with a leaven of judgement, freedom, and spiritual impulse.

V

THE CRITERION OF THE WHOLE MAN

Not only human freedom, but the providence and very existence of God are contested-as they have been before, and many times. Yet we will still maintain both God and human freedom. Mankind is as a meteor in the vast expanse of slow creation. What do we know of any why and whence and whither? Nevertheless, under the human (not bestial) impulse to know and understand, we press and are pressed onward. In our search for further and further knowledge, it is for us to employ all the data and all the means of ascertainment and suggestion within our reach. Who would think of rejecting physical science-the direct observation of nature and its operations, the investigation of force and life, of the whole range of inanimate and animate phenomena ? Who would reject this method, prosecuted in modern times with such glorious energy and success? But the advance of youthful and lusty science leads on to constant surprise, if not reversal. There seems no end to Nature's surprises, no bottom to her mysteries.

We are still profoundly justified in holding our intellectual judgement in suspense. Science has its inning, and we wish it Godspeed. But there may

be other vessels of the Lord, other ways of truth. Time and again men have set themselves to win certitude of knowledge through following the dialectic of their own intellectual processes into the ultimate reaches of metaphysics. They were forced to this by the contradictions of their immediate perceptions of themselves and the world about them. Often through intending the mind on its own processes and shortcomings, they have risen to schemes of things covering the universe and touching the ultimate realities. But the certitudes. reached by paths of metaphysics have been shaken, and after many centuries different-minded men began to find all such conclusions vain and such controversies futile. The direct investigators of nature scorned metaphysics, not realizing that aforetime the crude physical hypotheses of the early Greeks had called forth those schemes of thought which were designed to obviate sense contradictions. Even to-day physical science is constantly lured beyond its depth to metaphysics, as we shall note hereafter.

Yet, no man of science would wish to cast himself again into those dark gulfs. And we who have not given our lives to physical science, but as historians may profess to some acquaintance with the follies of mankind and the blind alleys of thought, no more than the scientists would we again trust our intellectual fortunes exclusively to the labyrinths of our inner consciousness or to the sole pointings of

our furthest aspirations. We, too, will be taught of all that science has to teach us, for the betterment of our lives and the enlargement of our wisdom. Nor will we discard those larger reasonings, possibly more profound and apparently less secure than the inferences of physical science, which we set under the name of philosophy and even dub metaphysics.

Nevertheless, for the larger judgements and decisions of life, the final criterion of truth and value lies in the total sum of our experience. Regard must be had to the totality, if not the wholeness, of our natures, in which our faculties are bound together, and either co-operate or act as checks upon each other. The different faculties subtly or palpably affect each other's behaviour, or combine or dovetail in their contribution to human actions and reactions. Each faculty has a validity of its own, and may claim to count in the estimate of human welfare, and in the determination of what is true, as well as what is right, for man.1

It may be, for example, that wish, the quality of desire, is never absent from our thinking, and that it influences the profoundest, the most abstract or detached conceptions of our minds. Possibly all our mental acts are of the whole self, or at least of

1 There is biological analogy or argument for this view. No single part or organ is supreme in the animal organism, or can perform its office except as a part or function of the whole.

the whole of that one of our changing selves which is operative at the moment. Thinking carries a conative and emotional quality, if only less markedly than it involves the energies of what seems sheer intellection-the action of what we call the perceptive and reasoning faculties. Indeed, an ideal, an attempt to conceive what is most desirable, and perhaps a volition to attain it, is involved in the best and most strenuous human thinking—as with Plato, for example. Assuredly wish, and even passion, are never utterly absent from the highest human thought.

It is when our professedly detached reason seeks to set itself apart from the human whole, that it most reasonably may be mistrusted. Yet still more, on the other hand, should men beware of their palpably emotional or passionate impulses, or even aspirations, when these energize without the control or guidance of the judgement which arises from reflection-reflection seeking to embrace every consideration offered by all the knowledge humanly available for the decision trembling on the lips or touching the act for which the body throbs. The action of impulse or passion, without the foreseeing eye of judgement, is only too likely to make for destruction and human bestiality.

One need not find that all human truth is held in rational knowledge; and one may well guard against pedantic and dialectic rationalism, the shrivelled fruit of case-hardened methods of think

ing in fixed logical categories that have become inelastic, unfluid, static, incapable of adaptation to the realities of any and all sorts of experience impressing human consciousness. Why need the intellect hold aloof from other ways of knowing and judging? Let it be still the guide and pilot, or at least the final judge of what the other faculties have done and of their novel apperceptions. But let the court have all the data, look every witness in the face, and be not over-ready to declare one or another unworthy of belief on oath, or his testimony irrelevant, impertinent, and inadmissible. Then there need be no question of the propriety and great importance of maintaining the ultimate authority of such a court of reason, nor need appeal be taken to ignorant emotion and a sentimentality which will not be instructed.

Yet so long as there are depths in our natures which the intellect has not plumbed, and shady places where no light of science has penetrated, we are justified in looking to our natures in their wholeness, and to those human or divine hopes and aspirations which, through the long panorama of history, by thorny and uneven paths seem to have led on and upward. These we will still include within the data of our judgements upon life.