JEREMIAH BY DEFAULT: A STUDY OF THE TELEOLOGICAL THEORY OF WILLIAM DOUW LIGHTHALL
by
Norman James Williamson

CHAPTER ONE





A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO LIGHTHALL AND THE THEORY





The religious system developed by W.D. Lighthall will provide the reader with an excellent example of how a teleological theorist utilized the “new” knowledge of his day to revise and modify aspects of older models in order to seek a better understand of the greater cosmic meaning of life and in this particular case his nation’s role in it.

Because Lighthall’s life spanned the decades from the eighteen eighties to the nineteen fifties and he lived and worked the majority of that time in Montreal, Quebec in eastern Canada he developed a system based on a distinctively parochial point of view.

Lighthall became a patriot seeking the Canadian “raison de etre” in the larger reason for existence.

Lighthall developed his religious system over a period of fifty years. During that time Lighthall continually, integrated new material, particularly recently discovered scientific data, into the argument for the validity of his system.

However, the underlying ethical concept which he voiced in 1887 in Sketch of a New Utilitarianism remained the “constant heart” of the system.

He introduced an aspect of integrated ontology to the system in The Outer Consciousness in 1923 and the system reached its ultimate development in 1933 with the “definitive” edition of that year.





Lighthall had been born in Hamilton Ontario but was educated in the city of Montreal when it was still the genius of Canadian national enterprise.

At McGill University he began his studies in English and medicine but turned to the study of law which he made his profession.

Lighthall was extremely conscious of his genealogical derivation. On his paternal side he was the descendant of a patroon family of New York State, the Schuylers of Albany. On his maternal side were the descendants of the Scottish Major, James Wright, of Chateauguay who had commanded the local militia at the battle of Chateauguay.[4]





As to his intellectual development W.D. Lighthall had been fifteen years of age when Darwin published The Descent of Man. He was among the first generation to grow up with the theory of evolution and the controversies it generated. Lighthall was also raised within the social environment that produced Canadian Imperialism.

These two factors would become the dominant influences on the development of the teleological theory called here “The Lighthall Theory”.





The distinctness of Lighthall’s Canadian Imperialism was probably the major reason why Lighthall would be neglected as a thinker even before his death in 1954.

As Carl Berger pointed out, “the First World War killed” Canadian Imperialism. Berger also noted that the 60,000 dead overshadowed all discussion of imperialism and nationality and gave impetus to the isolationism that weakened the bonds with Great Britain [1].

But the Imperial factor was only one of many probable reasons why The Lighthall Theory would be rejected by what became mainstream Canada ideology.

Some of the other probabilities were the following: (1) The radical capitalist rejected him as a communistic thinker; (2) The communists and socialists rejected him as a capitalist (3) Both rejected him as having fascist leanings; (4) The theologians rejected him, depending on the shade of the theologian as either a heretical deist or a rampant materialist; (5) The rising numbers of new specialists in philosophy, science, medicine, religion, and liberal theology rejected him, at best, as a rank amateur; (6) The literary critic rejected him for using his fiction as mere propaganda; (7) The historian rejected him for being subjective to the extreme; (8) The non-European rejected him as a racist; (9) The bigots of all shades rejected him as a liberal; (10) The remnants of French and English Canada rejected him for suggesting that they should integrate both culturally and biologically.

In other words, within the matrix of the burgeoning Canadian, New Order, in the post 1945 era, Lighthall’s printed views quickly became politically incorrect and one day may even be viewed as examples of “hate literature” in Canada, depending upon who the emergent ruling elite are at the time.





Nevertheless the scope of Lighthall’s body of work will labor hard to ensure him a place in Canadian cultural history in spite of that “new Order”.

Lighthall was the 1879 McGill gold metal winner in English literature. He published three novels; “The Young Seigneur; or Nation Making” (1888), “False Chevalier” (1898) and “The Master of Life” (1908). Lighthall also published a book of verse entitled “Old Measures” in 1922.

But perhaps of more importance he did much to bring Canadian poets and their works to international attention by editing “Songs of the Great Dominion”, “Canadian Poems and Lays” and “Canadian Songs and Poems” and he guided them through their various editions.

Lighthall also took a great deal of interest in Canadian history. His particular joy was of course Montreal. He published a popular “Sights and Shrines of Montreal” which went through at least four editions.

Even today the discipline of history has not completely forgotten Lighthall. For example, the historian Carl Berger noted that it was Lighthall who considered Canada to be “the future centre and dominating portion of the British Empire.” [2]

But is the discipline of anthropology, however, that best recalls Lighthall’s ability as a historian. Lighthall proved that the long-accepted Cartier drawing of the Indian village of Hochelaga was in fact an engraver’s interpretation of the Cartier text. [3]





Lighthall had been called to the bar in 1881 and he practiced civil law in Montreal. Nevertheless he continued in his passion for literature through a number of active affiliations including the Society of Canadian Literature and The Canadian Author’s Association.

His other academic and professional affiliations included The Canadian National League, which he founded in 1892 and The Royal Society of Canada of which he was President of (Section II) from 1904-05, and overall President from 1918-19. He was also President of the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society of Montreal from 1912-1952.

Lighthall’s civic contributions lay in his specific interest in governance at the local or municipal level.

He had first entered this realm in 1895 when he served on the committee to erect the Maisonneuve Monument and then founded the Chateaux de Ramezay Museum. The following year he became a member of the Westmount (Montreal) Council, a position he held until 1903. From 1900 to 1902 he was also elected Mayor of Westmount.

However the most prominent of his contributions to the field of civil government was probably his founding of the Union of Municipalities of Canada in 1901.

Following 1903 Lighthall continued in civic affairs in Montreal, though to a lesser degree, serving on the School Commission, Public Parks, and as a Trustee of the public library.

Lighthall’s military career was more typical of the male youth of the prominent English Canadian families of his age. He served in the “College Company” of the Prince of Wales regiment when he was twenty years of age and entered the Victoria Fusiliers in 1881. From 1914 to 1917 he served in the reserves of this regiment. Moreover it was typical of Lighthall’s personal vision of altruistic duty that led him to found the Great War Veterans Association in 1915 which would in time, evolve into the Canadian Legion.





While Lighthall’s philosophical ideas were ultimately integrated into a single ontological system which I refer to as “The Lighthall Theory,” historically they can be divided into two different periods of development over his experiential life.

The initial period was devoted to the study of ethics, particularly altruism. Lighthall’s first pamphlet on ethics came out in 1882, the year after he was called to the bar. This period closed with the publication of “Spiritual Happiness” in 1890.

Although one can follow something of the development of Lighthall’s views through both his fiction and non-fiction published during the interim it was not until the private publication of “Superpersonalism” in 1916 that Lighthall returned with his particular welding of science, philosophy and ontology. By then The Lighthall Theory model had attained its essential structural or systematic form.

In this second period (beginning around 1916 and ending in 1933) Lighthall concerned himself with strengthening his argument for the validity of the ontological system.





Lighthall’s personal view of imperialism was nationalistic in its focus on Canada.

As a thinker his methods were polymerous verging on the chaotic. Not so his understanding of real time and space. He had a distinctly clear view of Canada’s future. Nevertheless in Lighthall’s view that future always remained as a possibility, a hope, never a “manifest” destiny.

Lighthall’s understanding of Canada’s reason to be was that it had the ability to assume a leadership role in the world’s awkward march toward the achievement of “happiness.”

That was, to create a world free of all the causes that make man’s life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The possibility of this occurring in a world that was so apparently antithetical to such a state of existence was what Lighthall’s theory was about.

It was indeed, a philosophy of hope for all mankind.

However this vision was not put forward by Lighthall in utopia terms. Lighthall believed he lived in the real, although infantile, beginnings of that future world of which Canada could be the key only if Canadians so willed it. Lighthall’s view of Canadians was very much like the old testament view of the role of the Israelites in Yahweh’s dominion.

Therefore there was always that ever present problem of volition. If Canadians did not have the will for the task it would fall to others. Thus the title of this paper – “Jeremiah By Default.”

Within the theory there is also a clear understanding of what happens to those who abdicate their role in the cosmic purpose or got it wrong.





Lighthall proposed a theoretical model which would integrate the Canadian reality into a larger understanding of the cosmos. To that end he organized his theory as an ontological system.

The system of deduction which he used to carry out this endeavor involved a radically polymerous method of marrying aspects of both science and philosophy.





Lighthall retired from law in 1944 after 63 years of practice. In 1948 his premature demise was published in “Leading Canadian Poets” and this neglectful error was perpetuated in the “National Union Catalog” as well as on other lists. Lighthall did, however, die on August 3, 1954.





During his lifetime Lighthall had sought to mold his public action upon his ethical understanding of altruistic responsibility and he developed much of his ontological reasoning on this experience. Lighthall understood that the greater good of larger groups of human beings would be more important than any given individual within the group. This was how he would have viewed his own motivation for working for the better organization of civic groups.

First there was his work in the Union of Municipalities and then the organization of the returned soldiers into an association.

This altruistic dedication of the individual to the larger group was preeminent in Lighthall’s understanding of man’s and mankind’s progress toward greater joy.

Nevertheless Lighthall appears to have determined that the mankind of his time remained, for the most part, an amorphous directionless mass. For mankind to progress from that state there had to be better social organization. Lighthall understood the British Empire to be an organizational system that had succeeded in decreasing the total accumulative pain of the population aggregate within its precincts.





A reader finds some understanding of his particular imperialistic view in Lighthall’s dedication of the anthology “Songs of the Great Dominion”: “To that sublime cause the union of mankind which the British peoples, if they are true to themselves and courageous in the future as they have been in the past, will take to be the reason of existence of their Empire; and to the glory of those peoples in the service of man; this book is dedicated.”[5]

In Lighthall’s view the empire consisted of an organization of ever larger units of people potentially having the same purpose of mind that Lighthall grasped in the concept of the amelioration of pain.

In the essay “The Governance of Empire” we find Lighthall attesting to what he calls historic fact:





The essential fact is that those portions of the British people possessing Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, have grown naturally into sister nations of the United Kingdom and hence the old forms that purport to concentrate all authority in the mother Parliament are outgrown and corresponding obligations and responsibilities are thrust upon the Over-seas children. . . . But above all stands the great necessity of workability in the form of the union, - harmony in its political mechanism, progressiveness and effectiveness in its action, and a warmly fraternal sentiment. Unless such a constitution can be devised. . . the alternative is inevitably a gradual disintegration into separate peoples having no more common bond than alliance, and ultimately no permanence of that.[6]





But, in order for a social order to evolve beyond its “present” state at any given point in time, there had to be a continuum of leadership which had the will to sacrifice self to the good of all.

In the old structure of Empire this had been the role of Britain’s leadership.

But in the now time of W. D. Lighthall Britain was of the “old world” and the center was fast shifting from her home ports and from under Big Ben. Moreover, as of late, she had shown a dangerous tendency toward timidity.

In 1895 Lighthall wrote a poem about the Armenian situation. In it he was specific about the abdication of the role of leadership and how the leader, be it man or nation, should act:





ENGLAND, if thou must set, go down in strength!

if thou, as rivals say must soon decline,

Let it be with they great unbroken line

of champions of the weak! . . . [7]





But England did fail to act.

So where was there new leadership potential to be found? Was it in the union of Empire? Perhaps, but given the geopolitical reality apprehended by the Lighthall model it would inevitably be found somewhere in North America. But what kind of leadership would unfold?

Would that leadership be altruistic or psychopathic?





When Lighthall sought to communicate the importance of particular aspects of the theory he often turned to poetry. He did so when he sought to voice his awakening recognition of Canada’s potential leadership role. By using poetry Lighthall sought to maximize the emotional impact of what it could mean to be Canadian in what he saw as a impending New World Order. Those emotions, however, were not displayed for their own sake, but in order to present some truth in a form of communication which embodies so well the personal joy he himself felt in being a Canadian on the verge of this possible new awakening.

In the poem “The Confused Dawn” written in 1882 we find an excellent example of this poetic message:









The Confused Dawn





young man





What are the Vision and the Cry

That haunt the new Canadian soul?

Dim grandeur spreads we know not why

O’er mountain, forest, tree and knoll,

And murmurs indistinctly fly--

Some magic moment sure is nigh.









seer





The Vision, mortal, it is this--

Dead mountain, forest, knoll and tree

Awaken all endued with bliss,

A native land - O think! - to be -

Thy native land - and ne’er amiss,

Its smile shall like a lover’s kiss

From hence forth seem to thee.





The Cry thou could’st not understand,

Which runs through that new realm of light,

From Breton’s to Vancouver’s strand

O’er many a lovely landscape bright,

It is their waking utterance grand,

The great refrain “A NATIVE LAND!” --

Thine be the ear, the sight! [8]





Finally in 1904 Lighthall believed that he could see clearly the vision of Canada’s potential role as leader nation in the evolving social order. [9] If it did not abort in hedonistic particularization or institutionalized inertia it would be an brilliant role.

Lighthall was an imperialist not because he believed that his empire was an ultimate good, but because it was a fairly good step in the progression of the organization of man. He understood that in time the British Empire would become mere history as had the Roman Empire before it. It would inevitably be replaced by something. Would the replacement be better? Only if mankind so will it.





If the Lighthall understanding of cultural history was evolutionary and he certainly adhered to the concept of the evolution of biological life why did he appear to have some trepidation with the Darwinian system?

I believe Kuhn articulates the problem Lighthall, among other thinkers of his day and since, have had with Darwin:





For many men the abolition of that teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin’s suggestions. The “Origin of Species” recognized no goal set either by God or nature. [10]





According to The Lighthall Theory the problem of the Darwinian system was that it reflected a belief that it is unnecessary to prove or disprove “cause” outside a particular observation of a particular “episode” in time and space even if that particular episode encompasses all of time and space. In other words, no system need be extrapolated, either forward or backward, to a final cause and effect in order to be valid.

As Howard E. Gruber pointed out:





Darwin’s theory of evolution dealt only with the laws governing the ongoing operation of the organic world; he expunged the question of origins from his theory, which in its developed form said nothing about the origin of life or of matter and energy and the universe. Consequently, his theory could not be affected either favorably or adversely by the introduction of a supernatural Creator as First Cause.[11]





If one was to accept for the moment that reality had in fact a causal initiation and a causal termination or even a goal or purpose one might say Darwin’s theory got in at the middle and discovered a way to safely remain there. As Charles Coulston Gillispie suggests in “The Edge of Objectivity”:





Darwin did better than solve the problem of adaptation. He abolished it. He turned it from a cause, in the sense of final cause or evidence of a designing purpose, into an effect, in the Newtonian or physical sense of effect, which is to say that adaptation became a fact or phenomenon to be analyzed, rather than a mystery to be plumbed.[12]





Therefore, from Lighthall’s point of view, Darwin had integrated a number of particular observations into a paradigm in which the principle or general understanding was not “large” enough for the vision of The Lighthall Theory.





As I use the terms particular and general to describe the theory’s systematic understanding of reality I would like to make clear what I understand the terms to mean in reference to The Lighthall Theory model.

A particular in the mind is any fact or concept which in itself has meaning, and as such, can be used within the cognitive system to build a more comprehensive fact or concept. In concrete conditions, bricks may be said to be particulars of homes when they are used to build houses. On the other hand, they may also be said to be particulars of bridges and transportation systems when they are used to build abutments, and so on.

In conceptual terms, particular color, shade, line and curve are all used to describe that which is considered to be beauty.

Thought, home, bridge and beauty are all generalities of which the aforementioned are in each separate case their particulars.

In turn a generality may in itself be or become the particular of a more general or more complex comprehensive fact or concept. This allows for larger and more comprehensive concepts that can comprehend or communicate knowledge of ever more complex systems of concrete or perceptual form.

In the Lighthall Theory the discovery by the human and the superhuman mind of the ever expanding relationships of particulars to generalities accounts for both biological and cultural progression.





If the Lighthall Theory sought first to apprehend the relationships of particular insights to their generality within particular streams or strings of the evolving human cognitive system it also sought to accounted for the movement of a particular insight from one progression to an apparently entirely different cognitive string.





Lighthall believed that what he called a “known truth” could be used as a particular in any generality where it fitted in order to reveal more of the truth of that generality.

Thus a particular “truth” such as the concept of evolution could be shifted easily from the “incomplete” system of Darwin into the more complete system of Lighthall because in the theorist’s opinion it fitted there.

Nor did Lighthall feel that he had to “prove” the intrinsic validity of the truth i.e.; the particular, as he had chosen to use it because it was already a “known” fact. That is, it had been accepted by the intellectual community of mankind to be true. He could thus use it as a truth or precedent in his argument for the validity of the particular, generality, or colonial truth he was in the process of proposing.

Upon considering cultural evolution as a case for “coloniality” within the Lighthall Theory I found that the founding “insights” of biological evolution appeared simultaneously in the cognitive developmental sequences of at least two separate early thinkers, Wallace and Darwin. However should these apparently independent ideas be traced back through their progression or developmental string it would be found they had common roots in as much as both minds integrated many of the same types of intellectual observations in their own, particular models.

That, according to the Lighthall Theory, was because intellectual truth mirrors the nature of the cosmos. The cosmos in turn is a constant logical progression because the Final Cause is in itself colonial and evolutionary in nature in fact in all aspects of the cosmos. Thus to Lighthall cultural evolution and biological evolution were inseparable.

The cognitive processes Lighthall used in this method of logic can be viewed as a process of coalescence. It is not an exact synonym of cultural or biological coloniality but it describes the thought process by which coloniality is apprehended by the mind of the thinker.

The thinker recognizes the potential relationships of various particulars from various independent progressions. They are then drawn together in mind and apprehended as a newly recognized generality. This process can then continue through a string of logical quantum leaps to greater knowledge and thereby contribute to cultural evolution.





To summarize: The relationship of particular to generality along with the progression chain and the interrelationships called here coloniality are apprehended facets of nature. Within The Lighthall Theory they become apprehensible facets of the cosmos. Coalescence is the tactical process of mind by which the thinker discovers the interrelationship of particulars and the general truth they form at any given quantum. However, as man is himself a “fact of nature” this very process is in itself a facet of nature as a particular generality.





However upon returning to Lighthall’s difficulty with Darwin I discovered that the use of “scientific” data in the Lighthall Theory was intrinsic to a problem Lighthall faced within coalescence. Lighthall encountered the dilemma or paradox of the nature of “truth” as it was noted by Walter Lippmann:





For the modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere. There is no theory of the meaning and value of events which he is compelled to accept, but he is none the less compelled to accept the events.[13]





For the teleological theorist the problem is a matter of the possibility and the probability, of distinguishing the difference between a fact and the interpretation of same.

For modern man especially this presents itself as a Gordian knot. Lighthall considered Kant to be the first modern men.

In the “Critique of the Teleological Judgment” Kant wrote:





There is, then, indeed a certain presentiment of our reason or a hint, as it were, given us by nature, that, by means of this concept of final causes, we go beyond nature and could unite it to the highest point in the series of causes if we were to abandon or at least to lay aside for a time the investigation of nature (although) we may not have advanced far in it) and seek thenceforth to find out whither this stranger in natural science, viz. the concept of natural purposes, would lead us.[14]





This Kantian understanding of the “nature” of facts in their role as particulars led Lighthall to search beyond the observable particular to the whole of which it was a part. A integral whole or generality that may be, at a given point in time, beyond the apprehension of evolving man’s mind.

