Part III

indicated that the affected part is our intelligence, and that recovery depends upon sharpening our wits. It should now be evident that sharpening our wits is different from putting an edge upon a tool that is no part of ourselves. Our “wits” are not constituted of any impersonal intelligence, but of intelligence that quivers through and through with personality and the laws of its growth. Intellect, as such, cannot whittle itself to a point, as we see in the practical stupidities of intellectual men; the total attitude of the person towards himself and towards others is involved.

Shall we say, then, that the problem of release from our self-imposed bondage finds its solution in the Greek idea of being ourselves, or in the Christian idea of being saved from ourselves? The answer lies in the fact that when we become objective towards ourselves we come upon the requirement of repentance. We do, indeed, need to be ourselves, but not these selves that we behold in each of us! Here not only does naturalism in any of its current forms prove to be inadequate as a theory of motivation, but also all naïve confidence in ourselves whencesoever it be derived. Self-denial is not a vagary of unhealthy minds; it is a law of reason; it is fundamental in the motivation of a man. We save our lives by losing them. The solution of the problem is far more Christian than it is Greek.

A remark was made some way back that the technic of freedom will be found to be, not a pattern to be imposed upon conduct, but something more like friendship or worship. The meaning of this possibly cryptic utterance will be the subject of the next and concluding chapter.

XXX

THE REALM OF FREE SPIRITS

The spirit of man, when it is most awake, eager, and demanding, pants for the open spaces and for companionship there. But what sort of open spaces? Real emancipation is not only release from something but also release into something. How, then, shall we describe the realm into which our spirits, when they breathe freedom, struggle to press? What could really satisfy a man?

The question can be answered only in and through the act of struggling to be free. _Solvitur ambulando._ Wants become defined through the interplay of satisfactions and discomforts that awaken thought. I did not want to stop at Daggett to have the contents of my car examined by the California State Bureau of Plant Quarantine and Pest Control, but when my questioning taught me that I might inadvertently import an insect that would destroy the orange groves amid which I write these words, I acquired a desire for the examination. But this learning, mark! was not the plastering upon me of an external compulsion; rather, events guided me back to myself, making me act from within more fully than before. It is experience that teaches us what we want, but it does it by pricking us awake so that we ask questions and compare satisfaction with satisfaction, desire with desire.

Having been at this business of self-discovery for some time, there is no reason why we might not analyse the incidents and the processes of it, and thereby arrive at a general description of the attitudes that we take in our struggles to emancipate ourselves from ourselves. Attitudes are, of course, leanings “towards,” and hence pointers-out of a direction and possibly a goal. What, then, is this “life” concerning which we say:

’Tis life of which our nerves are scant; ’Tis life, and more of life, we want?

This question can be asked and answered without saying whether this which we want really exists or is ultimately attainable. I shall not enter into the metaphysical question whether we are in process of discovering an ideal world that already exists; or whether we are

## participating in the creation of an ideal reality that shares existence

with the unideal; or whether ideals are, in last analysis, chimerical. My sole question is this: If our likes could be filled to the very brim, what kind of world should we then find ourselves living in? It is appropriate to remark, however, that unless we permit our wants to go exploring, we cannot find out what the resources of the world are. We learn where food is, and where it is not, because hunger sets us upon a quest. Nature teaches us when we, the pupils, put questions to her. If, then, we desire to know whether our world-system is a fit habitation for persons, we must make the experiment of acting as persons, and then observe what happens. We must know what we want, and then go after it.

There is a tendency, which grows naturally out of the order in which the sciences developed--first the physical, then the biological, then the psychological and sociological--to invert the order of inquiry that has just been named, asking first what the environment contains and only afterwards what our desires are. Then, under a general theory of adaptation, the assumption is made that our desires, in the nature of the case, must be adapted to the particular environment that most occupies scientific attention. If we say that we want something more than _this_ environment provides, we are assured that we have misinterpreted ourselves, and that what we “really” want is only that which the already-assumed environment is ready to supply. Love is “in reality” only “galloping gonads,” as a college student put it; and idealistic cravings are “in reality” an expression of some physiological vacuum.

