What Can a Free Man Believe? [1]

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Vol. 2, No. 1_____________ January 1, 1931______________________ 13

MAGAZINE Published Twice Each Month by Haldeman*Julius Publications, Girard, Kansas

50c per copy; Yearly Subscription, In Advance, $5 for 2 4 Issues

What Can a Free Man Believe? E. Haldeman-Julius PART I

(Complete in 3 Volumes) *

Copyright, 1931, Haldeman-Julius Company

*

The Story of “The Infamous Mooney-Billings Frameup” in a Dramatic Book The frameup, imprisonment and long fight for justice of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, California labor leaders, will never be forgotten in American history. It is a dark stain of shame that can never be wiped out. The true story of this frameup is one of the most terrific indictments of America’s industrial system and the cor­ ruption of law which this system contrives for its defense. Innocent men were railroaded to prison for a crime they did not commit. The case against them was manufactured with deliberate, malicious crook­ edness; perjurers, bribed and coached by the San Francisco district attorney, swore away these men’s liberties—almost their lives. The frameup broke down—that is to say, it was exposed—years ago. Yet Mooney and Billings remain in prison. There is no longer any doubt that an injustice was done—a terrible injustice.- Yet the prison doors are still closed upon Mooney and Billings. What are the sinister and dramatic facts about the Mooney-Bil­ lings frameup? Every American should be fully informed con­ cerning this case, which has been prominent in the national news for a number of years, which is sure to be heard of even more challengingly in the near future, and which will stand forever as a tragic, warning chapter in American history. Now the complete story of The Infamous Mooney-Billings Frameup is available, as told by Marcet Haldeman-Julius, who made a special trip of investigation to California, interviewed the chief actors in the drama and thoroughly studied the records of the case. This story is offered in book form at the low price of 50 cents a copy. This is a large-size book, 5^ by 8V2 inches, bound in stiff blue covers. It is a living document, charged with the pain and tragedy and drama of gallant but crucified lives; and this story, by Marcet Haldeman-Julius will also remain as an invaluable historical document, referred to in the coming years when men talk about industrial injustice in America. This "book tells all about the frameup and vividly portrays the background.

ORDER BLANK FOR THE MOONEY-BILLINGS BOOK Haldeman-Julius Publications, Girard, Kansas I am enclosing 50 cents, for which send me a copy of The Infamous Mooney-Billings Frameup, by Marcet HaldemanJulius. (5 copies for $2.)

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What Can a Free Man Believe? E. Haldeman-Julius

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS Girard, Kansas

Copyright, ^81, Haldeman-Julius Company

Printed in Hie United States of America.

WHAT CAN A FREE MAN BELIEVE?

WHAT CAN A FREE MAN BELIEVE? CHAPTER I In This Age

of

Questions, “What’s the Idea"

of

Ideas?

r 1. THE SPIRIT OF INQUIRY

T appears very simple to say that thinking consists in asking questions. Simple, yes—but this questioning attitude is not favorably regarded by the crowd, nor in the marketplace, nor in the temple, nor in the political forum. The fellow who persists in putting questions—especially those questions which call upon official or popular ideas to justify themselves, which go to the roots of things, which are not to be turned aside by a neatly phrased dogma— is a nuisance to the average man, who would far rather rest comfortably in certain taught and trusted formulas, who prefers illusions, dogmas, traditions and superficial, pleasant-seeming assumptions to these diffi­ culties of weighing evidence and testing ideas by the process of reason. Socrates irritated his fellow-citizens of Athens, no doubt, by his persistent habit of interrogation, so that a discussion with him was an interminable series of questions, one plausible answer simply opening a larger and unsuspected field of inquiry. Still, Socrates lived among people who— a good many of whom—really enjoyed using their minds and he could never have been so free with his questions when medievalism had shut out the fine curiosity that distinguished the Greek-Roman world. Even as it was, Socrates asked one question too many and became a martyr. As a rule, men do not like to be pressed too closely as to why they believe certain things. And as for the overruling popular ideas of a country or an age which faithfully stands by authority—an age that is quite set in its ways and does not suspect that any considerable change in viewpoint is decently possible—the questioner may assail them, with b:s What? and Why? at his own peril: a peril that repeatedly in the course of history has been grave indeed. Asking questions is a decidedlv awk­ ward and unpopular pastime for several reasons. To begin with, let us say that certain ideas and rules of behavior are earnestly held to be sacred—and then it is clear enough that whoever questions them (i. c., intimates that they may not be true) will be damned and lucky is he if that damnation be only a matter of hard speech and black looks. And. again, asking questions is not only an offensive business, but it is apt to be disturbing, provoking men to bring forth answers which, perhaps, they cannot very well do. Here is something, let us suppose, that is declared to be final, unquestionable truth by the ruling authorities and the subservient masses. Along comes a thinker or a group of thinkers who question the finality of this supposed truth (of religion or govern­ ment or morals or what not)—who ask questions that indeed bear with

What Can a Free Man Believe? aggravating and upsetting force upon the creeds that men have taken for granted—and this, obviously, is troublesome. It is a kind of trouble that these inquiring heretics seem to like very well, but it makes the very devil to pay among people who are right- (that is to say, tight-) minded. The spirit of inquiry, when it is set broadly at work in the field of ideas, is certain to impinge with painful effect upon many minds. So, while it is simple enough to assert that thinking is merely ques­ tioning—and while no one would deny that thinking is not only a proper but even a noble faculty of man—it is well to insist upon the point: for what many call thinking is, in fact, simply repeating what they have been told—making statements and clinging to formulas that have not been arrived at by any process of investigation or reasoning. And ques­ tioning is generally looked upon with sharp disfavor by those who, thinking that they think, do not really think because they do not question. When a man tells you that he thinks thus and so, you will probably find that he only believes. He has never asked himself any question about his beliefs. They have been handed to him and he has accepted them with a credulity that he would never be guilty of in the practical affairs of life. Doubt, which is the indispensably animating principle of thought, is represented as an insidious danger to the mind. Doubt is evil. Doubt is cruel. Doubt is hopeless. So we are told. Yet doubt, even if it only sweeps certain errors from the mind—even when it does not throw any positive new light upon a problem—is salutary, making for clear-mindedness, encouraging soundness and consistency in our ideas, protecting us from the rash blunders of ignorance. And doubting—questioning— real thinking is the only way in which we can ever learn. Every bit of knowledge that we have, every useful idea, every glimpse of truth, we have because someone, sometime, somewhere asked a question. The individual and mankind at large learn and progress by the method of inquiry. Matthew Arnold remarks in one of his essays that the word “curi­ osity” has an unfavorable meaning attached to it in common English usage: a sense of prying, of too much inquisitiveness, of trying to ascer­ tain what is not properly one’s business, of impertinence and triviality. It has a snooping, gossipy, irrelevant character in the common opinion. Yet curiosity, as Arnold points out, is the true function of the mind. It is precisely the attitude that one should have. A curious mind is a mind that is verv much alive. And the lack of curiosity is equivalent, as it were, to mental death or stagnation. Certainly it means that one has censed to stow mentallv. This is true of a whole society as well as an individual. An a^e of fixed, dogmatic ideas, utterly bound by certain conventions and creeds, self-flaltered that it has finally reduced life to a set of infallible rules and princinles which admit of no further incmirv, is not an age of intellectual progress. The heavy weight of orthodoxv stifles or crushes the finest activities of the mind. It is only in the stimulating air of free thought that the intellectual life can strongly, brilliantly thrive. Great thinkers are always asking questions. Scientists are extraordinarily curious. Curiosity is the very breath of life for the artist. All sensitive and thoughtful persons are moved by the spirit of inquiry. ____ JI

E. Haldeman-Julius

We cannot say that this spirit has, in historic time, ever been entirely absent, although there have been periods when it was moribund, or dormant, or not notably active. Ideas circulate more freely at one time than another. For years men apparently feel that life has been explained and ordered to the last satisfactory degree. But then comes a restless, curious, changeful time and it quickly appears that “the eternal verities” were pretty shaky, after all. For example, when we contrast the intel­ lectual life—the curiosity—of the ancient Greek-Roman world with the darkness of the medieval world which scarcely was aware of that bril­ liant early civilization, we can readily see the difference. The Middle Ages, prolific in grotesque, superstitious fancies, were not intelligently nor over a wide range curious. Relatively they were not. We have to bear in mind, of course, that there was a great deal of disputation—which then meant not simply verbal argument but bloodshed and a considerable burning of heretics—yet this was not curiosity about life. Speculation wasted itself ridiculously on theology and devout “scholars” were lost in a fog of futile inquiry about unrealities. It was not simply that the medieval mind dealt with abstractions, but that it dealt with absurdities. It expended an incredible amount of zeal upon questions that belong, if anywhere, only in a madhouse. It is strange to reflect how the art of thinking—how curiosity about life—had degenerated after the downfall of the Greek-Roman civiliza­ tion. There had been a time when men engaged in free and wide inquiry about man and nature and society—when they were animated by the full urge and curiosity of living—and as a result they produced a splendid literature, art and philosophy. Not their errors, which we should expect, but their intense intellectual life, on the whole so admir­ ably sound and civilized (reflected indeed in a real civilization), has been, after the long night of medievalism, an inspiration to the world’s culture. The ancients were tireless, versatile, and often rather too subtle inquirers. And if they often sought erroneously within their own minds, instead of in the realistic study of the actual world about them, for the answers to their questions, still what is significant is their vast and vital curiosity. They were not dull and they did not rest with a settled, thoughtlessly accepted view of life. This applies to the ancient civili­ zation as a whole—brilliant, curious, alive. It was a world in which ideas circulated freely, in which was a tremendous, eager curiosity about life, although it does not follow that every inhabitant of that world was a thinker. It is true that however dull an age may generally be, there are always some askers of questions, some persons for whom life is not a fixed and incurious round of infallibly prescribed beliefs and duties. And it is also true that the majority, in an age of belief or an age of doubt, in an age of seemingly solid and unchangeable creeds or an age of heresy and revolution, do not bother themselves with intellectual exercises. Even when the majority yield to the influence of changing times, this yielding is not clearly and deliberately the result of thought. As men have clung to old ways and notions, accepting them uncritically, so in time they fall into new ways that come to be more easily adopted than resisted. The average man, who is not particularly a thinker, is swept along by the

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hat Can a Free Man Believe?

strongest currents, or let us say sticks to the most popularly marked and recommended routine, of custom and belief. And he is simply for­ tunate if he lives in an age that is free and progressive in spirit, which by a lively play of curiosity offers him release from the confinement of a narrow orthodoxy. He benefits not only by the freedom that has been won in the past but, if he lives in a period of change, he enjoys a degree of freedom that would perhaps have been scandalous a generation before and which is chiefly advocated by the very men whom he condemns as critics, skeptics, trouble-makers. Yet if there have always been thinkers to challenge the most formi­ dable system of dogmatism and tyranny; and if the crowd has always been inclined to take its beliefs—new or old, or new-within-old (for, as we see today, the crowd may in certain periods stick to many old beliefs while responding to new influences—incuriously on trust, as it were) still we need only a glance at history to show us that there have been, relatively, times of conservatism in which life was regarded as pretty well arranged, a code of opinions and morals and laws solidly established and virtually beyond question—and times of change, when the spirit of inquiry has been unusually keen and wide-ranging, when there has been a special tendency to examine newly and critically the values of life, when questions have been eagerly asked and the old dogmatic replies have not been at all satisfactory. It is obvious, anyway, that every age of great change is necessarily an age of inquiry. Looking at every great move­ ment in the thought or the social order of mankind, we can see that it gradually took form through the asking of questions. Or it is the chal­ lenging of the old by the new, and that is but another word for question­ ing. Naturally it would be so. For so long as men accept things as they are, taking for granted that these things are right and true and unchange­ able, so long does authority—dogmatism—conservatism easily hold the field. Revolutions, new institutions, new philosophies of life, new modes of behavior are in the way of developing when men begin to examine curiously the foundations of authority—when they begin to doubt what for long has been held superior to doubt—when they begin to besiege with innumerable, disconcerting, and penetrating questions the existing order of things. Beware, said Emerson (meaning that ruling classes and smug citi­ zens should beware), when a thinker is turned loose on this planet. He might as well have said that the guardians of the temple should beware when questions begin to fly about, when the creeds are shot through with interrogation points, when Why? is a query persistently on men’s lips. A few men, very alert and inquisitive, begin to question in a sharp way and a large way that cannot be ignored. The thing spreads, and larger groups are seized by this spirit of inquiry. At length, although the majority is not ready to surrender the old beliefs yet, there is an open, lively, general discussion whether the old beliefs are right or wrong and no literate person, however self-satisfied, can be unaware of these ques­ tions nor fail to be in some degree affected by them. Life and love, curiosity about the buried Greek-Roman civilization, a spirit of fresh realization and inquiry, prompted the questions that awakened Europe from the dark, wretched nightmare of the Middle

E. Haldeman-Julius Ages. In France during the century of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot— what a group of great questioners!—the vogue of the critical interroga­ tion point was tremendous. Europe seethed with heroic, revolutionary inquiry in the nineteenth century. In England, spite of Victorian smug­ ness as to morality and an unsuccessful effort to make prudery the rule of life, a remarkable body of historians, critics, and scientists bombarded the citadels of holy obscurantism with rapid-fire questions. Ibsen startled Europe with his questions. Tolstoy, muddle-headed and mindracked genius, nevertheless asked questions that were vital and burst, though incoherently, into the shelter of respectable silence. Anatole France asked questions in a suave and gently cynical manner. In Amer­ ica that sharp and witty questioner, Robert G. Ingersoll, challenged the advocates of a cruel and foolish religion, and they could not satisfactorily answer his incessant stream of questions. Wherever you find a lively, significant movement of ideas, there you find the questioners busily engaged. There you find men rubbing their eyes, wrinkling their brows, and responding, though it may be unwillingly, to the insistent urge of Why? Why? Why? What I have been saying is specially appropriate to our age—for this is an age of questions. Just a few years ago America was apparently altogether satisfied with its creeds, social, moral and religious and with its cultural (or non-cultural, one should perhaps say) attitude. It was an unquestioning satisfaction that prevailed in what has been called “the Age of Innocence’’ (though it was also the age of greed, crudity and cor­ ruption politically and industrially), when there was simply no thought, or no conspicuous insistent thought, of calling to account the old doc­ trines, the familiar ways of life, the incurious complacency and respect­ ability of the time. That was a time of strangely mingled practicality, prudery, and pseudo-romance—and, yes, it was well-trained in the tricks of hypocrisy. What a contrast is the time in which we now live! Within a few decades all the old smug dogmatic certitudes of American life have been brought to judgment. We are now questioning the old dogmas in every field of life. Nothing escapes—not religion, not government, not morals. We are again asking, asking, asking: What is the nature of this institu­ tion? What is the basis of that belief? Why are certain things said to be right or wrong, true or false? What, realistically, are the duties and the rights of man? What are the facts, to which our ideas should conform, rather than to any dictates of authority? What is the sound method—what the true aim—of thinking? What is rational behavior? It is an age of active, liberal, wide-ranging thought. It is an age of many questions. 2. THE VALUE OF IDEAS

Before we consider more definitely what a free man can believe in a changing world, it is necessary to have some clear understanding of what we expect from ideas—our method of approach to them—the tests we apply to them—the intellectual values that we regard as genuine. This is important because so many men regard ideas quite loosely, negli­ gently, accepting any notion that happens to please them: while others are dogmatic about ideas and import into them a quality of unreasoning

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What Can a Free Man Believe?