Kant’s discussion continues with:





But here these undisputed maxims pass over into problems opening out a wide field for difficulties. Does purposive connection in nature “prove” a particular kind of causality? Or is it not rather, considered in itself and in accordance with objective principles, similar to the mechanism of nature, resting on one and the same ground? [15]

Kant had, in point, noted the possibility that the final generality is in fact nature itself. The purpose seen in nature reflects upon no more than the mechanisms of matter in motion in the forms we term living or organic. However, Lighthall also noted that Kant conceded the limitation of the ability of the sciences of his day to observe particulars of nature.

In his own time Lighthall felt that the revealed truth of evolution had broken the former limit of science noted by Kant. Indeed, Lighthall believed his own teleological theory would appeal “to the mind of Darwinian Evolution [because it was] based on the broadest of observed fact bases.”[16] Nor did he feel he was breaking the Kantian limitation of knowledge, for he noted he was “concerned only with questions to which the answers [were] within our reach.”[17]

As Lighthall called his method of thought modified Kantianism [18] it was in Kant I first sought clues as to why Lighthall felt he could legitimately proceed systematically in the manner that he did. It is clear Lighthall felt that, it was due to the lack of available “data,” that Kant had made an understandable error in judgment as to the “nature” of causality. [19]

In contrast, Lighthall felt the science of his own day provided observable facts that made it possible to affirm purposive connection in nature as proof of causality. He believed that he could verify this while remaining within the limits set by Kant in his “Dialectic of the Teleological Judgment”. [20]





Lighthall’s claim that he used a broad base of facts is quite legitimate. He utilized more than one hundred and sixty authorities as his sources. Some are familiar today in the disciplines they represented. Such authorities would include; Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Henri Bergson, George Berkeley, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Edward Von Hartmann, Dean Inge, William James, Benjamin Kidd, John Stuart Mill, William Osler, Plato, Fredrich Schelling, Alfred North Whitehead, William Wordsworth, Henry R. Schoolcraft, Immanuel Kant, to name but a few.

But to know the work of these authors most often lends little to an understanding of the Lighthall Theory because it was particularized facts or insights that Lighthall sought among the ancient and contemporary writers. Within his coalescent process of reasoning Lighthall readily used particulars apprehended by authors whose generalized paradigms he may not have personally agreed with. Therefore, one cannot assume Lighthall was influenced by an authority simply because he used that author as a source.





Lighthall believed that it was the altruistic duty of science to apprehend the particulars of nature within its capability to do so in its own time. These particulars were then the means by which the colonial nature of reality could illuminate the way of philosophy in its “search for a comprehensive view of nature, an attempt at a universal explanation of things”. [21]





From the perspective of my own time the paradoxes of Lighthall’s system appear when he sought to coalesce “fact” and “truth”. Indeed, it was Lighthall’s attempt to weld Kant’s “particularized” philosophy together with scientific “fact” that first drew my attention to the Lighthall Theory. But I wondered if “fact” and “truth” actually slide into each other with the symmetry of Lighthall’s coalescence?

I was once informed by an enthusiastic high school mathematics teacher that his discipline was the only discipline that dealt with truth because it always dealt in absolute fact. “You can only trust numbers to give you the answer,” he informed me.

“But what about one divided by three?” I inquired mischievously. He looked hurt. “You people always trot that one out don’t you,” he retorted.

Perhaps he was right after all 2 + 2 = 4 always works and so does 1 / 3 its just that you have to be satisfied with the process not the result in the later. Happiness may after all be “a paradigm you can believe in.”

I do not say this frivolously, for The Lighthall Theory’s ethical base was a search for proof of a progressively accelerating achievement of greater joy.

Using what was in his day called “common sense” Lighthall sought to organize what he apprehended in nature as proof of a search for the greatest possible joy into a proof of intellectual directive cause; personified, but not necessarily the deity(s) as traditionally apprehended by mankind.





The coloniality of the political organization of the British Empire provided Lighthall with a working manifestation of the coloniality of the directive cause acting in human culture. Within this generality of coloniality Canada could act out its role in the progress toward the greatest happiness.

But the vision of Lighthall’s theory far exceeded Lighthall’s own time and place or even that of mankind. In Lighthall’s historical novel “The Master of Life” the spirit of Quenhia returns to Hiawatha out of the realm of absolute consciousness to prophesy:





“Strange things I see in the grave,” she chanted on, “where, under the earth are innumerable waters and creatures that have lived -- all their doings are before me. Others are coming and others preparing for their turn to go out above the grass. Our race shall pass away and never more be seen upon the Sacred Island. I see there a people, in number like the drops of rain, covering the island with lodges of stone. I see them pass, and a race of the splendor of gods make the land beautiful and fill the skies like birds. I see them pass -- and the earth itself is living and needs but itself for life.[22]





While all this can be apprehended in the generality of Lighthall’s body of work if one is studying Lighthall’s individual philosophic works his tendency to expect the reader to readily coalesce particulars, regardless of the order or style in which they are presented, may pose a problem to cognition.

Lighthall’s method sought to be inductive, yet when I was considering the definitive edition of 1933 I found that the work included two chapters that are partially reworked articles from the “Philosophical Review.” Furthermore the appendices, II and III are actually “addenda” which I believe should have been reworked into the text.

Not an easy style to follow.

Within the chapters themselves Lighthall’s massive use of “evidential” particulars from various authorities may tend to distract the reader from the logic of the argument.

For example, in the first six pages of Chapter One of the definitive editions Lighthall introduces material from Bruce Brotheston, Descartes, Samuel Butler, Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, Henry Rutgers Marshall and Driesch without much real reference to the particular authors own intended use of these same insights.

I believe that this style of presentation may have been due in part to Lighthall’s chosen profession.

As a lawyer Lighthall worked within the logic of precedent which is central to the legal system of apprehension. It certainly appears he considered that the authorities that he used, regardless of their field, were furnishing precedents for his own philosophical conclusions.

Because he used this accumulative system of evidence within his works Lighthall may unintentionally overwhelm the reader with the plurality of authority.

The particular direction of Lighthall’s argument often becomes lost in a reader’s critical reaction to the use of the particular authority in that particular context.

Initially I found myself drifting away from an apprehension of the theory to what I considered to be the peculiarities of Lighthall’s use of authority. The logic Lighthall seeks in progress and is what is required to hold his synthesis in place in the mind of the reader is under considerable stress due to his use of this system and his style.





In order to facilitate my consideration of Lighthall’s theory I have imposed an arbitrary sequential order upon major particulars of the theory in order to discuss them here.

In the Chapters that follow I attempt to outline the basic structure of the theory while providing some insight into the ethical base of the theory and the method by which Lighthall constructed his argument for it.

Hopefully the discourse will reveal some insight into the method an early post-Kantian deist used to integrate the aspects of evolutionary theory into a teleological system.





________________





FOOTNOTES





1 Carl Berger, “The Sense of Power” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 264.





2 W.D. Lighthall, “Canada, A Modern Nation” (Montreal, 1904), p. 78, as quoted in Carl Berger, “The Sense of Power” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 260-61.





3 W.D. Lighthall, “The False Plan of Hochelaga,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3d ser,. vol. 26(2) (Ottawa, 1932), pp. 181-192, as quoted in Bruce G. Trigger and James F. Pendergast, “Saint Lawrence Iroquoians,” Handbook of North American Indians (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), p. 358.





4 R.S. Somerville, “Canadian Celebrities, No. 69, Mr. W.D. Lighthall”, Canadian Magazine, no. 26 (April 1906), p. 553. Lighthall wrote a number of works that reflected his “roots”. See W.D. Lighthall, “The Manor House of Lacolle” (Montreal: privately printed for author, n.d.) and W.D. Schuyler-Lighthall, “The Plan of Campaign,” The Canadian Antiquarian and Numismatic Journal, 3d series, vol. 4, (1902). Note: W.P. Percival calls James Wright “Chief of the Clan,” see Leading Canadian Poets, ed. W.P. Percival (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1948), p. 107. Lighthall wrote of this incident in another pamphlet, see W.D. Lighthall, “An Account of the Battle of Chateauguay” (Montreal: W. Drysdale and Co., 1889).





5 “Songs of the Great Dominion,” ed. W.D. Lighthall (London: Walter Scott, 1889).





6 W.D. Lighthall, “The Governance of Empire” (Montreal: The author, 1910), p. 5.





7 W.D. Lighthall, “A Protest (1895)” Old Measures: Collected Verse (Montreal: A.T. Chapman, n.d.), p. 51, 11. 1-4.





8 W.D. Lighthall, “The Confused Dawn,” Thoughts, Moods and Ideals (Montreal: Witness Printing House, 1887), p. 5, 11. 1-21.





9 W.D. Lighthall, “Canada, A Modern Nation” (Montreal: Witness Printing House, 1904).





10 Thomas S. Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 172.





11 Howard E. Gruber, Paul H. Barrett, “Darwin on Man, together with, Darwin’s Early and Unpublished Notebooks” (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1974), p. 211.





12 Charles Coulston Gillispie, “The Edge of Objectivity” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 317.





13 Walter Lippmann, “A Preface to Morals” (New York: Time Incorporated, 1964), p. 9.





14 Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Judgment,” trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), p. 237. Lighthall considered Kant to be the demarcation line between ancient and modern man.





15 Ibid., p. 237.





16 William D. Lighthall, “The Person of Evolution” (Toronto: MacMillan, 1933), pp. 24-25.





17 Karl Lowith, “Meaning in History” (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1949), p. 70.





18 W.D. Lighthall, “Sketch of a New Utilitarianism” (Montreal: Witness Printing House, 1887), p. 4.





19 W.D. Lighthall, “The Person of Evolution” (Toronto: MacMillan, 1933), p. 166.





20 Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Judgment”, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), pp. 205ff.





21 Alfred Weber, “History of Philosophy”, trans. Frank Thilly (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), p. 1.





22 W.D. Lighthall, “The Master of Life” (Toronto: The Musson Book Co. Ltd. 1908), p. 198.













CHAPTER TWO





CONSIDERING THE SYSTEM OF LIGHTHALL’S THEORY









Insight derived from observable facts in nature was central to Lighthall’s system.

I liked to begin with a simple observation that demonstrated these facts in observed reality.

For example when I drew three particular chalk points on a blackboard and stepped back from them, sooner or later I would have enough distance from the three points in order to see them as a single point.

The three points would have coalesced in the reality or generality of the one thus contributing to the “nature” of the new whole without losing their own particularity.

According to Lighthall the law of coalescence held true for every particular of reality both the abstract and the concrete. Therefore, given the proper progressive distances, the mind’s eye could discern a series of “wholes” of reality ultimately coalescing into the first cause. Through an apprehension of these wholes, Lighthall believed, the acts and vocalizations of mankind loose the masks of rationalization and justification and the true causes lie revealed.





Within the system of The Lighthall Theory the revelation of truth depended on Lighthall’s particular way of using apprehended facts.

In order to distinguish the logic of Lighthall’s theory, it is necessary to assimilate any one particular he presents from two vantage points simultaneously.

The first vantage point is the position in time and space of that particular in the material reality of the cosmic evolutionary process.

The second vantage point is found within the relationships that particular may have within the overall coloniality of knowledge.

For example, I considered the place of amino acids within those contexts.

From the first vantage point they are, among other facts, a particular found throughout a great span of time and space occupied by terrestrial life. On the other hand, mankind, although containing amino acids does not have the same range of time space as the amino acids, however mankind is also a particular of terrestrial life.

From the second vantage point the amino acid and the knowledge of it is a particular of a cellular science and as such is a particular of human medicine that great reducer of human pain and a great potential for altruism and evolutionary progress.

Within the coloniality of knowledge within Lighthall’s theory there is an apprehensible relationship between the particular molecules and all molecules, the particular amino acids and all amino acids, and the particular cells that contain the amino acids and all cells.

When I continued the process of coloniality as understood by Lighthall I discovered that in “fact” the amino acids are a particular of a single human being conceived as a particular of the race group Homo Sapien Sapien. If that individual was a student then it may be induced that amino acids are a particular of students.

Even in this simple demonstration the “logical” sequence of Lighthall’s coloniality has moved readily from a biological sphere into a social or cultural sphere.

This, of course, might appear to open the way to false or untrue statements of fact. Consider a sequence in which the student in question is wearing a beard and the student is in fact a revolutionary.

Within the colonial relationship the “fact” is that amino acids are particulars of revolution. But a possible problem appears in understanding the relationships of the beard and the revolution.

However Lighthall would have said that there is no problem here because “common sense” informs one that the beard is part of the particular biology containing amino acid while the student as revolutionary is a cultural category not a biological one.

We are expected to be able to have the cognitive ability to apprehend these differences.

Lighthall’s theory therefore relies heavily on what Lighthall knew as British “common sense” or as he put it:





the course of thinking which led to it is a strict descendant of British methods, and in nearest genealogy - as far as from any distinct author - from John Stuart Mill - . . . The British spirit - “Seek the facts” -- infuses it. . . .[1]





Very early in the definitive edition of 1933 Lighthall summarized the conclusions he had achieved using the system of The Lighthall Theory, emphasizing their “factual” nature:





Among my chief conclusions of fact are: that life is “always and essentially” characterized by consciousness; that it has “always an affective motive;” that affective feeling (pleasure and pain) is the sole comprehensive basis of “value;” that the whole Evolution of life is “one conscious”, willing, process; that “the beginnings” of “terrestrial life” afford a key to interpretation of the outer universe; that “directivity” is a scientific fact. [2]





From these conclusions I could easily discern those difficulties a more discerning mind might have in determining the theory’s demarcation line between what is usually seen and understood as speculative, as opposed to factual.

For one thing, Lighthall included particulars in his argument which he believed reflected the “effect” of a “cause” which “in itself” proved “direction” and revealed the nature of the consciousness that directed.

For example, when he spoke of the nervous system and hormones the reader had to deal with this process in action:





My view is that neither the nerves nor the hormones determine the control, but that it is one out of the world-full of cases where the directive power uses one or both indifferently in order to accomplish its purposes; and that they both illustrate a hidden knowledge.[3]





Another cause for difficulty was Lighthall’s tendency to ask questions within the text that implied speculative interpretations of facts. [4]

For example, when he considered the process of cell division known as mitosis, Lighthall quoted from Raymond Pearl’s “The Biology of Death”. There Pearl noted that in the process of division, the protozoa, totally looses its own identity as an individual. Mitosis is an observed fact of the life process, but Pearl’s interpretation is speculative. Lighthall then followed his introduction of Pearl with the question: ”Does it [the cell] not rather enlarge its identity?”[5]

At this point in the textual progression it is an “interrogative,” but later, within Lighthall’s theoretical model this supposition appears as an “observed fact” which has assumed the status of a particular.

Lighthall has integrated the scientific observation with his own interpretation of it. However using available perspectives it is possible to observe the same particular (mitosis) one could apprehend the basic premises of two antithetical paradigms: One of death, the other of life.





In fact, these antithetical possibilities that appear in the matrix of biological evolution are the crux of a philosophical problem for Lighthall.

According to the Lighthall Theory any individual (including the savage) could sense the particulars of his own immediate environment.

If the individual did not, or did so and ignored them, that individual might not survive.

However, it was the duty of the philosophic mind (potentially in all, even the savage) to sense the true pattern of intent in the generalities of these particulars and to act upon these altruistically rather than hedonistically.

This was the antithesis of the growing objectivism of Lighthall’s age.

The fact that he personally made these choices in his own life revealed that, while Lighthall was firmly committed to an objective acceptance of the determination of the senses and their interpretation by the mind, he sought to avoid the humanistic trap of absolutism.

For contrast I considered the view of the radical capitalist:





…when one rejects the absolutism of reality, one undercuts the absolutism of one’s consciousness - and one’s mind becomes an organ one cannot trust any longer. It becomes what the mystics claim it to be: a tool of distortion. [6]





According to Lighthall this statement was in error, because it held that a particular (man) was the ultimate generality and that truth was in his hands.

Lighthall considered such ideas at best a remnant of, and at worst a throwback to, the state of absolute savagery.

Lighthall did not consider giving this type of “absolute” standing to his own theory: “If my language should appear dogmatic in places, it is not that I am not aware that nearly every one of the principal conclusions is the subject of strong differences of opinion.”[7] “In using the term ‘theory’ I mean a suggested, not a fully proved one: but it expresses my beliefs. My ideal of it is a truly scientific philosophy.”[8]





It is interesting to note that both ideologue capitalists and communists claim to have their origins in the same British roots as Lighthall’s theory. Ayn Rand informed her readers that, “It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights. . . .[9]

I found Engels quoting Marx: “Hobbes had systematized Bacon without, however, furnishing a proof for Bacon’s fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his essay “Concerning Human Understanding,” supplied the proof.”[10]

I believe that these similarities are accounted for by the fact that all three of these models are paradigms of perfectibility.

In popular capitalism “man” is already perfect in “some individuals”. In popular communism “man” is achieving perfection in “some aggregates.” In The Lighthall Theory the “Directive Cause” will achieve perfection in time. But not necessarily through “mankind.”





Thus my consideration of the structure of The Lighthall Theory must necessarily follow its intrinsic pattern from least perfection towards ultimate perfection. The measure of this course is the achievement of universal joy.





…with each step of this organized survival for permanence was associated a precious psychic phenomenon, - the attainment of joy, the first fact of value, something outside the order of physical phenomena and even of perceptual phenomena. It marked the deeper nature of “living substance”. And with this significant fact went all the facts of directivity.[11]





Lighthall consistently considered all facets of reality from that single standard: “Joy is the sole fundamental basis of the concept of value.”[12]

Lighthall’s view was a digression from the Kantian view that “Happiness is not something sensed but something thought. Nor is it a thought which can be taken from experience. . . .”[13] Kant (with his less “scientific” understanding) considered happiness to be an “idea” outside biological reality.

In the Lighthall Theory ideas had no reality of their own. They were the biological brain’s responses to experience and to direction from the outer consciousness within biological reality.

The Kantian “a priori” of the “rational” mind was antithetical to the Lighthall Theory, because there all consciousness was bound to the material existence of the life experience: “. . . all living substance thinks, in a broad sense. It also feels, and its thinking is the servant of its feeling.”[14]

There is, however, a possible comparison of Kant’s idea of “a priori” with the independent direction of the Directive Cause.

In the human mind the existence of an idea is the result of experience and memory. The illusion, if there is one, of an idea’s independence is due to the inability of the particular memory to draw forth the appropriate particulars of the experience which should have been coalesced in the mind by means of the coloniality of knowledge.





Lighthall made little attempt to elaborate on the “nature” of Joy or Pain, preferring to defer to Lotze and Bain who “…express best this aspect of joy and pain as value-facts.” [15] In the following quotation I believe I discovered what appealed to Lighthall in the Lotze view of affective feeling.

The key as always remains “direction.”





We speak of pleasure and pain in general, just as we do of movement in general; we can abstract from the direction and velocity of the latter, but no movement can occur without having velocity and direction; in the same way pain or pleasure can never “occur” in this formless and colourless generality, but must always have, or rather must always be, something definite in form or colour, as in fact we should say that movement is velocity which has some given direction, and not that it has velocity and direction.[16]





As for the immediacy of feeling, Lighthall left it to his reader’s own experience to provide that particular to the reader’s own mind.

But for whatever generality of Joy that may emerge in time space the Directive Cause has to have advised its particulars in that direction.





An important question for Lighthall continued to be: how did the Directive Cause communicate direction to individual particulars?

At first it appeared to Lighthall that the existence of the law of coalescence indicated a possible means of communication. But the associative linkages were over space and any direct connections there might be there had not yet been apprehended by science.

Furthermore there was, in Lighthall’s opinion, a very large failure rate in the transmission of directive information.

Here Lighthall was faced with the apparent flux, or as cybernetics explained it, the noise, caused by the conspicuous independence of the will of the particulars from the general Will of the Superconsciousness.





