Catalyst for Controversy: Paul Carus of Open Court

CATALYST for CONTROVERSY

Paul Carus of

OPEN COURT H

A R O L D

H

E N D E R S O N

CATALYST FOR C()NTROVERSY

CATALYST FOR CONTROVERSY

Paul Carus of

OPEN COURT

Harold flenderson

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale

Copyright © 1993 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University Paperback edition 2009 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09

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Designed by Kyle Lake Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henderson, Harold, 1948– Catalyst for controversy : Paul Carus of Open Court / Harold Henderson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index 1. Carus, Paul, 1852–1919. 2. Open Court Publishing Company— History. 3. Religious literature—publication and distribution— United States—History. 4. Publishers and publishing—Illinois— La Salle—History. 5. Publishers and publishing—United States— Biography. 6. Periodicals, Publishing of—United States—History. 7. Philosophers—United States—Biography. 8. United States— Intellectual life. I. Title. Z473.C25H45 1993 381'.45002'0973—dc20

92-17303

ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-1797-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

CIP

ISBN-10: 0-8093-1797-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2904-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8093-2904-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) Frontispiece: Paul Carus holding a copy of Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, published by the Open Court Publishing Company in 1898. (Courtesy Open Court Publishing Company archives, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. '

Contents

Illustrations Acknowledgments

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

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vi vii

Introduction Paul Carus's Early Life The Philosophy of Monism and Meliorism Open Court's First Year The Religion of Science The World's Parliament of Religions Looking Toward the East Mach Peirce Cams's Later Philosophy The Great War Epilogue

4 12 21 45 64 89 118 125 142 153 165

Notes References Index

175 185 199

I

Illustrations

Following page 80 Paul and Mary Hegeler Carus at the time of their marriage in 1888 Edward Carl HegelCl~ who founded The Open Court journal and the publishing company of the same name The Edward C. Hegeler house in La Salle, Illinois The premier issue of The Open Court, 17 February 1887 The premier issue of The Monist, October 1890 One of the sessions of the World's Parliament of Religions, 1893 D. T. Suzuki, prominent scholar of Zen Buddhism Ernst Mach, Austrian physicist, psychologist, and philosopher Charles S. Peirce, founder of the American school of pragmatism Paul Carns with his youngest son, Alwin Clemens Carns A selection of Open Court titles Galley proof of a note by Paul Carns, as amended by C. S. Peirce

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Bob Roth and Mike Lenehan at the Chicago Reader, for giving me the freedom to pursue this project; Ralph McCoy and Terrence Tannel~ for wise advice at the outset; David Koch, Sheila Ryan, and the staff at Morris Library Special Collections, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, for cheerfully making the mammoth Open Court archives understandable and accessible; the staff at the Peirce Edition Project in Indianapolis and at Chicago's Newberry Library, for their help; Seth Carus, for reconnoitering in the National Archives; Lewis Hahn, Richard Seager, David Loy, Sandy Henderson, Richard DeBacher, Henry FullenwidCl; and Andre Carus, for critically reading various chapters; Alwin and Elisabeth Cams, for sharing their memories; Arno Reidies, for transliteration, translation, and interest above and beyond the call of duty; and Blouke Cams, for the conception, the financing, the advice, and especially the freedom to use my own judgment in research and writing. For that reason, any mistakes the reader finds herein are also my own.

CA'TALYST FOR CONTROVERSY

Introduction

Between 1880 and 1920 Paul Carus wrote 74 books and nearly 1,500 articles on philosophy, religion, history, literature, politics, poetry, mathematics, and more (McCoy 1987, 76-111, 364-66; Sheridan 1957, 164-228).1 He oversaw the publication of 113 issues of The Monist and 732 issues of The Open Court. He counseled thousands of correspondents, from the great to the obscure, in tens of thousands afletters. In person he was" a magnetic presence" (Judson 1894) -outspoken, extroverted, and knowledgeable. "In the course of one morning at LaSalle," writes the poet and English professor William Ellery Leonard, he piloted me through his fathel'-in-Iaw's fuming zinc factolY, traversed Kant, Alfred the Great, Empedocles, and Gummere's ballad.theories on the way to the composing rooms, and then with whimsical mirth analyzed the character of a huge printer in his establishment who got drunk and wanted to divorce a wizened wife for cruel and abusive treatment. All was grist to his mill. ... . . . Professor Otto here at Wisconsin tells me of picking him up by chance in the corridor (the Carus boys were at our college) five minutes before the hour and getting him to talk to his students on Kant-in a luminous and well-ordered exposition without notes or other hitches. But most teachers, I suspect, would have begrudged him the hoU1~ (1919, 452)

