RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
studying the belief in immortality, the problem of evil, the ways of genius, I
was again and again led from “straight philosophy” into religion, into history
and literature, psychology and other sciences. Real problems pay no attention to
departmental fences; they go their ways, and in following their various courses
one may learn the importance of integrative thinking.
Our philosophy should not be the philosophy of a school. It must not be dic-
tated by conformity to any preconceived formula, but must itself be the integra-
tion of various evidence and inference that leads to the confirmation or to the
revision of traditional and provisional formulae. For this is always the advan-
tage of sound philosophical interpretation, that in its critical integrating outlook
many special ideas reveal significant aspects or inferences which they do not
manifest when regarded solely in their special provinces. Ideas become more
cultivated; their meaning expands and mellows when they enter into the stimu-
lating society of more thorough and balanced reflection?
But what ideas, specifically, had “become more cultivated” in his ex-
perieπce? Again, he has said it himself:
The view of the World as Drama is the most characteristic outlook on the
Reality of Values. Here man’s intelligence—reason and feeling and spiritual
vision—contemplates its own creative activity up to the verge and summit of
genius. Corresponding to the factual interplay of causes and urges and reasons
and purposes across the vast span of cosmic perspectives which we have been
endeavoring to understand, the dramatic outlook reveals the strains in the life
of spiritual aspiration, the counterplay of ideals in the pursuit of perfection
and in the struggle with evil.
The perspective of the world as process at this distinctively spiritual level
manifests a dynamic of values. The world as drama is a gradation of higher and
lower satisfactions and purposes and ideals. Value is never simply there, to be
described or explained. It enters the stage of possible realization as a challenge
and an aspiration, or as a menace or an insidious lure. The entire realm of
values is one of striving or relapse, achievement or frustration, perfection or
degradation. For here on the highest reaches of reality, man is ever resisting
the drags of his lower nature or yielding to them. In social activities progress
appears dubious when so often man's reason itself is bedeviled to serve lower
impulses, to make him “beastlier than any beast,” in the words of Goethe’s
Mephistopheles. Artistic creation is so often checked or misdirected by con-
fusion or vulgarity. The moral life is itself a dramatic contest of values and
purposes, arduous in the struggle between aspiration and appetite, baffling in
the tragic choice between counter-evils. These are gray and grim aspects of the
spiritual life, and religion has expressed them in its emphasis on man’s sinful-
ness and his utter need of redemption. The religious gospel of salvation is a
gospel of hope, hope to contrite man. The parable of the Prodigal Son evi-
dences this dual conviction. The prodigal son is the son of his Father—but a
prodigal son.
Have we presented the dramatic perspective of the world of values in a dour
pessimistic regard? It has also its vistas of more positive and sublime achieve-
ment. In our other views of the world—as cosmic mechanism, or evolution or
history—we have been considering the varieties and the complexity and the
limits of available knowledge. Now we contemplate man’s paths towards
wisdom, so frequently uncertain, unmarked and untrodden, so limitless in their
forward reach, onward and upward. Here man's creative spirit surpasses itself,