Cambridge Lectures

1.616-677           G-1898-1
5.574-589
6.1-5
6.66-87
6.185-237

  616. The early Greek philosopher such as we read about
in Diogenes Laertius, is certainly one of the most amusing
curiosities of the whole human menagerie. It seems to have
been demanded of him that his conduct should be in marked
contrast with the dictates of ordinary common sense. Had he
behaved as other men are supposed to do his fellow-citizens
would have thought his philosophy had not taught him much.
I know that historians possessed of "higher criticism" deny
all the ridiculous anecdotes about the Hellenic sages. These
scholars seem to think that logic is a question of literary taste;
and their refined perceptions refuse to accept these narratives.
But in truth even were taste carried to a point of delicacy
exceeding that of the German professor -- which he would
think was pushing it quite into that realm of imaginary
quantities which lies on the other side of infinity -- it still
would not weigh as logic, which is a matter of strict
mathematical demonstration wherein opinion is of no weight at all.
  617. Now scientific logic cannot approve that historical
method which leads to the absulute and confident denial of
all the positive testimony that is extant, the moment that
testimony deviates from the preconceived ideas of the historian.
The story about Thales falling into the ditch while pointing
out the different stars to the old woman is told by Plato **
about two centuries later. But Dr. Edouard Zeller *** says he
knows better, and pronounces the occurrence quite impossible.
Were you to point out that the anecdote only attributes ta
Thales a characte common to almost all mathematicians,
this would afford him a new opportunity of applying his

  * The first lecture on "Detached Ideas on Vitally Important Topics," of
1898. It is entitled " Philosophy and the Conduct of Life."
  ** Theaetetus 174A.
  *** Die Philosophie der Griechen, etc. 5 Auf. 1 Teil (1892) S. 183n.
|p340

favorite argument of objection, that the story is "too
probable." So the assertion of half a dozen classical writers that
Democritus was always laughing and Heraclitus always
weeping "proclaims itself," says Zeller, "an idle fabrication,"*
notwithstanding the supports it receives from the fragments
Even Zeller admits that Diogenes of Sinope was a trifie eccen
tric. Being a contemporary of Aristotle and one of the
bestknown men of Greece, his history cannot well be denied even
by Zeller, who has to content himself with averring that the
stories are "grossly exaggerated." ** There was no other
philosopher whose conduct according to all testimony was quite so
extravagant as that of Pyrrho. The accounts of him seem to
come direct from a writing of his devoted pupil, Timon of
Phlius, and some of our authorities, of whom there are a dozen,
profess to use this book. Yet Zeller and the critics do not
believe them; and Brandis objects that the citizens of Elis
would not have chosen a half-insane man high priest -- as if
symptoms of that kind would not have particularly
recommended him for a divine office. That fashion of writing history
is, I hope, now at last passing away.
  618. However, disbelieve the stories if you will; you
cannot refuse to admit that they show what kind of man the
narrators expected a philosopher to be -- if they were
imaginary legends, all the more so. Now those narrators are a cloud
of the sanest and soberest minds of antiquity -- Plato,
Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, Plutarch, Lucian, Aelian, and so
forth. The Greeks expected philosophy to affect life -- not by
any slow process of percolation of forms, as we may expect
that researches into differential equations, stellar photometry,
the taxonomy of echinoderms, and the like will ultimately
affect the conduct of life -- but forthwith in the person and
soul of the philosopher himself, rendering him different from
ordinary men in his views of right conduct. So little did they
separate philosophy from esthetic and moral culture that the
docti furor arduus Lucreti could clothe an elaborate cosmogony
in noble verse, for the express purpose of infiuencing men's
lives; and Plato tells us in many places how inextricably he
considers the study of Dialectic to be bound up with virtuous

  * Ib. S. 626n and S. 845n.
  ** Ib. 4 Auf. 2 Teil 1 Abt. (1889) S. 283n.
|p341

living. Aristotle, on the other hand, set this matter right.
Aristotle was not much of a Greek. That he was of full Greek
blood is not likely. That he was not altogether a
Greekminded man is rnanifest. Though he belonged to .the school of
Plato, yet when he went there he was already a student,
perhaps a personal pupil, of Democritus, himself another
Thracian; and during his first years in Athens he cannot have
had much intercourse with Plato, who was away at Syracuse a
large part of the time. Above all Aristotle was an Asclepiades,
that is to say, he belonged to a line every man of whom since
the heroic age had, as a child, received a finished training in
the dissecting-room. Aristotle was a thorough-paced
scientific man such as we see nowadays, except for this, that he
ranged over all knowledge. As a man of scientific instinct, he
classed metaphysics, in which I doubt not he included logic, as
a matter of course, among the sciences -- sciences in our sense,
I mean, what he called theoretical sciences -- along with
mathematics and natural science -- natural science embracing
what we call the physical sciences and the psychical sciences,
generally. This theoretical science was for him one thing,
animated by one spirit and having knowledge of theory as
its ultimate end and aim. Esthetic studies were of a radically
different kind; while morals, and all that relates to the conduct
of life, formed a third department of intellectual activity,
radically foreign in its nature and idea, from both the other
two. Now, Gentlemen, it behooves me, at the outset of this
course, to confess to you that in this respect I stand before you
an Aristotelian and a scientific man, condemning with the
whole strength of conviction the Hellenic tendency to mingle
philosophy and practice.
  619. There are sciences, of course, many of whose results
are almost immediately applicable to human life, such as
physiology and chemistry. But the true scientific investigator
completely loses sight of the utility of what he is about. It
never enters his mind. Do you think that the physiologist
who cuts up a dog reflects, while doing so, that he may be
saving a human life? Nonsense. If he did, it would spoil him
for a scientific man; and then the vivisection would become a
crime. However, in physiology and in chemistry, the man
whose brain is occupied with utilities, though he will not do
|p342

