserving the traces of the old conflicts, or to setting up monuments to mark historic spots, one still finds the original lines of earthworks, about which, in some cases, young forests of pines have now sprung up, half hiding the signs of the days of bloodshed and of patriotic devotion. Here brave men and true fought, sometimes for days in succession, and often in apparently useless struggles, which for the time decided nothing, but led only to new and equally stubborn conflicts elsewhere. All concerned fought in defence of everything that their hearts held dearest, and in the furious hatred that only brethren can know when they war together. Yet now, when one wanders in the solitudes, under the warm Southern sky, and among the young pines, whose roots grow through the banks of the old entrenchments, or whose branches overshadow in the cemetery near by the graves of the dead, it is indeed a comforting thought to remember, with reverence for all those who died there, that they died not in vain, that their devotion has led to the solving of the old problems, and to the coming of a new life which none of them could have foreseen—to the passing away of much that was narrower, and to the higher consciousness of a more united civilization. The descendants of those foemen will not retain the old hatreds. They will honour each other the more because the fathers knew so well how to die for ideals. Had

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not both sides been so much in earnest, there would be to-day far less hope for our common country, for our race, and for our type of civilization. And so, when the frivolities and the frequent social ills that are indeed present in some aspects of our national life sometimes sadden us Americans, the memory of the Civil War always helps us to look deeper, to know that the most formidable appearances of weakness of character which we can observe are but superficial symptoms, and that at bottom our people are the inheritors of the blood and of the traditions of the men of ’61. In brief, our war, just because it had to be fought out to a finality, resulted in attainments which our civilization could never have won without it. No desire for a renewal of any of its most essential issues survives amongst us in the minds of people whose feelings are of any serious social or national significance. The future of the American Negro is still a great problem; but nobody desires to see him again a slave, or seriously wishes the old slavery days back again. The Southerner, as I have said, is still as proud of his history, including that of the Civil War, as ever he was. But nobody genuinely desires any form of revenge, or keeps alive the sentiments that inspired the conflict. The South has still a keen and common political consciousness, and votes, where national issues are concerned, in a decidedly sectional fashion; but the honor and the deeper unity of the nation are to-day as dear to the former Confederate as to his New England brother. In brief, the outcome of our greatest national crisis, and one of the bitterest and most stubbornly-contested of all modern conflicts, has been, not separation, nor yet mere conquest, nor even prolonged hatreds, but national unity, a satisfied sense of historic honor in the minds of all those most concerned on both sides, a deep lesson in the seriousness of national life—a record of devotion. And, above all, the outcome has been a measure of true assimilation of North and of South, without any merely destructive confusion or simple mingling of their types of civilization. For these types still preserve a certain wholesome individuality at the same time when they contribute to the life of one nation.

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I have been led thus to speak of the greatest of all the cases where our characteristic American tendency to bring to a true assimilation social tendencies that at first seemed to be in hopeless conflict, met with enormous obstacles, and overcame them. Since your modern Colonial policy developed, and your new Empire came, during the nineteenth century, into its more recent form of existence, you have certainly met with no greater problem than was ours before the Civil War; and, during the same historical period, you have certainly never passed through any moment when your whole destiny was so endangered as was ours in the year preceding the battle of Gettysburg. But when your skies are stormy, it is perhaps well to recall, not only your own more distant and glorious historic past, but also the crisis through which we, your brethren, were called to pass not many years since. For our problem was then not wholly unlike, in its deeper social motives, the one which your present destiny brings you to face. I am sure that I but express what is in all your hearts when I put in words the wish and the confident hope that when, forty years from now, the wanderer visits the South African battlefields now so stubbornly and painfully contested, he may be able to say, without reserve, that your heroes there offered up their lives for the common cause of human unity, of organized civilization, of fraternal peace, and offered them not in vain—that race hatreds might be made to cease and not be perpetuated, and that your Empire might become, not only the protector of alien subjects, but the assimilator of men of kindred blood, and the object of a common loyalty, even to those who now, perhaps, fail to comprehend their true share in your destiny. You have often carried power, protection, and order into remote regions. May you in future more fully knit together your Empire by the ties of a conscious community of ideas, of interests, and of civilization. May your wars end in liberty and in future brotherhood. III And now for a few more detailed observations concerning the way in which the assimilating tendencies of our American civilization have

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been manifesting themselves. Our thirteen original States which formed the Union, at the time when the Constitution was adopted, were all situated, as you know, upon the Atlantic border. At the outset of our history, intercommunication amongst them was very difficult, local jealousies were very keen, and the Union itself was a doubtful political experiment. Beyond the Alleghanies, the wildernesses of the Missisippi valley were then only at the beginning of the process which later brought them as rapidly to settlement and prosperity. Further west still lay territories that only later purchase and conquest brought into our domain, and that were not fairly explored until after the middle of the nineteenth century. That all this country should ever come under one political dominion at all seemed very doubtful. That such domination should follow the political methods defined by our Constitution appeared to many of our foreign observers, in the early periods of our national existence, still less likely. Your own experience with your Colonies in this century has shown how easily the tendency might have developed, amongst us, to the gradual formation of various new communities in the West, each one of which should attain a practical independence of the central government. And yet, this is not what has occurred. We have expanded, but as a nation. We have developed our new States, with their own governments; but the unity and the limited sovereignty of the National Government, within the bounds laid down by the written Constitution, have come to be unquestioned. The social contrasts of East and West, of North and South, have not been lost; they have grown diversified. But ours is still one civilization. And more than this—so vast a territory could only come to be settled through the aid of great numbers of foreign immigrants. Such have come to us in multitudes—from your own shores, from Ireland, from Germany, and from Italy, as well as from Scandinavia, and, of late, from Poland, from Hungary, and from still other lands. These new comers have brought to our shores languages, customs, traditions, and religious interests, which were not ours. In many cases, they have naturally tended to group themselves into little communities, such as you find in many of our cities, and such as, in some cases,

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have occupied considerable country districts. Now a critical issue for our destiny was, of course, from the first, the question whether these various types of people should retain, for a series of generations, their own national or social characteristics and prejudices, their own speech, their own mutual antipathies; or whether they should become one with us. As a fact, you know the general result. Upon your side of the Canadian border, the French Canadians, by reason of something that seems so far characteristic of your Imperial life, despite their political loyalty and the liberty that they enjoy, have kept true to their type, have retained their social consciousness, have resisted assimilation, to an extent to which, as I think, upon our side of the border, you can find little that is parallel. We have our Germans, or Scandinavians, or Poles, or Russians, of the first generation, who live by themselves, and in their own streets of our greater cities. But their children are, on the whole, pretty rapidly won over to our speech, and to our characteristic American interests. The Irishman retains in the first generation his well-known political traditions, and his perplexing and fascinating national disposition; but his children, or at all events his grandchildren, are, on the whole, far more American than they are Irish in their social traits and in their ambitions. At all events, our Irish are, in national sentiment, very loyal Americans. In the critical matter of religious faiths, very notable tendencies are observable in the life of our country when it is viewed with reference to this matter of assimilation. The Catholic Church has, of course, a very strong sense of the importance of retaining its hold upon the great numbers of its children who are amongst the originally foreign portions of our population. It has been much concerned, as we Americans have been given to understand, with the question how best to keep under its influence the second and later generations of those who, by hereditary tradition, ought to belong to it, while by origin they may have been Poles, Germans, Hungarians, or Irish. So far as we can see, that Church, after many discussions amongst its own leaders, has decided upon the whole, and despite many diplomatic hesitancies of speech, in favour of a distinctly Americanizing policy in the conduct of its internal affairs in our country. While it

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insists, so far as possible, upon parochial schools, and desires the children of its faithful to be educated in them rather than in our public schools, and is, of course, strictly opposed, amongst us as elsewhere, to tolerating variety in matters of faith, it is careful, at present, to further this policy by means that shall be as little as possible of a nature to lead to direct contests between the interests concerned and our American political and social traditions. Its whole attitude with us is one of insistence upon the importance for America of religious liberty in all matters that have to do with politics. And with regard to the great practical question whether it shall attempt to keep its hold upon the children of its peoples of foreign origin by encouraging them to retain their original foreign speech and customs, the Catholic Church seems, upon the whole, to have decided that the parochial schools should not deliberately attempt to foster and perpetuate the foreign tongues, but should rather tend the other way; and that no systematic effort should be made to build up, as permanent institutions, Polish, German, and other national and foreign sections of the Catholic Church in America. In brief, so far as I understand the case, the Catholic Church with us has learned to respect the principle of assimilation, to conform to it, and to try to win success by conciliating the American people, rather than by emphasising in any unnecessary way the foreign source of the social tendencies upon which it might very naturally be thought to depend for much of its strength. Here again, the contrast between the policy of the Catholic Church upon our side of the border, and upon yours, in Canada, has sometimes seemed to me quite notable and symptomatic. You may remember how vigorously, not long since, the Canadian hierarchy intervened in a political contest wherein the policy of the Canadian Premier Laurier in a matter concerning the educational interests of the Catholic Church was at stake. I know nothing of the merits of that controversy. I know only that at a moment when the Catholic Church, under the leadership in the United States of the former Delegate Apostolic Satolli, was very obviously doing whatever could then be done to avoid any political contests, and to make its own interests

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seem to us Americans as little foreign as possible—on your side of the border the bishops were openly using threats of excommunication, addressed to their own French-Canadian children, and with reference to the issues of a current Parliamentary election, and in reference to the way in which the faithful were to vote in that election. It is long since upon our side of the border we have heard of such interferences. They do not belong to our type of social and political life. They seem to be still more or less possible in Canada. The Catholic Church is a great power amongst us with its six or seven millions of communicants, and, of course, our new territorial acquisitions will make it, in future, a still greater power. But I may at once frankly say that I suppose the Catholic Church to be, with us, a very valuable aid to our process of assimilating the foreign elements of our population, since, despite its own originally foreign types of tradition, it keeps great masses of our foreigners under a conservative control while we are engaged in the work of making American citizens out of them. And while it is, of course, alive to all its own interests, with us, at present, it avoids open interference in political matters as far as possible. Certain it is, at all events, that our civilization is not tending to assume the types of any of these foreign and non-English types of which I have spoken. We remain, ourselves, and we bring the foreigners to our own type of customs. In the newer regions, as, for instance, in my own native State, California, the social order and the political life have been determined in their development—not by the very various sorts of foreigners who, from the days of the first gold discovery, have been so frequent in California—but by the contest between the Northern and Southern types of American ideals and institutions. It was New England and the South that fought, not here with arms, but with arts and traditions, to shape the earlier Californian civilisation. The result has been, very naturally, the development of a new type. The Californian is neither Northerner nor Southerner in his general character, but he is distinctly American, and neither the older Mexican traditions nor the foreign immigrations have decided what manner of youth California should bring forth.