passion that obscures truth and precludes really intelligent discussion. These two attitudes—carelessness and dogmatism—are the worst general faults of thinking and we encounter them daily in discussions with our fellows, in' the press, in the pulpit, and in personal talk. It is difficult enough, it seems, for men to reach a common basis of discussion, but the thing is hopeless when men are so contradictory and vague as to the nature of ideas. Let us here freely use the terms “idea” and “belief” as interchangeable, although we might make a fine point as to the inferiority of beliefs that are merely imitative and not thoughtful. Anyway, let us say that we have several men stating each his attitude toward a certain belief—say, for illustration, the belief in immortality. One man expresses this belief in negligent fashion: it is an old, familiar, popular belief—tradition supports it and it is based upon certain alleged authority of holy book or high-placed pulpit—it is less an effort to fall in line than it is to stand apart and critically scrutinize this belief—and so, here, we have one attitude toward the idea of immortality. A second man believes in immortality because, when pushed to final explanation of his belief, he insists that the belief gives him comfort and hope; and he may add that it appeals to his sense of his dignity, his importance as a human being (or more likely he will say “a human soul.”) Another man, more passionate than the first, rests his belief upon the authority of Bible or church: he is, however, a dogmatist and firmly believes that . certain lines in the Bible were divinely inspired, that they are a revelation superior to all scientific truth, and that the “truth” of immortality is superior to all the processes of man’s reason: it is an unchangeable, undebatable article of his creed. And one man frankly says that a belief in immortality (or in God or in the Bible) is the safest attitude: even if we are not sure, he says, we should believe—or try to believe—and then we cannot lose; if there is a future life, we shall go to Heaven and if there is not, then we shall be no deader than the atheist who has staked his “immortal soul” upon his fidelity to reason as against mere belief. Finally, we have a man who asks of the belief in immortality only this one question: Is it true? He refuses to join in this general belief for any reason except that of genuine intellectual conviction. If the belief does not appear sound to him, if the weight of evidence is against it, if indeed there is absolutely no real evidence for it—then he will have nothing to do with this belief. It is not a valid idea to him. It does not stand the test of true thinking, of experience, of facts and conclusions that can, as he sees, only be willfully ignored by the believer but that certainly cannot be reconciled with the belief. The “reasons” which the others give for their belief are to him not reasons at all, but are intel­ lectually quite worthless. They evade the question—the question that will not down. W hat evidence can be offered to show that immortality is any more than an idle dream? Until such evidence turns up, he will not be dogmatic one way or another, but he will not believe. It is not dogmatism when he sticks to the sound position that immortality is an unproved dogma, without a scintilla of verification, with not a solitary instance to illustrate it, with not even good sophistry to support it. Now, it is easy to see what such discrepancy of attitudes must mean in the way of confusion when these men try to discuss immortality. It is

E. Haldeman-Julius

11

not simply a difference in ideas, but more vitally it is a difference in the method of judging an idea, a fundamental difference in intellectual stan­ dards or in the ethics of belief. Unless men are willing to let an idea stand or fall (in their own minds) by its truth—that is, by the weight of evidence and the tests of reason—they will ever be hopelessly at odds when they attempt to discuss that idea. These varying, illogical, and unconscientious distortions of the true meaning of ideas are met with in every field of disputed opinion: in questions of politics and sociology, in discussions of morality—of marriage and sex—and personal behavior, in standards of literary taste, in the different reactions toward science, in judgments of men and events. Take any subject—say, the subject of sexual behavior—and observe how much foggy nonsense is talked about it: false rhetoric and senseless sentiment, and in many cases a stubborn determination to ignore the facts of sex, to deny these facts however ob­ vious they are. In political appeals, again we all know how far the campaign oratory usually is separated from any realistic consideration of public affairs, how wild assertions are made glibly and facts are dis­ torted to suit the occasion. Under the head of patriotism, a torrential amount of bunk is released to submerge the intelligence of the people. Sentimentality—tradition—fear—sheer pre j udice—specious pleas prompted by self interest—all are brought enormously into play in pop­ ular and in professedly high-minded discussions that range far afield from the central aim of truth. And so long as men are not seeking the truth, so long as they have no respect for ideas, there cannot be clearness in the common atmosphere of opinion. Truth, reason, thought in a real­ istic sense sight of among many inferior and irrelevant considera­ tions. We have only a travesty of ideas. Worse luck, this travesty has serious and far-reaching consequences. It is sometimes laughable indeed, s yet it is painful also to one who regards the thinking faculty of man as something to be carefully and conscientiously employed—or, if one plays with ideas (which in its sphere is well enough), not to make the mistake of taking such playing too seriously. In view, then, of the sad confusion with regard to ideas, we empha­ size the sound basis upon which thinking must rest if it is to be of any value or at all worthy of consideration. Perhaps it is well to insist, first of all, that what is called authority in the realm of ideas can have no valid claim. The objection to this authoritative attitude is what we know as rationalism. What a church, or a party, or a “sacred” book, or a popular leader says on any question is not per sc of any value in testing the truth of an idea. Where this sort of blind and stubborn adherence to an officially pronounced creed is the dominating factor, realistic thinking is imposs­ ible. The mind that bows to authority has set up barriers beyond which truth cannot pass. Preachers—politicians—soothsayers appealing to tra­ dition—pompous men who repeat reverentially certain ancient texts—all who speak in the name of authority are simply wasting words so far as the free-thinking man is concerned. lie docs not acknowledge the right of these authoritarian bigots to settle ex cathedra the value of ideas. He places exactly no credence in their mere say-so. 1 le is, let us say plainly, interested (if at all) in the idea itself and he will indeed scrutinize it all the more carefully if it comes waving the would-be-deceptive banner of

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What Can a Free Man Believe?

authority. For he knows that the more heavily an idea leans upon au­ thority, the more likely it is to have not much else for support. Anyway, the free-thinking man considers that all ideas must meet fairly in an open field. All are subject to the questioning intelligence of this man who thinks for himself and who would be ashamed to delegate that important and interesting task. Tints' saith the Lord—or the forefathers—or the government—or the leading citizen, or whoever presumes to place auth­ ority above reason—is so much empty utterance to the man who asks of an idea only the one question: Is it true? The point is, of course, that these claims of authority are false. There is one sense in which there may be, not an infallible but a reasonable and weighty appeal to authority—not the authority of tradi­ tion, or mere social prestige, or political power, or any such glittering surface of impressiveness, but the authority of special knowledge. In science, for example, even a very intelligent man who is not specially equipped—who has not mastered, let us say, the subject of astronomy or biology—will naturally turn to the experts. In any field of real knowl­ edge, the man who has given long study to the facts can speak with more authority, in this legitimate sense of the word, than the man who has casually glanced at this field or who merely repeats what has been dog­ matically asserted by someone else who is no better informed. Here we see, however, a sensible consideration of values and not blind submissionto pomp, piety or prestige that has no intellectual foundation. What the rationalist objects to is that authority which consists of dogma, tradition, respectability, or power: that authority which claims sacredness for re­ ligious creeds and partisanism for political creeds: that authority which does not reasonably justify itself but which demands the surrender of rea­ son. In fine, the rationalist sticks to his right of asking questions. If he is convinced that anyone speaks from special knowledge, not easily access­ ible to himself, he will have due respect for his statements. He will ac­ knowledge that a Joseph McCabe, speaking from living present knowl­ edge on a scientific subject, is more worthy to be heard than another man who know’s really knothing about science but who speaks merely from personal prejudice, popular superstition or the false authority of dead and meaningless texts. At any rate, the scientist does not pretend to have soaked up his knowledge soul fully from the dark depths of a mystic Nowhere. His reports are the product of long and careful investigation and they claim no other authority than that of evidence, reasonably sur­ veyed. “Believe or be damned” is not spoken by those who offer knowl­ edge :• it is the threat of those who have nothing to offer but superstition. What we have said about authority, falsely so-called, applies to dog­ matism, tradition, custom, which indeeed compose that formidable influ­ ence, that terror of timid minds, that foolish but popularly impressive dictum: “It is so writ, therefore so must it be.” A dogiiia is an idea that is alleged to be absolutely true, even in face of all reason and evidence: an assertion, not requiring to be proved but demanding only belief or faith: an idea that will not yield to questioning. And, as we have said, the free man’s beliefs are independent of all dogmas. Not the most powerful and respectable assertiveness in the world can make an idea true: and

E. Haldeman-Julius

13

it is solely the truth of an idea, not its dogmatic source nor its popularity nor even its attractiveness, which interests the free-thinking man. When an idea is stated, that is the end, if one regards it as a dogma. It is only the beginning, if one regards it as an idea to be studied, questioned, weighed in the balance of realistic evidence. It is the same with tradition. An idea may have a mighty and venerable record in the popular sense, or officially it may have had a long reign, yet that is no guaranty of its truth. On the other hand the newness of an idea is not, by itself, a recommendation—unless we say that an idea which goes back to the infancy of human thought, when men knew very little about nature and the universe, is the more likely to be wrong, while today ideas have the benefit of the full light of modern knowledge: still, ideas are to be considered without prejudice, brushing aside all sentimental claims. There is no denying* that tradition, the dragging force of long and venerated custom, is a great hindrance to free thinking. Custom lays many snares even for the intelligent. How much harder, then, is it for the average man, who has no just and close regard for ideas, who is intellectually without guidance in a fog of mixed and irrelevant values, to go against, not merely the weight of contem­ porary public opinion, but the majestic prestige of opinion long held to be verily and righteously beyond dispute. When he hears the free man question ideas that he, the average man, has been taught to venerate as the very essence of righteousness and civilization, his feeling is that of astonishment and perhaps of indignation. For the average man has not learned the very first lesson in freedom of thinking, in the just evalu­ ation of ideas—namely, that all ideas may and should be questioned and that there is no such thing as a sacred idea. Ideas are true or false, that is all: not absolutely, but relatively and in accordance with the best evidence at hand. There is nothing sacred about truth, only it is far more satisfying to an intelligent man. And, finally, the value of ideas is not determined by mere senti­ mentalism. That is to say, because one wishes an idea to be true it does not follow that the idea is true. Nor is pleasantness the test of an idea—truth may be unpleasant, it may be shocking, at least when one first comes unsuspectingly upon it. Nor is it a reasonable defense of an idea to say that it is essential for the maintenance of a certain social order, or a certain governmental system, or a certain way of living. That argument has always been used in defense of systems and institu­ tions which even the popular conscience today condemns. Obviously, anything that is based on falsehood—anything that cannot sustain the light of truth—is of doubtful value, and certainly is not of permanent and irreplaceable value, to mankind. One system—and a better system —succeeds another and, following truth, mankind can only go forward to a freer, happier, larger life. 3. A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

It is on the principles that we have laid down that we shall in the following discussions consider what a free man can believe—or, if it should be put more cautiously, that I shall explain what one man, whose ideal is intellectual freedom, believes regarding the important questions of life about which the winds of doctrine blow so confusedly. Thus,

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iIF hat

Can a Free Man Believe?

first and last, the free man and his beliefs will be independent of au­ thority in the invidious sense, independent of dogma (resolutely armed, indeed, against dogma), not influenced superficially and thoughtlessly by tradition merely, superior to the appeals of sentimentalism (emotion not swamping thought), and carefully avoiding the kind of sophistry that springs from self-interest. That is the ideal of detachment—or mental integrity—which we should keep constantly in mind, and if we should sometimes fall short of it, yet the effort to realize that ideal will carry us clear of many errors. Similarly, we shall not be dismayed by the philosophically posed limitations of the mind in ascertaining truth. We are not dealing with absolutes. We shall discuss ideas from the viewpoint of the realist, not that of thq metaphysician who is so easily led astray by wordy quibbles and who refines ideas to a subtle, almost vanishing point where they cease to mean anything. It is only by the most careful observation and reason that we can ascertain truth—and this view of truth, realistically arrived at, is the best that we can pos­ sibly have. Ignoring facts, we lose all sense of values. Rejecting reason, we have no other guide. The moment we apply any other test to ideas save that of truth—reasonable, evidential, experienced .truth—we are on treacherous ground and we shall get farther and farther away from our real object. And there is, of course, a practical side to ideas. They are not simply exercises in reasoning, but they have an important relation to life. We shall find that free thinking—that the idea that squares with truth—is practically most successful as it is intellectually most satisfying. In other words, a reasonable view and conduct of life is by all tests and for all purposes superior. Truth and practice cannot strictly be separated. It is by a true understanding of life and by the application of this true understanding that we can best live. Realism is unimpeachably sound in thought and it works in the actual business of life. When a man has an incorrect idea of anything, his relation to that thing is imperfect and wrong. When he confuses his ideas, he botches and misdirects his life. So, after all, whether looked at from the relatively detached stand­ point of reason or from the near and interested standpoint of practice, ideas are to be tested by their truth alone. It is this test, in its various shapes and leadings, that we shall maintain in discussing religion, govern­ ment, social questions, moral questions, and all those vital relations of man to his world that are again in this modern age the subjects of free inquiry. Is it true? Whatever the subject, that is the question we shall ask about an idea and try to answer, not infallibly, but in a free and reasonable spirit.

E. Ha Idemail-Julius

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CHAPTER II Not “the Best

of

All Possible Worlds/' But Best Possibilities

a

World of the

1. THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS IN OUR TIME

E live today in an Age of Questions: such a brilliant period as has in times past lifted men from the rut of custom and credulous belief. Ideas are not tamely accepted as once—let us say recently—they were, on the plea of their being popular and respectable. At the beginning of the present century, there was (with the exception of a kind of political-economic agitation that proceeded mostly on quite conventional lines) a mild, orthodox, unquestioning in­ tellectual atmosphere. Beliefs and standards were regarded as soundly proved, beyond question, and beyond change. For that matter, proof was not demanded. It would have been resented as both irreverent and irrelevant. What! ask anyone to prove that the forefathers were right ? that the good old rules of virtue were true? that God was in his heaven? that our institutions—our basic social and moral institutions—were for the greater good (if not freely and excitingly for the happiness) of mankind? When anyone very conspicuously argued about these conclu­ sions—which appeared really to be conclusions, and to be quite settled —he was marked.as a mischievous or a malignant heretic. Heresy then meant heresy and was an epithet of unmistakably odious import. Few had the temerity seriously to dispute the prevailing notions. Ingersoll had challenged religious orthodoxy. Politically, however, he was an eminent Republican. Socially, he was not a rebel. Morally, he was unimpeachable and indeed attacked religion from an ethical view­ point that vzas rather conventionally understandable. Yet Ingersoll, although he assailed the common belief only in a limited field of thought —although he was prolific in pretty sentiments that were popularly pleasing—and although he was so brilliant and irresistible in personality, became among Christians a stock figure of Satanic significance. And Mark Twain, genuinely and thoroughly a skeptic—even a withering cynic in his private thought, which at times flashed as startling epigrams ' in his writing—was certainly not in public role the rebel that he was by • nature. He was well qualified and he was disposed to be a searching critic of the American credo entire—but he wasn’t. We know that he was overshadowed and largely silenced in his most significant ideas by the conventionality of his time. One cannot help wondering how dif­ ferent would have been the literary expression of Mark Twain had he enjoyed his artistic prime in our day. Today he would find an atmos­ phere very encouraging to the widest range of criticism. He would find that, instead of everything being settled, everything is unsettled and intensely discussed. Who can doubt that our present conflict of

H

16

What Can a Free Man Believe?

ideas would have stimulated Mark Twain—and others—to a far greater rebelliousness of utterance? At any rate, we know that ideas circulate vividly and vigorously today. The intellectual ground that was, supposedly, staked and sur­ veyed with finality is being traversed by new thinkers who are not satisfied with the reports of a previous, believing generation. What has been called “the believing mind” of America has been changed a good deal. Into this mind many questions—old questions, new questions, all sorts of questions—have come bursting and have shaken, where they have not completely tumbled, the old formal barriers. Let us say that America was like a child who believes implicitly—with perhaps a little suspicion in spots but surely no bold forthright challenge—what its father has asserted with authority; and that now America has come of age and is beginning to look at life with newly opened, inquiring eyes. If that is not the whole truth, still it indicates fairly the general truth concerning the attitude of our time. There is, of course, no popular revolution of thought, in the sense that the majority have decided to cast off the beliefs of their fathers— of their traditional “spiritual” guides—of the impressive, sermonical past. Yet the majority, even so, are today quite accustomed to discus­ sions that would have been almost unthinkably daring in the recently retired America of settled rules and creeds. Men argue, whether con­ servatively or radically, about things which in the yesterday of history they would have taken for granted as verities beyond the impious shock and challenge of perilous dispute. It is not one-sided, this extraordinary ferment of discussion in once quiet fields of opinion. As many are challenging venerable dogmas and conventionalities, so many others are justifying the beliefs of the past. These latter can no longer pronounce authoritatively that a thing is right and thus confirm it so simply. Everything is open to question, and this at least is a fact of our critical, argumentative age which the exponents of conservatism, tradition and piety cannot dodge. One can often detect a note of exasperation that these things should be discussed at all as if they were perhaps not true. Their truth, as the typically devout con­ servative will say, is established and needs only to be repeated—mere affirmation is enough. But it is not enough, as these persons recognize, therefore we have a spirited (and often very clever) defense as well as a vigorous attack. It is a cleverness of smart, dashing style and nimble handling of ideas which/one may say not ungraciously, has been bor­ rowed from the very iconoclasts who assail the pillars of respectability— and a cleverness, too, which perforce yields something to these iconoclasts. There is, as I say, a yielding in the admission that the truth of these “eternal verities” is debatable. A really smart defender of the traditions and conventions no longer takes the utterly defenseless position that these ideas are sacredly and self-evidently true. No, he endeavors with his best strength and wit to prove their truth—their truth (or use) on the ground of social expediency, if not on higher ground. Merc dogma hasn’t the old effectiveness. It has given way, on the whole, to a valiant —sometimes a desperate—show of reasonable argument. In a word, the conservatives try to justify their ideas by the tests that have been laid