much for science, may do a great deal for human life. But in
philosophy, touching as it does upon matters which are, and
ought to be, sacred to us, the investigator who does not stand
aloof from all intent to make practical applications will not
only obstruct the advance of the pure science, but, what is
infinitely worse, he will endanger his own moral integrity and
that of his readers.
  620. In my opinion, the present infantile condition of
philosophy -- for as long as earnest and industrious students
of it are able to come to agreement upon scarce a single
principle, I do not see how it can be considered as otherwise than
in its infancy -- is due to the fact that during this century it
has chiefly been pursued by men who have not been nurtured
in dissecting-rooms and other laboratories, and who
consequently have not been anirnated by the true scientific Eros;
but who have on the contrary come from theological seminaries,
and have consequently been infllamed with a desire to amend
the lives of themselves and others, a spirit no doubt more
important than the love of science, for men in average
situations, but radically unfitting them for the task of scientific
investigation. And it is precisely because of this utterly
unsettled and uncertain conditions of philosophy at present, that
I regard any practical applications of it to religion and conduct
as exceedingly dangerous. I have not one word to say against
the philosophy of religion or of ethics in general or in
particular. I only say that for the present it is all far too dubious
to warrant risking any human life upon it. I do not say that
philosophical science should not ultimately influence religion
and morality; I only say that it should be allowed to do so
only with secular slowness and the most conservative caution.
  621. Now I may be utterly wrong in all this, and I do not
propose to argue the question. I do not ask you to go with
me. But to avoid any possible misapprehension, I am bound
honestly to declare that I do not hold forth the slightest
promise that I have any philosophical wares to offer you which
will make you either better men or more successful men.
  622. It is particularly needful that I should say this owing
to a singular hybrid character which you will detect in these
lectures. I was asked in December to prepare a course of
lectures upon my views of philosophy. I accordingly set to work
|p343

to draw up in eight lectures an outline of one branch of
philosophy, namely, Objective Logic.* But just as I was finishing
one lecture word came that you would expect to be addressed
on topics of vital importance, and that it would be as well to
make the lectures detached. I thereupon threw aside what I
had written and began again to prepare the same number of
homilies on intellectual ethics and economics. They were
wretched things; and I was glad enough to leam, when
three-quarters of my task was done, that it would be desirable that
as much as possible should be said of certain philosophical
questions, other subjects being put in the background. At
that time, however, it was too late to write a course which
should set before you what I should have greatly desired to
submit to your judgment. I could only patch up some
fragments partly philosophical and partly practical. Thus, you
will find me part of the time offering you detached ideas upon
topics of vital importance, while part of the time I shall be
presenting philosophical considerations, in which you will be
able to feel an undercurrent toward that logic of things
concerning which I shall have an opportunity to interject scarce
one overt word.
  623. I shall have a good deal to say about right reasoning;
and in default of better I had reckoned that as a topic of vital
importance. But I do not know that the theory of reasoning is
quite vitally important. That it is absolutely essential in
metaphysics, I am as sure as I am of any truth of philosophy.
But in the conduct of life, we have to distinguish everyday
affairs and great crises. In the great decisions, I do not believe
it is safe to trust to individual reason. In everyday business,
reasoning is tolerably successful; but I am inclined to think
that it is done as well without the aid of theory as with it. A
logica utens, like the analytical mechanics resident in the billiard
player's nerves, best fulfills familiar uses.
  624. In metaphysics, however, it is not so, at all; and the
reason is obvious. The truths that the metaphysician infers
can be brought to the test of experience, if at all, only in a
department of experience quite foreign from that which
furnishes his premisses. Thus a metaphysician who infers
anything about a life beyond the grave can never find out for
  * See vol. 6, bk. I, ch. 7, # 2.
|p344

certain that his inference is false until he has gone out of the
metaphysical business, at his present stand, at least. The
consequence is that unless the metaphysician is a most thorough
master of formal logic -- and especially of the inductive side
of the logic of relatives, immeasurably more important and
difficult than all the rest of formal logic put together -- he
will inevitably fall into the practice of deciding upon the
validity of reasonings in the same manner in which, for
example, the practical politician decides as to the weight that
ought to be allowed to different considerations, that is to say,
by the impression those reasonings make upon the mind, only
with this stupendous difference, that the one man's
impressions are the resultant of long experiential training, while with
such training the other man is altogether unacquainted. The
metaphysician who adopts a metaphysical reasoning because
he is impressed that it is sound, might just as well, or better,
adopt his conclusions directly because he is impressed that
they are true, in the good old style of Descartes and of Plato.
To convince yourself of the extent to which this way of working
actually vitiates philosophy, just look at the dealings of the
metaphysicians with Zeno's objections to motion. They are
simply at the mercy of the adroit Italian. For this reason,
then, if for no other, the metaphysician who is not prepared
to grapple with all the difficulties of modem exact logic had
better put up his shutters and go out of the trade. Unless he
will do one or the other, I tell him to his conscience that he
is not the genuine, honest, earnest, resolute, energetic,
industrious, and accomplished doubter that it is his duty to be.
  625. But this is not all, nor half. For after all,
metaphysical reasonings, such as they have hitherto been, have been
simple enough for the most part. It is the metaphysical
concepts which it is difficult to apprehend. Now the metaphysical
conceptions, as I need not waste words to show, are merely
adapted from those of formal logic, and therefore can only be
apprehended in the light of a minutely accurate and
thoroughgoing system of formal logic.
  626. But in practical affairs, in matters of vital importance,
it is very easy to exaggerate the importance of ratiocination.
Man is so vain of his power of reason! It seems impossible
for him to see himself in this respect, as he himself would see
|p345

