Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Ralph V. Chamberlin on some insights of the Philosophy of W.H. Chamberlin (1870-1921)

 

 

 

VITAL ACTIVITY PRIMARY TO BOTHER COGNITION AND FEELING

 

W.H. Chamberlin makes both cognition and feeling subordinate to the activity exhibited fundamentally in interest and striving. Intellect and feeling both function in furthering growth, and they are in their particular form and results good or bad, according to the degree in which they support that growth. The purely intellectual process, as one of selection and analysis, tends to be abstract and to move away from the dynamic core of things. Feeling accompanies intellection and decides the value of an idea or tendency, and therefore whether it will be will not be taken up on the growing process. Feeling thus cements the discrete particulars secured by intellectual analysis. Feeling forms a sort of matrix. Alone it yields little; but when deeply informed with knowledge, with all the hard-won results of our scientific analysis, it makes possible a synthetic view, and an edifice such as philosophy aims to construct. In scientific analysis the effort is made to exclude feeling; but in any philosophic synthesis it must operate freely.

 

As the cognitive process tends to the abstract, feeling keeps up nearer to reality. Hence, unless the whole meaning and motivation of philosophy is to be changed, the philosopher cannot ignore feeling; for a basic urge is his longing to get a reflective view of reality, to win “the pleasure of conversing with real being.” Science in its movement to the abstract, results in a rigid, inert, austere structure, not of itself congenial to man; but when feeling suffuses and energizes it, it may become hospitable to the human spirit, because it is brought back to a close connection with reality. This was probably back of Emerson’s thought when he said: “The earlier generations saw God face to face: we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to Nature?”

 

W.H. Chamberlin believed that we may enjoy an original relation to Nature and God. He knew that feeling accompanies and affects all thought; but he knew also that deepening knowledge and understanding deepens feeling. The two things are coordinate aspects of the dynamic mental process. He believed, however, that feeling takes us more nearly to the heart of things. At the same time, the vision of these things in totality comes from feeling or intuition. No matter how prolonged his study upon a problem, a man has still to “put himself at the heart of his subject by a supreme act of concentrated sympathy and imagination.” W.H. Chamberlin believed that advancement in knowledge has come mainly from “flashes of insight” in great men; and the personal accounts of some of these men of the ways in which their new conceptions and discoveries were first grasped, tend to confirm this. Not only advances in science, but all great philosophical systems appear to have sprung out of intuition, to which effort was later made to give reasoned intellectual support. The vision of things as wholes is felt, rather than perceived. Intuitution is not here taken to designate a short-cut process of cognition; it is immediate acquaintance with the fact, an awareness that we are knowing, a direct contact with reality not mediated by the intellect.

 

INTUITIONAL INSIGHT AND DIVINE GUIDANCE

 

W.H. Chamberlin believed that the finer feelings carry with them a potential light which, if properly guarded and cultivated, throws ahead a beam to guide us. Insight always precedes proof. He felt, as have many others, that in exalted moods he had known such a light. Upon such feelings men have based decisions to which they traced a lifetime of right action and happiness. Men who believe that can enter, even if they cannot explore, a realm beyond science and logic, are mystics, in the good sense of the word. W.H. Chamberlin held that men in such exalted mods are influenced by the super-human spirit, or God, immanent in them. This follows naturally because, as he says,

 

“Being in interaction with man’s interests, and in the main an automatic and energetic support to these interests, God can, by giving attention to the elements of His life upon which man depends, vary these elements, now become interests, and consciously affect the lives of men. The habits in His life which sustain the interests of men can be reinforced or weakened; corresponding to this is the vitalizing or depressing of the correlated dependent interests of men. In such a case, the man whose interest is thus supported or depressed is aware of a power sustaining or weakening his interest which he may recognize as not his own. In case of a specific response to his need, like that here seen to be possible, God communicates with the man so affected as much as one man can communicate with another, for in all communication of men, one by using habits or producing sounds merely energizes or weakens the interests of another.”

 

He writes also:

 

“If such efforts are being engaged in, then in the lives of man persons there should be evidence of them, for such efforts must be manifest in the conscious life of the one to whose choice an appeal is to be made. Such evidence is not wanting. In serious moral situations, struggles and successes, there are many who assert they have felt a thrill of approval strongly contrasting with the usual feeling of value, and so unique and potent as to be capable of being thought of as in the warmest relation to God. And when many have been in such situations there has often been a mystic burning in them encouraging them to accept a suggested thought or course of conduct as true or right. Especially in striving to live in harmony and in cooperation with God, many have felt these sweet influences suffusing their attitudes. They contrast with the usual feelings of value, and their purifying, generous and exalting tendency has been such that they have seemed like a light in the surrounding darkness, or as a purifying fire.”

 

W.H. Chamberlin holds, with Plato, that virtue cannot be taught precisely as a science, but comes rather as an inspiration; that “the greatest goods are produced in us by a mania, and are assigned to us by a divine gift.” This is a complex world which no one approach has revealed completely. We should be slow to dogmatize as to the possibilities of roads other than how our own habitual ones. This universe has not been fathomed. (Ralph V. Chamberlin, The Philosophy of W.H. Chamberlin [Salt Lake City: The Deseret News Press, 1925], 339-43)