They certainly have begrudged it to him since. This is the paradox of Paul Carus-a productive and influential life followed by comparative obscurity. His work has left little trace in the philosophic record. His name appears in few histories of American philosophy.2 The reference books are slightly more charitable, but not always accurate. 3 1

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To some extent Carus's obscurity is no paradox. Lconard acknowledges that "his prodigious output was in fact a disconcerting farrago .... He never took time to write a magnum opus, and was short on footnotes. Writing for general enlightenment, he frequently merely popularized (sometimes too in rather slapstick fashion) facts already familiar enough to the betterinformed. He would intermingle, with naive indifference to excathedral dignity and scholastic reputation, familiar commonplaces of higher thought amid valuable original analysis .... Moreover he sometimes made palpable blunders of fact or ventured on erratic guesses of theory.... If one is as alert, many-faceted, and fluent as Carus, he shouldn't have the use of a personally ... controlled printing press always at his elbow" (1919, 453). But the paradox remains, and this book seeks to resolve it by making him less obscure. Carus deserves to be better remembered than he has been, for four related reasons: L His energy and persistence over the thirty-two years from 1887 to 1919 made Open Court Publishing Company, if not profitable, at least a larger, stronger, and more diverse entity than it otherwise would have been, one that survived his death and continues today. At a time when there were few university presses, Open Court served some of the functions they do today. 2. In his own time Carus's educational and sometimes philanthropic work was particularly helpful to three great thinkers not usually mentioned in the same sentence: D. T. Suzuki (Zen Buddhism), Charles S. Peirce (philosophy), and Ernst Mach (physics and philosophy), 3. Carus's early willingness to take Oriental thought (especially Buddhism) seriously and to make it available to a wider audience may have been his single greatest contribution to American culture. InA History ofAmerican Philosophy (1963, 289) Herbert Schneider writes that Carus's "personal catholicity and his liberal editorial policies were an influential factor in awakening an ignorant American public to the basic problems and traditions, both Western and Eastern, of free and critical speculation on the import of natural knowledge."

Introduction

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4. Whatever the final verdict on Cams's own philosophySuzuki and Mach concurred in important parts of it-he cannot be accused of making the technician's error of studying only those questions too small for anyone else to care about. In particular, the subject he cared about most - how to reconcile religion and science-remains alive today. It needs to be dealt with, and being acquainted with a thinker who made the attempt might help.4 Cams's obscurity has not been total. James Sheridan's doctoral dissertation (1957) is a model of diligence and judgment. Donald Harvey Meyer (1962) has written the best brief overview of Cams's life and thought, and Carl Jackson (1968, 73-92) has sensitively placed Cams's OrientaHst contribution 'in context. Sherwood Sugden's historical introduction to the Open Court centennial bibliography (1987,11-26) draws these and other sources together into a nicely balanced narrative. Ralph McCoy's bibliography (1987) is an indispensable tool. This book builds on these and more specialized contributions, and on the wealth of correspondence and other primary sources preserved by the Carus family and now housed and cataloged in Southern Illinois University's Morris Library. (All correspondence cited herein, with a few exceptions, is from this invaluable resource.) My goal is to describe Carus's thought and how it impelled him to act, speak, write, and edit during his thirty-two years at Open Court. This task is not always easy, both because Carus ranged widely and because his views, for the most part, are more significant as intellectual eatalysts than as philosophical contributions in thei r own right. Carus himself might have preferred that this book deal only with ideas, for he held that it is in the survival of our ideas that we achieve immortality. But his personal stOly-exile from Bismarck's Germany, eomparative comfort and renown in the turnof.the-centmy United States, and a ldnd of internal exile in Woodrow Wilson's war-maddened America - has its own interest. Finally, those who have puzzled over why a philosophical publishing house should exist in a small central Illinois factory town will find in Cams's story as much of an answer as there is.

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Paul Carus:>s Early Life Paul Carus was born 18 July 1852 to Gustav and Laura Krueger Carus- "descending from a family of distinguished scholars," according to Julius Goebel (1919, 513). At the time Gustav Carus was thirty-three years old and pastor of the Lutheran church at Ilsenburg am Harz; he rose steadily in the church hierarchy, received a doctorate of thcology in 1868 "in recognition of his scientific and theological writings," and ended his career as superintendent general of the church for Eastern Prussia (Obituary 1889). Paul Carus left no memoir or autobiography. Information about his first thirty-five years is scanty, although we can infer from his later writings that his parents' Protestantism and strong ethical sense left a deeper imprint on him than did any more specific beliefs (P. Carus 1891a; 1906c, 176-77). The family was well off (although probably without inherited wealth) and well placed in the fairly rigid German class structure of the time. Carus wrote later that he "had occasion to hear much good music in my childhood and youth, and met some artists at the residence of my parents" (P. Carus to C. D. Reynold, 23 Dec. 1893).1 A more substantial indication is the extent of his education-at gymnasia in Posen and Stettin and at the univcrsities of Greifswald, Strasbourg, and Tlibingen, culminating in a Ph.D. in classical philology from Tlibingen in 1876. Such a course required more than scholastic aptitude: it almost always betokened a family with financial and educational resources to help the student on his way (Goebel 1919; Sheridan 1957,2; Schafer 1986).2 4