himself if he could duplicate himself and observe himself with
a critical eye. Those whom we are so fond of referring to as
the "lower animals" reason very little. Now I beg you to
observe that those beings very rarely commit a mistake, while
we ! We employ twelve good men and true to decide
a question, we lay the facts before them with the greatest care,
the "perfection of human reason" presides over the
presentment, they hear, they go out and deliberate, they come to a
unanimous opinion, and it is generally admitted that the
parties to the suit might almost as well have tossed up a penny
to decide! Such is man's glory!
  627. The mental qualities we most admire in all human
beings except our several selves are the maiden's delicacy, the
mother's devotion, manly courage, and other inheritances
that have come to us from the biped who did not yet speak;
while the characters that are most contemptible take their
origin in reasoning. The very fact that everybody so
ridiculously overrates his own reasoning is sufficient to show how
superficial the faculty is. For you do not hear the courageous
man vaunt his own courage, or the modest woman boast of
her modesty, or the really loyal plume themselves on their
honesty. What they are vain about is always some
insignificant gift of beauty or of skill.
  628. It is the instincts, the sentiments, that make the
substance of the soul. Cognition is only its surface, its locus of
contact with what is extemal to it.
  629. Do you ask me to prove this? If so, you must be a
rationalist, indeed. I can prove it -- but only by assuming a
logical principle of the demonstration of which I shall give a
hint in the next lecture.* When people ask me to prove a
proposition in philosophy I am often obliged to reply that it is a
corollary from the logic of relatives. Then certain men say,
"I should like exceedingly to look into this logic of relatives;
you must write out an exposition of it." The next day I bring
them a manuscript. But when they see that it is full of A, B,
and C, they never look at it again. Such men -- oh, well.
  630. Reasoning is of three kinds. The first is necessary,
but it only professes to give us information concerning the
matter of our own hypotheses and distinctly declares that, if

  * See "Introduction," vol. 4.|p346

we want to know anything else, we must go elsewhere. The
second depends upon probabilities. The only cases in which it
pretends to be of value is where we have, like an insurance
company, an endless multitude of insignificant risks. Wherever
a vital interest is at stake, it clearly says, "Don't ask me."
The third kind of reasoning tries what il lume naturale, which
lit the footsteps of Galileo, can do. It is really an appeal to
instinct. Thus reason, for all the frills it customarily wears, in
vital crises, comes down upon its marrow-bones to beg the
succour of instinct.
  631. Reason is of its very essence egotistical. In many
matters it acts the fly on the wheel. Do not dubt that the
bee thinks it has a good reason for making the end of its cell
as it does. But I should be very much surprised to learn that
its reason had solved that problem of isoperimetry that its
instinct has solved. Men many times fancy that they act from
reason when, in point of fact, the reasons they attribute to
themselves are nothing but excuses which unconscious instinct
invents to satisfy the teasing "whys" of the ego. The extent
of this self-delusion is such as to render philosophical
rationalism a farce.
  632. Reason, then, appeals to sentiment in the last resort.
Sentiment on its side feels itself to be the man. That is my
simple apology for philosophical sentimentalism.
  633. Sentimentalism implies conservatism; and it is of the
essence of conservatism to refuse to push any practical
principle to its extreme limits -- including the principle of
conservatism itself. We do not say that sentiment is never to be
influenced by reason, nor that under no circumstances would
we advocate radical reforms. We only say that the man who
would allow his religious life to be wounded by any sudden
acceptance of a philosophy of religion or who would
precipitately change his code of morals at the dictate of a philosophy
of ethics -- who would, let us say, hastily practice incest -- is a
man whom we should consider unwise. The regnant system of
sexual rules is an instinctive or sentimental induction
summarizing the experience of all our race. That it is abstractly and
absolutely infallible we do not pretend; but that it is
practically infallible for the individual -- which is the only clear
sense the word "infallibility" will bear -- in that he ought to
|p347

obey it and not his individual reason, that we do maintain.
  634. I would not allow to sentiment or instinct any weight
whatsoever in theoretical matters, not the slightest. Right
sentiment does not demand any such weight; and right reason
would emphatically repudiate the claim if it were made. True,
we are driven oftentimes in science to try the suggestions of
instinct; but we only try them, we compare them with
experience, we hold ourselves ready to throw them overboard at a
moment's notice from experience. If I allow the supremacy of
sentiment in human affairs, I do so at the dictation of reason
itself; and equally at the dictation of sentiment, in theoretical
matters I refuse to allow sentiment any weight whatever.
  635. Hence, I hold that what is properly and usually called
belief, that is, the adoption of a proposition as a {...}
to use the energetic phrase of Doctor Carus,* has no place
in science at all. We believe the proposition we are ready
to act upon. Full belief is willingness to act upon the
proposition in vital crises, opinion is willingness to act upon it in
relatively insignificant affairs. But pure science has nothing
at all to do with action. The propositions it accepts, it merely
writes in the list of premisses it proposes to use. Nothing is
vital for science; nothing can be. Its accepted propositions,
therefore, are but opinions at most; and the whole list is
provisional. The scientific man is not in the least wedded to his
conclusions. He risks nothing upon them. He stands ready to
abandon one or all as soon as experience opposes them. Some
of them, I grant, he is in the habit of calling established truths;
but that merely means propositions to which no competent
man today demurs. It seems probable that any given
proposition of that sort will remain for a long time upon the list of
propositions to be admitted. Still, it may be refuted tomorrow;
and if so, the scientific man will be glad to have got rid of an
error. There is thus no proposition at all in science which
answers to the conception of belief.
  636. But in vital matters, it is quite otherwise. We must
act in such matters; and the principle upon which we are willing
to act is a belief.
  637. Thus, pure theoretical knowledge, or science, has
nothing directly to say conceming practical matters, and nothing

