It is good to be reasonable, but too much rationality puts the soul at odds with life. For rationality implies an almost superstitious reliance on logical proofs and logical motives, and it is logic that life mocks and contradicts at every turn. The most annoying people in the world are those who demand reasons for everything, and the most discouraging are those who map out ahead of them long courses of action, plan their lives, and systematically in the smallest detail of their activity adapt means to ends. Now the difficulty with all the prudential virtues is that they imply a world that is too good to be true. It would be pleasant to have a world where cause and effect interlocked, where we could see the future, where virtue had its reward, and our characters and relations with other people and the work we wish to do could be planned out with the same certainty with which cooks plan a meal. But we know that that is not the kind of a world we actually live in. Perhaps men have thought that, by cultivating the rational virtues and laying emphasis on prudence and forethought, they could bend the stubborn constitution of things to meet their ideals. It has always been the fashion to insist, in spite of all the evidence, that the world was in reality a rational place where certain immutable moral principles could be laid down with the same certainty of working that physical laws possess. It has always been represented that the correct procedure of the moral life was to choose one’s end or desire, to select carefully all the means by which that end could be realized, and then, by the use of the dogged motive force of the will, to push through the plans to completion. In the homilies on success, it has always been implied that strength of will was the only requisite. Success became merely a matter of the ratio between the quantity of effort and will-power applied, and the number of obstacles to be met. If one failed, it was because the proper amount of effort had not been applied, or because the plans had not been properly constructed. The remedy was automatically to increase the effort or rationalize the plans. Life was considered to be a battle, the strategy of which a general might lay out beforehand, an engagement in which he might plan and anticipate to the minutest detail the movement of his forces and the disposition of the enemy. But one does not have to live very long to see that this belief in the power and the desirability of controlling things is an illusion. Life works in a series of surprises. One’s powers are given in order that one may be alert and ready, resourceful and keen. The interest of life lies largely in its adventurousness, and not in its susceptibility to orderly mapping. The enemy rarely comes up from the side the general has expected; the battle is usually fought out on vastly different lines from those that have been carefully foreseen and rationally organized. And similarly in life do complex forces utterly confound and baffle our best laid plans.
Our strategy, unless it is open to instant correction, unless it is flexible, and capable of infinite resource and modification, is a handicap rather than an aid in the battle of life. In spite of the veracious accounts of youths hewing their way to success as captains of industry or statesmen, with their eye singly set on a steadfast purpose, we may be sure that life seldom works that way. It is not so tractable and docile, even to the strongest. The rational ideal is one of those great moral hypocrisies which every one preaches and no one practices, but which we all believe with superstitious reverence, and which we take care shall be proven erroneous by no stubborn facts of life. Better that the facts should be altered than that the moral tradition should die!
One of its evil effects is the compressing influence it has on many of us. Recognizing that for us the world is an irrational place, we are willing to go on believing that there are at least some gifted beings who are proving the truth and vindicating the eternal laws of reason. We join willingly the self-stigmatized ranks of the incompetent and are content to shine feebly in the reflected light of those whose master wills and power of effort have brought them through in rational triumph to their ends. The younger generation is coming very seriously to doubt both the practicability and worth of this rational ideal. They do not find that the complex affairs of either the world or the soul work according to laws of reason. The individual as a member of society is at the mercy of great social laws that regulate his fortune for him, construct for him his philosophy of life, and dictate to him his ways of making a living. As an individual soul, he is the creature of impulses and instincts which he does not create and which seem to lie quite outside the reach of his rational will. Looked at from this large social viewpoint, his will appears a puny affair indeed. There seems little room left in which to operate, either in the sphere of society or in his own spiritual life. That little of free-will, however, which there is, serves for our human purposes. It must be our care simply that we direct it wisely; and the rational ideal is not the wisest way of directing it. The place of our free will in the scheme of life is not to furnish driving, but directing power. The engineer could never create the power that drives his engine, but he can direct it into the channels where it will be useful and creative. The superstition of the strong will has been almost like an attempt to create power, something the soul could never do. The rational ideal has too often been a mere challenge to attain the unattainable. It has ended in futility or failure.