E. Haldeman-Julius

17

down challengingly and clearly by the new thinkers—by the questioners. Again, there is a yielding to the new spirit of thought (which, to be sure, has had its illustrious exponents through the ages) in the recog­ nition that freedom, freedom of thought and life, is not merely a legiti­ mate but a precious, indisputable right of man. The dispute turns upon what freedom in a realistic sense is, upon the application of the general principle of freedom, upon the rights of society (rationally, not dogmat­ ically, considered) as compared with the rights of the individual. A few years ago, in America at any rate, there was not even this sign of yielding to the cry of freedom. The authoritarian insistence upon the essential, unquestionable righteousness of the old beliefs was the prevailing attitude. And free thinking, free behavior, free judgment upon one’s own way of life, the whole idea of freedom as it has been modernly made prominent, was associated with wickedness. It was only a solitary and not well known figure here and there who wanted to be free. Most persons—not merely the commoners but those who repre­ sented the articulate brains of the community—were satisfied to follow in the beaten path, looking neither to right nor left, or taking at most only a casual, not a critical, glance around. And now—everywhere is the spirit of criticism that will not rest, that is bold and insistent in its claims. It is a criticism not merely of’ detail, of certain aspects of our institutions, but a criticism that deals broadly with fundamentals. For example, Americans have always felt free to protest against particular actions of their government; now we have a discussion of basic political ideas, a questioning of the very prin­ ciples which underlie the actions of government, even a prominently heretical attack upon the dogma of patriotism itself. While in the field of social theory, revolutionary ideas are, one might almost say, a com­ monplace. The idea of social responsibility, of the common welfare, of economic justice and altruism even—the criticism of the dangerous aspects of the old individualism—is growing. Poverty, unemployment, the extremes of inequality are increasingly recognized as matters of sharp concern and not fixed in an eternal order of things. The growth of skepticism, again, has been remarkable within the past quarter of a century. We have come a long way since Ingersoll’s time, so that today a far more extensive challenge to religion, employing a great variety of intellectual weapons, is familiar even to the average man. Whatever the degree or extent of belief in religion today, the attitude that it is superior to criticism has been all but forgotten. And what we have is not a timid distinction between “Churchianity” and Christianity, not merely objections to the views or actions of certain preachers, not a fine splitting of hairs about what true religion is—but a basic, thorough, intellectual attack upon religion: its historic origins, its institutional activities, its intellectual aspects, its social consequences. We are asking what can be the use—what the sense—of religion in any kind or degree. Why try to refine or newly define it, when it is—the term and all that it implies—quite worthless? Such is the uncompromis­ ing nature of the modern anti-religious attitude: not, to be sure, the at­ titude of the majority, nor even of many critics of religion, but widely held nevertheless and more or less familiar (not so shockingly, after all)

18

What Can a Free Man Believe?

to every literate person, certainly every person of wide reading. Yet it is not so many years ago that religion seemed to be firmly established— not simply as an institution, but as a devout and active creed of life— in an America of unconquerable Puritan tradition. We shall have a further study of the ideas of religion in a special chapter, but here it is only pertinent to emphazize how it has been drawn from its imposing place of authority, from its sacred eminence beyond the reach of shat­ tering criticism, into the general lively conflict of ideas which distin­ guishes the modern age. What, indeed, has escaped this revitalized urge of criticism? First of all and most obvious in any period which is inspired to look critically at conventional values, moral opinions—questions of right and wrong— are subjected to a searching examination. Because we have been told and because men for long have believed that this is right and that is wrong, shall we regard morality as a field in which truth has been absolutely, finally determined? Indeed we will not. Here, on issues that touch so intimately our daily conduct—our impulses, our very human natures, our happiness, all our relations one with another—criticism is inevitable. It is here also that there will be, in practice whether or not clearly in intellectual attitude, the most ready and striking change. At once it is realized that a great deal of morality has had for its sole and weak justification the dogmas of religion. Many things, which could not on rational grounds be proved harmful to the individual or society, which are quite unmeriting of the slightest censure, have been condemned merely by the foolish dictates of pious ignorance, intolerance, and morbid fear or suspicion of life. Some condemnations are so com­ monly seen now as having been ridiculous that they need be mentioned only as curious instances of olden folly and fanaticism: for example, the notion which at one time widely prevailed among the righteous that the theater was a recruiting station for the Devil; or that dancing was a principal and speedy means of travel toward Hell; that card-playing (whether in the way of gambling or not) was a fatal step on the down­ ward path ; that a smiling face and joyous behavior on a Sunday signi­ fied wickedness—-in short, the Puritan antipathy, from first to last, toward pleasure and the expression of the natural man. It is not so long ago that America was under the sway of this Puritanism, if not in every historic detail yet in general spirit. It was held gloomily in check by irrational inhibitions. The idea of sin was very real (to the credulous imagination), very painful, and utterly foolish, unable to sustain itself for a moment under the attack of modern-critical rationalism. A great deal was taught about duties—chiefly the duty of belief and that of obedience—and very little was mentioned about joys or rights. Man’s main purpose here below, apparently, was to glorify God and demonstrate a deadly-dull Puritan piety. At every step, or even every word or curious glance, he was probably committing what was identified in the customary language of “good people” as a sin. Concerning sex—what a wall there was of pietistic dogma to shut off the healthful view of realism. Ignorance and innocence were synony­ mous. Sex expression without marriage was not mentionable, let alone arguable as to right and wrong, save in salacious gossip and tales told

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privately among members of the same sex. A really serious discussion of sex, free from the influence of any dogma on the subject, was next to impossible. Marriage was a life sentence and anyone who took the difficult road toward escape was besmirched in public opinion. Not to dwell extensively in this place upon the subject of sex and marriage— moral ideas demand a separate treatment, plainly—it is enough to point out what a different attitude now prevails toward this once dark, sinister and forbidden subject. It has been brought, like most other things, into the light of criticism. It is being intensely and fearlessly discussed, and the discussion is not one-sided. “Sin”—that grotesque notion of theology —has been brushed aside impatiently as a foolish, impertinent trifling with a subject that belongs to reason. In general, as both conservatives and radicals will tell you, the revolt is against authority. It is not a complete casting away of old ideas and ways, but there is a determination that every idea shall justify itself in the light of reason and, if it refers directly to conduct, by its usefulness to life. Not its usefulness to a ruling class, nor to an arbitrarily pre­ conceived scheme of life, but its usefulness for a happy life on the broad­ est and freest lines. Without pushing the compari on too far, one can say that we have a critical reconsideration of human relations suggestive of the century of intellectual conflict which made the French Revolution. We are looking again, in the clear direct light of the present time, with the mists of past tradition brushed away, at the rights, the duties, the associations of men and women. What is meant, of course, is that this is the marked attitude of the age—an attitude that is widely and sharply felt—not that the attitude is shared, with a full understanding, by every­ one. Yet many who could not be called thoughtful are reacting naturally to the tendency of the age and are bringing an amount of freedom and rationalism into their lives which would have been unthinkable, on any such impressive scale, a half century ago. And we have the great advantage that we live in a rapid, scientific age, when ancient handicaps and barriers are more easily broken down, when the pressure of material change inevitably impels to new methods and manners. Thanks to our materialism, we have the means of a more expansive life than our ancestors. Puritanism cannot compete with the machine and with the scientific viewpoint that makes the machine. In the long run, the former mud be defeated by the logic of conditions, and we see that its defeat is already heralded by many signs of irrepressible freedom. It is not a paradox—it is entirely natural—that with greater opportunities for living men should be all the more eager for life, a free life and a full life. And so this machine age will not let us be tightly, unhappily bound by the ancient standards, when those standards are shown not to rest upon a rational basis and not to be compatible with the conditions of our time. These standards may be discarded, or some of them may be modified, shorn of their rigid absolute character, but first of all they must be examined clearly—they must be judged—they must be seen for what they really are, in special relation to our own time, and without the slightest intimidation of dogma. It is this which the modern age is doing: trying, in a critical yet wistful or eager way, to decide how best we can think and live for ourselves, not believing that our fore-

'hat Can a Free Men relieve? fathers could hand down to us the absolutely true ideas and the un­ changeable rules that we should live by. 2. EXTREMES AND THE MIDDLE GROUND

Naturally in any great struggle between opposing forces of thought such as distinguishes this age, there is a tendency to run into extremes— and this is equally true both of the conservative and the radical side. It is true, that is to say, that some conservatives insist upon sticking to the last letter of the old confining creeds, while some radicals seem intent upon smashing everything- that has come down to us from the past, unwilling to admit the least trace of virtue in any idea, any rule of life, which is found in the mingled good and bad of tradition. It seems to me there is more danger in the conservative extreme, although intellectually it is not more blamable. For the things of sound enduring value that have been learned by the race and admitted into the tradition and practice of men generally will not be destroyed by the attacks of the ultra-radicals. We know that one of the strongest forces among men is that of custom, and when the custom has been immemorially successful and enjoyable— when it has worked out, as we say, in the practical tests of life—they will be less ready to relinquish it. And, anyway, they are s'uspicious of all radicals whether or not the latter are also extremists. But concern­ ing new ideas which have not been tried fat least not generally), which have an unfamiliar appearance, which demand a break with old custom— they are the more seriously handicapped and held back by the ultra­ conservative attitude. An iron-clad conservatism is thus more pernicious in its actual effects than radicalism which vainly tries to smash the whole machinery of tradition. Let us, however, frankly condemn both. The free man, in his attitude toward ideas, does not precisely think of himself as either a conservative or a radical. He shies from labels. He avoids the narrow ways of doctrine. He is very careful not to replace the old dogmas by new ones. And while he may be interested in the manifestation of ex­ tremes and understand why they exist, he will not permit himself to be led astray by them. Whatever the idea, whether it is an effort at abstrac­ tion or deals with a concrete problem of daily life, the free-thinking man examines it with a simple realism that is unconfused by the cries of im­ moderate and too often bitter propaganda. What is true? What mode of behavior will be most rational, most successful? These are the questions that he seeks the answers for by going directly to life. And it sometimes happens that the free man, thus independently applying the true method of criticism, finds himself assailed by both sides. From the conservative side goes forth the cry, “You are a radical!” And from the radicals the cry is heard, “You are a conservative!” So, in these in­ stances, the free man satisfies none but himself—he being, of course, the sole person whom he wants to satisfy—at least first of all he seeks the truth for himself, regardless of old dogmas or new party cries or any labels, and then he is interested in spreading that truth. What a fine and what a rare thing, after all, it is to maintain the steady poise of rationalism! to look all things clearly in the face and be unmoved by polemical or prejudiced emotion! Yet it is only thus that one can see life as it is and adjust one’s own life most sensibly. Passion

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is an artistic force of high order, but it is a very treacherous force in determining one’s ideas or in guiding one’s steps through life. It may be beautiful or terrible, but it is not sensible. And when we are thinking —when we are approaching ideas—it seems plain enough that good sense is the sound and salutary prerequisite. It is this, of course, which afflicts the intellectual processes of all extremists—simply they are too passionate. They are carried too far by their feelings. The extreme conservative has such a deep emotional regard for the past, for what traditionally he has had instilled into him as the better way of life, that he cannot reason very well about new ideas. While the radical is so resentful of the past, so irritated by any restric­ tions or by the slow yielding of the old order to the new, and so con­ temptuous of the minds of his opponents (condemning those minds as more moral than intellectual), that he is likely to be aflame with a passion of rebellion which renders clear thought all but impossible. Undoubtedly we should all guard against this excessiveness, this confusion of emotion and reason, and should be willing to recognize the truth even though it is unpleasant—perhaps, in its strangeness, only a passing unpleasantness followed, when we have quite assimilated the truth, by a larger and more healthful kind of satisfaction. And certainly we should be ready to accept truth in any field without meticulous consideration of the name, very likely an irrelevant name, that is given to such truth. There is, truth to tell, an element of conservatism in all of us and a good deal of the radical element in many who style themselves (and who mainly are) conservatives. But not all traditionalists upholding the standards of the past, not all rebels waving the banner of the future, are so passionately extreme in their attitude. A good case can be made, broadly speaking, for tradition. Certainly it is a very real, unescapable force and while in detail it may often be (we know indeed that it A) mistaken—even very harmful to the tendencies that slowly and through difficulties which rationally are needless make for progress—there are other instances in which it is sound. The intelligent conservative, with all his specific errors in apply­ ing a viewpoint that may be wrongly emphasized, is right when he says that we cannot completely break with the past and that it would be unwise to do so if we could. His mistake lies in emphasis and selection. We may disagree with him on many things, yet credit him with a “sweet reasonableness” or moderation of tone and aim. It is the part of wisdom to consult tradition, history, past beliefs, all facts and opinions that may bear upon an issue—and then decide the issue according to a reasonable realism, leaning toward tradition much or little as reason decides, but always keeping square with the living reality before us. And t’ c radical, too, who is an intelligent thinker and not merely an emotional bundle of nerves, presents a strong and reasonable case for new patterns of thought and behavior. He very correctly points out the error and the practical unsuitability of certain old ideas, and he is always ri \ ’ n he refuses to accept tradition or authority per sc as the justification of an ideal. No matter what has led or jarred him into a new -viewpoint, his modern­ ity of thought is excellent when it is reasonably clear-visioned and

22

What Can a Free Man Believe?

balanced—when, that is to say, it has risen superior to the stress of passion. What we are really driving at, after all, is the ideal (and, let us say, we have a goodly number of real examples today) of the free man who is neither conservative nor radical: who occupies, in short, what is known as middle ground. The blazing red type of radical, now and always, despises the moderate. And so does the extremely rigid type of con­ servative scorn the moderate,y who is# too calm for the one and too free, z too intellectually many-sided and resilient, for the other. Yet it is in the moderate man, the man who is disposed to judge fairly, who lets realism and not any doctrine guide him, that the hope of truth resides. By moderation I do not mean a specious sort of opportunism, nor a bland indifferentism, nor a confused philosophy that nothing is true or that all ideas, however contradictory, are partly true. No, the moderate thinker —or the free thinker—cherishes all ideas that are convincingly sound to him, whatever their age, their source, or their identification with any party. He has no antipathy for tradition as such, but objects only when tradition interferes with the sanely progressive needs .or opportunities of life. He respects tradition as much as any man when it is sensible or really beautiful (and it cannot, by the way, seem beautiful to him when it is foolish, narrowly shutting out life, and dogmatically stifling the free impulses of the mind) and in conformity with the facts of life—when, let us say, it is that salt of earth and time, the soundly based and fully tested experience of the race. For that matter, the ideal of moderation has a long tradition behind it, not so much as practice but as a recognized desirable attitude toward ideas and modes of action. The average man is aware of the immemorially repeated truth that extremes are dangerous : only, he doesn’t know very well how to judge extremes save in the simplest affairs of life. In the realm of ideas, the average man is apt to condemn anything as ex­ treme which does not jibe with his own notions, which appears strange to him, or which arouses in him an emotional dislike. Wise men in all ages have counseled moderation. It was what distinguished the Greek at­ titude toward life. It is even the final victory of the artist, that one who deals with passions can yet represent them with a superb harmony. * Nor does moderation mean a tame, hesitating, or indeed lifeless at­ titude toward ideas. The fact that an idea is expressed eloquently, with intense conviction, with warmly persuasive intent does not imply neces­ sarily that it is an extreme idea or that it is simply the fruit of passion. Naturally, one who is interested in ideas will discuss them with animation: all the more so, when they have for their object the solution of a practical issue in life. Ideas live—they are not dead matter. But who will say that a moderate man cannot have emotions, has not a capacity for eloquent, thrilled appreciation, has not the quality of vivid life? So may an idea, arrived at by the process of moderate reasoning, have a very vital significance and demand indeed a vivid expression. Our plea is simply for a reasonable (?. c., a moderate) approach to ideas: for apply­ ing, in the first place, the tests of realism and not letting passion usurp the seat of judgment. It is all the more necessary to urge the importance of moderation or

