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)