In its most primal state this communication was from the generality of the Directive Cause to all living matter and because of the initial source and inception of the nature of living matter, also to non-living matter (ashes to ashes, dust to dust). But apparently because of the characteristic of coalescence, something of the nature of the Directive Cause can exist within its particulars; therefore something of its “independence”[17] is also possible in living matter.

In man this independence was euphemistically or correctly called “free will”. [18]

It is defined within The Lighthall Theory model as the capability of “not” paying attention to the Will of the Directive Cause during coalescence.

But Lighthall also realized that something in his idea of the process of coalescence was not fully developed. It was not until he wrote the appendices of the 1933 edition that Lighthall appeared to have concluded where the source of the problem of miscommunication lay.

Here I found Lighthall weaving particulars of modern physics into the matrix of the theory:





Space is the highway of all movement, the home of all matter and energy and in its Space-Time qualities lies the essential touch with our life, just as they are in essential touch with that Spirit which ever leads us. Are matter and energy forms of one thing as Relativist Einstein seems to prove? It does not change the situation. Nor does it make a difference if we call Time a “dimension of Space.” Time is no more a dimension of Space, or even of Space-Time, than Space is: for both are expressions of one Reality behind them. [19]





Then there is a further suggestion that this was the direction Lighthall was taking in the problem of communication. [20] He noted that the individual body,





was now a collector and distributor of energy - collected from the material universe. That energy was directed from a source independent of the individual. What was that source? Some of it came from the sun, some from the furthest regions of knowable space. It was “all directed”. And that direction has references to a “common life”. The Directive Power ranges through all of space. [21]





It is my opinion that Lighthall felt that energy would turn out to be the likely candidate for the medium of the Will’s communication.

Lighthall was already cognizant of the relationship of man to matter and, therefore, energy:





As “living substance” we have always had a primitive consciousness of “kinship with the external world”--an obscure but indispensable element of knowledge rooted among our first instincts: for we were then on the very borderline of transition from the outer cosmos to our terrestrial career. [22]





It was because of this growing understanding of the encompassing reality of directed energy that the Lighthall Theory model never found it necessary to reject religious experience and its accompanying belief systems.

The processes of “Revelation” and “intervention” were imperative to Lighthall’s own understanding of reality. What he emphatically insisted upon was that as these concepts did exist they had to operate within the matrix of creation and were therefore “ultimately apprehendable.” Lighthall understood faith as a belief in the reality not yet apprehended not as an infinite mystery which put him outside the dogma of the Yahweh an religions.





When Lighthall attempted to deal with the apparently innocent victims annihilated by the collateral damage caused by the processes of progress the theorist turned to utilitarian logic for an answer. He presumed that the Directive Cause was interested in the progress of whole groups or aggregates rather than particular individuals.

This brought him to the following question: When the joy of the whole must supersede the joy of the particular through the dutiful action of the particular (altruistic sacrifice) how does the process override the individual imperative to joy to survival? Lighthall told his readers that it was this very question that gave rise to the Lighthall Theory in the first place. [23]





Having had it constantly verified in his own experience Lighthall accepted both the utilitarian necessity and man’s innate hedonism. Lighthall, thereupon, came to the following conclusion concerning the altruistic act: “…that an individual could deliberately annihilate himself for another evidently imported some element extraneous to the individual’s own ordinary machinery of willing. [24]

His study of this altruistic action and its motivating cause led Lighthall to seek “a world outside the consciousness of the individual” for answers. [25] That world is the system model described by The Lighthall Theory.

Having apprehended the nature of his own world Lighthall firmly placed altruism in the only place where it appeared to him it could function in “the instinct.”[26]

As an instinct it could be driven by the powerful chemical triggers of primal involuntary action. By assigning an instinctive nature to the altruistic act, Lighthall could use coloniality and coalescence to explain that adherence to its command could produce increased joy in the population aggregate of mankind.





Thus when Lighthall finally drew the outline of the theory’s model he began with a probe of the very limits of the biological definition of life. In the process that followed the law of coalescence abandoned the traditional demarcation line between non-living and living matter:





…the behaviour of those apparently “non-living” “chemical” substances operating in all animated bodies, which act just as fitly and intelligently, in the service of the general Directive Power, as do the nerves, the instincts, and even the intelligence itself. [27]





When he referred to these chemical substances in their pre-biotic existence he did so as simple molecular chains and referred to that being the entire generality of their colonial reality. That is to say, before their colonial coalescence in cellular life.

In the process of considering this initial coloniality of life Lighthall referred to electrical energy as being the point from which consciousness would evolve:





Through each of them coursed the galvanic currents of the elementary life. And each unit vibrated in response to the impacts passed to it by its neighboring units and coming from the whole outer universe. The psychic side of those responses was the primal form of our terrestrial consciousness. . . .[28]





As the law of coalescence had been shown to have overcome the limits set by the paradigm of biological science and as the atom was a colonial particular of the molecular chain of amino acid Lighthall suggested “that the atom ought now to be frankly regarded as “a member of the terrestrial line of life”.[29]





However, having attained a place within the coloniality of a complex biological molecular chain an amino acid unit, for example, now faced the possibility of its own non-existence, which might occur during a catastrophic break-up of that complex chain of which it was now a part. From this necessity of coping with the possible reversal of the progress of complex coloniality Lighthall believed there developed the processes which the theory identified as “directed progress”.





That which caused the reversal of coloniality and coalescence was apprehended by the biological unit as pain, which it avoided; that which encouraged coloniality and coalescence was identified as joy, which was sought.

Initially this process was due to the primal chemical reactions of a single cell which then progressed through evolution to become the more complex reactions within a nervous system.

But the primal function of the system which also included basic reproduction and maintenance was the increase of aggregate Joy or affective feeling.





The Lighthall Theory viewed affective feeling as both the motive and the effect of the evolutionary process, because of its explanation of, and commitment to, the paradigm of evolution as progress: “....judging by the advances continually made, we may legitimately hope to entirely overcome pain in the due course of Progress, which is itself the law of Evolution.”[30] The ideal of progress was the optimistic heart of the theory.

Dean Inge who would call the ideal of progress “the lay religion of the last century” [31], suggested:





The fanatics of perfectibility fall into two classes. On the one side there are the utopians who resemble the chiliasts or millenarians of early Christianity. The other school looks for a slow and gradual amelioration, which will proceed for endless aeons, till perfection is reached. This was the dream of nineteenth century Liberalism.[32]





While I would hardly call Lighthall a fanatic, he did belong to the latter school. Beyond that he also rejected the view of Kant, who had laid his stress on “moral” amelioration.

As Bury pointed out, for Kant,





morality was an absolute obligation founded in the nature of reason. Such an obligation presupposes an end to be attained, and this end is a reign of reason under which all men obeying the moral law mutually treat each other as ends in themselves. Such an ideal state must be regarded as possible, because it is a necessary postulate of reason. [33]





Lighthall did not have Kant’s confidence in reason. He believed that morality had to come from beyond man because man was constantly under an imperative edict of hedonism.

Therefore the revealed fact that there was a hope of morality in some possible future was the keystone to Lighthall’s optimism. He rejoiced that “There are, thank Heaven! powers and arrangements through which we can not only “think” beyond ourselves but act beyond ourselves.”[34]

That power was in the Directive Cause, and the arrangement was in man’s instinct, not his reason. Therefore, the law of perfectibility existed as a particular of the firmly established law of evolution.





In order to apprehend the position of reason within the structure of The Lighthall Theory I had to turn once more to coloniality and the law of coalescence and consider how they apply to Lighthall’s understanding of consciousness.

I discovered the key in the relationship of man’s consciousness to the “outer consciousness” of the Directive Cause. [35]

Lighthall’s definitive argument for the particular of consciousness is quite disjointed.[36] I have, therefore, woven together a number of statements from the definitive edition which I believe illustrate the theorist’s comprehension of the basic nature of human consciousness.





At one point in his work Lighthall reduced this particular to a single sentence: “Reason is but the consciousness of wholes, and their implications, - the Outer Consciousness - human reason is that consciousness imperfectly present in us.”[37] This statement become clearer when I noted that the theory understood that “Reason and instinct, intuition and genuine faith (not credulity) are all forms of one process” [38] -- the human consciousness.

The nature of the human consciousness as a “whole” was given by Lighthall as:





Instinct is a less evolved Intelligence. The instinctive process receives light and interpretation from the characteristics of Intelligence, and the interpretation of Intelligence reciprocally receives light from the characteristics of Instinct. Both are evolved; both are imperfect manifestations of a far greater Intelligence and a more complete Knowledge. [39]





That more complete knowledge was that of the Directive Cause; which is knowledge based on intellect, “and like that of the separate instincts, is based on the same principles as what we know as reasoning.”[40]

Further, in the manifestations of those particulars, intelligence and instinct, instinct is called the deeper knowledge [41] and, therefore, is more immediate to the Outer Consciousness. Intelligence on the other hand manifests itself in the capacity of the clearer consciousness to interpret sense perception comprehensibly.

Lighthall portrayed the process by which these particulars interact within the generality of human consciousness within the real time space of living in the following manner:





If we examine the connection between the Outer and Inner Consciousness, we will notice that when an instinct, such as the maternal, wells up in a human inner consciousness, it blends with the conscious reasoning of the moment, and the two correct one another for the best welfare of - in the example of maternity - the infant. Since this is a typical example, it proves the continuity of our conscious purposing with that of the Outer Consciousness. . . .[42]





Now I must turn to the particular that is instinct and consider it in relation to its central position in man’s reality in the Lighthall Theory.

Lighthall’s view of instinct was distinctly Lamarkian for Lighthall found Darwin’s theory to be inadequate because it lacked the element of social progress that Lighthall sought in Lamarkian thought. [43]

I believe the key to Lighthall’s Lamarkianism is in the principle of “the act of willing”. How this matter was viewed by Lamark was expressed by C.G. Gillispie in “The Edge of Objectivity”:





. . .in Lamark only life can act, for life and activity are ultimately one. Rather, the environment is a shifting set of circumstances and opportunities to which the organism responds creatively, not precisely as the expression of its will (although Lamark’s admirers interpreted him in that fashion), but as an expression of its whole nature as a living thing. [44]





Upon considering the nature of coloniality and coalescence within the structure of the Lighthall Theory, it becomes apparent to me that Lighthall’s view was in many aspects similar to that of Lamark. On the other hand, in Lighthall’s model the will that directed the instinct to “respond creatively” to pleasure and pain was transmitted, through coalescence, to the individual, from the Will of the Directive Cause. In The Lighthall Theory the Lamarkian factor was a particular of the Law of Progress.[45]





Lighthall’s Theoretical model functioned mechanically on the possibility of will being transferable. In Lighthall’s opinion it was this transferable will which directed the endocrine process -- “the wisdom of the body. . . .”[46] Thus while all the chemical processes in living bodies, both catalytic and induced, are part of material reality (ashes and dust) there is with them their constant companion - consciousness:





My view is that neither the nerves nor the hormones determine the control, but that it is one out of the world-full of cases where the directive power uses one or both indifferently in order to accomplish its purpose; and that they both illustrate a hidden knowledge. [47]





This was a prime example of how the cyclical proof constant, perhaps data feedback would be a more modern term for it, which is a factor in the logic of the Lighthall Theory and how it functions within it.

Consider: The Will of the Directive Cause effects action which illustrates the knowledge of the Directive Cause. Apprehending the knowledge reveals the existence of the Will. That revelation in man extends the motivation of the Will by integrating the wills. There the “definite maxim” is the expansion of Joy. Which is the motivation within the Will that effects action completing the reinforcement impulse of the cycle.

There follows here an extensive quotation in which Lighthall once more runs through the structure of the theory, this time positioning the Will:





It is now a truism that not even at his highest can man escape his place as part of nature; nor may we not add, his qualities as a part of living substance.

… His individual will is a rill of the River of Evolution, an organ of the will of the Person of Evolution, his directive power a portion of the Larger Directive Power. Analysis therefore of this typical act of will throws light on the larger. Man’s typical act of will is a concomitance of (1) a series of conscious phenomena (desire or aversion, and joy or pain) with (2) a series of material phenomena (leading to conditions of Joy or Pain). The concomitance between the conscious and the material, in action, implies a bond between the two; and in that mysterious bond lies the source of directivity. It runs through all acts of will. It is part of a great world, which not being itself phenomenal is not directly knowable to us. It is the shield between the sides …

It is out of this mysterious, omnipresent source that the Directive Power emanates. All directivities, individual, communal, and evolutionary, are parts of its one stream. Behind the phenomenal universe is the directive universe. [48]





Thus mankind has a place as an integral part of a system. The aggregate of mankind obeys its “law” reflexively, imperfectly, but with purpose, and therefore the individual can legitimately claim to have an answer to that terrible question: “Why am I?”









___________________





FOOTNOTES





1 William D. Lighthall, “Sketch of a New Utilitarianism” (Montreal: Witness Printing House, 1887), p. 3.





2 William D. Lighthall, “The Person of Evolution” (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), p. 14.





3 William D. Lighthall, “Sketch of a New Utilitarianism” (Montreal: Witness Printing House, 1887), p. 76.





4 For examples see Lighthall, “Person”, pp. 33, 90 and 185 among many more.





5 W.D. Lighthall, “Person,” p. 98.





6 Ayn Rand, “The Virtue of Selfishness” (Toronto: Signet Books, 1964), p. 38. Rand adds: “Man’s need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality. . . .”





7 Lighthall, “Person,” pp. 13-14.





8 Ibid., p. 235.





9 Ayn Rand, “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” (New York: Signet Books, 1967), p. 138. Lighthall’s philosophic line was from Bacon through Locke to Kant.





10 Freiedrich Engels, “On Historical Materialism” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Basic Writing on Politics and Philosophy,” ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1959), p. 49.





11 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 81.





12 Lighthall, “Person”, p. 129.





13 Immanuel Kant, “Precritic Ethics” (a fragment) as quoted in “Lose Blatter,” Reiche ed. trans. Schilpp, p. 129, as quoted in Immanuel Kant, “Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,” trans. L.W. Beck (New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1959), p. 36 fn.





14 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 30.





15 Ibid., p. 46.





16 Herman Lotze, “Microcosmus,” trans. E. Hamilton and E.E. C. Jones (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, n.d.), Vol. 2, p. 695.





17 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 34.





18 The word free must be equated with dissociation. See Lighthall, “Person,” p. 37. It is therefore not seen as a positive state.





19 Lighthall, “Person”, p. 241.





20 Lighthall was considering one more reworking of the material but it was never published. See Lighthall, “Person,” p. 235.





21 Lighthall, “Person,” pp. 240-241.





22 Ibid., pp. 83-84.





23 Ibid., p. 107.





24 Ibid., p. 12.





25 Ibid.





26 Ibid., p. 107.





27 Ibid., p. 237.





28 Ibid., p. 80.





29 Ibid., p. 238. This is a further modification of Kantian thought: “But the possibility of living matter cannot even be thought; its concept involves a contradiction, because lifelessness, “inertia,” constitutes the essential character of matter.” Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Judgment,” trans., J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), p. 242. Lighthall is in fact questioning the paradigm which justified the existence of a demarcation line between the sacred and the profane.





30 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 53.





31 William R. Inge, “The Fall of the Idols” (London: Putnam, 1940), p. 21.





32 Inge, “Idols,” p. 31.





33 John B. Bury, “The Idea of Progress” (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 247.





34 Lighthall, “Sketch,” p. 20.





35 In further discussion I will consider in some detail the natures of the Directive Cause and man and their relationship.





36 For example in chapters 12 and 13 respectively, of the definitive edition, he spent a great deal of time with Hobhouse and Spencer without really working the discussion into the theory.





37 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 51.





38 Ibid., p. 199. See also pp. 72ff. and 117.





39 Ibid., p. 85.





40 Ibid., p. 26. For Lighthall on reason in ethics (an earlier view) see Lighthall, “Sketch,” pp. 19ff.





41 Ibid., p. 85.





42 Ibid., p. 143.





43 Henry Drummond also insisted on the social factor. Consider: “. . .all the work and thought and life and aspiration of man. The great moral fact, the moral forces so far as they are proved to exist, the moral consciousness, so far as it is real, must come within its [evolutions] scope. Human history must be as much a part of it as Natural History.” Henry Drummond, “The Ascent of Man” (New York: James Pott and Co., 1899), p. 10. Interestingly something of this view can be found with a more modern writer. See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Phenomenon of Man” (London: Wm. Collins Sons, 1959), pp. 198 et al.





44 Gillispie, “Objectivity,” p. 272.





45 Others objected to this view. Consider: “On Lamarkian principles he [man] ought to be getting innately better in each generation. There is, unfortunately, no evidence for this view.” John B.S. Haldane, “The Causes of Evolution” (New York: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 130.





46 Lighthall, “Person”, p. 79. Lighthall appears to have included all catalytic chemical actions in living matter, including the enzyme processes, in terms of hormones. Catalytic action could be considered directive in nature.





47 Ibid., p. 76. Lighthall uses the beaver to provide an example of the hidden knowledge at work. That being the creature’s instinctive engineering ability.





48 Ibid., pp. 65-66.









----------------









CHAPTER THREE





CONSIDERING THE CREATOR AND THE CREATED





According to The Lighthall Theory’s understanding of consciousness the hedonistic imperative forces self to be the highest priority in the individuals existence. As hedonistic delusions tend to break down the coalesced cosmic generality in mind, the individual can go so far as to believe that when they die the universe dies with them. Thus if the creating force of the Directive Cause is the first cause human consciousness begins by believing itself to be the final and ultimate result of the Will. Whether it ever leaves this infantile state is another matter entirely.





Lighthall was very explicit about what the Directive Cause was not:





It is not a concept of any universal Idealism, subjective, objective, nor monist, Greek, German nor English: not the Stoic Nature; not the First Cause, the Absolute, not a Neo-Platonic personification of The One, nor of Logos, Wisdom, or what-not; not Schopenhauer’s Will; nor Von Hartmann’s Unconscious; no immanent Brahma; no Ormuzd, Tao, Demiurge, Weltgeist, Oversoul or entelechy; no Cosmic Consciousness; nor Mill’s Limited God; nor Spencer’s Unknowable Power; nor Arnold’s Power Not Ourselves that Makes for Righteousness; it is not transcendental, mystical, spiritualistic, intellectualistic, nor a creation of imagery or poetic license. [1]





Without making light of Lighthall’s disclaimers The Lighthall Theory did have its inception in the same changing pattern of the turbulent nineteenth century that produced many of the theories he mentions here.

Faced with the new paradigm of science, many philosophical thinkers attempted to refute the existence of, or at the very least, to redefine the nature of, the creator and/or director of reality.

For those who chose to redefine, most worked using methods of subtraction. That is to say they dropped much of what was now seen as merely mythical. For example they rejected the biblical genesis and substituted a geological one but left their own particular “god” in command.

Lighthall, on the other hand, chose to reconstruct the entire “creative truth” from the ground up. I say “re-construct” for there is very little that is new to the human imagination in the Lighthall Theory.

The central theme of the Lighthall Theory was the theorist's idea of perfectibility. As he suggested himself, the nineteenth century shifted the ideal of the “Kingdom” to the corporeal reality of a material universe. It is interesting how readily the perfect kingdom in heaven became, once more, as in its ancient Mesopotamian roots, a perfectible kingdom here on earth. But this time the power to produce the forthcoming perfectibility slipped into the hands of men.