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IV So far I have been illustrating the facts with regard to the extent to which the assimilation of an alien population has gone in America. But you will be interested now to hear something about the means by which this assimilation is accomplished. It is easy to distinguish, in the causes which have led to this power of assimilating a large number of new comers to our own language and ways, two classes of causes—the material and the ideal. The material causes have, of course, played an obvious and very large part in the process. The physical continuity of the country, the gradual extension of settlement from place to place, the large developments of modern industry which have led to a constantly increasing connection of the life of one part of the country with the life of another—all these are features which necessarily have had a great influence in helping our people to a unity of consciousness, and in making it plain to the new comers that they must adapt themselves to an already existing situation if they were to find their way under our conditions. On the other hand, one must not neglect the importance of the purely ideal features in our civilization. In my discussion to this Society a year ago, I had occasion to mention the fact that, to my mind, our nation, which had been so much accused of materialism, is really under the influence of very ideal motives. I had hardly then so much occasion as I may now have to point out to what a great extent these ideal motives are of English origin. When I spoke about academic developments, I necessarily pointed out the close relations that we have had with German Universities, and with the learning and science of the world, in so far as they are not only of English, but also of Continental European origin. But our political and social life is founded unquestionably upon motives that may be easily and directly traced to their sources in these islands. The American has been dependent for his social successes upon the retention of a very large body of ideas that the whole history of these United Kingdoms has brought into existence. And ours is a world where, after all, ideas in the long run conquer. To such ideas material conditions are on the

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whole secondary. It is a wonderful thing to begin a national life with the possession, in great measure, of the social, political, and the ideal fruits of an older civilization. If one must mention in particular the masses of older ideas that have been of the most importance to us, one first thinks of the English system of common law. This system with us, as in your Colonies, has extended the range of its application, and has received a new life under the special conditions of our Commonwealths. Then, in the second place, the English language itself, with its greatest literary treasures, has been ours. And with a language and a literature, there goes, of course, a vast treasury of ideas. And, in the third place, we are the inheritors of your ideals about human freedom, about individuality, and about tolerance towards strangers and towards all strange conditions. These are ideals which have characterized the whole life of the Anglo-Saxon people. And now as to the way in which these fundamental ideas of our civilization come to be applied in our life. I fear that it is not easy to imagine in what way and how directly they influence the life of a new community formed under the conditions under which our new communities have constantly been formed. Let me attempt, then, a more concrete suggestion. I, myself, as I have already said, am a Californian. I grew up in a very new country. To many of you it is simply the country of Bret Harte’s stories; but no Californian can recognize in the early mining life as depicted by Bret Harte any more than such a creation of romance as is possible under any conditions. The mining camp of Bret Harte bears much the same relation to the actual early life of California that the ideal shepherd and shepherdess (so well known through a style of poetry that once was common) may bear to the life of the actual country folk who tend their flocks. For just as the idyll is always possible, so any other romantic transformation of facts may be suggested by many different social conditions. But the real life that you find in a new country is not to be judged by any such romantic sketches. Yet what actually happened in early California is a very fair illustration to you of the way in which a new American community is formed.

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The gold excitement of 1849 brought within a short time a vast number of strangers to a new territory to engage in an occupation of which, at the time of the gold discovery in California, very few Americans indeed had ever known anything whatever. Hardly anybody who came to California from the older American States was at all acquainted with gold mining. One may except, perhaps, a very few possible miners from the State of Georgia. Therefore, the new life had to be begun under very strange conditions. Meanwhile, not only Americans, but also a great many foreigners had been equally attracted to the new country. They came from South America, from the Far East, and from Europe. The inhabitants thus brought together seldom intended to remain for any great length of time in California. Most of them felt themselves to be mere wanderers. They had come to acquire a quick and easy fortune; they would soon return. The new land, as most of them at first thought, was to mean little or nothing in their future life when once fortune had been won. Very quickly, of course, a great many of them discovered their mistake. Fortunes are not quickly and easily to be acquired by any considerable number of men in the occupation of placer mining. That occupation, as was soon found, is a very laborious and a very expensive occupation: at least in case one has to undertake it at a great distance from the base of supplies. On the other hand, it was soon observed that the climate of the new country was very attractive, and, what with ill-fortune and hard times in the mines, and with unexpected opportunities to begin agricultural or other occupations in the new land, and with the natural attractions of the region, before long a great many of the new comers found that they must indeed, and not very unwillingly, spend their lives there. Some of them—especially of those who had crossed the Rocky Mountains to the new country—had brought with them their families. Others soon began to send for their families. And, within a few years, a considerable population of a representative American character, coming both from the old North and the old South, as well as from the middle West of our country, were actually undertaking to live permanently in the new State.

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At no time in the early days was there that population which Bret Harte’s stories seem to describe, namely, a population composed wholly of rough frontiersmen, who, even in 1849, had already lived for years as miners, or as people of some similarly irresponsible type. Very few large mining camps were ever long left wholly without the presence of families. Very few remained for any length of time prosperous without passing into the condition of somewhat stable towns. And the great lesson of these early days, as we Californians of a newer generation have since come to read the lesson, is one of the swiftness with which many of the most essential conditions and institutions of civilization may be carried to a great distance, and may be rapidly brought to a new growth in a new State. This is what has since occurred all over our great West. California was only one of the most notable instances. Even in the midst of the most exciting days of 1849, a company of the settlers and miners who were not so sure that their life in the State was to be transient, and who looked forward already to an ideal future from the Commonwealth, found themselves elected by their fellow-citizens to meet in a Constitutional Convention, and to make a Constitution for the new State. With an easy self-sacrifice of their present advantage, these men devoted some months during the busiest part of the golden days to the work of providing the new State with its organized law. They took the task very seriously. They followed the models of our older State Constitutions. They worked with great deliberation and foresight. Then they sent delegates with their new Constitution to the Congress at Washington. The Constitution, to be sure, had first been adopted by a vote of the people of the State. But at Washington they applied for admission to the Union. This Constitutional Convention of 1849 in California was a perfectly spontaneous act of its own inhabitants. It was authorised by no act of Congress. But as soon as the crisis which then existed in the slavery controversy in Congress could be settled with reference to the application of California, the State was admitted to the Union in 1850. Thus quickly the new life was organized, and after the fashions of our older States.

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In San Francisco, which was naturally the base of supplies for the whole State, a large mercantile community quickly grew up. This community was, of course, of paramount importance for the political life of the State. Meanwhile, in the mountains, mining camps turned into mining towns, and later, in the successful cases, into towns of a decidedly permanent type. Agriculture soon began to flourish even in the midst of the mines, although it was impossible at that time to get any land titles in the mountainous mining regions except with a land tenure founded wholly upon actual occupation. On the other hand, nearer the coast of the Pacific, and outside of the mining region, there were land titles to be bought. But these were the subject of many controversies, because of the certain difficulties which long existed regarding the old Mexican land grants upon which such titles were founded. In consequence a large company of lawyers soon found themselves supplied with ample means of earning a livelihood in California. In general, in our newer communities, the legal profession forms one of the most powerful, if one of the most expensive, of the forces of conservative civilization. The political issues of the older portions of the country also came, of course, along with the new inhabitants. In view of all these social forces, it is not strange that, by the time that ten years of early California life have passed, the State had in many ways become a populous and a perfectly definite American community, with very progressive tendencies, but also with many conservative forces. The general traits of its civilization were prevailingly determined, as I have already said, by the relations of the settlers either to the New England, or in general to the Northern, tradition, or else to that of the South. But the oldest Mexican type of social order which we had found when we first came to the new land rapidly became a mere romantic memory, while the great masses of foreign new comers had wholly been subordinated to the American type. And now, if I may speak of some of my own personal memories, in so far as they illustrate what the social conditions of California early became. I myself was born and reared as a child in a mining town which was five years older than myself. I shall always remember the surprise with which I heard my mother remark at a moment in

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my childhood when I first began to be conscious of my world that this town and its life had the characteristics of a new community. I remember thereupon vaguely wondering, as I looked at the things about me, ‘‘Why do they call all this new?’’ To my mind, so far as I could observe, the town seemed quite as if it had always been there. The old people taught me the old ways just as the people of any land teach a child, and the old ways seemed to me very old. Now this child’s feeling, unfounded and foolish in one sense as it was, was still not wholly without a very good warrant. For I was actually surrounded by precisely the conditions and the interests that must tend to bind the minds of your own young people to the distant past. Were not the churches numerous in my native town? Were there not the schools and the families, the clergymen and the religious controversies? Was not one instructed at home in his Old Testament history? Was not the earliest secular literature that I read such as told me about the ways of the days of old, and about the knights and the heroes, and the kings of olden times? As a fact, most of the great men and great events of history about which I heard were those that fascinated your own childhood. To be sure, I also heard a great deal about our War of Independence and about the deeds of Washington. But then these things, too, were not matters that belonged to the mining town in so far as it was new. And if the stirring events of the Civil War, that were just then occurring, also filled a great deal of my childish imagination, these were not mere local matters. In brief, I was in California a child of the civilization of the fathers just as truly, if not as elaborately, as the like thing is true of any of you. Again, all about me there were foreigners—French, Spanish, German, Irish, English in their origin as the case might be. Now there were, indeed, some of these foreigners who were, of course, to me and to all of us quite unintelligible and unassimilable. Such were the Chinese. But in general, even in a community composed, as my own native town was, of the most various nationalities, there was present the same tendency to an assimilation from the very outset. The foreigners determined no important part of our life. We, in turn, were moulding to our own ways their life. Our real interests lay in the

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country as a whole, in the exciting fortunes of the Civil War, in the history of our glorious past as represented by Washington. They, the foreigners, had no such interests and ideals to hold them together. In the end their systems of ideas must yield to ours,—and did so. Thus, as you see, we who were Americans early learned the necessity of tolerating that we might assimilate, while the foreigners, from the first, tended to accept the situation and to become assimilated. You will pardon, I hope, this use of personal reminiscence. I have merely wished to illustrate what I suppose to be typical of American frontier life under all the more wholesome and stable conditions. What I have desired to suggest to you is the swiftness with which, in our newer communities, the order of an actually ancient, because Anglo-Saxon, civilization establishes itself, the strongly conservative motives that mould even our frontier life, the way in which our consciousness of national unity lies deeper than our manifold sectional differences, and the way in which our lands, our customs, our language, our churches, and our schools give our newer communities the power rapidly to control, easily to tolerate, and in the course of a generation or two, largely to assimilate our varied foreign types of population. VI But now, as I close, let me try yet further to characterise the precise reasons why we have thus been so skilful in assimilation. The chief cause of the vast assimilative power of the American civilisation has been, as I hope you may now see, the fact, that the strong national consciousness, the pride in being one great and independent people, has joined itself in every case with local pride, and then with that large heritage of ideas which we have from you. It is the organized union of all these elements that had formed a force such as has proved so far in two respects irresistible. 1. It has enabled us to extend our realm very widely, without having the portions of that realm grow as far apart as the mother-country and her Colonies in your case have, in many instances, grown.