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the middle ground in an age of intellectual conflict such as we live in. There is such an intense spirit of discussion, offensive and defensive, such a stir and clash of seemingly (and often really) irreconcilable opinion, such an upheaval of old fields and exploration of new fields, that one does well to go carefully. It is plain that in our age, at once critical and creative—at once rebelling against the past and striking out toward the future—we have not generally the high, detached attitude of philosophy (though, by the way, philosophers have been pretty apt at wrangling). The ideas that are in dispute today impinge upon the most important and intimate affairs of life, and it follows that they arouse on all sides a great deal of feeling. It is, first of all, an age of conflict—of intellectual transition, challenge, and sharp inquiry—wherefore the passionate tone is heard everywhere and the tendency of extremism is encouraged. Per­ haps we can’t escape it—not entirely. Personally, I do not set myself up as the perfect rationalistic thinker nor the ideal free man. What is im­ portant, however, is that we should do our best to maintain intellectual poise and vigilance (keeping a careful eye, above all, upon our own in­ tellectual processes) and that we should not blindly surrender to the appeal of passion. Let us keep before ourselves always an ideal—the ideal of moderation, of sanity, of truth regardless of passion, party or prejudice. Let us strive always to realize this ideal, and even in our failures we shall win increased victories: and this victory, among others, that when we fail we shall be able rationally to perceive and acknowledge our failure. Some there are who tell us that life is an endless swinging back and forth between extremes. This is an argument frequently used by con­ servatives, who assure us (or try to reassure themselves) that the present tendency of free behavior—the revolt against the narrow morality of another age—is but a phase, which will be followed by a return to the other extreme of Puritanism: only, the conservatives do not admit that Puritanism is an extreme attitude. It is true that history records periods of freedom and periods of repression—times when men held the moral law (or what was thought to be the moral law) lightly and were more interested in the color and adventure of life, and other times when there was strong emphasis upon virtue and obedience—but it does not follow that mankind will always be doubling in their tracks. Certainly, it is reckless to assume that such must be the case and, worse yet, to speak favorably of it rather than advocate that rationalism—that moderation— which is a sure and healthful and constantly dependable guide. But the argument—“from one extreme to another”—is not true. Historical instances show its falsity. For example, who believes that the world will ever return to the extreme of superstition, the extreme of religious dogma and domination, that was the curse of the Middle Ages preeminently and that has throughout history until this modern age of science been the greatest obstacle to man’s happiness and progress? Here the race has surely made a real and permanent advance. Again, spite of a few modern dictatorships, it seems clear enough that the tendency of our age, which is not apt to turn backward, is toward politi­ cal freedom: that despotism is another extreme which lies safely behind us. We have, again, achieved pretty surely the ideal of democracy in a

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What Can a Free Man Believe?

social sense—a certain equality, of right and respect, for the personality of every man—so that we shall not, in the old extreme sense, have the aristocratic or caste system. And so the richness and vitality and manysided appeals to significant life in this scientific, materialistic age will make unthinkable a return to the extreme of Puritanism. None will deny that some persons go to extremes nowadays in throwing aside all moral restraint. In the most extreme cases, the trouble lies not in hav­ ing new standards but in having practically no standards. And we may admit that such extreme tendencies may wear themselves out. But there will be a settling back, as it were, into the enjoyment of a reasonable and tolerable freedom, not a turning back to the slavish, narrow, intolerable regime of Puritanism. There are certain things that distinguish modern life—say, for one notable example, the changed relations between men and women—which plainly are permanent gains for the race. So those who use the figure of the pendulum, swinging back and forth, are not only poor reasoners but they are not broadly truthful historians. 3. WE ARE JUST BEGINNING TO LIVE

It is a wonderful age we live in, with all its unsettlement and con­ flict (which indeed make it interesting), and a greater future that beckons to us. Taking the race as a whole, we can say truthfully that man is just beginning to live. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that man is just learning how to live. Indeed, the past has its joy and beauty (especially when we idealize it) and men who have been dust for centuries knew what it was to enjoy a full and happy life. Yet we should bear in mind that for the unknown millions of men, the past was narrow when not intolerable—mostly, if we are truthful, we will admit that it was intolerable. It is our machine age—this age of science—which has brought the common man into the clear air and robust hope of vital, selfrespecting, many-sided living. Not to speak of the enlarged intellectual viewpoint which we owe to science, there are material conditions of power and wider opportunity which we preeminently enjoy in this age, and which the past never had. Still do we carry many needless burdens, still do we blunder and see life darkly or not at all in many corners, still do we have our important problems that cry for solution: yet what should thrill us is the vast, firm, material basis—the basis of power, knowledge and technique—upon which we can build, so far as intelli­ gence and good will and earnest striving will reach, a lofty and free and beautifully significant life for all men. Scientifically—not simply as a pretty fancy—there is no limit to what mankind can make of life on this planet. It will not suddenly do wonders, of course, and it will struggle yet for a long while with preju­ dices and passions and past traditions that have a sentimental or moral appeal but that, actually, stand in the way of a better life. The thought which should impress us profoundly, and to apply which we should spare no effort, is that only moderation, the spirit of just inquiry, the love of truth—in a word, the ideal intellectual attitude of the free man—will carry us to this splendidly possible goal. We can escape from the restrictions and despairs of the past. We can live fully in our own right, making realism our test and following tradition only when it runs

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parallel with realism. We can keep to the middle ground, avoiding both a blind, passionate dogmatism and a blind, passionate rebellion against all standards, definitions, and aims. We can let our emotions be servants, enriching life for us, and not masters, confusing life for us. Ideas should serve the useful and happy ends of life. And hence there is nothing so valuable, seen from every viewpoint Qf theory or practice, as truth.

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What Can a Free Man Believe?

CHAPTER III Things—How Man Should Look at His World

Our View of the Nature

of

1. MAN AND HIS KNOWLEDGE

'T has been said that every man has a philosophy of life: that is to say, his general view of nature, man, and society—the way in which he looks, whether or not with very precise and con­ scious thought, at the world he lives in—or his feeling about life, which takes the place of thought, or which is a vague and disordered kind of thought. That seems a large statement and a dubious one, when we call to mind many persons who seem really to have no view of life and whose talk and reading and range of interests appear absurdly in­ adequate to support the dignity of such a term as “philosophy.” Yet we may take it loosely that everyone not an imbecile has, by the time he reaches maturity, got a haphazard, disjointed view of life. It may be superficial, and with enormous gaps, and composed of contradictory ideas. Press the average man, and you will find that he has a set of opinions strung together, with some, though slight, connection. It is, of course, this connection and orderly grasp of ideas which is commonly lacking, tenuous or pretty ragged. Among men there are all degrees and varieties of “philosophy” in this use of the term, and I shall not attempt the encyclopedic task of tracing them in their tortuous courses. But I shall take an impersonal figure of Man, and ask what is the importance to him of a philosophy of life and what, in some points—or in a broad way—that philosophy should be. It is the business of man to know his world. “The proper study of mankind is man”—man and nature and all things which come within the scope of man’s intelligible thinking and acting. From birth to death (or, let us say, until we—if we do—reach that period of being “set in our ways”) we are busily receiving impressions of the world about us and in some sort thinking about those impressions and following the guidance of experience and reflection, whether faintly or clearly, in all the affairs of life. If one observes correctly (and widely) and thinks intelligently, one lives, subject to the chances of character and circum­ stance, a reasonable life. The provisional phrase refers to the well known fact that we cannot always—or not all of us can—follow our finest, truest vision and that we do not act precisely in the light of the best knowledge we have. For that matter, nine men among ten regularly violate, in some way or ways, the rules of common sense. But let us not digress; let us return to the question of how man should look at his world. It will help us to glance briefly at the record of man’s knowledge. The world was a mystery to primitive man—infinitely more a mystery than it is to us—although it is probable that very primitive people were not given much to reflection or to the feeling of the mystery of things.

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But, at any rate, the earliest gropings of man—his earliest attempts at thought—or his earliest stirrings of fancy were, indeed, gropings in the dark. With sharpening sensitiveness, he was certainly very much im­ pressed by the operations of nature, by his own self, and by the un­ imaginable blankness of all he didn’t know. He wondered. He marveled. He guessed. He did a great deal of guessing, and weird fancies were conceived by him, and religions ranking from crude to the elaborate. Evolving man, more notably from the beginning of civilization, learned more about his world, but he learned slowly and inaccurately—enough to survive, and to form societies, and to proceed in acquiring more knowledge, chiefly how to build and how to destroy what he built, how to sow and reap, how to identify familiar objects, how to carry on social intercourse—a number of things, indeed, but not how to think scien­ tifically. When we come to the beginnings of what really may be called the intellectual life of man, our minds turn at once to “the glory that was Greece’’: a glory of art and intellect that will command the admiration of men throughout all civilized time. The Greeks were full of intellectual O < curiosity and they reflected profoundly upon the nature of life. They had a lofty order of ideas, they speculated boldly and ingeniously about the What, How, and Why of things, and modern thought, looking back through the centuries, recognizes kinship with the best and soundest (which was a great deal) of Greek thought. Truth-seekers they were, the Greeks, and with much brilliancy to show for their efforts. Their chief distinction, intellectually, was in studying the nature of thought itself and in the clarification of human nature. Nature, more largely speaking, they knew less well, albeit the Greek thinkers hit upon ideas that were centuries later to be developed soundly by evolutionary science: the idea of evolution, by the way, was known to the Greek thinkers, although they had not the means (nor the right direction of aim) for carrying it far and providing for it the immense and sound basis of fact which we have in modern science. The Greeks were too enamored of abstract thought—thought for its own sake, thought sublime and in­ trospective but not scientific. It may be said that they speculated rather than observed, regarding the origin, nature, and meaning of the universe. The Greeks and Romans had literary and philosophic and humanistic knowledge—but they did not develop that most amazingly successful and unimpeachable kind of knowledge, namely, science. Inspired partly by the humanism of the Greeks and Romans, mankind came slowly out of the medieval night, in which the attitude toward nature was incredibly and wholly superstitious. By little man gained a knowledge of his world, of nature, although learning himself (and therefore the intelligent management of his life) last of all. He began to put the universe, so to speak, into an intellectually orderly shape. (When one says that man did this, one means, to be sure, that a few men thus studied the causes of things and with the advancement of scientific knowledge light spread through the world of common men who had darkly plodded and stumbled in the midst of forces they did not understand and to which, save in phases of terror and legend, they were indifferent.) Doubt and the desire to know were, as they still are, the

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What Can a, Free Man Believe?

incentives that effectively most stimulated the mind of man. Skepticism, candidly confessing that it does not know the whole truth—not pretend­ ing that the last depth of mystery has been plumbed (this pretense is reserved for the faith-mongering dogmatists)—is, after all, the only safe attitude. The skeptic does not embrace reckless assumptions and leap blindly without looking for the direction of the evidence. The mark of the skeptic is a careful mind. He has, let us say, an intellectual con­ science, his attitude toward truth being neither the loose attitude of the easy conformist nor the perverse and specious attitude of the unyielding dogmatist. And the skeptic agrees with Locke in his “sensational” theory of knowledge: i. e., that the mind has no thought and contains no under­ standing of things which is not the result of impressions coming through the five senses. You can say that the mind is acted upon by the things of the sensory world (what other, independent world is or can there be?) or that the mind acts upon these things—but something must be there, since evidently the mind cannot spin ideas out of some secret store within itself. Philosophically, a good many fine hairs have beemsplit and twisted and curlycued into curious shapes in dispute of this “sensational” theory —yet it stands today a plain theory, the view of common sense, incontro­ vertible save by a strange species of romantic “reasoning.” It is certainly this theory which directs the triumphant work of science. To be sure, science theorizes and engages in abstract speculation, but always beginning at and returning to the facts. There is combined speculation and observa­ tion, but observation is the first and last test. Not all of us can be scientists, although we can be scientific as far as we go. The average man can do no better than apply, within his sphere of daily experience, the methods of the scientist. We can, all of us, at least avoid a great deal of bunk by simply checking up theories, assumptions, illusions, and the like, by the plain facts of life. I do not pretend to discuss science in any but a superficial way—its general princi­ ples and its attitude toward the understanding of life, its broad intellectual conclusions, so to speak—but it is enough to bring home the thought that science provides an impregnable ground of rationalism, which in its com­ mon range of significance is not beyond the comprehension of the average man who will use his mind freely. Man can recognize, in a scientific but not a sentimental way, his true relation to all life, the material ele­ ments that compose his being, the story of his evolution, and the fact that he is a creature who responds definitely to certain physical stimuli. Is man a machine? To pose that question—even to suggest it, tenta­ tively, as a possible and plausible attitude of thought—is to offend the pride of the average man. HE a machine! He is a “soul”—or some­ thing: yes, he must be something. Yet it is clear that man’s actions can be convincingly explained in mechanical terms, action and reaction, cause and effect. We seem to have no choice save between two alternatives, either the exploded free-will theory or the mechanistic theory. The former is impossible, and the latter is in many respects not satisfying—but it is strongly favored by all the evidence we have, real evidence at hand, and not the supposition of evidence still to come. What is true is that from the simplest actions of daily life to the formation of a philosophy of life, man can see that the method of science

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is more enlightening and efficient than that of guess-work or faith. In his work, his simple functions of keeping alive, and his going about the world, man behaves on the realistic principle, seeing things as they are (or if he does not thus see them he suffers in consequence) and not letting every sort of chimerical notion divert him from reality. What is the difference, concerning the ordinary business of life, between the sane man and the insane? It is the difference, is it not, between the realist and the man whose mind is dizzy with chimeras? Yet when he comes to the larger questions of thought, the average (sane) man abandons his day-by-day rule of realism, and thinks inco­ herently, without rhyme or reason—oh, perhaps with rhyme!—not testing an idea as he would test a simple personal action. Practically, he learns by his mistakes and, even when he repeats such mistakes, he acknowledges that he knows better and is merely led astray by his desires. It’s a real world, and the same world, that we all live in. After all, spite of the many theories “spiritual” and otherwise, everybody lives in this one undeniable world of familiar objects and actions, and no amount of rigmarole will change the facts. To deny realities, or to speciously “interpret” them, does not alter their character and their operation. This attitude, fundamentally, a man should cultivate: namely, to see things as they really are and to ask of every theory or assumption, “How does it correspond with the observable facts?” We need also to keep carefully in mind the necessity of suspended judgment when we are not familiar with many facts bearing upon a certain question. How can one have an opinion of the least value unless one is acquainted with the facts, out of which material all opinion must substantially form itself? Ordinarily, men have a poor regard for anyone who “shoots off his mouth,” as they say, without knowing whereof he speaks. Every village has a character who is notorious for telling everything and knowing nothing. Yet in very important matters of opinion, how common is this habit of positive assertion without in­ formation or judgment! “Believe only what you see” has a strong element of truth, if taken liberally. Believe at least only what man has seen, done, learned and reliably, reasonably reported. Certainly, man should not go perversely counter to the testimony of his senses, nor should he run loose amid theories without sufficient knowledge. If anyone extends his curiosity beyond what a well-read man, cultured but not thoroughly scientific, knows—let him go to the scientists who, and who only, can furnish him valuable knowledge. It is true that we can ask many “Whys?” but at last come to a “Why ?” that is unanswerable. Let us recognize the mysterious character of life, at bottom, not in the spirit of mysticism but that of honest skepticism or agnosticism. The farthest reach of scientific knowledge does not mean a complete explanation of life and the universe. Mor do scientists make any such claim of all-knowingness. But this is no ob­ jection to science or the attitude of sticking to observable facts and the rule of reason. It is not so very long that science—especially science in its great modern organization—has been exploring the nature of things. For centuries men, save a few here and there with poor equipment work-

