theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	the conclusion of all I came here to say to-night. For the only consistent way of representing a pluralism and a world whose parts may affect one another through their conduct being either good or bad is the indeterministic way. What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, —nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there	null
book	be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannot understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real, genuine possibilities in the world. Only then is it other	null
book	than a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it must forever after mourn.	null
book	If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the eye of science and reason	null
book	impossibility, and that if I act badly ‘tis that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism, from out of whose toils we have just wound our way.	null
book	Now, we are of course free to fall back, if we please. For my own part, though, whatever	null
book	difficulties may beset the philosophy of objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply, determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romantic ism, contains	null
book	difficulties that are greater still. But you will remember that I expressly repudiated awhile ago the pretension to offer any arguments which could be coercive in a so- called scientific	null
book	fashion in this matter. And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk, obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way. This personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the problem; and the most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.	null
book	27 The burden, for example, of seeing to it that the end of all our righteousness be some positive universal gain.	null
book	78	null
book	Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this. The world is enigmatical enough in all	null
book	conscience, whatever theory we may take up toward it. The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular sense based on the judgment of regret, represents that world as vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they act wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly warded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt, remain forever inacc eptable. A friend with such a mind once told me that the thought of my	null
book	universe made him sick, like the sight of the horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.	null
book	But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminism with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the native absolutism of my intellect, —an absolutism which, after all, perhaps, deserves to be snubbed	null
book	and kept in check. But the determinism with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with no possible maggots to eat the la tter up, violates my sense of moral reality	null
book	through and through. When, for example, I imagine such carrion as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature without shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And I deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of the whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive reactions which I, for one, will not tamper with. The only remaining alternative, the attitude of	null
book	gnostical romanticism, wrenches my personal instincts in quite as violent a way. It falsifies the simple objectivity of their deliverance. It makes the goose -flesh the murder excites in me	null
book	a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime. It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one’ s diseased	null
book	curiosity pleases to carry it out. And with its consecration of the ‘roman naturaliste’ state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of Parisian littérateurs among the eternally	null
book	indispensable organs by which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the objective ca rrion I called it in to take away.	null
book	No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward; but better far than that the world of chance. Make as great an uproar about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and nothing more. If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of affection and an unsophisticated moral sense. And if I still wish to think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all. That ‘chance’ whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish from my view of the future	null
book	as the suicide of reason concerning it, that ‘ chance ’ is—what? Just this, —the chance that in	null
book	moral respects the future may be other and better than the past has been. This is the only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist. Shame, rather, on its repudiation and its denial! For its presence is the v ital air which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.	null
book	And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see admitted by others to-night. But I know that if I do stop here, misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you, and keep all I have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a few more words.	null
book	79	null
book	In the first place, in spite of all my explanations, the word ‘ chance’ will still be giving	null
book	trouble. Though you may yourselves be adverse to the deterministic doctrine, you wish a	null
book	pleasanter word than ‘ chance’ to name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider	null
book	my preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part. It certainly is a bad	null
book	word to make converts with; and you wish I had not thrust it so butt-foremost at you,—you wish to use a milder term.	null
book	Well, I admit there may be just a dash of perversity in its choice. The spectacle of the mere word -grabbing game played by the soft determinists has perhaps driven me too violently the	null
book	other way; and, rather than be found wrangling with them for the good w ords, I am willing to	null
book	take the first bad one which comes along, provided it be unequivocal. The question is of things, not of eulogistic names for them; and the best word is the one that enables men to know the quickest whether they disagree or not about the things. But the word ‘ chance, ’	null
book	with its singular negativity, is just the word for this purpose. Whoever uses it instead of ‘freedom, ’ squarely and resolutely gives up all pretence to control the things he says are free.	null
book	For him, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be. It is a word	null
book	of impotence , and is therefore the only sincere word we can use, if, in granting freedom to	null
book	certain things, we grant it honestly, and really risk the game. “Who chooses me must give and forfeit all he hath. ” Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets us, after the fashion of the	null
book	soft determinists, make a pretence of restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other we anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does not get beyond our sight.	null
book	But now you will bring up your final doubt. Does not the admission of such an unguaranteed	null
book	chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a Providence governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of the universe at the mercy of the chance- possibilitie s, and so far insecure?	null
book	Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?	null
book	To this my answer must be very brief. The belief in free- will is not in the least incompatible	null
book	with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating	null
book	nothing but fatal decrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as actualities to the	null
book	universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be from all eternity.	null