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2. It has enabled us to meet the foreigner without great concern regarding his new type, if only he would respect our essential customs. It has, meanwhile, shown us that in the conflict of ideas not his but ours would be the determining features of the further development of our civilization. What I have merely illustrated by my memories as a Californian experience you will find exemplified in a most diverse fashion in the various parts of our territory. It is not merely that new States have rapidly been created, but that the old culture so rapidly enters these new States, and then always enters them in a consciously national form. Of course, it is very easy to confuse this picture of a uniformly growing national life if you dwell upon the perplexities of political controversy. If, for instance, you lay stress upon the way in which the various alien populations present in such a city as Chicago have affected, and often not for good, its municipal organization, you will indeed meet with many disappointing facts. But with us, as with all civilized peoples, culture lies very much deeper than politics. And if our great municipalities are not the organizations that they should be, they are also places where vast powers for good, as well as for evil, are growing. Moreover, as you know, it has been one misfortune of American life that our political activities have often been too much divorced from the rest of our culture, and from all our non-political, moral, and. religious interests. Whatever you may say of that divorce (and wherever it has taken place I lament it as much as you can), the fact remains that in judging the American life of a great and complicated city like Chicago, or of a relatively cosmopolitan community such as that of some parts of California, you must always remember that, even if the political life is confused, the characteristic culture of the community is frequently very much healthier, very much stronger, and very much more ideal than the superficial look which the insistence of politics would be likely to suggest to you, indicates. And now, as I must insist, the culture of our communities is on the whole distinctly American and, therefore, in the sense in which I have before pointed out, is in its origin strictly British. What we have added in America, and the special ideas that we have won, depend

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upon our own experience of the life of a new world, upon the guidance that the Fathers gave us at the outset of the history of the Republic, and upon the wholesome evolution of our own national consciousness. The greater lesson of the whole process, when viewed in this aspect, is the enormous potency of a historical system of ideas—the vast power of civilization at the present time to transfer its own treasures to new regions, and, above all, the power that man has to bring over to his own type apparently alien men, if only they are not too far from him in race, and if only his work in their presence is inspired at once with that general toleration so common in our own civil life, and with that determination so characteristic of our people—a determination that, despite all, our own civilization shall continue in its own way, and shall be paramount. As you see from the illustration that I just gave, the most potent institutions of our life in extending our civilization have been the churches, the law courts, and the schools. Unquestionably, in recent times, the newspaper, despite some developments that all Americans regret, has also been one of our great assimilating instruments. It is probable that even the most objectionable journals of some of our larger cities actually accomplish in this direction a great deal of good by means of their skill in appealing to great masses of men. They are indeed not of much service in wisely moulding public sentiment about political questions. Very often, as we have found, they have unexpectedly little power in purely political issues. But they are useful in giving to a wide circle of unlearned and even foreign people a knowledge of our common stock of ideas. For, side by side with much that is useless or pernicious, these, our greater popular newspapers, even of the worst sort, contain a great deal in the way of often excellent contributions bearing on questions of current science, or on moral issues. They quote from every source, give space to anybody’s teachings if only the teacher, good or bad, has acquired a name; and, in brief, they print a great deal that is educating, or that at any rate proves educating to minds to whom such journals appeal. So that even they, despite the considerable evils that they represent, have also

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decidedly a soul of good. Meanwhile, on the whole, our newspaper press is very decidedly above the level of the worst journals, and has served a great end in making our characteristic stock of ideas known to ourselves. To be sure, the foreigners, as, for instance, the Germans, the French, have their own newspapers in their own tongues. But then our own newspapers have greater financial backing and in the end prove, at any rate to the children of the foreigners, the more interesting reading, and so come to take the place of their foreign rivals. I have given thus some hint of the way in which with us the ideal motives that have led to our power of assimilation have been developed. I have no time to speak at length of the possibly more obvious material causes that have contributed to our assimilative tendencies. The vast development of the railway systems of the country is a development due not merely to enterprising builders of railways, but still more to great skill in consolidating and in working the railway systems. This development, I say, has served greatly to keep together widely-sundered sections of the country. New England, for instance, is at present dependent for nearly the whole of its food supply upon regions lying very far to the west. In its turn the Far West has, of course, been in a great number of cases a borrower of capital from New England and from other eastern communities. The interdependence of all parts of the country has thus become extremely close. It has been increased of late by those great combinations of capital and industry of which you hear so much, and against which so many things have been said. I have no independent judgment about the issues here in question, but I suppose that these great modern combinations represent almost, if not quite, irresistible social tendencies, with which in future we shall always have to deal, until some great and world-wide revolution ushers in a wholly new type of civilization. However that may be, this vast unification of industries leads to both direct and indirect results which certainly tend to the absorption of the foreign peoples, and to making them part of our system, just as this same unification also does tend to bring into closer unity different sections of the country.

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But now, as my last word, I must indeed speak once more of the ideal factors in this great assimilative process from still another point of view. I have spoken of the schools as amongst the institutions that have helped us toward the power to assimilate our foreign population. Last year I discussed in your presence our academic movement. That movement, as you know, seems to me one of the very greatest expressions in the last twenty or thirty years of our national spirit. What we have instinctively felt is that without organized learning our national ideal could not prosper. Organized learning means organized and well-knit social consciousness. The system of ideas of which I have spoken, ideas whose origin is so truly English and whose special developments on our soil are so truly due to our peculiar national genius—this system of ideas, I say, can only be preserved, understood, improved, and in the best way applied and kept assimilative, in case it becomes understood through learning, and interpreted by wise teachers, and kept in close touch with the consciousness of humanity through the prospering of all forms of science and of the liberal arts amongst us. This we have felt. Hence our enthusiasm for educational reform, and advancement. The greatest assimilative powers in our life are such as can win expression, and that do win expression, through our educational system. In that system as it now is our academic movement is the principal influence. That was what last year I tried to show you. I can here only recall to your minds what I there set forth at length. If I may be allowed to speak plainly what this thought brings to my mind as I consider your own situation, I must venture to insist that here we Americans have already a lesson to teach to those who are to guide in future not so much the political as the spiritual fortunes of your Empire. An empire cannot be closely knit by visible ties, except in so far as it is bound by the invisible ties of the spirit. That you all well recognize. But has the general public of Great Britain yet drawn the inevitable inference, the inference which we Americans have already drawn, regarding the truth of these two resulting propositions? (1) In the process of assimilation by which a vast empire of widely diverse regions, peoples, and interests, can alone win a stable

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and organic unity, since the principal permanent factors that can tend to such assimilation are ideas, these factors must all depend for their growth and their strength upon the wisdom, the unity, and the organization of an educational system. For ideas exist and spread through teaching. (2) Since local laws and customs must indeed largely control the organization of the lower schools of any colony or community, the true Imperial unity of an educational system cannot be artificially established by law, but must largely be dependent upon influences such as can only proceed from the central and powerful Universities of the Empire. Or, more briefly put: Imperial unity demands, in the long run, unity of educational system. But unity of an educational system in a great and widely-sundered empire cannot be won through mere legislative enactment. It must be due to agencies that come from above, from the head and crown of the educational system. There must be Universities, and they must not only exist. They must be strong enough to do honour to their own immediate regions, and also to reach and to inspire by their example the more distant regions, to send far abroad their graduates to be the bearers of great national ideals to all parts of the Empire. Such Universities you indeed do not need to create, as we have had to do, in the wilderness. You have them already, if your public would but recognize their primal importance, in the Universities of the United Kingdom. The whole world knows their names; but, after all, do your own people sufficiently magnify their office, appreciate their needs, recognise that they are destined to be the light, not of provinces, nor yet of kingdoms, but of your whole Empire, if you are permanently to retain your Empire, and are to give it that spiritual unity without which neither navies nor generals nor statecraft can permanently secure its political unity. Do your public yet sufficiently observe that political unity depends upon assimilation more than upon physical power, and that the assimilation is a matter, above all, of the power of ideas, while ideas are propagated through educational systems, and while the educational systems, where they succeed, are the creations of a spirit that only Universities can either initiate, or train, or guide, or control, or spread from land to land? We Americans have learned to

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reverence the British Universities for their historical dignity, to learn through their present scholarship, to feel their influence, and often to welcome to our shores, with all the delight of learners, their scholars. Yet some of us will wonder whether their own nation, despite all that she has done for them, and they for her, yet sufficiently recognises, or often enough remembers in the daily life of legislation and of public opinion that in them, above all, lies the chief hope that the Empire of the future will attain the spiritual unity which only ideas can give it. Only through the influence of strong, highly prized, and largely endowed Universities will the Empire come to be closely knit by bands that no varieties of political interest, of Colonial isolation, or of population, can rend. Where the ideas are, there, in the long run, is the power also. That is what we Americans have come to feel. And that is why our Universities, new as many of them are, and humble as their history must often appear, are at present so warmly cherished, not only by their students and their own States, but by the most practically minded of our general public. Is this sufficiently true with you? I hope that ere long it may come to be true. Well, I may seem to have wandered from my topic. But you must remember that, to the student of philosophy, all topics are more or less connected. A recent Continental historical novelist says, at the close of one of his romances of a heroic past, that he has set down these things for the strengthening of hearts. Your hearts, in this land, I am sure, need no strengthening through any poor words of mine. But in speaking of a distant, yet kindred land, I have hope what I might say might appeal, in some measure, to your own deeper interest, not only in our land, but in your own Imperial future.

provincialism Based upon a Study of Early Conditions in California




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am a native of California, and the first ten years of my life were passed in a mining town in the Sierra Nevada—a town which was six years older than myself, having been founded in 1849. My earliest recollections, therefore, are of a community that had no history behind it, except the history of the individual fortunes of its members and of their families. And so if any child in an American community could be brought up without being influenced by any definite provincial traditions, I, as a child, was at first in that position. As a fact, the young Californian of my generation was naturally trained to a sort of individualism that might be good or bad in its results, but that at any rate involved little tendency to be the slave of merely local prejudices of any sort. It was indeed not true in that community that every man This essay appeared in Putnam’s Magazine 7 (1909): 232–40.

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did merely that which was right in his own eyes. There was a prevailingly wholesome public opinion. There was generally good order in the community. And there was a lively play of social forces. But it was true that this play of social forces was uninfluenced by any historic local memories. It was true that nobody’s costumes or speech or religion or ideals could as yet stand for anything like a finished provincial consciousness of just that community. Provincialism was in the making. It was not yet made. And so, in childhood, I unconsciously learned what it was not to be provincial. For as yet I had no province. I had my home. But home meant my father and mother and sisters. So far as what lay outside of the household was concerned, we had only a dwelling-place,—a dwelling-place where nature had made the beautiful abound, and where man was busy, in the main, in the reckless defacing of nature,—a dwelling-place where vast natural wealth was stored up, and where man was devoted to the recklessly wasteful plundering of that wealth. In my environment the men were indeed numerous, interesting, various in type, intelligent, eager, adventurous, and, like all men, intensely social. But there was as yet little social memory in the community. The community, as an organized body, was as unable to form an idea of a past that it could call its own, as I, the unconscious child, was unable to know whence I had come when I entered the world. Since that time I have had numerous reasons to think over what that whole social situation really meant. In later years I was once moved to attempt a sketch of early California history. When I wrote the volume which contained this sketch, I, of course, could not trust any of my early childhood impressions. I spent a good while working over the records of early California, studying old newspaper files, and manuscript statements of pioneers, and contemporary magazine literature,—trying as I could to catch the very elusive social spirit of the years which preceded my own memories. I found the study very instructive regarding both the good and the evil consequences of that lack of provincialism which was inevitable in the first mining period of California.

