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Page 23
V
But one need not go so far back as Emerson to see the higher reaches of
the American temperament. Perhaps in no one have they been revealed with
more distinctness than in William James. There are those who consider it
dispraise of a philosopher to suggest that his work has local color.
However that may be, William James thought as an American as certainly
as Plato thought as a Greek. His way of philosophizing was one that
belonged to the land of his birth.
He was as distinctly American as was Daniel Boone. Daniel Boone was no
renegade taking to the woods that he might relapse into savagery. He was
a civilized man who preferred to be the maker of civilization rather
than to be its victim. He preferred to blaze his own way through the
forest. When he saw the smoke of a neighbor's chimney it was time for
him to move on. So William James was led by instinct from the crowded
highways to the dim border-lands of human experience. He preferred to
dwell in the debatable lands. With a quizzical smile he listened to the
dignitaries of philosophy. He found their completed systems too stuffy.
He loved the wildernesses of thought where shy wild things hide--half
hopes, half realities. They are not quite true now,--but they may be by
and by.
As other men are interested in the actual, so he was interested in the
possible. The possibilities are not so highly finished as the facts that
have been proved, but there are a great many more of them, and they are
much more important. There are more things in the unexplored forest than
in the clearing at its edge. Truth to him was not a field with metes
and bounds. It was a continent awaiting settlement. First the bold
pathfinders must adventure into it. Its vast spaces were infinitely
inviting, its undeveloped resources were alluring. And not only did
the path-finder interest him but the path-loser as well. But for his
heedless audacity the work of exploration would languish. Was ever a
philosopher so humorously tender to the intellectual vagabonds, the
waifs and strays of the spiritual world!
Their reports of vague meanderings in the border-land were listened
to without scorn. They might be ever so absent-minded and yet have
stumbled upon something which wiser men had missed. No one was more
keen to criticize the hard-and-fast dogmas of the wise and prudent or
more willing to learn what might, by chance, have been revealed unto
babes. The one thing he demanded was space. His universe must not be
finished or inclosed. After a rational system had been formulated and
declared to be the Whole, his first instinct was to get away from it.
He was sure that there must be more outside than there was inside.
"The 'through-and-through' universe seems to suffocate me with its
infallible, impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity with no
possibilities, its relations with no subjects, make me feel as if
I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights."
Formal philosophy seemed to him to be "too buttoned-up and
white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast,
slow-breathing, unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its
unknown tides. The freedom we want is not the freedom, with a string
tied to its leg and warranted not to fly away, of that philosophy. Let
it fly away, we say, from _us_. What then?"
To this American there must be a true democracy among the faculties of
the mind. The logical understanding must not be allowed to put on
priggish airs. The feelings have their rights also. "They may be as
prophetic and as anticipatory of truth as anything else we have." There
must be give and take; "what hope is there of squaring and settling
opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground and
admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties,
emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which will in
the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose
faculties on the whole had the best divining power?"
Do not those words give us a glimpse of the American mind in its natural
working. Its genius is anticipatory. It is searching for a common ground
on which all may meet. It puts its trust not in the thinker who can put
his thoughts in the most neat form, but the man whose faculties have _on
the whole the best divining power_.
To listen to William James was to experience an illogical elation--and
to feel justified in it. He was an unsparing critic of things as they
are, but his criticism left us in no mood of depression. Our interest is
with things as they are going to be. The universe is growing. Let us
grow with it.
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