 * Fundamental Problems, Open Court, Chicago (1891), p. 22.
|p348

even applicable at all to vital crises. Theory is applicable
to minor practical affairs; but matters of vital importance must
be left to sentiment, that is, to instinct.
  638. Now there are two conceivable ways in which right
sentiment might treat such terrible crises; on the one hand, it
might be that while human instincts are not so detailed and
featured as those of the dumb animals, yet they might be
sufficient to guide us in the greatest concems without any aid
from reason, while on the other hand, sentiment might act to
bring the vital crises under the domain of reason by rising
under such circumstances to such a height of self-abnegation
as to render the situation insignificant. In point of fact, we
observe that a healthy natural human nature does act in both
these ways.
  639. The instincts of those animals whose instincts are
remarkable present the character of being chiefly, if not
altogether, directed to the preservation of the stock and of
benefiting the individual very little, if at all, except so far as he
may happen as a possible procreator to be a potential public
functionary. Such, therefore, is the description of instinct that
we ought to expect to find in man, in regard to vital matters;
and so we do. It is not necessary to enumerate the facts of
human life which show this, because it is too plain. It is to
be remarked, however, that individuals who have passed the
reproductive period, are more useful to the propagation of the
human race than to [?] any other. For they amass wealth, and
teach prudence, they keep the peace, they are friends of the
little ones, and they inculcate all the sexual duties and virtues.
Such instinct does, as a matter of course, prompt us, in all
vital crises, to look upon our individual lives as small matters.
It is no extraordinary pitch of virtue to do so; it is the
character of every man or woman that is not despicable. Somebody
during the Reign of Terror said: Tout le monde croit qu'il est
difficile de mourir. Je le crois comme les autres. Cependant je
vois que quant on est la chacun s'en tire. It is less characteristic
of the woman because her life is more important to the stock,
and her immolation less useful.
  640. Having thus shown how much less vitally important
reason is than instinct, I next desire to point out how
exceedingly desirable, not to say indispensable, it is for the successful
|p349

march of discovery in philosophy and in science generally that
practical utilities, whether low or high, should be put out of
sight by the investigator.
  641. The point of view of utility is always a narrow point
of view. How much more we should know of chemistry today
if the most practically important bodies had not received
excessive attention; and how much less we should know, if the rare
elements and the compounds which only exist at low
temperatures had received only the share of attention to which their
utility entitled them.
  642. It is notoriously true that into whatever you do not
put your whole heart and soul in that you will not have much
success. Now, the two masters, theory and practice, you cannot
serve. That perfect balance of attention which is requisite for
observing the system of things is utterly lost if human desires
intervene, and all the more so the higher and holier those
desires may be.
  643. In addition to that, in philosophy we have prejudices
so potent that it is impossible to keep one's sang-froid if we
allow ourselves to dwell upon them at all.
  644. It is far better to let philosophy follow perfectly
untrammeled a scientific method, predetermined in advance of
knowing to what it will lead. If that course be honestly and
scmpulously carried out, the results reached, even if they be
not altogether true, even if they be grossly mistaken, can not
but be highly serviceable for the ultimate discovery of truth.
Meantime, sentiment can say "Oh well, philosophical science
has not by any means said its last word yet; and meantime I
will continue to believe so and so."
  645. No doubt a large proportion of those who now busy
themselves with philosophy will lose all interest in it as soon as
it is forbidden to look upon it as susceptible of practical
applications. We who continue to pursue the theory must bid adieu
to them. But so we must in any department of pure science.
And though we regret to lose their company, it is infinitely
better that men devoid of genuine scientific curiosity should
not barricade the road of science with empty books and
embarrassing assumptions.
  646. The host of men who achieve the bulk of each year's
new discoveries are mostly confined to narrow ranges. For
|p350

that reason you would expect the arbitrary hypotheses of the
different mathematicians to shoot out in every direction into
the boundless void of arbitrariness. But you do not find any
such thing. On the contrary, what you find is that men
working in fields as remote from one another as the African diamond
fields are from the Klondike reproduce the same forms of
novel hypothesis. Riemann had apparently never heard of
his contemporary Listing. The latter was a naturalistic
geometer, occupied with the shapes of leaves and birds' nests,
while the former was working upon analytical functions. And
yet that which seems the most arbitrary in the ideas created
by the two men are one and the same form. This phenomenon
is not an isolated one; it characterizes the mathematics of our
times, as is, indeed, well known. All this crowd of creators of
forms for which the real world affords no parallel, each man
arbitrarily following his own sweet will, are, as we now begin
to discern, gradually uncovering one great cosmos of forms,
a world of potential being. The pure mathematician himself
feels that this is so. He is not indeed in the habit of publishing
any of his sentiments nor even his generalizations. The
fashion in mathematics is to print nothing but demonstrations,
and the reader is left to divine the workings of the man's mind
from the sequence of those demonstrations. But if you enjoy
the good fortune of talking with a number of mathematicians
of a high order, you will find that the typical pure
mathematician is a sort of Platonist. Only, he is [a] Platonist who corrects
the Heraclitan error that the eternal is not continuous. The
eternal is for him a world, a cosmos, in which the universe of
actual existence is nothing but an arbitrary locus. The end
that pure mathematics is pursuing is to discover that real
potential world.
  647. Once you become inflated with that idea, vital
importance seems to be a very low kind of importance, indeed.
  But such ideas are only suitable to regulate another life
than this. Here we are in this workaday world, little creatures,
mere cells in a social organism itself a poor and little thing
enough, and we must look to see what little and definite task
our circumstances have set before our little strength to do.
The performance of that task will require us to draw upon all
our powers, reason included. And in the doing of it we should
|p351

chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is
most superficial and fallible -- I mean our reason -- but upon
that department that is deep and sure -- which is instinct.
  648. Instinct is capable of developement and growth -- 
though by a movement which is slow in the proportion in
which it is vital; and this developement takes place upon lines
which are altogether parallel to those of reasoning. And just
as reasoning springs from experience, so the developement of
sentiment arises from the soul's Inward and Outward
Experiences. Not only is it of the same nature as the developement of
cognition; but it chiefly takes place through the
instrumentality of cognition. The soul's deeper parts can only be reached
through its surface. In this way the eternal forms, that
mathematics and philosophy and the other sciences make us
acquainted with, will by slow percolation gradually reach the
very core of one's being; and will come to influence our
lives; and this they will do, not because they involve truths
of merely vital importance, but because they are ideal and
eternal verities.