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And what was the social lesson thus to be learned? In what condition is a large and fairly prosperous community of civilized men when it possesses a local habitation, but has as yet no provincial consciousness?

Bret Harte’s Misleading Tales The difficulty of answering these questions may be indicated by reminding you of the so famous pictures that Bret Harte drew, in his stories of the early California days. As a Californian, I can say that not one childhood memory of mine suggests any social incident or situation that in the faintest degree gives meaning or confirmation to Bret Harte’s stories. It is true that, when I came to consciousness, in the early sixties of the last century, the earlier California of Bret Harte’s stories had, of course, passed away. But it is also true that Bret Harte himself never saw the mines in ’49 and ’50, and that, years later, he collected the chance materials of his stories from hearsay. It is also true that the social order which Bret Harte depicts is an order that never was on sea or land, and that his tales are based upon a deliberately false romantic method. What concerns me here, however, is that Bret Harte’s stories err very notably just in this, that they depict the early California mining camp as if it were more or less of an established institution and portray the miners as if they already possessed a sort of provincial consciousness. For Bret Harte the early miner is already a definable social type,—with a dialect, with a set of characteristic customs and manners, with a local consciousness almost such as a peasantry or a Highland clan might possess. In fact, however, no Americans who went to California in 1849 knew beforehand anything about mining. Everybody was there, so to speak, by accident. Nobody at first intended to make his permanent home anywhere in the mines. There were dialects of course,—Yankee, southern, western,—but there was no ruling dialect. There were customs, good and bad; but they were such as individuals brought with them,—such as our villages and our frontiers had in various ways

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developed all over our country. And—herein lay the essential matter—nobody regarded his customs or his dialect or his ideals as especially fitting to this new community. One’s memories, and usually one’s hopes, lay elsewhere. One owed at first no loyalty to the place, or to its social order. One’s heart and one’s social ideals, if one had such, generally clung to the old home. One meant, by lucky mining, to collect quickly the means to pay off the mortgage on the New England farm, or to make a fortune wherewith to grow old in one’s native place. Meanwhile one felt quite free of foot. Home was not here. If hard times came, one moved on to another mining camp. How hard it is to depict the social life of just such a community as this. Bret Harte cannot accomplish the feat. One needs a social background for the characters of a story. Bret Harte creates this social background by conceiving his mining community in distinctly provincial terms. An unprovincial community seems something indescribable, senseless. By the time when I myself began to look about me, this earliest stage of the mining life had indeed quite passed away. The community was not yet possessed of the consciousness of a province. But it was indeed rapidly becoming provincial. What I was privileged to see in my childhood was, as I now know, the second stage of frontier social life,—the struggle for and towards a provincial consciousness. This second stage,—this, and the motives which made it in California so critical and so momentous a stage for social health, have taught to me personally something of the true value of provincialism.

II The Second Stage of Frontier Life Men who have no province, wanderers without a community, sojourners with a dwelling-place, but with no home, citizens of the world, who have no local attachments,—in these days, also, we all know of the existence of far too many such beings. Our modern great cities swarm with them. Ships that it is hard to number carry them to

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and fro across the seas. And they are not all of them poor men. The rich also furnish their contribution to the hordes of the men without a province, as our American colonies in Europe remind us. But in California, so long as it was still a frontier region, the problem presented—the problem that I unconsciously saw the people engaged in working out in my native community—was the vital problem of a new state,—it was the vital problem of the community’s finding itself, the problem of creating a province, of converting a frontier into a rational social order. That problem, in such a community, could not be postponed or neglected, as our great cities now neglect it. The conditions of the frontier made the problem pressing, unavoidable. And so I, who as yet could have no province, saw as a child the people about me busy in making one. And now, as I am glad to know, California is indeed provincial in a very marked sense. Why was this problem vital for California? I have tried in my sketch of the early local history to illustrate the obvious answer. Until a local social consciousness, a genuine community spirit could appear, everybody, however good a citizen he might at first be, tended to degenerate. Loyalty, having no root, withered; and individualism, finely as the conditions of early California favored its more healthy growths, found no really absorbing social business in life. One often associates the early mining life in California with disorder and with social confusion, as if these were the essentially primary conditions. On the contrary, however, as Mr. Charles Shinn and others have shown, and as I also have verified, the earliest mining camps were surprisingly quiet and orderly. 1849 was on the whole, so far as external order went, a quiet year in the mines. 1850 saw some serious social disturbances, but no general disorder. It was not until 1851 that lynching became common in the mines. Then conditions improved for a while, and then renewed disorders led to the reform movement of 1856, which especially affected San Francisco. In sum, the mining population was, at the start, a prevailingly peaceful one, which settled its disputes at regular miners’ meetings, by the method of the town meeting. Its disorderly stages were acquired social diseases, due to the lack of any settled community consciousness, due to the absence of

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loyalty on the part of the individual in his relation to his town and to his State. Because the provincial consciousness was lacking, the community tended to a rapid degeneration into a disorderly state. But, as I have said, the mining town that I as a child remember had already become once more, after all its earlier crises, a prevailingly orderly community. Any very considerable strike, nowadays, if it comes to violence at all, leads to much worse social disorders, in almost any of our larger cities, than were the disorders of which I ever heard in my childhood. Once in a while a stage robbery on the lonely mountain roads, or a personal affray in some near-by town, or a report of an armed fight over a disputed mining claim,—such are the only disorders that I can recall. Otherwise, my childhood memories of social events have to do with churches and schools, with what I heard of the lively sectarian religious controversies which still play so notable a part in our newer American communities,—with these, and with the patriotic enthusiasms of the Civil War time. And so, if I had not yet a province, I saw one in the making. For how, after all, did the disorderly social conditions, so rare in 1849, so frequent by 1851, come later to pass away in California? How did the community recover from its early acquired diseases? It was always a constitutionally wholesome community. It began everywhere in a prevailingly orderly way. Its earliest camps were peaceful. But because it was a community of wanderers, who had no common provincial traditions and so nothing to bind them to their locality, and who therefore cared for no present institutional life, it had no safeguards against disorder. When the gamblers, and the other birds of prey, appeared, there was therefore no safeguard against their mischief other than chance outbursts of general indignation. And so disorders arose. When this first stage passed away, and mining became a more settled occupation, and farming began, and hard times, often repeated, had taught many people that they must seek a home, if anywhere, then just where they were,—well hereupon it occurred to people that they might wisely make the best of life by having a province, and loving it. In my childhood, this was what the better people were doing. They were building homes, and thinking of orchards and of

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gardens and of vineyards, and not merely of gold nor yet of further wandering. And so they were beginning to regret their own former devastation of the landscape, and occasionally they would try to cover the wounds by gardens and by orchards. Furthermore they were beginning to boast about their own town, and to say that it should be better than other towns. They were making much of their older inhabitants. The man who had been in the place ten years, and who, having wronged nobody, had come to possess a decent property, was respected accordingly. He and his formed a certain aristocracy. Social distinctions began to become marked; and they had the advantage of resting upon a certain merit, just because there was nothing else to rest upon. Moreover, one already spoke of California with a deeper pride and patriotism. One gloried in its climate. One began to try to define its peculiar customs. One such California custom became indeed marked during the Civil War. It was one of our first notable provincialisms. It was the custom of clinging stubbornly to a gold currency in all our business transactions at a time when the East fell prey to a paper currency. Public opinion would not permit a man to pay his debts in greenbacks. If he tried to do so, his creditor advertised the fact in the newspapers. San Francisco’s Model Government As a child I felt a certain contempt for Eastern folk, who were understood to suppose that a ‘‘greenback’’ dollar was money. We in California knew it to be a bit of paper that we bought for from sixty to eighty cents and used at the post office when we wanted stamps. Such peculiarities already began to give us a sort of provincial consciousness. This rapidly grew and assumed more important forms. At San Francisco, for many years after the Vigilance Committee of 1856, they boasted, not without warrant, that they possessed, and for nearly a generation retained, the purest and soundest municipal government then known in any city of the size in the whole country. It was a business man’s government,—the fruit of the hard lessons of the early days,—a conservative and for a long time an effective administration.

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As the pioneers grew old, this particular bit of provincialism, as I regret to say, decayed. The merchants of San Francisco, moreover, had in the early days developed, of course, their own business methods and ere long clung to them rigidly. They were proud of their custom of requiring prompt settlement of commercial accounts, not monthly, but on ‘‘steamer day,’’ that is, on the day before the steamer left for Panama and the East, decidedly oftener than once a month. And many other local customs soon sprang up. And so, oddly enough, I who had begun growing up without a province, later found myself, at twenty years of age, restless in what then seemed to me, in my ignorance, all too conservative and narrow-minded a province, already too set, as I thought, in the tradition of the pioneers, too unwilling to listen to what the world beyond the mountains was saying, too sure of itself, too disposed to thank God that it had no blizzards in winter, and needed no new ideas but its own at any season of its year’s gracious climate. I have since learned that this swiftly acquired provincial consciousness, despite its incidental narrowness, was indeed the salvation of California, and that the more recent disorders and corruptions of which you have heard the echoes from that region, have been due to the intrusion of still other and as yet unassimilated social conditions, with which the old provincialism was not yet sufficiently deep-set to cope. Now I know that California needs to be and to become, not less, but more, provincial,to have more customs of its own, even as it constantly acquires, as time flies, more ancestors to remember, more legends of the pioneer days to glory in, and more results of civic devotion to cherish and to revere. By provincialism California must conquer its new enemies, as it learned to conquer its old. Thus then, watching a provincial consciousness grow, reading something of its early annals, remembering how the society of wanderers in the earliest golden days rapidly degenerated so long as it had not yet learned loyalty to its province, observing how it saved itself by forming its own local customs and attachments,—yes, noting also that even a Bret Harte could not depict his early California without

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displaying his individual characters over against the background of a mythical provincial society which he romantically feigned,—learning from all these considerations,—I have come to know how vital for the very conception and existence of any rational social order a provincial consciousness is.