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What Can a Free Man Believe?

ing in a world hostile to their labors, were incurious about the natural world or were satisfied with the most childish guesses and fancies. Within the past two centuries, or mainly within the past century, science has successfully established itself as the true explorer and interpreter of life, and in that time it has accomplished wonders which would have seemed incredible to our pre-scientific ancestors. At any rate, all that we reliably know and that our transformed world of mechanical and efficient action guides itself by, we owe to the methods of science: the method of realism, of looking at the facts, which every man should apply to his whole life and all of his ideas. And if not to science, where then shall we look for still ogreater knowledge? It is man ’ s business to o know the world, and he can only do that by observing the world, by keep­ ing in touch with realitv, by sticking close to. facts. It is sometimes objected that science does not deal with the meaning, or the nature, of things but only describes their appearance and behavior. This argument comes from poets who must have a beautiful inexpress­ ibleness to lend wings to their fancy, and from metaphysicians, who have the itch to be “profound”—i. e., to construct imaginary thought­ worlds all their own. In fact, philosophy has been led a-stray by seeking vaguely behind the realities that the scientist (and within his limits the average man') can correctlv observe, for some hidden, undefinable, inconceivable “thing-in-itself”—for something, one would suggest, that is “spiritually” superior to mere facts. Yet, after all, the truth about things is just what we can know about their characteristics, their shapes and colors and elements, etc., and their ways of behaving. If we fall short of knowing the whole truth about any phenomenon or any process of nature, this simply means that we have yet to learn other characteristics which have so far eluded scientific research. What is the “nature” of fire? of water? of an animal body? of any familiar thing in our world? When we know its use and behavior, and the like, do we not know its “nature”? No man would think of performing his morning ablutions in a bowl of fire, nor of keeping warm by lighting a match to a furnace full of water, nor of setting a man to pull a railroad train. The scientific attitude is that of perceiving things clearly, knowing how they work, and placing (or seeing) them in their true relation to other things. We are always trying to know more about things in this way, but man should not make the mistake of thinking that a fantastic image or set of words has the validity of real knowledge. An idea that does not square with the facts of life, or that has no evidential basis in life (a fantasy or dogma), is an unscientific idea. In many of his actions, man is roughly scientific but in his larger ideas he is capable of any folly. Up to a certain point he is scientific about death, for example—he has to be—but then he turns to the unscientific belief in immortalitv. 2. HAS LIFE ANY MEANING?

Was it Spinoza who wrote that if a stone on its way through the air could speak it would exclaim, “Flow free I am”? So men, not realizing the motivation of their acts, talk about free will. And so, explaining their lives in terms of effort and desire, they talk largely—and vaguely —of a “meaning” in life. What life means in rational, active significance to the race or the individual is not enough for these idealists (or these

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egoists?) but they would have it that man is the sublimest agent in the working of a cosmically arranged destiny, plotted and manipulated from Olympus, Valhalla or Heaven. Or as Emerson expressed it, that life means the “Inworking of the All,'’ which is precisely as transparent as the side of a brick building. Here is a question that men have argued for ages and that they will probably continue to vex their brains about until the last of the human chronicle. They must be something more than merely human beings fretting their brief hour upon the stage of time. Usually men have given temperamental meanings to life: well enough, if they correctly limit this meaning each to himself: but scarcely convincing when they assert this or that meaning, reflecting their own personal bias, to be the universally true and predestined scheme of life. In truth, the many differences about the meaning of life are enough to show that it has no meaning beyond what men, in varying circumstances, give to it. “Life is real, life is earnest”: it is real, surely, but its earnestness takes many forms and is a product of human social evolution. The poet, let us say, makes a meaning for life that is beautiful to him; it is not the meaning of life to the common man, nor to a financier, nor to a military leader, nor to an evangelical saver of souls. And men have the quite under­ standable aim of satisfying or supporting their egoism, their moral sense, their fears and hopes and what-not: so they idealize life to reassure them in some such preconceived attitude. Take a man who is burdened with the moral sense: he must imagine to himself a universe of meaningful moral law, purposefully ordained and carried out from the beginning of time. In a word, life “means” what any man wishes it to “mean.” This idea of a plan or destiny in life—something, you understand, that is supposed to be superior yet ennobling to man—is not exactly the same as the old dispute between pessimism and optimism, the argument as to whether there is more pain or pleasure in life: a life of predomina­ ting pain might have a meaning, in the sense insisted upon by the be­ lievers in an “intelligent universe” of grand and conscious design—for instance, if there were a God, he might be a malignant ruler of the cosmos and his celestial hobby the making sport of men. But with this question, as with others, we have to take the attitude of common sense. It may seem a pretty humble or homely attitude, yet it has its compensations, being safe and at least enabling us to get somewhere in our discussions. We must not try to be too “profound” and thus neglect obvious facts, ignoring, to paraphrase an old figure of speech, both the wood and the trees* for something ethereally beyond the human perception or conception. Philosophically (or religiously) those who say that life has a mean­ ing have in mind a principle of design imposed upon the universe and upon man from somewhere, by somebody, somehow—which, if you ask me, is some Chinese puzzle. As a general idea, it is away up in the air: and in detail, nobody has ever been able to do much toward working it out. These would-be subtle and really opaque thinkers have in mind a “far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves,” Pennyson’s “one increasing purpose” that runs magically through the ages. \\ e are asked to conceive of an absolutely patterned order and aim of life, although the pattern is inscrutable to man: to all except bundamentalist

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What Can a Free Man Believe?

preachers, we might cautiously add. Inscrutable, yes: your true devotee of this design theory says nothing, after all, about the design except that it is perfectly wise and good and will some day be complete for the men of an unimaginably remote future age to see. “We’re here because we’re here” seems to be a much better way of looking at it, for at least it does not claim so much on so slender a basis—on no basis whatever that we can see. For in this sense life has no meaning that man has been able to discover. Here verily are words without sense, although they be pretty and clever words. Oh, it is easy to spin these words of glittering and insinuating sophistry and the agile wits of man can make out some sort of case for any theory. Put your mind firmly to the task of finding a solid, tangible, usable idea in the midst of these fine words, and you must quickly perceive that it is all simply idealism, sentiment, wish-thinking. There is nothing plainly, convincingly evident in life to show that it has a meaning, beyond what you and I have been led to trace upon its surface for our own satisfaction. Rather we conclude the opposite: think of the .infinitely slow, bloody, wretched, blundering course of evolution, the “trial and error” of nature, the terrible penalties life has had to endure, the rise and fall of civilizations, the follies man has innumerably committed against him­ self—think of this and then ask yourself where is that perfect guidance. Evolution (and evolution is only one aspect of life, for there are also retrogression and stagnation) is indeed contradictory to the idea of in­ telligent design. If there were a divine designer, what a botched and wobbly design would he be responsible for! Evolution ? Preachers have seized upon that truth—when they could no longer combat it with their ancient dogmas—as wonderful evidence of the handiwork of God, the master builder and artist. They do not dwell, however, upon the ghast­ liness of the evolutionary story (if we look at it, as scientifically we should not, from a moral point of view) and the fact that in the succession of forms of life, struggling and dying, and a few finally surviving^ no intelligence has been manifest: only the slow and clashing operation of natural forces. Nor can the history of man, a mere flash compared with geological time, be regarded idealistically from the viewpoint of the theorists of intelligent design and “one increasing purpose.” Only within the past few centuries have we had a steady progress of mankind, broadly speak­ ing—yet, even so, retrogression and smash-up here and there—and today how sad and disorderly the world still is. And in man’s past—what lack of intelligence, what insensate disasters, what tragic conflict's and ruins! Take but one great historic example: If there is an intelligent planner and an intelligent purpose behind human life, why should the brilliant Greek civilization—the ancient world so full of hope and culture and capable of all good things (assuming, with all it logically implies, the theory of a purpose of intelligent earth-superior power in life)—have died? Why should mankind have suffered the darkness and terror of the Middle Ages? Why any of the catastrophies and insanities of his­ tory? It is all very well to talk about inscrutability, and say that we don’t understand (we don’t} the universal plan, but these facts are

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plainly contradictory to the notion of an all-ruling intelligence. If any­ thing seems to be indicated relentlessly by the record of man, it is that there is no intelligence in this philosophic or religious sense but a nat­ ural play, good and evil (or perhaps we should say beyond good and evil), of events. We seek in history, as in the larger field of science, not for some hidden, all-wise, all-powerful purpose but for soundly efficient and, once traced, plainly explicable causes. As for evolution, it is not a perfect, infallible “law.” There is nothing inevitable about it. Forms of life have evolved when changes in their environment compelled such evolution or made it easy and desirable; otherwise, they have been fixed—that is to say, satisfactorily adapted—at certain stages. Not everything evolves; some things do, given the right conditions. It happens that in man we have had most powerfully the conditions of evolution. From the higher mammals to the lowest forms of life we see countless instances of interrupted evo­ lution. Nature is blind and purposeless—that is the best way we can express it; it is an accurate way. And when nature behaves “intelligently” it is under the direction of man. Nature acts unintelligently in certain ways (not always orderly ways) regardless of consequences to life. Nature is quite indifferent to man, and at times it may well strike the imagination that nature is inexorably the foe of man. The truth appears to be that nature, being unconscious, doesn’t care one way or the other. Calamitous forces repeatedly destroy the proudest works of man—the unintelligence of nature colliding with the creative intelligence which, so far as we know, only man possesses. Life has no cosmic, no perfectly patterned and precise, “meaning.” It is not true that all things work infallibly together for a certain aim—there is no aim or, if so, what is it? None can say. There is a meaning, we are told by various soothsayers, but what meaning they cannot agree nor clearly indicate. Of all the philosophies, all the religions, all the forms of idealism, which one may be the true discovery or interpretation of life’s meaning? Echo returns its usual answer: simply the question thrown back to us unsatisfyingly. Such meaning as, in another and more limited and more temporary sense, there is in life has been written or worked into life by man himself. We have objects, desires, ideas in this life of ours, but their meaning, their significance, begins and ends with ourselves. There are nations, groups, individuals that have certain humanly considered meanings in life, and these meanings—or aims—often conflict in a tragic way. As men have highly developed emotions, very active senses, and reasoning power which somehow they use, it follows that they give what they call a “meaning” to their lives. They may be foolish, they may have a very poor idea what they are about, they may end in failure; yet, as they think and feel, they ascribe their different purposes and draw their pat­ terns, drab or gaudy or really beautiful, for this e'arthly show. 1 hey strive variously toward goals near and far, small and large, foolish and wise—but what does nature car a? what recks the universe of this striv­ ing? what intelligent meaning, applying to the whole of life and time, is discernible? Yet this is not pessimism. Man’s conception of the meaning of life

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IF hat Can a Free Man Believe?

is important to man, but to him alone. Progress is real and desirable. The ideal of the civilized life is just as fine and worthy of our efforts, regardless of the indifference of nature or the absence of an all-seeing mind planning the whole. If we work toward human, not divine plans— toward limited, not absolute plans—what then? There is still as truly the element of choice, the intelligent conception of values, the possibility of a happy and significant life. I live a few years and then I die: certainly when I am dead life has no meaning for me: yet while living I have not the less a desire to express my aliveness in certain ways. We must reduce this question of the meaning of life to a rational, human scale. If life, philosophically speaking, is indifferent to us, it does not follow that we should or that humanly we could be indifferent to life. 3. THE FUTILITY OF MYSTICISM

Some time ago I read a criticism of Voltaire, not the vituperative outburst so frequently heard from preachers, but on the whole a sym­ pathetic and intelligent account: but this writer declared that Voltaire’s great weakness was that he lacked the tone, the outlook, or perhaps it was the “insight” of “spirituality.” In other words, he meant to say that Voltaire was not a mystic. The sage of Ferney (his home in the latter years on the French-Swiss border)—the most directly and widely effective thinker of the eighteenth century—was a rationalist of keen and balanced mind, who did not swamp his intelligence with moonshiny speculations about the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Why play idly with words (in the realm of ideas) when one could deal with facts and with ideas that were realistic? That was Voltaire’s—and is consistently the rationalist’s—attitude. It was fortunate for his age that Voltaire was not “spiritual,” which is not the same thing as to say that he was deficient in human feelings: but he discussed life as it concretely appeared and moved before him, he had a lucid grasp of ideas, and he looked straight at the common facts of life: nor was his range of vision narrow, but was as wide as the world. What, after all, is mysticism? It is an attempt to go beyond the realities of life and to transcend the power of reason. One might say that it is a fantastic effort to “feel” what the mystic calls truth without the mental labor of seeking it by means of observation and reason. The mystic may sometimes be a poet but he is not a thinker. And no pro­ cedure or product of thought—no explanation of things, however intel­ lectually sound and satisfying—is acceptable to the man who flies off on a tangent of mysticism. Indeed, it seems that he will go far out of his way to avoid contact with a reasonable and simple idea. The firm and noble and wholesomely earth-wise simplicity of reason is not for him; he really does not believe that it is noble. When he speaks of the sublime, you may be sure that he means “such stuff as dreams are made of,” something (or a shadowy, insubstantial nothing) which is utterly remote from life, the pale ghostly fluttering of an idea that is too esoteric and pointless for mortal comprehension, let alone mortal use. At bottom, mysticism is a turning away from life. He who seeks this sort of escape is by no means unaware of the very material and factual order of things which the rest of us know. He can train himself to be less sharply aware of, or less clearly efficient in, real life: the true mys­

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tic can do this, although the charlatan who peddles some new cult is exceedingly efficient in gathering material riches. But the true mystic knows reality well enough to dislike it and his poetic or theoretic vapor­ ing is a cloud placed between him and the facts which he does not like to gaze upon. Pore over all the volumes written by those who pretend that, through some magic in their own minds, they have discovered the “secret truth” of life: and you will end your reading without having gained any real knowledge of life. Now, it is clear enough that the important affairs of mankind, both material and cultural, depend upon men who have a grasp of realities, who know and who are intelligently interested in life, who think and act in a rationalistic spirit. Great ideas that have enlightened the world have been the product of rationalism. “Life is real, life is earnest”—but it is not real to the mystic, who is engaged in earnestly persuading himself that what is real is therefore false and that truth is synonymous with a “soulful” unreality. Imagine a world entirely given over to mystical belief and rule! It requires no great effort of the imagination, for we need only glance at the Middle Ages, when mysticism thrived in the rank darkness and ugliness and wretchedness of a semi-barbaric Europe; then the mad devotees of a somber and terrible faith went into well-nigh incredible excesses of self-torture, superstition-mongering, contempt for themselves and for mankind and for all life. In that time of extreme faith and mysticism, when the gospel of unreality and “unworldliness” (actually, ugly-worldliness) was widespread, there was overwhelming, unrelieved filth, disease, ignorance, cruelty—in short, not any less real a world but a terribly, hopelessly real world. And naturally so: for what had mystics, contemplating their crazy “souls,” to do with light and health and sanity in the world? Again, naturally, the decline of medievalism and mysticism and the growth of the rationalistic spirit made the world a more and more decent place to live in. It is the business of man to know his world, to live intelligently in his world, and he can do this only in a realistic way. Mysticism is not only worthless as an attitude toward truth but it is absolutely incompati­ ble with a safe, orderly, efficient, civilized life. It has given nothing in sound culture or comfort or common good to the race. It is not only absurd; it is pernicious. In a word, it tells man to wallow in the mire and fix his gaze upon the stars—although individual mystics would revolt at going so far and indeed (consider the Christian Scientists or any of the noi^-materialists) do not live according to their own creeds.

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What Can a Free Man Believe?

