ART. VII.-WILLIAM JAMES AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMERSON.

MUCH that one hears of to-day as new thought is but a part of that philosophic drift toward monism of which Mark Hopkins gave notice nearly forty years ago. To the Williams graduating class of 1866 he said: "You are entering life at a period when the thought of the world, so far as it separates itself from the Bible, tends toward pantheism. Modern infidelity has various names and forms but the substance is that, and under whatever form it is sure to chill and dwarf man and disintegrate society. Of pantheism as a system the mass of the people as yet know nothing and for it they care nothing, but through conversation, the lecture, and the press the tendency reaches them, coming in like a mist and affecting, chilling, deoxidizing, their whole atmosphere of thought." In a brilliant address on "Philosophic Conceptions and Practical Results," delivered before the University of California in the summer of 1898, William James, of Harvard, registered what Mark Hopkins had prophesied. He said: "In the philosophy of the absolute, so called-that post-Kantian form of idealism which is carrying so many of our higher minds before it, we have the triumph of what in old times was summarily disposed of as the pantheistic heresy." Ours is an age which no longer holds it quite good form to employ such terms of disparagement as "infidelity" and "heresy," and William James is entirely at home in our age. Carlyle has preserved a flash-light of John Sterling in debate "looking hurt" at a certain thrust of "flippant heterodoxy." Sterling had charged, "It is mere Pantheism that! flat Pantheism!" "And suppose it were Pot-theism," came the retort, "if the thing is true!" It has not been recorded of the Harvard professor that any instance of heterodoxy ever caused him to look hurt. "Live and let live," is writ large in his philosophy. Perhaps nothing is more characteristic of him than what he calls "a sportsmanlike love of fair play." That preliminary scientific attitude of "pure agnosticism" for which Romanes latterly contended has seldom been more perfectly exemplified than in him.

This spirit has been witnessed by his own scientific caution. Wise enough to know that "metaphysics is only an uncommonly obstinate effort to think clearly," he nevertheless, in his Principles of Psychology, fought shy of metaphysics to the point of impossibility, confined his psychological concern to the phenomenal stream of consciousness, and declined to the end to assume such an entity as the soul. It may fairly be said that the question with Professor James in any case is precisely whether "the thing is true." But in the interests of the fullest truth he has felt called upon to oppose whatever dogmatism has seemed to him to ignore or warp facts for the sake of theory, even though that dogmatism chanced to be the fashion of his own camp, and arrogated to itself a peculiar claim to the banner of truth. No student of his Psychology will forget his challenge of the assumptions of materialistic science, when he so raked the position of the "Mind Stuff" theorists as to drive them to a new respect for the spiritualistic view. "Consciousness," he declares, "however little, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it and yet professes to explain all facts by continuance of evolution;" and he concludes: "If there be such entities as souls in the universe, they may possibly be affected by the manifold occurrences that go on in the nervous centers. . . . I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain states, and responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance so far as we have yet attained. If it does not strictly explain anything, it is at any rate less positively objectionable than either mind-stuff or a materialmonad creed."

But this skirmish with materialism is only an incident in a wide campaign. Beneath all monad theories and the like lies a certain radical and ultimate fact-the deep and constant longing of the human reason to reduce its manifold experience to unity. This is the meaning of philosophy's endless quest, and hence has sprung much legitimate impulse toward faith in the one worldground of theism. Yet pure intellect has an appetite for unity which is often tempted to satisfy itself in an illegitimate way; there is a rational greediness which having refused to halt at

human freedom speedily draws both God and man into the one fact of a fate-bound universe. The conception of wills, human or divine, transcending the uniformities of physical nature and refusing their yoke, is an embarrassment to that speculative tendency which would "drink up" the sum of reality in knowledge -would pluck out the heart of its secret and by one theoretic clue follow its eternal course without break or hindrance. Hence the effort of monistic thought to assimilate the incalculable factors of personality to the processes of a seemingly necessary and impersonal and abiding order. This effort has many forms and names; it may call itself materialism or pantheism or transcendental idealism, but its essential meaning is the same-a fatalistic unity for thought at the expense of that true manifold of selves which is indispensable to the moral life. It is against this monistic aggression that Professor James's fundamental protest is directed, and his championship of a radically contrasting system of thought constitutes one of the most original and significant chapters in American philosophy. In place of the dogmatism of synthetic reason he offers an attitude of teachableness which he terms "radical empiricism." "I say 'empiricism' because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical' because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, unlike so much of the halfway empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm that monism is something with which all experience has got to square."