III The Real Winning of the West Now the story of California is, mutatis mutandis, the story of our recent frontier life everywhere. The ‘‘winning of the West’’ has been a spiritual much more than a merely physical conquest. And the spiritual history of the West has been the history of the formation of local institutions,—the tale of the rise of local traditions and of local loyalty. Chance adventurers have at first crowded here or there: ‘‘boomers,’’ emigrants, ranchmen, miners. At first they have come together without any consciousness of community loyalty. But in our country they have usually brought with them good political instincts and a wholesome social good-humor, together with a fondness for orderly conditions. Most of our new communities have therefore begun well. But most of them, under stress, have in their early years degenerated rapidly; so that frontier life has meant in many places a period, brief or longer, of relative social disorder. This disorder has been, as in California, an acquired disease. Many individuals, of course, never recover from this disease. Those who, in such communities, have acquired the wandering habit have passed on to constantly new enterprises; and of such the really evil elements of our frontier population have consisted. Some years ago one such chronic wanderer was reported in a newspaper as having summed up his experience as boomer, squatter, land-claimant and speculative ‘‘home-seeker’’ in these moving words: ‘‘Yes, I have migrated a good many times. Home,—yes, a home is a good thing. In my time I have had some twenty homes. But for me home means a hole in the ground and a Winchester rifle.’’ Such are those amongst our frontiersmen who

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have never come to know what provincialism means. But such are not the men to whom the real winning of the West has been due. Today, as a fact, we no longer have any frontier in the old sense. In general, and apart from a few scattered communities, the province has taken the place of the frontier settlement. Local traditions, the reverent memory of the pioneers, the formation of local customs, the development of community loyalty,—these have displaced the merely wandering mood, and the merely detached spirit of private individual enterprise. The man whose hole in the ground was defended by his Winchester rifle has generally, by this time, found his way to his long home. And whatever our social evils, however difficult our present or future problems, we have learned one lesson—namely, that in the formation of a loyal local consciousness, in a wise provincialism, lies the way towards social salvation. During an academic visit in the Middle West, a few years since, I read an earlier paper on Provincialism. There, as I may now add,— there where I had come to praise provincialism, I found it indeed flourishing, and in most instructive fashion, in the particular community which I was privileged to visit. The conditions of that community had been very different from those of California; but there had been the same need of teaching wanderers to make homes and to stay at home and to love home life. And the provincial spirit had been developed as a means of organizing all the good things of life. At a college reunion of alumni which I attended, I listened to some hours of very pleasing local reminiscences, such as belong to such occasions in the life of a smaller college. The already legendary memories of the early pioneers, the honor done to departed worthies, the always harmless, and occasionally very well founded and justified boasting about the unique importance of local institutions, the idealizing of life which went along with the whole celebration, the sedateness and conservatism of this representative country college community,— well all these were beautiful features of this celebration. Here was a true provincial life. And it was not a narrow life. The college in question stands high in its class, progresses wholesomely, and looks far afield for new ideas and new ideals. Yet it is also set in some of its

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ways. It is provincial without being cut off from the larger world. It gives as well as takes. And the whole community of which I speak is one that has its very real part in the nation’s affairs. Thus, then, I went to do my little bit of prophesying. But I found no Nineveh against which to prophesy. Wholesome provincialism was growing all about me, as the crops were growing under the sun and the rains of June.

IV The Importance of Being Provincial As you see, I am indeed preaching no new doctrine in emphasizing the importance of the provincial spirit for our whole national life. But I may next try to explain a little more clearly just what I mean by the provincialism I have been illustrating, and even in doing this I may be able to suggest how my views about provincialism may have some application to your own problems here in Massachusetts. By provincialism, as you remember, I mean, in general, the devotion of each community to the cherishing of its own peculiar social life, and of its own unique ideals. Provincialism, as you thus see, stands in a certain contrast to national patriotism. Sometimes, of course, the two tendencies in the past have stood in direct conflict with each other. When provincialism opposes, or perhaps assails, national ideals, we call it sectionalism. Of the sectionalism that leads towards disunion, you and I have all of us a very well founded horror. But provincialism does not necessarily take the form of sectionalism. Nor, when sectionalism is overcome in a given community, does provincialism, in its other and better aspects, tend to decline. On the contrary, in European countries, you can see many instances where provincialism has long survived the very high development of a love of the national unity of great peoples, and has even prospered by reason of the very fact that the consciousness of membership in a great nation is closely bound up, in each community, with a genuine local patriotism. Scotland and Germany are both of them countries where

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provincialism flourishes. Both of them are regions where, in the past, sectionalism was long predominant, and where the results of sectionalism were disastrous. In both of them, moreover, the consciousness of membership in a great nation has triumphed over the older sectionalism. And in both of them the wiser provincialism, surviving, is still a source of strength, both to the single community and to the nation itself. What more loyal and effective servants has the British Empire than are furnished to her by the better sorts of Scotchmen? And who is to the very depths of his strongly individual soul more provincial, who is more a lover of the social ideals of his own home, than is the Scot? As for Germany,—wherein lies the strongest safeguard of her national future? In her navy? In her colonial ambitions? In her foreign policy? No, I should say, in her fondness for retaining and cultivating the better traditions and the manifold ideals of her provinces. If the Imperial power and the military discipline of her great army unify her national consciousness, she needs all the more the retention and the training of the local consciousness of her various communities. Nobody who knows anything of German life and literature can doubt that if Luther’s Bible and the unity of language and of literature have been essential to the formation of the German nation, the health of that nation also depends upon the strength and the warmth of the local affections and ideals of her numerous and various communities. As such instances remind us, the difference between sectionalism and the higher forms of provincialism is analogous to the difference which, in individuals, makes selfishness so markedly contrasted with self-respect. The provincialism for which I am pleading is the selfrespect of the community, not its sectional selfishness. And of the idealized forms of self-respect no community can possess too much, just as no individual can set his personal ideals too high. The provincial self-respect depends first, in any one instance, upon observing that each community must indeed live its own life, and that therefore a community cannot wisely live if it merely takes over the customs of other people, unchanged and hence unassimilated. The provincial self-respect depends secondly upon insisting that the

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stranger, the new-comer, the alien, must win his social place, if at all then, through his willingness to conform in due measure to the characteristic social standards which the community sets. Every community needs new blood, new life, progress. But the new blood must become its own blood. The new life must circulate in the veins of the community. That is, provincial self-respect forbids the community to be at the mercy of the social standards of transient visitors, or of intruders. The community must emphasize its own ideals. Until a new community thus wins some sort of spiritual authority over its newcomers and its transient folk, it has not yet become provincial, but remains, like an early California mining camp, a community where individuals indeed have souls, and may have noble souls, but where the social order has no soul. For the wiser provincialism is the soul of the community, seeking expression in word, in custom, and good works. By this soul the stranger’s soul must be judged before he can find his due place. But an older community that, once having been thus provincial, has dwindled in soul until it has lost control over its incoming or over its transient population of strangers, so that its summer visitors or its foreign immigrants can henceforth make of it what they will,—well such a community is in great danger of moral death. Its old home then becomes a sort of abandoned farm in the spiritual world. And in the spiritual world, where there is always so much good soil to till, abandoned farms are always out of place. And so these three factors in every healthy sort of provincial selfrespect I emphasize: First, the determination of the community to live its own life, not in isolation, not in sectional selfishness, but through preserving the integrity of its individual ideals and customs. Second, the authority, the gentle but firm social authority which the community exercises towards new-comers and sojourners,—not repelling them, not despising them, but insisting that the soul of the community has its dignity to assert over the souls of all those wayward individuals who have not yet learned to appreciate its meaning. And third, the local patriotism which loves to make this authority beautiful and winning, by idealizing the province, by adorning it, by glorifying it through legend and song and good works, and kindly provision

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for the needs of its inhabitants. Wherever these three factors, provincial independence of spirit, provincial authority, and provincial love for making this authority beautiful and winning co-operate, there you have the genuine self-respect of the province awakened. There you have what ought to survive when sectionalism passes away. There you find what the whole nation needs to get through and from the province. Provincialism a National Asset And herewith I come directly to the most important aspect of provincialism,—an aspect which I have indicated all along, but which I must now, if only by means of a word or two, especially emphasize. Provincialism, of the sort that I have just described, is good for the province. But it is still more good for the nation as a whole. In a former essay upon this subject,—an essay that I long since put into print,—I stated at length the special reasons why I hold this view. The modern nation tends from its very vastness to become self-estranged, incomprehensible to its citizens, the prey of vast and fatally irresistible social forces. Economic tendencies more and more lead to a crushing of individual initiative, to a levelling of social interests and to a corresponding decrease of the spirit of true loyalty. When certain forms of popular excitement appear, as for example when the newspapers begin to preach some unholy war or other, the nation is too much in danger of falling prey to the mob-spirit. Under these conditions our national safety lies in cultivating that spirit of calm and clear considerateness which only a highly developed provincial self-respect can keep permanently alive. Repeatedly of late years we have seen how much the national safety depends upon the silent voters,—the voters whom the newspapers that most cater to the mob, and that circulate most widely, cannot influence,—the voters who care little how long the shouting lasted at this or at that national convention, and who are at once conservative and docile, critical and practical, thoughtful and decisive. We still have this vast silent vote, this body of considerate and prudent electors to depend upon. Nobody knows upon which

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side these electors will vote when next we come to decide great national issues; but we have good reason still to hope that no agitators will be powerful enough wholly to mislead them, that no political bosses are crafty enough permanently to enslave their judgment, that no popular magazines will have so large a circulation as to control them, that no newspapers can be noisy enough to deafen their ears to the voice of wisdom. Now, how shall we keep this body of silent and thoughtful voters? I answer, through the cultivation of a wholesome provincial spirit. In provincial life the small social group of those who take counsel together, the town meeting, the local association, the club, can be kept alive, and the use of the clear reason in local affairs can be wisely cultivated, while the loyal practical instincts of the well-knit community can prevent that fantastic misuse of the reason which gives birth to schemes of wild reform, and which deceives the multitude by the mere show of argument. The province is the place for cultivating coolness of judgment side by side with intense and homely devotion.

an american thinker on the war Professor Royce




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n my last letter I believe that I laid some stress to you upon the necessity, both patriotic and academic, of my trying to preserve a formally strict neutrality of expression, not merely because the community of mankind as a total community is my highest interest, as it is yours, but because our President’s advice to the nation, and our manifold relations to foreigners, both in academic life and in the world at large, limit our right, or have limited our right, to express ourselves regarding matters of the war and of current controversy. It is now a relief to be able to say with heartiness, that one result at least The title is the Editor’s. The text consists of the relevant extracts from a letter written by Professor Royce to the Editor, permission for the publication of which is given on p. 268. With the exception of two passages (in the second paragraph on p. 266 and the end of the last paragraph), the extracts were published in the London Morning Post of July 5, 1915. It will be noted that whereas Dr. Fo¨rster’s pamphlet, discussed by Mr. Lowes Dickinson in the preceding article, was written before the sinking of the Lusitania, Professor Royce writes after the event.—editor [Note in the original].