     # 2. PRACTICAL CONCERNS AND THE
          WISDOM OF SENTIMENT*

  649. Among the advantages which our humble cousins
whom it pleases us to refer to as "the lower animals" enjoy
over some of our own family is that they never reason about
vitally important topics, and never have to lecture nor to
listen to lectures about them. Docilely allowing themselves
to be guided by their instincts into almost every detail of life,
they live exactly as their Maker intended them to live. The
result is, that they very rarely fall into error of any kind, and
never into a vital one. What a contrast to our lives! Truly
that reason upon which we so plume ourselves, though it may
answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer
than a toss-up.
  650. Logic is computation, said Hobbes; ** and those who
have deepest delved in that dreary discipline testify that all

  * The remainder of this chapter is from an alternate version of the first
lecture on Detached Ideas entitled, " On Detached Ideas in General and on VitaUy
Important Topics," 1898. A number of duplicate passages have been omitted.
  ** Logic or Computation, part I, ch. 1.
|p352

reasoning whatever involves mathematics, and laugh over the
fallacies of those who attempt to reason unmathematically.
Now tell me, is mathematics an occupation for a gentleman
and an athlete? Is not such drudgery fit only for the lower
classes? One may well be struck with pity for the masses of
population concentrated in New York and living under such
unnatural conditions that they are forced to think
mathematically. However, it is not as if they had the tender nurture of a
cultured modern Harvard, that great eleemosynary institution
that Massachusetts has established to the end that the elite
of her youths may be aided to eaming comfortable incomes
and living softly cultured lives. The brains of those New
York plebeians are coarse, strong, laboring brains, that don't
know what it is to be free from mathematics. Their
conceptions are crude and vulgar enough, but their vigor of reasoning
would surprise you. I have seen my [private] scholars there
wrestle with problems that I would no more venture to allow the
exquisitely polished intellects of a modem university to attack
than I would venture to toss a cannonball into an eggshell cup.
  651. I intend to call upon you for no reasoning in these
lectures more complicated than one of Hegel's dilemmas. For
all reasoning is mathematical and requires effort; and I mean
to shun the guilt of overstraining anybody's powers. That is
why I have selected a subject for my lectures which is not at
all in my line, but which I hope may prove to be to your taste.
  652. On vitally important topics reasoning is out of
place.... The very theory of reasoning, were we resolutely to
attack it without any dread of mathematics, would fumish us
conclusive reasons for limiting the applicability of reasoning to
unimportant matters; so that, unless a problem is insignificant
in importance compared with the aggregate of analogous
problems, reasoning itself pronounces that there is a fallacy in
submitting the question to reason, at all. That must remain
merely an assertion, mathematics being taboo.
  653. In regard to the greatest affairs of life, the wise man
follows his heart and does not trust his head. This should be
the method of every man, no matter how powerful his intellect.
More so still, perhaps, if mathematics is too difficult for him,
that is to say, if he is unequal to any intricate reasoning
whatsoever. Would not a man physically puny be a fool not to

|p353

recognize it, and to allow an insane megalomania to induce him
to enter a match game of football? But the slightest of
physical frames might as well attempt to force back a locomotive
engine, as for the mightiest of mental giants to try to regulate
his life advantageously by a purely reasoned-out theory.
  654. Common sense, which is the resultant of the
traditional experience of mankind, witnesses unequivocally that the
heart is more than the head, and is in fact everything in our
highest concems, thus agreeing with my unproved logical
theorem; and those persons who think that sentiment has no
part in common sense forget that the dicta of common sense
are objective facts, not the way some dyspeptic may feel, but
what the healthy, natural, normal democracy thinks. And yet
when you open the next new book on the philosophy of religion
that comes out, the chances are that it will be written by an
intellectualist who in his preface offers you his metaphysics as
a guide for the soul, talking as if philosophy were one of our
deepest concems. How can the writer so deceive himself?
  655. If, walking in a garden on a dark night, you were
suddenly to hear the voice of your sister crying to you to rescue
her from a villain, would you stop to reason out the
metaphysical question of whether it were possible for one mind to
cause material waves of sound and for another mind to
perceive them? If you did, the problem might probably occupy
the remainder of your days. In the same way, if a man
undergoes any religious experience and hears the call of his Saviour,
for him to halt till he has adjusted a philosophical difficulty
would seem to be an analogous sort of thing, whether you call
it stupid or whether you call it disgusting. If on the other hand,
a man has had no religious experience, then any religion not
an affectation is as yet impossible for him; and the only worthy
course is to wait quietly till such experience comes. No amount
of speculation can take the place of experience.
  656. Pray pardon my hopping about from one branch of
my discourse to another and back again with no more apparent
purpose than a robin redbreast or a Charles Lamb. Because
it would hardly be logically consistent for me to arrange my
matter with scrupulously logical accuracy when the very thing
I am driving at is that logic and reasoning are only of secondary
importance. There are two psychological or anthropological
|p354