CHAPTER IV Creeds Are Mental Slavery and Faith Is the Jailer of Reasoni *

1. CHAINS FOR THE MIND

REE thinking does not apply alone to religion but it is in this connection that it is best known or, as the man of piety would say, notorious. It means a reasonable attitude toward all things: morals, politics, human nature, common beliefs and every prob­ lem, small or large, that concerns life. And it is impossible to have the right use of reason when one has dogmatically fixed ideas in any field of opinion. Nor is dogmatism confined to religion. A man may be free from all the restrictions of religious belief and his mind may confront things directly and judge of them without the confusion or interference of illogical creeds, yet be the narrow adherent of a party in political affairs or have an intolerant view of morals or have the mind of a censor in considering literature or hold stubbornly to intense racial prejudices. The converse sort of inconsistency is not so likely to be met. Intolerance in religion seems to rule out the possibility of toleration on any other subject. There are many chains for the mind other than the chains of reli­ gion. Granted: yet religion, having for many centuries—throughout historic time indeed until its lessening influence in our time—sensation­ ally oppressed the human mind and being today a very lively source of dispute, it is important to say something about it from the viewpoint of a free-minded individual. It is the more important when we reflect that the first necessary step toward intellectual freedom is to throw off this bondage of the superstitious past: to face life without any illusions of faith or dogma. It is not an exaggeration to say that the man who binds himself mentally by a pious creed, by a supernatural view of the uni­ verse, by any doctrinal fetters of theology is in comparable case with the man who should let himself be tied down physically so that he could not move. For it is obvious that such creeds confine opinion within certain very narrow channels and on the subjects which the creeds touch they stop thought almost entirely. Once a man has subscribed to a set of arbitrary notions about God, the Bible, immortality, sin, and righteous­ ness—once he has surrendered to the “conviction,” as the preachers say, that this is the last word of truth—his mind ceases really to act in this field. Of course one might add fairly enough that his mind did not exhibit any considerable signs of action in the first place, since much activity of reason would make the acceptance of such creeds impossible. And it is true that the emotions have greatly an influence in persuading to religious credulity. Or if some believers may be said to reason after a fashion, they but repeat well-worn formulas, echoing what others have asserted without proving, relying as it were upon texts rather than real thought; saying, for example, that there must be a Supreme Power to

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account for the universe, that religion has been so immemorially and widely believed that it must be true, that the fact of man’s having the hope and idea of immortality proves the wish to be true, that to gaze upon nature is to have belief and faith—and so on. This is simply repeating a lesson without inquiring into its sound­ ness or into the intellectual qualifications of the teacher. Try to lead the believer into a discussion of the validity of these glib assertions: he will not follow such a lead—or if he does follow, finding himself quickly involved in contradictions and most annoying dilemmas, he falls back upon his original assertions, perversely refusing to be moved. One might think from his attitude that he is announcing self-evident truths: yet these ideas are not, after all, evident to him. He is taking them on trust ■—very poor trust. He is letting his mind be overborne by the prestige of solemn ceremony and time-heavy authority instead of bringing his mind independently to bear upon the subject. If the man who is a believer after this decidedly careless fashion of thinking were to do some genuine reasoning—if he were, in short, to take the attitude of a free man instead of an easily impresesd slave of creeds—he would ask himself a few questions that go to the very heart of the matter: What does the idea of God mean? Who or what is it? How does anybody know it and how can anybody explain it ? And what value does it possess as a solution of the mystery of life? If one must think of a God as having “made” the universe, if one demands logically the conception of a creative force, what can one say to the question of God’s own origin? (Yes, I know it is an old question very easily asked— obvious indeed but strangely overlooked by those who affirm the dogma of a God—and how difficult to answer! No matter how often it has been asked, this question has not lost its original force in knocking over the notion that to imagine a God is any solution or simplification of the Riddle of the Universe. Its simplicity does not take away from its effec­ tiveness. Let him who calls it a foolish question be wise and obliging enough to point out exactly what is its foolishness.) If this hypothetical believer should apply individual, realistic thought to religion instead of learning somewhat dumbly by rote the official arguments, he would realize that because millions have held a certain belief or kind of belief that can be no evidence of truth-yielding value. It would rather occur to him forcibly that what has been believed so widely as a matter of custom is likely, by that same token, to be untrue; the exceptional thinker is more apt to have sound ideas than the many who are not skilled in the use of reason and who are more easily influ­ enced b'r the pomp and threats and foolish dogmas of religion. It would, again, be clearly recognizable in the light of free thought that hope is no guaranty of fulfillment. The reflection would be unavoid­ able that men do not always get what they wish and that immortality, like other wishes, is subject to the laws of real life and probability—that if a man cannot have riches or power or genius merely by wishing, he would have even less chance of wishing himself into enjoyment of the dreamy prize of immortal life. And, of course, if this man looked at religion thoughtfu'ly he would be impressed by the fact that never has there been exhibited the faintest trace of evidence for immortality—that it is only an assertion, unproved and unreasonable. To be sure, the aver-

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What Can a Free Man Believe?

age believer knows well enough that none has ever returned from the grave to tell us about a future life other than the one we now know. If he is a Fundamentalist he refers us to certain texts in the Bible, as his proof of immortality, which are worthless because their authority—their source of knowledge—has to be proved in the first place and that is quite impossible. And speaking of the Bible, what a fettering weight and constriction upon the mind is belief in the “inspired truth” of this collection of ancient fables, prophecies and dogmas! The Fundamentalist, the type of believer who in the extent and rigidity of his belief prevailed until recent years, is the horrible example of slavery and Stygian darkness of mind associated with creeds. The modern tendency of rationalism has destroyed the old, terror-striking authority of religion. The pall of ecclesiasticism has been lifted from civilization, which it once covered so somberly and stiflingly—the creedal fetters have been broken in many places and weakened in others —even though we are still plagued by preachers and Christianity cannot be regarded as quite dead, although it exhibits moribund symptoms that he who runs may see. From present-day Fundamentalism to that re­ ligious attitude which is just as oddly called Modernism, there is a con­ fused medley of beliefs. A little here and a little there is lopped off from what preachers sonorously declaim to be the “sacred heritage” of re­ ligion, until finally a number of believers retain only the dogma of a God. Yet the man who holds partly to any creed or mystical belief, although it may not be so binding nor offensive to the mind as the literal, extreme dogmatism and pietism of the “old-time religion,” is not in a position to think freely—not quite. He has thrown off this chain, but he hugs that chain. He has opened one eye a little, but he keeps the other eye tightly shut. So far he may be willing to reason, but then he stops short at an assumption that he insists blindly upon believing. He may believe only in a God—he may reject the entire bundle of Christian doctrines—yet this theistic dogma can only be held in violation of reason: let us say, by an affirmation of something for which the believer has no evidence nor rational basis, which he can defend only by the declaration of faith; and to say that one has faith in an opinion simply means that otherwise the opinion is baseless. Consider any religious doc­ trine, and you cannot think about it—you cannot deliberately subject it to the process of reasoning—without the perception that it is only a chain of mental servitude. You understand I am not saying that everyone who has credence or sympathy for some aspects of religion is an abject, complete mental slave—nothing so melodramatic as that. There are degrees of submis­ sion to forms of belief or traditional, sentimental attitudes which cannot be reasonably maintained. The fact that a man is intelligent doesn’t mean that he invariably uses his reason on a subject. He may be for the most part a civilized and rational being with spots of bunkistic susceptibility. And, without particularly worrying over the idea of a perfect and bunkless world, we may yet agree that as an ideal the reasonable attitude is always desirable. Our besf thought should go to a consideration of any subject that is worth thinking about. If religion has no reasonable basis, and if otherwise reasonable men nevertheless

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have some sort of belief in religion, we have to record the fact and point out the contradiction. We know what the defenders of religion will reply. Take them at their best—those who do not pretend to argue dogmatically about the truth of religion—and what will they say? It will be alleged that re­ ligion—that a quality of faith or belief that may be called religious—is not only emotionally satisfying but inspiring. They will say further, these would-be “rational” religionists, that belief in religion is a vastly potent influence in upholding social morality. Here a grossly super­ stitious Fundamentalist and an amiably sophisticated Modernist will indeed meet on common ground. As thinking men, however, we shall still insist that the truth of an idea is what interests us first and last. We cannot agree with any belief in compliance with the plea that it is some­ how for the good of man in spite of its falsity. To do so would be a form of hypocrisy. But truth is not only intellectually compelling of our regard: it is also the best attitude toward life from the standpoint of the individual character and the social welfare. What has strewn history with the record of crimes, injustices and disasters? False ideas! Ideas of superstition! Ideas of greed and conquest! Ideas of hatred! Ideas of fear, of intolerance, narrowness and truth-obscuring passion! Truth has never injured man. The value of truth i?, after all, that of a scientific attitude toward life. It brings us into correct relations with the things of our world. In any situation, the more clearly we understand it the better we can deal with it. ‘Life, illumined by truth, can be more satisfactorily and effi­ ciently lived by men. And surely there is enough to do with our lives in a realistic way that can be far better done than hugging to ourselves vain illusions. If wishing for immortality will not make it true, it is a fact on the other hand that the cultivation of an intelligent, well-rounded, ardent life is possible. It has undoubtedly been a marked evil of religion that it has turned men’s thoughts too much away from the world —or twisted their attitude toward the world—and led them to neglect the real possibilities around them. I have often remarked that atheism is essentially an idea of progress. Once the idea of God and immortality and all the creeds are dismissed from the reckoning, man naturally turns his attention with all the clearer and stronger energy to the busi­ ness of earthly, human life. The world has been getting away from the vapidities and vanities of religion for the past few centuries, and during this time the race has made its greatest progress. So that, on the ground of expediency as well as truth (if we are to distinguish the two), the truth about religion is better than any false attitude of hope or belief. One way or another, false beliefs interfere with the business of living. Religion does not consist simply of abstract errors, but it has a concretely unfortunate bearing upon the issues of immediately daily concern to mankind. It has a part in confusing our minds on social questions. It has made a most unscientific and unhappy mess of moral ideas, standing in the way of an enlightened, wholesome joy in the natural expression of .our humanity. It has been responsible for infinite distress among men and women who, taught falsely by re­ ligion as to what life is or should be, have come to the most bitter dis­ illusionment. It has been an agency of sad repression and neglect, hold­

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What Can a Free Man Believe?

ing men and women back from happiness that lay within their grasp if they could have pierced with clear vision the shams of religion and realized their opportunities. To look at it most mildlv. it is but a child­ ish folly not fit for the maturity of human thought and action. It ministers to weakness, we are told; and we reply that it flatters and encourages weakness and what we regard as important is the cultivation of strength. A vain hope, once thrown aside and forgotten, simplifies and strengthens one’s character. He who leans upon something, imagi­ nary or real, other than himself undermines his own powers or prevents them from developing at all. Is thought useful to life? Is man a mere automaton? If he is a thinking creature, and if the activity of his mind is of the greatest significance in managing his affairs and guiding him along the various paths of life, then it is obvious that his mind should be free and strong and, in a word, an efficient machine. Growth is the ideal of life and the chains of religious belief prevent growth of the mind. And, although beyond the appreciation of the average man (yet open to the discovery of any man who has the good fortune to be released from the fetters of dogma), there is a rare intellectual satisfaction in the truth. After all, life is never so fascinating and full of drama, zestful urge and challenge, and solid significance as when one confronts it with a thoroughly active, free, realistic mind. Samuel Johnson remarked that there is as much difference between the lettered and unlettered as there is between the living and the dead; factually an exaggeration, yet expressing the truth that we live very little or very much according to the extent of our mental horizons. And between the man who is sensi­ tively and clearly thoughtful about life, and the man who merely exists incuriously or who shuts himself away from the truth and wonder of life by a wall of illusion, what a vast difference! There is a parallel between the body that is crippled or chained and the mind that is motionlessly bound; between the blind and those who see; between those who live fully and those who go the petty, narrow way of creeds. The value of truth is that it adds immensely to the rang© and meaning of life. 2. WHAT USE RELIGION?

If religion is not true—and the intellectual objections to it have never been cleared away but have become more formidable with the advance of science—what then can be said in its favor? There is, as I have mentioned, the dogmatic insistence upon the truth of religion as an absolute view of life and the opportunistic plea that religion is in cer­ tain ways useful to mankind regardless of its truth. Those who put the question on this ground of opportunism or pragmatism will have diffi­ culty in finding any solid justification. For when we ask what in the light of our modern knowledge and needs is the value of religion, we can discover no answer that would be satisfactory to those who senti­ mentally wish to retain a kind of extra-rational faith as a comforting illusion or as an idealistic social influence. What, for example—to put first things first—can religion tell us about the actual world? It offers no knowledge of the natural forces nor of the social elements that make our problems and that are the materials with which we must solve these problems. All that we know

E. Haldeman-Julius about nature, about how to use it for creative human purposes, and about how to survive in a world of reality (even though we insist upon living at the same time in a fool’s paradise of pretty chimeras) is the result of scientific investigation. No creed has ever, in its character as a creed theological, extended the boundaries of culture, of science, or of human possibilities in doing things worth while. Indeed, religion has never been interested in the truth about phenomena upon which we perforce depend for wrestling with the problems that naturally and steadily con­ front us. It is not from this source of faith and folly that men have obtained knowledge to prevent and combat disease. Nor has religion given them, to enumerate plainly, the facilities of travel and communica­ tion. Nor has it enabled them to increase their productivity—their wealth and power and thus their joy in life. Nor has it made possible for them any of the conveniences and comforts that distinguish our modern world. In short, religion has not been instrumental in teaching men how to live. In no way has this pompous and fallacious influence light­ ened the actual burdens of men or made life definitely easier and more understandable for them or helped them in the struggle of progress. Here—in practical, resultful use for living—religion is notoriously valueless. And the apologists for faith admit as much when they emphasize that religion reserves “spiritual” ministrations for its proper field of activity. Plainly stated, it offers us certain forms of belief that have nothing to do with reality or a tangible understanding of the nature of things and of ourselves. What else then does religion perhaps give to man ? Does it help man to understand himself? and how? As it gives no picture, or a false one of nature, so it fills man to sanctimonious and gaseous repletion with bunk about himself. One thing which religion primarily does is to deny the truth of man’s position in the world of nature. It insists that man is or has something called a “soul” and that this transcends his biological relation to the animal world. Admitting perhaps that he is an animal, the “soul” illusionists add that he is something mystically more, namely a particularly favored and noble creature of God direct, having the divine implanted in his nature (so skillfully, it appears, that it can­ not be discovered) ; that he is not just body and mind, but an invisible, indefinable spirit. That is flabbergasting enough to the man who asks a concrete hold upon truth. Yet contradictorily religion teaches that man is nothing very much of his own self and right in the view of God, that he is chiefly here to swell with glorification the divine vanity, and that he cannot follow his own intelligence or his own impulses but must count himself subservient to a mysterious higher power. Neither the evolu­ tionary truth about man, his animal origin and his material limitations, nor yet the truth that man represents the highest intelligence known in the universe and that therefore he must make his own world and live independently of any imagined deity, is recognized by religion. No, the tendency of religion is to apply arbitrary tests as to what is God’s will and the revealed way of worshipful righteousness and simi­ lar bunk, instead of thinking out things in a realistic, human way. The influences of heredity and environment, as well as the individual pecu­ liarities and the subtly varied accidental circumstances that govern human behavior, are ignored fatuously by religion. For any real light on this

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What Can a Free Man Believe?