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of the Lusitania atrocity has been and will be to make it both necessary and advisable to speak out plainly many things which an American professor in my position has long felt a desire to say upon occasions when he still supposed it to be his duty not to say them. Thus, for instance, immediately after the Lusitania incident, and before Wilson’s first letter, addressed to Berlin, I quite deliberately told my own principal class in metaphysics that, and why, I should no longer endeavour to assume a neutral attitude about the moral questions which the Lusitania incident brought to the minds of all of us. That friends of mine, and that former pupils of mine, near to me as the students whom I was addressing are near to me, were on the Lusitania—this, as I said to my class, made it right for me to say, ‘‘Among these dead of the Lusitania are my own dead.’’ And so, I went on to say, ‘‘I cannot longer leave you to suppose it possible that I have any agreement with the views which a German colleague of mine, a teacher at Harvard, recently maintained, when he predicted what he called ‘the spiritual triumph of Germany.’ It makes very little difference to anybody else what I happen to think, but to you, as my pupils, it is my duty to say that henceforth, whatever the fortunes of war may be, ‘the spiritual triumph of Germany’ is quite impossible, so far as this conflict is concerned. I freely admit that Germany may triumph in the visible conflict, although my judgment about such matters is quite worthless. But to my German friends and colleagues, if they chance to want to know what I think, I can and do henceforth only say this: ‘You may triumph in the visible world, but at the banquet where you celebrate your triumph there will be present the ghosts of my dead slain on the Lusitania.’ ’’ I insisted to my class that just now the especially significant side of this matter is contained simply in the deliberately chosen facts which the enemy of mankind has chosen to bring into being in these newest expressions of the infamies of Prussian warfare. I should be a poor professor of philosophy, and in particular of moral philosophy, if I left my class in the least doubt as to how to view such things. And that, then, was my immediate reaction on the Lusitania situation.

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Of course, one still has to live with his German colleagues in the midst of this situation. I am glad to know at least one such German colleague—and, I believe, a thoroughly good patriot—who views the Lusitania atrocity precisely as any honest and humane man must view it, unless wholly blinded by the present personal and social atmosphere of ferocity and confusion in which so many Germans live. I do not endeavour to have unnecessary controversy with these colleagues, or with anybody else, and have spoken of the matter both to colleagues and to students precisely as much and as little as the situation seemed to me to permit and require. But it might interest you to know that, in my opinion, the Lusitania incident has affected and will affect our national sentiment—and what has been our desire for a genuine neutrality—in a very profound and practical way. Of the political consequences of the incident up to this date, you will have, I hope, a sufficiently definite ground for judgment. Fortune is fickle; and war is a sadly chaotic series of changes. But this I warmly hope: henceforth may the genuine consciousness of brotherhood between your people and mine become more and more clearly warm, and conscious, and practically effective upon the course of events. The Lusitania affair makes us here, all of us, clearer. A deeply unified and national indignation, coupled with a strong sense of our duty towards all humanity, has already resulted from this new experiment upon human nature, which has been ‘‘made in Germany,’’ and then applied to the task of testing what American sentiment really is. I do not know how often the changing fortunes of war, or the difficulties about neutral commerce, will bring to light causes of friction or of tension between our two peoples. But I cordially hope that we shall find ourselves, henceforth, nearer and nearer together in conscious sentiment and in the sort of sympathy which can find effective expression. It is a great thing to feel that Wilson, in his last two notes to Germany, has been speaking the word both for his nation and for all humanity. I am sure that he has spoken the word for a new sort of unification of our own national consciousness. Unless Germany substantially meets these demands, I am sure that she will find all our foreign populations more united than ever through their common

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resentment in the presence of international outrages, and through their common consciousness that our unity and active co-operation must have an important bearing upon the future of all that makes human life precious to any of us. In so far as our German-American fellow-citizens fail to appreciate the call of humanity in respect of such matters as this, they have further lessons to learn which America will teach them,—peaceably if we can, but authoritatively if we must, whenever an effort is made to carry dissensions into our national life for the sake of any German purpose. As a fact, I believe that unless Germany meets the essential demands of President Wilson, our German-American population will be wholly united with us, as never before, in the interests of humanity and of freedom. In brief, the Lusitania affair, and its consequences, give one further tiny example of that utter ignorance of human nature and of its workings which the German propaganda, the German diplomacy, and the German policy have shown from the outset of the war. Submarines these people may understand, certainly not souls. I do not love the words of hate, even now, or even when uttered over the bodies of those who were slain on the Lusitania. It is not hate, but longing and sorrow for stricken humanity, which is with me, as I am sure it is with you, the ruling sentiment. I have no fondness for useless publicity. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the words which I have just written down may not only have a little friendly interest to you as expressing a certain change in my own attitude towards those problems about neutrality which I mentioned to you before, but may conceivably suggest to you some way in which a more public expression of mine might be of real service to some cause which you, or which other of my English friends, hold dear. The controversial literature of the war is, as you know, and as you yourself have said, a cup which seems to be overfull. Yet I now no longer feel that any duty or desire makes me hesitant concerning the expression of whatever plain speech and worthily strong sentiment might be able to contribute to a good cause. You will see from the way in which I spoke to my class, after long dutifully preserving a deliberate reticence in the classroom regarding the war,—you will see that my mouth is

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now open enough, if only any words that could be of use for the cause of true peace, or against the deeds and the motives of the declared enemies of mankind, could be uttered by me. It is a relief to have in such matters not only a free soul, but a perfectly free right of speech, so long as one’s speech promises to contribute anything, however little, to the cause of mankind which such bitter and cruel enemies are now assailing in the sight of us all. So do with this letter, or with any part of it, precisely as you think best,—not indeed making it seem as if I were at all fond of notoriety, but merely using the right which I give you as my friend to let anybody know where I stand. I am no longer neutral, even in form. The German Prince is now the declared and proclaimed enemy of mankind, declared to be such not by any ‘‘lies’’ of his enemies, or by any ‘‘envious’’ comments of other people, but by his own quite deliberate choice to carry on war by the merciless destruction of innocent, non-combatant passengers. The single deed is indeed only a comparatively petty event when compared with the stupendous crimes which fill this war. But the sinking of the Lusitania has the advantage of being a deed which not only cannot be denied, but which has been proudly proclaimed as expressing the appeal that Germany now makes to all humanity. About that appeal I am not neutral. I know that that appeal expresses utter contempt for everything which makes the common life of humanity tolerable or possible. I know that if the principle of that appeal is accepted, whatever makes home or country or family or friends, or any form of loyalty, worthily dear, is made an object of a perfectly deliberate and merciless assault. About such policies and their principles, about such appeals, and about the Prince who makes them, and about his underlings who serve him, I have no longer any neutrality to keep. And without the faintest authority in any political matter, without the faintest wish for any sort of notoriety, I am perfectly willing to let this utterance receive any sort of publicity that, in its utter unworthiness to express adequately or effectively the nature of the crimes and of the infamy which it attempts to characterise, it may by chance get, should you or anybody else wish to make use of it. Of course, I need

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not tell you that a Harvard professor speaks only for himself, and commits none of his colleagues to anything that chances to be in his mind or on his tongue. Josiah Royce Harvard University

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Notes


introduction to race questions, provincialism, and other american problems Scott L. Pratt 1. Josiah Royce, ‘‘What Should Be the Attitude of Teachers of Philosophy Towards Religion?’’ International Journal of Ethics 13 (1902–03), p. 177. 2. Josiah Royce, ‘‘An American Thinker on the War,’’ Hibbert Journal 14 (1915–16):268. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908; Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 9. 6. Ibid, 25. 7. Ibid., 10. 8. Royce, Josiah Royce’s Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works, vol. 2, ed. Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J. (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 2001), 138. 9. Josiah Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (New York: Macmillan Company, 1908), 147. 10. Ibid., 152. 11. Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight (1912; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 2001), 203. 12. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 156. 13. One can be mistaken about whether a cause is really one that fosters loyalty. The principle of loyalty to loyalty requires that one also be prepared to recognize when she has made a wrong choice and correct it as best she can in accordance with loyalty to loyalty. { 27 1 }

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14. Royce, California, From the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character (1886; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 221–22. 15. Ella Lyman Cabot Collection, A-139 Radcliffe Collection, 1892 Notebook [320v], March 14,1892. The quotation was located by John J. Kaag, AAS Fellow, 2007–08. 16. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 38. 17. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 55. 18. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (1913; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 2001), 41; also, his statement ‘‘Loyalty, in the individual, is his love for an united community, expressed in a life of devotion to that community,’’ 128; also see Josiah Royce’s Late Writings, ed. Oppenheim, 5. 19. The Problem of Christianity, 254. ‘‘A community,’’ he says, ‘‘is not a mere collection of individuals. It is a sort of live unit, that has organs, as the body of an individual has organs. A community grows or decays, is healthy or diseased, is young or aged, much as an individual member of the community possesses such characters. Each of the two, the community or the individual member, is as much a live creature as the other’’ (Ibid., 80). 20. Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, 198–99. 21. Royce, Josiah Royce’s Late Writings, ed. Oppenheim, 7. 22. Royce, Josiah Royce’s Late Writings, ed. Oppenheim, 7. 23. Ibid. 24. Royce, The Hope of the Great Community (1916, New York: Macmillan), 129. 25. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 56. 26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1903), in Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986); see the conclusion of the first essay, ‘‘Of Spiritual Strivings,’’ in particular. 27. Originally given as an address at the University of Iowa and initially published in the Boston Evening Transcript; see Ignas K. Skrupskelis, Annotated Bibliography of the Published Works of Josiah Royce, in The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, vol. 2, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 1205. 28. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 77. Royce introduced the notion of wise provincialism in The Philosophy of Loyalty, 114–15.

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29. Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 74. 30. Ibid., 76. 31. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 77. 32. Royce responded in part to the work of Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 2nd ed. (Marietta, Ga.: Larlin Corporation, 1910). 33. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 81. 34. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 104; this essay was originally an address given in 1899 and, according to Ignas Skrupskelis, was probably used as a ‘‘stock lecture’’ (Skrupskelis, Annotated Bibliography, 1209). It is interesting that, despite its early composition, it nevertheless serves as a clear application of the philosophy of loyalty. 35. See Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), for a survey of these movements. 36. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 104. 37. Ibid., 105. 38. Ibid. 39. See Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922). 40. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 117. 41. The ‘‘Pacific Coast’’ was originally a lecture before the National Geographic Society in 1898 (see Skrupskelis, Annotated Bibliography, 1203). 42. Royce says little here or elsewhere about the role of California’s indigenous peoples. He does acknowledge the failure of U.S. policies regarding Native peoples; see Royce, ‘‘Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization,’’ Transactions of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society 3 (1900): 226–27, for example. 43. The sixth lecture in The Philosophy of Loyalty directly addresses the issues of ‘‘training for loyalty’’; in it Royce briefly mentions the relation of loyalty to athletics (p. 124). 44. Jane Addams argued for such training as part of the Social Settlement movement in the Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909; Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972). 45. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 160.