Indeed Hobhouse said:





It is not that our little lives are rounded in ourselves. On the contrary, if we find happiness anywhere, it is only in merging ourselves in some greater object. It is that if all objects worthy of effort may be considered as contributing to the advancement of mankind, this advancement, properly understood, goes not over the bodies and souls of individuals like a Juggernaut’s car, but through their heightened activities and larger lives like a quickening spirit. Here precisely lies the issue between two views of the state. In the democratic or humanitarian view it is a means. In the metaphysical view it is an end. In the democratic view it is the servant of humanity in the double sense that it is to be judged by what it does for the lives of its members and by the part that it plays in the society of mankind. In the metaphysical view it is itself the sole guardian of moral worth. In the democratic view the sovereign state is already doomed, destined to subordination in a community of the world. In the metaphysical view it is the supreme achievement of human organization. [2]





Yet in Lighthall’s view there remained the unanswered question of the “quickening spirit.” It was to that particular that he applied the inductive method of his theory as he sought to discover the ultimate source of that force. [3]





Others of Lighthall’s “first century” sought the solution to perfectibility solely in man. Of these, the objectivist materialists were to become the most common. Some called themselves capitalists, some called themselves communists and so on -- names infinitum. What they had in common, above all else, was an idealized absolutist vision of a perfectible social organism.

That is where Lighthall differed from the idealists - utopian and otherwise. His model was never absolutist, but sought rather for the potentialities for progression in mankind.

But Lighthall did not remain with man. In the following short discussion I will demonstrate the process by which the Lighthall Theory comes to the generality of the Directive Cause from the particulars of man.





When Kant denied himself the rational existence of God, he had to provide a viable alternative source of ethical imperatives: in simplistic terms, an alternative to a god message on tablets of stone. His alternative was the “a priori”:





for example, pure sincerity in friendship can be demanded of every man, and this demand is not in the least diminished if a sincere friend has never existed, because this duty in general, prior to all experience, lies in the idea of a reason which determines the will be “a priori” grounds.[4]





But how was Lighthall, the inductive thinking scientific philosopher, to accept the evidence of an “a priori” as fact when it is something not experienced and appeared to claim existence through the mere imagination of man, albeit rational man. Moreover Kant, who stated that man cannot know God AKA Yahweh through reason, appeared to expect a rational acceptance of the existence of an absolute, for example, the absolute of “pure” sincerity as a priori. Beyond that absolutism this “a priori” was to be accepted as “being” outside experience but not outside of “faith.” Yet it had to have a basis in authority somewhere. Kant indicated that the authority lay in the mind of the rational being: in consciousness.





Here lay the ultimate paradox for Lighthall.





While Lighthall agreed that the concept of an “a priori” of ethical imperative was a particular of consciousness, his understanding of consciousness was far more encompassing than Kant’s was.

Lighthall wrote that in all living forms “we recognize the presence of consciousness. . . .” While Kant’s “consciousness” was that of the “rational being,”[5] Lighthall’s “consciousness” is the generality-consciousness, of which reason was but a particular, and in order to supersede the hedonistic imperative to joy, the authority of the ethical “a priori” had to be of what Lighthall called the deeper consciousness.

Thus I came to the final key to the structure of the theory and found myself at Lighthall’s own beginning. For it is in that deeper consciousness that he found that “element extraneous to the individual’s own ordinary machinery of willing.” [6] The Lighthall Theory agrees with Schelling that “consciousness” is a constitutive part of the Directive Cause; [7] although not necessarily God at that level of coloniality.[8]





Who or what is this Directive Cause that stands between man the particular and the ultimate cosmic whole? It is the ultimate Person of Evolution. It is a living spirit and is, therefore, imminent, “but perhaps finite, to us; and, like the starry system, a concrete subject of simple inductive scientific research. In its terrestrial form at least it is a biological entity. It is to be investigated factually.”[9] Of the biological nature of the Directive Cause Lighthall stated,





As far as we see it terrestrially it is no Absolute Divine Being, although the facts concerning it greatly broaden the basis of evidence of the theistic Argument. It is “a biological entity -- a vast composite, living reasoning being, of which all lesser individuals are extensions”. In its enormous sphere seemingly it is occupied with the same aim as we--the universal attainment of happiness and flight from sorrow and agony. It aims at the same ideals as we--infinite happiness for all the entire knowable universe. It has the same striving as we to arrange those material forces in the midst of which it lives into such shapes that they may not obstruct its aims. [10]





According to Lighthall the “entire” nature of the Directive Cause was unknowable to “present” man. However, the effects of its willing were apprehendable in natural history, which, of course, includes human history as a particular. From this “factual” evidence Lighthall believed man could apprehend certain aspects of the nature of the Directive Cause. Thus the theorist could propose such “names” for the Directive Cause as: The Person of Evolution; The Outer Consciousness; The Directive Power, and The Hyperpsych.

Lighthall considered that the apprehendable nature of the Directive Cause would be twofold being of both matter and consciousness.

Of its material nature the theory states,





Every conscious individual then, is a projection of the Outer Consciousness, and is himself one of its local organs of feeling, thought and action. For unnumbered ages it has thrust out such feelers into all the places that life can live in or know; for unnumbered ages it will continue to do so. [11]





When considering consciousness in the light of the Lighthall Theory I discovered there was no escaping the model of integration, through the law of coalescence, of concepts normally understood by science as separate neurological functions of the brain.

For example, instinct and reflex become “Instinct in the broadest sense”. [12] “Now in them are being pursued ends that are only explicable in terms of effective feeling (happiness and pain) which is a form of consciousness. . . .,”[13] hence they are all based on the principle “. . .we know as reasoning.”[14]

The basis of this understanding was a law which Lighthall described as follows:





Light is thrown upon that question by the compound nature of consciousness. The consciousness of every man, and of all complex living beings is “colonial” in its composition, that is to say it is a flow of coalesced conscious states derived from the trillions of component cell - and nerve - organisms of which his body is made up -- each living its own life. This view necessitates the general conclusion that one consciousness “can be coalesced” with another. Many have held this form of the idea. One is stated by Huxley in his “Physiology,” on “the coalescence of sensations with one another and with other states of consciousness.” But by coalescence I mean something more than what psychologists call “fusion”. A law of Coalescence of Consciousness, might perhaps be formulated as follows: “Every conscious unit has the faculty of coalescing its consciousness with, and of decoalescing it from, that of another conscious unit or group, under certain conditions.” This principle is apparently a result of the unity of all consciousness at a general source. [15]





Following this explanation the model, once more, became unclear as to how the communicative process by which coalescing takes place occurs. At first blush the expectation of communication whispers of divination and miracles. Lighthall himself asked the question: “How is this passage between the Outer field and the individual accomplished and to what does it extend?” [16] Lighthall’s answer was a light one for he simply fell back to using the evidence of multiple particulars. He then concluded “No one can contemplate the evolutionary history of life with its increasing aggregation of cells and departments in the evolving creatures and their cooperative nature, without recognizing the truth of the colonial conception in mental as well as physical organization.” [17]





Later, however Lighthall introduced “Dreaming.” His approach to this ancient realm of possibility was extremely cautious: “Dream-life is one of the spheres of the Outer Consciousness, apparently somewhat as it is one of the spheres of the inner -- a borderland of both and not fully expressing either. Into it enter the suggestions to us of the instincts and functions -- creatures and instruments of that of which the Outer Consciousness is an expression.” [18]

Apparently it is in this borderland that the problem of communication lies. In material terms, the failure to translate the Will into an acceptable motivation for will to action in the particular. This appears to be especially true when neurological evolution developed that particular in man we tend to call reason and which Lighthall termed the “clearer consciousness”.





Nevertheless, it was in these “borderlands” that mankind has met the creator in the past. What then is the nature of this borderland?

Lighthall stated:





The Outer Consciousness is much more exact and systematic than ordinary dreaming, for example, for its actions are not wandering, but are clearly shaped along definitive laws of purpose. Nevertheless it has several resemblances to the dreaming state. Dreaming is largely a (to us disconnected) review of the distant past experiences of our ancestry, providing an arsenal of suggestions derived from these experiences and ready for connection with the current stream of our sensory experiences. Every dream is largely made up of memories, chiefly inherited and of vast antiquity. All animal life below us is in a state of dream. And even when we are most awake we also dream, beneath the surface of our waking thought. [19]





Lighthall made clear in his model that the Will of the Directive cause is always immanent. To apprehend it mankind must pay “attention.” “Those who obey the urge to listen to the holy voices will ultimately hear them.” [20] “From this knowledge, do not some glimpses reach the individual man in such forms as flashes of genius and promptings of the Inner Light? And at least from its will, come such messages to the man as impulses to public service and patriotic and religious martyrdom, as well as all his instinctive promptings.” [21]





Lighthall considered that there are two distinct streams of messages directed at mankind through this conduit. First there are the messages that instruct man to the public good. These are bound up in the realm of “instinct”.

The second stream contains what Lighthall expresses as experiential “glimpses” of the Will. I can find no better comparison for what Lighthall suggested here than aspects of traditional mysticism. Indeed when I turned to Lighthall’s fiction I found that that is precisely what the theorist contended.

In the novel ”The Master of Life”, the mystic Hiawatha’s dead platonic lover Quenhia returned to him in a dream [22] and revealed to the founder of the League the entire vision of The Lighthall Theory:





“Strange things I see in the grave,” she chanted on, “where, under the earth are innumerable waters and creatures that have lived -- all their doings are before me. Others are coming and others preparing for their turn to go out above the grass. Our race shall pass away and never more be seen upon the Sacred Island. I see there a people, in number like the drops of rain, covering the island with lodges of stone. I see them pass, and a race of the splendor of gods made the land beautiful and fill the skies like birds. I see them pass -- and the earth itself is living and needs but itself for life. But ever the sun and the moon continue, and our live is between them like a star in the sky. [23]





Nevertheless, even such visions are apparently not always a reliable way to persuade hedonistic mankind to obey. This led Lighthall to contemplate that: “Like the lesser biological entities, it [the Directive Cause] perhaps has its trials and sorrows, its struggles, its happiness, its limitations of knowledge, its explorations of its sphere.” [24] “…there are apparently limits to its power. Are not such shown in the constant struggle to attain its ends, in the everlasting procession of its failures, in the horrible carnage and disasters in nature, the bestialities and social cannibalism of men?” [25]

These are all problems in the particulars, however, and the inevitability of progress in the general remains the cosmic imperative! That progress is achieved slowly “not because blindly, but restricted by time and the intractability of matter. The nature of that intractability doubtless also transcends our cognition.” [26]





At a much later point in his argument Lighthall returned once more to this particular of time in relation to the Directive Cause:





How can a terrestrial, or even a wider, biological entity be conceived as other than existing in time and space: and if conscious, conceiving itself as so existing? But does not Einstein recognize a “relativity of simultaneity?” May there not be another “relativity of time”. Consider some short-lived butterfly’s view of time if it could have one…

What if the Outer Person regards all geological time as we regard a moment? It is not likely that Outer Person time is very much like human time. [27]





Therefore the terrors of the trial and error [28] method of the Directive Cause are exaggerated in the lifetime of mankind only because of the immediate nature of the individual’s particular disposition to experience them as such.





Further, in order to come to a better understanding of the nature of the Directive Cause I was expected to consider this matter of time in the light of “its care for vast numbers, rather than for the individual.” [29]





This contemplation of the Directive Cause will end on the rather ironic note that although The Lighthall Theory sought to be teleological [30] Lighthall finally had to face the paradox of the limitations of the entity in his own time space. Something ordinary theologists regularly avoid by simply emerge it in mystery for later consideration at the end of time - theirs that is.

Quoting Lighthall:





The Outer Consciousness, as we find it terrestically (sic), is certainly not the Perfect Ideal Supreme Being. Nor is the problem a question of any such Dualism as of Ormuzd against Ahriman. The problem of God, as Ultimate and Absolute, is a different one and remains to theology. And the metaphysical question also remains: what directs the directive power of the terrestrial Outer Consciousness? [31]





Upon turning to the created I found that within the model of the Lighthall Theory mankind holds no uniquely indispensable existence in the evolutionary structure of creation. The role man does play he holds in the “process” of evolution. The “implication of this is that even though man were blotted out, some branch of the inferior mammals would ultimately fill his place.” [32]





Nor is the individual human being an independent free agent: “To the Person of Evolution the individual is an organ, a member of its community body, a kind of cell of its multi-cellular whole. . . . The disconnection of individuals is an illusion. “There is no such thing as a fully disconnected individual.” [33] Therefore, it is a truism, “that not even at his highest can man escape his place as part of nature. . . .” [34]





Considering the above as the horizontal dimension of man’s reality, then there is also his vertical dimension:





In the scale of living beings known to us biologically, each includes in its mental makeup the mental make-ups of all its ancestors. Those ancestors still actually live within us, according to the principles of “biological immortality” whereby each of them has simply divided himself and passed on his divisions (except the sarcoplasm) alive to his descendants, with all the hidden memories and influences of the ancestral history. In that respect each of us is many hundreds of millions of years old. We never escape the influences of the primeval, the far distant, the universal and of relation to everything. [35]





This statement is comparable to Butler’s assertion that we “actually were our remote ancestors…” [36] and is reflected in Lighthall’s Lamarkian evolutionary view. If man was changed in his reality as an aggregate it was due to the accumulated remembered experience of coping with past necessity.

Thus mankind’s reality was both colonial and coalescent in both time and space. Any given individual may exhibit what appear to be unique particulars but they are, if they actually exist, infinitesimal in relation to the mass of the continual integrating particulars.

The Lighthall Theory proposes that the Will works in mankind at two levels that of the imperative instinct to survive and the adjunct instinct to the altruistic act

In the realm of primal consciousness, the imperative instinct to survive is that of attaining joy and is the ultimate motivation of man’s action. His coalescing of will with the Directive Cause triggers this hedonism.

While this creature of operation appears to have the characteristics of the clockwork automaton Lighthall actually rejected the mechanistic view of evolution. He stated that “the mechanical deduction for this great hypothesis is defective: it would explain only the survival of a sequence of unfeeling machines. What it does not explain is the attainment… of pleasures and avoidance of pains…

It is this which proves purposing, instead of meaningless, action or symmetry.” [37]

Lighthall saw meaning for man in this attainment of Joy. It appears that man’s reality within The Lighthall Theory model was linked firmly to “affective feeling,” both the individual’s affective feeling as particular and the Directive Cause’s growing affective feeling as the ultimate generality or cosmic whole.

While the hedonistic nature of mankind generated a measure of joy and a larger aggregate of joy could be achieved by the cloning of the same particular joy through population growth. But the effectiveness of the aggregate in that circumstance would remain flat as would the level of pain. There would be no evolution in the aggregate or in the First Cause

Progress could not be attained and maintained when there was either an error in direction from the Directive Cause or a disregarding of direction by the particular, either through self-centeredness or lack of attention.

This lack of attention may be due in part to the partially dislocated reality of any given individual.

Lighthall offered a “limitations” apology to explain the inconsistency or “apparent” error in the signal adding, nonetheless, the reminder that there was a higher level of existence than mankind:





If confusion has sometimes resulted from the fact that in man, his ends sometimes have the appearance of being devoid of any motive of joy or pain, or may even occasionally court pain rather than joy, it is because the true end does not lie on the surface of the individual consciousness but in the larger consciousness behind it. [38]





This view reinforced the mechanistic view, or if you wish the scientific Calvinism, [39] which can be detected in The Lighthall Theory. Still it is a mechanism of process and I would like to consider what that process means in man within the model.





Man is under the primal edict to seek to attain joy, and -- with, perhaps, the exception of the altruistic act -- inevitably attempts to do so. But the result of any such action may be pain in one form or another somewhere within the matrix, therefore, the problem appears to lie in “the means taken to obtain the joy”.

Now the understanding of primitive utilitarianism would accept any means as long as upon doing the books the result came out on the joy-plus side of the joy-pain equation. [40] However, although Lighthall was utilitarian in the particular, he tended to be a utopian idealist in the general:





With regard to its [the Directive Cause’s] character, I shall only repeat that its source of action is inferentially a Personality, with an ultimate aim which is mirrored dimly in the ideal curve of the aspirations of the children of life -- the general happiness of that Tree of Personality, the mighty universe, the original Living Substance. [41]





Therefore, it follows that in order to achieve “general happiness” particular pain must ultimately be eliminated from the equation. Thus the Directive Cause must confront pain at its source, wherever it exists. Any biological entity whose endeavors produces pain, in any way, must ultimately become extinction or be redirected to an alternative means of existence through evolution.





Why does living matter appear to have the constant difficulty with following such re-direction? Ironically this is ultimately due to the independence of the Directive Cause. It in itself does not depend upon living or non-living matter for its existence. Thus living matter’s consciousness is once removed from the consciousness of the Directive Cause. Coalescence is possible but not omnipresent.

Thus a given consciousness in the particular, say a human being, at any given time, could exist independently in the particular or independently in the whole of which that particular belongs through coloniality, i.e., a man or woman within a race, or the given consciousness can be said to exist in the particular both individually and as race in coalescence with the Directive Cause, as in the progress of evolution.

It appears that man is more exposed in respect to the later process than other living matter. This is primarily due to his specialized brain -- this particular of matter with its dichotic mate, the clearer, but more dislocated human consciousness.

This apparent dislocation of mind from brain makes “reason” twice removed from the Directive Cause, which, as Kant pointed out, makes direct rational communication impossible. Lighthall, however was certain that communication remained possible between mind and the Directive Cause, but reason must remain an observer; after the fact -- as best it can.





This clearer consciousness of the human mind is especially handicapped by its lack of experience -- having only its own personal history to fall back on. It is for this reason that it has difficulty thinking in generalities and is immanently prone to errors in judgment. Therefore, it is quite understandable that the individual functioning under the imperative of their instinct to joy is readily able to rationalize whatever pain he or she causes in the world of the living.

Further, the individual is usually incapable of or refuses to extrapolate their actions beyond the present time and space of their own hedonism.

Thus we might say that the human being, ethically speaking, is quite capable of defecating in its own nest until it terminates its own genetic line in the name of the illusion of cultural “progress.”





Lighthall was painfully aware of this contradiction in man. But before I move on to Lighthall’s proposed “solution” to the problem I would like to take a closer look at that particular of the human mind: the clearer consciousness within The Lighthall Theory model.





The model of the clearer consciousness contains at least three particulars that were pertinent to Lighthall’s “solution”. The first is a limited and dislocated history. Because of this man tends to view himself through the illusion of total dislocation and thinks of himself as being apart from all other life, even going so far as to develop peculiar origin myths to reinforce this illusion.

The second particular of the clearer consciousness is its tendency to limit its field of experience to the earliest stages of its development. It appears satisfied to remain “on hold” in the stage of infantile gratification within hedonistic objectivism. Conducive to this stagnation are those rationalizations which are voiced by cultures throughout history to justify their unconditional search for joy. In other words, mankind can always find someone, or some thing other than himself or herself to blame.





The third particular is the fact that the clearer consciousness contains the “potential” for the appreciation of “Beauty”.

Thus the clearer consciousness in man is the organ of sensory perception which can be stimulated by the beautiful to affective feelings of joy.

In The Lighthall Theory beauty is already an “a priori” realization in the “mind” of the Directive Cause. Thus observed creation which is “the infinite storehouse of beauty” [42] is potentially the source of the greatest joy without the necessity of pain.





The cosmic mandate of the Directive Cause as the Person of Evolution directs that the pain caused by the first two of these particulars will be eliminated in the due process of evolution. They were, after all, the result of the initial generalized state of the emerging clearer consciousness: the mind of man in process.

Regardless of the successes or failures of mankind, evolutionary refinement will move the pain factor towards zero, one way or the other.

It is, however, the third particular which offers mankind hope for a continuing patience on the part of the Directive Cause.





