§3. Vitally Important Truths
670. It would be useless to enumerate the other sciences, since it would only be to reiterate the same declaration. As long as they are not looked at as practical, and so degraded to pot-boiling arts — as our modern writers degrade the philosophy of religion, in claiming that it is practical — for what difference does it make whether the pot to be boiled is today's or the hereafter's? They are all such that it would be far too little to say that they are valuable to us. Rather let our hearts murmur »blessed are we« if the immolation of our being can weld together the smallest part of the great cosmos of ideas to which the sciences belong.
671. Even if a science be useful — like engineering or surgery — yet if it is useful only in an insignificant degree as those sciences are, it still has a divine spark in which its petty practicality must be forgotten and forgiven. But as soon as a proposition becomes vitally important — then in the first place, it is sunk to the condition of a mere utensil; and in the second place, it ceases altogether to be scientific, because concerning matters of vital importance reasoning is at once an impertinence toward its subject matter and a treason against itself.
672. Were I willing to make a single exception to the principle I thus enunciate, and to admit that there was one study which was at once scientific and yet vitally important, I should make that exception in favor of logic; for the reason that if we fall into the error of believing that vitally important questions are to be decided by reasoning, the only hope of salvation lies in formal logic, which demonstrates in the clearest manner that reasoning itself testifies to its own ultimate subordination to sentiment. It is like a Pope who should declare ex cathedra and call upon all the faithful to implicitly believe on pain of damnation by the power of the keys that he was not the supreme authority.
673. Among vitally important truths there is one which I verily believe — and which men of infinitely deeper insight than mine have believed — to be solely supremely important. It is that vitally important facts are of all truths the veriest trifles. For the only vitally important matter is my concern, business, and duty — or yours. Now you and I — what are we? Mere cells of the social organism. Our deepest sentiment pronounces the verdict of our own insignificance. Psychological analysis shows that there is nothing which distinguishes my personal identity except my faults and my limitations — or if you please, my blind will, which it is my highest endeavor to annihilate. Not in the contemplation of »topics of vital importance« but in those universal things with which philosophy deals, the factors of the universe, is man to find his highest occupation. To pursue »topics of vital importance« as the first and best can lead only to one or other of two terminations — either on the one hand what is called, I hope not justly, Americanism, the worship of business, the life in which the fertilizing stream of genial sentiment dries up or shrinks to a rill of comic tit-bits, or else on the other hand, to monasticism, sleepwalking in this world with no eye nor heart except for the other. Take for the lantern of your footsteps the cold light of reason and regard your business, your duty, as the highest thing, and you can only rest in one of those goals or the other. But suppose you embrace, on the contrary, a conservative sentimentalism, modestly rate your own reasoning powers at the very mediocre price they would fetch if put up at auction, and then what do you come to? Why, then, the very first command that is laid upon you, your quite highest business and duty, becomes, as everybody knows, to recognize a higher business than your business, not merely an avocation after the daily task of your vocation is performed, but a generalized conception of duty which completes your personality by melting it into the neighboring parts of the universal cosmos. If this sounds unintelligible, just take for comparison the first good mother of a family that meets your eye, and ask whether she is not a sentimentalist, whether you would wish her to be otherwise, and lastly whether you can find a better formula in which to outline the universal features of her portrait than that I have just given. I dare say you can improve upon that; but you will find one element of it is correct — especially if your understanding is aided by the logic of relatives — and that is that the supreme commandment of the Buddhisto-christian religion is, to generalize, to complete the whole system even until continuity results and the distinct individuals weld together. Thus it is, that while reasoning and the science of reasoning strenuously proclaim the subordination of reasoning to sentiment, the very supreme commandment of sentiment is that man should generalize, or what the logic of relatives shows to be the same thing, should become welded into the universal continuum, which is what true reasoning consists in. But this does not reinstate reasoning, for this generalization should come about, not merely in man's cognitions, which are but the superficial film of his being, but objectively in the deepest emotional springs of his life. In fulfilling this command, man prepares himself for transmutation into a new form of life, the joyful Nirvana in which the discontinuities of his will shall have all but disappeared.
674. Do you know what it was that was at the root of the barbarism of the Plantagenet period and paralyzed the awakening of science from the days of Roger Bacon to those of Francis Bacon? We plainly trace it in the history, the writings, the monuments, of that age. It was the exaggerated interest men took in matters of vital importance.
675. Do you know what it is in Christianity that when recognized makes our religion an agent of reform and progress? It is its marking duty at its proper finite figure. Not that it diminishes in any degree its vital importance, but that behind the outline of that huge mountain it enables us to descry a silvery peak rising into the calm air of eternity.
676. The generalization of sentiment can take place on different sides. Poetry is one sort of generalization of sentiment, and in so far is the regenerative metamorphosis of sentiment. But poetry remains on one side ungeneralized, and to that is due its emptiness. The complete generalization, the complete regeneration of sentiment is religion, which is poetry, but poetry completed.
677. That is about what I had to say to you about topics of vital importance. To sum it up, all sensible talk about vitally important topics must be commonplace, all reasoning about them unsound, and all study of them narrow and sordid.