most important problem, the understanding of human nature, we must turn in every instance to science. From religion we have a queer mixture of certain allegedly divine commands, certain precepts, certain assump­ tions about the nature and duty of man, which are baseless and many of which are quite foolish. At best, if it may be called a “best,” religion when it enters the field of morality tells man to be good. But it doesn’t tell him how to be good, nor teach him primarily to know himself, nor has it a convincing explanation of what constitutes goodness. Even pious people among themselves, starting from the same dogmatic prem­ ises, reach different conclusions about what is virtue. And religion does not confine itself to ordinary morality, to the common-sense field of behavior, but lays down a set of pietistic theo­ logical rules that are valid only if one admits the irrational ideas of religion by surrendering his reason into the keeping of the creeds. Re­ ligiously regarded, it is a virtue, for example, to believe in God and Jesus and heaven, and so forth, brain-distortingly, but this is utterly apart from the real question of what man is and what he should do. Belief is not a virtue in itself. If we should use the term virtue in con­ nection with belief, we must say that only that belief is worthy and good and at all defensible which is arrived at by honest and freely employed reason. It is a virtue—if any virtue there be in the matter—for a man to believe what he thinks is true. This at least should be the justification of belief, nor should a man refuse at any time to reconsider his belief in the light of a skeptical challenge to that belief. The Christian may be honest enough in lending credence to the rigmarole of theology; but so is the atheist perfectly honest and true to his highest conscience in rejecting the beliefs of the Christian. It is sufficiently evident that religion does not throw any useful light upon human nature. It has abso­ lutely nothing to offer you or me in explanation of the working of our minds, the realistic influences that direct us and mold our natures, the quality and guidance of our impulses, or the adjustment of ourselves individually to life. In what other way may religion possibly be useful? Well, wc have been told often enough that it is the necessary basis of morality in our social world; and that the individual cannot be good without the sacred fortitude of faith. In crude language the evangelist tells us and in more polished, artful phrase the more intelligent defender of religion tells us that society would speedily be corrupted or would go to smash if it were not for holiness doing business in its archaic temples—for the preachers —something, that is to say, besides reason and pla'in, sensible morality and the motives of social welfare. Yet where is the authoritv for the notion that religion makes men better or that it is essential for social purposes? The very laws of human behavior and its scientifically traced ramifications are unknown to these religious apologists. Almost, they seem to say in effect that men are good or bad according to whether or not they listen to the preachers. They are decidedly in error, to begin with, in ignoring the social evolution and basis of morality and the realistic motives that impel human action. Does religion in any way clarify or even consider the economic, biological, cultural, emotional ele­ ments that make the nature of a man and determine his conduct? Does it offer us knowledge—or in its own favorite full-mouthed word, “in-

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spiration”—to deal with the conditions of life and education of human beings so that we can develop toward civilized ways of living? It cer­ tainly does not. But on the contrary there is in religion a kind of think­ ing (or believing) incompatible with what modern science teaches us soundly regarding nature and man, concerning sociology and psychology, and concerning, first and last, the physiological responses of the human being. The morality of religion, insofar as it is religious, is quite arbitrary and unscientific; therefore, it is not merely useless but harm­ ful, diverting its followers from a true analysis of life. It is, anyway, the primary mistake of these apologists—these men who, embarrassed in their defense of religion as thought, try to justify it as conduct—that they confuse morality with religion. Evidently they would persuade us that the two things are inseparable, that without one the other would perish. It seems indeed that almost everything, regard­ less of its plainly natural and non-religious source and significance, is * bv or one man or another attributed to religion. Whatever man does—if he discovers a natural law or builds a skyscraper or writes a poem or com­ poses a symphony or exhibits a sense of decency and order in his rela­ tions with his fellow man—it is absurdly alleged that he has been inspired thereto by religion. But morality, using that term in its broadest and not in a puritanical sense, is far too important to be confined to such a narrow field as that of religion. It is obviously indispensable to the life of any social organization. Certain rules of behavior were evolved in human society as the necessary protection of men. Had men never been deluded by religious beliefs, were the whole record of religion absent from the human story, we should have morality (t. e., a naturally selective attitude toward con­ duct) just the same. Taking first place in morality, of course, is the prevention of actual injury by one man to another. “Thou shalt not kill” and all similar injunctions or laws against hurtful encroachment upon another’s person or property or peaceful pursuits have no divine origin, nor do they stand in need of any such origin, but are obviously and essentially human laws. There are, again, the moral ideas of honesty, kindness, respect for the rights of one another’s personality, and the like. And these again plainly have their social origin and aim in making life more livable under social conditions. Inevitably where two men live together there is a code, written or understood, that guides their dealings one with another: and that will be the case if they never hear of religion. The man who runs amuck without any rational code of be­ havior injures not merely others but he is certain to bring himself to grief or ruin. Surely, the conduct of life is important, and moral questions, prop­ erly considered, are of high concern. But it must be a sensible morality. It must be a consideration of human rights, definitely and fairly, and of rationally perceived effects in behavior. Morality, in short, must have a realistic and social sanction and we ignore what passes, under any other pretended sanction, in its name. I say only this much about morality (which I shall discuss more thoroughly at a later point in this study of a free man’s beliefs) in order to show the baselessness of the familiar but never well-supported claim that piety or faith in religion is essential to moral life.

What Can a Free Man Believe? A man’s religious belief is certainly a poor guaranty of his moral nature and on the other hand many men get along very well without the least religious belief and manage to keep the very finest character. To picture a collapse of morality, of the social structure, with the downfall of religion is to imagine the incredible paradox that society would not be sufficiently interested nor able to maintain itself apart from religious influence. It is to imagine that if religion were to disappear men would at once set murderously upon each other, begin to cheat and lie without exception, and lose all traces of kindliness and sociability. Even so—a simple fact that we should not overlook in this discussion—religion seems not to perform so remarkably well its boasted mission of keeping up the moral tone and protecting the social order. We have a great deal of crime in the world, which is not effectively dealt with on any religious plan; what means of protection we have are realistic in their nature. Morals, too, are rather haphazard, but puritanical, objections inspired by religion do not help us; and, anyway, there is room for a good deal of what is called “vice” in the world without a catastrophe such as taber­ nacle howlers love to prophesy. And still we inquire vainly, “What use religion?” Oh, yes, we are assured that religion with its hope of immortality is actually a vital inspiration to man’s carrying on his life at all. What keeps us working, loving, playing, thinking and planning in this theater of human action is the idea that we will be translated when we die into a heavenly sphere, so that we can believe our efforts here are not wasted; thus do the pious argue—without religion, man would simply lie down and “give up his ghost.” Must one really take the trouble to knock over this childish argument? The will to live is so strong that even under the most diffi­ cult, painful and hopeless circumstances men still hang on to their brief but strangely precious mortality. Life instinctively fights for survival. The beasts in the fields are not kept alive by the hope that they have a home ready in heaven, but they cling to life no less persistently. And with men there is additionally the awareness that life, after all, is intelligible and desirable and, indeed, fascinating within the limits of mortal experi­ ence. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, we may say that men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but they have not died in despair because they had ceased to believe in immortality. The reason­ able view, of course, is that when a man realizes that this is the only life he will have he will be all the more desirous to make it yield him joy and significance and because, so to speak, it is his sole possession of cer­ tainty he will not therefore the more readily throw it away. On this ground, as on all other grounds, religion is seen to be of no value prac­ tically just as it is of no value intellectually. 3. DEAD FAITH AND LIVING TRUTH

Yesterday belonged to religion. Today and tomorrow belong to science. And when I say “religion” I do not mean sentiment nor poetry nor ethics nor any emotional, moral sensitiveness with regard to life. Religion is a mystical, irrational, dogmatic attitude toward man and nature—a pretended explanation of life which does not even faintly explain—a form of belief that is without intelligible basis or significance. Dead faiths—those old, rusty, heavy chains for the mind—those prescientific guesses and fears about the world—what have we to do with

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them in this insistently realistic modern age? We have no more use for the ideas of religion than we have for the old-fashioned stage coach and tallow candles. What we must have is living truth for our very present and pro­ gressive needs. How pitiably ridiculous for a man to cling to the old, unscientific ways of judging life when science has revolutionized our conceptions and, however superficial our knowledge of science in detail, we can at least be familiar with its broad conclusions. And when, too, we can look critically and candidly at life for ourselves—a plain, well­ working faculty for observation and analysis being sufficient to expose for us the fallacies of religion. We know that we must die, and to the best of our knowledge death is exactly what it seems to be—well, all the more reason why we should be zealous to live while we may. Thinking rationally, we can realize that all the faith and mysticism and arbitrarily posed belief in the world will not bring us understanding nor assist us in the problems of life nor infinitesi­ mally alter the facts with which we deal. Then what else remains but to employ our wits sanely, acquire all the knowledge and experience which we possibly can, stick to sound values and be no more idly and childishly deluded by hoary vanities that are but the shadows- of the intellectually groping past? Come, my beloved, fill the cup that clears Today of past regrets and future fears; Tomorrow? Why, tomorrow I shall be Myself with yesterday’s seven thousand years.

In being oneself, free-minded and alert and resolute, is all that can or need be. Life has only a human significance, insofar as it is at all intelligible and purposeful. Judge all things in the light of this real world and its possible aims and evident limitations. Only in this way can we enjoy to the full what life really has to offer. Thus and not otherwise shall we function as reasonable beings. Are there limits to our knowledge? Well, it is only ignorantly that we can assume to go beyond these limits. We shall be neglecting what lies plainly before us for some­ thing that is less substantial than a shadow. Human knowledge has grown amazingly within the past hundred years. It will doubtless con­ tinue to grow during the next hundred years. Let us grow with the growth of knowledge—with the living truth—but let us not linger vainly over the relics of dead faith.

What Can a Free Man Believe?

CHAPTER V Only in Self-Understanding Do We Find the First Aid Free Minds

to

1. MINDS AND MIRRORS

HETHER the statement of the old philosopher (“I think, there­ fore I am”) is a bit of the obvious or an arresting epigram merely or a remark deep in truth, it may usefully begin this chapter on freedom, candor, carefulness of the mind in self­ analysis. (To be sure, Descartes might just as reasonably have said, “I love, I eat, I get tired, I have such and such feelings. I feel hot or cold, sick or well, therefore I am”; any one of which would have been an assertion of consciousness which no one but a sheer mystic would think of denying.) Whatever consciousness is, we live by it and we can observe it more or less carefully: call it a matter of nerves, a thing of mechanistic reactions, most sensitive and wide-ranging in man because he has the most highly developed nervous system; nevertheless here we are—conscious actors in a show called life which intensely concerns us, in which we are at once actors and spectators—and our supreme role is that of thinking. In the slang phrase, some persons are “dead from the neck up” or at any rate seem to be far below the possibilities of full mental living; yet to the degree that a man regards life thoughtfully (which does not mean always seriously, certainly not somberly nor heav­ ily), to that same degree he may be said to live. And here we fall into a paradox: Thinking is a very personal thing. It is also—or should be if it is to be reliable—impersonal. First, it is true that each one must closely identify himself with life. He is conscious of the world in relation to himself and vice versa. He judges matters as they affect himself first of all. It is, in a word, not a spectacle upon which he looks indifferently: the artist-type or the aloof indifferentist who professes to regard life in a detached way as merely a spectacle is relatively correct in thus naming himself insofar as his attitude contrasts with the common one: but, of course, he cannot really be indifferent, he has his opinions and feelings about this spectacle into which his own per­ sonality enters, he cannot escape from his very own particular conscious­ ness. There is the feeling in the moment of his most complete detach­ ment that it is intimately HE and not another who is absorbed in this business of living. He may have an extraordinary understanding of the emotions of others; he may quite well understand many different view­ points ; he has phases of personality that are found in varying combina­ tions in many of his fellows; and he has, of course, the universal stuff of human nature—yet he is, after all, an individual and he cannot fully enter into another’s being. In the last analysis and in the truest sense, each man lives unto himself, for himself, by his own light and tendencies. What is life? It is I—my thoughts, feelings, interests, activities. So each man can say to

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himself. His interests may be-narrow or broad; they may range far beyond the more obvious limits of self; nevertheless, the note of self is subtle, dominant, all-permeating. One’s mind may be likened to a mirror in which is reflected the world and the chief object in that reflection is one’s self. This may be said whether one confronts the world arrogantly, seeking to impress himself upon his fellows, or whether he goes timidly through life; whether, to use terms recently made familiar to students of psychology, he is an introvert or an extra­ vert: for egotism (or ego) manifests itself in myriad forms. Events large or small, far and near, immediately or remotely con­ cerning us are felt or thought about in personal terms. These feelings may not be unique with us: as, for example, our reactions to the weather, to money, to sex, to work and play, to all the things that commonly engage men’s attention; but each man feels them most strongly as they relate to his own consciousness. We have our social impulses; there is the fact of cooperation and sympathy, which not even the most ego- centric can quite ignore; some have a broad social philosophy, far above patriotism as provincially manifested, which assures a sentiment of kin­ ship with all humanity—yet the personal equation is always there, unescapable and subtly definitive. The mind may mirror a poor or a fine image, a magnificent or a petty image, a clear or confused image, an intelligent or an unintelligent —false and distorted—picture of the world. Yet we have, always and everywhere, the reflection of life in the mind of an individual. Figur­ atively we may say that there are mirrors broken and whole, mirrors dull and bright, mirrors which are diligently observed and mirrors which are but carelessly, occasionally glanced at. In terms of thinking about life, that is to say, many are not very active. They are none the less individualistic in their consciousness, egos unreflectively asserting them­ selves, each having a personality although it may not be very strong nor in a fine or interesting sense original. To be commonplace is not to be impersonal. The man who is just one of the crowd, dully like the majority of his fellows, is still a special “I.” It is indeed the man who rises originally superior in thought to the crowd who is capable of the most impersonal understanding of life yet who, even so, in the vivid or distinctive quality of his thought is most personal—most broadly conscious—in his identification with life. It is such a man who does not deceive himself. He glories in his personality, while at the same time he does not want that personality to be confused nor to be identified in any illusory, false, distorted way with life. Your average fellow is the one who professes (in most cases seifdeceptively, believing himself) to think as a good citizen, or as a patriot, or as a lover of righteousness, or as an upholder of the true gospel and the public welfare. Really his attitude is personal, but he does not know it. His ego is just as active, though on a lower and more confused plane, as that of the independent thinker. Only, the latter’s independence has this double but not contradictory nature: it combines a keen realization of his very own personality, powers and propensities in life with a clear, realistic understanding of life. He feels life very personally, very fully, very intensely: but he does not, for any personal reasons, ignore the facts of life. He seeks

What Can a Free Man Believe?

neither to escape from himself nor from life, but rather to maintain an intimate, harmonious understanding, accepting life frankly and realizing —developing—himself for all that he may be. When I say that life is personal to each one of us, I do not mean to repeat the time-worn fallacy that “Life is what we make it” nor that cliche of mystical vacuity that “We live in different worlds.” Neither statement is true, but they are both misleading and exemplify the very confusion of thought which we should escape by an undeceived, unmysti­ fied comprehension of ourselves and of the terms upon which we must really, sensibly live in a world of facts that we may be conscious of personally—toward which we may act with personal intelligence or not —but which personally we cannot change. It is by clear thinking that the individual will best adjust himself to life: recognizing the possibil­ ities of choice and differentiation, but also recognizing the inexorable character of what are called the laws of life, that life is infinitely greater than anyone who talks poetically about being “Master of his Fate and Captain of his Soul,” and that while man individually and collectively must find his own meaning in life—each living much or little according to his own personality—this attitude toward life should be sound and realistic. It is only in this attitude that safety lies, only by seeing things for what they are that we can deal correctly with them, only by understand­ ing ourselves in true relation to life (by looking into a clean mirror) that we can avoid the pitfalls of loose thinking and self-deception. The man who is filled with illusions is looking at life through a cloudy and cracked mirror. He is a blind man following blind leaders along a blind trail. If his illusions are purely theoretical—if, in a word, he does not believe them to the extent of letting them determine his conduct in the real business of life—he will escape many bad tumbles. Illusions may be pleasant to play with, emotional luxuries, so to speak, but they are dangerous unless one realizes them for what they are. One may appre­ ciate a poem, a picture, a sentiment without fooling oneself that it is true to life. Realism is the basis of self-understanding, as it is the only intelli­ gent attitude toward life. Be true to yourself—but first know yourself. See the best in life—but first know life. Here is a world which your senses report to you, which your intelligence can place in orderly, com­ prehensible relations, and to which you may adapt yourself personally— which you may feel and know with intense personal consciousness—by at once letting the personal element have its full natural share and let­ ting impersonal thought clearly light your path. Let me try to make a little more explicitly this distinction between the personal and the impersonal—a distinction that does not necessarily mean a conflict, although, with one who does not analyze himself and at the same time observe carefully the life about him, there is a conflict. The true personal attitude toward life is that which is finely, firmly rooted in independence of mind and character. A man’s ideas, his tastes and desires, his code of behavior should be personally thought out, proved and soundly justified for him. They should be valid for him and this, first and last, is the fundamental test. There are, of course, plenty of chances for error. Very good minds,