In the meantime, in his own lifetime, Lighthall saw that there remained that tendency of the particular individual to gravitate to the “ego” [43] and away from the “whole”. Always the optimist, Lighthall felt that there had to be an apprehendable “process” by which this tendency could be “overcome”. There was no doubt in his mind that man could be a factor in progress, for man’s own directive power was in fact part of the larger Directive Power. As such the Canadian experience had specific implications in Lighthall’s view of history. I will discuss this particular view in the chapter that follows.





Given that man is potentially a factor in this real “Progress” how then does the Directive Cause release this potential from the cage of the egocentricity of the clearer consciousness. The answer provided by the theory was, of course, the “Altruistic act” which must be motivated from the more coalesced realm of man’s inner consciousness -- the seat of instinct:





In us there are continually being manifested the signs of this consciousness other than that of the individual, the source of which is constantly working for him, but also for purposes which are not his. Many of these purposes are even unknown to him, except insofar as he may ultimately learn how to observe and study their action….

Most striking of all is that complex instinct Altruism which, like the sexual, the maternal, and the herd instinct, urges men to martyrdom for others other than themselves. [44]





Just how this instinctive process overcomes the primal edict of hedonistic joy is illustrated by Lighthall in the following manner: “Altruism, even in its most clearly reasoned forms, always retains at least a part of its instinctive basis: for it is always Outer Conscious in its “point” of view. Its “impulse” also is always Outer Conscious. And when its judgments are exercised, as they usually are, ‘below the threshold’ of our consciousness, it is always totally instinctive.” [45]

It is the Directive Cause, the source of the primal edict who “substitutes” the altruistic for the hedonistic!

Nevertheless, the purpose of both edicts remains the same ultimate value joy: “In an Altruistic Act, then, the feeling of pleasure is subconscious.” [46] Thus satisfying the law of progress.





Within the framework of the scientific method of the theory Lighthall spoke little on the matter of “spirit”, preferring to speak of matter and consciousness. In the light of these two particulars he did speak to the terrifying reality of the human condition as it presented itself in his time. That reality was of course the ever present pain and death.

Therefore in prescribing for the short term amelioration of pain Lighthall suggested the continued use of the old anesthetics as needed:





In both men and animals, death in itself is the great anesthetic. And to the Outer Consciousness death is but an incident, not an end. Sleep, in its various forms, is, next to death, the most universal anesthetic.

In intellectual man, however, supreme anesthetic can be hope and faith. The joys of these, such as that of the mother in childbirth, coalescing in the common clearinghouse of the feelings, are able to conquer and neutralize the severest pains. Even philosophy can do much; but not so much as the “consolations of religion”, where the highest hopes and faiths are the instinctive promises of the Person of Evolution. [47]





And how did the theorist see the nature of the “great anesthetic”? It was the point when what has been coalesced in the individual mind now de-coalesces. Lighthall described the cycle of consciousness “in man” as follows:





Thus, out of the realm of the Outer Consciousness, -- the conscious life of a man emerges and thrusts its head temporarily through dream into the light of clear day. It is but a small concentrated part, an emerged point, of that vast individual, -- an organ of it, having a short, but not totally dissociated, individuality of its own. During our lifetime, our clearer consciousness is to some extent de-coalesced from the larger: soon it falls back through the dreamlike into the vaster Consciousness, re-coalescing, and, resuming its larger activity. The Outer Consciousness, clear, overactive, comprehensive, will be ours when the leaf falls away and the hour of return comes. . . .[48]





That then is the ultimate fate of the individual biological unit within The Lighthall Theory model.





_____________________





FOOTNOTES





1 William D. Lighthall, “The Person of Evolution” (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 40-41.





2 Leonard T. Hobhouse, “The Metaphysical Theory of the State” (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1960), p. 137.





3 Lighthall was quite clear on this matter: “The Person of Evolution is not the fossil of a dead past. It is a living spirit today.” Lighthall, “Person,” p. 121.





4 Immanuel Kant, “Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,” trans. L.W. Beck (New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1959), p. 24.





5 Kant’s statement on this has intrigued me since I first read it: “. . .it holds not merely for men but for all rational beings as such. . . .” Kant, “Foundations”, p. 24. This concept also held a great deal of meaning for Lighthall.





6 Lighthall, “Person”, p. 12.





7 “Ibid.”, pp. 12, 28 and 51.





8 “Ibid.”, p. 13.





9 “Ibid.”, p. 41.





10 “Ibid.”, p. 37. Note: In the 1926 edition Lighthall calls the Directive Cause the “community animal”. However, he dropped the term from the 1933 edition. See W.D. Lighthall, “The Outer Consciousness” (Montreal: Witness Press, 1926), p. 17.





11 “Ibid.”





12 “Ibid.”, p. 25.





13 “Ibid.”





14 “Ibid.”, p. 26.





15 “Ibid.”, pp. 26-27.





16 “Ibid.”, p. 26.





17 “Ibid.”, p. 27.





18 “Ibid.”, p. 29. One cannot help noting the “mystical” possibilities in this concept. However, I cannot fault Lighthall for not providing an answer here. As a scientific method the logic meets the criteria of Kant. (See Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Judgment,” trans. J.H. Bernard [New York: Hafner Press 1951] p. 247), and comes within the Wittgenstein conclusions (See Thomas S. Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” [Chicago: University of Chicago 1970], p. 45.) Further, as Kuhn points out: “To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competition, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted,” Kuhn, “Scientific Revolutions,” p. 18. Therefore Lighthall remained true to his purpose: to expand the Kantian principle of “limited formula”. Lighthall never claimed he would be able to eradicate it. But he did however provide a possible future: “Perhaps too, in long ages to come the Outer Consciousness may have its coalescence in a conscious life still higher, carrying all of us with it, each in possession of its full tide of being.” Lighthall, “Person,” p. 39.





19 “Ibid.”, pp. 28-29.





20 “Ibid.”, p. 54.





21 “Ibid.”, p. 55.





22 Of the Indians of the novel Lighthall stated: “To understand his philosophy it is necessary to remember that he was a mystic; yet he believed one thing firmly, -- that the whole world of objects was living: nothing to him was inanimate: he himself was part of a living world, and so were his dreams.” W.D. Lighthall, “The Master of Life” (Toronto: The Musson Book Co., 1908), pp. v-vi.





23 Lighthall, “Master of Life,” p. 198.





24 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 38.





25 “Ibid.” pp. 33-34.





26 “Ibid.”, p. 49.





27 “Ibid.”, p. 153.





28 “Ibid.”, p. 48.





29 “Ibid.” p. 32.





30 “Ibid.” p. 11.





31 “Ibid.” pp. 34-35.





32 “Ibid.” p. 69.





33 “Ibid.” p. 50.





34 “Ibid.” p. 65.





35 “Ibid.”, pp. 49-50.





36 Samuel Butler, “Life and Habit” (New York: AMS Press 1968), p. 241.





37 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 30.





38 “Ibid.”, p.. 133.





39 J.B.S. Haldane, “The Inequality of Man and Other Essays” (Harmondsworth: Penquin Books Ltd. 1937), pp. 36ff.





40 Jeremy Bentham, “A Fragment on Government and an Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation” (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1967), p. 153. For Lighthall on “pushpin” see Lighthall, “Person,” p. 114. Lighthall of course calls his theory “New Utilitarianism”. See W.D. Lighthall, “Sketch of a New Utilitarianism” (Montreal: Witness Printing House 1887).





41 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 70.





42 “Ibid.” p. 102. See also p. 37.





43 Radical capitalists have developed an entire “cultus” around the ego. Its focus is “self esteem.” “Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved in production and trade is ‘man’.” Ayn Rand, “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” (New York: Signet Books 1967), p. 15. The Communists having the same problem provide the same answer. “He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play.” Leon Trotsky in “The Marxists”, ed. C. Wright Mills (New York: A Laurel Edition 1962), p. 288.





44 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 25. See also Lighthall, “Sketch,” pp. 5ff.





45 “Ibid.” p. 111.





46 Lighthall, “Sketch,” p. 18.





47 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 52.





48 “Ibid.” p. 37.









------------





CHAPTER FOUR





CONSIDERING THE LIGHTHALL THEORY WITHIN THE PARTICULAR OF CANADIAN HISTORY









Lighthall was a citizen of dominion Canada and I would now like to discuss Lighthall’s personal view of history, in particular his view of Canadian history.

Lighthall understood the nature of reality from observed “fact”. Canadian history was the laboratory where he sought and found, he believed, the proof of the accuracy of the Lighthall Theory.

One has only to turn to Lighthall’s writing outside the field of philosophy to discover how he saw the particulars he had used to create The Lighthall Theory model functioning in the process of history.

To begin with as Berger pointed out, for Canadians in the 19th century;





the chief value of history was that it affirmed and detailed the relentless march of improvement by contrasting the state of things in some remote time with the high level of society in a later age. With varying degrees of emphasis and qualifications the theme of progress was the burden and the integrating principle of nearly every historical account of Canada in the nineteenth century. [1]





Berger also distinguished the mind-set behind that philosophy as it viewed the Canadian reality:





The literature of imperialism was characterized by a profound emotional attachment to Canada. Far from denigrating Canadian things, imperialists were positively utopian in their expectations and it was exactly this overestimation of Canadian capacities which enabled them to believe that their country would become “the future center and dominating portion of the British Empire.” [2]





As a Canadian Imperialist, Lighthall shared these attitudes.





In Lighthall’s opinion the key event in the progress of Canadian history was the firm establishment of British principles on the North American continent. He states that “the greatest event in the history of the New World, (outside of its discovery by Columbus)… was the conquest of Canada, for that event decided the fate of North America, as respects the dominance of races and institutions.” [3]

Considering the particulars leading up to the great event both W. D. Lighthall and Horatio Hale [4] believed that the “disappearance” of the “Hochelagans” from what is now Montreal was the historic particular, on the vertical of time that initiated the chain of events that culminated in the establishment of Canadian Imperialism AKA British principles in Canada.

Nevertheless, Lighthall disagreed with Hale as to the cultural identification of the people of Hochelaga. This disagreement and the consequent writing Lighthall did on the subject provided me with some insight into his method of approach to history and its relationship to the structure of The Lighthall Theory.

To Hale the Hochelagans were Hurons on the eastern fringe of their homelands. However in order for Lighthall use the Hochelagans to prove his theory, it was imperative that they “not” be Hurons.[5] For Lighthall’s theoretical understanding of Canadian history to match real time and space the Hochelagans had to be Iroquois who would later joined the League of Iroquois.

Within The Lighthall Theory’s understanding of North American pre-history the Algonquian hunters were the savages on evolutionary parallel with all hunting-gathering people. The Hurons who were degenerate horticultural villagers, were the parallel of the inertia stranded French Canadians. The Iroquois actively evolving villagers were in the same social evolution stream as the British themselves. Thus Lighthall understood that the establishment of the League of Iroquois was the evolutionary step just below the establishment of the British Empire in North America.

In his publication of 1899 Lighthall set forth his argument for the cultural link he required between the Hochelagans and the Mohawk. At that time he stated, “it does not appear as if the Hochelagans were exactly the Mohawks proper.”[6] However, by the time he wrote his novel of 1908 the statement had become more definite: “Field scholars now identify the Mohawk with the Hochelagan…” [7] But the only field scholar I could find developing this premise at the time was W.D. Lighthall himself.[8]

It is interesting to note how Lighthall uses colonial coalescence to create his own paradigm. First he presents his reader with two linguistic particulars of the Iroquois stock: the Sinnekes and the “. . .Caniengas (or Mohawks). . .”[9] “the latter [being] the Mohawks and their offshoot the Oneidas.”[10]

Thus having established the Mohawks as a generality with particulars (horizontally colonial) Lighthall states:





As we have seen, the Mohawks and their younger brothers, the Oneidas, had only recently entered the territory adjoining the Onondagas. Their original palisaded capital Hochelaga, on the island of Montreal, which had been visited in 1535 by Jacques Cartier, and approached in 1542, had been sacked and burnt at some time about 1560. . . .[11]





Now Lighthall had given the Mohawks two levels of existence: they were particulars of their own generality which was a “truism” in coloniality.

Next Lighthall identified the leader Hiawatha:





I confess a distrust in the tradition that Hiawatha, the Mohawk, was originally an Onondaga, and I find it more probable that he had always been a Mohawk, who had spent some time among the Onondagas, and then returned to his own people… [12]









Now Hiawatha was “definitely” a Mohawk in the Lighthall model. But Lighthall had referred to the “Mohawk generality” as the “Hochelagan race”.[13] Therefore, Hiawatha was a Hochelagan and in the novel “The Master of Life” Lighthall portrays him as a resident of the village of Hochelaga.

Finally in 1924 Lighthall did state in a historical publication that “the Mohawk chief Hiawatha the founder of the League was probably a Hochelagan.”[14]

Lighthall had not deliberately set out to misled his reader, but the reader had better understand the colonial nature of reality in Lighthall’s work.





Lighthall’s novel “The Master of Life,” which is legendary in content rather than historical, depicts the “process” of evolutionary progress in action in human affairs. In it Lighthall lays out the chain of events that culminated in the “Great Event”. It is the origin myth of Canada’s contingent destiny.

The novel opens on a revelation of the evolutionary differences between “townsmen” and “hunters”: “It was easy to distinguish the two races, if only by their ornaments and feathers, for those of the nation of the town were rich and well-made, while those of the wilderness were clumsy and scant.” [15]

When these cultural differences break out into warfare between the two stations in the stream of cultural progression it involves a battle at Hochelaga between an allied force of the savage Algonquian hunters[16] and the degenerate Huron town dwellers [17] and the progressive townsmen the Hochelagans. Because of its superior numbers the savage alliance was able to defeat the Hochelagains.

In negotiations for the safe conduct of the remnants into exile the Hurons demanded a human sacrifice to their god.

In the response of Awitharoa, the Hochelagan Peace Chief, Lighthall provides a vivid picture of the altruistic act as it occurs:





He quietly advanced. He nerved himself. He stepped upon the fire, resisting and battling with the instant agony. He stood upright upon it, while it are terribly into his bare feet; drew his robe slowly around him, and, lying down, composed himself in the midst of the eager flames as if in slumber. His eyes had hitherto rested on the long files of his enemies; now they looked up through the crackling smoke at the portion of sky between the trees above him, and, in that terrible moment, with voice fighting against the choking vapour, his tones rang loud and strange out of his fierce pains and the crackle and roar---





“I do this for thee, Hochelaga!”





The torture was vast, but quick, as the fire raged at his flesh and smothered his senses, but not his stern fortitude. Shudders and convulsions shook his frame, he clutched at the air in delirium and writing on the raging bed. But soon he fell totally unconscious; and the last broken words caught from his mutterings were:





“I do this -- for the little children.”[18]





The remnants of Hochelaga go free and the philosophical Hiawatha, who incidentally was not at Hochelaga at the time of the battle, begins to reflect upon “war.”

Until this point in time war had been within the realm of “joy” because it raised the “self esteem” of the young man and was necessary for the cultural process leading to procreation. [19] As he speaks to the Arrowmaker, however, Hiawatha finds himself announcing a “new direction”: “All war is evil.”[20]

It is at this point that I discovered why the timing in the chain of events was critical to Lighthall.

According to the neo-Lamarkian understanding of race memory Hiawatha could not have drawn on enough race experience to have come to this understanding through the “voices he heard”.[21] Nor would it have fitted the progression of Canadian destiny if the source of that “inspiration” came from race experience that was not Europe. Therefore, Lighthall had to introduce Quenhia “the half-breed daughter of one of the Cartier’s men”.[22] It is Quenhia who had planted the seed of “attention” in Hiawatha’s mind:





“The spirits, my people, whisper to me -- they whisper to me, ‘Peace’. My father the Spirit taught my mother that the Master of Life hateth war; that His Son is Lord of Peace; and that when wounded he smote not back, but was tied to the stake.”[23]





Thus the League which followed from this communication was the result of the progression already existent in Yahwehan British principles.

Of course Quenhia dies a virgin’s death before there is any change of her mothering a competitive “new race,”[24] for Lighthall already knew what the genetic particulars of the new race should be.

In the following quotation I am jumping into the middle of a conversation out of the text of “The Young Seigneur; or, Nation-making” one of Lighthall’s historical novels:





“But, my chief, the positions of the French and the English! -- We who were first, are becoming last!”

“Come here if you please, sir,” Haviland said, turning to Chrysler, who rose and advanced to him surprised. Haviland took him, and passing over to De La Lande, placed the hand of the Ontario gentleman in that of the high-spirited schoolmaster, who accepted it, puzzled. “There!” cried Haviland, raising his voice to a pitch of solemnity. “Say whatever you can in that position. “That is the position of the Canadian races.”[25]





To return to “The Master of Life”, I discovered that the events that followed Hiawatha’s revelation reflect Lighthall’s view of the trials of leadership. As he attempts to implement the new direction Hiawatha is rejected by the people because they prefer to adhere to the old paradigm, which still worked.

Lighthall’s assessment of the masses was full of the reservations he shared with men like Burckhardt who, as Karl Lowith suggests, “thought that a radically egalitarian democracy would not lead to individual liberty and responsibility but to a pretentious mediocrity and a new type of despotism.”[26]

Lighthall felt that true leadership had to come from the direct prompting to religious, patriotic and or civil duty by the Directive Cause. Any other leadership was just a mask for hedonistic self-gratification and thus dangerous.

Furthermore, his understanding of leadership was Catholic,[27] and, like Comte, sought a “proper” division of authority.

According to Lowith,





What Comte appreciates, first of all, in the Catholic system is the consequential division of spiritual and temporal power, a division by which the universal morality of Christianity was established outside and above secular standards and the sphere of political action. This division… established a spiritual authority equally respected by lord and serf, and it authorized the meanest Christian to invoke against the most powerful noble the inflexible prescriptions of the Church.[28]





Thus, having initiated the institution of the new order Hiawatha, having properly refused “authority in himself,” departed forever.

Lighthall’s view of Hiawatha was biblical -- bringing the law but not carrying authority in the “new order”.

In the novel “The Master of Life” Atotharho was Lighthall’s portrayal of the idealized “strongman” leader. When he is offered the pipe of office he says “Not I, but Hiawatha is the greatest of men. Let the Pipe be given to him.”[29] But the leadership of the League, not sought, was his altruistic “duty”.

In this manner Lighthall pointed out: “the Master of Life [the Directive Cause] decreed that his League should turn and guide the mighty current of the world itself… and the League was the bulwark which protected them during years of weakness and prepared the way for the spread of British principles in North America.”[30]

In Lighthall’s opinion not even the rebellion of the New England merchant elite under the land pirates George Washington and company would break the chain of progress that was British North America. The outcome was “the ‘natural selection’ to borrow Darwin’s phrase, which sifted these sixty thousand out from the three million of the colonists.”[31]





Lighthall’s plan for the inception of the Canadian race was a neo-Lamarkian masterpiece:





The foundation must be the Ideal Physical Man. We must never stop short of working until, --now, do not doubt me, sir, --every Canadian is the strongest and most beautiful man that can be thought. . . . Physical culture must be placed on a more reasonable basis, and made a requisite of all education. . .we require a military term of training, compulsory on all young men for its effect in straightening the person and strengthening the will. We must have a nation of stern, strong men -- a careless people can never rise; no deep impression, no fixed resolve, will every originate from easy-going natures. [32]





And in the realm of consciousness:





“…let every Canadian be educated to see the National Work, and how to do it.

“In short, educate for what you require. . .Purity and elevation of the national character must be held sacred as the snowy peaks of Olympus to the Greek. . .so we must lay foundations for our finer aspirations by the acquirement of certain basal habits:

“The Habit of Industry.”