book	An analogy will make the meaning of this clear. Suppose two men before a chessboard,—the one a novice, the other an expert player of the game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what any one actual move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all the possible moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet each of	null
book	them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how devious a course, in the one predestined form of check- mate to	null
book	the novice’s king.	null
book	Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for the infinite mind in	null
book	which the universe lies. Suppose the latter to be thinking out his universe before he actually creates it. Suppose him to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not now	null
book	28 decide	null
book	28 This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of time. And to any one who insists on the	null
book	timelessness of that mind I have no reply to make. A mind to whom all time is simultaneously present must see	null
book	all things under the form of actuality, or under some form to us unknown. If he thinks certain moments as ambiguous in their content while future, he must simultaneously know how the ambiguity will have been decided when they are past. So that none of his mental judgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his	null
book	80	null
book	on all the steps thereto. At various points, ambiguous possibilities shall be left open, either of	null
book	which, at a given instant, may become actual. But whichever branch of these bifurcations	null
book	become real, I know what I shall do at the next bifurcation to keep things from drifting away	null
book	from the final result I intend.29	null
book	The creator ’s plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to many of its actual details, but	null
book	all possibilities would be marked down. The realization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; that is, would only be determined when the moment of realization came. Other possibilities would be contingently determined; that is, their decision would have	null
book	to wait till it was seen how the matters of absolute chance fell out. But the rest of the plan, including its final upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all. So the creator himself would not need to know all the details of actuality until they came; and at any time his own	null
book	view of the world would be a view partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours is now. Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that his world was safe, and t hat	null
book	no matter how much it might zig -zag he could surely bring it home at last.	null
book	Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creator leave the absolute chance -	null
book	possibilities to be decided by himself, each when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he alienate this power from himself, and leave the decis ion out and out to finite	null
book	creatures such as we men are. The great point is that the possibilities are really here. Whether	null
book	it be we who solve them, or he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate’ s	null
book	scales seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now. That is what gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as	null
book	Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement. This reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft alike, suppress by their denial that anything is	null
book	decided here and now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long ago. If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the error of continuing to believe in liberty.	null
book	30 It is fortunate for the winding up of controversy that in every discussion with	null
book	determinism this argumentum ad hominem can be its adversary ’s last word.	null
book	world is one from which chance is excluded. Is not, however, the timeless mind rather a gratuitous fiction? And	null
book	is not the notion of eternity being given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon us the block- universe, and of denying that possibilities exist? —just the point to be proved. To say that time is an	null
book	illusory appearance is only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may be its for m.	null
book	29 And this of course means 'miraculous' interposition, but not necessarily of the gross sort our fathers took such	null
book	delight in representing, and which has so lost its magic for us. Emerson quotes some Eastern sage as saying that if evil were really done under the sun, the sky would incontinently shrivel to a snakeskin and cast it out in	null
book	spasms. But, says Emerson, the spasms of Nature are years and centuries; and it will tax man's patience to wait so long. We may think of the reserved possibilities God keeps in his own hand, under as invisible and molecular	null
book	and slowly self -summating a form as we please. We may think of them as counteracting human agencies which	null
book	he inspires ad hoc . In short, signs and wonders and convulsions of the earth and sky are not the only neutralizers	null
book	of obstruction to a god's plans of which it is possible to think.	null
book	30 As long as languages contain a future perfect tense, determinists, following the bent of laziness or passion, the	null
book	lines of least resistance, can reply in that tense, saying, "It will have been fated," to the still small voice which urges an opposite course; and thus excuse themselves from effort in a quite unanswerable way.	null
book	81	null
book	The Moral Philosopher And The Moral Life	null
book		null
book	An Address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the International Journal of Ethics,	null
book	April, 1891.	null
book	The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical	null
book	philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other, however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which determine what that ‘ say’ shall be.	null
book	First of all, what is the position of him who seeks an ethical philosophy? To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who are satisfied to be ethical sceptics. He will not be a sceptic; therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and renounce his original aim. That aim is to find an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into the unity of a stable system, and make of the world what one may call a genuine universe from the ethical point of view. So far as the world resists reduction to the form of unity, so far as ethical propositions seem unstable, so far does the philosopher fail of his ideal. The subject-matter of his study is the ideals he finds	null
book	existing in the world; the purpose which guides him is this ideal of his own, of getting them into a certain form. This ideal is thus a factor in ethical philosop hy whose legitimate presence	null
book	must never be overlooked; it is a positive contribution which the philosopher himself necessarily makes to the problem. But it is his only positive contribution. At the outset of his inquiry he ought to have no other ideals. Were he interested peculiarly in the triumph of any one kind of good, he would pro tanto cease to be a judicial investigator, and become an advocate for some limited element of the case.	null
book	There are three questions in ethics which must be kept apart. Let them be called respectively the psychological question, the metaphysical question, and the casuistic question. The	null
book	psychological question asks after the historical origin of our moral ideas and judgments; the metaphysical question asks what the very meaning of the words ‘good,’ ‘ ill,’ and ‘obligation’	null
book	are; the casuistic question asks what is the measure of the various goods and ills which men	null
book	recognize, so that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.	null
book	I.	null