This type of procedure regards itself as strictly objective, whereas it is infected with subjectivity in that a particular mental habit prevents consideration of unaccustomed questions. It is sheer self-imitation that makes us believe that the fundamental apprehension of our world is to be had by way of the physical sciences. It is a self-deceived subjectivity that restricts the description of our wants to sub-human categories instead of letting these wants speak for themselves.

The universe may make possible what we want, or it may not; the issue must be determined by observation and experiment under hypotheses adapted to testing the free flight of desire. This free flight is what now concerns us, and what we want to know is the direction in which it goes when it is most free, most completely personal and venturesomely rational. To change the figure, what is the medium that our wings must press against in order to fly? The answer is partly implied in the preceding sections.

_First_, how small or weak must a minority be in order to become totally insignificant and rationally negligible? I do not see how we can give any answer to this question that will not assume, rightly or wrongly, that there is a realm of free spirit that lives by forces resident within itself, and not by permission of anything external to itself. Whatever matter may prove to be, and whatever factor of determinism may reside in the temporal process; however irrational and self-defeating we may at times become, something that is self-nourishing appears to be capable of asserting itself in the weakest minority.

_Second_, how broad must cooperation in thinking be in order that I may become fully emancipated from myself? Who is to be included, and who is to be excluded from the fellowship of intelligence? Again, I do not see what answer can be given that will not assume that inclusive good-will is an inherent aspect of intelligence. Good-will assumes, likewise, to be a self-sustaining thing; it cannot be either purchased or compelled; rather, it creates the fellowship of minds from within mind.

_Third_, is the grace of repentance whereby we break through our shell into freedom a matter of arbitrary liking or a matter of obligation? Knowing the blunderous way that we live, and the hurts that our blunders entail, how can we possibly say that repentance may wait upon our convenience? How can we possibly maintain the rightful supremacy of rationality unless we assume that “I ought” is inherently involved in it? How could we possibly be at home and free in an a-moral universe?

_Fourth_, what reservations are made by the mind that fully emancipates itself from its self-imposed bondage? Is a taboo placed upon any subject or material of thought? Is there any area of the universe that is “posted” so that we may not hunt upon it?

Men used to assume that there are such areas. The name of God was spoken with a hush; men even forbade themselves to speak it at all. They became mute and abject in the presence of supposedly fearsome forces, whether divine or demoniac; yes, some men and institutions and old thoughts were even walled off so that eyes might not see. All this was self-imprisonment from which it is necessary to achieve self-release. We must reach the point where we realize that it is only a pseudo-sanctity, a piece of mere conventionality, that reserves any kind of actuality from the peering eyes of anyone who desires to know. We are guilty of no irreverence when we investigate the pedigrees and weigh the conduct of all the gods; we must be able with tranquillity to endure uncertainties while waiting for evidence; and, as for the sanctity of any temple built by men, what men have built that they can rebuild or replace.

At this point release from the thralldom of selfhood is equivalent to making ourselves at home in the universe. The experience takes different forms with different persons. Freedom to doubt, coming to some persons like the sun suddenly emerging from a black cloud, makes them dance and skip; occasionally it reproduces, almost point for point, the emotional phenomena of religious conversion. That some, upon realizing their release, should luxuriate in skepticisms is not strange; they are like children from the city streets let loose in the country and pulling up wildflowers by the roots. With other persons the experience of release takes the form of glad consecration to the rigorous labor and the strict methods whereby alone we can know the truth. Still others feel the fellowship side of their new world. Separated from other minds hitherto by prejudice and fear, they now discover friends on all hands, and they glow with friendliness themselves. Not a few have said, “Behold, God is here, and I knew it not.” For they feel that they are dealing with what L. P. Jacks calls “a living universe.”

