ART. VI.-THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL.

THE exaltation of duty, in distinction from dogma, has become a characteristic mark of our time. But is it an utterance from the depths of the Christian consciousness, or only obedience to a shallow fashion? Sometimes, doubtless, it expresses little but the personal equation of minds devoid of historical and philosophical perspective; sometimes it proceeds from intellectual laziness; sometimes it results from conservative disinclination to reexamine traditional beliefs. Nevertheless, this way of thinking has taken so general and apparently so firm a hold upon both the masses and their leaders, upon both the intellects and the sympathies of men, as to preclude the suspicion that it is a mere inadvertent neglect, an aberration, or a "fad." It has assumed the proportions of a great, though subtle, religious movement. The very air throbs with its spirit as with the impulse of a new reformation. We may well surmise that some truth of deep import is thus finding expression; that some part of the divine plan is being accomplished. What this plan is may not be known until the far future historian has placed our age in his just balances. But the truth that underlies this tendency is, perhaps, already accessible. At least it invites investigation, both because its intrinsic interest is great and because the maintenance of a wise equilibrium requires, in times of rapid transition, a doubly firm grasp of fundamental principles.

The great philosophical classic on the relation of theory to life was not written until about a hundred years ago. Reason and faith had indeed been a theme of discussion through all the Christian centuries, but even Aquinas had not been able to assign them their bounds. The attempt to be loyal to two authorities, or to reconcile intellectual liberty with ecclesiastical authority, had broken down of its own weight. No one had either given philosophical justification for the content of Christian faith or shown that faith could walk without the support of philosophy. Kant was the first to discover that the reason this problem of the centuries had not been solved was that the question itself had been improperly put. Faith had been treated either as a special mode of cognition, that is, conviction, concerning truth, or as cognition of a special sort of

objects; while reason had claimed to be a superior mode of knowing, and had assumed a right to the entire realm of the knowable. The tendency of critical intellects, therefore, was to reject what was not proved; that of devout minds, to demonstrate all that they held dear. On all hands reason was acknowledged to have a secure footing of its own. Faith was always the one to have its basis, as well as content, called in question. But Kant saw clearly two things-the need of inquiring whether reason really possessed the powers hitherto attributed to it, and the fact that faith was not primarily a matter of cognition or the acceptance of a revelation, but was moral volition. Not that intellect was to be excluded from all share in determining the content of faith; but this share rather consisted in drawing out the implications of an already existing moral life than in discovering a rational basis for the moral life itself. According to Kant we do not accept moral obligation because we believe in God, but we believe in God because we accept moral obligation. The real problem, therefore, was not to determine the relation between two bodies of truth or two modes of reaching truth; but it was to determine the relation between the functions of willing and knowing, or, in Kantian phrase, between the practical and the theoretical.

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We cannot better approach the answer to this question than by noting the general character and the limitation of Kant's own solution. In his Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason he announces that he intends to remove knowledge in order to make room for faith." The confidence with which both theist and atheist have gone at the deepest questionings of the human spirit he declares to be misplaced, for the reason that the human faculty is incompetent to attain knowledge on such transcendent subjects. His own conclusion, the grounds for which cannot here be even hinted at, is that knowledge, strictly so called, is limited to objects of a possible experience, that is, to the phenomenal order, observed or inferred. Realities, whether the world, the soul, or God, are conceivable but not knowable. The result is that Kant admits the existence of a theoretical reason, whose sphere, though limited, is free from admixture of practical, that is, volitional, elements. In his complementary work, the Critique of Prac tical Reason, he next labors to prove that there is also a

practical reason, or cognitive process, mixed with, and indeed depending upon, volition. This is the faith for which he proposed to make room. The logical structure of this Critique may be summarized as follows: If moral obligation is rational, then freedom, God, and immortality are real (as is shown by a series of prosyllogisms). This is, of course, the beginning of a merely hypothetical syllogism; yet, since all men admit that obligation is rational, the conclusion should be acknowledged as a conviction universally human, in short, as knowledge. Nevertheless, this is not theoretical knowledge, not knowledge in the strict sense, since it rests upon a proposition merely assumed or postulated, namely, the rationality of obligation. This can be neither proved nor disproved, but only voluntarily accepted or rejected.