book

the conclusion of all I came here to say to-night. For the only consistent way of representing a pluralism and a world whose parts may affect one another through their conduct being either good or bad is the indeterministic way. What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, —nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there

null

book

be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannot understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real, genuine possibilities in the world. Only then is it other

null

book

than a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it must forever after mourn.

null

book

If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the eye of science and reason

null

book

impossibility, and that if I act badly ‘tis that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism, from out of whose toils we have just wound our way.

null

book

Now, we are of course free to fall back, if we please. For my own part, though, whatever

null

book

difficulties may beset the philosophy of objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply, determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romantic ism, contains

null

book

difficulties that are greater still. But you will remember that I expressly repudiated awhile ago the pretension to offer any arguments which could be coercive in a so- called scientific

null

book

fashion in this matter. And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk, obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way. This personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the problem; and the most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.

null

book

27 The burden, for example, of seeing to it that the end of all our righteousness be some positive universal gain.

null

book

78

null

book

Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this. The world is enigmatical enough in all

null

book

conscience, whatever theory we may take up toward it. The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular sense based on the judgment of regret, represents that world as vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they act wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly warded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt, remain forever inacc eptable. A friend with such a mind once told me that the thought of my

null

book

universe made him sick, like the sight of the horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.

null

book

But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminism with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the native absolutism of my intellect, —an absolutism which, after all, perhaps, deserves to be snubbed

null

book

and kept in check. But the determinism with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with no possible maggots to eat the la tter up, violates my sense of moral reality

null

book

through and through. When, for example, I imagine such carrion as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature without shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And I deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of the whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive reactions which I, for one, will not tamper with. The only remaining alternative, the attitude of

null

book

gnostical romanticism, wrenches my personal instincts in quite as violent a way. It falsifies the simple objectivity of their deliverance. It makes the goose -flesh the murder excites in me

null

book

a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime. It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one’ s diseased

null

book

curiosity pleases to carry it out. And with its consecration of the ‘roman naturaliste’ state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of Parisian littérateurs among the eternally

null

book

indispensable organs by which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the objective ca rrion I called it in to take away.

null

book

No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward; but better far than that the world of chance. Make as great an uproar about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and nothing more. If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of affection and an unsophisticated moral sense. And if I still wish to think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all. That ‘chance’ whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish from my view of the future

null

book

as the suicide of reason concerning it, that ‘ chance ’ is—what? Just this, —the chance that in

null

book

moral respects the future may be other and better than the past has been. This is the only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist. Shame, rather, on its repudiation and its denial! For its presence is the v ital air which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.

null

book

And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see admitted by others to-night. But I know that if I do stop here, misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you, and keep all I have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a few more words.

null

book

79

null

book

In the first place, in spite of all my explanations, the word ‘ chance’ will still be giving

null

book

trouble. Though you may yourselves be adverse to the deterministic doctrine, you wish a

null

book

pleasanter word than ‘ chance’ to name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider

null

book

my preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part. It certainly is a bad

null

book

word to make converts with; and you wish I had not thrust it so butt-foremost at you,—you wish to use a milder term.

null

book

Well, I admit there may be just a dash of perversity in its choice. The spectacle of the mere word -grabbing game played by the soft determinists has perhaps driven me too violently the

null

book

other way; and, rather than be found wrangling with them for the good w ords, I am willing to

null

book

take the first bad one which comes along, provided it be unequivocal. The question is of things, not of eulogistic names for them; and the best word is the one that enables men to know the quickest whether they disagree or not about the things. But the word ‘ chance, ’

null

book

with its singular negativity, is just the word for this purpose. Whoever uses it instead of ‘freedom, ’ squarely and resolutely gives up all pretence to control the things he says are free.

null

book

For him, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be. It is a word

null

book

of impotence , and is therefore the only sincere word we can use, if, in granting freedom to

null

book

certain things, we grant it honestly, and really risk the game. “Who chooses me must give and forfeit all he hath. ” Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets us, after the fashion of the

null

book

soft determinists, make a pretence of restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other we anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does not get beyond our sight.

null

book

But now you will bring up your final doubt. Does not the admission of such an unguaranteed

null

book

chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a Providence governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of the universe at the mercy of the chance- possibilitie s, and so far insecure?

null

book

Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?

null

book

To this my answer must be very brief. The belief in free- will is not in the least incompatible

null

book

with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating

null

book

nothing but fatal decrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as actualities to the

null

book

universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be from all eternity.

null

book

An analogy will make the meaning of this clear. Suppose two men before a chessboard,—the one a novice, the other an expert player of the game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what any one actual move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all the possible moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet each of

null

book

them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how devious a course, in the one predestined form of check- mate to

null

book

the novice’s king.