“The Habit of Economy.”

“The Habit of Progress.”

“The Habit of Seriousness.”

In other words the habits of honestly acquiring, keeping and improving, all good things, material, intellectual and moral, and of dealing with the realities of things.[33]





The future stood before Canadians; they had but to assert their will in the same direction of that of “The Will”![34]

The British Canadians already knew their mission. It had been voiced by none less than Principal Grant:





We have a mission on earth as truly as ancient Israel had. Our mission was to make this world the home of freedom, of justice, and of peace, and to secure these ends the British Empire was the highest secular instrument the world had ever known. [35]





Nevertheless, not all was well in Canada, for there were other forces loose in the land: the ever-present addiction to hedonism. The Canadian Imperialists, including Lighthall, reacted strongly to “the primacy of commercialism” inherent in Canadian radical capitalism. As Berger wrote “. . .William D. Lighthall, one time mayor of Westmount, helped organize the Union of Canadian Municipalities in order to check business oppression on one front.”[36]

But how could Lighthall view capitalism as a social and genetic throwback when corporate barons such as Donald Smith were donating money “to encourage physical and military training in school?”[37] After all, was this not one of the necessities of the new course?

It was because Canadian Imperialists like Lighthall understood why Donald Smith of Hudson’s Bay Company, of the Canadian Pacific Company and of the Bank of Montreal wanted men with military training among the masses they controlled.

As Ayn Rand put so clearly,





Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

…In a capitalist society, no man or group may “initiate” the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights.[38]





In contrast, Lighthall spoke to what he called the “Lessons of History” which were:





A. Unlimited private ownership will inevitably bring us to great land monopolies and consequent disinheritance of the people at large.

B. Our land supply will be rapidly exhausted.

C. If we would save our future, we must reform the defects of this tenure, and husband our estate.[39]





Lighthall, ever the moderate, pointed out that “Private ownership itself is not an evil, if limited… the passing of the land out of national proprietorship into the private possession of innumerable settlers, with a few generous understandings as to public rights, is an enormous good, and if history permitted us to think that it would remain so forever, half the problem would be solved.”[40]

As for putting limits on human exploitation of the common Lighthall suggested that: “There ought to be a constitutional limit to the value of agricultural land permitted to be owned or controlled by any person or corporation, at least for more than a limited period.”[41]

This was certainly not radical communism. But Lighthall did not stop at agriculture:





(a) Lands less productive for agriculture than forestry should be set apart as forest reserves.

(b) State ownership over all public forest lands is the only system advantageous to the nation.

(c) Such ownership needs to be firmly and unequivocally asserted, or it will be lost.

(d) Limited licenses to cut the timber crop, under the State and open to competition periodically, should be the only tenure to all forests.

(e) No water powers need or should be sold; all should be leased by the State.

(f) No mines should be sold, and especially none bearing coal, petroleum, iron, and other necessaries. [42]





This point of view marked him on “Bay Street” and the tar has stuck to this day.





When it came to his vision of the creator Lighthall was the child of his own time in more than his understanding of the “facts” of history. He was influenced, to some degree, by the progress he noted in the philosophers of his day. But as for the influence of these schools of thought I would hazard to say that out of the sixty odd schools of thought outlined by Albert E. Avey in the “Handbook In The History of Philosophy,” Lighthall drew particulars from twenty of them without retaining the general model of any school.

In his published writing Lighthall would admit to a similarity between his revelation and that of another philosopher, but he would then annotate the differences.

This was true, for example, with Samuel Butler. Lighthall made the point of indicating the similarities in their views.[43] Then Lighthall added that Butler’s Teleology was “not one of feeling, but of order. . . .”[44] Then Lighthall focused on the particular that he was deriving from Butler which was a fact on which they both agreed that “hereditary memory” was “the basis of instinct”. [45]

Lighthall made a point of utilizing Fechner. He stated that Fechner:





maintained, by a loose process of analogies, that the universe is everywhere conscious and organized in higher and higher circles of life, of which nearest to us is our globe itself, which he maintains is a living creature, of which we and all things upon it are organs.[46]





However Lighthall then went so far as to state that Fechner’s vision differed from the practical reality of The Lighthall Theory “as the creations of Jules Verne differ from the suggestions of the physical laboratory.”[47]





In spite of Lighthall’s “broad” choices of references I believe it is possible to place the Lighthall Theory in some historical perspective by considering the main aspects of the theory; the ethics of Altruism, coloniality, direction and the Directive Cause; in relation to some of the authorities that Lighthall mentions in his works.

The very existence of the Altruistic Act had of course been questioned. Therefore, Lighthall divided all philosophy into those who have agreed that it exists and those who disagreed. Then he tackled the variations on the subject.

Kant had relegated the act to the realm of moral “duty” and made it a result of reason. Hobhouse, on the other hand, shifted the cause outside of the individual: “It is that in him which answers to this position which realizes, however dimly, the nature of the whole to which he belongs. . . .[48]

Others left altruism within the imperative reality of the individual but shifted it from reason to the realm of reproduction and the maternal instinct.

For Drummond altruism was an absolute. “Altruism “had” to enter the world, and any species which neglected it was extinguished in a generation.”[49] Dewey simply allocated altruism to cultural development. [50]

Then there were those who questioned altruism. Haldane doubted “if man contains many genes making for altruism of a general kind. . . .”[51] He then provided an extensive appendix to prove his point. [52]

Interestingly, the greatest objection to altruism does not deny its existence, but insisted that it was the ultimate madness! Rand insisted with fervor of a vocal psychotic personality that “Neither mysticism nor the creed of self-sacrifice is compatible with mental health or self-esteem. These doctrines are destructive existentially and psychologically. [53]





Lighthall, for his part, felt that his ontological model, based upon the existence of the altruistic act, was constructive because it offered hope. Indeed Lighthall felt that his theory’s ethics were in substance Christian. [54] In what he called scientific terms those ethics were grounded in Lotze.

But it was to Kant even more than Lotze that Lighthall always returned for his inspiration. If in Lighthall’s opinion Kant had committed errors or omissions, it was due to the state of the science of Kant’s day. He, Lighthall, would rectify the problem in his “modified Kantian” theory. Nevertheless Lighthall saw his philosophic base not as German, but as British: “it is the strict descendant of British philosophy - Hume, Darwin and Mill,” [55] he said in 1890.





Here then is the quintessence of the Lighthall purpose. It is to revise through progress the ontological vision in order to support the evolution of culture with the goal of determining the purpose of the Greater Will and to support it. Kant was right up to a point. It was the duty of Lighthall to “tweek” the system in order for it to improve in the right direction.





As for the Lighthall’s concept of coloniality which was so important to The Lighthall Theory system, although it was not commonly called “coloniality,” as a concept it was not uncommon among Lighthall’s contemporaries.

For example, H.R. Marshall described cellular existence in the following manner:





It must be granted, I think, that organic wholes would not persist, and increase in complexity and interrelation or integration, unless the cells, or cell aggregates which form their differentiated parts, had, as parts of the general organism, some advantage that they would not have if they existed as separate cells or separate differentiated parts.[56]





John S. Haldane observed of the personality:





At first sight it might seem that the conception of the world as world of personality involves the inference that the existence of the world is bound up with our own individual self… Such an inference would… be… mistaken. There is nothing more certain than the existence and compelling power of duty which is no mere duty to the individual self, and of truth which is no mere truth for an individual. This signifies at once that personality is no mere individual personality. [57]





And Samuel Butler observed of nations: “analogy points in the direction of supposing that the great civilizations of Europe, as they are the coalition of subordinate provinces, so must coalesce themselves also to form a larger, but single empire.”[58]





The Lighthall Theory model also integrated an understanding of The Will within this general understanding of progressive direction. Lighthall’s contemporaries also struggled with this apparent paradox in their own way.

For example, Alexander Bain who placed the process of direction in a chronological order: feeling-will-action:





Although the operations of the will are conceived by us as some thing distinct from, or superadded to, the operation of Feeling proper, yet in every volition, rightly so named, the stimulus, or antecedent, is some feeling. The genuine antecedents are pleasure and pain. [59]





There was however some controversy existent in the day on the matter of joy being the goal towards which the will was manifest.

Consider H.R. Marshall:





Do we, for instance, desire the pleasure of eating when we are hungry, or do we desire the food which is to assuage our hunger. In other words, is the idea which becomes emphatic, and which determines the desire, the idea of a pleasure to be reached; or is it the idea of an object to be attained, in the attainment of which, as a matter of fact, we find by experience we gain pleasure? I hold to the latter view, which in modern times has such well-known advocates as Green and Sidgwick… [60]





While Lighthall rejected Marshall’s assumption that the will to joy was in man alone he did use Marshall as a confirming authority for coloniality.[61]





As Lighthall considered himself to be a post-Kantian thinker and that his theory was a modified Kantianism how did Lighthall’s view compare with that of Kant?

Kant held that will was a matter of the individual mind and reason and once more he was faced with his own belief in the absolute nature of “law”.





Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being has the capacity of acting according to the conception of laws, i.e., according to principles. This capacity is will. Since reason is required for the derivation of actions from laws, will is nothing else than practical reason. [62]





Kant placed the will in the process as the trigger to action but isolated it from the material reality of man:





For the will stands, as it were, at the crossroads halfway between its “a priori” principle which is formal and its “a posteriori” incentive which is material. Since it must be determined by something, if it is done form duty it must be determined by the formal principle of volition as such since every material principle has been withdrawn from it. [63]





The following quotation indicated to me that Lighthall agreed with Kant that will is not of the material. However Lighthall’s theory placed that will outside the consciousness and, therefore, outside of reason: [64]





Some bond, neither physical nor of consciousness, but capable of interacting between the two and forming a connection between them, works here. It belongs to a realm other than the physical and the mental. There is, therefore, such a third sphere in man; and out of it comes… action. [65]





For Lighthall one of the problems with Kant’s older system was in Kant’s insistence on the concept of volition. As Lotze, to whom Lighthall had turned, had emphasized: “this formula not only presupposes a work of theoretical interpretation by which in each case the definite maxim, in accordance with which the resolution is to be apprehended, has first to be discovered. . . .”[66]

It was not so much that Lighthall believed that Kant’s system, as it was described by Lotze, was beyond the capability of the human consciousness; it was not. However, that process was not to be found in the clearer consciousness, where volition would be found, but in instinct.





Finally I wondered what deeper roots were there in Lighthall’s image of the Directive Cause?

I found them in the days of the “New Wave” scientific development that followed Newton’s “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” (1687) where “direction” remained the providence of Divine Providence and the divine being, the will of Yahweh a local Mesopotamian deity of multifaceted coloniality and identity.

Joseph Priestly had outlined much of what was also the foundation of Lighthall’s theory of an alternative to such an extremely parochial divine providence:





We ourselves, complex as the structure of our minds and our principles of action are, are links in a great connected chain, parts of an immense whole, a very little of which only we are yet permitted to see, but from which we collect evidence enough, that the whole system (in which we are at the same time both instruments and objects) is under an unerring direction, and that the final result will be most glorious and happy. [67]





Leibnitz had apprehended the Perfect Reason of that “immense whole”. In the Leibnitz vision there also lies the hope of perfectibility.

The following was Bury’s digest of the Leibnitz view of the cosmic reality:





The Creator, before He acted, had considered all possible worlds, and had chosen the best. He might have chosen one in which humanity would have been better and happier, but that would not have been possible, for He had to consider the interests of the whole universe, of which the earth with humanity is only an insignificant part. The evils and imperfections of our small world are negligible in comparison with the happiness and perfection of the whole cosmos. Leibnitz, whose theory is deduced from the abstract proposition that the Creator is perfect, does not say that now or at any given moment the universe is as perfect as it could be; its merit lies in its potentialities; it will develop towards perfection throughout infinite time. [68]





What Lighthall had discovered in the works of these writers was confirmation of the possibility of perfectibility which he himself had coalesced, as he called it, with the imperative of evolution.

Never the less there is no easy way to fit Lighthall into the history of philosophy. Not even into the Kantian or the British schools where he very much desired to be placed.

Although Lighthall’s “imperative” of joy did have roots in Benthams: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”[69] Lighthall had soon expanded the concept of “nature” far beyond Bentham’s use of the term.

At best, I think that Lighthall was more the product of the struggle in his day to understand the apparently new relationship between biological science and religion than any already existent school of philosophy or theology.

This may be due in part to the fact that Lighthall did not have a Kantian faith in the abilities of the arising specialists of the turning of the century [70]

Lighthall felt that, “The man of one science notoriously fails to deal adequately with… puzzles,… [that]… lead into interlocking fields of several sciences at once.”[71] Kuhn would also echo something of this complaint some years later. [72]

Lighthall treated his problem with scientists as he had philosophers -- he used the particulars of a given authority and ignored the writer’s general paradigm. In doing so he felt that he had succeeded in his purpose of welding science and philosophy into a single system which was in fact a religious one. He felt he had succeeded in bringing religion’s wayward children home where they belonged. For Lighthall was a deist.





All of this was woven by Lighthall into an ethical view of the Deity’s role for Canada:





Patriotism is nothing else than a duty,--our duty to faithfully advance the true interests, the fair rights, and the happiness of each of our brother-citizens, and of the whole of them united as the national organism. [73]





Nevertheless we must recall the nature of man in The Lighthall Theory model because in that model mankind is expendable; species, race, nation, individual, all expendable.

Other particulars, called species by science, could not or would not obey the will, and therefore, turned aside from the living line of progress to that of extinction. This was in the mind of Lighthall when he asked:





Yet, do we every stop to ask ourselves what manner of life that people will live, and whether, notwithstanding all its material might, it will be a good or an ill life for those who are to live it? Whether, when grown old, our nation is but to suffer all the evils of the nations we see grown old to-day? Whether poverty, misery, un-remunerative toil, neglect, ignorance, class contempt, domination by capitalistic or other greed and fraud, landlordism servitude, privilege, drink, war, the social evil, crime, corruption, public peculation, and the host of associated ills, are to become, as a matter of course, the lot our our land and people….[74]





For Lighthall the choices made by the national organism were a matter of national will. Canadians could accept or reject their proscribed destiny. Nor did Lighthall, as Berger suggests, “overestimate Canadian capacity.” Nothing he suggested was outside the realm of possibility -- if there had been the will. The Canadian aggregate, weakened, it is true, by the useless sacrifices demanded of it by a dying empire, just could never muster the will.

Any race or group from that race was only as good as its will to act on its own destiny. That is the edict of the Divine Purpose of the Directive Cause. Better a single altruistic act than a thousand years of purposeless hedonistic inertia by which a nation drifts into the reduced state of a client and finally slavery and extinction.

G.R. Parkin said in 1911, “. . .I am convinced that when the moral energy of a nation does not rise to the fulfillment of that purpose the nation is doomed to decay.”[76] Parkin was echoing Lighthall who had already written of Canada’s “raison d’etre”:





To do pre-eminently well a part of the highest work of all the world! If by being a nation we can advance mankind; if by being a nation we can make a better community for ourselves, our arms are founded on the highest raison d’etre,… the ethical spirit. We must deliberately mark out our work on this principle; and if we do not work upon it we had better not exist. [77]









_________________________





Footnotes





1 Carl Berger, “The Sense of Power” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1970), p. 110.





2 “Ibid.”, pp. 260-261.





3 W.D. Schuyler-Lighthall, “The Plan of Campaign for the conquest of New France; Its origin, history and connection with the invasions of Canada,” The Canadian Antiquarian and Numismatic Journal, v. 4, 3d series (1902), p. 1.





4 See Horatio Hale, “The Fall of Hochelaga,” The Journal of American Folk-lore, vol. VII, No. XXIV (Jan-Mar. 1894), pp. 1-14. For a popular Iroquois history of the day see Horatio Hale, “The Iroquois Book of Rites” (1883) and Lewis H. Morgan, “League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois” (1851).





5 It is perhaps noteworthy that a later suggestion as to the identity of the Hochelagans was that “the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians as a whole represent a distinct branch of northern Iroquoians who lived in the Saint Lawrence valley at the same time that the Iroquoian groups who survived into the seventeenth century were living in Ontario and New York”. in “Handbook of North American Indians” ed. W.C. Sturtevant, vol. 15 “Northeast” ed. B.G. Trigger (Washington: Smithsonian Institution 1978), p. 360.





6 W.D. Lighthall, “Hochelagans and Mohawks; a link in Iroquois History,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Sec. II (1899), p. 210.





7 W.D. Lighthall, “The Master of Life” (Toronto: The Musson Book Co. 1908), V. Note: In reference to the formation of the League: It was also important to Lighthall that it be placed properly in the chain of process, i.e., after Cartier. See Lighthall, “Hochelagans and Mohawks,” pp. 207ff and “Handbook,” p. 420.





8 W.D. Lighthall, “Hiawatha the Great,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, London, vol. XXIII (1901), pp. 1-18.





9 “Ibid.”, p. 6.





10 “Ibid.”, p. 7.





11 “Ibid.”, p. 9.





12 “Ibid.”, p. 10.





13 “Ibid.”, p. 11.





14 W.D. Lighthall, “Hochelaga and ‘The Hill of Hochelaga’”, Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Sec. II (1924), p. 96.





15 Lighthall, “Master of Life,” p. 5.





16 “Ibid.”, p. 82.





17 “Ibid.”, p. 101.





18 “Ibid.”, pp. 102-103.





19 “Ibid.”, p. 88.





20 “Ibid.”, p. 142.





21 This was the problem for the “devotees of Moloch,” W.D. Lighthall, “The Person of Evolution” (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), p. 54. Further to this Lighthall denied that the Iroquois could have developed the military ability to formulate a plan of attack combining land and sea forces: “. . .it is evident that any suggestion of this kind could scarcely originate with an inland savage people,” but it was the result of “the inherited store of experiences of the Schuyler group. . . .” Lighthall, “Plan of Campaign,” 10 and 27 respectively.





22 It is clear that Quenhia does not meet the popular standard for a pure Indian: she’s not pigeon toed! Lighthall, “Master of Life,” p. 49.





23 Lighthall, “Master of Life,”, p. 31. This passage is a particularly interesting one. In it the Master of Life is apparently God and the Son Christ. However in Iroquois cosmology De’hae hiyawa kho, the Master of Life is a son of a father. See J.N.B. Hewitt, “Iroquoian Cosmology” extract from The Forty-third Annual Report of the B.A.E. (Washington: Gov. Printing Office 1928), pp. 467-469. Indeed in many ways the traditional Iroquoian Master of Life appears very much to be in the nature of a Directive Cause. But this would break the chain and contradict neo-Lamarkianism as Lighthall viewed it. Yet one must wonder just how much influence Iroquois cosmology had on the development of the theory. One might consider the impact that the League was supposed to have had on the constitution of the United States Of America.





24 She is, of course, a surrogate Elizabeth; giving birth to John in America: the “new” Hiawatha. However she must then pass into “heritage” where her reality can be shaped by the inheriting gentiles. For other views of Indian maidens in the same period see my “The Indian in the Canadian Novel in English in the Period 1860-1918,” an unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba (1976), pp. 46-65.





25 W.D. Lighthall, “The Young Seigneur; or, Nation-Making,” by Wilfred Chateauclair [pseud], (Montreal: W. Drysdale 1888), p. 113. Note: Haviland is himself a mixed blood. His grandfather an English officer, his grandmother a petty bourgeoisie’s daughter- -French-English; he is the “New Nation.”