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Of his education we know little. At the Stettin Gymnasium one of his teachers was the great mathematician and Indologist Hermann Grassmann. CanIs matriculated at Tiibingen in October 1873 and spent one semester as a law student before leaving. At some point he encountered an unnamed Buddhist priest who gave him "much food for thought." His ability to visualize mathematical relations made that subjeet easy for him, but he studied primarily "the classics and philosophy" (Sheridan 1957, 2; Schafer 1986; P. Carns to Pfounds, 7 Aug. 1893; P. Carns to Rev. Alan Hawkesworth, 31 May 1909),3 Carns then served in the Seventeenth Regiment of the Prussian field artillery and as a "lieutenant of the reserves" attached to the Twelfth Saxon Artillery Regiment. This tour of duty did nothing to disillusion Carns with either the military in general or the German militalY in particulm: "The writer of these lines has fulfilled all his duties as a German soldier in the ranks as well as an officer in the reserves," he wrote in 1909. "He knows what he is talking about and he here most emphatically contradicts the statement that the army is a tyrannous institution and a burden on the country" (P. Carus 1900b, 91n; Sheridan 1957, 2; P. Carus 1909h, 335),4 Having passed the civil service examination, Carus taught in gymnasia in Dresden and then at the military academy of the Royal Corps of Cadets of Saxony in Dresden. As oberlehrm" (a position that Carns described as ranking between instructor and professor) he taught Latin, German, history, and various other subjects to the cadets. (He later described himself as having been a "scientific instructor" there [Sheridan 1957, 2; von Billow 1888; P. Carus 1906c, 24].) Carus's diSCiplinary and teaching methods seem to have been those of an enlightened despot, degending on and fostering an esprit de corps among his classes. At the military academy, he recalled: I adopted the principle, whenever any disturbance of a recitation occurred, of simply asking the question, "Who did itP" On the first occasion, of course, there was no response, whereupon I spoke contemptuously of the spirit of the whole

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class, in which there was some one too cowardly to stand up frankly and acknowledge the mischief which he had committed. I argued that all the members of the class were responsible for the esprit de corps; and that so long as such cowardice was condoned and encouraged, I could have no respect for the class.... The result was that somebody rose to expose the delinquent; but I refused to listen to the denunciations, and stigmatized, at the same time, in strong terms, the practice of playing the informer.... The malefactor appeared after the recitation and denounced himself privately, but here again I refused to listen to the confession, and told him the proper thing would be to stand up before the whole class and publicly acknowledge his guilt .... Without any further suggestion, at the next recitation the malefactor jumped up, and in a few clear words made the confession required. An occurrence of this kind took plaee once only in every new dass and never again .... [Thereafter,} the question "Who did it?" was always followed by the prompt self-surrender of the delinquent. He knew, of course, that he would not be punished, nor was it ever necessary, because the confession ended the joke, if there was any joke in it, for its repetition had become impossible. (P. Carus 1906c, 24-26)

This mild unconventionality-Carus referred disparagingly to teachers who spent class time conducting ainvestigations" of misbehavior-was all that seemed to distinguish Paul Carus from others on the same humdrum career path. But beneath the surface the seeds of his great upheaval and later life had already germinated. Carus, it seems, had begun school intending to follow in his father's clerical footsteps. "When I was a youth," he wrote in 1890, a voice came unto me and said: "Preach!" ... That voice came from my parents and grandparents, from my teachers and instructors; and it found a ready response in my soul. To be a preacher of Truth, what a great callingl I knew the gospel by heart, and I studied eagerly, that I might be a worthy minister of the word of God. But the more

Paul Cams's Early Life

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I studied the more that sinful tendency to doubt grew, first secretly, then openly, first suppressed, then frankly acknowledged, until doubt ceased to be doubt; it became an established conviction .... Could I step to the altar in this condition and swear to preach the gospel? Never! ... I abandoned religion and followed science. (1890e)