Thus, underlying our motivation when we most radically claim freedom is the implicit assumption that we are living in a universe in which no mental reservations are really needed by anyone. But we cannot go as far as this without assuming likewise that no reservations on behalf of any sort of self-interest are necessary. Here is where the shoe pinches most, and here is where self-deception most enslaves us. When we get beneath the surface of our mental reservations--theological, ethical, economic, social, political--we usually find that they are servants of some form of self-interest, whether of an individual, or of an institution, or of a social class. How desperately we cling to our littleness! But our very desperation is a defence-reaction towards something dimly appreciated as greater. We are like a very small child who wanted to get out of bed all by himself, but found himself hanging to the mattress, afraid to let go because he could not feel the floor under his toes, and yet not strong enough to pull himself back. The sickness of our society is in its fear to let go what it regards as its security, though it does not really secure. We employ argument and systems of thought to protect us, but we are like some persons accused of crime who refuse to make a clean breast of their conduct even to the attorney who defends them. Our salvation must come from a cooperative thinking that is more than abstract. I have already remarked that cooperative thinking assumes that the realm of intelligence is the realm likewise of good-will or active respect for all persons. In the end, then, our struggle against our bondage is a struggle towards a cooperative intelligence that is likewise a cooperative choice and enjoyment of the good, whatever the good is.

I promised to keep as clear of metaphysics as the case permits. I have not even argued, though I am convinced, that the best clue we have to the general character of the universe consists in this, that persons exist, and are, as a matter of fact, in the process of achieving freedom, and of achieving it cooperatively. The experience of becoming free, even though it be incomplete, even though it never can be completed, surely casts a beam of light into the problem of being. An original, self-sustaining light. For the becoming of freedom is an experience, a datum, primary and underived. We do not learn it by inference from some otherwise-known system of things; we do not need to ask whether a place can be made for it in a view of nature that is derived from the pre-human world. It is here; it makes its own place, and our view of nature must be sufficiently large and objective to include it. This does not deny either the general self-consistency of nature that we call law, nor yet any specific connection of events that can be shown to be probable. Any experience whatever, the experience of becoming free not excepted, occurs under conditions that can theoretically be formulated in a general proposition. But the event need not repeat or continue the conditions under which it arises. Out of a songless egg, someone has said, emerges the song of a lark.

The realization that one is freely a member of such a realm of spirits as I have described is not only like worship, it is indistinguishable from worship. For it is just the opposite of spiritual isolation. This outward movement from self, though it be initiated within us, is not, in any complete and exclusive sense, initiated by us. It is wrought through us as much as by us! It chooses us as much as we choose it. Over and over again the experience repeats itself of being certain, just where we are most original, that then and there we are organs of something greater than our particular selves. It is as if each

## particular self were enveloped and suffused and already partly actuated

by some self-like principle that is abroad in the universe.

INDEX

Academic freedom, 188 ff.

Accidents, preventable, 159.

Acquisitive instinct, 39.

Adolescence, see “Youth”.

Advertising, 13, 38, 52.

Affection, 231.

“American Tragedy, An”, Dreiser’s, 29.

Amusements, 52, 130, 139.

Analytical method in psychology, 40, 81, 93.

Anger, 179 ff.

“Areopagitica”, Milton’s, 185.

Argumentativeness, 243.

“Arrowsmith”, Sinclair Lewis’s, 31.

Art and artists, 78, 106, 109 f., 118, 125.

Assemblage, freedom of, 191.

Authority, 26, 176, 195.

Averages as standards of judgment, 173.

Ayres, C. E. 194 (note.)

Balance sheet as index of values, 126.

Balderston, J. L., 146 (note).

“Bear, The”, Robert Frost’s, 244.

Beauty, 109, 160, 231.

Behaviorism, 41, 52, 93.

Bible, 22.

Biography, recent, 110 ff.

Biology, Ch. IV, 39.

Bondage of our powers, Part III ,