This superstition comes largely from our incorrigible habit of looking back over the past, and putting purpose into it. The great man looking back over his career, over his ascent from the humble level of his boyhood to his present power and riches, imagines that that ideal success was in his mind from his earliest years. He sees a progress, which was really the happy seizing of fortunate opportunities, as the carrying-out of a fixed purpose. But the purpose was not there at the beginning; it is the crowning touch added to the picture, which completes and satisfies our age-long hunger for the orderly and correct. But we all, rich and poor, successful and unsuccessful, live from hand to mouth. We all alike find life at the beginning a crude mass of puzzling possibilities. All of us, unless we inherit a place in the world,—and then we are only half alive,—have the same precarious struggle to get a foothold. The difference is in the fortune of the foothold, and not in our private creation of any mystical force of will. It is a question of happy occasions of exposure to the right stimulus that will develop our powers at the right time. The capacity alone is sterile; it needs the stimulus to fertilize it and produce activity and success. The part that our free will can play is to expose ourselves consciously to the stimulus; it cannot create it or the capacity, but it can bring them together.
In other words, for the rational ideal we must substitute the experimental ideal. Life is not a campaign of battle, but a laboratory where its possibilities for the enhancement of happiness and the realization of ideals are to be tested and observed. We are not to start life with a code of its laws in our pocket, with its principles of activity already learned by heart, but we are to discover those principles as we go, by conscientious experiment. Even those laws that seem incontrovertible we are to test for ourselves, to see whether they are thoroughly vital to our own experience and our own genius. We are animals, and our education in life is, after all, different only in degree, and not in kind, from that of the monkey who learns the trick of opening his cage. To get out of his cage, the monkey must find and open a somewhat complicated latch. How does he set about it? He blunders around for a long time, without method or purpose, but with the waste of an enormous amount of energy. At length he accidentally strikes the right catch, and the door flies open. Our procedure in youth is little different. We feel a vague desire to expand, to get out of our cage, and liberate our dimly felt powers. We blunder around for a time, until we accidentally put ourselves in a situation where some capacity is touched, some latent energy liberated, and the direction set for us, along which we have only to move to be free and successful. We will be hardly human if we do not look back on the process and congratulate ourselves on our tenacity and purpose and strong will. But of course the thing was wholly irrational. There were neither plans nor purposes, perhaps not even discoverable effort. For when we found the work that we did best, we found also that we did it easiest. And the outlines of the most dazzling career are little different. Until habits were formed or prestige acquired which could float these successful geniuses, their life was but the resourceful seizing of opportunity, the utilization, with a minimum of purpose or effort, of the promise of the passing moment. They were living the experimental life, aided by good fortune and opportunity.
Now the youth brought up to the strictly rational ideal is like the animal who tries to get out of his cage by going straight through the bars. The duck, beating his wings against his cage, is a symbol of the highest rationality. His logic is plain, simple, and direct. He is in the cage; there is the free world outside; nothing but the bars separate them. The problem is simply to fortify his will and effort and make them so strong that they will overcome the resistance of the cage. His error evidently lies not in his method, but in his estimation of the strength of the bars. But youth is no wiser; it has no data upon which to estimate either its own strength or the strength of its obstacles. It counts on getting out through its own self-reliant strength and will. Like the duck, “impossible” is a word not found in its vocabulary. And like the duck, it too often dashes out its spirit against the bars of circumstance. How often do we see young people, brought up with the old philosophy that nothing was withheld from those who wanted and worked for things with sufficient determination, beating their ineffectual wings against their bars, when perhaps in another direction the door stands open that would lead to freedom!
We do not hear enough of the tragedies of misplaced ambition. When the plans of the man of will and determination fail, and the inexorable forces of life twist his purposes aside from their end, he is sure to suffer the prostration of failure. His humiliation, too, is in proportion to the very strength of his will. It is the burden of defeat, or at best the sting of petty success, that crushes men, and crushes them all the more thoroughly if they have been brought up to believe in the essential rationality of the world and the power of will and purpose. It is not that they have aimed too high, but that they have aimed in the wrong direction. They have not set out experimentally to find the work to which their powers were adapted, they did not test coolly and impartially the direction in which their achievement lay. They forgot that, though faith may remove mountains, the will alone is not able. There is an urgency on every man to develop his powers to the fullest capacity, but he is not called upon to develop those that he does not possess. The will cannot create talent or opportunity. The wise man is he who has the clear vision to discern the one, and the calm patience to await the other. Will, without humor and irony and a luminous knowledge of one’s self, is likely to drive one to dash one’s brains out against a stone wall. The world is too full of people with nothing except a will. The mistake of youth is to believe that the philosophy of experimentation is enervating. They want to attack life frontally, to win by the boldness of their attack, or by the exceeding excellence of their rational plans and purposes. But therein comes a time when they learn perhaps that it is better to take life not with their naked fists, but more scientifically,—to stand with mind and soul alert, ceaselessly testing and criticizing, taking and rejecting, poised for opportunity, and sensitive to all good influences.