observations about our reasoning powers which it is
convenient to insert here.
  657. One is that powers of reasoning in any but the most
rudimentary way are a somewhat uncommon gift, about as
uncommon as a talent for music. Indeed, a much smaller
number of persons actually attain to any proficiency in
reasoning. But then the exercise of intricate ratiocination requires
great energy and prolonged effort, while musical practice is
nearly unmixed pleasure, I suppose, for those who do it well.
Moreover, owing to several peculiar circumstances, good
instruction in reasoning is exceedingly rare. As for what is taught
in the colleges under the name of logic, oh dear, perhaps the
less said the better. It is tme that mathematics teaches one
branch of reasoning. That is, indeed, its chief value in
education. But how few teachers understand the logic of
mathematics ! And how few understand the psychology of the puzzled
pupil ! The pupil meets with a difficulty in Euclid. Two to one
the reason is that there is a logical flaw. The boy, however, is
conscious only of a mysterious hindrance. What his difficulty
is he cannot tell the teacher; the teacher must teach him. Now
the teacher probably never really saw the tme logic of the
passage. But he thinks he does because, owing to long familiarity,
he has lost that sense of coming up against an invisible barrier
that the boy feels. Had the teacher ever really conquered the
logical difficulty himself, of course he would recognize just
what it was, and thus would fulfill the first condition, at least,
of being helpful. But not having conquered the difficulty, but
only having wom out the sense of difficulty by familiarity, he
simply cannot understand why the boy should feel any
difficulty; and all he can do is to exclaim, "Oh, these stupid, stupid
boys!" As if a physician should exclaim, "Oh, these horrid
patients, they won't get well ! " But suppose, by some
extraordinary conjunction of the planets, a really good teacher of
reasoning were to be appointed, what would be his first care?
It would be to guard his scholars from that malady with which
logic is usually infested, so that unless it runs off them like
water from a duck, it is sure to make them the very worst of
reasoners, namely, unfair reasoners, and what is worse
unconsciously unfair, for the rest of their lives. The good teacher
win therefore take the utmost pains to prevent the scholars
|p355

getting puffed up with their logical acquirements. He will
wish to impregnate them with the right way of looking at
reasoning before they shall be aware that they have leamed
anything; and he will not mind giving considerable time to
that, for it is worth a great deal. But now come the examiner
and the pupil himself. They want results, tangible to them.
The teacher is dismissed as a failure, or, if he is allowed another
chance, he will take good care to reverse the method of his
teaching and give them results -- especially, as that is the
lazy way. These are some of the causes of there being so few
strong reasoners in the world. But allowing for the infiuence
of such causes as well as we can, the fact still remains that
comparatively few persons are originally possessed of any but
the feeblest modicum of this talent. What is the significance
of that? Is it not a plain sign that the faculty of reasoning is
not of the first importance to success in life? For were it so,
its absence would cause the individual to postpone marriage
and so affect his procreation; and thus natural selection would
operate to breed the race for vigorous reasoning powers, and
they would become common. And the study of characters
confirms this conclusion. For though the men who are most
extraordinarily successful evidently do reason deeply about
the details of their business, yet no ordinary degrees of good
success are influenced -- otherwise than perhaps favorably -- 
by any lack of great reasoning power. We all know highly
successful men, lawyers, editors, scientific men -- not to speak of
artists -- whose great deficiency in this regard is only revealed
by some unforeseen accident.
  658. The other observation I desired to make about the
human reason is that we find people mostly modest enough
about qualities which really go to making fine men and women
 -- the courageous man not usually vaunting his courage, nor
the modest woman boasting of her modesty, nor the loyal vain
of their good faith: the things they are vain about are some
insignificant gifts of beauty, or skill of some kind. But beyond
all, with the exception of those who, being trained in logic,
follow its rules and thus do not trust their direct reasoning
powers at all, everybody else ridiculously overrates his own
logic, and if he really has superior powers of reason is usually
so consumed by conceit that it is far from rare to see a young
|p356

man completely ruined by it; so that one is sometimes tempted
to think, and perhaps truly, that it conduces not only to a
man's success from a worldly point of view but to his attaining
any real elevation of character to be all but a fool in this regard,
provided only he be perfectly aware of his own deficiency. . . .
  659. All those modem books which offer new philosophies
of religion, at the rate of one every fortnight on the average,
are but symptoms of the temporary dissolution of the Christian
faith. This appears as soon as we compare them with the works
of religious philosophy of the ages of faith, such as the Summa
of St. Thomas Aquinas or the Opus Oxoniense of Duns Scotus
 -- the one reproducing without a shadow of mistrust every
dogma of the Fathers of the Church, while the other displays a
far stouter faith in maintaining that metaphysics has nothing
to say either one way or the other concerning any question of
religion, but leaves it to be decided by positive testimony or
inspiration. The only old book which these modern
philosophies of religion really resemble a good deal -- except that
they lack its terrible earnestness -- is the De consolatione
philosophiae and it is paying them a high compliment to say
so. Boethius, you know, is utterly religionless, but he feels the
need of religion and vainly tries to find a substitute for it in
philosophy. His first two books are somewhat inspiring, because
they breathe an unconscious religion. But as the work
progresses, reasoning enters more and more into the thought, until
the last book, which resembles a modern essay much more
than all the rest, is a mere diet of bran for the hungered soul.
  660. It is hardly necessary to insist here that the highly
cultured classes of Christendom -- excepting always those
families which are so important as to be an object of solicitude
on the part of the priests -- are nowadays nearly destitute of
any religion. It was made perfectly manifest five and twenty
years ago or more -- no matter for the exact date; it was at a
date when men saturated with the mechanical philosophy were
still hesitating to separate themselves from the church -- when
John Tyndall, in the innocence of his scientific heart, proposed
to measure the efficacy of prayer by experimental statistics.
Instantly, the clergy, one and all, instead of meeting the
proposal with the candor with which Elijah met the priests of
Baal -- though by the way I notice some ingenious persons
|p357

think his barrels of water were really deodorized kerosene,
which for a student of the history of chemistry, would, of itself,
seem to be a good enough miracle -- instead of thanking
Tyndall for the idea, I say, the clergy to a man shrank back in
terror, thus conclusively betraying to every eye their own utter
disbelief in their own dogma. They pronounced it an impious
proposition. But there was nothing more impious in it than in
any other sort of inquiry into religion except this -- that they
feared it would bring all " talkee-talkee " to an end. Although
it must be granted that in our country the clergy are by far
the most sceptical class of the community, yet where the
clergy stood a generation back, the bulk of the highly educated
and cultured class stands now.
  It is a thousand times better to have no faith at all in God
or virtue than to have a hemi-hypocritical faith....


