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Some of Professor Morris' characterizations and criticisms of my political views seem fairly reasonable. Human political relations are complex and subtle indeed. There are, however, some serious failures of communication in one specific passage. For such failures, both parties may be partly at fault. I allow myself to think that I have usually written with more clarity than in the following quotation from my 1942 essay, "A Philosophy of Democratic Defense": If one loves A, B, and C, and if A can be prevented from killing or torturing B and C only by being threatened with loss of his own life, then there is an enforced choice between A's interest and those of B and C, and this is not less true because all the interests, including A's, have, through love, become as one's own. What love does mean is that, in killing A, one destroys or defeats a part of oneself, as it were, but with the sole alternative of seeing an even larger part of oneself doomed to frustration. In these few sentences I was trying to express ideas that require much more space to eliminate obvious ambiguities and guard against misinterpretations. I was using "interest" in a very broad sense indeed, and in Webster one finds how broadly the word can be used. It may mean whatever someone takes an interest in, regardless of whether it is truly advantageous for that person to do so, and regardless of how legitimate or illegitimate, wise or foolish, the interest might be. That Morris failed to understand this as my meaning is, I admit, partly explained by my phrase, "through love, become as one's own." I am here using love in an extreme sense of imaginative participation in the feelings of others. To understand another, as only God can fully do, is to feel their feelings, not as literally and simply one's own but as theirs yet empathetically also felt by oneself. Ethical or other approval is not necessarily involved. A psychiatrist would, I think, understand what I mean. "Legitimate" was Morris' word, not mine. No such notion was in my mind. The same with the word "true" in this context. I blame myself, however, for the ambiguity of "as one's own" I now see some difficulty also in "by love another's defeat is made partly one's own." One is not entirely pleased that even a scoundrel is unhappy. Emotional life is complex, as sadism and masochism indicate. Stalin said he was wonderfully pleased by the sufferings of his enemies, but most of us would not like to be Stalin. Even God, according to Whitehead (and Berdyaev says virtually the same), is "the fellow-sufferer who understands." Not grasping what I meant, my critic took off on his own and arrived at a radical distortion of anything I could ever in my life have intended. I suppose a deconstructionist might say, "I told you so." However, that is a somewhat different issue. Having done what I could to take my share of responsibility for the remarkable failure of communication that occurred in this case, I shall now try to show how complete the failure was. The essay quoted from was published in 1942 but was written well before that, at a time when my country had not yet officially entered into the war against Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito and their all-too-obedient subjects. The question was, Isolationism (and pacifism), or full entry into the war against three nations. It happens that I am one who never shared the enthusiasm so many seem to feel for the great killers of history. From Henry Fielding and Tolstoy, two great artists who were also, up to a point, sagacious thinkers, also from G. Borghesi (whom I knew) and H.G. Wells. I learned to rather despise as well as fear persons like Napoleon, much more, Mussolini and his understudy in villainy, Hitler. As for Hirohito, I used to admire him as a natural scientist, which he was, but I have recently learned that he, too, was an all-too-willing leader of military scoundrels. Japanese treatment of Korea and China seemed to me brutal imitation of European (and sometimes American) militarism and imperialism at their worst. I was in Germany when Hitler made his abortive putsch that put him in jail, all too briefly. I expected only harm from him. Imagine then the shock of being told that in my view the instigators of World War II, my implied examples of "A" in the quotation, had only legitimate interests. In my view Hitler and Mussolini were unwise and very wicked people. The problem was, how to stop them from proceeding with their program, described (by a Frenchman, I think) as "making a pigsty of Europe," and eventually of more than Europe. I must add that early in my adult life I had temporarily argued for pacifism, influenced by Tolstoy and some other writers, but had changed my mind, slightly before our entry into WWI. I hated war but could not permanently convince myself of the practicality of unqualified renunciation of military force. Do I hold a preferential theory of self-interest, so that 'A's true interests are whatever A thinks they are"? Not at all. Only God would fit the formula. Conflict is more or less unavoidable because people often act from preferences, legitimate or not, in their true interest or not. Nothing I say about politics is deduced merely from my definition of God as dually transcendent, or as all-others-surpassing-love. It is deduced from that, plus my understanding of human history, daily experience, and literature, and what these all show about human beings. The very existence of our animal species is not a metaphysical or necessary truth. My (and any) view of human nature can only be empirical and others may have a far truer view. So may human beings in general at some future time. My "metaphysics" is not refutable by refuting my political philosophy. If it were, then by my and Popper's definition, it would not be metaphysics. Metaphysical truth (Popper said it first) is truth that no conceivable observations could falsify. In some planet out in space there may be an animal species that is so much superior ethically to ours that a truly democratic socialism is possible for it. The mere metaphysics of deity cannot decide otherwise. I much dislike thinking that "rational animals," better than we are now, are nowhere to be found. The passage Morris quotes, written 50 years ago, is less than ideally clear; I hope my writing has gained in clarity in those years. However, I dispute the legitimacy of Morris' interpretation. Considering the date of Morris' book, it seems a pity he did not take Wisdom as Moderation (1985) into consideration. The last chapter is particularly relevant. especially with its discussion of the war-peace problem. I am surprised that Morris, in relation to that problem, focuses on an essay written well before the atomic bomb. I've had 50 years to learn better since then and much has changed in our knowledge of how technology has been making war itself more and more the real enemy, so that the pacifist position tends to come closer to the only adequate solution. Even my creative synthesis book (1970), which he does mention, is, in its last chapter, relevant (in ways he overlooks) to questions of mutual incompatibility and conflict, also to the ideal of equality. So-called energy is directly experienced only as emotion and otherwise is only a verbal check drawn on no known bank, unless it is subanimal forms of feeling. Wordsworth saw that long ago; Whitehead and I, independently, saw that he was right. So did many others, including another poet, Shelley. In other world-kinds or cosmic epochs, sentience could take forms we can only vaguely imagine, but the word matter is no addition to our knowledge of what we directly intuit. What we know is feeling and thought, hope and fear, memory and expectation; they are not mere words, as any pain or pleasure should tell us. We directly know heat and cold as feeling, the same with light. Value is what matters, and it consists of feeling; thoughts, as Whitehead puts it, are "intellectual feelings." Peirce says similar things, so have many if not all Buddhists, with their ''mind only.''

I begin with two flat statements. (1) None of the recognized great philosophers has been more widely underrated (or more misinterpreted) than Plato, unless it is Bergson; moreover, the two have important beliefs in common. (2) None of the recognized great philosophers has been more widely overrated than Aristotle, unless it is Kant; these two also have some beliefs in common.

(1) Bergson (in his maturity) and Plato were both theists, both believed in the "self-motion" (Plato) or "creativity" (Bergson) of mind or the psychical. Both thought that all motion or change involves mind. Both explained disorder and suffering, at least partly, by the multiplicity of non-divine psyches. Neither had much sympathy with materialism, and Bergson in his maturity broke completely with the concept of mere mindless matter as a possible truth. If Plato did not do this it is because, in his time, no one had any well established theory of the ever-active atoms which Epicurus shrewdly guessed make up both organic and "inorganic" parts of nature. Also no one knew anything of cells or invisibly minute organisms. By Bergson’s time things were different in principle. The idea was already around, indeed Leibniz had already said (long before the general acceptance of cells), that visible organisms have invisibly small organisms as constituents. As someone has put it, "Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite-em, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum." Apart from the over-emphasis on parasites, the infinite regress may be dismissed as a Leibnizian extravagance. Leibniz tended to go to extremes.

In his Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson wrote his masterly explanation of why speaking and thinking animals, such as we are, would have a need of religion, and why this would make possible and probable a certain amount of extravagance or superstition in manifestations of the fonction fabulatrice. I think that Plato would have seen a lot of sense in this carefully qualified appeal to religious experience. Both writers were trying to apply reason to religious phenomena. Neither Plato nor Bergson had much use for an extreme pluralism or logical atomism (or an unqualified contingentism) such as Hume’s, Russell’s, or Quine’s, or radical monism (or nessitarianism) such as those of Parmenides, Spinoza, or Bradley. In the mysterious doctrine of the "receptacle," or cosmic subject of changing predicates, Plato seems to lean toward monism; however, in his belief in individual human souls as immortal he seems inordinately pluralistic. If Plato is interested in anything, it is the multiplicity of human individuals in their relations to one another and to deity as concerned about and aware of them. Plato also saw, as few since have seen so well, the complexity and subtlety of theoretical problems. Well did Peirce say, "Plato knew what philosophy is." Aristotle was simple-minded by comparison, except in biology, ethics, and formal logic. In his physics and philosophy of religion, his almost good (or merely ingenious) accounts made him the dangerous enemy of the better, or really good. It was Aristotle whom the Medieval Schoolmen (partly) knew and liked. It was also Plotinus and Dionysius, not Plato, whose influence counted then. The Plotinian worship of bare unity is a far cry from Plato’s God (Phaedrus, Timaeus, Sophist, Laws 10) as all-caring Soul of the cosmic body.

In his two most mature books Bergson (like Plato) vigorously defends a dynamic, partly temporal, not merely eternalistic, mysticism. Although interested in posthumous careers for people, he eventually said definitely that this did not mean such careers would be infinite. Bergson was a scholar in neoplatonism and knew better than to endorse it in its monistic extremisms. Also, like Plato, he had seriously studied some mathematics.

(2) Kant, before the Critiques, thought of God as the Ens Realissimum, timeless, self-sufficient Reality, having in itself all that is worth having. In its most nearly consistent form, this was Aristotle’s theism, according to which the deity knows everything that is worth knowing, its own pure "thinking-of-thinking" -- whatever, if anything, that is. True, Kant did attribute knowledge of particulars and individuals to God, as moral postulate and regulative idea, but what was accomplished thereby was at the cost of losing some of Aristotle’s consistency. Knowing X cannot be without X, and if X might not have been, then knowing X might not have been. So no wholly self-sufficient timeless, ens realissimum can know anything contingent. True. Kant quarrels with the view that what comes to be must therefore be contingent. Here he regresses both from Aristotle’s logical level and from Plato’s. We have in this philosophy neither Aristotle’s unmoved mover nor Plato’s all-knowing and caring World Soul, but who can say what? I think it is an example of second-rate metaphysics, trying to use language without due regard to the requirements of that enterprise.

Kant attempts to account for the failure of our knowing to tell us anything about the independent reality, the noumenon, by this very independence itself; whereas God, as ethically postulated, he implies, in knowing produces the to-be-known, which has no independent status in relation to God. I find all this, after thinking about it for some seventy years, almost ludicrous in its begging of questions and failure to make coherent sense. Aristotle was simply and clearly right in this: and to know something and by the same act make it, is an incoherent combination of words. This is even more obvious if the thing known has any freedom, makes decisions of its own. And Kant postulated our noumenal freedom. Here it was the Socinans who were simply right in postulating freedom in us and deducing some contingency in God as knowing our free acts. Socinus too was grossly under-rated. He admitted becoming as well as being in God.

Kant was right enough in saying that our categories achieve application only in terms of the temporal structure of experience. But Aristotle came closer than Kant to correctly reporting that structure. Aristotle, though insufficiently clearly, did admit freedom and chance (lack of strictly sufficient reason) in becoming. Previous events, he held, are precisely required for subsequent ones, but not vice versa. Time’s arrow is there for Aristotle but not for Kant, who takes causes to exclude any aspect of indeterminacy in effects. Excruciatingly wrongly, he thinks temporal order can be definite or objective only if particular successors in becoming are causally as necessary as particular predecessors. In short, causal necessity must hold both ways. On the contrary, the order a then b is unambiguous if a is necessary condition for b, while b is not so for a. Asymmetrical conditioning suffices for order of succession: moreover Kant seems part of the time to know this, for in dealing with the first antinomy, he argues that the future infinity of time is not a vicious regress since the infinity is only potential not actual. What that means for determinists is their problem. Some of us have no need to assume it.

On the whole it seems to me dubious whether Kant was much of a rival for clarity as to what he was doing compared to his ancient predecessor. Certainly Kant was no logician comparable to Aristotle, also not comparable to Leibniz. With William James I do think Kant has been treated with undeserved deference! In ethics and aesthetics I rate him somewhat higher than in the first Critique. However, Aristotle also contributed significantly to both normative disciplines.

That Kant’s writings called forth one of the most outrageous outpourings of not very "logical" speculations (Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling [the best of the four]), I do not think irrelevant to a judgment of the clarity of Kant’s thinking and writing.

The finest single sentence Kant wrote I take to be his expression of awe before the categorical imperative (which I would formulate somewhat differently) and the starry sky. Our human obligations and the vast cosmos we faintly discern at night, yes, that combination does deserve reverence. Kant was a person, not just a thinker, and as a person I deeply admire him. But as a critic of metaphysics, he was himself too much a bad metaphysician to rate highly. Hume, Carneades, are the great critics, less pretentious, less "dogmatic" in the normal sense (not in Kant’s self-serving one) and much clearer. Hence it takes less time and effort to grasp what they say. Too much else now calls for understanding to spend a lot of our energy on Kant. I mean what I am saying. I had a Kant scholar as teacher (C.I. Lewis) and I taught Kant, reading him in German where necessary, and I knew the views of Julius Ebbinghaus, heard him lecture, talked with him often and in both languages. He was the most nearly strict Kantian in this century, so far as I know. But where are his disciples? I learned from him and admired him as a person and a scholar, but I did not unlearn my conviction that his primary message like Kant’s is unacceptable.

The primacy of practical reason and of the summu bonum or supreme aim or purpose, has some validity, but should not be allowed to belittle theoretical reason, nor should the relations between human and divine values be allowed to reduce God to a mere means for the production of human good. Nor are the other animals so non-rational and we so rational that the others are there only for our good. All feeling has intrinsic value (or disvalue). Value-for-God is the final measure, not value for us. Kant set the stage for Fichte’s and Hegel’s virtual deification of human consciousness and for Schopenhauer’s candid atheism. Also for Schleiermacher’s determinism and reduction of God to that on which we depend, rather than that with which we, in our humble roles on this planet, cooperate in creating a world worthy of an all-loving consciousness. Kant’s relegation of our freedoms to a wholly hidden noumenal realm of timeless, spaceless, totally uncharacterizable Something must be rejected. As Harry Wolf-son said, Any "sensible" person "is a Pelagean, " not an Augustinian [or a Kantian]. Here we must, to adopt the Hegelian phrase, "Negate the negation. Time’s arrow is required not just for ethical or religious reasons but for all our basic concerns.

The definite orderliness of nature is what only God could decide. It cannot be decided by creatures mutually adapting to one another according to natural selection and mutation, for this assumes a basic physico-chemical order it does not explain. Atheists and materialists miss the truth here "as if by magic." The mere existence of an atom for a second is an order. Order is either inexplicable or it is explained by an orderer. Once freedom anywhere is granted, an orderer is explicable as supreme or divine freedom inspiring (Plato "persuading") all lesser freedoms to feel the attraction of the cosmic plan envisaged by the (eminent but not the only) Decider. The idea of atoms in infinite time happening to fall into the order of a Shakespearean sonnet is no more rational than a fairy tale.

The one-sided complete necessitarians, Stoics and Spinoza, have had good public relations long enough to show what they can do. The issue is, as the French say, "a thing judged." With the new physics, even physicists are open to argument on that question. Einstein was the last great proponent of the infatuation with deductive logic mistaken as the "logic of events." With this phrase Peirce crystallized the issue. Reason is not essentially a search for two-way necessity, but rather a search for ways to create happiness in individual freedoms sufficiently ordered to make harmony the rule rather than the exception. Every organism is a harmony of parts and activities. Only very sick organisms are hopelessly unhappy, and the sicker they are the sooner they may die unless deliberately kept alive by others, perhaps because of foolish human laws. lam on record as not wanting this to happen to me.

I have already twice mentioned Peirce. With him one rightly associates James, Dewey, and Whitehead, who read the other two. With both Peirce and Whitehead I have been closely associated. Weiss is associated with all of these. He was, as I was not, in the technical sense a pupil of Whitehead, while also helping greatly to edit Peirce. There is some agreement that, as Victor Lowe put it, I am only a "semi-Whiteheadian." There is a dissertation, (by Vitali) arguing that I am primarily a Peircian. There is also some agreement that Process Philosophy, especially in its theology and its psychology of sensation, is partly my creation. How far are the six of us named in the first three sentences of this paragraph properly rated? I am old enough to have some objectivity in this. At 95, I see myself as in sight of the end, and (like Aristotle but unlike Plato or Kant) I mean the end of my career, not only on earth and in space-time but anywhere and anyhow. End, however, does not mean destruction, of concrete actuality. Bergson said this first, and it is one of his flashes of genius. Whitehead’s "objective immortality of the past" turns it into a fully-formed doctrine. My first reading of Whitehead on that doctrine settled the question for me. This is one of the many aspects of my incomplete but genuine "preestablished harmony" with Whitehead. Experiences are the actualities, and in God they all ‘live forevermore." Whitehead also says they "perish," but here he is trying too hard to agree with Locke. I never use "perish" in this odd sense. For our feeble memories, past experiences are largely lost, but we are not the final measure of truth, reality, or value.

My view is that the profession as a whole has only begun to grasp what has happened in the Anglo-American movement that we six, with many others, represent. One of my contributions is to have shown that the new metaphysics and cosmology are, to a considerable extent, also German, French, Italian, and, in addition, have parallels in India and Pakistan (via Bergson), and also, via Buddhism, in China and Japan. I consider ours the Twentieth Century position in constructive or speculative philosophy. Because of its basis in Plato, Epicurus, Aristotle, Leibniz, and nearly all so-called "idealists" (so far as the question of mind-and-matter is concerned), my term "neoclassical" has some justification.

Thanks partly to Descartes’ unambiguous affirmation of divine and human freedom, a long line of French philosophers generalized this to include all individuals or active singulars (my phrase), so that Whitehead’s "category of the ultimate" or creativity (Peirce’s "spontaneity" of feeling as such) has genuine French support. Whitehead’s great concept of "prehension" as the intuitive relation common to memory and perception -- a stroke of genius second to none, and not quite anticipated by Peirce, Bergson, Tibetan Buddhism, Fechner in Germany, Varisco in Italy, and spelled out by Whitehead as "feeling of others’] feeling" -- changes everything. I say everything because all actual entities -- whether human, subhuman, super-human or divine -- are said to prehend. Moreover, Whitehead points out, feeling of feeling is literally sympathy (with antipathy as a special distorted case), so that what we have is a metaphysics of love in its central meaning. At long last the old Hindu and Greek question -- Is love the ultimate or only the penultimate concept? -- has an answer. Radically superior to dog love and human (rational animal) love is only divine love. Love is the key to the one and the many, to causality, and to mind and body (we sympathize with our bodily cells, especially some of them, all our waking or dreaming lives).

Whitehead’s definite rejection of Plato’s idea of God as the Soul of which the cosmos of nondivine things is the body, I call a downright mistake. It is feebly and uncharacteristically supported by an obviously inconclusive and merely historical, non-systematic, argument. A number of scholars agree with me in taking this mind-body view seriously, and admirers of Merleau-Ponty should take note of this. My system of ideas has partial support in many countries.

If neo-classicism exalts love, it also and equally exalts freedom, self-determination, self-change, Epicurus against Democritus and the Stoics (including Spinoza) and Einstein, their last great speculative representative. Divine power "lets things be" (Heidegger), it does not simply make them be what they are. It inspires them to relate themselves to the basic cosmic scheme as in this cosmic epoch. The cosmos has an orderer, but the order is not an absolute, freedom-excluding, or eternally decided, regularity or lawfulness. It is an order of agents, none of which is completely determined in any concrete action by any previous (still less any simply timeless) action or set of actions or decisions. Omnipotence, if properly interpreted, is not too great a power to attribute to God, but unless so interpreted it is viciously ambiguous as to what it is power over. Divine freedom cannot be the only freedom, for if it were, how would we know what "free" means? "Supreme freedom" has meaning because it is not the only freedom. Creativity, the transcendental category, spells this out. All active singulars, including atoms, molecules, and cells, decide, truly make, create something of the definiteness of the cosmos. Peirce, Bergson, W. P. Montague, Whitehead, and others in various countries agree on this. The supreme creator is as far as possible from the only creator.