It will be seen how far the discussion of monism is here lifted above the plane of the old debate between monism and realistic dualism. Two passages from The Will to Believe will serve to show concretely the nature of the issue joined. Now he is speaking of Herbert Spencer's theories: "The plain truth is that the philosophy of evolution (as distinguished from our special information about particular cases of change) is a metaphysical creed and nothing else. It is a mood of contemplation, an emotional attitude, rather than a system of thought-a

mood which is old as the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation of it (such as the Spencerian philosophy) will dispel; the mood of fatalistic pantheism, with its intuition of the One and All, which was, and is, and ever shall be, and from whose womb each single thing proceeds." Now it is of Hegel he writes: "In short, the notion that real contingency and ambiguity may be features of the real world is a perfectly unimpeachable hypothesis. Only in such a world can moral judgments have a claim to be. For the bad is that which takes the place of something else which possibly might have been where it now is, and the better is that which absolutely might be where it absolutely is not. In the universe of Hegel-the absolute block whose parts have no loose play, the pure plethora of necessary being with the oxygen of possibility all suffocated out of its lungs-there can be neither good nor bad, but one dead level of mere fate."

Among all the forces making for this monistic mood in America probably none are to be compared for popular influence with the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It might seem difficult to attribute any view in particular to a man who professed all views in turn; but "Omnes"-that watchword of Walt Whitman, the "enfant terrible" of the pantheistic renaissance, a watchword which Emerson himself might well have adopted—is itself only a party cry. "I am always insincere," wrote the Concord dreamer, "as knowing there are other moods;" to certain of these moods we owe heroic strains that call to duty even unto death; in one of the later moods he gratified Bronson Alcott by permitting himself to be classed as a Christian theist. But the mood lying back of and conscious of all others, the dominant speculative mood of the Emerson of fame, that Emerson who prepared Boston soil for Mother Eddy's profitable husbandry, is unmistakably pantheistic. That his essays were in President Hopkins's thought at the time of the quoted baccalaureate there can be little doubt. Years before, the great educator had become aware of the tendency of Emersonianism by a chance collision with it at a point which to him. was vital. Opening his newly purchased copy of the second series of essays, he had encountered the passage in "Nominalist and Realist" which reads: "Jesus would absorb the race, but Tom

Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power." Forty years later, in his "Scriptural Idea of Man," he recalls the pain caused him by those words concerning One "who was to him the Redeemer of the race, the Man, and whose influence was for him the hope of the race." It is not within the scope of this article to discuss Emerson's attitude toward historical Christianity; his was but the old gnostic attempt, once more, to transcend Jesus by including him. The denial that a value unique, universal, and ultimate may inhere in a personality appearing in time is but one of the many implications of that monistic world-view which he held and whose basal meaning it has been our purpose to suggest. Happily the light by which we have sought this meaning has recently been flashed directly upon the very genius of transcendentalism himself.

In the already famous Gifford lectures by Professor James on "The Varieties of Religious Experience" occur two passages which lay bare the fatal weakness of Emerson's thought-his failure to accord its rightful place to personality human or divine. The chapter on "Conversion" includes a note of comment upon Emerson's well-known passage from "Spiritual Laws:" "When we see a soul whose acts are regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say: Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils." "True enough," adds his critic, "but Crump may really be the better Crump for his inner discords and second birth; and your once-born regal character, though indeed always better than poor Crump, may fall far short of what he individually might be had he only some Crumplike capacity for compunction over his own peculiar diabolisms, graceful and pleasant and invariably gentlemanly as these may be." Here we have Emerson's favorite conception of human character as a growth of nature, unfolding under necessary laws like the rose. Preceding the quoted passage are the words: "Our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will. People represent virtue as a struggle, . . . but there is no merit in the matter; either God is there or he is not there." In "SelfReliance" we find: "I suppose no man can violate his nature.