    # 3. VITALLY IMPORTANT TRUTHS

  661. Conservatism, true conservatism, which is
sentimental conservatism, and by those who have no powers of
observation to see what sort of men conservatives are, is often called
stupid conservatism, an epithet far more applicable to the
false conservatism that looks to see on which side bread is
buttered -- true conservatism, I say, means not trusting to
reasonings about questions of vital importance but rather to
hereditary instincts and traditional sentiments. Place before
the conservative arguments to which he can find no adequate
reply and which go, let us say, to demonstrate that wisdom
and virtue call upon him to offer to marry his own sister, and
though he be unable to answer the arguments, he will not act
upon their conclusion, because he believes that tradition and
the feelings that tradition and custom have developed in him
are safer guides than his own feeble ratiocination. Thus, true
conservatism is sentimentalism. Of course, sentiment lays no
claim to infallibility, in the sense of theoretical infallibility,
a phrase that logical analysis proves to be a mere jingle of
words with a jangle of contradictory meanings. The
conservative need not forget that he might have been born a Brahmin
with a traditional sentiment in favor of suttee -- a reflection
that tempts him to become a radical. But still, on the whole,|p358

he thinks his wisest plan is to reverence his deepest sentiments
as his highest and ultimate authority, which is regarding them
as for him practically infallible -- that is, to say infallible in
the only sense of the word in which infallible has any
consistent meaning.
  662. The opinion prevalent among radicals that
conservatives, and sentimentalists generally, are fools is only a
cropping-out of the tendency of men to conceited exaggeration of
their reasoning powers. Uncompromising radical though I be
upon some questions, inhabiting all my life an atmosphere of
science, and not reckoned as particularly credulous, I must
confess that the conservative sentimentalism I have defined
recommends itself to my mind as eminently sane and wholesome.
Commendable as it undoubtedly is to reason out matters of
detail, yet to allow mere reasonings and reason's self-conceit
to overslaw [over-slaugh? over-awe?] the normal and manly
sentimentalism which ought to lie at the cornerstone of all
our conduct seems to me to be foolish and despicable.
  663. Philosophy after all is, at its highest valuation,
nothing more than a branch of science, and as such is not a matter
of vltaidmportance; and those who represent it as being so
are simply offering us a stone when we ask for bread. Mind, I
do not deny that a philosophical or other scientific error may
be fraught with disastrous consequences for the whole people
It might conceivably bring about the extirpation of the human
race. Importance in that sense it might have in any degree.
Nevertheless, in no case is it of vital importance.
  664. A great calamity the error may be, qua event, in the
sense in which an earthquake, or the impact of a comet, or the
extinction of the sun would be an important event, and
consequently, if it happens to lie in the line of my duty or of yours
to investigate any philosophical question and to publish the
more or less erroneous results of our investigations, I hope we
shall not fail to do so, if we can. Certainly, any task which
lies before us to be done has its importance. But there our
responsibility ends. Nor is it the philosophy itself, qua
cognition, that is vital, so much as it is our playing the part that is
allotted to us.
  665. You will observe that I have not said a single word in
disparagement of the philosophy of religion, in general, which
|p359

seems to me a most interesting study, at any rate, and possibly
likely to lead to some useful result. Nor have I attacked any
sect of that philosophy. It is not the philosophy which I hold
to be baleful, but the representing it to be of vital importance,
as if any genuine religion could come from the head instead of
from the heart.
  666. Somewhat allied to the philosophy of religion is the
science of ethics. It is equally useless. Now books of casuistry,
indeed, using the word "casuistry" not in any technical sense,
but merely to signify discussions of what ought to be done in
various difficult situations, might be made at once extremely
entertaining and positively useful. But casuistry is just what
the ordinary treatises upon ethics do not touch, at least not
seriously. They chiefly occupy themselves with reasoning out
the basis of morality and other questions secondary to that.
Now what's the use of prying into the philosophical basis of
morality? We all know what morality is: it is behaving as you
were brought up to behave, that is, to think you ought to be
punished for not behaving. But to believe in thinking as you
have been brought up to think defines conservatism. It needs
no reasoning to perceive that morality is conservatism. But
conservatism again means, as you will surely agree, not
trusting to one's reasoning powers. To be a moral man is to obey
the traditional maxims of your communuty without hesitation
or discussion. Hence, ethics, which is reasoning out an
explanation of morality is -- I will not say immoral, [for] that would be
going too far -- composed of the very substance of immorality.
If you ever happen to be thrown in with an unprofessional
thief, the only very bad kind of thief, so as to be able to study
his psychological peculiarities, you will find that two things
characterize him; first, an even more immense conceit in his
own reasoning powers than is common, and second, a
disposition to reason about the basis of morals.
  667. Ethics, then, even if not a positively dangerous
study, as it sometimes proves, is as useless a science as can be
conceived. But it must be said, in favor of ethical writers,
that they are commonly free from the nauseating custom of
boasting of the utility of their science.