Carus told the story of his disillusionment (and his subsequent return to what he saw as a higher and purer form of religion based on science) several times in slightly different ways, but he gave no hint of when, how, or under what circumstances he went through this wrenching process. The best guess is that it happened between the late 1860s and the late 1870s, by which time he had become a teacher rather than a preachCI: This loss of orthodoxy might have caused Carus no problem ifhe had kept his new beliefs to himself But although his faith in church doctrine had died, his impulse to preach had not. In the summer of 1880 he published a pamphlet denying the literal truth of scripture and describing the Bible as a great literary work comparable to the Odyssey (von Bulow 1888; Andre W. Carus, pel's. com., 21 Nov. 1989). Such views were not unusual in that day or this, but the Royal Corps of Cadets found them "not in harmony with the Christian spirit, in accordance with which the training and education of the Corps of Cadets should be conducted" (von BiHow 1888).5 At a later date Carus might have defended himself with the argument that his views were the logical fulfillment and future evolutionary direction of Christianity. Instead, he appealed to the memory of Frederick the Great, who himself had held that all religions are equal: "Have we forgotten, then, that the most glorious Prussian military deeds took place during the reign of the great king who, even on the throne, was not afraid to be and appear open-minded and who was in every sense the model of a good prince? - But I do not wish to quarrel with the governing powers of our people" (1884, 4). The young obCl'lehrer was given a choice: "I had either to ask most humbly for forgiveness for daring to have an opinion

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of my own and to express it, perhaps even promise to publish nothing more on religious matters, or to give up my post. I chose the latter. But not only had I therewith lost my office, but any chance of advancing in the service of the state had also been cut off. Anyone who has fallen into such a conflict should not be surprised if, from then on, he finds all possible paths closed to him. There was thus no other choice for me but to emigrate and, trusting in my own powers, to establish for myself a new home." His resignation was effective on Easter of 1881. Either that fall or the following one, after a farewell trip along the Rhine, he went to Belgium (P. Carus 1884, 4-5, 27; von Bulow 1888). This entire episode-from Paul's first loss of faith to his final decision to resign and leave the country-must have caused his parents great distress, both personal and professionaL (We have no firsthand evidence, but the career of an ambitious cleric in a state-run church can hardly be enhanced by having one's son denounced as an atheist [P. Carus 1884, 27J.) Yet neither in Aus dem Exil, his most personal book, nor in later accounts of his religious trauma are his parents ever mentioned. We have no idea what their relationship was during these years. 6 But by the late 1880s, when Paul Carus was established in La Salle, Illinois, they were once more-or still-in touch. In 1888 Gustav Carus, then aged sixty-nine, contributed a critique of The Open Court's philosophy to the magazine (G. Carus 1888). There is nothing in it, nor in his son's reply, to suggest that their relationship had ever been strained. The elder Carus expressed doubt that the magazine would succeed, partly because it held, in his opinion, inadequate doctrines and partly because it was too highbrow; but he added that he did not mean to question "the ability, the foreSight, and the skill of the editorial management!" That's as personal as their exchange got. One can deduce that, for a father in his time and position, Gustav Cams was unusually humane. But one wonders what he would have thought of his son's dedicating his 1892 Homilies of

Paul Cams's Ea'rly Life

9

Science to "the sacred memory of my father, the late Gustav Carus ... who would not have agreed to the main doctrines of this book but whose life exemplified its teachings" (1892a). Of Carus's mother Laura we know considerably less, but she remained in correspondence with him until death in the late 1890s. 7 She read The Open Court and The Monist, and well into the 1890s she was urging her fortyish son to set aside his own convictions and raise her grandchildren in the Christian faith. We don't have Paul's letters to hel~ but there is no evidence that her appeals bore any orthodox fruit. Carus took his departure in stages: a last look at the Rhine, then to Belgium ("pure Low German ground" [27]), then to England, and finally to the United States. Sometime after October 1882 he began his "extended visit" to England for the purpose, he says, oflearning the language well enough to thrive in the United States. When he wrote Aus dem Exil in 1884, he still had some trouble with the language; for instance, he advised his readers that" all words consisting of a single letter are to be capitalized" (1884, 37). Nevertheless, Carus had, as he later recalled, "very qUickly obtained a comfortable position as Foreign Master in a Military College, where I had plenty of free time and as much vacation as I wanted, so that my position seemed to me to be a regular sinecure" (1884, 44). He also lectured at least twice at the German Athenaeum Club. English education, English military prowess, the Anglican church, and the aristocracy's passion for blood sports all drew Carus's disdain. But he acknowledged compensating virtues, and in any case by late 1884 or early 1885 he was on his way to the New World. In Aus dern Exil, written in England, Carus did display considerable emotion over the loss - not of his family, but of his fatherland: "Germany was more to me than the land of my birth. It was and is my intellectual homeland ... because I am convinced that it is on the salutary path of quiet and constant progress and that, of all nations, our German people contribute the most toward the advancement of culture and civilization"