The experimental life does not put one at the mercy of chance. It is rather the rational mind that is constantly being shocked and deranged by circumstances. But the dice of the experimenter are always loaded. For he does not go into an enterprise, spiritual or material, relying simply on his reason and will to pull him through. He asks himself beforehand whether something good is not sure to come whichever way the dice fall, or at least whether he can bear the event of failure, whether his spirit can stand it if the experiment ends in humiliation and barrenness. It is surprising how many seeming disasters one finds one can bear in this anticipatory look; the tension of the failure is relieved, anyhow. By looking ahead, one has insured one’s self up to the limit of the venture, and one cannot lose. But to the man with the carefully planned campaign, every step is crucial. If all does not turn out exactly as he intends, he is ruined. He thinks he insures himself by the excellence of his designs and the craftiness of his skill. But he insures himself by the strange method of putting all his eggs in one basket. He thinks, of course, he has arranged his plans so that, if they fall, the universe falls with them. But when the basket breaks, and the universe does not fall, his ruin is complete.
Ambition and the rational ideal seem to be only disastrous; if unsuccessful, they produce misanthropists; if successful, beings that prey upon their fellow men. Too much rationality makes a man mercenary and calculating. He has too much at stake in everything he does to know that calm disinterestedness of spirit which is the mark of the experimental attitude towards life. Our attitude towards our personal affairs, material and spiritual, should be like the interest we take in sports and games. The sporting interest is one secret of a healthy attitude towards life. The detached enthusiasm it creates is a real ingredient of happiness. The trouble with the rational man is that he has bet on the game. If his side wins, there is a personal reward for him; if it loses, he himself suffers a loss. He cannot know the true sporting interest which is unaffected by considerations of the end, and views the game as the thing, and not the outcome. To the experimental attitude, failure means nothing beyond a shade of regret or chagrin. Whether we win or lose, something has been learned, some insight and appreciation of the workings of others or of ourselves. We are ready and eager to begin another game; defeat has not dampened our enthusiasm. But if the man who has made the wager loses, he has lost, too, all heart for playing. Or, if he does try again, it is not for interest in the game, but with a redoubled intensity of self-interest to win back what he has lost. With the sporting interest, one looks on one’s relations with others, on one’s little rôle in the world, in the same spirit that we look on a political contest, where we are immensely stirred by the clash of issues and personalities, but where we know that the country will run on in about the same way, whoever is elected. This knowledge does not work against our interest in the struggle itself, nor in the outcome. It only insures us against defeat. It makes life livable by endowing us with disinterestedness. If we lose, why, better luck next time, or, at worst, is not losing a part of life?
The experimenter with life, then, must go into his laboratory with the mind of the scientist. He has nothing at stake except the discovery of the truth, and he is willing to work carefully and methodically and even cold-bloodedly in eliciting it from the tangled skein of phenomena. But it is exactly in this cheerful, matter-of-fact way that we are never willing to examine our own personalities and ideas. We take ourselves too seriously, and handle our tastes and enthusiasms as gingerly as if we feared they would shrivel away at the touch. We perpetually either underestimate or overestimate our powers and worth, and suffer such losses on account of the one and humiliations on account of the other, as serve to unbalance our knowledge of ourselves, and discourage attempts to find real guiding principles of our own or others’ actions. We need this objective attitude of the scientist. We must be self-conscious with a detached self-consciousness, treating ourselves as we treat others, experimenting to discover our possibilities and traits, testing ourselves with situations, and gradually building up a body of law and doctrine for ourselves, a real morality that will have far more worth and power and virtue than all that has been tried and tested before by no matter how much of alien human experience. We must start our quest with no prepossessions, with no theory of what ought to happen when we expose ourselves to certain stimuli. It is our business to see what does happen, and then act accordingly. If the electrical experimenter started with a theory that like magnetic poles attract each other, he would be shocked to discover that they actually repelled each other. He might even set it down to some inherent depravity of matter. But if his theory was not a prejudice but a hypothesis, he would find it possible to revise it quickly when he saw how the poles actually behaved. And he would not feel any particular chagrin or humiliation.
But we usually find it so hard to revise our theories about ourselves and each other. We hold them as prejudices and not as hypotheses, and when the facts of life seem to disprove them, we either angrily clutch at our theories and snarl in defiance, or we pull them out of us with such a wrench that they draw blood. The scientist’s way is to start with a hypothesis and then to proceed to verify it by experiment. Similarly ought we to approach life and test all our hypotheses by experience. Our methods have been too rigid. We have started with moral dogmas, and when life obstinately refused to ratify them, we have railed at it, questioned its sincerity, instead of adopting some new hypothesis, which more nearly fitted our experience, and testing it until we hit on the principle which explained our workings to ourselves. The common-sense, rule-of-thumb morality which has come down to us is no more valid than the common-sense, scientific observation that the sun goes round the earth. We can rely no longer on the loose gleanings of homely proverb and common sense for our knowledge of personality and human nature and life.