null

book

Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for the infinite mind in

null

book

which the universe lies. Suppose the latter to be thinking out his universe before he actually creates it. Suppose him to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not now

null

book

28 decide

null

book

28 This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of time. And to any one who insists on the

null

book

timelessness of that mind I have no reply to make. A mind to whom all time is simultaneously present must see

null

book

all things under the form of actuality, or under some form to us unknown. If he thinks certain moments as ambiguous in their content while future, he must simultaneously know how the ambiguity will have been decided when they are past. So that none of his mental judgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his

null

book

80

null

book

on all the steps thereto. At various points, ambiguous possibilities shall be left open, either of

null

book

which, at a given instant, may become actual. But whichever branch of these bifurcations

null

book

become real, I know what I shall do at the next bifurcation to keep things from drifting away

null

book

from the final result I intend.29

null

book

The creator ’s plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to many of its actual details, but

null

book

all possibilities would be marked down. The realization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; that is, would only be determined when the moment of realization came. Other possibilities would be contingently determined; that is, their decision would have

null

book

to wait till it was seen how the matters of absolute chance fell out. But the rest of the plan, including its final upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all. So the creator himself would not need to know all the details of actuality until they came; and at any time his own

null

book

view of the world would be a view partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours is now. Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that his world was safe, and t hat

null

book

no matter how much it might zig -zag he could surely bring it home at last.

null

book

Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creator leave the absolute chance -

null

book

possibilities to be decided by himself, each when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he alienate this power from himself, and leave the decis ion out and out to finite

null

book

creatures such as we men are. The great point is that the possibilities are really here. Whether

null

book

it be we who solve them, or he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate’ s

null

book

scales seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now. That is what gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as

null

book

Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement. This reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft alike, suppress by their denial that anything is

null

book

decided here and now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long ago. If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the error of continuing to believe in liberty.

null

book

30 It is fortunate for the winding up of controversy that in every discussion with

null

book

determinism this argumentum ad hominem can be its adversary ’s last word.

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world is one from which chance is excluded. Is not, however, the timeless mind rather a gratuitous fiction? And

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is not the notion of eternity being given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon us the block- universe, and of denying that possibilities exist? —just the point to be proved. To say that time is an

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illusory appearance is only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may be its for m.

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29 And this of course means 'miraculous' interposition, but not necessarily of the gross sort our fathers took such

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delight in representing, and which has so lost its magic for us. Emerson quotes some Eastern sage as saying that if evil were really done under the sun, the sky would incontinently shrivel to a snakeskin and cast it out in

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spasms. But, says Emerson, the spasms of Nature are years and centuries; and it will tax man's patience to wait so long. We may think of the reserved possibilities God keeps in his own hand, under as invisible and molecular

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and slowly self -summating a form as we please. We may think of them as counteracting human agencies which

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he inspires ad hoc . In short, signs and wonders and convulsions of the earth and sky are not the only neutralizers

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of obstruction to a god's plans of which it is possible to think.

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30 As long as languages contain a future perfect tense, determinists, following the bent of laziness or passion, the

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lines of least resistance, can reply in that tense, saying, "It will have been fated," to the still small voice which urges an opposite course; and thus excuse themselves from effort in a quite unanswerable way.

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81

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The Moral Philosopher And The Moral Life

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An Address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the International Journal of Ethics,

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April, 1891.

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The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing possible as an ethical

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philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race’s moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other, however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which determine what that ‘ say’ shall be.

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First of all, what is the position of him who seeks an ethical philosophy? To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who are satisfied to be ethical sceptics. He will not be a sceptic; therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and renounce his original aim. That aim is to find an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into the unity of a stable system, and make of the world what one may call a genuine universe from the ethical point of view. So far as the world resists reduction to the form of unity, so far as ethical propositions seem unstable, so far does the philosopher fail of his ideal. The subject-matter of his study is the ideals he finds

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existing in the world; the purpose which guides him is this ideal of his own, of getting them into a certain form. This ideal is thus a factor in ethical philosop hy whose legitimate presence

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must never be overlooked; it is a positive contribution which the philosopher himself necessarily makes to the problem. But it is his only positive contribution. At the outset of his inquiry he ought to have no other ideals. Were he interested peculiarly in the triumph of any one kind of good, he would pro tanto cease to be a judicial investigator, and become an advocate for some limited element of the case.

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There are three questions in ethics which must be kept apart. Let them be called respectively the psychological question, the metaphysical question, and the casuistic question. The

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psychological question asks after the historical origin of our moral ideas and judgments; the metaphysical question asks what the very meaning of the words ‘good,’ ‘ ill,’ and ‘obligation’

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are; the casuistic question asks what is the measure of the various goods and ills which men

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recognize, so that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.

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I.

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