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Catalyst for Controversy

(P. Carus 1884, 3, 4). Nor did he take easily to English ways during his sojourn there. But in the United States, interestingly enough, Carus was able to remain German without constantly looking backward. His children don't remember him talking about his own childhood or the "old country," although there was discussion of current German political and intellectual events. And he undel'stood that the thinker's role must be different on the west side of the Atlantic. "European philosophers," he wrote in 1893, "may sit in their studies and devote themselves to the abstract questions that please them. American philosophers" he was happily counting himself as one- "have to step upon the same platform with the mountebank" (A. and E. Carus 1988; P. Carus 1893b, 11). When he did mention the Fatherland in print, it was not always in a favorable light. In 1896 he condemned "the most outrageous and illegal acts on the part of the German government" when Dr. Bruno Wille, the speaker of a "free religious congregation," was imprisoned for his preaching. "This actually happened, not during the Middle Ages, but a few months ago, in the civilized kingdom of Prussia." Carus even appealed to the English monarch: "Would that the QueenofEngland had heard of the suppression of religious liberty and had sent a message of sympathy to Dl: Bruno Wille encouraging him to bear his martyrdom with dignity and to stand up for his rights with manly couragel" (1896d). At first Carus found it more difficult to make a living in the United States than hc had in England. Teaching German classes in Boston proved unsuccessful, but still Carus managed to make the right contacts. A paper he read to the Industrial Art Teachers' Association on 29 December 1885-"Principles of Art, from the Standpoint of Monism and Meliorism" -was printed by vote of the association. Carus may have been involved in Henry George's insurgent campaign for mayor of New York City in 1886. At some point he found work there as coeditor ofZickel's Novellen-schatz and Familien Blatter (Un-

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derwood and Underwood [hereafter Underwoods] 1887, 14, 15,23; McCoy 1987,365; P. Carus 1886b; Hegeler et al. 1887, 639). Meanwhile, he had written and published his first philosophical work in English, Monism and Melim'ism (1885). Although it was not widely circulated, it was read by one person who counted-Edward C. Hegeler-ancl it serves as a convenient benchmark for judging the futurc evolution of Carus's own views.

CD

The Philosophy of Monism and Meliorism "Thought for its own sake is a disease," wrote Paul Carns (1891b, 361). "Thought should always end in the regulation or adjustment of our behavior toward our surroundings. If it does not, it is not the right kind of thought." As he told Edwin N. Lewis (5 Oct. 1897), editor of the Milway Master Mechanic, he most valued "the appreciation of a sober minded man who deals with the practical sides of life .... Both The Open Court and The Monist, although apparently velY theoretical, have very practical aims." The notion of a purely technical philosophy, or one of interest only within the academy, repelled him. "Most of the prohlems which are so vigorously discussed by many philosophers ... are mere sham such as the problem of pluralism and unity, and such also as the problem of the reality of the real," he wrote to Seth D. Merton (16 May 1904). "It is scarcely worthwhile to explode these bubbles because they are suited for whiling away a student's time when he attends his philosophical course at the university." This same line of thought led Carns to compare his adopted home favorably to the Old Wor1d: "Here all meet without pretensions," he told the World's Congress of Philosophy in 1893 (1893b, 11), "and the sage must reply to the incoherent notions of the fool as to his equal. This naturally appears to a European scholar as a humiliation; but by doing so a thinker does not stoop; it does not lower his work; on the contrary, it will only widen his views and deepen his convictions." In the United States, Carns argued, "A philosopher must feel the

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pulse of the people beat in his own heart, with all the nobility of their aspirations, and with all the errors that sway their minds" (1893,3). For this reason most of Cams's many philosophical writings are more or less popular in style and approach. He restated his views repeatedly over more than a quarter-century, but these restatements were rarely systematic or thorough enough to satisfy professionals in the field. In 1890 Charles Peirce described Cams's Fundamental Problems as containing "the average opinions of thoughtful men to-day.... [A]nd if there be here and there an inconsistency, it only ... adapts it all the better to the need of the public" (1890, 118-19). When Cams proposed that his 1893 Primer of Philosophy would "set the ship of philosophy afloat again" (iii), John Dewey in a brief and tactful notice (1895) suggested, "Were the ship of philosophy stranded, I doubt the ability of the united efforts of the whole race to get it afloat." Much later, Cams's friend, the poet William Ellery Leonard, praised Carus's lifelong willingness to debate all comers, famous or obscure ("he took any thinking, or honest attempt at thinking, seriously"), but he lamented Carns's tendency to blend popularization and "valuable, original analysis" (Leonard 1919,453). Carus frequently affirmed his willingness to change his mind ifhis adversary could convince him he was wrong. These declarations encouraged many a spirited debate in the pages of The Open Court and The Monist, but his bedrock views remained constant throughout his mature years: that the world is in some sense a unity and not a plurality, that we learn about it by applying reason to our sense experience, and that evolution is moral progress. With one exception (noted below), Carus did not call attention to changes in his point of view. Nor did he claim to be original in his work. "I do not want to propound a new philosophy of my own but to help in working out philosophy itself, ... one that would be as objective as any branch of the natural sciences" (1909d, 1).