Whatever else God decides, it is obvious to me that -- if theism makes any sense at all -- the laws of nature can only have been divinely decided. To talk, as some do, as if scientists made these laws is clearly enough absurd, belonging, in New Yorker language, to the "department of utter confusion." Our picture of nature is not, even for us if we know what we are about, all that nature is. If that were so, then my pictures of you would be you, for me. But even for me you are obviously more than I can ever know. Indeed, I know that I am myself more than and partly different from what I can ever know that I am. Do deconstructionists really take these facts, and they are facts, adequately into account in their talk about how we are shut up in a linguistic cage and can never get out? If I am not in error, they have somewhere admitted that their position needs to be deconstructed. It most certainly does.

One more underrated philosopher is Sir Karl Popper. After Whitehead, to whom he was obviously unfair, he has been, by my standards, the best recent philosopher of science. He was not unfair to me, nor I to him. I met him, even visited him. He did not, like Carnap or Wittgenstein, mis-define metaphysics as the misuse of words. Bad metaphysics is that. Good metaphysics (as I learned from Popper) is two things: (1) making verbal statements that have coherent meaning, these meanings derived of course from experience, but (2) such that no conceivable experience could be incompatible with or falsify them. They are necessary truths.

Empirical science is the making of statements that also get their meanings from experience but are such that some genuinely conceivable experiences or observations could and would be incompatible with or falsify them. Empirical truths are contingent. Popper’s example of a metaphysical statement is akin to mine, a basic realism. My version: no experience can have merely itself as datum. Even in dreams, as Bergson has shown, once and for all so far as I am concerned, two further realities are involved: some aspects of the subject’s own past experiences (memory) and (sensory awareness) of the subject’s bodily state, in whatever sense it has a body, and with the last, to some extent, the state of the environment, as well. I have verified this scores of times in my own case. Memory and bodily awareness are what waking life and dreaming have in common; the differences are the more particular ways in which memory and bodily awareness function and are interpreted in the two states.

The traditional notion of mere dream is a myth and a very misleading one. So is the Berkeleyan form of idealism, and the Cartesian form of dualism, which the myth helped to produce. Berkeley was a provincial Irishman who never dealt with Leibniz’s most creative doctrine, which was his radical realistic idealism. Monad’s were for Leibniz just as real on the subhuman, even subanimal, levels, as on the human level; they were merely much less capable of thought and definite conscious recollections and perceptions, more limited to simple feeling and extremely short-run memory of what has just happened. They have "petite perceptions," or "sentiments," and feel without knowing that, what, or how they feel.

In a number of ways Popper, in a group of logical positivists, was indeed a "positivist" in a more literal and good sense. He held, rightly, that observation statements are essentially positive. What we experience or observe is never nothing but always something. Thus we observe not the nonflatness of the earth but the (approximate) sphericity of it. On the sea or a sizeable lake, we can literally see something of this curvature. Popper affirmed freedom, not classical determinism, also behaviorism as method, but so that mind as well as body are thereby known.

A mistake of Popper’s (and a lapse into negativism a la Carnap) was his admission of the concept of wholly mindless matter in nature below the animal (or is it plant) level. In molecules, atoms, particles there are self-motions and all the other non-question begging requirements (Plato, Epicurus) of the presence of mind. To demand DNA for mind is question-begging. There is nothing in the idea of feeling, as minimal requirement of mind, that logically entails reproductive capacity, the essential biological ability. If it were otherwise, the idea of God as purposive, or as knowing, would be ruled out and atheism established by definition. Self-motion as libertarian freedom is allowed by quantum theory to the active singulars of "inanimate nature," insofar in agreement with Epicurus, who (and I knew a scholar in Greek who said this) ought to have been a psychicalist. Mind-body can be mind-mind on two levels.

Wholly mindless matter can never be demonstrated, it can only be asserted. And Popper claims no certainty for his negation here. His only argument for mindless matter is that mind requires memory, and atoms can have none. My reply is that memory behavioristically is shown by the influence of the past of the individual on its present, and I wonder how physics can reduce such influence to zero while still maintaining even partial individual identity. All causality is influence of the past on the present. I feel my ignorance here and I admire Popper in that he does offer a definite argument against psychicalism. Otherwise all I ever find are vague appeals to common sense or to the "pathetic fallacy," against which I balance the "prosaic fallacy." Unimaginative people -- and to talk about the feelings of atoms does make demands on imagination -- are not going to understand nature. Physicists now know that nature is "stranger than we think, perhaps stranger than we can think." (Was is Bohr who said this?)

One other greatly, scandalously, underrated figure is Rabbi Abraham Heschel, in my view one of the best theologians of this century. Even, sadly enough, some Jewish theologians underrate him and prefer a mediocrity. Sorry, I can see it no otherwise, but wish not to name the latter. Heschel is, of all theologians I know about, the one who most completely understands what it means to talk about divine knowledge, will, or purpose. These terms acquire human meaning from our experiences of our knowledge, will or purpose. If these are analogically to enable us to conceive radically super-human (and super-animal) forms in God we cannot simply dismiss what in our experience always goes with them. For one thing, perception goes with them. For another, memory, for another, emotion, feeling. I suggest that we know nothing at all of what knowing or willing would be like without memory, perception, and feeling. Among our feelings the most essential is, in many great traditions, taken to be love. In Aristotle’s view God perceives, knows, loves only the divine timeless self, not worldly individuals or details. Ditto in Hindu Advaita Vedantism. But not according to Plato (after The Republic) and not in the Old or New Testaments. (In Stoicism all action is by necessity, not freedom, whether in God or worldly individuals.) Heschel attributes love to God and with it the opposite of Aquinas s pure actuality," entirely closed to influence from the world. On the contrary, God is "the most moved" of beings and observes all that happens in the world.

What then distinguishes divine love from ours? And what analogy have we to justify the vast difference between us and God if divine love is only our love at its possible best? This was Feuerbach’s question. Here Plato gave a key which Aristotle threw away and lost for many a century. Plotinus, after Philo, helped to keep it hidden. Our love is from a single body, a tiny fragment of the cosmic whole, outward. According to Plato’s Timaeus, the divine body is formed by all the actualities there are, other than the divine experiences. Nothing actual is simply outside God, as embodied mind.

"Out of space and time" or "beyond" space and time are spatio-temporal metaphors for the status of space-time itself! As Paul Weiss once put it, a superspace is being appealed to in which the space-time whole can have a locus and God another locus. Is this not a childish way to try to express the status of God and cosmos? Experiencing X is not that without X, and the subject of actually experiencing X must contain that experiencing in its own actuality when it does that experiencing. God-knowing-all-else becomes contradictory it there is anything simply "outside" God. The reason we do not grasp this easily is that our "knowledge" is largely indirect and inferential, from tiny fragments of reality to the whole.

Judaism and Islam said there can be "no graven image" of God. Well, is there a graven image of the cosmos, God’s body? Notice too that belief in God is very different from belief in fairies, ghosts, or angels. Fairies have the appearance of bodies, but of what materials are their bodies made? Have fairies’ bodies any weight? We have considerable well-founded knowledge of the Cosmos, though we know that our ignorance of its contents is vast. With fairies and ghosts, however, we haven’t a single clear clue, just talk. With angels is it any better? If theism is a superstition, it is, so far as I can see, different in principle from any other superstition. Freud knew that, in his way. There is a Cosmic Unity and we have evidence of the laws of what goes on in it. They are the same as the laws in our solar system. My (or your) genes are almost like laws peculiar to my (or your) body, the cosmic unity alone is, for our present knowledge, comparably definite and distinctive, indeed vastly more so. This unity of laws is either a mere fact, with no further explanation, or there is a further explanation. If so, physics is not giving it. What other is there than the theistic one? Astronomer Fred Hoyle long ago mentioned this in his science fiction, The Black Cloud.

We do not have all the answers, but, compared to all previous ages on this planet, we now have many definitely grounded answers where formerly there were mere guesses or hopeless vagueness. We do know how far off the moon and the sun are, we do know that determinism, taken as absolute, could not be verified and can reasonably be taken as falsified. We do know that if theism cannot be proved, neither can it be disproved, unless by theism we mean various traditional conceptions or the all-surpassing Being that recent philosophies of religion, say since Hegel, have criticized as objectionable for religious reasons. As many have described God, no such being ought to exist. Some theologies are so self-inconsistent, or so utterly vague, or ethically repellant, that they barely deserve refutation. But land others have shown how some classical inconsistencies can be avoided, and some vagueness replaced by definiteness.

Mystery will always remain. We fragments of the cosmos can never survey the cosmos from a cosmic perspective, and our tiny attention span, with even two minutes ago already vague as to fine details, can never know as the cosmic self knows. "I am not God" is one of the theist’s great resources by which to retain a becoming modesty as to our likelihood of being mistaken. Belief in God’s infallibility, even if this belief is supposed infallible, does not make us infallible in any more definite sense. Much of what God infallibly knows beyond this infallibility itself may still largely escape us.

Bergson and Plato, Aristotle and Kant, seem to some of us to have been admired not simply too much or too little but also partly for the wrong reasons. James admired Bergson for his worst mistake, his rejection of logic, and of the use of concepts, in metaphysics. Indeed, two of Bergson’s greatest contributions were in his definite revision of the concept of dreaming as it has been used in epistemology, and in his demonstration of the essential relativity of the concept of nothing. Bergson’s early books involved other serious mistakes; he tried hard to contribute to biology, whereas his greatest talents were in psychology and anthropology. His Two Sources appeared when he was 73. He was right that intellect tends toward the static view of things, or to "spatialize time," but wrong to think becoming cannot be viewed intellectually. And he was grievously mistaken in his contention that intellect is bound to turn really continuous becoming into discrete unit-cases. On the contrary, mathematicians (for example, Benjamin and Charles Peirce) are fascinated by the subtleties of continuity, and Bergson’s example of the cinema, where in fact discrete unit-cases give an illusion of pure continuity, testifies against him. In all the history of Western philosophy the common view of becoming (Aristotle to Peirce and Bergson) has been that becoming is continuous, not in definite least unit-cases. Before Whitehead and Von Wright, and before quantum physics in the West, only some Islamic doctrines were clearly otherwise. Buddhists in Asia did indeed anticipate Whitehead, but I recall nothing about this, even in Schopenhauer. In spite of Bergson’s failure to help much in biology, he was insightful in stressing the importance of sympathy and of freedom as basic principles in nature. He was right in insisting that Newtonian physics could not possibly be the literal whole truth, but he was at least partly wrong about Einsteinian relativity.

If Bergson was better in high maturity than earlier, so was Plato. And, as Burnet said (but who took note of it?), Plato’s great discovery was not that of the timeless forms but of the soul as self-moved, and (Cornford) of God as the Soul of which all else is the unique body, the only body with no external environment.

As Freud says somewhere, reason is not a strong force in human life but it is persistent and in the long run may prevail. However, Freud’s neglect of the mother-child relation, his manifest male chauvinism, needs the correction Elie Sagan has given it. Of all social relations, the mother-child is the most basic. Preservation of acquired behaviors is primarily through it. Incidentally, here, too, Bergson was superior to Aristotle, even to Plato and Socrates, in his saying, "Woman is as intelligent as man" the difference, he rightly says, is emotional, what women care most about. On the average there is bound to be some such difference. This, too, is a fine example of Bergson’s anthropology. Paul Valerie was right: Bergson was a very "great European." So was Plato, to whom (as Whitehead, more right than he knew, tells us) Western philosophy has been a series of (not always judicious) footnotes.

And Peirce, Whitehead, Hartshorne (who lacks the mathematical competence of the other two), how do they rate? Let me put it this way: they have been given their chance to be noticed. Time will tell. As Heidegger (and who could deny that he has been given his chance to be noticed?) said, Denken ist Danken, thinking is thanking -- the final word is gratitude. It is only through countless others that any of us has had the slightest possibility of being praiseworthy.

Professor Keeling proceeds with a good deal of care and lucidity. He does some justice to my presentation of the case for psychicalism (the term I now prefer to "panpsychism"). With many of his sentences I have no quarrel. However, I have a correction to what he says in the third paragraph of section I. I do not hold that we have "direct access only to human feelings." In human feelings we feel feelings of subhuman bodily constituents, though without distinctness as to the individual constituents concerned. Still, our access to the latter is direct. Human sensation is human awareness of subhuman feelings. The point of bringing in God as able directly to compare feelings in diverse creatures is that we can do the analogous comparison, though not with distinctness, and only with feelings in certain bodily constituents. The aim here was not to make behavioral criteria for ‘feeling’ unnecessary but to supplement the merely behavioral with a more direct criterion in a special case other than the introspective one. In introspection, really retrospection, the direct datum is previous human feeling; in sensation the datum is previous subhuman feeling. This means that direct experience, even apart from behavior, shows that the word feeling applies more broadly than merely to mammals or many-celled animals.

For specific application of ‘feeling’ or ‘sentience’ to nonhuman feelings other than those of our own bodily constituents, the behavioral criteria are all we have. And these criteria must fit also even the special cases mentioned of human and subhuman bodily feelings. However, Keeling seems to have rather forgotten my various discussions of how the behavioral criteria may be generalized beyond common sense. The criteria are generalized, not just the concept. The criteria are: self-initiated activity, including motions (growth and other changes involve motions on the microscale); unity or integration of the motions; influence of the past and the environment; something expressive of anticipation, desire, purpose, satisfaction. These criteria exclude many things, such as typewriters, mountains, trees (but probably not plant cells). They also exclude groups of animals, including termite colonies and the occupants of an airplane.

Contemporary physics no longer expressly denies self-initiated activity of atoms (hence, we may surmise, as one example, the irreducibly statistical half-life law of the transformation of radium atoms into lead). The kinetic theory of heat and the vibratory theory of matter banished merely inert units from science. As Francis Bacon saw, the responsiveness to other things (really to past events) that in our experience appears as memory or perception cannot be denied of the least constituent of matter, since causality would then also be denied. Memory may indeed be absent, since it is the special case in which present and past actualities occur in "personally ordered" linear sequences; but a generalized form of perception is then left as sole representative of causality. To be sure, a door with an electric eye is not a perceiving subject, but then it is "less unitary than its most unified constituents" and hence is to be regarded as a crowd, not an individual.

The full force of the case for psychicalism is too complex to be summed up in the simple account my critic gives. One must, for instance, see that the theory gives a direct "answer" to Hume’s denial of intuitions of causal influence, an answer incomparably clearer than Kant’s and more moderate in its demand for orderliness in nature. Being indeterministic, it does not produce Kant’s antimony with freedom, but does provide for necessary, though not in the classical sense "sufficient," conditions for events, unless by sufficient one means only "sufficing for the possibility of the event." Granted the possibility (which is always less definite than actuality), the event makes itself happen. This is the creativity, the self-initiated activity, of which process philosophers (Peirce, Bergson, James, and others) speak.

As for purpose, valuation, satisfaction, it is important to realize that among the differences which the idea of feeling can tolerate are enormous contrasts in time span. An ameba does not look far ahead or vividly recall the distant past, but it may anticipate a fraction of a second and remember over a similar time span. In microphysics it is clear that the time span is vastly different again, as is the space span. I think the criticism that Keeling offers is merely one more attempt to tie us down to belief s which science has already vastly transcended. The physicist uses terms like mass, movement, slow, fast, in ways that would not occur to any ordinary citizen not exposed, at least indirectly, to modem science. Just so psychology, seeking to understand the individuals, the genuinely self-active units, of nature, will have vastly to generalize ordinary concepts of response, stimulus, memory, aversive behavior, and something like preference, hence valuation, satisfaction, dissatisfaction. Of course most creatures do not feel like doing mathematics. But if they are singulars rather than composites they feel like doing something special and prove it by doing that something.

In Keeling’s example about green’s not being a metaphysical generality, he does not stress sufficiently that the reason we know green is not universal is that other positive qualities exclude it; for instance, red does. What excludes feeling? Lack of activity and lack of unity do, but these are not positive in the sense in which "sentient" is so. And all things are either active and unitary, or have constituents or members that are. That this is not so could not conceivably be known.

It is correct that there must be borderline cases where decision is difficult and beyond which feeling is pretty surely inapplicable -- but only in the sense in which it is inapplicable to groups, and there may be doubt as to whether one confronts a singular or a group. There are also extreme singular cases very difficult for our imaginations to deal with. But it is anthropomorphic to derive metaphysical or antimetaphysical conclusions from the fact that, for example, we cannot easily and distinctly imagine how a paramecium, or a fortiori an atom, feels. We still are not talking nonsense if we say that it feels somehow, though only superhuman intelligence could know more than vaguely how. We know a lot about how it does not feel.

Linguistic analysis can rightfully require that "not everything feels." The principle of contrast must be honored. However, crowds are not singular sentient subjects, whether crowds of people, termites, cells, atoms, or molecules. Although a "psychology of atoms" is not at present a recognized branch of science (yet some physicists have talked about it) and though it may never be an especially rewarding one, it does not follow that below the level of microorganisms, say, there just is nothing analogous to what on the higher levels are feeling, memory, anticipation, perception. Absolute negations of this sort explain nothing not better explained otherwise and are incapable of ever being verified.

The attempt to guess my (Peirce’s? Bergson’s? Leibniz’s?) motivation does not impress me. The early experience referred to as convincing me of psychicalism was of the duality "feeling of feeling" as directly given. It was a question of what I took to be evidence, not a question of desirability. I look upon the answer to Hume above referred to as powerful additional evidence. Many other considerations of a similar kind could be mentioned.

The case for psychicalism is so strong, in my view, that I thank anyone for attacking the doctrine. It is one of the two doctrines I am most confident of, the other being the idea of nonclassical, creationist, or indeterminist causality. Absolute exclusion of creativity and absolute exclusion of sentience from entire portions of nature are alike groundless. They are illicit conversions of "not easily knowable" into "known not to be." Nor is it likely that extreme cases of the subhuman (or the extreme case of the superhuman, deity), are open to easy commonsense dogmas, especially negative ones. The opposition to psychicalism has so far taken the posture of casual rejection, as though the truth, at least the negative truth, about what is most remote from ordinary experience were easy to arrive at. I see no ground for this attitude. It is easy to know that atoms do not feel as human beings do. But then neither do apes. Nor do infants feel as you and I do.

One consideration seems to me worth mentioning: if a mind or spiritual being exalted in principle as far above the human mode of awareness as God is defined to be is in any genuine sense conceivable, then a form of awareness as far inferior to the human as an atom is physically might very well also be conceivable. If theology is a difficult subject, then so, for partly the same and partly analogous reasons, is psychicalism. It will take much more than linguistic analysts have so far proposed on this topic to justify negative dogmas as the only reasonable way to view these subjects.

Whatever the valid results of linguistic analysis, putting topics "under the rug" because they are remote from ordinary and prescientific ways of thinking and therefore especially difficult can hardly be one of them. Ordinary good sense does not exhaust possible wisdom. Nor should a philosopher take the agenda of current science as definitive for all the future. The question, what are the lower limits of comparative psychology, or even whether there are any such limits, is important for the future both of science and of philosophy. One of the uses of philosophy is to help future scientists to transcend mere common sense, as Greek atomism and Platonic cosmology, (but hardly Aristotle, with his commonsense physics) helped early modern physicists. The inhibiting role akin to that of Aristotle is assumed by many philosophers today. It is well that some of us should take a different role.

Dr. John J. Shepherd’s criticism of panpsychism (PS 4:3-10) is ingenious and too complex for adequate consideration in brief compass. The principle of parsimony is not the final court of appeal. In metaphysics the decisive question is not whether an account is the simplest possible but whether it is possible, provided criteria for the coherence and positive meaning of the concepts are accepted. Psychicalists, from Leibniz down, have challenged the ability of materialism or dualism to meet these criteria. Concrete realities in the form of experiences are directly given; so this concept of concreteness has positive meaning. But concrete reality in the form of mere matter differs from the psychicalist concept only by its negative "mere." No positive alternative is provided.