26 Karl Lowith, “Meaning in History” (Chicago: Phoenix Books 1949), p. 23.





27 Consider: “Moreover, since God made men social by nature, and since no society can hold together unless someone be over all, directing all to strive earnestly for the common good, every civilized community must have a ruffling authority, and this authority, no less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has, consequently, God for its authority”[3] (footnote 3 being Leo XIII’s Encyclical Leter, Immortale Dei, Acta Leonis XIII, V (1885) p. 120). “Pacem in Terris: Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Pope John XXIII, Peace on Earth,” ed. W.J. Givvons (New York: Paulist Newman Press 1963), pp. 19-30 in “Necessity and Divine origin of Authority” in “Relations between Individuals and the Public Authorities within a single State” in “On Being Responsible” ed. James M. Gustafson and James T. Laney (New York: Harper and Row 1968), pp. 283-284.





28 Lowith, “Meaning in History,” pp. 75-76,





29 Lighthall, “Master of Life,” p. 256.





30 “Ibid.”, pp. 260-261.





31 Nathaniel Burwash, “The Moral Character of the U.E. Loyalists,” The United Empire Loyalists Association of Ontario, Annual Transactions for the years ending March 1901 and March 1902 (Toronto 1903), p. 59. In Berger, “Sense of Power,” p. 100.





32 Lighthall, “Nation-Making,” p. 127. Lighthall could call upon the man to whom he had dedicated his 1933 definitive edition, to ascertain that his vision was medically sound. Dr. William Osler ascertained that “the most virile nation on this continent will be to the north of the great lakes.” Dr. William Osler, “Anglo-Canadian and American Relations,” Addresses Delivered Before the Canadian Club of Toronto, Season 1904-05 (Toronto n.d.), p. 65 in Berger “Sense of Power,” p. 129.





33 “Ibid.”, p. 29.





34 In the preface to “Nation-Making” Lighthall stated: “The chief aim of this book is the perhaps too bold one -- to map out a future for the Canadian nation, which has been hitherto drifting without any plan.” Lighthall, “Nation-Making,” iii [see also IV: “The Book is not a novel”!]





35 G.M. Grant, “Current Events” Queen’s Quarterly, V (July 1897), p. 85 and Grant Papers, Vol. 25 clipping from the Daily Times, May 5, 1897 in Berger, “Sense of Power,” p. 218.





36 Berger, “Sense of Power,” p. 196.





37 “Ibid.”, p. 254. For a vivid portrayal of this Canadian robber baron see W.T.R. Preston, “The Life and Times of Lord Strathcona” (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, n.d.).





38 Ayn Rand, “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” (New York: Signet Books 1967), p. 19. For Lighthall’s reaction to private ownership of real estate see W.D. Lighthall, “Canada, A Modern Nation” (Montreal: Witness Printing House 1904), pp. 15ff.





39 Lighthall, “A Modern Nation,” p. 15.





40 “Ibid.”, p. 37. Lighthall had earlier pointed to the Highland clearances when the Lairds drove their crofters from the land to make way for the more readily exploitable resource of wool. See pp. 15-16.





41 “Ibid.”, p. 38.





42 “Ibid.”, p. 52.





43 Consider Butler’s “Concluding Remarks” in Samuel Butler, “Life and Habit” (New York: A.M.S. Press 1968), pp. 240ff. or Samuel Butler, “Evolution, Old and New” (New York: A.M.S. Press 1968).





44 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 58.





45 Both Lighthall and Butler disagreed with the fundamental biological paradigm that, “There is no known way by which somatic cells may pass characteristics to reproduction cells. . . .”, Jay M. Savage, “Evolution” (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc. 1969), p. 17.





46 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 41. Lighthall understood Fechner through William James. For James on Fechner see William James, “A Pluralist Universe” (New York:; Longmans, Green and Co. 1909), pp. 152ff.





47 “Ibid.”, p. 42.





48 Leonard T. Hobhouse, “Morals in Evolution” (London: Chapman and Hall Ltd. 1915), p. 580. For Lighthall on Hobhouse see Lighthall, “Person,” pp. 174ff.





49 Drummond, “Ascent,” p. 31. See also p. 13. Bergson speaks of “the invisible breath that bears them” in the same light as Drummond. See Henri Bergson, “Creative Evolution” (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd. 1960), p. 135.





50 John Dewey, “Human Nature and Conduct” (New York: The Modern Library 1930), pp. 133ff.





51 Haldane, “Causes of Evolution,” p. 131.





52 “Ibid.”, pp. 207ff.





53 Rand, “Virtue of Selfishness,” p. 37.





54 Lighthall, “Spiritualized Happiness,” p. 18, and W.D. Lighthall “The Law of Cosmic Evolutionary Adaptation,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada Sec. 2. (1940), p. 141.





55 Lighthall, “Spiritualized Happiness,” p. 18.





56 Henry R. Marshall, “Instinct and Reason” (New York: The Macmillan Company 1898), pp. 78-79.





57 John S. Haldane, “Mechanism, Life and Personality” (Westport: Greenwood Press 1973), p. 127.





58 Samuel Butler, “Evolution, Old and New” (New York: A.M.S. Press 1968), p. 350.





59 Alexander Bain, “The Emotion and the Will” (London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1880), p. 14.





60 Henry Rutgers Marshall, “Instinct and Reason” (New York: The Macmillan Co. 1898), p. 539.





61 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 17.





62 Immanuel Kant, “Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,” trans. L.W. Beck (New York: The Library of Liberal Arts 1959), p. 29.





63 “Ibid.”, p. 16.





64 Although Lighthall compared his initial insight to that of Schopenhauer - “Thence I was brought to conclude, like Schopenhauer, that there is a unitary directive cause behind all these processes, . . .” (Lighthall, “Person,” p. 12). He did not agree with what he termed Schopenhauer’s “pessimism” and he ultimately took a great deal of trouble to criticize Schopenhauer’s views in that light. See Lighthall, “Spiritualized Happiness,” pp. 18ff and Lighthall, “Person,” pp. 166ff.





65 Lighthall, “Sketch,” p. 11.





66 Herman Lotze, “Outlines of Practical Philosophy,” trans. George T. Ladd (Boston: Ginn and Co. 1890), p. 13.





67 “Priestley’s Writings,” ed. John A. Passmore (New York: Colier Books 1965), p. 171.





68 John B. Bury, “The Idea of Progress” (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd. 1920), p. 77. For Lighthall on the cosmic aspect of the Directive Cause see Lighthall, “Person” pp. 86ff. and 217ff.





69 Jeremy Bentham, “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,” The Utilitarians (New York: Dolphin Books 1961), p. 17.





70 Immanuel Kant, “Foundations,” p. 4.





71 Lighthall, “Person,” p. 12.





72 Kuhn, “Revolutions,” p. 21.





73 Lighthall, “A Modern Nation,” p. 11.





74 “Ibid.”, p. 7.





75 Lighthall, “A Protest (1895)” Old Measures: Collected Verse (Montreal: A.T. Chapman n.d.), p. 51, 11. 1-4.





76 G.R. Parkin, “True Imperialism,” United Empire: Royal Colonial Institute Journal, New Series II (Dec. 1911), p. 848 in Berger, “Sense of Power,” p. 218.





77 Lighthall, “Nation-making,” pp. 216-217.













CHAPTER FIVE





IS IT CONSCIOUS OR UNCONSCIOUS: A COMPARISON OF THE VIEWS OF THOMAS HARDY AND W D LIGHTHALL AS TO THE NATURE OF THE DIRECTIVE CAUSE.













A force that was not God yet was God. Lighthall [1] was not the only post-Darwin writer who depicted “a force” at work in their fiction. Thomas Hardy called the force The Will. Lighthall called the force among other names The Hyperpsych. Both authors were explicit in their non-belief in the Yahwehian Judeo-Christian depiction of that force. [2]

Hardy used the epic-drama “The Dynasts” as a vehicle to carry his understanding of the Force while Lighthall primarily used the novel “The Master of Life”.

Critically speaking Lighthall was not the novelist Hardy was. However the novel he wrote was as good a vehicle for the intended purpose as was Hardy’s epic-drama.

I found that I agreed with Samuel Hynes statement that Hardy “. . .violated the integrity of his material to make his philosophical point.”[3] Furthermore, the same can be said of Lighthall.

As it is the philosophical points that are of interest here there is no further need for literary criticism.

Lighthall and Hardy were for some years contemporaries. Indeed “The Dynasts” was published in 1903-08 and “The Master of Life” in 1908. As contemporaries, both were exposed to the ideas that were prevalent following publication of Darwin’s and Spencer’s views on evolution. It was during that period that the “new reality” of science brought into full bloom doubts that had been nurtured by some philosophers since the beginning of the Age of Reason.

One form this reaction took was described by Albert Elliott:





The prevailing philosophy of the last half of the nineteenth century tended toward a complete condemnation of man’s littleness, inherited from the evolutionary discoveries of Spencer and Darwin. . . .All the time there lay behind its superficial optimism a growing sense of horror, from which timid souls shrank into the relatively secure and unquestioning confines of the church. [4]





Neither Lighthall nor Hardy were to be found among the timid.

Although they agreed, totally, on the littleness of man they did differ greatly in their optimism concerning mankind nor did either choose to adhere to any recognized school of thought as they voiced their views. Both presented a view of reality which they expressed as being uniquely their own. Indeed Hardy could have been speaking for both of them when he wrote:





Let everyman make a philosophy for himself out of his won experience. He will not be able to escape using terms and phraseology from earlier philosophers, but let him avoid adopting their theories if he values his own mental life. [5]





While both authors were cognizant of the theories of many philosophers and had a number in common [6] it remains speculative as to how much any one of these contributed to the understanding of either author.

A case in point would be Schopenhauer. Ernest Brennecke gives a great deal of credence to this philosopher’s influence on Hardy. However Harold Orel and Albert Elliott disagree with Brennecke. Lighthall mounted a vicious attack on Schopenhauer in “The Outer Consciousness”. Yet the model of the “Person of Evolution” which is part of Lighthall’s definition of the Hyperpsych shows definite similarities to Schopenhauer’s Will.

It was of some interest to me to note that Lighthall was sure that Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view was due to his having hereditary depression, personal perversity and an extreme neurotic sensitiveness. [7] Of course Hardy, it has been noted, was also prone to depression. [8] However, as there is no “letters of” or “life of” Lighthall yet available, any comparison to Lighthall personally must remain open. Nevertheless, the venomous nature of Lighthall’s uncharacteristic attack on the pessimistic philosophies does appear to indicate that Lighthall felt a personal threat from them. [9]





While both Hardy and Lighthall laid a claim to be the author of a theory concerning the Force they differed in their claim to the role of Philosopher. Hardy disclaimed the role entirely. He wrote Noyes; “. . .I have no philosophy - merely what I have often explained to be only a confused heap of impressions (***). . . I have never attempted scientific. It is my misfortune that people will treat all my mood-dictated writing as a single scientific theory.”[10]

On addressing the Royal Society of Canada in or about 1940, Lighthall fully accepted the role of Philosopher stating, “I like to call myself, in the humble definition of Saint Socrates for a student of philosophy, “a friend of wisdom,” . . . .”[11] He also believed his theory to be the “…concrete subject of simple scientific research.”[12]





As Hardy understood the Will to be unconscious, albeit there was the possibility of its becoming aware, he apprehended the underlying motivating force for human action to be necessity.[13] Therefore, there was no moral law motivating that force nor none of the super-governmental procedure prevalent in the covenant tradition of Yahwehian Judeo-Christianity. In contrast the motivating force of the conscious Hyperpsych is directed in the altruistic action which brings about the utilitarian result that progress requires. Therefore any non-altruistic act must be considered “bad”.

As such any of that kind of act would be considered to be contrary to The Will of the Hyperpsych and therefore immoral.

In Hardy all judgment was the judgment of men, in Lighthall all judgment, to be correct judgment, had to be the judgment of progress in history.

In order to compare these models in more detail I intend to follow three steps; 1. To define the Force according to the personal statements of the authors, 2. To discuss some of the characteristics of reality as defined by the two models, 3. To consider something of the models as they were portrayed in the two literary works.





Hardy wrote Edward Wright that the Will was “. . .a vague thrusting or urging internal force in no predetermined direction.”[14] Through the pen of his wife-biographer we find that “. . .he had often held [a fancy] . . . that the never ending push of the universe was an un-purposive and irresponsible groping in the direction of the least resistance, . …” [15]

Finally he wrote to Dr. Caleb Saleeby:





The nature of the determination embraced in the theory is that of a collective will; so that there is a proportion of the total will in each part of the whole,….[16]





Thus, according to Hardy the Will was a collective unconscious force which as a motivating agent produced unconsidered action in the parts of the collective.

It must be pointed out however that Hardy added a faint hope clause to his pessimistic judgment by considering the meliorate possibility:





. . .I think the view of the unconscious as gradually becoming conscious: i.e., that consciousness is creeping further and further back towards the origin of force, had never (so far as I know) been advanced before. . . .[17]





As Lighthall published a number of monographs on his theory the available data for a definition of the Hyperpsych is far more extensive than in the case of Hardy’s Will. Therefore I have restricted the major part of the comparative quotations to “The Outer Consciousness” as it is the more readily available text and was his most definitive exposition of his theory.

First an initial statement by Lighthall:





Whenever we experience the workings of Instinct and the subconscious - which involve affective processes, we are on the edge of a greater Consciousness to whose behavior joy - indifference - pain facts are the clue. [18]





Its conduct is intellectual, and like that of all the instincts, is based on the same principles as what we know as reasoning. It is purposive, because it pursues ends which we can recognize as purposes. [19]





The first of its outstanding characteristics is its likeness to the inner consciousness of the individual in its method of work. [20]





…the attainment - the persistent attainment - of pleasures and avoidance of pain. . . . It is this which proves purposing, instead of meaningless symmetry. [21]





And finally the theorem:





To come down to an attempt at connective reasoning: the basic question regarding the Outer Consciousness is: How can we describe a purposing power which seems to consciously understand joys and pains: and especially those of the many as well as of the one? Our answer is the proposition that (a) it must itself be conscious and (b) sufficiently clear conscious to comprehend the import of the pleasure-pain result it seeks, and (c) have a consciousness which is common to the many, and (d) overlap, include, or coalesce with, the consciousness of each individual whose joy is sought or whose pain is avoided. Thus we have contended, arises the hypothesis of a community animal, or, to meet the objections to the latter word - a hyperpsych. [22]





Thus it could be said of the Hyperpsych that it is a collective conscious force which as a motivating agent produces considered action in the parts.





It appears that Lighthall and Hardy both apprehended a very similar world, yet they concluded that what they saw was caused by a very different Force causing very different results.

They had, for example, very similar images of mankind as a whole. As early as 1886 Hardy had written: “The human race to be shown as one great network or tissue which quivers in every part when one point is shaken. . . .”[23] Lighthall speaks of the same network as the “coloniality” of man. First, the individual man is a colony of “. . .cell and nerve-organisms of which his body is made up - each living its own life.”[24] Second, the individual man was himself a member of a colony:





He is not only the head of a colony of lesser units;… he is part of a larger colony. He is more. That larger colony is probably one of a hierarchy of greater and greater colonies, and in the end his consciousness is apparently part of that of the “infinite” universe itself.[25]





Further to Hardy’s and Lighthall’s image of mankind they both agreed that man was not a creature of free-will. Initially Hardy appeared to give man a “kind of” free-will when he wrote Edward Wright using the parable of the fingers. [26]

He clarified this concept in his letter to Caleb Saleeby:





The theory is that of a collective will; so that there is a proportion of the total will in each part of the whole, and each part has therefore, in strictness, some freedom, which would, in fact, be operative as such whenever the remaining great mass of will in the universe should happen to be in equilibrium.[27]





However I believed his understanding of the freeness of this will was qualified when I considered the following statement: “Moreover, he thinks he could show that no man is a rationalist and that human actions are not ruled by reason at all. . . .”[28]

If the source of this freed individual will was not reason it must be the same unconscious force that is the collective will.

In other words, the part may act independent of the whole but the character of the part remains that of the whole.

Therefore, Hardy was not describing a rationally responsible free-will he was describing a unitary response to necessity. As a result Hardy’s image of mankind in this respect continues to be quite similar to Lighthall’s “scientific” observation:





…the bodily functions and instincts, together with many other contrivances and operations within and without the individual are beneficent towards him, yet do not proceed from his own intelligence or will. Hence they are attributed to a conscious intelligence and personality outside the individual. [29]





Within the framework of humanity the similarity of view continued as both authors divide mankind into two basic groups: The elite and the mass.

It was Hardy who said that:





You may regard a throng of people as containing a certain small minority who have sensitive souls; these, and the aspects of these, being what is worth observing . . .into souls and machines, ether and clay.[30]





Lighthall called his divisions the sophisticated and the unsophisticated.

However in their view of humanity in time and space or in history Hardy and Lighthall are poles apart.

Of history itself Hardy says:





There is nothing organic in its shape, nothing systematic in its development. It flows on like a thunderstorm - rill by the roadside; now a straw turns it this way, now a tiny barrier of sand that. [31]





On considering the possibility of progress in society Hardy’s view was that “had the teachings of experience grown cumulating with the age of the world we should have been ere now as great as God.”[32]

As for progress through evolution his attitude is the same. He concludes that “the human race is likely to be extinct before Freedom arrives at maturity.”[33]

Lighthall on the other hand concluded that:





It is much to be able to say that it is after all a largely successful process, attaining at least most of its ends, and enlarging its goals, as time proceeds (***)

And we can understand by its success in progressing that it is capable of the ultimate triumph of happiness. This is indeed the gradually nearing goal of the law of progress - the reigning rule of the Outer Consciousness. [34]





Lighthall’s theory was not one of an absolute Force but one that was learning, evolving:





Yet there are limits to its power. Are not such shown in the constant struggle it makes to attain its ends, in the everlasting procession of its failures, in the horrible carnages and disasters in nature, the bestialities and social cannibalism of men?[35]





In contrast to this point Hardy appeared to have retained the traditional absolute omnipresent nature of the Will. In fact he had blacked out the awareness of the Force but left its power to act in history intact. Therefore there could be no error for there was no judgment made by the Force.

Lighthall retained the conscious power to act in history and removed the incomprehensible nature of the Force’s judgment by maintaining the goodness of the motivation to act in history but he also removed perfection as a characteristic.





In concluding this segment I would like to consider the optimistic vs. pessimistic attitudes prevalent in the theories of the authors more closely.

Hardy reacted very strongly against the claim that he was a pessimist. Ernest Brennecke quotes the following from William Archer’s “Real Conversations”: “On the contrary, my practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist…” [36] But this “meliorism” was shown to be contingent on the possibility of the Will becoming aware. Found only in the added dimension. Therefore, in his root model of the Will Hardy viewed reality in fatalistic terms.

Lighthall’s argument against this kind of pessimistic view of reality was as follows:





“Pessimistic criticism has constantly pointed to its failures and imperfections. These have been many, but there are two great answers to pessimism. One is that the essence of the primal act of will is at least a power is some degree to escape evil and pursue joy: it is not a complete helplessness. The other is that, through the continuing form of this power progress is actively attained.”[37]





When they portraying their theoretical models to the fullest in their literature both authors chose to use plots adapted from historical events as the vehicle.

This gave their theories a push-me-pull-you proof as they could construct their plots to show that their theories could be apprehended in or applied to real time events.

The Napoleonic wars were used by Hardy to show that, in spite of the tremendous combustion of human resources in the venture, mankind as a whole was as it was before it began. Lighthall used the formation of the League of the Iroquois to show that the expenditure or exploitation of human resources showed social progress as a historical fact.





In the comparison of the two works “The Dynasts” and “The Master of Life,” I have limited the consideration here to some aspects of the two divisions of humanity portrayed in them: The elite and the mass.