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in dealing with this or that question, go astray. The reason is not far to seek. For one thing, they are not well informed. They form opinions upon a very limited view of the facts, without particularly studying the question—or perhaps, led unsuspectingly by a wish to believe, they have studied only one side of the question. And this indicates their second weakness: namely, their letting personal predilections or prejudices determine their opinions, their subordinating of thought to desire. Pre­ cisely where they should be clear, impersonal, sharply observant they let themselves be misled by sentiment, by early training, by public opinion, by various weaknesses that make them prefer error to truth (although, naturally, they do not so consciously put it to themselves). A man must be sure, then, that his opinions are valid for him— that he has really reached them personally by a process of thinking and observing for himself (which of course includes a wide range of intelli­ gent reading). When a man holds to certain notions because they are popular, or because they have the weight of respectability and tradition behind them, or because his self-interest is involved, or because he has readily, credulously accepted the word of others who pretend to speak with authority (without most carefully investigating their claims to authority in the sense of special knowledge), then he cannot be said to have ideas that are really personal to him. He has not thought for him­ self, but has permitted others to tell him what to think. The opinions that most people express are not genuine convictions. It does not follow that these people are insincere; but simply that they have never deeply, thoughtfully and fully considered these opinions. For all the emotion with which they may defend these opinions, they are nevertheless super­ ficial in their nature, intellectually speaking. Those ideas are our own (the question of originality aside) which we have thoroughly mastered, which we have tested in every possible way before accepting them, which we have compared directly with experi­ ence and which we have fitted harmoniously in the general framework of knowledge, which we have made a vital part of ourselves. Yet not too vital—not so vital that it would be like death to give up those ideas. Profoundly as we are convinced, we should always be open to further and changing conviction, not lightly, not irresponsibly, but in accord with new facts which may be brought to light. We should be independent—of tradition, of custom, of common errors, of subtly emotional or opportunistic influences that confuse thought—but we should not be independent of facts in our thinking. If we are, our thinking is but a poor excuse for the real thing. We are then not thinking—not seeing straight. After all, while truth must be person­ ally realized and taken into one’s being, it cannot be fabricated or twisted to suit one’s ulterior wishes or motives. Truth itself is imper­ sonal, although it may be given a tremendous personal significance. The truth must be real to us, but this is not to say that mere illusions can pass satisfactorily for the truth. In real life we must seek the reality that forms our own personal life. And let me point out that in emphasizing the importance of each man thinking out for himself personally his own attitude toward life, I do not mean that any one can sit down and by a blind, irresponsible process of theory or feeling discover the truth about himself and about

tWhat

Can a Free Man Believe?

life. He must train himself to think carefully. He must, first of all. adopt for himself the rule of free-mindedness. He must read widely yet discriminatingly. He must know who are the best authorities— authorities by fact, not by fiat—in any field of special knowledge. And he must be ever heedful of the wisdom that is constantly to be gained by experience. And he must realize his own weaknesses. If he has an excess of sentimentality, he must guard against that weakness, trying not to make himself hard so much as realistic. If he has an excess of cynicism, a too gloomy and depreciating cast of mind, he must realize that as a weakness. If he has deep within him the influences of early prejudices and inhibitions, these he must watch to see that they do not distort his thinking. This obviously calls for a kind of self-understanding which is very rare. However, I am not advocating the common ways but am rather pointing out the common errors and traps of deception. Nothing is better than to know our own weaknesses: in such knowledge there is strength. And what is more amusing (or sad, if you will) than to see a man condemning errors and faults in others which, without suspecting or admitting it, he exhibits in his own thought and behavior? 2. THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOR

It has been said that thought is the highest faculty of man, yet it is plain that the mind must have something to work on: in a word, that observation must precede thought. We do not create our thoughts or spin them out of our minds in a mystical or intuitive sense. Our think­ ing, however rarefied it may seem, is about things: or else, as may be, it is only a flinging of words meaninglessly about nothing. In under­ standing ourselves, we cannot just form a picture that is pleasing, imagine ourselves to be this or that kind of person, ascribe to ourselves arbitrarily certain qualities or motives. We cannot simply ‘Took into our minds.” We must study our own behavior and the behavior of others, seeking for the springs of human action, but above all observing these actions carefully and recognizing them for what they are. Self-deception is the common covering for the endless errors that men commit, and back of many a case of ill-adjustment to life is a man’s false estimate of his own nature, his motives and the nature of his behavior. It appears that people shrink from giving plain, truthful names to the exhibitions of human nature that come dailv under their notice. They err in both directions, by covering mean actions with the name of respectability and by exaggerating perfectly natural and harm­ less actions into evils and indecencies. And thev have not usually a very just conception of what should be left for the individual to decide, rightly or wrongly, since it affects himself alone or, if it affects others in some sort, does not injure them in the sense of actually trampling upon their personalities and taking away their rights. Human nature—there is no more fascinating study nor one that so much profits him who intelligentlv observes his fellows and always, of course, himself. It has been the subject of the greater part of the world’s literature and many are the fanciful and bunkistic notions that have been entertained concerning man, his nature and his ways. Yes, there have

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been plenty of wise reflections, too, clear and candid observations of the real man, actual and not theoretical. This wisdom, however, even when it is commonly known and has found its way into familiarly repeated proverbs is not applied by the average man to his own life. By this 1 do not mean that all men are entirely unwise in their behavior, but rather that they persistently do things which are in conflict with their own better knowledge. And doubtless the principal reason for this discrepancy between common knowledge (or common sense, as it is popularly phrased) and behavior is the looseness with which people make excuses, the ease with which they deceive themselves, the false names which they give to actions that are, after all, pretty clear in their nature and not dubious in their consequences. (No—this is not a moral discourse; or, if so, it is posi­ tively not in the conventional vein of morality; it is not preaching but simply a commentary, more suggestive than thorough, upon human nature.) And people err on the side of what they call righteousness as much as on the side of what they call wickedness. They have indeed a most jumbled'set of notions on behavior and as for sound principles they are notable by their absence in the common judgments that men deliver concerning one another. Principally, this is due, as I have said, to the fact that every man is a special pleader—for himself, for his friends, for the kind of behavior that is agreeable to him or fits his prejudices; and a pleader unfairly against characters and actions which he does not understand, or which he has been taught to condemn dogmatically. And a great deal of this confusion is due to the very old tendency of setting up arbitrary ideas of what man is or should be. Psychology, or the study of human behavior, was indeed until recently under the sway of religion. It dealt with man’s “soul” and with his duty piously considered and with the dogmas of so-called right­ eousness. And even when divorced from religion, it still tended toward not only a moral attitude but a preconceived, theoretical study of the human mind. It is not until modern times that there has been any gen­ eral study of the mind as reactive mechanism, of the realistic relation between ideas and actions, of human nature in the concrete rather than in the abstract. It was also thought that precept, often ornately adorned but seldom enforced in any convincing way, was a pretty safe and forceful guide to behavior. Yet so many of those old precepts were, shortly, bunk. Either they were false in their definitions of right and wrong or they advised behavior that, however idealistically admirable, was incompatible with the conditions of actual life. Above all, the old-fashioned psychology, both in its common and its more academic phase, did not teach men to understand themselves by the most realistic process—namely, by keeping an eye upon the facts of their behavior, by checking scientifically the results of their behavior, by singling out their weak and strong tendencies, by looking for the most sound and probable motives, and so on. We can now better understand that facts, facts and more facts are to be gathered if we are to have a worth-while knowledge of behavior. Not glib generalizations about human nature—not moral dicta in the old terms of virtue and vice—not

52

What Can a Free Man Believe?

“looking into the mind” as if it were an original source of truth and conscience regardless of external circumstances—not these are the real aids to self-understanding. What is needed is a realization of the forces that move people to action. If we would know a man, we should not subject him to any arbitrary theory, not measure him by ready-made rules, but observe what he does. And this, of course, applies most forcibly or most importantly to the man with whom you are most concerned: yourself. Do you really analyze your behavior? To be sure, you are conscious of what you do— but do you observe it in a sharp, critical, investigative way? Are you curious about the kind of man you are, curious enough to watch your­ self in action as you would watch another who intrigued you and by sound induction lead to an understanding of the personality that is You? Do you label your actions (when you choose to label them at all) in a fanciful way or in agreement with specious common rules? Do you really sit down and study the consequences of your behavior and seek to ascertain how far your notions of behavior are confirmed by the facts of experience? Are you careful how you define actions, seeking for the most accurate name, whether or not it has a pleasing sound ? Do you ask yourself how certain ideas of virtue and vice, certain notions of what constitute good and bad influences, work out with regard to copy­ book rules? Do you look carefully for the motives that lie back of your actions, with the idea not of adorning those actions but of explain­ ing them? Perhaps you do—if you are the one man in a thousand (a generous estimate, indeed) who is thus curious and candid about himself. Well—here again we have an attitude that is rare and yet indubit­ ably sensible. Few men know themselves because few men think ration­ ally, upon the basis of sound observation, about their behavior. To this failure in self-knowledge are, obviously, due so many of the sad blunders that men make in their lives. I do not mean simply episodes of unintelli­ gent behavior, nor bad habits (which may be bad for one man, not for another—not “bad” in the sense of “sinful” that is usually implied, but destructive or disruptive) which may be consistent with what is on the whole an intelligently chosen plan of life, but the entire missing of a man’s natural bent, the violation of temperament, the forcing of a cer­ tain kind of character into false courses. Many, we know, are living according to ideals of success or respect­ ability or duty—living artificially—who would be far happier if they consulted understandingly their own natures. Instead of asking, “What are others doing?” or “What does the world say one should do?” it is better to inquire, “What kind of life will best suit my nature and abilities?” Very few, I believe, give any profoundly personal thought to their careers in life. They fall into these careers by chance. Or they are influenced by others, and no wonder, since they have never counseled deeply with themselves. A great many are drawn by the lure of money­ making, splurge, feverish getting and doing, when happiness would be found for them in a simpler path and, too, a better realization cd their talents. Others, to be sure, could not live the simple life. Here, of course, is no question of right or wrong morally. It is but a question of the right man in the right path. After a long period of Puritan repression, we have come to a brighter period of self-expres­

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sion; and it is important that this self-expression should be intelligent, should truly reflect one’s deepest nature and thoughtful desire in life, which is obviously impossible without self-analysis and choice free from the influence of the world’s conventional ideals and demands. “They say—let them say” and go your own way, clearly and courageously, unheeding. You have your own life to live and that is quite enough, a job sufficient to keep anyone active and with full employment for his wits. But first be sure of what you are, study your own behavior in the light of rationalism, know others (know human nature in the individual and in large) not by rule but by observation, and place yourself in har­ mony with the facts of life—for although the strong and clear personal­ ity may do many things it cannot alter the natural courses of life and death and human nature. It must, in short, while being artistic and vivid in self-realization (while personally getting close to the heart of life) be also scientific in thought. After all, true knowledge begins and ends in the knowledge of one’s self: one’s self, not in a mystic or anarchic void, but in relation to the irrefragable facts of life. 3. OLD FEARS AND ILLUSIONS

There is no finer result of rationalism, illuminated by a wise self­ analysis, than the emancipation from old fears and illusions that have been the curse of mankind. Consider fear, and what a ghastly part it has played in the life of man. It has probably been said (or if not, then it now should be said) that the events of history have been largely determined by the element of fear. Man has always been afraid, and of many things. He has been afraid of imaginary gods, demons, mysterious forces of the air. That fear is nothing like what it was a few hundred years ago, yet plainly it is still operative on a considerable scale. When it disappears entirely, religion will be no more with us. And man has been afraid of rulers, charlatans, strangers, foreigners, his neighbors— and himself. Not all these fears have been or are baseless. ■ Even so, what is the best protection against them save a full understanding of them and con­ sequently a knowledge of how to guard against them? Chiefly, how­ ever, man’s fears—of life and of himself—have been due to ignorance. It is always the unknown that strikes the deepest uneasiness, terror or paralyzing doubt in our minds. We can cope with known things or can reconcile ourselves to them. Man has been afraid to live fully and be himself, the obvious explan­ ation being that in the past he did not have the slightest conception of what a full life might be (men as a whole did not) and there were griev­ ous limitations upon self-expression. The majority had to live narrowly and in obedience to the harsh restrictions and dictates of rulers, lords an 1 priests. Such a thing as the dignity and freedom of the human personality, regardless of rank or wealth, was undreamed of. The ordi­ nary man was no better than a beast in the opinion of those who dwelt elegantly above him (yet sordidly enough upon the fruits of his labor). As for the natural forces, of which everyone has some scientific conception today, they presented terrifying aspects to mankind in prescientific times. Where there was no knowledge, fear was as natural ns night and day. Men could not escape it. Mentally they were in dark-

54

IFhat Can a Free Man Believe?

ness that held weird and frightful images. And religion, with its dog­ matic threats and penalties, greatly increased this fear. It needs no scholar to tell, in broad outline at least, the remarkable change between medieval and modern times in respect of this old fear, this new possibility of self-expression, this confident light which we now may have upon ourselves and the natural forces in the midst of which we have our being. Science has discovered to us innumerable", tre­ mendous secrets of the natural world, so that we can place ourselves ir sensible unity with the laws, so called, of living things. Although it is truly said that psychology has only begun to find itself as a science, yet we know a great deal more on the whole about the workings of the human mind than was formerly known. And, what is more important, we are beginning to take a realistic attitude toward human behavior as the material with which psychology must deal. We can see ourselves, not merely as others see us, but as we really are. Greatest of all, we can—if we have minds free from the old fears and illusions—see ourselves bravely and fairly in relation to the funda­ mental, changeless facts of nature. As realists, we have lost the illusions —it is true—hut we have also discarded the ancient crippling fears. And those illusions, were they not mainly the product of fear? They were meant to assure man that life was not what it seemed—what it is. And why? Because man looked fearfully upon a life which he did not begin to understand. Those illusions also interfered (as they always must inter­ fere while they last) with the realities of life. They threatened man with punishments which he needlessly feared and promised him rewards in some vague Bevond O J • whichJ foolishly satisfied him for the lack of the actual things he might have in this world. Did they sometimes bring men happiness or its shadow? Aye, it was but a shadow, and it was moreover the happiness—if one may call it that—of slavery rather than freedom. It was the happiness of weakness, safely clinging to a dark corner, rather than the happiness of freedom venturing forth Jjoyously in the light. J J And those old illusions were at the mercv of the first strong wind of reality. Upon them as upon treacherous shifting sands was any socalled happiness insecurely based. To have illusions means that one may be disillusioned. And certainly it means that, if one never comes upon full and clear disillusionment, one will have many bitter moments railing needlessly against the uncomprehended or unaccepted laws of life, feel­ ing oneself painfully mystified in the pull between false beliefs and in­ exorable reality, thinking of oneself as hanging precariously upon the favor of unknown powers. This cannot be a healthy nor happy state of mind. Even if one has faith that one will be guided by friendly hands in the darkness, how much better it is to move self-confidently, with full understanding, in the light. Understanding ourselves, we are free within the limits of nature (and of man’s knowledge how to control the forces of nature) to be ourselves and even to smile ironically at Time and Chance. When man rises from his knees he is obviously a taller and a stronger man and he has a wider range of movement. It is a great deal to have rid oneself of the last illusion and to stand, finally, face to face with life on its own terms. Every man must, anyway, meet the terms of life one way or

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another and it is better to do so clear-eyed, unafraid, and intelligently taking the best tnat life has to offer. “All is v’anity,” saith the preacher—but the worst vanities are the very ones with which the preachers have befogged man’s vision. The free man has no fears, not because he is sustained by the false and fragile courage of illusions, but because he has left fear behind in a solid knowl­ edge and adjustment to life. We know just how brief and unimportant we are as individuals in the universal “scheme.” We know that the ancient illusions were but childish dreams that could not outlive knowledge. They were also ter­ rible nightmares and filled the world with fear that was sadly foolish and needless. We know that we must die. What then? Why, then, the ringing call is to live—live intelligently and fully—live by a wise under­ standing of ourselves and in the process give to ourselves an importance, for ourselves, which nature does not give. We recall the storv of the mvstic who said after solemn reflection that he “accepted the universe” and the philosopher who commented, “By God. he’d better.” So with the free man: he “accepts” the universe, he “accepts” himself, but with understanding—without illusions—and, most happily, without fears.

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