Shepherd asserts that mental images and brains have "different and incompatible spatio-temporal patterns" and concludes that one must choose between the correctness of neurophysics and the correctness of the psychicalist theory. However, (1) images, like thoughts, are abstractions, not concrete actualities. They are neural states so far as these appear in human experiences. The neural states consist of subhuman experiences and are actual; actual also are the human experiences. The images are not additional actualities, but are the former as appearing to the latter. In so far psychicalist and central-state materialist can partly agree: images are appearances. (2) To count against psychicalism, any incompatibility of spatio-temporal patterns must, I should think, be between the patterns assigned to the neural actualities and the human experiences of which images are abstract aspects. Of course a sequence of human experiences has a different spatio-temporal pattern from the (nonlinear) sequences of neural events. But where is the incompatibility, if this means contradiction, in asserting both patterns? They do not qualify the same actuality. (3) Perhaps the argument is that physics purports to give a complete account of the spatio-temporal structures in nature. However, since physics does not even consider the question, what is the nature of experiences (which certainly have temporal and, I hold, spatial structures), the justification for this claim is not apparent. (4) Is the argument that there is not room in the region of space occupied by the neurons for both the types of structures mentioned above? This might, I suppose, be held, yet I cannot help wondering with what cogency in a world that accommodates particles, photons, and other kinds of radiant energy, atoms, molecules, cells, and animals.

It may be that my speaking of "the spatial patterns in some of our sensations" as evidence that our experiences are not point-like has been taken as implying that, contrary to (1) above, sensations or images are extended actualities. I realized even in appealing to this evidence that there was danger of ambiguity. "The sensations are extended" is elliptical. The immanent data of the sensations are in diverse parts of space, and the mass of data is extended in the sense in which a group of actualities, each with a different locus in the spatial system, is extended. The experience of which a sensation is an aspect is extended in the sense in which a single actuality is so. Leibniz almost succeeded in making this distinction and failed only because he denied intrinsic dependence of successive states of his monads upon previous states of other monads. To be spatial as a single actuality is to depend upon a plurality of immediate prior data that are contemporary with (independent of) each other. The spatiality "in" the sensations expresses this form of spatiality. To be spatial as a single actuality is also to condition immediately a plurality of subsequent data that are contemporary with one another. An event occurs when and where it is most directly conditioned and conditioning, and the directly conditioning and conditioned events are always plural and in different loci. This, I take it, is what is meant by saying that the locus of an event is a volume, not a point.

The reader will now see why I do not find a conflict between the physics of the nervous system and my psychicalism. It is indeed true that the faith of some, by no means all, atomic physicists in the literal and complete truth of quantum physics when applied to animal organisms contradicts the forms of conditioning mentioned above. But Heisenberg and Bohr suggested and Wigner argues that quantum physics in its present form cannot be the whole and literal truth of organic behavior. The issue here is not between physics and a certain philosophy; it is an issue within physics and an unsettled one.

Professor Keeling, to return to his essay, makes use of the argument, ostensibly derived from Wittgenstein, that psychicalism implies the possibility of a private language or implies that mind is more than behavior, although only one’s own mind, at most, is knowable except as behavior. Part of my reply here is that psychicalism is in a genuine respect as far possible from the concept of mind as merely private. That our own feelings are not the only feelings is known to us (mostly subconsciously to he sure) not solely by analogy and from the behavior of other people or animals, but by direct givenness in at least one privileged case, the feelings of our own bodily microconstituents. (There is another such case, which I shall not here discuss, the givenness of deity.) The bodily constituents are given mostly subconsciously, but some of us think we can consciously intuit our physical pleasures and pains as direct participations in feelings enjoyed or suffered by our bodily constituents. "Other minds" are at all times directly experienced, even though indistinctly so far as the individual other subjects are concerned. (I hold with Leibniz, Peirce, Bergson, and many others that human direct intuitions are pervasively indistinct as to the data, taken one by one or as singulars. But "indistinctly given" is not equivalent to "indirectly given." Intuitions both direct and wholly distinct are the prerogative of deity. It is a persistent illusion that we human beings can have them.)

Psychicalism implies that there is nothing concrete besides one’s own experiences except experiences not one’s own. And so, of course, all experience furnishes examples of "other minds." In memory the other mind is ones own past mind; in perception it is mind not one’s own at all. The argument from behavior and by analogy comes in to get us beyond other mind in the limited forms, one’s own past mental states, mental states of one’s bodily constituents (also divine mind). Here I agree with Plantinga; the argument by analogy, whatever its defects, is all we have (GOM 269). But it does not have to bear the burden of teaching us that "other mind" in some sense is a reality. In any case, until technology produces much better robots, there is only trivial doubt about the basic validity of ordinary inferences of this kind, granting a measure of vagueness and inaccuracy. And of course the primary learning to interpret the behavior of other animals as indicative of minds more or less like our own takes place in infancy, and we have no need of appealing to it every time we deal with another person or a dog or horse. One can, even a psychicalist can, include the social nature of language as a special and very significant form of the behavioral analogy.

Another part of my reply (and here I follow a suggestion of Lewis Ford) to the private language argument is that metaphysics is concerned with generic features of feeling, not its specific or individual nuances. Any privacy of the latter does not prevent metaphysical generalizations. Still another part concerns the givenness of deity, which is more relevant, I think, than Keeling allows.

One final point: the "introspection" by which our own experiences are given is not a mysterious function additional to perception and memory. It simply is memory, especially in its very short-run and most immediate form. (Here Ryle and Whitehead are in notable agreement.) In introspecting I keep remembering how I have just felt and thought, also how I have just perceived and remembered. To know one’s own knowing is to remember it. To introspect is to use memory in a special way, above all to use the memory of just previous not yet forgotten experience as contrasted to memory of experience for a time "forgotten." Those who fail to find experience as itself a datum are those whose conscious attention is to the data of previous perception rather than to the previous perceiving -- and remembering -- itself. They are extreme extroverts or objectifiers, or they philosophically affect to be. They fail to notice or admit their remembering of remembering or remembering of perceiving. However, the givenness of mind is not limited to remembering, for perceiving is also the intuiting of mind, but of subhuman (or superhuman) mind, rather than of the animal mind which is either one’s own or a constituent of one’s own body.

Thus psychicalism has a fairly complete theory of how its own truth is known.

May I say again that I appreciate criticisms of psychicalism, especially those of the high quality of Dr. Shepherd’s. I hope on some other occasion to say something about his objections to the Buddhist-Whiteheadian event-theory of individuals.

Reference

GOM -- Alvin Plantinga. God and Other Minds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

This symposium is the 5th, in which I’ve been asked to comment on comments of other philosophers about me. To have Cobb’s frank, critical comments on my work is a fine reward for longevity. (see The philosophy of Charles Hartshorne by John B. Cobb, Jr. at www.religion-online.org.) When I passed my 80th birthday, I began saying longevity is my secret weapon. Like Plato (and I am as much a Platonist as anyone alive that I know about, provided reference is to the Plato, not so much of the Republic and other dialogues that are perhaps more Socratic than Platonic, but of the Phaedrus, Timaeus, Sophist, and Laws, Bk. 10), I believe that of all subjects philosophy requires maturity. I am still finding new conceptual connections and clarifications. The history of philosophy is its testing laboratory and it has had a very complex history which is fully intelligible only in relation to the history of science, also the history of the religions.

My use of psyche is partly with Plato in mind. No great philosopher has been more badly misinterpreted than Plato. He was himself somewhat confused, but he knew that what he could say was "only somewhat like the truth," and this was what Aristotle did not know about himself, although -- except in elementary formal logic, zoology, and prudential ethics and political theory -- he too, was badly mistaken in some of his positions; in physics and philosophy of religion especially his influence has been calamitous. About mind or psyche, however, PL, as I like to abbreviate the great name, was sagacious. Burnet put things right when he said, the great platonic discovery was not the timeless forms but soul, that is, awareness, under which very definitely PL emphasized emotions. Even God is said to care about the creatures, not just to know about them. And the platonic criterion for the presence of psyche is self-activity, by which I take him to mean some degree of freedom from causal determinism. I think Plato knew that the other animals, especially the lower kinds, for instance insects, although of course self-moved and hence minded, are not intellectual, and live by feeling rather than thought. Plato even assumed that civilized humanity was preceded by uncivilized, more primitive societies.

Above all, Plato attributed the mind-body duality to God, of whom the body or soma is the cosmos of non-divine things. This body keeps changing by additions, as does the divine soul. So far I agree. Instead of psyche I can also say subjectivity. Whitehead’s "reformed subjectivism" is about what I mean by psychicalism. Cobb’s last sentence on p. 80 about mathematicians may not apply to all of them. The just preceeding sentence seems to mis-state my position. Of course there are both pure and impure possibilities, but no possibilities are as particular as actualities. Peirce was right on this. Possibilities are vague. Full particularization is creation, as Peirce and Bergson co-discovered. Always there is novelty, as well as partial repetition. God grounds, makes possible, both; the creatures add their own final self-actions. In their humble fashions they also create. Emergence is not an occasional thing but the universal of universals, or category of the ultimate. Plato would have loved to take this position and get rid of the supposed lifeless, inert, unfree, mindless matter. It’s the negativity of matter, not its spatiality, which is the error. The new subjectivism is the true positivism.

Concerning mind and matter, it was Peirce who corrected two great mistakes of Leibniz, his failure to allow for freedom as essential to mind, and his failure to make clear that, far from space being needed only to make matter possible it is mind that Descartes was cheating when he denied space to it. Peirce’s tychism or shancism opens the door to freedom; Peirce also gave the best statement ever made about why mind needs space. Wrote he: "My neighbor is he with whom I intimately react." We need space because we need neighbors, some at least of which are friends, those with whom we interchange ideas, feelings. We also have possible enemies against whom we must be on guard. (So long as there are extremes of rich and poor, there will be locks of doors.) Leibniz had simply, and correctly, said that as time is the way there can be successive mental states of individuals, space is the way there can be coexistent individuals. All correct, but then LZ (for Leibniz) spoiled it all by trivializing and virtually contradicting the distinction between the symmetry of coexistence and the asymmetry of succession (time’s famous ‘arrow’); he did this trivializing in two ways, by his sufficient reason, his polite word for a specially complete kind of determinism, according to which it is just as necessary for A to precede B as for B to succeed A (my ancestors required my existence as truly as I needed theirs); also coexistence for Leibniz did not mean interaction, but the mere agreement between vast, or was it infinite, numbers of perfect, time-keeping clocks in divinely chosen correspondence with one another. It was all a superbly artificial mathematical puzzle designed by a mathematical deity to make the best possible over-all pattern in which there are no accidental details, no free choices which may conflict with one another. As a satirist said, our best possible world is one in which everything that happens is a necessary evil.

Peirce brought philosophy back to the real world or genuinely individual, fallible, localized choices, actions, with necessary antecedent conditions, and possible or probable subsequent outcomes, involving free choices in each momentary present. Ah, but about the present Peirce became another mathematician legislating for actuality; he decided that the presents in which actions happen are infinitesimally brief, with an infinite number in any finite time however short. In effect he rejected quantum physics before it became fact. In this he was all too much like Leibniz. In his probabilistic view of the future he was like quantum physics but in his continuity-ism, or Synechism, he negated the quantum idea. On what ground? I say, on no ground, but because of feeling. He becomes lyrical in writing about the beauties of mathematical continuity. His father Benjamin wrote similarly on the subject. He was also his son’s principal intellectual teacher.* Charles was even more of a genius in mathematics than Benjamin, as experts have noted. Neither man, however, had what Plato, also enthusiastic about mathematics, did have, a sagacious understanding of the difference between mathematical concepts and concrete actualities. No two things in nature, PL said, are absolutely equal; mathematical entities are ideals, not facts of nature. He would not have believed that human experiencing could have an infinite number of successive experiences in a second, and that the same infinity would also occur in a non-human animal. He was impressed by the variety of nature. Nor did he think the species of animals are eternal ideas; on the contrary he thought they were divine creations (in The Republic). Moreover individual animals have each its own self-motions.

Of course, as Cobb notes, my 16 or 32 options tables are open to challenge. Buddhists and Hindus of the Sankara stripe reject conceptual devices as irrelevant in relating oneself to Nirvana or to the highest truths; Bergson in his early period did so also. I am not impressed by any of these people on just this issue. On the other hand, monks of The Bengali School of Hinduism come closer to my position than almost any Western writer. They say that God is love, that love is consciousness of consciousness, or experience of experience, that God is not the absolute but is "more than the absolute," also is not without becoming or dependence on ordinary individuals for the full divine actuality. This is a relatively modern Asiatic equivalent of process theism.

One can always retreat into mysticism but then one must also retreat into silence. Why keep trying to say what is unsayable? When mystics do talk they talk with concepts, and so did Bergson in his maturity. Language is conceptual; logic tells us how to use concepts responsibly. My big mistake, which a more mathematical person would have avoided, has been that my arrangement of a full table of the options in Creative Synthesis, the only book of mine that has it at all, is mathematically inelegant, which considerably reduces its power. The profession has scarcely begun to evaluate its importance.

A final remark about the apparent continuity of experiencing and the Whiteheadian (also in principle Buddhist) rejection of this. As a theist I explain this continuity as one of the ways in which our direct intuitions and the intuitions of God differ. All our intuitions are, as Leibniz said, confused or blurred, lacking in distinctness. Only God simply intuits what is there. Kant radically misunderstood all this in his theory of appearance and reality; he carried to the limit a tendency in Descartes of supposing that it made sense to posit an experience of just itself, that very experience. An experience is itself but does not experience itself, it experiences something else which has to be there. Even in dreams this is always true, as Bergson brilliantly shows. One dreams of being sexually, physically excited, and so one is, of being cold and so one is, of hearing a sound and on waking the sound is heard. In all these and many other ways I have confirmed Bergson’s masterly account. There are no experiences of just those experiences, and no mere dreams. Kant’s theory of Erscheinung completely hiding was erscheint is a myth we need to get rid of, along with the idea of mere mindless matter, which is also a myth. As I interpret Plato -- when imagined in possession of our modern science, and at his mature best -- all mind is embodied mind, but bodies consist also of minds on mostly subhuman, also sub-vegetable, but ever self-active constituents, and therefore above the zero of mentality. No such zero can be demonstrated. For the rest I will only reiterate my appreciation of Cobb’s reflections, which speak for themselves.

Mary Elizabeth Moore’s (see her article "Musings of a Psychologist-Theologian: Reflections on the Method of Charles Hartshorne at HYPERLINK l "".) musing or reflections also speak for themselves. I think well of the Hopi, who by their contrary one-sidedness tend to help the rest of us correct our anti-temporal bias. In general the Amerindians, as I like to call them, had a sounder view of nature and even the great spirit than many a theologian has had, so far as I am concerned. I would say the same about Africans when not Christian or Islamic: they did not believe in Hell at all apparently, and apparently not in supernatural heavens either, which for me puts them above some of those who colonized and exploited them to their disadvantage.

Logic, in its modal aspect, as to which Aristotle was the great founder, shows the relationship between contingent or empirical and necessary or metaphysical truths to be thus: if P is a necessary truth and Q is a contingent truth, then the conjunction, P and Q. is a contingent truth. There can be no complete truth that is merely contingent or merely necessary. That I exist is a contingent truth, but it includes whatever necessary conditions there were for my existence, including the divine existence, unless all theologians are mistaken. The middle ground is in a way the inclusive ground. The tragic mistake was to suppose that the necessary truths were basically negations, that God is wholly, exclusively non-temporal, immutable, independent, etc. Worship of such unqualified negations is a gross intellectual kind of superstition, period. That is all I see in it. Aristotle invented this theology, he and Philo; it is not genuinely Platonic at all, in spite of Plotinus etc. Philo on this point was worse than Aristotle, who did allow God to think, though he prohibited God from thinking or caring about you or me and our thinking.

Marjorie Suchocki (see her article Charles Hartshorne and Subjective Immortality at www.religion-online.org.) like most of us, inherited an immense tradition that there ought to be justice. She is certainly right that our human notions of justice do not seem to be backed by the laws of nature as we know them and the way things happen on this planet. Waldo Emerson, as he liked to be known, tried to persuade himself that justice is done because "There is no chance, no anarchy." "There is a system of compensations, every defect in one manner is made up in another. Every suffering is rewarded; every sacrifice is made up, every debt is paid." When, however, his beautiful little boy dies he declares that nothing in his philosophy is of any help in his sorrow, and repeats this a year later. In short his theory was a bad guess about the nature of things. Emerson was not talking about posthumous compensations but those in life between birth and death.

Much suffering of people comes from the wickedness of others, as in child abuse, wife abuse, and many other forms of not loving a neighbor as oneself. We may try to prevent such things by legal means, using punishments and in civil cases monetary rewards to the mistreated. How well do these systems work? They are executed by human individuals, with all their weaknesses and even their own wickednesses. What is the remedy? Is it supernatural heavens or hells or purgatories? Will God be doing this supernatural punishing and rewarding, or will angels or devils be doing the work? I deeply fear we are not competent judges of how the cosmos -- and God, as I use words, is at least cosmic -- is or should be made or managed. How many Christians, I wonder, are aware that in the Book of Job there is much discussion about God and about human suffering and wickedness but not a whisper about heaven or hell, or anything of the kind? Nor is there in the supernatural voice from the whirlwind any affirmation that suffering is divine punishment or means of teaching us this or that. What Job is told is that he is in no position to tell God how a universe can or should be made or governed. He was not there when the Pleiades constellation was made, he does not know how it came to be that animals can feed their young. At this point I think of Darwin, who, according to those who taught me when young about religion, was the one who (with Wallace) gave the first factually based account of how the animals came to be. The account was not atheistic, so far as it was factual, and Darwin’s letters make it clear that he knew this. What he explained was not how there is cosmic order, with physical, chemical, astronomical laws; he assumed all that, and then explained how the emergence of living forms, vegetable and animal, could have occurred. His religious difficulty came from the kind of theology he found around him, its habit of identifying words in a book (written by human hands and thought by human brains) with the words of God, also from the habit of playing fast and loose with the dangerously ambiguous concepts of omnipotence and omniscience, and taking these more seriously than any definite affirmation of the freedom of creatures to make decisions that are their own and not God’s. In addition Darwin was handicapped by the determinism and materialism of the Newtonian era still not definitively transcended, though it was already beginning to show signs of giving away to something in principle different. In spite of Darwin’s phrase chance variations in animal and plant offspring which artificial selection made use of to produce domestic animals and plants, giving him and Wallace the opportunity to recognize natural selection as an important factor in the coming to be of animals and plants not artificially produced, Darwin himself could not quite believe the variations were produced by creaturely freedom transcendent of any fully deterministic causal laws. Multiple freedom means chance, for if A freely makes decision D1 and B makes decision D2, who or what makes the conjunction of the two? Obviously no one, it just happens. Offspring variations are chancy, there animal celluar, molecular, atomic-particle freedoms, strict determinism is not demonstrably true and is a problem not a solution for problems. Darwin would have been even greater had he been able to accept this. He was great and good as it was.

Dr. Suchocki is struggling with the tragedy inherent in the very idea of life as multiple freedom. Even with God, that is, supreme and cosmic freedom, whereas ours are only more-or-less-good and localized forms of freedom, the forms of life are all forms of freedom. Materialism and mechanism (determinism) are the twin traits of the absolutely dead, if there is such a thing. Life-ism, the real pro-life-position, denies that there is. By life meaning self-activity and at least sentience, feeling, the death of animals means only falling back to lower animal, vegetable, or sub-vegetable but still self-active and sentient levels.

There is something else. In ethics I take seriously the injunctions, Love God with all your being and the neighbor as yourself. Note that the first commandment here is the basic one, in the light of which the other is to be interpreted. How are we to love ourselves? In principle as we are to love our neighbor? And how is that? As valuable to God. Self-love is not the principle here. The principle is love ("God is love"); we are not to make bargains with God, such as, do this and we will do that! Job, Plato, and the Greater and lesser Commandments are my basic traditional assumptions, together with the new freedom in science to admit self-activity as the index of mentality or the psychical. I do add the Buddhist-Whiteheadian notion of actual entity, meaning momentary unit-experience with a finite and small number per second in the human case. If we do not distinctly introspect these units and seem to experience a continuum of experiencing this is because we are not God, and our intuitive capacities are of limited power. We intuit things always with details blurred, as Clerk Maxwell put it, like a swarm of bees seen at a distance.