In these particular literary works Hardy and Lighthall continued the similarity in their treatment of the masses even to the point where both have used the term “rustic” in describing characters who are portrayed as being representative of that class. It is, for example, a rustic who comes to see Boney burn and is a rustic who is induced to attempt murder by the shaman.

As a whole the masses are viewed as pawns in the hands of the elite who will to Power. In “The Dynasts” they cannot shoot Napoleon, and once more become his pawns. In “The Master of Life” all Atotarho has to do is show his displeasure at their opinion and “the thousands melted as the dew had done.”[38]

The differing views of the authors can be seen in their understanding of the motivation of and the role of the elite in human history. Both works contain among the elite the dynasts, men who will to power. They are Napoleon and Atotarho who are both military leaders. In both cases they are portrayed as acting as antagonists in history

Napoleon is opposed at one point by Nelson who, according to Amiya Chakravarty, “believes in a moral purpose, and stands for justice.”[39]

If Chakravarty was correct I have concluded that this portrayal comes from the “melioristic” added dimension. However, if it is merely rationalizing hindsight portrayed by Hardy’s character then the character remains within the limitations of the model. This is one of the many gray areas in Hardy’s literary portrayal of his theory in action. [40]

Lighthall’s portrayals do not contain these gray areas. Atotarho’s will to power is not the blind energy of Napoleon.

Napoleon who is caught in the grip of the Will:





My star, my star is whats to blame - not I

It is unswervable [41]





Atotarho on the other hand has the potential for receiving revelation for we are told “a clear mind dwelt in that brow, and thought worked within it for the welfare of his nation.”[42] Both the “receptability” of the Will of the Hyperpsych and the tendency to altruism are there although the reasoning of Hiawatha was not able to bring Atotarho in line with the Will of the Hyperpsych. When Atotarho does hear the message he undertakes the altruistic step into social responsibility. He is portrayed as gracious in victory. His captives are set free, not shot like a dog as was Ney. By setting the captives free the break has been made with the old necessity of war which dictates that once the war was “begun there as no safety except to exterminate the foe.”[44] The way is open to reconciliation in Joy.

In contrast, in “The Dynasts” that necessity remains and the inevitable pain:





Nought remains

But vindictiveness here amid the strong,

and there amid the weak an impotent rage.[45]





In his preface Lighthall had stated that he saw the Indian Hiawatha as a mystic. [46] Therefore, when revelation first comes to Hiawatha he immediately apprehends the source:





The Master was in him, the Fire was in him, the Sun was in him; and in his exalted spirit a thought was being born. This thought was - to abolish war. [47]





But what happens when a would-be dynast attempts to function in history without revelation and altruism? Lighthall provided his case in point in his portrayal of the shaman Hatiria. Lighthall uses one of his many cross-cultural images as he portrayed Hatiria as a Simon Magus tempting Hiawatha:





I would know how thou communest with the gods. If thou wilt give me this secret, I will give thee the hearts of Atotarho the entangled, and of the whole people, and the men of mystery as they servants. This is thy path to the Headchiefship of the four quarters of the world.[48]





Of course there is no character to be found in Hardy to compare with Hatiria. Hardy’s characters are all to be “pitied” for they are pathetic pawns caught in the blind force of the Will.

In contrast Hatiria cannot hear the Hyperpsych so he follows the dictate of his own will. A free man, he can do nothing but bring pain and destruction to those around him and inevitably to himself. His is the tragic rebel angel, and as such he is cast down to his death from the mountain. [49]





There are women among the elite portrayed in both works and their vastly different roles add to any comparison of the two models.

Four of these women, two from each work, can be compared. Josephine, Napolean’s consort, can be compared with Quenhia, Hiawatha’s platonic lover, and Louise the Prussian captive princess can be compared with the Noblewoman, the Cherokee captive princess.





The two women from “The Dynasts” are subjected to the necessity of complying with the will of Napoleon, who is of course himself compelled by blind Will. Josephine must help Napoleon in the very act of casting her off. All of Louise’s feminine charms cannot save her the loss of Magdeburg.

In apparent contrast to these subjective roles, the two women in Lighthall’s work are active agents of the Hyperpsych. This means, however, that they are as equally subject to a Force outside themselves.

Quenhia with her half-European blood carries the mystic image of the “Lord of Peace” to Hiawatha. Through her knowledge of Christ he is able to unlock the door to revelation. As a ghost she is the medium by which he is made aware of the destiny of his people and all mankind:





Our race shall pass away and never more be seen upon the Sacred Island. I see there a people, in number like the drops of rain, covering the island with lodges of stone. I see them pass, and a race of the splendor of gods make the land beautiful and fill the sky like birds. I see them pass - and the earth itself is living and needs but itself for life. [50]





In this short passage the time and space vision of Lighthall becomes clear and it appeared that the value of the individual human in it is as little if not even less than in Hardy’s own time-vision. The difference, I think, is that Hardy is appalled by this apparent waste of human existence; while Lighthall extends absolution, if not justification, to it through his theory.





The Noblewoman, like Louise, must try to bend the will of a Dynast. However, Louise wants or wills to have Magdeburg under the same blind drive as Napoleon wills her not to. It is a contest and his will being stronger wins.

The Noblewoman situation is more complicated. She wills to have a mate worthy of herself, for in the evolutionary scale she is far beyond other Indian women. In order to obtain this biological requirement she conceives the idea of binding Atotarho’s unitary biological strength to the social collective strength of the League. She tells him:





Knowest thou not why I left thee - why I went to Hiawatha? It was to make my Atotarho the greatest man in the world. I bring the Headchiefship of the Long, Long House. . . .[51]





She wins her desire, for her biological needs are in line with the law of progress and her action brings about the aligning of Atotarho’s will to power with the will of the Hyperpsych.





I would now like to consider the fact that both these authors used war as the means of proof to validate their theories.

I believe that their separate attitudes towards World War I gave me some insight into this problem.

Of that war Florence Hardy tells us that Hardy felt “the war gave the coup de grace to any conception he may have nourished of a fundamental ultimate wisdom at the back of things.”[52] Lighthall on the other hand founded the Great War Veterans Association in Canada and wrote its constitution. His recognition for the altruistic act.[53]





Within Hardy’s model of history the concept of protagonist and antagonist have no reality. However, in Lighthall’s theory the main character is the protagonist because they are the winners with the altruistic drive and they are the ones who prove that progress is a reality in spite of the carnage of war.





In conclusion I believe that both Hardy and Lighthall were students of the post-Darwin view of man; that being, that man is subject to an external force that is not God as Yahweh is known in the traditional way. They both reject the covenantal relationship of individual man and his God. Both authors place man firmly in the reality of his material environment where his biological senses responding to pain and joy are in conflict with the dominance factor of the will to power in others and himself. Man’s prime directive is to comply with necessity and necessity in nature is primarily a state of competition, whether that necessity exists within the realm of a blind force or an evolving one!

Because Hardy’s model was bound to the principle that the Will was unconscious he had no necessity for justifying history. He could assume the role of the passive observer. This was one of the reasons why Hardy became upset when he was “personally” attacked in the criticism of his work and why he continually disassociated himself from the stance of a philosopher.

Quite the opposite, Lighthall was personally caught up in his view of Canada’s destiny in the progressive scheme of the Hyperpsych. Canada was to be the son of Mother Britannia. As such Lighthall, like Geoffrey, before him, felt he must account for the disinheritance of a people.

Without some reasonable understanding of the fate of the Indian there would remain a specter to haunt the justified who had willed to power. In Hardy it mattered not who won or lost. Hardy's novels could just as easily have been read in French.





A final word on Lighthall - there was a single prophesy to be read in his theory. Lighthall held out a role for Canada that the nation had not the will to grasp. His theory being correct, then Canada having abdicated her role, must join the fate of the Indians.





Footnotes:





1 William Douw Lighthall K.C.LLD. FRSL. F.R.S.C. (1857-1946)





2 Florence Hardy, “The Life of Thomas Hardy Vol. 2” (London: MacMillan and Co., 1933), 264 and W.D. Lighthall, “The Outer Consciousness” (Montreal: Witness Press 1926), 15.





3 Samuel Hynes, “The Pattern of Hardy’s Poetry” (Chapel Hill; The University of North Carolina Press 1961), 39.





4 Andrew P. Elliott, “Fatalism in the Works of Thomas Hardy” (New York: Russell and Russell 1966), 22.





5 F. Hardy, “The Life of Hardy Vol. 2,”, 91.





6 At least Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, Schopenhauer and Hartmann.





7 W.D. Lighthall, “The Outer Consciousness” (Montreal: Witness Press 1926), 75.





8 Elliott, “Fatalism in the Works of Hardy,” 17.





9 See page 73 “The Outer Consciousness” for a point by point comparison by Lighthall of the Hyperpsych and Schopenhauer’s Will.





10 F. Hardy, “Life of Hardy Vol. 2,” 219.





11 W.D. Lighthall, “The Law of Cosmic Evolutionary Adaptation,” Trans. R.S.C. (1940) Sec. 11, 135.





12 Lighthall, “The Outer Consciousness,” 15.





13 Hardy believed that chance did not govern the universe. See F. Hardy, “The Life of Hardy Vol. 2”, 128. Lighthall agreed. He called chance -- accident, “trifles.” See Lighthall “The Outer Consciousness,” 47.





14 F. Hardy, “Life of Hardy Vol. 2,” 124.





15 “Ibid.”, 165-66.





16 “Ibid.”, 269.





17 “Ibid.”, 270.





18 Lighthall, “The Outer Consciousness,” 1.





19 “Ibid.”, 6.





20 “Ibid.”, 7.





21 “Ibid.”, 9.





22 “Ibid.”, 17.





23 F. Hardy, “Life of Hardy Vol. 1,” 232.





24 Lighthall, “The Outer Consciousness,” 6.





25 “Ibid.”, 7.





26 F. Hardy, “Life of Hardy Vol. 2,” 125.





27 “Ibid.”, 270.





28 “Ibid.”, 209-10.





29 W.D. Lighthall, “The Person of Evolution” (Montreal: The Author 1930), 125.





30 F. Hardy, “Life of Hardy Vol. 1,” 243.





31 “Ibid.”, 225.





32 “Ibid.”, 73.





33 F. Hardy, “Life of Hardy Vol. 2.”, 139.





34 Lighthall, “The Outer Consciousness,” 12.





35 “Ibid.”, 11.





36 Ernest Brennecke, “Thomas Hardy’s Universe: A study of a poet’s mind” (Norwood: Norwood Editions 1977), 146.





37 Lighthall, “The Outer Consciousness,” 23.





38 W.D. Lighthall, “The Master of Life” (Toronto: The Musson Book Co., 1908), 168.





39 Amiya Chakravarty, “The Dynasts and the Post-war Age in Poetry” (Folcroft: The Folcroft Press Inc. 1969), 24.





40 In the light of this consideration the “foxy” Kutuzof is even more interesting however space does not permit further exploration here.





41 Thomas Hardy, “The Dynasts: An Epic-drama of the War with Napoleon” (London: MacMillan and Co. 1929), 170. See also page 468.





42 Lighthall, “Master of Life,” 225.





43 “Ibid.”, 103.





44 “Ibid.”, 151.





45 T. Hardy, “The Dynasts,” 517.





46 Lighthall, “Master of Life,” VI.





47 “Ibid.”, 142.





48 “Ibid.”, 161.





49 “Ibid.”, 242. Lighthall was not alone in his portrayal of the Indian in this type of role for others, see Norman J. Williamson, “The Indian in the Canadian Novel in English in the Period 1860-1918.” MA Thesis University of Manitoba 1976. for other examples





50 “Ibid.”, 198.





51 “Ibid.”, 255.





52 F. Hardy, “Life of Hardy,” 165-66.





53 John M. Elson, “Who’s Who in Canada,” in “The Canadian Bookman” (1930) Vol. XII No. 8, 152.





THE END

































BIBLIOGRAPHY





THE WORKS OF W. D. LIGHTHALL KNOWN TO THE AUTHOR.





Note: p.p. means private publication. "Witness"‑‑in any form is also a private publication. The number of pages are given primarily to indicate pamphlets.





Lighthall, William Douw. An essay on pure ethics; with a theory of the motive. Montreal: p.p., 1888, 15p.





The altruistic act; an essay in ethics, by Alchemist, Montreal. Montreal: p.p., 1884, 12p.





An analysis of the altruistic act in illustration of a general outline of ethics. Montreal: p.p., 1885, 20p.





Sketch of a new utilitarianism; including a criticism of the ordinary argument from design and other matter. Montreal: "Witness" Printing House, 1887, 40p.





Thoughts, moods and ideals, crimes of leisure, by W. D. Lighthall; advocate. Montreal: "Witness" Printing House, 1887, 24p. (poetry)





The Young Seigneur; or Nation‑making, by Wilfrid Chateauclair. Montreal: W. Drysdale, 1888, 200p. (a non‑novel)





ed. Songs of the Great Dominion: voices from the forests and waters, the settlements and cities of Canada. London: W. Scott, 1889, 465p. (anthology‑‑poetry)





An account of the battle of Chateauguay: being a lecture delivered at Ormstown March 8th 1889 by W. D. Lighthall. With some local and personal notes by W. Patterson. Montreal: W. Drysdale & Co., 1889, 32p.





Spiritualized happiness‑theory: or, New Utilitarianism, a lecture before the Farmington School of Philosophy, June, 1890. Montreal: "Witness" Printing House, 1890, 22p.





ed. Canadian poems and lays; selections of native verse, reflecting the seasons, legends and life of the Dominion. Toronto: Musson Book Co., 1891, 276p. (anthology‑‑poetry)





Sights and shrines of Montreal; a topographical, romantic and historical description of the city and environs, by W. D. Lighthall, M. A. With maps and illustrations and text of the historical tablets erected by the Antiquarian society . Montreal: F. E. Grafton

& Sons, 1892, 163p.





ed. Canadian songs and poems; voices from the forests and waters, the settlements and cities of Canada. London: Walter Scott, 1892, 465p. (See Songs of the Great Dominion).





A new Hochelaga burying‑ground discovered at Westmount on the western spur of Mount Royal, Montreal, July‑September 1898. Montreal: p.p., 1898, llp.





"The conditions of a colonial literature," Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom , 2nd. Ser. Vol. 19 (1898).





The False Chevalier; or, the lifeguard of Marie Antoinette.

Montreal: F. E. Grafton, 1898, 328p. (novel)





Hochelagans and Mohawks; a link in Iroquois history. Ottawa: Hope, 1899, 13p. (See also Trans. R. S. C. 2nd.Ser. Vol. 5 ‑Sec. 2 [1899‑19001).





The "glorious enterprise," the plan of campaign for the conquest of New France; its origin, history and connection with the invasion of Canada, by W. D. Schuyler‑Lighthall. Montreal: C. A. Marchand, printer to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society, 1902, 38p. (See also Canadian Antiguarian and Numismatic Journal, 3d. Ser. Vol. 4, No. I [Jan., 1902]).





"Hiawatha the Great," Royal society of literature of the United Kingdom, London, 2d. Series, Vol. 23 (1902).





"Westmount: a municipal illustration," University of Toronto studies, History and economics. Toronto, Vol. 2, no. 1 (1902).





Canada, a modern nation. Montreal: Witness printing house, 1904, 78p.





Thomas Powell‑‑his part in the conquest of Canada. Ottawa. For Sale by J. Hope and Sons, 1904, 4p. (See also Trans. R. S. C. 2d, Series, Vol. 10, Sec. 11 [1904‑1905]).





"French‑Canadian Literature," Royal society of literature of the United Kingdom, London, 2d. Series, Vol. 26 (1905).





The Master of Life; a romance of the Five nations and of prehistoric Montreal. Toronto: The Musson book co., ltd., 1908, 262p. (novel)





The governance of empire, being suggestions for the adaptation of the British constitution to the conditions of union among the overseas states (Essay receiving honorable mention in the "Standard of empire" competition, London). With a note on the name "Imperial conference," and a proposal for a permanent "Americanadian confer‑

ence.11 Montreal: the author, 1910, 15p.





What the provincial unions of municipalities have accomplished. Montreal: p.p., 1912, 21p. (Read at convention of the union of New Brunswick Municipalities, Moncton, Oct. 15, 1913). (See also Canadian municipal journal, [Nov. 1913j) .





"English settlement in Quebec" in Canada and its provinces, Toronto, Vol. 15 (1914).





"City government [in the Province of Quebec]" in Canada and its provinces. Toronto, Vol. 15 (1914).





The manor house of Lacolle; a description and historical sketch of the manor of the seigniory of de Beaujeu or Lacolle. Montreal: p.p., 1914, 10p.





The land of Manitou. Montreal: p.p., 1916, 18p. (poetry)





Superpersonalism; the outer consciousness, a biological entity . Montreal: Witness Press, 1916, 115p.





"Signposts of prehistoric time," Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada. Ottawa, 3d. Series, Vol. 10, 6p. (1916).





Canadian poets of the Great War. Ottawa: n.p.,1918. (See also Trans. R. S.C. 3d. Series, Vol. 12, 1918 [Presidential address]).





A philosophy of purpose. Montreal: p.p., 1920, 15p.





The Westmount "stone‑lined grave" race (an archaelogical note). Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1922, 2p. (see also Trans. of R. S. C. 3d. Series, Vol. 16 (1922).





old measures: a collected verse by W. D. Lighthall. Montreal: A. T. Chapman, 1922, 140p. (poetry)





The outer consciousness. Montreal: p.p., 1923, 8p.





The person of the outer consciousness. Montreal: p.p., 1924, ?p. (being the outer consciousness pt. 11).





The Outer consciousness in ethics. Montreal: p.p., 1924, ?p.





The teleology of the outer consciousness. Montreal: p.p., 1924, 13p.





The cosmic aspect of the outer consciousness. Montreal: p.p., 1924, 16p.





The outer consciousness and a future life. Montreal: p.p., 1925, 23p.





Superpersonalism; the outer consciousness, a biological entity; reflections on the independence of instinct and its characteristics in evolution. Montreal: Witness Press, 1926, 115p.





The person of evolution; the outer consciousness, the outer knowledge, the directive power; studies of instinct as contribu­tions to a philosophy of evolution. Toronto: MacMillan, 1930, 232p.





The false plan of Hochelaga. Ottawa: p.p., 1932, llp. (See also Trans. R. S. C., 3d. Series, Vol. 26, Sec. 11 [1932]).





The person of evolution; the outer consciousness, the outer knowledge, the directive power; studies of instincts as contribu­tions to a philosophy of evolution, Definitive edition, with three appendices; including a theory of atomic life, undying and evolu­tionary. Toronto: MacMillan, 1933, 246p.





The origin of the Maya civilization, can China contribute to its solution. Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1933, 7p. (See also Trans. R. S. C. 3d. Series, Vol. 27, Sec. 2 [1933]).





Is the end of the diffusion‑of‑culture controversy in sight? Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1936, 7p. (See also Trans. R. S. C. 3d. Series, Vol. 30, Sec. 2 [1936]).





The diffusion‑of‑culture controversy‑‑unity of Maya and Chinese astronomv decides it. Toronto: n.p., 1939, 4p. (See also Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol. 33, [19391).









NOTE: It is not clear how much of the writing of the following can be attributed to Lighthall. However, the play is based on the Master of Life and having read the libretto it is my opinion that it was a great deal.





Armstrong, Louis Olivier. The book of the play of Hiawatha the Mohawk depicting the siege of Hochelaga and the Battle of Lake Champlain. (This libretto is necessary to fully enjoy the stage production). [?]. n.p. 1909) (Copyright by W. D. Lighthall and L. 0. Armstrong.









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