By stopping at this point Kant left us with an unreconciled dualism in knowledge, and with apparent internal disunion of our faculties. The theoretical reason is credited with an unclouded title within its own field, but this field holds only the seeming, not the real; while the practical reason, though it lays hold of the real, does so by violence, not by legal process. Once or twice, indeed, Kant seems to have glimpses of a unity of the two, and that not merely in the mediatorial work of the Critique of Judgment; for even in the Critique of Practical Reason he remarks that every faculty of the mind has an interest, and significantly says that the practical reason cannot be subordinated to the speculative "because all interest is, in final analysis, practical." Otherwise expressed, this is the truth, brought clearly to light through the searching analysis of later psychology, that cognition is throughout a function of will as well as of intellect; or, better, that intellect itself is conative. Pure intellect, unmixed with desire, impulse, volition, nowhere exists; nay, an intellectual event, qua event, whether it be an event of perception, judgment, or inference, is the utterance of some sort of impulse. It is for this reason that we can consistently speak of intellectual "tendencies," "preferences," affinities," "impulses," "acts," and "achievements." Faust was not illogical when he proposed to read in place of "In the beginning was the Word" (Logos, rationality), "In the beginning was the Act," for rationality is activity, and therefore a function of will.

So much of importance for the understanding of our problem hangs upon a clear grasp of the truth just mentioned that we shall do well to dwell upon it for a moment. The way in which the doctrine of the faculties of the mind has been handled has concealed as much truth as it has revealed. Even when the intellect has not been said to do the knowing, the sensibility the feeling, or the will the willing, an impression has been allowed to exist that functions of each sort could be performed in the absence of all the others; that, for instance, some states were pure feeling, some pure volition, and others pure intellection. A more careful analysis shows that these three functions, though discriminable, are never separate. Every state of consciousness has all three aspects. Each is, intellectual, for each is a state of awareness and discrimination more or less clear; each is sensitive by virtue of its feeling-tone; each is conative, for attention in greater or less degree is always present. The bearing of this upon the theory of knowledge and faith will be perceived by asking for the ultimate grounds of any judgment. Undertake to prove anything completely, and one will sooner or later discover that he knows something that is not and cannot be proved. This unprovable knowledge will be found to consist of universal judgments, such as the laws of thought or the assertion that there is an external world, and particular judgments of perception and introspection, such as the assertion that one object is harder or softer than another. Now, if we are asked how we know these ultimates of knowledge, we can only reply that there is no process, method, or ground of this knowledge; we simply perform the act of assertion, and this is the end of the matter. If the question arises whether we may with the same seeming arbitrariness assert anything whatever, we can only answer that it is not in ns to do this; that our nature goes out toward, and finds its own realization and satisfaction in, some assertions, but not others. The ultimates of knowledge, then, are simply acts of self-realization; they are facts of sensibility and will as well as of intellect. Now, our entire knowledge is built up of judg ments, each of which is, in its own way, an ultimate. Judgments of perception, judgments of memory, and judgments of inference express. the tendency or impulse of the mind at the moment of their formation. All knowledge, therefore, is an

expression of interest more or less conscious and volitional, and "all interest," as Kant says, "is in final analysis practical." There is, then, no purely theoretical knowledge, no pure insight; but, at the foundation, knowledge is simply self-assertion. This self-assertion may indeed be self-limiting, and so lawabiding; it may set up standards, ideals, criteria for itself, but this limit is only another self-assertion of the same mind. If, therefore, faith means conviction that something unprovable is nevertheless true, knowledge itself reduces to faith.

Proofs, like this, of a "credo ut intelligam" have not unfrequently given great comfort to defenders of the faith-too great comfort, indeed; for, while the argument has been sup posed to confirm the method of faith as against, or in contrast to, that of knowledge, it in fact denies that there is any such radical difference. We are as far as ever from justifying any article of the content of faith. For the reduction of the elements of knowledge and of faith to the same category would naturally imply that all the processes by which the mind purifies and certifies its knowledge are applicable also to its faith. As soon as we remove the partition by means of which some have tried to separate a faith compartment from the rest of the mind faith forfeits all its supposed immunities; henceforth there is no refuge from the demand for a rational justification of our beliefs; we are at liberty to hold as true only such propositions as evidence renders at least probable.

The individual or the generation that accepts this conclusion comes to a parting of the ways with respect to the religious life. Henceforth common honesty forbids both lazy acquiescence in tradition and the calming of intellectual doubts by the assumption that faith is a privileged highway to certainty. To be religious one must either become a theologian, a philosopher, or whatever else that is necessary to have critical knowledge of the things of the Spirit; or else he must find a way to be religious while being noncommittal concerning questions of fact or truth which he has not yet rationally adjusted. The Christian consciousness of to-day seems positive that it has discovered this latter way. For it is amazingly unconcerned about the party names, definitions, and formulas which were very near the center of interest even a generation ago. Two facts may seem to contradict this statement, the dogmatic spirit