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46. Ibid., 162. 47. Josiah Royce, ‘‘What Should Be the Attitude of Teachers of Philosophy Towards Religion?’’ International Journal of Ethics 13 (1902–03): 177. 48. Josiah Royce, ‘‘The Problem of Natural Religion: the Present Position,’’ International Quarterly 7 (1903): 85–107. 49. Josiah Royce, ‘‘Football and Ideals,’’ Harvard Illustrated Magazine 10 (1908):211. 50. Josiah Royce, ‘‘Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization,’’ 229. 51. Ibid., 230. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid.; Royce’s 1900 discussion anticipates details of his 1909 discussion of California in ‘‘Provincialism: Based upon a Study of Early Conditions in California.’’ 54. Royce, ‘‘Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization,’’ 241–42. 55. Royce, ‘‘Provincialism Based Upon a Study of Early Conditions in California,’’ Putnam’s Magazine 7 (1909): 232–40. 56. Royce, ‘‘Provincialism Based Upon a Study of Early Conditions in California,’’ 261–62. 57. Royce, ‘‘An American Thinker on the War,’’ 267–68. royce’ s ‘‘ race questions and prejudices’’ Shannon Sullivan 1. Josiah Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 37. Further citations from this volume will be provided parenthetically in the text. 2. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995). 3. See, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Knopf, 1976), first published in 1903. Jane Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), first published in 1902, argues that democracy must be forged out of diverse experiences, and her argument is grounded in her interactions with people of various ethnic and racial backgrounds while living at Hull House in Chicago. To its credit, the book thus touches on issues of race and racism, but it does not address them in the direct and sustained manner that Du Bois’s work does.

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4. Published posthumously as Alain Locke and Jeffrey Stewart, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1992). 5. John Dewey, ‘‘Racial Prejudice and Friction,’’ in vol. 13 of The Middle Works, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988) 242–54, and John Dewey, ‘‘Address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,’’ in vol. 6 of The Later Works: 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989) 224–30. 6. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 5. 7. Ibid., 1. 8. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1999), 22. 9. Here Royce’s characteristic attention to climate, landscape, and topography takes a racist turn as he rehearses the then-common belief that ‘‘serious moral burdens’’ come with living in a tropical climate (52). For more of Royce’s thoughts on the relationship between geography and the particular inner life and social arrangement of groups of people— Californians, in particular—see ‘‘The Pacific Coast’’ in this volume. 10. In ‘‘Provincialism,’’ Royce also praises England and the United States for having ‘‘the especial art of the colonizing peoples,’’ which enables them ‘‘rapidly to build up in their own minds a provincial loyalty in a new environment’’ (76). 11. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), and Foucault, ‘‘Society Must Be Defended:’’ Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 12. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 89. 13. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 81. 14. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 93. 15. On loyalty and sports—one of Royce’s favorite examples of training for loyalty—see Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty, 123–24, and ‘‘Football and Ideals,’’ in this volume. As ‘‘Football and Ideals’’ makes clear, sports that are a significant social force (such as football) should cultivate the loyalty not only of its participants, but also of its spectators.

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16. For more on the connections between civilization, white racial dominance, and ideals of manliness in early-twentieth-century United States, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1990–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 17. Du Bois, Darkwater. 18. Ibid., 17. 19. Mills, The Racial Contract, 18. 20. Ibid., 19. 21. For more on the epistemology of ignorance in connection with race, see Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, SUNY Series on Philosophy and Race, eds. Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2007). 22. See, respectively, Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines, Reaching Beyond Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Noel Ignatiev, ‘‘Abolitionism and the White Studies Racket,’’ Race Traitor (1999) 10:3–7. 23. See, respectively, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) and Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr., ‘‘Rehabilitate Racial Whiteness?’’ in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004). 24. For examples and analyses of post–Jim Crow racism in the United States, see Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, and Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Index


Abbot, Philip Stanley, 43, 167–68, 170–71 absolute being, 196–209 absolute experience, 204, 206–9 absolute will, 209 abstraction(s), 9, 74, 88, 111–14, 199 accidental (and essential), 27, 32, 43, 49, 57, 65, 157 Addams, Jane, 12, 21, 273, 274 administration, 25–27, 54–57, 138, 255 African Americans, 8, 15 agriculture, 124, 127–28, 137–38, 142, 240 American Indian, 64, 226 ‘‘An American Thinker on the War,’’ 13, 271n2, 274n57 anthropology, 22, 27–28, 47, 58–61 Antigone, 116 antipathy, 32, 41, 58, 65–68, 233 assimilation, 9, 15, 76, 77, 80, 91, 227–28, 230–36, 241–48, 256, 260 Australia, 59, 61, 64, 76, 225 Bellamy, Edward, 96 benevolence, 4, 29, 31, 152 black (race), 22, 24–27, 46, 52–57 British West Indies, 46, 52 Broderick, David C., 140 Brooks, Phillips, 141 Browning, Robert, 96 Bryan, William Jennings, 96 Buddhism, 176 Bushido, 146, 151 Cabot, Ella Lyman, 5, 272n15 Caesar, Julius, 63

California, 6, 7, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 96, 167, 235, 273n42, 274n55, 274n56 Gold Rush, 127–28, 235, 238–39, 255, 256 ‘‘Pacific Coast’’ essay, 11–12, 37, 118– 44, 275n9 and provincialism, 251–63, 274n53 Royce as a native Californian, 74–75, 101, 237–43, 249 Royce’s history of California, 5, 9, 38, 250, 271n14 Catholic Church, 233–35 cause(s), 8–9, 16, 17, 19, 46, 98, 140, 141, 145, 267, 268, 271n13 common cause of human unity, 231 good or high cause, 106–7 of human liberty, 177 and loyalty to loyalty, 28–29 nature of, 2–6, 148–59 nature of devotion to, 12–13 others’, 161–65 in sport, 216–20 Chamberlain, Houston S., 48 Chapman, George, 166 charity, 4, 29, 31, 150, 152, 155, 156, 164 childhood, 7, 49, 66, 109, 120, 122, 136, 241, 250, 251–52, 254 Chinese, 64, 76, 226, 241 chivalry, 146, 151, 156, 164 Christianity, 50, 176 civilization, 82, 94, 133, 138, 139, 146, 164, 198, 220, 275n16 levelling tendency of, 77–79

{ 27 7 }

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and provincialism, 69, 71–74 and race, 22, 28–32, 45–50, 58, 61–65 ‘‘Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization,’’ 223–48 of the U.S. West, 118, 126–28 Civil War, U.S., 15–16, 72, 94, 228–30, 242, 254, 255 climate, 11, 17, 52, 75, 116, 120–26, 128–38, 139, 143, 238, 255, 256, 275 colonial. See colonialism colonialism, 26–27, 34, 226, 231, 248, 260 colonization. See colonialism community, 23–24, 56, 70, 73–76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86, 88, 89, 91–92, 95, 102–4, 264, 272n18 nature of, 5–12, 16–18, 272n19 and provincialism, 249–63 western and Californian, 125, 128, 136–38, 140–44, 159, 171–72, 221, 231–32, 237, 240–42, 243–45, 247 Coolbrith, Ina, 131, 132 courage, 4, 150, 216, 222 culture, 1, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 24, 28, 29, 31, 59–61, 146, 157, 243 custom(s), 23, 25, 49–50, 60–61, 69–70, 71, 73, 78–79, 82, 90, 91, 127, 133, 166 and American civilization, 226, 232, 234, 235, 242, 247 and ideals, 17, 71, 90 and provincialism, 251–52, 255–57, 258, 260, 261 death, 7, 50, 116, 140, 162, 167, 207 Dewey, John, 21, 274n5 disloyalty, 18, 73, 156 Du Bois, W. E. B., 9, 21, 22, 30, 272, 274n6, 275n8, 275n17 economy, 1, 10, 25, 31, 52–53, 55, 77–78, 91, 96, 113, 114, 234, 246–47, 262 education, 2, 10, 16, 29, 37, 62, 72, 77, 93, 98–99, 102, 105, 112, 115, 116, 142 moral, 146–47, 170–72, 210, 213–15, 221–22 physical, 12, 145, 157, 159–65, 171 empire, 16, 17, 18, 29, 63–64, 223, 225–26, 228, 231, 246–48, 260

essential (and accidental), 27, 57 ethnology, 22, 47 fair play, 13, 29, 43, 155–56, 162–64, 165, 171, 216, 220 family, 2, 21, 88, 136, 142, 149, 154, 155, 162, 238–39, 241, 249, 268 Fanon, Franz, 27, 275 Field, Judge Stephen G., 140 ‘‘Football and Ideals,’’ 14, 273n49, 275n15 foreign, 16, 24, 48, 49, 72, 91, 93, 94, 99, 101, 106, 155, 161, 264, 266 foreigners and civilization, 226, 227, 228, 232–35, 238–46, 260, 261 foreigners. See foreign Foucault, Michel, 26, 275–81 freedom, 16, 87, 108, 124, 135, 137, 142, 143, 196, 237, 267 friends. See friendship friendship, 2, 51, 55, 88, 109–10, 113, 135, 139, 141, 143, 147, 149, 154, 162, 167, 221, 265, 267, 268 frontier, 17, 239, 242, 251–53, 257–58 George, Henry, 95–96, 141 German, 18, 29, 58, 62–64, 69–70, 160, 234, 236, 260, 265–68 Germanic. See German Germany, 1–2, 3, 7, 18, 63, 232, 259–60, 265–68 God, 46, 79, 117, 120, 136, 149, 178, 179, 183, 190, 192, 195, 201, 204, 209 grace, 6, 88 Gulick, Dr. Luther, 159 Gwin, William, 140 habit, 32, 33, 56, 67, 70, 81, 86, 110, 128, 134, 138, 160, 201, 257 Harte, Bret, 129, 237, 239, 251–52, 256 Heraclitus, 200 Homer, 135, 166 humanity, 2, 4, 9, 13, 22, 34, 61, 71, 74, 107, 116, 136, 145, 149, 164, 183, 246 duty toward, 266–68 and provincialism, 86, 87–88 and religion, 176–77

index

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idealism, 12, 27, 38, 94–105, 112, 144, 203 ideals, 5, 11, 15, 16, 17, 50, 71–74, 86, 89– 92, 94, 97, 98–99, 103, 105–6, 107– 12, 114–15, 119, 139, 141, 142, 164, 165, 171, 178, 222, 225, 228, 229, 235, 237, 242, 247, 250 and facts, 13–14, 184, 187–89, 195–99, 202 moral, 175, 213–17 and natural religion, 190–94, 195–99, 203–4, 205–9 ignorance, 24, 27, 30–33, 56, 61, 65, 82, 97, 114, 141, 203, 212, 220, 256, 267, 275n21 illusion, 32, 33, 68, 144, 193, 198 imitation, 49–50, 67, 77–80, 90, 117 imperial. See imperialism imperialism, 15, 18, 21, 22, 26–27, 34, 45, 94, 226–27, 233, 247–48, 260 independence, 73, 77–79, 80–81, 90, 134, 139, 142, 232, 262 individuality, 10, 15, 81–84, 89–90, 135, 136–38, 140–44, 184, 186, 230, 237

love, 13, 55, 66, 93, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 115, 117, 129, 131, 162–63, 165–67, 198, 205, 207, 213– 14, 222, 267 of abstract formulas, 110–11 loyalty as or related to, 5, 147, 149, 150, 152–54, 221, 272n18 lover of ideals, 105, 110, 112, 116, 212, 216–17, 260 and provincialism, 17, 71, 73–74, 79, 82, 88, 92, 258, 259–62 loyalty, 38, 144, 171, 172, 181, 228, 231, 233, 271n13, 272n18, 273n34 nature of, 1–15, 18, 147–65 and provincialism, 73, 76, 84, 86, 88, 91, 252–58, 262, 275n10, 275n15 and race, 20, 23–24, 25, 28–30, 31, 33, 55 and sport, 215–22, 273n43 See also loyalty to loyalty loyalty to loyalty, 4–5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 18, 20, 28–29, 33, 37, 155–56, 161, 162–65, 172, 271n13 Lusitania, 1–2, 3–4, 5, 18, 264–67