Much of this may seem irrelevant or unnecessary in a response to Dr. Suchocki’s essay. I deeply sympathize with her grief that there is so much abuse of some people by other people, of women, children, minorities. It happens that my present circumstances are not very favorable to careful consideration of the details of her contribution. I do agree with her that God is conscious of our consciousness, or unit-instances of becoming. I take Whitehead literally when he says that these units by virtue of objective immortality, live everlastingly, but not literally when he says they perish. My John Locke seems less Whiteheadian than Whiteheads’s JL. I also take "their being cannot be abstracted from their becoming" literally. Yet it is not clear to me that this means they can enjoy God’s awareness of each of their experiences in those very experiences, for Whitehead defines prehension, or feeling of feeling, as temporally subsequent to its concrete data. Still he seems to accept telepathy.

One point in which I seem rather eccentric among philosophers is that I do not quite take literally what some do seem to take literally, namely unbearable pain. To feel the unfeelable is contradictory, so is to bear the unbearable. I say this contradiction is not to be taken as truth. This is one reason I reject the idea of Hell. Not even God can force creatures to go on living miserably. Animals can die from not wanting to live. There are known cases, loss of a mother, or other loved one, that result in refusal to eat, and death. Without the will to live there is little nondivine living. It is God who could not cease to have this will, and in a sense it is not a definite volition in the divine case but a common aspect of every possible divine volition. I hold that we creatures are born to want to live for a limited period but not to go on endlessly being ourselves in ever-new variations. We may say we want this but I hold (with Baine, Peirce, James) that mere sayings do not prove real belief, only corresponding behavior can do that, and in this case it is endless future behavior we are talking about, an infinity. Do those who assert this infinity really think through what this means? Only God fully knows any of us, not we ourselves. Our temporal finitude and our spatial finitude belong together. Charles Peirce said this in his twenties with superb clarity, except that finitude is in this usage an inadequate word; we are but fragments of the finite cosmos, which so far as we know is itself finite. (I have never accepted the hypothesis of a spatially infinite cosmos, and deny it makes sense. The merely infinite is the merely conceptual, Whitehead was perhaps first to say it: "All actuality is finite.") Whitehead also speaks of each actual entity attaining its "satisfaction." This too I take literally. Any experience is better than none, better, that is, for the person in question. It is not rationally for one’s own sake that one commits suicide, for being dead is nothing positive for the one who died. Indeed no person can be dead, as Shakespeare knew. A carcass is not a person; even when alive we are more than just our bodies, as Plato knew and said clearly. Plato also said, and we know why he did so, that after death we are reborn in new bodies. Many of us think he thereby weakened his position. In any case, that we require our bodies to exist does not prove we merely are those bodies. Requirement or inclusion is not identity, by any logical principle I know. I require my gene mixture but I am certainly not identical with it. Nor are identical twins, as two of my brothers have been, simply identical with one another, either in their minds or their bodies. The human psycho-physical system is the most complex entity which acts as a single agent on this planet.

Though it is not really better for any of us to be dead than alive, it may be better for the world and for God. We were not born to live forever and our proper time may be up. Fanatical attachment to mere life in human form is no saner than any other fanaticism. I deeply admire whales and elephants, and a person in a coma, or an early fetus, is less impressive by far to me. The history of fanaticism is dismal, a record of slaughter not just of fetuses but of persons in the full value sense. One-issue people are misfortunes for us all.

What we can do about the injustices in our society or on our planet is practical, partly political and partly by private individual or organized charity, though such organizations have, I suppose, their own politics.

David Griffin (See David Griffin, Hartshorne, God, and Relativity Physics has, since I first became aware of him, been one of my best readers who was not also a class student of mine. Unfortunately the problem he discusses are closely related to problems in physics so technical that my mathematical limitations, limitations of age, and the pressure of other unfinished projects nearer to my areas of competence cause me to leave them for others to deal with. I recently read a physicist who seemed to think even the Big Bang is not a settled matter, and I gather that Hoyle is still unconvinced. My new table of 16 (or 32) options in thinking conceptually about God yields an argument for just one of the 32 options so strong that I find it reasonable to hope that metaphysics and physics will between them find a way to solve the problems Griffin outlines with characteristic ability.

In conclusion I wish to express my appreciation to the other contributors and the Center for all they and it has done for so many people. For one example, thanks to one intercultural meeting it arranged I actually found out why Mahayana Buddhism came to be in Fa Tsang of the Hwa Yen tradition in 6th or 7th century China. Another example, it got John Hick, leading British Christian philosopher, to the Center and made him knowledgeable about Buddhism, and other non-English religions, with interesting results that I came to know about. Add Process Studies and Ford’s editing, how much has been made to happen!

NOTE

* There is now a superb biography of Charles S. Peirce, with an excellent concluding essay on his thought by the historian, who is also a capable philosopher, Professor Joseph Brent, who has become a close friend, although I had not heard of him until a year or so ago. We seem to agree not only about Peirce but extraordinarily well about many important things. His book comes out from The University of Indiana Press this year -- the press, blessed coincidence, which published my Born to Song; Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song, and will reissue it, also this year. Brent has been working on Peirce since 1935, only ten years after I began working on him. He and I are in some ways the two among the living who have had the best opportunities to know about Peirce and his world. He knows the complete Harvard manuscripts better than I do. They were added to after I left Harvard. We seem to have no important disagreement however. Where my impressions of CP, as I call him for short, disagree with his it is he who knows. This is particularly true of CP’s first marriage, of which I acquired an extremely one-sided view from a nephew who lived in the house of the couple at the time when the marriage was about to be ended by the husband. Both marriages were emotionally intense and tragically up and down in happiness and misery. The man and his loves were unstable psychically. CP’s troubles came mostly from his domineering father, who however got him his first and only long-lasting means of livelihood. It was a tragic but in the end richly productive life of a great genius who near the end of his life came fairly close to what I consider the central religious truths. At the age of 14 he stated the basic principle: Love is the foundation of everything good. In a poem I said much the same thing when a year or two older. Even Whitehead talks less about love than Peirce and I have. CP got it from his mother, not his father.

For twenty-five centuries of Western philosophy and theology, apart from Judaism, only two forms of philosophical theism were widely known: what I call classical theism and classical pantheism, the latter best known as Stoicism (until Spinoza); the former was chiefly Islamic or Christian, except for some among the Jews. Two traits of classical theism were that it either (like Stoicism and Spinozism) clearly and consistently denied human freedom (in the straightforward sense of actions being not wholly determined by their causal conditions) or else ambiguously or contradictorily affirmed and denied causal determinism -- truly classically in Aquinas’s statement that God strictly causes our actions but in such fashion that we were also free to act otherwise. The contradiction was, in my judgement, and that of a multitude of other philosophers (including Spinoza), left standing. Long before the blessed Thomas, the blessed Augustine made even less pretension of avoiding unqualified theological determinism. I am familiar with the efforts made to show there is no contradiction but will omit the reasons that for many of us refute these attempts.

It is true that Descartes, a classical theist, did unequivocally affirm human freedom, as did Arminius, but neither of them removed the contradiction between this freedom and the timeless perfection of the deity which knows the free act. Aristotle, inventor of the concept of God as unmoved mover, correctly drew from it the conclusion, therefore God does not know or care about us. No Christian, or religious Jew either, could take this way of removing the contradiction that in the long run ruined the intercultural reputation of classical theism, Christian or Islamic (as in Al Gazalli).

There was another basic flaw which made classical theism vulnerable to rejection not just by atheists but by convinced theists. This was its linking belief in God with belief in posthumous careers for human persons, in spite of the fact that, in the Book of Job for instance, although the divine existence is there taken for granted, there is not a whisper about Heaven or Hell, or about posthumous rewards or punishments, or any other prolongations of a person’s experiencing after death.

Now I come close to the theme of this article: one writer, and I have found no other, in the early Middle Ages attacked classical theism head-on precisely on its two most vulnerable points -- its affirmation of, or failure definitely to reject, unqualified theological determinism, and its commitment to endless posthumous careers for human persons, making them in that respect rivals to God. Dying was not to be the last of our sequence of experiences, but the beginning of a new and endless series. This isolated individual (there may, among Jews, possibly also in Islam, have been others) was Omar Khayyám, a Persian (Iranian). He was a mathematician and astronomer who wrote some prose writings in religion showing that he did not reject the idea of God but that he was very cautious about philosophical or theological definitions or explications of the idea. He also wrote poetry, not for publication or for money, but for distribution among friends; in these he emphatically rejected or made fun of two ideas: that of endless careers for human beings involving rewards or punishments for our behavior on earth, combined (absurdly, as he felt) with the view that divine power fully decides our behavior, no matter how wicked or good. The combination of absolute divine power, zero human freedom, and supernatural Heaven and Hell he robustly repudiated. And, so say many of us today, why not? What else does it deserve?

Most of us would probably never have heard of Omar had not another poem, miscalled a translation of Omar’s, been published in England; it was by Edward Fitzgerald, and came out in 1859. It is one of the glories of English literature, who can deny it? I seriously wonder if Omar himself was quite as good a poet; his profession was in mathematics, and, in the entire history of the mathematical scientists, I doubt that one can find a single poet comparable to Fitzgerald. The only one that occurs to me is Lucretius (if he was a mathematician) with his Latin poems. It is good, but as richly beautiful as Fitzgerald’s? What he wrote was both less and much more than a mere translation. However, the basic double attack, in my view wholly justified, on classical theism, whether Islamic or Christian, was in both original and paraphrase essentially the same. (Ali Dashti has shown that.) Only the poetic vividness and beauty was, I cannot but believe, considerably enhanced in Fitzgerald’s poem.

The fundamental silliness of a God who predestines us to be wicked and then punishes or rewards us everlastingly for doing what it has always been settled that we do is wonderfully set forth. If it does not refute the doctrine, what view that has ever been held has been refuted?

I have only one quarrel with Omar. He seems to think our mortality is objectionable simply as such, and not merely because of our lack of freedom and the injustice of posthumous punishments or rewards where there is no real responsibility on our part. It does not seem to occur to him that if God fully knows our experiences, most of which we ourselves cannot remember, surely God does not forget them when we die, as we mostly do when our friends die. In this Omar seems only too much like those he is attacking, who cannot bear to accept mortality and want to be as temporally enduring as deity.

I am amazed how feebly multitudes of persons have imagined what it means for God to be ideally perceptive and retentive of worldly happenings, as by most definitions God is said to be! How could they fail to see that the idea of social immortality acquires new dimensions through belief in God? This is Whitehead’s thesis of objective immortality in God as consequent upon the world, sympathetically attentive to all that happens in it, "the fellow-sufferer who understands." At my first reading of this idea in Whitehead I felt, "there’s the truth itself on this topic," and I am still exactly of that opinion. Why so many multitudes of people cannot get the point is rather more than I can understand.¹ It seems so simple and clear. Surely social immortality is the principle to start with in reflections on death. Surely also we live for others as well as for ourselves; even the other animals (especially animal mothers and sometimes fathers) do that. Also Christians say the words, "Love God with all your being" They show how little they mean to do what these words say when they insist that we should not have to accept our mortality and should, like God, have an infinite future.²

This brings out another defect in classical theism, according to which God does not in truth have an endless future, but is strictly timeless, pure actuality, being without becoming. God is then not in space or time but "in eternity" -- as though eternity were a special place outside of space-time in a super container for which we really have no words at all. What kind of a word game is this? I hold it is "language idling," to adapt Wittgenstein. We do have words for "unborn and undying," a phrase attributed to Buddha, but it is entirely compatible with Plato’s admirable but badly neglected idea of the divine life as having both being and becoming, to which duality (apparently without fully realizing it) Whitehead returns with his thesis of primordial and consequent divine natures. I further generalize it with my doctrine of dual transcendence. In Omar’s society Plato’s name meant primarily neoplatonism, which I see as a sad regression from Plato’s Timaeus, Phaedrus, Sophist, and Laws, Book 10.

I now introduce our third poet, another superb one, the American, Sidney Lanier, whose premature death is partial explanation for his not having been adequately appreciated. Like the other two, and with equal definiteness and eloquence, he rejected classical theism (without so naming it)³ because of its failure to protect freedom in our relation to God. The poem is called Individuality, and the title is significant as it shows how philosophical the poet was in this poem. Without knowing it, probably, he was repeating a doctrine of Epicurus: to be individual is to act individually, freely, not entirely determined by any condition or cause.

The poem is addressed to a cloud, from which have come thunder and lightning with disastrous human results that seem undeserved by the victims. We seem to be confronted with a problem of evil. Is the cloud wicked to produce these uncalled-for damages? No, for the cloud has no freedom, no will or sensibility of its own; it is not in any significant sense an individual. "There is no thee." The cloud is not acting wickedly for it is not acting at all; it is not an agent (or what I like to call an active singular).

In the eleventh verse the poet turns from the cloud to a quite different topic, an artist, for example a poet who has written a poem in praise of God. In him we do have an individual, an agent or active singular. Who then has made the poem, God who "makes" all things, or the one who writes the poem? (This is Lanier himself -- a musician in two senses, playing a flute superbly in the Baltimore orchestra, and writing some of the most beautifully musical verses ever written -- though Individuality is scarcely an example of that.) The poem leaves no doubt as to the answer: the poet, not God, has made the poem. (In all literature, in English or other languages, I know of no other poem comparable to this in its unambiguity on the freedom side of the topic. On the other side Robinson Jeffers was equally definite. So Ambrose Bierce, but in prose.) In this poem Lanier meant to be definite and, being a master of language, he succeeded. Here is the relevant part of the poem.

[The poet then returns to the cloud, and adds two verses, toying with the paradox that the cloud can and cannot be addressed as a fellow creature (kinsman), and concludes, addressing the cloud:]

Lanier sees with devastating clarity the ghastly absurdity of the unmoved mover being taken as the model of deity in a religion of which the principle of principles is love (deus est cantas). Piteous farce indeed, how better can one describe it? And why talk about "serving" a God in whom our greatest joys and worst sufferings can awaken no sympathetic response, who gives all and receives nothing? Two thousand years of that should be sufficient. Even a century was pretty long, for that matter.

Lamer does not solve the problem of evil the poem seems to begin with, but then who did at that time? Science was still in the trap of Newtonian determinism and materialism, except in a few choice spirits here and there in the world. Then too in the old South (outside of Virginia) there was much more understanding of art than of science. The Georgian-Maryland poet has a few epigrams on the subject, none of which is a pearl of wisdom I fear: "Science that cannot prove proof is," "o’er-bright, smit with desire to see and not to see," "the sense making love to the all," this last being what he wants from science. He names no scientists, does not mention evolution, names no branch of science, does not seem to have any realistic idea of what scientists have been trying to do or why.⁴ In dealing with the arts, especially the two kinds of music I have mentioned, he is much more knowledgeable; he also knows quite a little about the religions of mankind, is perceptive about Buddhism (see his poem Nirvana) , and, to my surprise, is aware of Omar Khayyám!

Sadly ironical is the fact that it seems entirely foreign to Lanier’s view of science that one of its values has always been supposed to be its capacity to help prevent or cure diseases. The tuberculosis which haunted his adult life and killed him when he was thirty-nine years old would, in a few decades, become only a very minor problem in his part of the world thanks to Pasteur and bacteriology.⁵

I am somewhat discomforted by the male chauvinism of Lanier’s language. God as Father, man as the same as person. Of course in this he was like nearly everyone of his time.⁶ He was no Emerson, cordially favoring women’s rights, but then he was not in New England. (He was, however, well aware of and rather perceptive about Emerson.)⁷ It is enough that he was perfect on the necessity of genuine freedom in philosophy of religion. Indeed, who else is as good, apart from a few theologians and philosophers scattered through intellectual history, among hosts of the wont-sees and the shant-sees, to borrow the language of a superb but neglected satirical English novelist who was partly contemporary with, but earlier and longer-lived than Lanier, and who wittily made fun of theories of human behavior conceived in terms of causal necessity. If the reader doesn’t know his name then he has missed a lot of fun on a high level. He has lots of company in this misfortune, so he can probably bear it. Only by having a learned and himself witty father-in-law; did I come to know and read this and some other enjoyable English writers of the nineteenth and the present century.⁸

Lanier implicitly did give a clue to the problem of evil. A cloud is not a thou, an active singular. But the fallacy of distribution, in any good book of elementary logic, is to apply terms, especially negative ones, appropriate to a whole (or totality) inappropriately to all its parts (or members) as well. Large wholes can have small parts, inactive wholes can have active parts, insentient wholes can have sentient parts, unfree wholes can have free parts. Epicurus (and Lucretius, to whom Lanier refers with some appreciation) knew this with reference to freedom, but the great Plato and Aristotle did not. Epicurus (and Lucretius) did not know it with reference to sentience, but I hold that Plato would have, had he agreed with Epicurus about freedom -- which Plato called self-motion or self-activity. Not just human freedom explains conflict and evil in the world but also the humbler forms of freedom that no portions of nature are wholly without. Nothing that happens is in detail simply what God has decided. Always non-divine freedoms are involved. The combinations of free agents’ actions come about by chance. X does al and Y does a2, the combination al.a2 neither X nor Y has decided, it just happens; bring in God as Z, and the logic still holds, chance is still there. So when Lanier writes "miscalled chance" of happenings he is making a mistake, a very common one to be sure. He is stating an "opinion" not a truth, and he has declared his dislike of opinions. (However, he does well to object to violence being used for or against opinions, as in the burning of Servetus at the stake by Calvin, a deed not to be humanly forgiven.)⁹

The question sufferers often ask, "Why has God done this to me?" is always a wrong question. (My father, a pious Episcopal clergyman, knew this before I was born ninety-four years ago.)¹⁰ By the same logic it is always wrong to think that if we do something as a service to God it is really God who has seen to it that this deed shall be done. The deed is ours, not God’s or any one else’s. The same is true of the actions of other animals, such as the rail or marsh wren Lanier writes about. It is also true of what bacteria do. Our chief difference from these other active singulars is that we can know; in our verbal ways and in terms of universals, principles, what is going on. We can think as well as merely feel situations. We are sentient plus. But, as Peirce saw; before Whitehead gave technical expression to it with his concept of "prehension," the merest feeling implies "spontaneity," a degree above the zero of freedom.

All feeling, for Whitehead, and, though less clearly, for Peirce and Bergson, is social, feeling of others’ feeling; this is the kernel of love, which for Lanier also was the principle of principles. This is what I mean by "neo-classical metaphysics," analogously to what is or may be neo-classical physics -- if and when physicists find out how to unite relativity and quantum physics in a unitary theory, and how to relate the many kinds of particles and waves (or strings) and the four (or three) forces. The metaphysical aspect is not wholly finished either. Science and metaphysics, as practiced, are not simply and mutually independent; if, for example, Aristotle’s zoology was not clearly evolutionary it was also insofar not good metaphysics.¹¹ No empirical observation could show that something, say a species, never changes, or that nature makes no leaps. In principle something like quantum physics could have been vaguely predicted. Peirce made the contrary prediction and should not have.¹²

The big changes in science correct previous positions that never were justified, except at most as a program of research. As Bergson said, years before it collapsed, classical physics simply could not be literally true. Nor could the theology that mostly went with it, in Newton’s mind as in many others. Omar’s eloquent, and Fitzgerald’s probably even more eloquent, rejection of the medieval form of theism was in the long run deadly. Lanier’s equally emphatic negation was long over-due; something happened when he wrote that poem. But who, for a hundred years, saw this? Similarly, when Socinus and his followers gave their defense of human freedom, even in relation to divine power, and rejected the timelessness of deity to make room for human freedom, who took them seriously? Again, when Kierkegaard defended freedom in the same human-divine context (but did not alter the immutability of deity and thus fell behind the Socinians) how long was it before anyone saw what was wrong and that the job had been better done long before?

I add Freud’s remark that, though the power of reason in human life is weak it is in the long run our best hope. And life is hope or nothing much. In this I appeal to Albert Schweitzer, also to Peirce, who sometimes despaired but knew that this was a weakness, and that extreme pessimism is as false as extreme or foolish optimism. And even the psychologist Skinner, who is myopic about freedom, does say that positive is better than negative reinforcement. He votes on the side of hope and love, not fear, hate, or despair. So should we all.