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Later students of Cams's thought have usually followed his lead and treated his writings from 1885 to 1919 as expounding a single, fixed system. (K. S. Shin's discussion of the varying definitions of monism [1973, 76-96] is an exception.) But in fact Cams's philosophical views changed between 1885 (Monism and Meliorism) and 1911 (The Philosophy of Form) as his rationale, terminology, and subsidiary points evolved. Monism and Meliorism was Cams's first philosophical statement in English and his last such writing before he joined Open Court Publishing Company. In the retrospective bibliography Philosophy as a Science Cams described the book as "a preliminary statement" that "plainly foreshadows his views, which are more fully expressed in later publications" (P. Cams 1909d, 29). The book also expresses some views that were dropped from later publications. Although now obscure, and on some points less persuasive than Carus's later writings, Monism and Meliorism is the best evidence we have of the thoughts that Paul Cams brought to La Salle and that appealed to Edward C. Hegeler. Published in 1885 by F. W. Christern of New York City, the book's five "articles" expounded "a philosophical system" of which "causality is the beginning, ethics the aim and end .... All other questions are of minor importance." As ever, Cams aimed high: HI sincerily [sic} trust that I have succeeded so far as to have realized what David Hume ,and Immanuel Kant planned, and to have brought to a certain consummation what they intended to do .... If Kant compared his work to that of Copernicus, I may fairly liken mine to that of Kepler who filled ,P11t the Copemican system and reduced the law of motion of planets to simple mathematical formulae" (1885,5, 7, 6-7). Cams began by identifying himself with the "progressive party in philosophy," among whom he Singled out Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. Not that he agreed with any of them completely-Comte "forgot the main pOint," and Mill "ought to have declared himself a sceptic." Spencer, whom Carus later savaged, received rather respectful treatment in Monism and Meliorism, although Carus did not

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endorse his ethics. In any case these men represented the tradition within which he was arguing - a generally hardheaded, debunking worldview oriented more toward science and thc future than toward religion and the past Cams dismissed much of old-time philosophy: "Kant," he wrote approvingly, "cleared the place where the rotten edifice of metaphysics had stood so long, and at the same time contrived a plan for constructing another and a better building." And now the general contractor announced he was ready for work (1885, 6, 32n, 10). Carus followed Kant's argument with Hume and Kant's establishment of time, space, mathematics, and causality as a priori-or, in the terminology Carns preferred, "internal" truths. But when Kant concludes that we cannot stand aside from our reason and discover whether the world in itself is organized in the forms in which we must perceive it, Carus accused him of a fallacy. Carus explained what Kant "overlooked" in the central argument of the book, a difficult section entitled "The Foundation of Monism." First let us ask, what is the subject in the objeetive world? What are we ourselves in regard to our surroundings? If we were standing outside of ourselves, inquiring into what we call our subject, our ego, the centre of our cognition, we should find it to be an object like all other objects beside it. How now, with regard to our problem? Are not the internal tmths inherent and a priori to all subjects which swann around us as objects; and should we not suppose, therefore, that they belong rather to our subjective existence? EvclY ego in this world (as it must needs have-or rather must be-an objective existence) finds the internal truths in this objective existence, i.e., within itself, in such a way as to be able to construct them a priori. ... evelything exists materially and must, of necessity, partake of the form of the world, viz. time and space .... such being the laws of objective existence, they adhere to any object permeating its entire essence so that any object, if developed to the state of consciousness, will find these laws by mere reflection and meditation. (1885, 43-44)

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In other words, the subjective self is also an objective entity. And as an object it conforms to the laws of time, space, and causality, which must therefore be objective. The forms define our thought because they have permeated us from 'OXDE:-:ClL A Lc-Utr(tom Ct'lf JenJtlll.km QnupOPlkllL "SpccbJ" ••.••..•......•• ~ BOOK xonC1!.S.. To 1M Poef b1lrrtt..................................... •• .... • .. • .... ··71

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B ROVV N ING. CORSON's IXTItODUCTJO-S to the STUDY o f Bll O WNUf O.

The premier issue of The Open Court, 17 February 1887. (Courtesy Open Court Publishing Company.)

VOl.. I.

OCTOBER, 1890·

No. I .

THE MONIST. A QUARTERLY MAGAZINE PUBLISH ltD BY

The Open Court Publishing Company. CONTENTS: .,ACa.