Jamaica, 8, 24–27, 38, 52–57 James, William, 7, 21, 110, 214 Japan, 23, 27, 46, 49–50, 146 Japanese, 23, 24, 39, 49–50, 51, 61, 64, 90–91, 151 Joseph, 149 justice, 4, 30, 33, 56, 68, 152, 156, 164

Mead, George Herbert, 21 Mexico, 64, 127 Mills, Charles, 26, 30–31, 275n12, 275n19 mob-spirit, 9, 10, 23, 61, 66, 80–87, 143– 44, 171, 262 moral, 2, 3, 4, 137, 138, 175, 176, 188, 192, 205, 207, 261 and American civilization, 227, 243, 244, 265, 275n9 education (moral training), 145–47, 151, 157–60, 161–62, 170–72, 210, 213–15, 221, 222 and physical training, 145–72 and provincialism, 78, 89 and race, 27, 28, 30, 47–48, 59–60 and sport, 210–11, 213–17, 221, 222 morality. See moral

Kant, Immanuel, 191–95, 203, 204, 209 Kearney, Dennis, 141, 143 Keats, John, 166 King, Thomas Starr, 142 knowledge, 4, 17, 23, 31–33, 48, 59–60, 105, 107, 124, 134, 184, 189–94, 195– 201, 202, 207, 209, 224, 244 Koch, Konrad, 160n Le Bon, Gustave, 80, 85, 86, 272n32 levelling tendency, 77–79 Lippmann, Walter, 11, 273n39 Locke, Alain, 21, 274n4 Lorenz, Hermann, 160n1

natural religion, 13–14, 182–209 natural theology, 191–92, 194–95, 201 New England, 70, 71, 74, 122, 126, 127, 134–36, 230, 235, 240, 245 New Zealand, 76, 225

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index

‘‘On Certain Limitations of the Thoughtful Public in America,’’ 10 ‘‘On the Problem of Natural Religion,’’ 13 Oregon, 120–25 Pacific Coast, 11, 119, 122, 125–26 ‘‘The Pacific Coast. A Psychological Study of the Relations of Climate and Civilization,’’ 11, 37, 38, 273n41, 275n9 Page, Thomas Nelson, 56 Palmer, George, 102, 168, 170 patriotism, 3, 71–74, 82, 88, 99, 229, 254, 255, 259, 261, 264, 266 Pauline, 150 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 21 philosophy (the philosopher), 2, 8, 13, 18, 21, 33, 107–8, 109, 110, 111–14, 146, 175–81, 182–83, 184, 192, 195, 248, 265 The Philosophy of Loyalty, 2, 7, 14, 20, 37, 38, 271n5, 272n17, 272n28, 273n43, 274n2, 275n15 physical training (physical education), 8, 12, 14, 29, 145–47, 150, 157–65, 171, 210 physical world, 189–203 Plato, 102, 198, 200 prejudice(s), 8, 11, 21–23, 32–34, 45, 48, 58, 104, 226, 233, 249 pride, 60, 70–71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 86, 89, 92, 95, 102, 229, 242, 255 primitive, 28, 59–61, 127 The Problem of Christianity, 17, 272n18, 272n19 ‘‘Provincialism,’’ 9, 23, 39, 275n10 provincialism, 9–10, 11, 14–15, 17–18, 23, 37–38, 69–77, 79, 87–91, 139, 250– 63, 272n28, 275n10 ‘‘Provincialism Based Upon a Study of Early Conditions in California,’’ 14, 274n53, 274n55, 274n56 psychology, 59, 66, 80, 82, 110, 115, 116, 159 race, 8, 11, 20–34, 37, 45–68, 226–31, 244, 274n3, 275n16, 275n21

race-psychology, 28, 60–62 ‘‘Race Questions and Prejudices,’’ 8, 20–21, 24, 32, 34 Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 4, 7, 13, 14, 17, 20, 271n9, 271n12, 272n16, 272n25, 272n28, 272n29, 272n31, 273n33, 273n34, 273n36, 273n40, 273n45, 274n1 racism, 8, 11, 21–27, 31–34, 274n3, 276n24 reform, 10–11, 12, 95, 98–99, 100–1, 104–5, 111, 114, 115, 138, 141, 171, 221, 246, 253, 263 religion, 2, 13–14, 16, 50, 61, 96, 102, 117, 175–81, 182–99, 202, 209, 226 reticence, 1, 19, 25–26, 54–55, 267 Ripley, William Z., 58 Roosevelt, Theodore, 21 Ruhl, Arthur, 169 sacrifice, 92, 95, 99, 160, 216, 219, 222, 239 salvation, 6, 18, 87–88, 96, 98, 101, 111, 179, 180, 256, 258 Satolli, Francesco, 234 Schiller, F. C. S., 87 science, 2, 14, 102, 116, 117 and American civilization, 236, 244, 246 and natural religion, 184, 189, 192–99, 208 and provincialism, 82, 86, 90 and race, 22, 28, 32, 47–48, 59–60, 65, 68 sectionalism, 17, 23, 72–73, 230, 242, 259–62 self-consciousness, 49–50, 53, 73–74, 88– 89, 103, 139, 158, 224 Shakespeare, William, 198, 200 Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 201 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 170 Shinn, Charles, 253 Shinn, Millicent, 130 Sill, Edward Roland, 144 social order, 5, 27, 46, 55, 76–77, 78, 80, 83, 86, 91, 102, 103, 128, 142, 159, 197, 212, 221, 235, 251–52, 253, 257, 261

index ‘‘Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization,’’ 14, 223, 273n42, 274n54 The Sources of Religious Insight, 4, 5, 271n11, 272n20 South, the (U.S.), 26, 51, 52, 56, 57, 70, 228–31, 235, 240 South Africa, 15, 16, 46, 231 Spinoza, Baruch, 98 spiritual order, 90, 175–76 spirituality, 4, 152, 177 sport, 14, 43, 48, 135, 155, 160, 161–71, 210–22, 275n15 Stoler, Ann Laura, 27, 275n14 stranger, 46, 66, 67, 73, 74–76, 79, 141, 142, 224, 227, 237, 238, 261 struggle, 7, 15, 22, 26, 46, 59, 95, 103, 106, 139, 140, 196, 197, 198, 207, 229, 252 sympathy, 5, 56–57, 72, 81–86, 99, 113, 142, 224, 266 Tarde, Gabriel, 84 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 101 Terry, David S., 140 topography, 102, 118, 125–26 tradition(s), 71, 73, 79, 84, 103, 127–28, 136, 139, 142, 147, 176 and American civilization, 226, 230, 233–35, 240 local, 70, 257–58 and provincialism, 249, 254, 256, 258, 260

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tragedy, 132, 199 Trinidad, 8, 52, 56 truth, 10, 14, 23, 31, 67, 79, 98, 105, 108, 111, 177, 178–80, 182–83, 188–89, 193, 199, 207–9, 246 and/or falsity, 185–87, 203–6 lover of, 116–17 truthfulness, 152, 164, 184 union, 15, 82, 105, 136, 139, 165, 168, 229, 242 the Union (U.S.), 56, 70, 232, 239 United Kingdom, 15, 225, 236, 247 unity, 15, 16, 17, 71, 72–73, 119, 148–50, 230, 231, 236, 242, 245, 247–48, 259, 260, 267 virtues, 4, 60, 150–51, 152, 155, 159, 164, 222 weather, 115–16, 122, 124, 135, 137 ‘‘What Should Be the Attitude of Teachers of Philosophy Toward Religion?’’, 13, 271n1, 273n47 white (race), 8, 21, 22–23, 24–34, 46, 51– 53, 56, 227, 275n16, 276n22 Whitehead, Alfred North, 21 Wilson, Woodrow, 265–67 The World and the Individual, 7, 14 World of Facts, 184–89, 194, 195–96, 204–6 World War I, 1, 18–19, 22, 228, 264–69

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american philosophy series Douglas R. Anderson and Jude Jones, series editors

Kenneth Laine Ketner, ed., Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquiries. Max H. Fisch, ed., Classic American Philosophers: Peirce, James, Royce, Santayana, Dewey, Whitehead, second edition. Introduction by Nathan Houser. John E. Smith, Experience and God, second edition. Vincent G. Potter, Peirce’s Philosophical Perspectives. Ed. by Vincent Colapietro. Richard E. Hart and Douglas R. Anderson, eds., Philosophy in Experience: American Philosophy in Transition. Vincent G. Potter, Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals, second edition. Introduction by Stanley M. Harrison. Vincent M. Colapietro, ed., Reason, Experience, and God: John E. Smith in Dialogue. Introduction by Merold Westphal. Robert J. O’Connell, S.J., William James on the Courage to Believe, second edition. Elizabeth M. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s ‘‘Process and Reality,’’ second edition. Introduction by Robert C. Neville. Kenneth Westphal, ed., Pragmatism, Reason, and Norms: A Realistic Assessment—Essays in Critical Appreciation of Frederick L. Will. Beth J. Singer, Pragmatism, Rights, and Democracy. Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immorality: A Jamesian Investigation. Roger Ward, Conversion in American Philosophy: Exploring the Practice of Transformation.

Michael Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Kory Sorrell, Representative Practices: Peirce, Pragmatism, and Feminist Epistemology. Naoko Saito, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson. Josiah Royce, The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce. Douglas R. Anderson, Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture. James Campbell and Richard E. Hart, eds., Experience as Philosophy: On the World of John J. McDermott. John J. McDermott, The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture. Edited by Douglas R. Anderson. Larry A. Hickman, Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey. Larry A. Hickman, Stefan Neubert, and Kersten Reich, eds., John Dewey Between Pragmatism and Constructivism. Dwayne A. Tunstall, Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s Ethico-Religious Insight.