This essay has not so far been kind to a writer who has meant a great deal to many. Someone, with I think a Catholic background, has called me an anti-Thomistic Thomist. I do take the sainted Thomas seriously enough to attack him definitely and, in some ways I agree with him, even against some of his disciples. Thus I agree with him that if God is entirely immutable, then God is also without potentiality and vice versa. In pure eternity there is no contingency; however, I add, with full support from Aristotle, there is also in it no knowledge of definite contingent things or worlds. The choice between non-dual and dual transcendence is rigorous: either God is (in diverse respects, to avoid formal contradiction) both absolute and relative, necessary and contingent, immutable and mutable, infinite and finite, or only absolute, necessary, immutable, or infinite. The famous theologica negativa, so far as it was or is merely negative, was wrong all through, or not wrong at all.¹³ Thomas says it is not wrong at all; I say this is a more nearly logical position than that it is wrong here and there. I take Plato as on my side in this when he says that in God is both being and becoming, both permanence and novelty, a closed past and an open future, also that God cares about the creatures, thus siding in advance against Aristotle’s unmoved mover, taken as the God of religion.¹⁴ What moves things is at least "self-moved," and is soul, including the supreme and cosmic soul, God, whose body is all else than cosmic soul and other than forms. Did Aristotle or his followers refute Plato’s doctrine? No, they ignored it. What causes motion and change, for Plato, was soul, which by definition is self-moved and can also move whatever is movable. The eternal form of Good is envisaged by God in producing or changing the world but, apart from soul, forms are powerless. As Burnet, the great British scholar in ancient Greek thought, said, "Plato’s great discovery was not the forms but soul." Sad to say, most of the learned world still does not seem to know this. Even Whitehead partly missed it.¹⁵

Another remark about Thomas, the "great arranger of ideas:" I recall having read somewhere that, late in his rather short life, he expressed discontent with his writings as not really up to their exalted subjects. I do not take this confession as mere or false modesty. I suspect it was an honest confession. Often in reading the Summas I have felt how much stronger some of the objections he formulates to the conclusions he knows all along he must reach than are his rebuttals of the objections. Who knows but he began to see through his own devices for reaching these preordained conclusions?

With Plato I strongly believe that philosophy, of all subjects, requires maturity. One of my advantages over most of my contemporary rivals is that, decade after decade, in eighty or so years I have gone on gaining additional clarity on a number of topics which interested me from the start. I am now close to forty-five years older than Thomas when he died.¹⁶ And even he spent his last months, or was it years, writing hymns. Adding this to his final apology, what do we have? I think we have a learned world that for centuries overrated a person who himself did not agree with the rating! Long before Thomas was born the "medieval synthesis" was already set almost in concrete. He had a poor chance of considering its foundations on their merits. His tradition was a mixture of second-rate Greek philosophy and second-rate biblical scholarship, going back to Philo and Augustine. Shakespeare’s tide "comedy of errors" comes to me as all too fitting for this story.¹⁷

An interesting common trait of the poets referred to in the title of this essay is that they seem (it is hard to be sure about this) to believe in God but not in metaphysics, not in the then available theoretical explications of the idea of deity They knew the dangers of religious intolerance and felt that truths of the intellect must take second place compared to truths of the heart. The latter formula is usually attributed to Pascal, and it is possible that Lanier knew that, though there seems no evidence to support this. However that may be, he does speak of knowing with the heart, also his scorn of "opinions," and reference to Servetus as having died because of his opinion is close to what Omar faced in his time and place. I take the present century to contrast with all its predecessors in the way in which it is now possible for educated people -- alas many of our population are but little educated scientifically or philosophically -- still, for those who are it is now possible to be religious intellectually without ceasing to be lovingly so, and without threatening anyone.¹⁸

I have studied forms of theism as they have been for three millennia around the world, and have talked to philosophers and theologians in many countries. No one threatened me except two fundamentalists (with letters about my future residence in Hell) in the part of the world where I now live. I think I know the arguments for the various positions about theism almost as well as any one person could know them. I claim no infallible wisdom in my choice of doctrines or arguments, but I use rigorous logic in showing that certain ways of classifying possible ways of thinking positively or negatively about God do exhaust the possibilities. In all there are sixteen such ways, and each has two subdivisions, making thirty-two in all. Nothing like this analysis seems to have been proposed by others but intellectual history exhibits examples of most of them, so that what I am talking about is definitely relevant. What follows is that theological or atheistic disputes in the past committed the "fallacy of many questions." They never realized anything like the complexity of the problem they were trying to solve.¹⁹ This was true no matter what position they were taking. From now on only the illiterate in the topic can go on making this mistake.

The rigorous logic referred to does not dictate the choice among the thirty-two, but it throws a lot of light on what it means to make a choice, and does this for the first time in all those thirty centuries. Always there was gross underestimation of the size of the problem. It just is that complicated. But sixteen or even thirty-two are not hopelessly many possibilities. Also the subdivisions all depend on a single principle, Plato’s mind-body analogy for the God-Cosmos relation, so that the choice among the sixteen is the basic one.²⁰ It makes a square of four columns and four rows; thus we have four times four. Each row has a single principle and so does each column, and one of the two diagonals also has a single principle.^{21, 22} All this shows how right Omar, Fitzgerald, and Lanier were to shy away from reasoning about just how God was to be conceived. No one really knew then what the problem was, but they felt they loved God, that only superhuman love could merit our loving it with all our being, and that doing so helps us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, in both cases as valuable to the all-loving One.

Poor Pascal, he was a determinist, denying freedom.²³ That was an intellectual mistake as well as a mistake of feeling. God, like a good not a tyrannical parent, wants children to make their own decisions. Being parent is clearly female more than male. If Lanier missed that it was partly at least because he loved Jesus, the "crystal Christ," who was male and who called God "Father." Of all the tributes to Jesus I have read, I find Lanier’s the most eloquent. I still cannot quite go with him. Jesus I have not seen the face or heard the voice of, though I revere most of the words and deeds attributed to him. My own Christian mother was reliably wise and loving, selfish or unkind never, and she treated everyone she encountered as a neighbor, regardless of race, or whatever.²⁴

For me, and Lanier does not seem very different in this, women are not persons minus something, they are persons plus something. What men can do (other than fertilize female egg cells) women can do, provided they are not too occupied with doing what only they can do. More and more clear does this become. Any human skill or intellectual operation can be managed by the brains and muscles of either sex unless it requires more crude muscular strength and height than most women have. Technology has made that difference less and less relevant. So also have better medicine and hygiene, lengthening life spans far beyond the child-bearing age, thereby diminished the male advantage or female disadvantage. In music this potential equality is especially obvious. I agree with Ashley Montague, the English sociologist: women not men are in principle the more complete persons. (Lanier’s Two Springs can perhaps, with parts of his Symphony, be taken to support this.) One must know some micro-physiology to see this completeness fully, but the facts are there. Montague knew what he was talking about. So, without all the scientific facts, did Emerson by trusting his intuitions, though some of his readers miss this. It is his diary one must read to be sure of finding it. In my book on American philosophy give the data. ²⁵

One last remark about this wonderful poet of Georgia. He is upset about trade, commerce. He seems almost to want only art, religion, plus gardening, carpentering, local house-building, without much division of labor interregionally. Or, is his discontent not rather with what we now call capitalism, and the habit of measuring values by money, and of making individual or family self-interest rather than brotherly-sisterly love the motive. I suggest he is raising the democratic-socialist ideal, and if so I think he has a point. The Old South was not just more pro-slavery, it was also less crassly commercial than the North. The issue is still genuine.²⁶ In the South I find more feeling for the art of conversation and for life itself as the art. Lanier embodies that. Two recent presidencies, making the rich richer and the poor poorer are dismal signs of our country taking a wrong turn. Even in this way Lanier is still relevant. He proclaimed a glorious ideal of love of nature, love of persons, of all the arts, and of the cosmic all-encompassing love. Let us add for him science, philosophy, and an economic and political theory that is environmentally, democratically, and internationally sound -- --but that last is for another occasion. Lanier had enough to do to relate to his country, or a small part of it. In this too he was like Omar. I accept the testimony of All Dashti in his book (translated into English) that Omar’s talk about wine did not mean alcoholism, but was symbolic of his repudiation of doctrinaire theology.²⁷ His reputation was that of a well-behaved person, moderate in all things.²⁸

Properly interpreted all four of the persons this article is about can help us to live better than we might live without them. They did what they could with what they had. It is for us, mutatis mutandis, to do the same.

Notes

1. B reads: Why so many multitudes of people cannot get the point is almost more than I can understand. Note the almost, I can verbalize explanations, but they seem so uncomplimentary!

2. B adds this to the end of the paragraph: I call this trying to make bargains with God. From the book of Job, I learn that we are in a poor position to judge so easily how cosmic creating can be possible at all, let alone be such that our human ideas of rewards and punishments can be met. How well do our prison systems work?

3. In B (and nearly identical wording in D) the words in parentheses are. (or something like it, his father was a strict Calvinist)

4. In C the following is added: He names almost no scientists (Huxley being the only one I find), mentions evolution but dismisses it as hostile to freedom. In truth Huxley and even Darwin are not on the side of freedom though Darwin’s letters show how hard he tried to find a way to admit it. He did not know that his theory made no definite use of strict determinism. He did not know that Peirce, Willard Gibbs, and Clerk Maxwell were, at about that time, coming to the conviction that strict determinism was not necessary, even to classical physics. The time was not ripe for general recognition of this. The Bishop [Wilberforce] who opposed evolution would not have satisfied Lanier any more than Huxley did. Of course Lanier knew far too little of science to decide between evolution and no evolution in biology. In dealing with the arts . . .

5. C adds this to the end of the paragraph: Indeed the first vaccination for tuberculosis control took place in the 1880s, the decade in which the dear poet died.

6. B inserts this remark, the comment in parentheses is written in my hand: Indeed during much of my career I have used male words -- though never I think Father -- for God. (Wrong, I have found one case even of that.)

7. A and B have different variations after the parentheses. A reads: Even Emerson was, in some passages, a determinist -- "there is no chance, no anarchy, every god is sitting in his sphere." The B variant is: Deeply discomforting and to me, puzzling, is his total silence about the wickedness of slavery, even in his novel, where he might have discussed it. The nearest he comes to that is to exhibit Southern African Americans (in some of their ancestors, who knows how many?) as at worst harmless, and Northern African Americans as wanton marauders. (As Grant said about General Lee, how was it possible to be so enthusiastic about so bad a cause as maintaining and extending slavery?)

8. Hartshorne is referring to Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866). Shantsee and Wontsee are characters in Peacock’s novel, Crotchet Castle. See The Darkness and the Light 254.

9. B concludes the paragraph thus: If it was not unbearably wicked then it was dismally stupid, a horrifying example of human weakness.

10. A, B, C, and D read: 95 years ago.

11. I have followed the B manuscript by inserting "as practiced" and "clearly" in this sentence.

12. A and B conclude the paragraph differently A’s conclusion: He predicted the freedom, but not the discreteness. B ‘s conclusion: It was his worst mistake.

13. In the preceding four sentences I follow the Variants of A and B by inserting the words and phrases. "entirely," "definite," "(in diverse respects, to avoid formal contradiction)," and "so far as it was or is merely negative."

14. In this sentence I follow A by inserting the following: both permanence and novelty, a closed past and an open future.

15. A adds: He was misled by A. E. Taylor, who was closer to orthodox Christianity than Whitehead was.

16. B, C, and D agree with this version. A, however, says: I am now close to fifty years older than Thomas when he died.

17. A’s final lines of the paragraph: Long before Thomas was born the "medieval synthesis," Harry Wolfson’s phrase, was already set almost in concrete. I think, with Wolfson, that the basic error of classical theism was already there in Philo’s non-dual transcendence, his utterly negative view of God, with the (inconsistent) qualification that Philo did believe in human freedom. Thomas had a poor chance of considering classical theism on its merits. It was a mixture of second-rate Greek philosophy and second-rate biblical scholarship, going back via Philo and Augustine to Aristotle hut without his superb logic of modality or possibility. Shakespeare’s title, "comedy of errors" comes to me as all too fitting for this story. No wonder that poor Wolfson, whom I knew well, became a complete skeptic in religion.

18. 1 follow the A, B, and D manuscripts, where the qualification "scientifically and philosophically" is inserted

19. B concludes the paragraph with these lines: Those who came nearest to doing this were, I think, theists, but they were not widely noticed or appreciated for this achievement; one sect of Hindus founded by Sri Jiva Goswami, Plato in his mature dialogues, the Socinians, Gustav Fechner the German psychologist (for his time in some ways the best of all), and Whitehead (ditto). Peirce hesitatingly and inconclusively gave hints in the right direction, as did some of my teachers at Harvard, so that when I came to know Whitehead and his metaphysical writings I was ready to utilize the advances he had made in this tradition, with some of which he was not himself familiar. He was both more traditional than he knew and even more revolutionary than he or most of his contemporaries knew.

20. 1 follow At variation b’ inserting: Plato’s mind-body analogy for the God-Cosmos relation. Hartshorne added a paragraph in A, expanding on the reference: Plato’s mind-body analogy, accepted by a number of modern theists before I came to my view has not, so far as I know; been carefully criticized. Whitehead’s argument against it depends on the assumption that Plato was no wiser in his use of this analogy than Plotinus and the other neo-platoni5ts. Even Philo was closer to the central message of Jesus than those people were. Indeed so was the author of Job.

21. A and B have different variations inserted here. A says: I am not the only one who has proposed the principles, and none of the three seems to beg the question of theism. One of them was advocated by Morris Cohen, who impressed me as an atheist. The three "lines," row, column, diagonal intersect uniquely in a single one of the 16 options. B says the following, and from this point on it differs from all the others. I am probably not the first to propose any of the three principles, but the other proponents may not have seen their application to the theistic problem. One of the principles was advocated by Morris Cohen, who impressed me as an atheist. The three principles intersect in a single one, the all-positive one, of the sixteen or thirty-two options. This constitutes a really new theistic argument which I see as by far the strongest there is or is likely to be. Its conclusion is not just theism of some kind but a fairly definite kind of theism. By some criteria there are six kinds, by others nine.

22. For an explanation of the four times four diagram see editor’s introduction to this focus.

23. Both A and D add this: So, let it not be forgotten, was the great God-denier, Neitzsche. In both writers this was an intellectual mistake as well as a mistake of feeling.

24. D adds: With people like her one has the basic clue, with or without Jesus.

25. Creativity in American Philosophy 36-37.

26. Manuscript A ends here, but appends the manuscript with the four times four diagram.

27. Ali Dashti. In Search of Omar Khayyám.

28. C inserts this penultimate paragraph: So far, in dealing with Lanier’s religious views I have neglected his attitude toward death and our mortality. In Resurrection he does seem to imply that we can "pass the grave," mentioning Christ. On the other hand his vivid interest seems to be essentially in life in this world of people and nature that we know and love. He is definitely a poet of nature in the concrete along with Wordsworth and Shelley. I am inclined to think it possible he could have accepted the objective immortality of the past if he had read about it. I feel the same about my pious patents. Relevant here is Reinhold Niebuhr’s remark to me that he was not prepared to say a Christian could not accept this Whiteheadian doctrine as sufficient, adding, however, that he preferred to leave the matter as open mystery, without any pretense of having a definite theory.

Works Cited

Dashti, All. In Search of Omar Khayyám. Trans. L. P. Elwell-Sutton. Columbia UP, 1971.

Hartshorne, Charles. The Darkness and the Light. Albany: State U of New York P.1990.

Creativity in American Philosophy. Albany: State U of New York P, 1984.

Why should God have a world? Why not just enjoy the perfect divine existence alone, without any relation to imperfect or less than divine existents? What can the imperfect add to the perfect, or the finite to the infinite? From this paradox traditional theism tried in vain to free itself. It never could tell us why God should have a world. The difficulty is a typical example of how easy it is to use words that have good meanings in ordinary discourse in such a way that neither the ordinary, nor any extraordinary, meaning remains. Is Mozart perfect? Certainly not in the sense that nothing was left for Beethoven or Chopin to add. I will state dogmatically: no one has ever succeeded in making sense out of the idea of an aesthetic value so great that all possible beauty is already in it. The intensity of experience depends upon contrast as well as harmony, and to experience all possible contrasts as harmonized together is logically impossible. Not all values possible one by one are possible together. There are "incompossible" value possibilities. Traditional theology must deny to the allegedly absolute perfection of God the enjoyment of at least some of these possibilities.

The conclusion is that the infinity of God must be qualified somehow. God may actually enjoy all actual, but not all possible beauty, for beauty is inexhaustible by actualization. Further conclusion: there must be a divine form of becoming or of change. Whatever beauty God enjoys, God could enjoy additional beauty. It follows that God could only arbitrarily and absurdly renounce such possible values by resting eternally content with the beauty actually enjoyed. "There could be more, let there be more" is the only reasonable attitude. So God changes, of course in a divine, not a merely human way. Even Karl Barth (he told me so, and it’s in his writings) speaks of a "holy change" in God. So far Barth is a process theologian. Berdyaev (in his late writings) is more definite and emphatic on the point. Many others, some going back several centuries, could be named. Traditional theism is slowly dying, but a new theism is coming to be.

Granted that God must somehow change, one may still ask, why should God have a world. Why not simply an endless succession of divine imaginings of possible beauties without perceiving any of them as actualized? Answer: this assumes a concept of imagining entirely distinguishable from and independent of perceiving. Who can claim to have such a concept? I think it is merely verbal. Imagining is somehow parasitic on perceiving. Both require, in our experience, a body and depend in much the same way on a nervous system. To cut short an argument, I will affirm that all beauty depends upon relation of an experience to something other than that experience, and other than relation merely to the past experience of one and the same person or individual.

Trinitarians may say that the three persons of the Trinity can solve the problem. If they are right, then there is still no solution to the problem, why God has a world. Moreover, they are implying that the world is needless and that we do nothing for God by existing, but at most something for ourselves or other creatures. God is then either unrelated to us in value terms or related to us only as means to our ends. Pious as this view has seemed to many, for me it is blasphemous. Our finite forms of beauty must contribute to the divine enjoyment of beauty, or God lacks some values that we enjoy.

To ask "Why does God have a world?" is, I suggest, like asking, why teachers have pupils, statesmen citizens, composers musicians to play their compositions, painters canvasses to paint, friendly persons other persons or animal pets to enjoy; or why people want children as well as adults around them. All our enjoyments have some involvement with others as well as ourselves, and -- as we shall see -- many enjoyments relate us to creatures far below us in the hierarchy of natural kinds. Herein I see a clue to the nature of God.

Remember please that since we (unless perhaps we are mystics) cannot simply perceive God, we have to conceive the divine nature by analogy with things we do perceive. If we are concerned with God, it is because of God’s value to us, or our value to God, or both; we can interpret these relations only by comparison with value relations that we non-divine individuals enjoy with others. I hold that absolutely no value experiences are of single individuals simply enjoying themselves. Take for example physical pleasures: these relate us not simply to ourselves but to our bodies, which are vast societies of micro-individuals called cells, and these are societies of molecules. If all our value experience relates us to other individuals, why should we suppose that the idea of value retains any meaning apart from inter-individual relations? I see no ground for this supposition.

In Western thought there has been a strong tendency to take value to mean either moral value or else mere physical pleasure. But then art, enjoyment of sports, scientific inquiry, friendly conversation (itself an art) all seem to get left out. And what is life without them? The pervasive, universal values are not moral and are not mere pleasure, they are aesthetic in the sense of the intrinsic harmonies and intensities of experiencing. An infant has no moral sense but it is sensitive to the charms of novelty and contrast; after some months it begins to show a sense of humor, it can be bored and it can be interested. These are values but aesthetic not moral values. The lower animals are not demonstrably righteous or wicked, but they too can be bored or the opposite, they show signs of experiencing conflicts or harmonies of their feelings or impulses. I see no way to show that any single creature, sufficiently integrated to act as one is totally immune to aesthetic values, positive or negative. "What acts as one feels as one" is my doctrine, derived from Leibniz, and the criteria of value in feelings as such are aesthetic.

Please understand that, as Leibniz was the first to formulate clearly, many things that we ordinarily take as single objects do not act, hence do not feel, as one. A stone does not act as one, only its molecules do. Our perception of the stone as unmoving is our blurred sensory grasping of its collective molecular movements. Even a tree’s growth is shorthand for the self-multiplication of its cells. Animals with nervous systems are the only many-celled individuals we perceive that act integrally, and even they do not do so in deep sleep.