MA.. A . R. W ALLACIt ON PHYSIOLOGICAL SltLtCTION. n GEORGE J. ROMANES, LL. D., F. R. 5., f i t h.MORTALlTY Ott INl"USORlA. BY ALFRED BINET, ON THIt MATItRIAL RItLATIONS OF SItX IN HUNAN SOClltTY. BY Paol'. E. D. COPE, filt ANALYSIS 01' THE SItNSATION_ANTllfItTAPHYSICAL. n PROtt. ERNST MACH, TIlIt OalGIN or MIND. BY DR. PAUL CARUS, THt MAGIC MIRROR. BY MAX DESSOIR, HllrFDUlO ON THt RtLATION OF TBt MWD TO THt BODY. BY W. M. SALTER,

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LITItItAR y CoRRItSPONDENCB--FIUoNCE. BY LUCIEN ARREAT.

I~

Boox RItVlltwa,

139-1.7

PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN CoLLaoES AND UNIVItItSlTlItS,

148-156

PtIUODICALS.

1 57-160

CHICAGO:

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO . .......1F lallNdpUo.. ,I.".

The premier issue of The Monist, October 1890. (Courtesy Open Court Publishing Company.)

One of the sessions of the World's Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago during the World's Fah~ 1893; delegates from many religions and nations are shown seated on the stage. It was through contacts at the parliament with representatives of Eastern religions that Carus became deeply interested in Buddhism. He later published many commentaries on and translations of classic Eastern religious texts. His own compilation, The Gospel of Buddha, became one of Open Court's best-sellers. (Courtesy Open Court Publishing Company archives, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.)

D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966), a prominent scholar of Zen Buddhism, with one of Car us's children. Suzuki spent eleven years of his remarkable career at Open Court Publishing Company (1897- 1908). He was introduced to Carus by his teachel~ Shaku So),en, soon after the World's Parliament of Religions. Suzuki's first book was published by Open Court in 1908. (Courtesy Open Court Publishing Company archives, Special Coliections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.)

Ernst Mach (1838-1916), a distinguished Austrian physicist, psychologist, and philosopher. Carus published translations of many of Mach's works, both as articles and as books. (Courtesy Open Court Publishing Company archives, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.)

Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), founder of the American school of pragmatism. His five-part series of articles published in the early issues of The Monist offered his definitive philosophical articulation of an evolutionary cosmology that led him to question the dogma of physical determinism. (Courtesy Indiana University Peirce Edition Project.)

A family photo of Paul Carus with his youngest son, Alwin Clemens Caruso (Courtesy Alwin C. Carus.)

A selection of Open Court titles showing their special cover artwork Since its founding in 1887, Open Court Publishing Company has published more than 640 books. The Gospel of Buddha (left) has been among the company's best-selling books, going through numerous editions and printings. (From Open Court: A Centennial Bibliography by Ralph McCoy, by permission of Open Court Publishing Company, La Salle, Illinois. Copyright © 1993 by Open Court Publishing Company.)

"OW it happellS that Illy iricnd. ~Ir. Francis C. Russell of Chicago. received a I~t{cr on 5undry t01>lc~ of modern logic from MI'. Charles S. S. Peirce, kno\\,l1 as one of tll

,.

invcstigatlon into the consequences of the to be diffcrent froll1 what tIw\' I1re. It was a of non-i\ristoleliat? logic. in the sense in which we speak of nOll~Ettcljdcall geometry. Some- of the: developments were somewhat illtel'csting. but

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not sufficlcnU), so lo induce me to publish them. The gcncra~ idea was. of conrse, obvious to anybody of sufficicltt glllSp of log-kal ':t* . analysis to sec thnt logic reposes \iPOIl certain positive f~...aud-- 'Ifn 6~ is not mere formalism. I--ffil.l-y--mclltion i~-l\'t\i;~\!ritcl' ~

~~. 'lftl'l"\vtl.rd sngge~·'.~d s~!'.':h ~ hl~e 10~i{'.

1, '

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ift~t ~

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wildest lunacy. instead of being a plain and l!aturai hypoth~ csiswo(,tillookillgillt ~~ I . '~t~lg."

