A WORKING PHILOSOPHY[*]

[This lecture has been very considerably re-written since it was delivered, and much of the matter it then contained has been cut out, and is now printed in the Appendix.  These excisions were purely speculative, and while they have a certain bearing on the arguments and conclusions in the other lectures, might very well be prejudicial to them, and for this reason it has seemed better to remove them from the general sequence and give them a supplementary place by themselves.]

The first reaction of the World War was a great interrogation, and the technical “Peace” that has followed brings only reiteration.  Why did these things come, and how?  The answers are as manifold as the clamourous tongues that ask, but none carries conviction and the problem is still unsolved.  According to all rational probabilities we had no right to expect the war that befell; according to all the human indications as we saw them revealed amongst the Allies we had a right to expect a better peace; according to our abiding and abounding faith we had a right to expect a great bettering of life after the war, and even in spite of the peace.  It is all a _non sequitur,_ and still we ask the reason and the meaning of it all.

It may be very long before the full answer is given, yet if we are searching the way towards “The Great Peace” we must establish some working theory, if only that we may redeem our grave errors and avoid like perils in the future.  The explanation I assume for myself, and on which I must work, is that, in spite of our intentions (which were of the best) we were led into the development, acceptance and application of a false philosophy of life which was not only untenable in itself but was vitiated and made noxious through its severance from vital religion.  In close alliance with this declension of philosophy upon a basis that had been abandoned by the Christian world for a thousand years, perhaps as the ultimate reason for its occurrence, was the tendency to void religion of its vital power, to cut it out of intimate contact with life, and, in the end, to abandon it altogether as an energizing force interpenetrating all existence and controlling it in certain definite directions and after certain definite methods.

The rather complete failure of our many modern and ingenious institutions, the failure of institutionalism altogether, is due far less to wrong theories underlying them, or to radical defects in their technique, than it is to this false philosophy and this progressive abandonment of religion.  The wrong theories were there, and the mechanical defects, for the machines were conditioned by the principle that lay behind them, but effort at correction and betterment will make small progress unless we first regain the right religion and a right philosophy.  I said this to Henri Bergson last year in Paris and his reply was significant as coming from a philosopher.  “Yes,” he said, “you are right; and of the two, the religion is the more important.”