Aesthetic value is the most concrete value. Moral value is less concrete. To enjoy music by constantly asking about one’s duties is impossible. Moral discernment is never the whole of experience, but the aesthetic values of experiences are their entire intrinsic values, what makes them good simply in themselves. Moral values do add something to aesthetic values. A morally good will is a kind of harmony in experience, as ill-will is a kind of disharmony The "beauty of holiness," or of a noble deed, enriches much artistic experience, but always there are other values in such experience. The best definition of aesthetic value is that it is intrinsic value. Extrinsic value is simply the potentiality of further intrinsic value. The value of ethical goodness, or virtue, is that besides helping to make life in the present good in itself it will tend to make life in the future good in itself. Supposedly good people whose presences or actions make life ugly for themselves or others are dubious specimens of goodness.

If the concrete values are aesthetic, to define deity in terms of ethical goodness alone is to imply that divine goodness is a mere abstraction. And many signs show how abstract the traditional concept of divinity was. God, to be concrete, must enjoy aesthetic values, the intrinsic values of experiencing. And all our value experiences show, as I have argued, that no experience is simply of itself (not even in dreams) but is always experience of others’ experiences. Experience is universally social (recall that our bodies are cellular societies). It is a mistake to set aside this sociality of value in thinking about God.

The conclusion so far: God must have aesthetic experiences and these must involve enjoyment of non-divine as well as divine experiences. We enjoy our bodies as well as other animals, and still other creatures; by analogy God enjoys all creatures, none of which is comparable in value to God, as none of our cells is comparable to us. God has a world, the beauty of experiencing which contributes to the divine life. By creating and enjoying beautiful experiences in ourselves and others we enrich the divine experiences, which are aesthetic on the highest possible level. Divine experience is aesthetically surpassable only by itself. As Fechner said over a century ago, only God can surpass God, and God perpetually does so by enjoying new creatures -- not simply enjoying divine enjoyment of divine enjoyment in empty repetition.

The foregoing amounts to saying, as Plato in the late dialogues did say, that the world is the divine body, provided that the mind-body relation be understood as I have been presenting it. For a body is a society of lesser individuals than the mind or soul of that body; and every creature is a lesser individual in relation to God. Our bodily cells are only a tiny fraction of the subhuman individuals in existence; also each of us is but one of countless individuals on our own or perhaps higher levels (recall the billions of possibly inhabited planets that astronomers believe exist). Every creature is related to God somewhat as our cells are to us. Take any traditional objection to accepting the old Platonic analogy of God as the World Soul and it can be shown that the objection stands or falls with aspects of a tradition which philosophy has been moving away from since the middle ages -- for instance ideas of sheer infinity, sheer immutability, also what is usually meant by omnipotence.

This brings us to the question of God’s power. Those philosophers who regard metaphysics as nothing but the misuse of words show an unconscious bias in the selective way they apply this principle. They may object, for instance, to the proposition that God loves the creatures on the ground that it is a strange love which expresses itself by acting as God does, inflicting upon the loved ones numerous sufferings, the well-behaved ones being victims along with the wicked or unkind. In this objection it is assumed that whatever happens to us is deliberately determined by divine power, or at least is not prevented from happening by One who at least could determine worldly events to the last detail.

The reasoning seems to be: since we human beings show our power by influencing or partly determining how others behave, the ideal or divine power must be an ability to fully determine the behavior of others. That this is to misuse words appears when one considers that if X fully decides and determines what Y does, then Y decides or determines no aspect of its own behavior. Yet the start of the reasoning is that each of us, for instance, at-least-partly decides and determines his or her own behavior. Decision-making cannot be monopolized. Ordinary language shows the problem directly. For we say that we "make" decisions, and yet the theological proposition is supposed to be that God makes all things, therefore our decisions. Do you and God make exactly the same thing, your decision? I hold that this is meaningless. One of the two, you or God, does not make that decision, and if it is not you and this is generalized to apply to all creatures then the word decision has lost its application. Surely we do not discover what it is to decide by observing God in the process of deciding, and then apply the idea to ourselves. Is not the reverse procedure the basis of the human meaning of the word?

If decision-making, or making in general, could not be monopolized then omnipotence in the usual interpretation is a pseudo-idea. It does not attribute too much power to God, it merely talks nonsense.

If ideal or divine power is not power to determine all, what is it? It is power to ideally inspire and ideally influence or partly determine all decision-making by others. Ideally means unsurpassably well. You or I have power to non-ideally inspire and non-ideally influence, or partly determine, some others near us in space-time. We never have had any power to influence what happened before our coming to be, whereas God has always existed, cannot cease to exist, and always has been and will be ideally influential upon all. We are non-ideally influential and only upon some. Ideal influence is that which is fully compatible with the freedom of others to make their own decisions in such fashion that the risks of freedom are justified by the opportunities which freedom also involves.

All multiple freedom involves risks. X decides A, Y decides B, so far as both are successful what happens is A and B. And this combination neither has decided. Bring in God as Z, and we have ABC; this combination too no one has decided. It simply happens. And it may be inharmonious, unfortunate. There is no way to eliminate the element of chance and risk from decision-making. The failure to see this has resulted from overlooking the logic of decision-making which prevents its monopoly.

Another analogy is that of a playwright who also directs the play. But still the players determine the final details of the actual performances. No stage directions can do this. They are hints or outlines only. So are divine directives. Until or unless the creatures respond, God has only a blueprint of the architecture of a world, not a world; only a musical score, not an actual piece of music. If the blueprint were as beautiful, or as good, as a building God would not want a building; and the same with the musical score and the music.

So the world is not superfluous for God and we are not useless in the divine scheme of things. If this is not the meaning of our lives, please do not ask me to assign them a meaning. I know of no meaning other than this one. Supreme, divine freedom, directs the performance of countless forms of lesser freedom; the supreme agent with supreme appreciation enjoys the performance, including the varied experiences and satisfactions of the performers as they perform. If the latter are in the best sense religious they value themselves and others in principle in the same way, as fellow performers in the service of the supreme Director. This is how I interpret "Love God with all your mind, heart, and soul and your neighbor as yourself." It is a sublime vision, in principle not peculiar to me or to Whitehead or to Berdyaev but shared with many in many countries including India and Pakistan. Always only a minority have the vision with any clarity.

If asked why I am a theist, not an atheist, I reply I have about six reasons of which I have just given you two. Belief in God enables me to understand the value of human life and no form of atheism does so. This is one reason. Belief in God enables me to understand the orderliness of the world, and no form of atheism does so. The other four arguments are similar. The point is not that if I did not believe in God I would not believe in the value of life, and if I did not believe in God I would not believe that the world is orderly. To live at all is to affirm the value of living (even the act of suicide affirms the value of human action and of human life); similarly every animal acts as if the world were orderly. The question is only how to understand the value or the orderliness. If you tell me that life and the cosmos are too mysterious, too vast for a mere human animal to understand, I cannot absolutely prove you are wrong.

The six arguments for belief are stated in only one of my books, Creative Synthesis and Philosophical Method, chapter 14. This book has been reprinted by University Press of America, 1983.

Some of you may be thinking that my view of creaturely freedom contradicts the causal determinism that has dominated modern science for several centuries. Fortunately quantum physics has put this doctrine in doubt and some scientists and philosophers of science had already rejected it long before quantum physics, including the great Clerk Maxwell, and the great American philosopher who was also physicist, Charles Peirce. Peirce believed that every atom has some freedom and that an aspect of real chance is pervasive in nature. Unqualified determinism seems to be more and more on the defensive in our time. Like Peirce many authorities now believe that the order of nature is statistical or approximate, not strict and absolute with respect to the fine details. The laws of nature do not uniquely prescribe individual behavior. God then can determine the laws while the individuals determine the precise activities. Whitehead, another mathematician-physicist-philosopher, had a similar view Thus our theological scheme is no longer as seriously at odds with science or the philosophy of science as it was in the days of classical or Newtonian physics. Karl Popper, second to none among living (now, 1996, no longer) philosophers of science, defends indeterminism, as do Dirac and Wheeler, among the more creative of living scientists, including some biologists. Thus, theologians can no longer adopt a deterministic position on the ground that science requires it.

Unluckily just when scientists are opening their minds to a nondeterministic view of cosmic order many philosophers, here and in England, are still playing the old game (as old as ancient stoicism) of trying to reconcile human freedom with strict causal determination of all events. They say that to be free is simply to be able to act as one decides or chooses to act. It is assumed that it makes sense to suppose that how one decides or chooses can he precisely implied by the previous situation and natural laws. There is good ground for denying this assumption. Determinism means that what I was at birth was already determined, settled by what I was before birth and what the surrounding world was then. So it seems that the previous universe was the decider and nothing was left open or indeterminate requiring further determination. True, the actual process of my thinking was not yet in being at my birth, but its entire quality to the last iota was already a fact in the form of a going-to-be. If my decision was bad or unfortunate, then the antecedent universe that made it a going-to-be was also bad or unfortunate to the same extent. Is this what we really mean by deciding? Did I decide, or did the entire previous universe decide? Responsibility vanishes backward into the unknown beginning, or into an equally unknown infinite regress. William James, in his "Dilemma of Determinism," stressed this consideration.

If, on the other hand, we admit that causes do not fully determine effects, and that effects are in part self-decided, then the "I" that now decides was not fully determined by the previous "I" with its environment, and so on back to one’s first state of awareness. Thus, a person is truly to a certain extent self-created, and indirectly creative (but not fully determinative) of others. Any divine creation will be analogous on a superior level; God will be supremely self-created and creative, but not fully determinative, of the others, who will be lesser creators. This and only this is a theism that can give an intelligible account of itself. To influence another will mean to recreate or further create oneself in such a way as to influence (but not simply determine) the other’s partial self-creation, as the other is made aware of one’s own self-creation. Every conversation is an example. We keep making ourselves slightly differently, with new qualities not definitely settled by previous qualities; as others perceive our new qualities, they take them into account in their own deciding or self-making. As a student at Harvard, before I had met Whitehead or read Peirce, I wrote a paper called "The Self its own Maker." Possibly I had read Bergson on the subject.

Determinism may appeal to the allegedly self-evident principle of sufficient reason, that "for everything that is, there must be a reason why it is as it is." Consider then the events of the past. Yesterday was as it was because the day before was as it was. But why was the whole series as it was? Spinoza and Leibniz tried with great ingenuity to answer this question. Scarcely anyone that I know of finds their answers satisfactory. Are there any new and equally definite or clear answers? I know of none. So the appeal to the principle of sufficient reason is, to put it bluntly, a bluff. The principle is not self-evident, and for all we know is false.

Consider too that if the present follows causally from the past, it does so in terms of certain natural laws. Have we a reason why these laws "are as they are and not otherwise?" Some physicists have tried to find such a reason. Suppose they find it, will not the reason be itself in need of a further reason? Or will it be wholly self-explanatory and need no further reason? Spinoza and Leibniz argued that there must be such a self-justifying reason. But who stands up to be counted as agreeing with them?

We know if we know anything that abstract ideas do not imply the particular cases coming under them. Universals are neutral between various particulars exemplifying them. From the universal concept shape one cannot deduce any particular shaped thing rather than another. From the abstraction Leibniz appealed to, "best possible world," that is, three universals -- best, possible, and world -- one cannot derive this, or any other, particular world. Again, the principle of sufficient reason is not congruent with the most elementary logical truths, for instance that propositions may be such that one proposition, p, implies the other, q, but not conversely; or they may be mutually independent. If there were a self-justifying, that is necessary, reason for everything, there could be no independence, whether mutual or one-way. Independence means that X could be though Y were not, and this implies that there are at least some things that might not have been, that is, are without any necessary reason.

One can do three things with the idea of contingency. First, one can reject it altogether. Spinoza did this openly, and Leibniz covertly or with double talk. But who is ready to follow either of them in this? Second, one can say that, granted its past, any present is causally necessary, but the entire series of presents, whether finite or infinite, is contingent, has no sufficient reason. Or finally, one can say that, even granted its past, no present is wholly necessary. To any present its past is indeed closed, necessary, but to any present its future is in some degree open, contingent. This is the idea of piece-meal contingency and is the third possible doctrine. It is the admission of freedom in the creative sense. Determinism rejects this and is left with a choice between Spinozism (or the Leibnizian subterfuge) and a wholesale admission of contingency entirely beyond our experience, back at the beginning or back of the beginning, some act of God, endowed with supreme freedom (in a sense in which our freedom is not simply inferior but is zero), or some mere arbitrary, absolute chance, or finally an infinite regress for which nothing at all by way of reason is conceivable.

How carefully have those who claim the compatibility of determinism and freedom thought about these matters? I think they have largely ignored the ramifications of the problem and its history to an extent that suggests they are only playing at dealing with it. Twenty-five centuries have gone into this discussion; the basic possibilities are now known. Like so many pompous simplicities, the principle of sufficient reason is itself without good reason.

If you ask, "what then is causal explanation if it does not explain why things are as they are and not otherwise?" I answer: causes are necessary conditions. Without my parents and their world I could not have come to be. Necessary conditions are required to make an event possible, but possible is one thing, actual another. My parents and their world made me as I am now possible, but I (helped by countless others) made me as I now am actual. Necessary conditions are not sufficient conditions. Science explains possibility not actuality.

Why, you may wonder, did it take over two thousand years for science to come to see the element of exaggeration in the concept of sufficient condition? The answer is that for many purposes the exaggeration is insignificant quantitatively, and negligible practically. For example, given certain conditions there definitely will be an explosion the violence of which is approximately predictable, and this may be all that matters. What each molecule or atom may be doing in the explosion is not at all predictable but does not matter if one is using dynamite to quarry rock or destroy something. Water will freeze or boil at certain temperatures and again who cares what a particular molecule, atom, or particle does in these cases? Even before quantum physics it was clear to some that it was vain and useless to try to plot the paths of the micro-constituents of ordinary perceptible things. Peirce and the great physicist Maxwell guessed the statistical nature of cosmic order decades before Heisenberg declared it. Such things as atoms occur in huge numbers of closely similar cases, each individually insignificant, and only collective atomic patterns are important to such animals as we are. Moreover, on the atomic level there is no originality and responsiveness to leadership, comparable to the way one human being, Buddha, Jesus, Newton, can change the behavior of millions thereafter.

Astronomy and the physics of floating or falling bodies were the first sciences to approach exactitude. But they dealt with things that do not act as one and therefore do not feel or enjoy freedom as single agents. So the idea arose of nature as, in good part at least, devoid of freedom as well as of feeling. Then machines, more and more complicated and smoothly running, were invented and seemed to confirm the idea. But none of the facts known then or now contradicts the belief that the really integral natural agents are, to some slight extent at least, both free and sentient. Philosophy has, I think, adequately yet to digest the cellular, molecular, atomic, particle-wave (or "wavicle’) structure of nature at large. Leibniz almost got the point in the very time of the first microscopic perceptions of micro-organisms, but he could not free himself from the mechanical model and so, though he held that every individual at least feels, he did not attribute even the least creativity, originative power, to any individual other than God, who thus had no proper place in the system. The Leibnizian phrase "spiritual automaton" for his monads, or active individuals, tells the story. The phrase is nonsense or contradiction. Even the phrase "quantum mechanics" suggests cultural lag, for a quantum ensemble is not a mechanism in the traditional sense. Its members do not push or pull one another like levers, pulleys, or cogwheels. They repel or attract one another, more as sentient creatures do than as bits of infinitely hard stuff, the original Greek idea of matter. As Whitehead has said, one by one the traits that distinguish "matter" from mind have been dropped from science, until none are left. As a result sufficiently varied forms of mind or experience, some vastly different from human minds or experiences, could without contradiction be thought to relate themselves as molecules, atoms, or particles do to one another, and to our perceptions. That many scientists and philosophers still call themselves materialists is to be viewed, I suggest, as akin to Leibniz’s mistake. And those more recent thinkers who are most like Leibniz in comprehensive knowledge (Peirce and Whitehead being almost unique in this respect) reject any such jumble of notions as automatic yet spiritual realities.

If you wonder why I am so severe with the theological tradition, as well as with the classical scientific scheme, I reply: our terrible human difficulties in this century suggest that our religious and ethical traditions are inadequate to our formidable tasks in a fast changing and dangerous technological world. We are trying to honor ideals of freedom and love on the basis of a theology which only verbally took these two ideas as central in its thoughts about God and humanity. God was not clearly thought of as supreme originative freedom sympathetically cherishing the creatures who were lesser forms of originative freedom sympathizing with their fellows. "God" threatened people with hell and bribed them with promises of heaven. They were asked to "serve God" though such service added no value to the divine life. "God" judged our behavior but had no sympathy for our sufferings. I am not inventing all this. Read Anselm or Aquinas. Of course such a theology was bound in the long run to generate skepticism or outright denial.

On relatively ignorant minds the old theology may produce a different effect. Finding no convincing, easily comprehended philosophical or theological theory able to relate religion and science to each other, people may fall back upon the mere words of the Bible (or the Koran), read largely without scholarship. Biblical literalism is a powerful force today; it tends to imprison people in attitudes that were suitable enough when science and technology were little dreamt of but which fail to illuminate a society in which, for instance, it is desirable, because of the effects of modern hygiene on death rates, for women to bear, on the average, perhaps a third as many infants as were appropriate two or three thousand or even two hundred years ago, a society in which war might mean something like the end of the species, or at least vastly closer to that than any war of the past could be.

While strongly objecting to what has until recently been the dominant tradition in theology, I am the grateful heir of another tradition going back to Socinus, sometimes called "the first Unitarian." Faustus Socinus and his followers were the first to break, not only with trinitarianism and the worship of Jesus as literally divine but above all with the one-sided view of God as immutable and merely infinite, also with the tragic error of omnipotence in a sense contradictory of freedom in human beings. Socinus really believed in human freedom and argued that God cannot know our free decisions eternally, for they are not eternally there to be known. Only when and after we decide are there such things as our decisions. To the objection that this makes God ignorant of the future Socinus replied: not so, for until events are no longer future but present or past, there are no such events as definite items, but only as more or less probable, somewhat indefinite possibilities. To know the indefinite as that is not ignorance or error but genuine knowledge. God knows the past as it is, settled and definite, the future as it is, partly unsettled and indefinite. Two centuries later, Jules Lequier in France, knowing something about the Socinians, agreed with them. Addressing God, he declared: "Thou hast created me creator of myself." Thus anticipating Whitehead’s phrase, "the self-created creature." Lequier added, "The creature makes a spot in the absolute," that is to say, we change God, provide the divine experience with new content, thereby anticipating Whitehead’s "Consequent Nature" of God.

British Unitarianism has, so far as I know, completely overlooked this side of Socinianism, which the encyclopedias and histories fail to clearly state, and I have not found references to it in American Unitarianism or Universalism. This seems a tragedy. Channing did reject the interpretation of God’s power that deprives us of originative freedom. He did not identify God with sheer infinity and absolute independence (as scholasticism did) and was emphatic in his rejection of that aspect of the tradition. Whether or not he clearly admitted change in God I do not know. Emerson, on the other hand, was definitely (for a while at least) a theological determinist, as his Journal makes clear. Indeed Emersonianism is closer to Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinism than is generally realized.

The whole world was for centuries imprisoned in the greatest of intellectual superstitions, the doctrine of causality as an absolute all-determining pattern, fully definite either from the beginning or throughout a beginningless past. Philosophy, theology, and science have been struggling to escape from this prison for many decades now Quantum physics is merely one chapter in this struggle. Einstein tried to resist the change but it was not that side of Einstein which physicists in general have accepted.

I suggest that biographies of prominent writers of recent times will show over and over again how the idea of God as pre-empting creaturely decisions, with the resulting problem of evil, has been the flaw that has chiefly led to agnosticism or outright atheism. It was definitely a factor in Charles Darwin’s inability to accept Christianity. Indeed I argue in several writings that when Darwin spoke of "chance variations" he was more right than he knew and that something like evolution is what a sound theology requires. If creatures make themselves in some degree, then they also in some degree make their descendants and, under certain conditions, this would lead to new species. God is not the only maker in the scheme of things. The supreme or eminent creative power cannot be the sole creative power; "supreme" implies that there are also less than supreme powers. If a creature were at zero in attributes that in God are eminent (or unsurpassable), it would know nothing of those attributes. Thus the doctrine cannot even explain its own possibility of formulation. Is it not odd that the linguistic analysts have failed to point this out? It is a linguistic point.