.'Y

Galley proof of a note by Paul Carus that appeared in 'the Monist for JanualY 1910, as corrected and expanded by Charles S, Peirce, Carns and Peirce frequently sparred over philosophical and The Monist was the fornm for their debate, Their articles and correspondence, archived at Southern Illinois University, show that Carus was an unusually sympathetic editor to a sometimes difficult contributor. His insistence on publishing Peirce's writings, despite Edward Hegcler's objections, illustrates the seriousness with which Carns took his editorial responsibilities, Here, Peirce sheds some light on his philosophical development. (Courtesy Open Court Publishing Company archives, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.)

o

Looking Toward the East

Of all the ways in which Paul Carus sought to promote the religion of science, by far the most consequential was Open Court's patronage of Oriental religion and philosophy, especially Buddhism. Carl Jackson, author of The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth-Century Explorations (1981), has described Carus as "one of the most important and one of the earliest popularizers of Oriental thought in America" (1968,74,78). UnderCarus's direction, between 1893 and 1915 Open Court published thirty-eight books on the subject, fifteen ofthem by Carus himself The Open Court and The Monist gave Easteru religions and societies more extensive and sympathetic coverage than any U.S. publications had before-and, according to Jackson, more than any others did until after World War II. Although complete sales records have never been located, the available evidence indicates that Carus's compilation The Gospel a/Buddha was his, and the company's, runaway all-time best-seller. It went through more printings and editions, and more translations, than any other Open Court work. In 1915 Carus knew personally of translations into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Urdu and had granted rights for translations into Russian, "Czechic," Italian, Siamese, and "other Oriental tongues" (McCoy 1987, 9, 89-91; P. Carus 1915b, vi). For the one year for which we have firm sales figures (1 Feb. 1896-1 Feb. 1897), books on Buddhism made up more than one-quarter of Open Court's total sales (McCormack 1897). The company's best-seller that year was Carus's tale Karma

89

90

0

Catalyst for Controversy

(1894b; 1,360 copies), which indeed enjoyed such popularity that it was pirated in at least ten languages, including a version attributed to Leo Tolstoy (Fullenwider 1987). Of the three books by Carus that remain in Open Court's recent catalogues, one deals with Buddhist and one with Chinese thought. Until the World Parliament of Religions, howevel; there was little evidence that Carus would become a particular advocate of Buddhism at all, let alone an ardent one. Just a month before it opened (7 Aug. 1893), he wrote to Professor Robert Smith of Birmingham, England, that he was interested "not in modern Buddhism, but in the old Buddhism of Buddha." That same day he elaborated in a letter to C. W. Pfounds, a possible contributor in Kyoto, Japan: "My interest in the Buddhism of today is not more intense than any other anthropological or ethnological or historico-religious subject .... It is a matter of course that [for publication] I want a cool, unbiased statement which should be benevolent but not enthusiastic." Carus was no stranger to Buddhism at this time. Although it is no longer possible to reconstruct his early intellectual history, we do know that in a scholarly climate already open to the East, he had studied under Hermann Grassmann, who in addition to his mathematical profession was also a Sanskritist (Jackson 1968, 75). Some time prior to his leaving Germany, Carus had discussed religion with a visiting Japanese Buddhist high priest, a "Rev. Kitabatake" whom he later described as "highly educated" (P. Carus to Pfounds, 7 Aug. 1893) and who gave Carus "much food for thought" by shOwing him a religion that" does not prescribe any dogma to be believed in" (P. Carus 1888d, 837). And a few years later he had published the sixtypage Lieder eines Buddhisten (1882). But this acquaintance had not flowered into anything more. Up to the fall ofl893 readers of The Open Court had had only a small taste of Orientalia. During the Underwoods' tenure, General J. G. R. Forlong described Buddhist influences on early Christianity (1887), a favorite theme throughout

Looking Toward the East

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91

the magazine's history, and five years later Professor H. H. Williams (1892) described the psychology of Buddhism in the magazine. In The Open Court's first seven years Carus himself touched on Buddhism only twice, both times speaking from a distinctly Western standpoint. Buddhism and Christianity are quite simi1ar' he argued in January 1890: "Other religions require sacrifices of lambs and goats. Buddhism and Christianity demand the surrender of self' (1890b). He concluded that "the religion of the future will not be Christian dogmatism" without mentioning Buddhism. Carus's only other preparliament discussion of Buddhism was entitled "The Religion of a Forerunner of Christ" (1890a). In it Carus warned his readers that the idea ofN irvana could be "of a most dangerous charactCl; if it is conceived as mere pessimism .... It will in that case lead to apathy, to destruction and death." Although Carus did not believe that was its true meaning, he acknowledged that the Buddha "perhaps" meant it that way, and that certainly many of his followers did. Carus believed that this version of Buddhism had debilitated the societies where it prevailed-hence its "danger." And that was it for the first seven years of The Open Court. Its more scholarly twin, The Monist, in its first four years offered even less-one article by Richard Garbe, "Hindu Monism" (1892). And the book-publishing arm of Open Court, although it so far had issued thirty-four volumes, had published nothing that touched on the Orient. It is difficult to overestimate the impression that the Buddhists at the parliament made on Caruso He immediately set to work on The Gospel of Buddha (P. Carus to 1