668. Far be it from me to decry. Though I do hail from
|p360

New York,* I shall hardly be mistaken for a Wall Street
Philistine. A useless inquiry, provided it is a systematic one, is
pretty much the same thing as a scientific inquiry. Or at any
rate if a scientific inquiry becomes by any mischance useful,
that aspect of it has to be kept sedulously out of sight during
the investigation or else, as I shall try to show you another
evening, its hopes of success are fatally cursed.
  669. As long as ethics is recognized as not being a matter
of vital importance or in any way touching the student's
conscience, it is, to a normal and healthy mind, a civilizing and
valuable study -- somewhat more so than the theory of whist,
much more so than the question of the landing of Columbus,
which things are insignificant not at all because they are useless,
nor even because they are little in themselves, but simply and
solely because they are detached from the great continuum
of ideas.
  670. It would be useless to enumerate the other sciences,
since it would only be to reiterate the same declaration. As
long as they are not looked at as practical, and so degraded to
pot-boiling arts -- as our modern writers degrade the
philosophy of religion, in claiming that it is practical -- for what
difference does it make whether the pot to be boiled is today's
or the hereafter's? They are all such that it would be far too
little to say that they are valuable to us. Rather let our hearts
murmur "blessed are we" if the immolation of our being can
weld together the smallest part of the great cosmos of ideas to
which the sciences belong.
  671. Even if a science be useful -- like engineering or
surgery -- yet if it is useful only in an insignificant degree as those
sciences are, it still has a divine spark in which its petty
practicality must be forgotten and forgiven. But as soon as
a proposition becomes vitally important -- then in the first
place, it is sunk to the condition of a mere utensil; and in the
second place, it ceases altogether to be scientific, because
concerning matters of vital importance reasoning is at once an
impertinence toward its subject matter and a treason against
itself.

  * Peirce was born in Cambridge, Mass., September 10,1839, and lived there
and in Milford, Pa., most of his life. For a time, however, he gave private
instruction in logic at New York.

|p361

  672. Were I willing to make a single exception to the
principle I thus enunciate, and to admit that there was one study
which was at once scientific and yet vitally important, I should
make that exception in favor of logic; for the reason that if we
fall into the error of believing that vitally important questions
are to be decided by reasoning, the only hope of salvation lies
in formal logic, which demonstrates in the clearest manner
that reasoning itself testifies to its own ultimate subordination
to sentiment. It is like a Pope who should declare ex cathedra
and call upon all the faithful to implicitly believe on pain of
damnation by the power of the keys that he was not the
supreme authority.
  673. Among vitally important truths there is one which I
verily believe -- and which men of infinitely deeper insight
than mine have believed -- to be solely supremely important.
It is that vitally important facts are of all truths the veriest
trifles. For the only vitally important matter is my concern,
business, and duty -- or yours. Now you and I -- what are
we? Mere cells of the social organism. Our deepest sentiment
pronounces the verdict of our own insignificance. Psychological
analysis shows that there is nothing which distinguishes my
personal identity except my faults and my limitations -- or if
you please, my blind will, which it is my highest endeavor to
annihilate. Not in the contemplation of " topics of vital
importance" but in those universal things with which philosophy
deals, the factors of the universe, is man to find his highest
occupation. To pursue "topics of vital importance" as the
first and best can lead only to one or other of two
terminations -- either on the one hand what is called, I hope not justly,
Americanism, the worship of business, the life in which the
fertilizing stream of genial sentiment dries up or shrinks to
a rill of comic tit-bits, or else on the other hand, to
monasticism, sleepwalking in this world with no eye nor heart except
for the other. Take for the lantern of your footsteps the cold
light of reason and regard your business, your duty, as the
highest thing, and you can only rest in one of those goals or the
other. But suppose you embrace, on the contrary, a
conservative sentimentalism, modestly rate your own reasoning powers
at the very mediocre price they would fetch if put up at
auction, and then what do you come to? Why, then, the very
|p362

first command that is laid upon you, your quite highest
business and duty, becomes, as everybody knows, to recognize a
higher business than your business, not merely an avocation
after the daily task of your vocation is performed, but a
generalized conception of duty which completes your personality
by melting it into the neighboring parts of the universal cosmos.
If this sounds unintelligible, just take for comparison the first
good mother of a family that meets your eye, and ask whether
she is not a sentimentalist, whether you would wish her to be
otherwise, and lastly whether you can find a better formula in
which to outline the universal features of her portrait than
that I have just given. I dare say you can improve upon that;
but you will find one element of it is correct -- especially if
your understanding is aided by the logic of relatives -- and
that is that the supreme commandment of the
Buddhisto-christian religion is, to generalize, to complete the whole
system even until continuity results and the distinct individuals
weld together. Thus it is, that while reasoning and the science
of reasoning strenuously proclaim the subordination of
reasoning to sentiment, the very supreme commandment of sentiment
is that man should generalize, or what the logic of relatives
shows to be the same thing, should become welded into the
universal continuum, which is what true reasoning consists in.
But this does not reinstate reasoning, for this generalization
should come about, not merely in man's cognitions, which are
but the superficial film of his being, but objectively in the
deepest emotional springs of his life. In fulfilling this
command, man prepares himself for transmutation into a new
form of life, the joyful Nirvana in which the discontinuities of
his will shall have all but disappeared.
  674. Do you know what it was that was at the root of the
barbarism of the Plantagenet period and paralyzed the
awakening of science from the days of Roger Bacon to those of
Francis Bacon? We plainly trace it in the history, the writings,
the monuments, of that age. It was the exaggerated interest
men took in matters of vital importance.
  675. Do you know what it is in Christianity that when
recognized makes our religion an agent of reform and progress?
It is its marking duty at its proper finite figure. Not that it
diminishes in any degree its vital importance, but that behind
|p363

the outline of that huge mountain it enables us to descry a
silvery peak rising into the calm air of eternity.
  676. The generalization of sentiment can take place on
different sides. Poetry is one sort of generalization of
sentiment, and in so far is the regenerative metamorphosis of
sentiment. But poetry remains on one side ungeneralized, and to
that is due its emptiness. The complete generalization, the
complete regeneration of sentiment is religion, which is poetry,
but poetry completed.
  677. That is about what I had to say to you about topics
of vital importance. To sum it up, all sensible talk about
vitally important topics must be commonplace, all reasoning
about them unsound, and all study of them narrow and sordid.