In my opinion the truth of theism, properly formulated in terms of love and freedom as universal principles, appears from the radical deficiencies of its only rivals. If there is any proposition upon which great minds have agreed throughout history, from Plato to Einstein and Whitehead, from Zoroaster, Ikhnaton, Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, the authors of the Vedic hymns, Confucius, Lao Tse, to many recent Indian and Japanese writers, it is that human life is not adequately interpretable in merely human terms. Even Buddha is reported to have said, "there is an eternal being, unborn and undying. If it were not so we could not ourselves escape from life and death." (I interpret "life and death" here to refer to the impermanence spoken of above, also to the fragmentation of values as scattered about, a little in me, some in you, some in other higher animals, indeed as Buddhists assert some even in lower animals, all of these perishable.) I think we should not lightly put aside the testimony of the great innovators and discoverers, some of whom are named above. All the more since the form of theism most of them were acquainted with has been gradually transformed into a doctrine purified of defects brought out by millennia of critical examination and intellectual progress, including discoveries of the exact sciences. If Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Leibniz, Newton, Kant, found weak reasons for believing in God, better reasons are now available.

One last word: so long as there are idolatrous forms of theology, for instance those which practically worship a book written by human hands, we shall need aggressive atheists like Madalyn O’Hare to balance the account. Or, so long as there are those who identify God with some one-sided abstraction like infinity, absoluteness, or worst of all omnipotence (not even a self-consistent abstraction), we shall need the help both of more balanced theists and of nontheists to counteract these more subtle and intellectual forms of idolatry. Only the best versions of truth can drive out error, but contrary errors can keep each other from acquiring too much power.

My first course in psychology was at Harvard, about 1921, under L. T. Troland, whose magnificent [Principles] of Psychophysiology [1929-32] made it possible for me, in writing The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, 1934, to deal in considerable detail with the state of sensory psychology at that time. In my address to this society in 1965 1 defended a view of the ultimate philosophical bearings of psychology. In one important respect this view coincided with Troland’s. He called it psychical monism. By philosophers it is often called panpsychism. I prefer Troland’s term, but I also like to use a simple "psychicalism," parallel to physicalism or materialism.

I did not derive the view from Troland but had it before I went to Harvard or knew anything of Troland. However, he helped me to clarify it. I agree with him that there are three basic options concerning the relations of the physical and the psychical: dualism, which is the common sense view, and the one that has been prominent in philosophy throughout its history and, in more or less subtle forms, is still widely held; physicalism or materialism, to which scientists and philosophers now incline; and psychicalism. With Troland I agree that dualism is not satisfactory and that matter as natural science presents it is an abstract and, as he says, an "empty" concept. It treats as inessential in principle what philosophers call secondary qualities, such as colors or sounds (as directly intuited, not as mere wave lengths); or olfactory and gustatory qualities, or qualities of warm and cold, or pleasure and pain. Also qualities of value, sometimes called tertiary. What Troland saw and many, both scientists and philosophers, seem unable to see, is that what physics substitutes for these qualities is not some positive alternative on the same level of concreteness. On that level physics gives us nothing at all. Wave lengths and chemical formulae are descriptions in terms of spatio-temporal-causal shapes or structures; as experienced such shapes or structures are always filled in. Thus a blue circle is different experientially from a red circle, not merely in spatio-temporal terms but in qualitative ones. Physics simply omits these qualitative terms as such, rather than replacing them by others. What physics adds is a more adequate way of identifying structures so as to take time into account as well as space and to indicate causal relations between structures here and now and structures there or then.

On the most concrete level physics is an agnostic science. It does not pretend to know what concretizes mere spatio-temporal-causal structures to make them full actualities. It does not pretend to know even what distinguishes matter from mind, for it does not deal with mind as such, except when the physicist turns philosopher or psychologist. If psychologists are austerely behavioristic, then they too are agnostic in the same sense as physicists. Troland thought this a mistake. So did and do I. We are supported by the leading contemporary philosopher of science, Karl Popper. Most philosophers, past and present, would I think agree with us. If physicalism is not the answer, is dualism? Or is that a cop-out?

We do not scientifically know matter as concrete reality; if matter is only what physics characterizes. What fills out the abstractions of physics and chemistry, makes them more fully definite, are the so-called secondary and tertiary qualities. Troland saw that physics generalizes and renders more accurate and adequate our ideas of the spatio-temporal-causal structures of nature but is unable, for its purposes, to generalize and render more accurate and adequate our ideas of quality and value. In psychology we do confront quality or value as well as structure. For values are dynamic factors in behavior; witness Skinnerian principles of pleasure as positively and pain as negatively reinforcing. Troland’s view of motivation seems to me to anticipate Skinner’s.

The difficulty is this: the qualities directly given to us are, it seems, only qualities of human experiences, not of canine, whale, bird, or insect experiences. These seem hard or impossible to get at. In this is no evidence whatever so far as Troland or I could or can see, that there are not qualities or values in the animals referred to. Ignorance is not to be turned into negative knowledge of the things ignored. Either then we confess our total ignorance at this point or we try to conceive, at least in some limited respects, what it would be like to see as a bee, smell as a dog, or hear as a bird. If this procedure is to constitute knowledge, all the structural and behavioristic evidence must be carefully taken into account.

I tried to do this in my book on bird song called Born to Sing [1973] It turned out that in the process I discovered behavioral facts not previously noted in the literature and gave intelligible explanations of many behavioral facts hitherto left unexplained. Example, why do the many members of the parrot family of birds show in captivity outstanding capacity to imitate sounds, although no one had observed them imitating sounds in the wild? Arguing that it was poor biology to suppose no natural use for a capacity so well-developed and widely distributed in the family, I presented a theory as to what that natural use could be. Shortly thereafter a species of parrot was observed doing what my hypothesis called for. Parrots do imitate in the wild, but in a manner easily overlooked by casual human observers. So, here as so often, facts had been inadequately observed because theory was inadequately developed.

I also posited primitive aesthetic feeling in songbirds for their singing, and showed that well-known facts about singing behavior, and some facts I observed that were previously unobserved, were explicable by this hypothesis. So far this is the only explanation that has been offered. Here also a too austere behaviorism inhibited observation, rather than helped it. Troland’s basic idea is entirely in conformity with all this. He thought, as I did and do, that there were feelings, experiences in the most general sense, on all physical levels from atoms to single cells, and in the metazoan animals. As for multi-cellular plants I am not sure of his view, but mine is that without nervous systems the feelings are probably felt only by the cells, not by an entire tree, for instance. Troland was aware that any feelings on the simpler animal levels, and still more on subanimal levels, must be extremely different from ours. The analogy becomes remote in these cases. But then the spatio-temporal-causal structural or behavioral analogues that physics thinks of on these levels are also only remotely analogous to humanly perceptible shapes, motions or behaviors. What is meant in physics by space and time is difficult to grasp in application to particles or atoms.

The reason our ability to know feelings other than our own is far less than our ability to know spatio-temporal-causal structures other than our own is that the only way to know a quality definitely is to sense, intuit, or feel it oneself. And then, for all we know, it fails to give the qualities non-human animals sense or feel. Structures, in contrast, can be conceptually grasped without concretely intuiting them. They can, in a sense, be conceptually created by manipulating abstractions. Geometry and algebra show how this can be done. We define a circular curve by a mathematical formula. But how something feels is not definable conceptually in any such manner.

My philosophy significantly overlaps Troland’s, as he recognized on my doctoral exam. It also overlaps largely with the views of a great geneticist, Sewall Wright, the greatest scientist I have known well.

In philosophy, psychology, biology, and physics, psychicalism is the position of a minority. But I regard this as an elite minority and am not abashed by the majority on this point. For I fail to find careful reasoning on the majority side and there is much careful reasoning on my side, from Leibniz to Troland, Whitehead, Wright, and some others.

I cannot here and now go into the aspects of my philosophy that do not overlap but really conflict with Troland’s views. I mention only that he seems to have been a determinist in the strict sense, which I regard as a serious mistake, and that he has no rational way, in my opinion, of dealing with the essential religious questions, though he does discuss them, or with the sense in which the universe as a whole has psychical quality. But the double rejection of dualism and materialism seem common to us. We are both psychical monists in the same sense.

On one point I am not quite clear. Troland used to say that our human awareness or consciousness somehow arises from the psychical qualities of the brain cells. The cells, he said, have sciousness but we have consciousness. The full development of this in my or Whitehead’s system is that each cell (or some still smaller unit) feels in its own little way, and my or your feeling is my or your comprehensive feeling of their little, localized feelings. Feeling is thus essentially social, as Whitehead says, it is always feeling of feeling. It is in some degree sympathetic. Apparently Troland did not quite see this. What it means is that human feelings are not the only ones we directly experience. Subhuman cellular feelings are no less directly, though indistinctly, given or intuited. Indistinctly, because otherwise we should know all about the cellular structure of the brain by direct intuition. The cellular feelings are "human" only in the sense that they are confined to human nerve cells, but they are the feelings of single-celled creatures just the same. So ‘other mind’ than one’s own is no mere postulate (as Troland seems to hold) but is actually given. It is, however, a rather primitive level of mind that is given to each of us, additional to our own level. In my form of theism God intuits all feelings analogously to our feeling of cellular feelings, except that God feels the feelings distinctly and universally. I once knew a German Freudian psychiatrist who held that we are to God somewhat as our cells are to us.

Troland was scornful of philosophers for their inability to really solve problems. For him all theoretical problems were scientific ones. I do not agree with this and find his ethical views, for example, all too crude. But I do agree with him that, for an ultimate world-view, the key science is not physics but psychology. For only psychology can deal centrally with the inclusive form of reality, the concrete as such. A generalized comparative psychology, including ethology as study of the behavior, and in principle more than the behavior, of all natural individuals, including animals as high level cases, would embrace physics as a special case -- the study of the behavior of the lower levels of physical (in themselves psychical) systems, where the qualitative and value aspects of experience or feeling can for most purposes be neglected.

Between physics and psychology is biology, partly derivative from both but also contributory to both, by the way it explains the origins of modes of behavior and feeling in the evolutionary process whereby species survive, expand, and develop new branches, or offspring species. I claim that my theory of sensation is more truly biological than the accounts given in most text books on the subject, for it makes the sensory qualities adaptive in their very natures, as pain motivates us to avoid bodily injuries and pleasure to engage in wholesome or species promoting activities. Skinner’s idea of reinforcement seems anticipated in Troland’s hedonic principle.

With all his limitations in partly falling to understand relations of science and philosophy, I regret not only Troland’s premature death but also the fact that Volume III of his great lifework exits only in microfilm of a not fully polished version. This is obtainable from the Harvard library. My account of his psychicalism is mostly taken from that version, plus a few recollections of his lectures or conversation.

I do not know who in this country, since William James, has had a more interesting comprehensive philosophy than Troland of what he was doing as a psychologist, and also of what he was doing as a human being.

My book on sensation of nearly fifty years ago is one of the not very numerous interdisciplinary studies linking psychology and philosophy since William James. The psychology may not be as good as the philosophy and I can see some flaws in both aspects. But a few years ago a psychologist of some distinction said that the book was well ahead of its time on some problems.

That a psychiatrist should undertake so elaborate a biography is remarkable, that it should be so readable and insightful is fortunate indeed. At last we begin to see something like the full truth, so far as we humans can know it, about "the greatest biologist who ever was." We learn that this rightly famous person was as remarkable for his goodness as his genius. His relatives, hosts of acquaintances, offspring, in the end even his somewhat tyrannical father (I imagine), all admired him. His wife deeply loved him and cared for his needs with zeal and wisdom. One of the photographs of her suggests her strength of character.

The photos of Charles are helpful too, especially the one as a father with his four-year-old son; what a noble kindness in the parent’s face! This man was ideal parent as well as scientific discoverer. That his pious wife helped to edit his writings and did everything she could to help him shows he was a lovable husband.

A virtue of the book is the fairness to Alfred Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection. His unpretentiousness in never claiming anything like equality with Darwin was an example of honesty on a high level. Partly because of bad luck in the sinking of a ship containing Wallace’s collection of specimens, he produced nothing remotely like the immense mass of facts assembled by the primary founder of the new science of living things. (Yet Wallace was the founder of Zoogeography, dealing with the regional distribution of animals, a subject important to me since boyhood.) When, however, it comes to the question of the religious meaning of the discovery; the great Workaholic, as Bowlby once called Darwin, was not the best person to find the answer. Nor, I suspect, was Wallace, though I have not read him enough to be sure of this. He evidently did not share the other’s agnosticism, approaching though not quite reaching atheism.¹ (The Origin did end with a positive reference to the Creator.) Three of Wallace’s books came out after Darwin’s death. His book on The Theory of Natured Selection was in published 1871.

That even the greatest human discoverers have limitations is, unsurprisingly, true of these two and of their biographer. I use the word limitations rather than mistakes, for none of the biographer’s statements seems to me false.² What I miss in the book is awareness of some intellectual advances during the century or more between the end of Darwin’s career and the publication of this biography. I refer to new ideas in physics, chemistry, physiology, philosophy, theology, all of which are pertinent to the religious significance of Darwinism.³ What many seem not to understand is that the crux of the religious issue is not between fundamentalism -- which I recall no one whose intelligence I greatly admire defending -- and evolution, but between two kinds of theism and two kinds of evolutionism.

Modern science began, as did ancient Greek science, with the adoption of an ultra-simple and essentially negative notion of causality, the belief that, given the causal conditions, what concretely happens is the only thing that then and there could happen. Leibniz’s principle of Sufficient Reason means just that, and he was preceded by Democritus, followed by the Stoics, with their talk of universal necessity. For me, and I hope many others, the last word in Ancient Greece on this topic was given by Epicurus and his talk about a mixture of chance and necessity, and the bits of free "swerve" in the movements of atoms. He believed firmly in his own freedom and generalized this for creatures as such. Temporally between the significantly different atomic views of Democritus and Epicurus came Plato, in his mature and late dialogues asserting the "self-activity" of souls or minds, any and all of them, even the supreme or divine mind whose body, Plato says, is the cosmos, including all lesser bodies or minds. Modern knowledge has repeated this move from freedomless causation to freedom-permitting, indeed enhancing causation. The last great partisan of unfreedom was Einstein. I once heard him argue for this view before an audience of philosophers. He made it as clear as this view can he made that by freedom he meant only doing what one wishes to do, even though these wishes were determined by events taking place before one existed. I briefly expressed my disagreement with this. Einstein, before his death, I am told, somewhat relaxed his insistence on complete determinism, but never gave up his rejection of the Quantum idea. This I see simply as mistake. Discreteness is what makes our world intelligible. Actualizations of possibilities come in definite bits, only possibilities can be continuous. His not seeing this hampered Charles Peirce in his life-long and in some ways admirable attempt to achieve success in metaphysics, a success he predicted for our century. The idea of much postmodernism that metaphysics is a thing of the past is for me the opposite of the truth. So long as deterministic science dominated there could be no coherent metaphysics. Now there can be.

The famous "chance variations" of offspring showed Darwin himself paradoxically taking the anti-freedom interpretation. He said the variations are not really by chance, and he meant by this what Leibniz meant by causation as sufficient reason. Worse still, Hume and Kant both reiterated this unfreedom view of causality, as do many admirers or critics of each today. Insofar they are back with Democritus, not with Plato or Epicurus; they are not even with Aristotle as some scholars (though not Wolfson) interpret him. In the late 19^th century Clerk Maxwell rejected this ultra-simple, negative and not possibly justified view in physics and so did Willard Gibbs, the great Yale chemist; Peirce, himself a chemist (as well as several other kinds of empirical scientist, also mathematician, logician, and philosopher) radically repudiated determinism. He even seems to have been influenced by reading about Epicurus.

With Heisenberg’s uncertainty article, 1927 (I read it as it reached the Harvard Library, thanks to a young physicist friend I had), many physicists began to get the message. I also, in Chicago, talked to Heisenberg. Moreover, even without the quantum of Planck (whom I once heard lecture in Berlin) there were other indications against determinism. The cell theory of organisms was a change in principle, not merely in degree, compared to all ancient thought. Moreover there is a quantum involved, for electro-chemical exchanges among neurons are subject to an all-or-nothing law. Nature does make finite leaps. Then too, if three body interactions are mathematically difficult, what about interactions among millions or billions of neurons in higher animal brains. Unqualified determinism, mechanism has always been a bluff that only needed to be called to show its arbitrariness. Nature’s leaps may be small on the micro-level but, as Leibniz, in another aspect of his monadology said, there are an infinity of fractions between any one size or degree and zero. In this he was talking about mind, a zero of which he and I, also the ancient Buddhists and some Hindus, have denied. So-called identical twins are finitely different. I had a pair as brothers.

The unplausibility of theism without creaturely freedom⁴ and the absurdity of deity, or any actuality, as wholly timeless was apparent to Plato, who in late dialogues said that in God was "being and becoming" that God cares about the creatures, and is soul and therefore self-changing For him a changeless soul is a contradiction. He also said that being is power, to be is to influence others; obviously, though he failed to quite say this, it is also to be influenced by others. Without creaturely freedom God would be the murderer in all homicides and the torturer in all torturing. In no way can a coherent theism be formulated without taking the Platonic-Epicurean pro-freedom turn. Determinists grossly beg the question against theism; theologians who treat deity as the cosmic tyrant who timelessly decides the details of the temporal cosmos are not friends of religion at its best.⁵

One of these dubious deterministic friends of religion is a former student of mine named Huston Smith, a pleasant, likeable person, who enjoys his complex view, in which he finds places for a number of recent writers, though he knows how little some of us agree with it. My snide reaction to the scheme is to quote Mortimer Snerd, the sarcastic puppet of some time ago, "That’s the way it goes" (sometimes, in theorizing about religion).

A third gifted Englishman contemporary with Darwin and Wallace was Charles Kingsley, the clergyman and prolific author writing for children, also adults, in both cases about religion, philosophy, and science. He did what no one else at the time seems to have done, with brilliant insight he discussed the positive religious significance of evolutionism. He wrote Darwin twice, first to say, "I must consider this," second to say, "I accept it." He did much more: he said what Wallace ought to have said but, I gather, did not.⁶ Speaking for Pan, the Spirit of Nature (i.e. God), this other Charles wrote: "I tell the creatures they must [partly] make themselves." In the long run why should their doing this not make new species? This extraordinary and strangely underestimated writer made a further insightful remark. He pointed out that the theism which evolution should do away with could be called the "magical" phase in the development of theology, according to which God said (or shall we say thought?), Let there be light and there was light, let there be a man and there was Adam, etc. In short, God does everything, the creatures do nothing. Then finally the creatures begin to do things . . . or do they?⁷

Is it not about time some historian recognized the fact that in a few adroit asides Kingsley in principle raised the level of reflection about the mystery of creation? If we can significantly say "God creates" there must be something in our world that furnishes the meaning of create. Surely it cannot be what a watch-maker does making a watch. The Cartesian idea of an animal as just a machine insults not only you and me, it insults the merest fly or plant cell.⁸ It even insults Epicurus’ atoms. Unfortunately Kingsley’s learning probably did not include Plato’s suggestion, that to furnish an analogy for what God does for the world we should look to the bodily aspects of our own deeds, as when we decide to do something, say to utter a word or write a sentence. Our experience of willing to do this produces changes in our brains (to modernize the discussion) and these produce changes in our muscles, etc. Why do our neurons respond to our wishes or volitions? What is the relation of mind to matter when the matter is in our central nervous system? Also why do we suffer when some of our cells are injured? Plato gropingly wrote of the sympathy of parts of the body for one another. Why have so many sages said that love is the key? The simplest genuine form of love is sympathy; without that the rest is something else, lust for example. Or take Plato’s word: care. Why care about or believe in God? Because God ⁹ cares about us and all other active singulars, and cares in a more excellent manner than we can care about ourselves or anything; God preceded us and made us possible, and is the law-giver of the freedom-sustaining laws of nature. That evolution favors freedom was seen immediately by Peirce, who did not need Kingsley for this. Right away on receiving the information about natural selection as factor in the becoming of animal species Peirce said to Chauncey Wright that he’d have to give up his determinism; animal habits are not absolute regularities. The basic postmodernism is evolution; Kingsley and Peirce saw what many still refuse to see, that evolution favors a reasonable theism. It opens the door to Whitehead’s insight that creativity cannot be uniquely or solely divine; if it were how could the word have a human meaning? Rather creativity is, as Whitehead says, "the category of the ultimate," or what the Scholastics called a transcendental.

