The people who have the deepest reason to be loyal to this country in its conflict with the powers of darkness abroad are the Americans of German descent who had previously espoused the cause of their Fatherland. Their piety has been dishonored, their confidence has been abused, their defence has been discredited, and their faith has been undermined. They had a reverence for what was great and noble in the land of their fathers; they refused to believe in the reports of baseness; above all, did it seem absurd to suppose that the people whose kindness and truth they knew, could be guilty of the immeasurable savagery and unlimited falseness with which they were charged. It has all been abundantly proved; the half has never been told. The details of treachery which have lately been exposed, of insidious hypocrisy on the part of her highest representatives, sicken the mind and make faith in human nature tremble. To find one’s highest and surest trusts crumbling to dust blown by the wind to discover illusion in the greatest certainty, is reason for turning right about face. Germans most of all will profit by the restoration of truth and good will in their government.
Each science has a different subject-matter. It will, perhaps, help to emphasize the importance of this inquiry if we recall, first, that a science presupposes the existence of a special kind of material, called its subject-matter; and, second, that each science has a different subject-matter. For example, in geology we learn about the structure of the earth’s surface; in physiology, about the functions of living organisms. Physics is a study of bodies in motion; and geometry, of figures and space. In these, and in similar cases, the subject-matter of the science is the material which the scientist observes and describes… At present, we wish to call the student’s attention to the fact that the attainment of any kind of knowledge is impossible without an active exercise of the thinking processes, and to warn him that the passive flow of images and ideas through consciousness must not be mistaken for thinking. It is true that without images and ideas there can be no thought; but thinking consists in comparing objects with one another, in differentiating the like from the unlike, in combining them into more complex wholes, in relating in many and diverse ways these wholes to each other, etc. Thinking, in other words, is a specialised sort of mental activity, an activity that taxes to the utmost, and frequently brings into play, all the abilties with which the human mind is endowed. It is the supreme task to which the many have been called; but if we regard it lightly, or presume that it can be accomplished without toil, or if we erect our own incapacity or indolence into a reason for the uselessness of the endeavor, we must abandon the hope of joining the company of the few who are chosen. It is, therefore, with good reason that logic directs attention to the function of thought in human knowledge, for thinking is the one way, the only royal road, to the goal of an educated life. To think about the objects of one’s experience is, then, necessary if knowledge is to exist; but thinking, it must also be borne in mind, is “not a passive suffering of something, but a doing of something with” these objects.
Every one who has studied history is familiar with the myths which crowd its pages. I do not mean by this the frankly mythical tales which tell of gods and goddesses, of the divine founders of nations, tribes, and families, or those in which the Middle Ages delighted and which were replete with angels and devils, with witches and sorcerers, with magic and miracles. The myths to which I refer are those which masquerade as history, which are moden as well as ancient, which make no pretence to the supernatural, but which, being either pure invention or a huge growth from some little seed of fact, possess all the characteristics of their great namesakes which have rejoiced the world for centuries, awakened almost every emotion of which the human heart is capable, and from which the historian and the man of science have been able to learn innumerable lessons as to the toughs and beliefs, the hopes and fears, of primitive man. These historical myths grow up silently. Some of them reign for centuries. Modern research has exposed many of ancient lineage and long acceptance, has torn away the mask and revealed them in their true character. Yet the historical myth rarely dies. No exposure seems able to kill it. Expelled from every book of authority, from every dictionary and encyclopedia, it will still live on among the great mass of humanity. The reason for this tenacity of life is not far to seek. The myth, or the tradition, as it is sometimes called, has necessarily a touch of the imagination, and imagination is almost always more fascinating than truth. The historical myth, indeed, would not exist at all if it did not profess to tell something which people for one reason or another, like to believe, and which appeals strongly to some emotion or passion, and so to human nature.
The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character. Love, the strongest and deepest element in all lives, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman. And publicity has already played an important part in the struggle against the Money Trust. The Pujo Committee has, in the disclosure of the facts concerning financial concentration, made a most important contribution toward attainment of the New Freedom. The battlefield has been surveyed and charted. The hostile forces have been located, counted and appraised. That was a necessary first step — and a long one — towards relief. The provisions in the Committee’s bill concerning the incorporation of stock exchanges and the statement to be made in connection with the listing of securities would doubtless have a beneficent effect. But there should be a further call upon publicity for service. That potent force must, in the impending struggle, be utilized in many ways as a continuous remedial measure.
Now it is perfectly true that men must be brought to Christ one by one. There are no labor-saving devices in evangelism. It is all hand-work. An yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel. It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resisters force of logic, prevent christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root. Many would have the seminaries combat error by attacking it as it is taught by its popular exponents. Instead of that they confuse their students with a lot of German names unknown outside the walls of the universities. That method of procedure is based simply upon a profound belief in the pervasiveness of ideas. What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mold the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity.
Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J.E. Crawford Flitch (1912). Emphasis added.
Go
Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.
If there were in the world a sincere and total pessimism, it would of necessity be silent. The despair which finds a voice is a social mood, it is the cry of misery which brother utters to brother when both are stumbling though a valley of shadows which is peopled with — comrades. In its anguish it bears witness to something that is good in life, for it presupposes sympathy. … The real gloom, the sincere despair, is dumb and blind; it writes no books, and feels no impulse to burden an intolerable universe with a monument more lasting than brass.
The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find… that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.
Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.