If we do not adopt the experimental life, we are still in bondage to convention. To learn of life from others’ words is like learning to build a steam-engine from books in the class-room. We may learn of principles in the spiritual life that have proven true for millions of men, but even these we must test to see if they hold true for our individual world. We can never attain any self-reliant morality if we allow ourselves to be hypnotized by fixed ideas of what is good or bad. No matter how good our principles, our devotion to morality will be mere lip-service unless each belief is individually tested, and its power to work vitally in our lives demonstrated.
But this moral experimentation is not the mere mechanical repetition of the elementary student in the laboratory, who makes simple experiments which are sure to come out as the law predicts. The laws of personality and life are far more complex, and each experiment discovers something really novel and unique. The spiritual world is ever-creative; the same experiments may turn out differently for different experimenters, and yet they may both be right. In the spiritual experimental life, we must have the attitude of the scientist, but we are able to surpass him in daring and boldness. We can be certain of a physical law that as it has worked in the past, so it will work in the future. But of a spiritual law we have no such guarantee. This it is that gives the zest of perpetual adventure to the moral life. Human nature is an exhaustless field for investigation and experiment. It is inexhaustible in its richness and variety.
The old rigid morality, with its emphasis on the prudential virtues, neglected the fundamental fact of our irrationality. It believed that if we only knew what was good, we would do it. It was therefore satisfied with telling us what was good, and expecting us automatically to do it. But there was a hiatus somewhere. For we do not do what we want to, but what is easiest and most natural for us to do, and if it is easy for us to do the wrong thing, it is that that we will do. We are creatures of instincts and impulses that we do not set going. And education has never taught us more than very imperfectly how to train these impulses in accordance with our worthy desires. Instead of endeavoring to cure this irrationality by directing our energy into the channel of experimentation, it has worked along the lines of greatest resistance, and held up an ideal of inhibition and restraint. We have been alternately exhorted to stifle our bad impulses, and to strain and struggle to make good our worthy purposes and ambitions. Now the irrational man is certainly a slave to his impulses, but is not the rational man a slave to his motives and reasons? The rational ideal has made directly for inflexibility of character, a deadening conservatism that is unable to adapt itself to situations, or make allowance for the changes and ironies of life. It has riveted the moral life to logic, when it should have been yoked up with sympathy. The logic of the heart is usually better than the logic of the head, and the consistency of sympathy is superior as a rule for life to the consistency of the intellect.
Life is a laboratory to work out experiments in living. That same freedom which we demand for ourselves, we must grant to every one. Instead of falling with our spite upon those who vary from the textbook rules of life, we must look upon their acts as new and very interesting hypotheses to be duly tested and judged by the way they work when carried out into action. Nonconformity, instead of being irritating and suspicious, as it is now to us, will be distinctly pleasurable, as affording more material for our understanding of life and our formulation of its satisfying philosophy. The world has never favored the experimental life. It despises poets, fanatics, prophets, and lovers. It admires physical courage, but it has small use for moral courage. Yet it has always been those who experimented with life, who formed their philosophy of life as a crystallization out of that experimenting, who were the light and life of the world. Causes have only finally triumphed when the rational “gradual progress” men have been overwhelmed. Better crude irrationality than the rationality that checks hope and stifles faith.
In place, then, of the rational or the irrational life, we preach the experimental life. There is much chance in the world, but there is also a modicum of free will, and it is this modicum that we exploit to direct our energies. Recognizing the precariousness and haphazardness of life, we can yet generalize out of our experience certain probabilities and satisfactions that will serve us as well as scientific laws. Only they must be flexible and they must be tested. Life is not a rich province to conquer by our will, or to wring enjoyment out of with our appetites, nor is it a market where we pay our money over the counter and receive the goods we desire. It is rather a great tract of spiritual soil, which we can cultivate or misuse. With certain restrictions, we have the choice of the crops which we can grow. Our duty is evidently to experiment until we find those which grow most favorably and profitably, to vary our crops according to the quality of the soil, to protect them against prowling animals, to keep the ground clear of noxious weeds. Contending against wind and weather and pests, we can yet with skill and vigilance win a living for ourselves. None can cultivate this garden of our personality but ourselves. Others may supply the seed; it is we who must plough and reap. We are owners in fee simple, and we cannot lease. None can live my life but myself. And the life that I live depends on my courage, skill, and wisdom in experimentation.