None of the reasons for theism work unless simple, or as I see it simpleminded determinism, is entirely false. I have yet to see a cogent argument for its truth. Rorty does not argue for his determinism, he simply declares it. As John Searle says, Rorty insinuates, he does not argue.¹⁰ I judge by arguments, not insinuations.

The simplicity of the love idea I see as profound. It is not negative, like timeless, mindless, absolute (extending freedom and contingency); it is a positive relation of one sentient subject to another. Even one’s past selves are not strictly the same subjects. Ordinary language and several philosophical and psychological traditions accept this. One can say, I love me, but not, I love I. This bit of grammar tells us that personal identity is far indeed from strict identity. Nor is the non-identity between you and me an absolute non-identity. We have a lot "in common."

When Peirce, a theist virtually all his life, and an evolutionist virtually all his adult life, was fourteen, he wrote, "Love is the foundation of everything desirable or good." At almost the same age I wrote in poetry a similar view about the supreme importance of love. These basic common beliefs, there were others about the falseness of materialism and mechanism, are part of the explanation of the fact that when I was given (I had not asked for it) the job of editing an edition of Peirce’s mostly unpublished philosophical papers, I immediately began to like what I found in them. All the better that I felt similarly about another task which I was given (again without asking), in the same year (1925-26) to help A. N. Whitehead grade papers, hence listen to him lecture, and read what he wrote as a philosopher, rather than just a logician, mathematician, and physicist. He took "sympathy" as basic in his concept of prehension, or what memory and perception have in common, the feeling by one subject of the feelings of other subjects, as theirs. Except for some hesitation in his early adult life, he too was a life-long theist. He took quantum theory seriously, and I saw to it that he knew about Heisenberg’s revolutionary essay (He had decided before that time not to try to keep up with physics after 1924 when he came to Harvard to teach philosophy for the first time in his life.) Of course he knew about Planck’s and Einstein’s contributions to physics.

The great little country of England produced Darwinism in the nineteenth century, and the great Churchill’s No to Hitler’s 1000 year kingdom in the present century, but notable intellectual creativity was, by the two world wars and the Holocaust, substantially, driven to the American side of the Atlantic.¹¹ Harvard, Johns Hopkins, or the University of Chicago, not Oxford or Cambridge, became the centers. The price for those two horrible wars and religious intolerances was naturally high. I visited a number of those to us Eastern yet Occidental countries in the twenties, also late forties. I have some knowledge of what went on there intellectually. Leadership in disciplined knowledge, not only in empirical science, also in philosophy and theology, is no permanent national possession. It skips about. In applied science Japan and several other countries are now formidable rivals to this country. I know some Christian Japanese that I feel theologically closer to than to most religious sects or most Roman Catholics in this country. Also a small branch of Hinduism (in Bengal) exalts love as sympathy above such empty abstractions as "the absolute," "the infinite," or "the eternal."

About a hundred years after the Origin the SCM Press published Metaphysical Beliefs: Three Essay, by the English philosophers S. Toulmin, R. W. Hepburn, and A. MacIntyre. In my opinion none of these writers are in the same class with Wallace, Darwin, or Kingsley. In the General Introduction to the series of which this book was one, R. Gregor Smith says that "neither the idealist nor the linguistic philosophy, neither the liberal nor the neo-Calvinist nor the neo-Thomist theology is able itself to speak properly to the needs of our time." Nothing is said in the book about Methodism, the most numerous American sect, non-fundamentalist and reasonably open to science, nothing about the Society of Friends, with similar characteristics, nothing much about the importance of liberal Anglican or Episcopal forms of religion, already open to Darwinism in Darwin’s time, and soon after that for at least three of my four grandparents. Also, if idealism means the doctrine that mind in various forms and manifestations is all we can possibly know, then I am one of many around the world who find no cogent argument against this. The Buddhists held and hold it, at least one sect of Hinduism ditto, Peirce, perhaps the greatest cognitive genius this country ever had, and the Anglo-American (as I call him), A. N. Whitehead held it, as did Haeberlin, a Swiss philosopher and my best psychology teacher at Harvard, Leonard Troland. Nor do I know any careful argument against it. Of course mind-only partisans do not mean by "mind" just human mind, or even only the mind of cells or atoms, but rather mentality; in all platonically "self active" singulars. For brevity I call them active singulars. Rivers or mountains are not such singulars, nor are rocks or other solids, or clouds, or liquids, but molecules, atoms, particles, are. I see a decline in English culture in this mid-century book compared to the great Darwinian phenomenon in the previous century.

After Darwin many would say that Sewall Wright, the American population geneticist, was the next at all comparably great biologist. He and his wife, I and my wife (before two illnesses reduced her to a helpless invalid) were close friends for more than fifty years. His last letter may have been one to her. My brother Richard, a famous geographer, and his family attended the same Unitarian church in Madison as Sewall, after he went there to live. So we kept in touch with him. Wright’s philosophy; and he definitely had one, was mind-only and he rejected unqualified determinism. We disagreed about God but I understood his difficulty in that subject. It was not something in his biology but only in relativity physics. It is perhaps the greatest difficulty in my theism. But physicists have yet to come to a definite decision about mind and matter. Mind and body, yes, mind and in some cases mindless matter, that is the problem.

Nothing in the above should be taken as retracting much from the view of Bowlby’s book as a superb example of the important science-art of biography. It is greatness dealing with greatness. The psychiatrist author shows that Darwin’s illness came mostly from the death of his mother when he was eight, but partly’ from his domineering, but too-Victorian father. But so did some of the money’ that made the biologist’s family life and his rather long career of continued work possible.¹² In half a century England gave the world great gifts.

The sad thing is that none of these people except the neglected Kingsley knew how to deal positively with the religious import of the new knowledge of nature. In the next century in England came the three critics of religious ideas who did not quite believe this or quite disbelieve that. A similar figure whom I knew rather well was John Wisdom, They were all pre-Kingsley, pre-Plato, pre-Socinian, with no suspicion of what I call neoclassical metaphysics. They mostly ignore Whitehead, the greatest metaphysician England ever produced -- with some help from another country. (For details see Victor Lowe’s three volumes about Whitehead.) Although still, I think, a British citizen, he had left England and gone to another country. The British, of course, like William James, try to be completely empirical; they also greatly trust specialization. Whitehead was mathematician, logician, and physicist, so what was he doing trying to be a philosopher?

The answer to this was given by my great Harvard advisor and friend, named after my maternal grandfather, James Haughton Woods. He read what Whitehead had written as physicist and said to himself and others, "This man should be teaching philosophy." Woods came from business people and was knowledgeable about money. He got the capital needed to guarantee that the elderly Englishman would be able to teach indefinitely past the ordinary retirement age, sent a cablegram which Whitehead read to his wife, adding "to teach philosophy, something I have always wanted to do." His wife told me that after the word philosophy she was about to say, "but you won’t do it," then, as she heard the rest, she saw that no such response could be considered ("I would have bitten my tongue out"). They were going to live in a country they had never seen. She was from Ireland. I consider Woods not only a very learned scholar but also the most important and wise departmental chairman I have known, and I’ve known many, and not thought poorly of any while they held that office. At Harvard the question had been, should we have Russell or Whitehead? I never heard -- and I was there during much of the time -- any regret about the choice they had made and I heard several of the faculty say the choice had been the right one. The human aspect of philosophy is more important and relevant than that of science. In neither is it insignificant. So far as I am aware I am the first to give Woods anything like his due in this matter.¹³

Whitehead, like Darwin, had the perfect luck of one ideal marriage, lasting until he died. Peirce had a mixture of good and not at all good in both his marriages. This is not the only reason why Whitehead’s set of ideas was better recorded by him and more in conformity with what is now taken as true in science, but it is one reason. On the other hand, Peirce was much more of an empirical experimentalist than Whitehead. A contrasting difference is that Peirce had a powerful mathematician as father who tutored him in that subject, helped him in other ways, but was almost brutally unkind at times and a possible cause of a psychosomatic illness in his son. His biographer, Joseph Brent, a professional historian whose philosophy I find congenial -- he is even knowledgeable about birds -- tells the story of the good and great, but also the very sad aspects of the career. A distinguished English mathematician, Sylvester, said of Charles Peirce, that he was a "much greater" mathematician than his father, Benjamin.¹⁴ The word "great" has not been used of Whitehead as mathematician, though his pupil Bertrand Russell said of him that as teacher of that sub₁ect he was "perfect."

Although Darwin is not normally termed a mathematician, in his writings one sees that his work is quantitative. He is aware that to know we must, as Fermi says, measure. And in the numerous cases in which exact measurements are not possible one must at least measure the degree of probable error, something that determinists tend to forget. Materialists who assign a total absence of mentality to much of nature egregiously commit the zero fallacy, as I call it. Peirce argued that, since zero magnitude is one of an infinity of possible magnitudes, all except one greater than zero but too small for us to definitely detect in nature, the improbability of the zero size being the exact truth is infinite. This applies to two properties found even in very’ small things, as I, with many others, would say freedom and mentality are, for instance in ants, also protozoa, and (with Plato) in all self-active beings.

Does not Peirce’s argument for the improbability of an exact zero of a property found in highly variable degrees, and in highly variable extents of space, hold against the exact truth of Euclidian geometry? So much for Kant’s argument on that subject. Similar arguments dispose of the exactly circular view of planetary orbits. Ultra-simplicity is an argument against rather than for a view about nature. Male-favoring views about genetic inheritance is another dismal example. Zero eggs were imputed to mothers, against rather than for what evidence there was on the subject.

The ultra-simple view of divine creation was the Dark Age to Reformation non-evolutionary one: God, the absolute power, does it all, we are God’s deeds -- puppets, only apparent doers. In current physics actual puppets have constituents the puppeteer cannot fully control. Besides, "doing" is a word with a definite human meaning. No wonder "humanists" reject theism, so-conceived.

Of course, if ultra-simplicity is a sign of theoretical error, ultra-complexity may also be such a sign. The supposed perfect circles, that is simplest conic sections, of planetary orbits, taken together, form a very complicated whole, painfully lacking in the apparent simplicity of any single circle. Anyway the logical possibilities are covered by the mathematics of conic sections and deviations there from, so sooner or later that is what one should come to. Before finding definitely expressible structures In nature we need to consider possible ones. Simply by looking at the sun one sees approximate roundness but what the sun is doing at night in relation to the earth has to be imagined.

Another example of dubious complexity is in primitive religious views, thus the gods and goddesses of India and ancient Greece. From all this, ancient Judaism largely escaped into monotheism, except for some angels and demons, especially the latter, as in Satan. Socrates seemed to accept polytheism, Plato struggled mightily to overcome it, but seemed never fully clear on the topic, even in the Laws, Book 10. The New Testament made much of angels and demons, and seemed to deify a human male person, and to give maleness to God. My only recollection of having a visual image of deity is as a great light, which I took to symbolize love; a "magnified, non-natural man in the sky" (Matthew Arnold), never, so far as 1 know, in my case.

Let us return to the great Charles and the not-to-be-forgotten Alfred, why’ was it two Englishmen who did what they’ did? I see three reasons. For a high probability of making their discovery one had to get out of England and even out of Europe. The farther from the equator one is the fewer the species of plants and animals one can observe in their habitats. Also it is on islands that the most striking evolutionary evidences are found (as in the Galapagos group), and incomparably the most numerous islands are in the tropics. A third reason is that it is not in the tropics where sciences, including biological ones, have flourished but in the North-Temperate Zone. It follows that the discoverers would need financial resources to go to the right far-off places, and these would be more likely’ to be available in an advanced country in which world-wide ventures were customary. The British empire uniquely furnished all these requirements. It furnished something additional: of all the forms of religion then known it was the official Anglican church that was the most open to basic revisions In its view of relations between God as creator and the cosmos of the creatures. With Catholics it was the popes and archbishops, also (until the good Pope John) Thomas Aquinas, that one had to face. With the Protestants it was, in most countries, Luther or Calvin, but England became Protestant by the action of Henry the Eighth, and who in the 19th Century knew or cared about his theological view? In the U.S.A. the Episcopalians, also the Quakers and Unitarians, were similarly free from Dark Age or Medieval beliefs. I personally benefited from all of these post-reformation influences, and never had to fight what is now called "creation science," which for me is mere verbiage so far as anything I ever believed is concerned.

Note too that the ancient Greeks were, like the English, sea-going people, aware of the wide world so far as was then possible. Even the Jews knew about whales, about Egypt and the Africans, as well as the Romans and perhaps a little about the Greeks.

Consider Darwin’s luck in getting his father’s permission, without which he said he would not go, for the voyage on the Beagle. At first Dr. Robert Darwin, the medical father, a domineering but generally kind person, said no, but as his son continued to protest, the Doctor said, if you can get the support of someone whose good sense I respect, I’ll agree. Then -- and how the world should thank him for this -- Uncle Josiah Wedgewood II said, Yes, let him go, and the matter was settled. That uncle is on my list of heroes. By chance he had to mediate a momentous dispute and his unambiguous choice was the right one. So England gave everything that was needed for the evolutionary cause.¹⁵

A final fact, this time about American history Why is it left for me to tell a neglected truth about Henry D. Thoreau? I forget how I learned it, but that young friend of R. Waldo Emerson became an evolutionist "immediately" when the Origin reached him. Moreover, he began right away to look for factual evidence to further support and particularize the new view. His premature death was a great loss. This is one more example of how we must partly do our own history of our special subject (or subjects) and not leave this entirely to professional historians. For their work we are all indebted, but we must supplement it with our own investigations or we will pa~’ a price for our neglect. Historians always overlook something and there is no guarantee it will be unimportant. From biology many examples could be given. For one, the territorial function of bird song had to be rediscovered several times before a final discoverer could get the attention of the busy world. The true history of this came to me via a housewife living a few blocks away from my home in Chicago. The lady was Mrs. M. M. Nice, she had lived in Germany for a time and knew the literature of ornithology in at least two languages. She was a highly competent scientist in one of my favorite subjects. By luck I knew her well. My pro-feminist attitude did not need her example; it was settled long before I came to Chicago or knew about her. Masculine stupidity’ on that subject is a deep mystery to me, as is masculine violence and preference for irrational ways of dealing with disagreements. Right now there are hideous examples of it in Bosnia. Alas, what a species is ours.

However, we men sometimes do right things.

I add a less gloomy touch. Mr. Nice was exactly that, a good and I presume competent school teacher of physiology. (if I recollect correctly); he was helpful to his wife in her specialty; not in the least upset, it seemed, by her being the famous member of the family. There are of course such men, an elite minority.

I hope the readers have not forgotten Emily Darwin’s loyal and clearly capable assistance to her husband in the writing of his books. This is one of doubtless many cases of famous writers (and their readers) benefiting from editorial wives. My wife from the outset began to grasp my beliefs and my style at its best and in detail showed me where and how and why it was not at its best. As a successful professional editor she knew (and only a few professionals do not know) better than to try to change the style of an already good writer into someone else’s style, for example, the editor’s, or to make it accord with a rule open to occasional reasonable exceptions. For an example, take Winston Churchill’s "This is an (editorial) interference up with which I will not put."

Notes

1. Two manuscripts add: [Darwin] was sometimes afraid, perhaps not wholly wrongly; that his co-discoverer did not go all the way in accepting our human place in the new scheme. He may perhaps have wanted to retain some idea of future human careers in heaven. This needs to be looked into. Three of his books . . .

2. Three manuscripts add: His explanation of the psychosomatic illnesses of the biologist is convincing.

3. One manuscript adds: We are told little about this in the book. Wallace, of course, was on the side of theism, Emma’s position is left somewhat unclear.

4. Three manuscripts read: the ugliness of theism without creaturely freedom . . .

5. In place of "are not friends of religion at its best" two manuscripts read: enemies of religion at its best. One manuscript reads: among the worst enemies of religion at its best.

6. In place of the sentence, "He did much more, he said what Wallace ought to have said but, I gather, did not" one manuscript has: He went well beyond mere acceptance; he said what CD[arwin], had he been even greater than he was, might have in effect said.

7. One manuscript closes here with the following paragraph: Is it not about time some historian recognizes the fact that England produced a third person who did what was not done by Darwin, Wallace, or Huxley; by moving the issue about divine creation beyond the sterility of ultra-simple causal determinism[?] The laws of nature are valid but they’ are not deterministic, they allow for freedom, and so for conflicts and frustrations that are not specifically providential (divine punishments, educational devices, or. . .) but are simply examples of creatures partly making themselves and one another, under the general guidance which insures that symbiosis and mutual helpfulness are as real as self-assertion and predation. My formula is, the risks of harm from freedom are justified by the opportunities for good. With high levels of freedom great harms are possible, with also great benefits. Our species is clearly the best and the worst in its possibilities. We cannot, it seems destroy our solar system but we can this planet and its surface as livable for high animal life; however, the galaxy and the island universes are remarkably safe from our interference. I suspect this separateness of the solar systems and their probable planets is providential. Only God not such as we are can appreciate anything remotely like the wealth of concrete life there presumably is in the vastness that surrounds us. Well did Kant, in one of his best utterances, declare his awe for the starry’ skies, together with the ethical principles by which we, and any other comparably thoughtful animals, should live.

8. One manuscript reads: The Cartesian idea of an animal as just a machine insults not only the elephants and whales, it insults the merest fly or plant cell.

9. One manuscripts inserts a parenthetical comment (or the Gods -- for, like so many of the non-Jewish ancients, Plato had trouble eliminating polytheism).

10. One manuscript includes the following sentence at this point: That is why I take him as fashionable rather than impressive.

11. One manuscript includes the following two sentences at this point: Especially after WWII, or shortly before it, many capable scientists and philosophers left Germany or other European countries, many coming to the U.S.A., or to Canada, Latin America, or Australasia. Some of those who came to the last ended up in my country.

12. Two manuscripts include the following: The small country of England gave the world some great gifts in two or three decades, beginning in 1959 [l859?]. In our present century Julian Huxley, and English mathematician, Fisher, and J. B. S. Haldane (who went to live in South India), with Wright, found needed mathematics for evolutionism, but did nothing much to clarify its religious significance.

13. Two manuscripts introduce the following paragraph as follows: A tragic aspect of the life of Woods occurred before I knew him well; his first marriage was a dismal failure ending in her suicide by jumping off a boat in the Atlantic. He had married an emotionally unstable person hoping to stabilize her. His second marriage, to a mature philosophical lady he came to know in one of his classes, was as happy as the other was miserable. They were a joy to see. Two other cases of this kind were R. M. Hutchins and T. S. Eliot. There were no suicides in the other two cases, but otherwise they were undoubtedly two more examples of unhappy failures followed by happy marital successes.

14. Two manuscripts give a lengthier ending to the paragraph: This has not been said about Whitehead. So on some issues and in two ways, he enables me, not very advanced in mathematics, though in some ways an empirical scientist, to see mistakes in Whitehead. My marriage finally became tragic because of two illnesses of Dorothy’s but this happened only after I had had superlative help for some 55 years. One of my many agreements with Sir Karl Popper is with his statement that worldly fame or success is mostly a matter of luck. Those who deny this are probably much luckier than they know. The first and very important piece of luck, good or bad, is in one’s parents or first caretakers and appreciators. Mine were close to ideal. So were most of my cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, only one of whom I failed to encounter, the paternal grandmother. I went to no mediocre schools or colleges. I just about had to make some discoveries. My medical help has been nearly perfect. My parents lived healthily and used the best medical help they could get. At ninety-six I think and read almost as vigorously as ever though for some years now I have taught no classes and given few talks at meetings. Some of my best discoveries in their best presentations are not in any of my published books. This I hope will soon change.

15. One manuscript has this variation: Then, and how the world should thank him for this, uncle, who believed in evolution in a pre-Darwinian sense, said emphatically, Yes, let him go. That uncle is on my list of heroes. Note too that in the long run the father was helpful financially. England gave all that was needed in that cause.