April 9, 1873

Hartley Burr Alexander,(April 9, 1873 to 1939) was American philosopher from Nebraska. He worked in a variety of fields. In 1901 he received a doctorate from Columbia University and he taught philosophy at the University of Nebraska starting in 1908. In 1919 he served a term as president of the American Philosophical Society. His books include poetry, investigations of American indian beliefs, also and he was consulted as to the best decorations for the facades of new urban buildings, like the Joslyn Art Museum,(1931) , and the Nebraska State Capitol.

Hartley Alexander wrote, among his books, these volumes:

The Problem of Metaphysics (1902)

Poetry and the Individual (1906)

The Religious Spirit of the American Indian (1910)

Truth and the Faith (1929)

and published posthumously--

The World's Rim - Great Mysteries of the North American Indians (1953)

Below are some extracts from his writing; they show an inquisitive and fresh thinker. The first is from Mythology of All Races, (volume x): North American (1916) , and concerns the beliefs of certain American indians.

.....

The deeds of the Great Hare include many contests with the giants, cannibals, and witches who people Algonquin folk-tales. In these he displays adept powers as a trickster and master of wile, as well as a stout warrior. The conflict with Flint turns, as in the Iroquois tradition, upon a tricky discovery of what substance is deadly to the Fire-Stone Man: Flint asks the Hare what can hurt him; he replies, the cat's tail, or featherdown, or something of the sort, and, in turn, puts the question to Flint, who truthfully answers, "the horn of the stag"; and it is with stag's horn that the Hare fractures and flakes his body — a mythic reminiscence, we may suppose, of the great primitive industry of flint-flaking by aid of a horn implement.The great feat of the Hare as a slayer, however, was his destruction of the monstrous Fish or Snake which oppressed and devoured men and animals. This creature like the Teutonic Grendel was a water monster, and ruler of the Powers of the Deep....

Following is Alexander writing for the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, to which he contributed an essay on "Human Personality" in 1907. The quotes are large which seems appropriate since we have forgotten this thinker, and perhaps unfairly. In the first section, Alexander, the philosopher, compares his own times with that of the ancient Greeks.

This strange myth of the martyred divinity is but one expression of an ever-recurrent theme—the god sacrificed for man—seeming to dominate the shadowy background of the primitive human consciousness. At its basis is the human sense of unworthiness, the conviction of sin; at its culmination is faith in redemption, the atonement. It is the naive and perhaps fundamental expression of man's belief in the world's interest in him and his destiny...

... The Greek view of the world...was unaffectedly natural: men were half divine, gods half human, and Nature but the outworking of the divine...in...[the] human destinies of mankind. But modern thought has passed far from such easy anthropocentrism. Nowadays there remains nothing of that neighborliness of the Cosmos which could set its bounds just at the outskirts of the barbarians and establish its actuating powers upon the near Olympus. Earth's navel is no longer at Delphi,—nay, the earth itself, which then seemed the center of all, is but an incident of a solar system, in turn but an incident of the Universe. In a world of which the measures are light-years, what is a mere man? Human decrees and the ordinations of mythic gods, are they not pygmied beyond expression by that Natural Law which constitutes the formulary of a reality infinitely more stable and certain than any personality? Before the massiveness of such conception even the sense of physical abasement is outmatched by the shame of spiritual littleness and of the vanities of this contentious life.....

[Against the view that man's position in the universe has been revealed by modern science as insignificant--a common view at the beginning of the 20th century, Alexander argues that the mind which has revealed a scientific world view must itself share in the glory of that conception.]

....When we speak of Nature in the large, the Nature of laws and histories and destinies, we really designate the ideal form of our human intelligence. We mean by it no present physical fact, but our thought of what reality may or must be—that is to say, our conceptual creation.

....

Nature's universals are our ideals. It should be needless to add that, being so, they are the ultimate measures of our personalities. The human mind creates itself in its discovery of truth, and truth, in turn, is the symbol of the mind's growth and the image of its powers. To adopt Plato's metaphor, human nature " participates " in the universal Nature, and the form of this participation is truth....

Truth, then, is the measure of man—as is never more evident than in the belittlement of the here-and-now self in [the] presence of our conceptual creations. But we should not lose the correlative axiom: that man is the measure of reality. Nature as a harmony of laws and processes is an ideal creation, the total truth; but truth, participating in humanity, is the reflection of an ideal human nature and intelligence; that is to say, it is the likeness of a personal Mind.

There is and there can be no evasion of our primitive bent toward personification of natural events and ways. Personification means intelligibility, reduction of the world-riddle to homely and familiar parable, and it is indispensable ... The whole cast and glamour of reality...in perspective is of wills and intentions (evolutions, as we say, having in view the external aspects of growing things) whose natures we can only conceive as in man's inner likeness, that is, as personalized...

But personification is in many degrees. We may say, for instance, that our globe possesses a personality: it develops from youth to age like a living being, runs its gamut of experience, and at last (who knows?) sinks into the cold and dark. At another extreme of time, the sunset—a single golden hour, running a course of its own and dying away with at best but the imaginary promise of a successor. Earth and Evening, each has its ideal image like an indwelling sprite, and in each is death and decay.

Mere personality is not in itself escape from transitoriness. The ideal nature must be more than a map or pattern of the reality; it must have in it something incommensurable, it must have a range of promise which outleaps immediate being, ceaselessly erecting for itself more opulent futures. Unless Nature be all awry such a personality cannot but be immortal.

Evolution implies a foreseeing personality in Nature as a whole. Possession of knowledge, prevision, truth, reveals it in man. That [man is] so gifted, at once prophet and artist, [and yet as] man should condemn his present backward attainment, is but the better surety for his future. For the correlative of his condemnation is his idealization, and idealization is the natural incentive to acquirement. Without the consciousness of present frailty and insufficiency there could be no meaning in human endeavor and no influx of that aspiration which is the psychical secret of evolution. It is not to be thought that Nature should have raised up a power so unique to no end nor fulfillment.

Alexander is here making a sophisticated argument that man is part of evolution and as such can look towards a glorious destiny.